A Brief Guide to Star Trek (38 page)

John Meredyth Lucas, producer of the second season of
Star Trek
from ‘Journey to Babel’ to ‘The Omega Glory’, wrote four episodes (‘The Changeling’, ‘Patterns of Force’, ‘Elaan of Troyius’ and ‘That Which Survives’) and directed three (his own ‘Elaan of Troyius’, plus ‘The Ultimate Computer’ and ‘The
Enterprise
Incident’). Even with all those credits, his script for ‘The Godhead’ found itself stuck in development hell in the
Star Trek
production office in 1968. It concerned the last two representatives of an ancient race out to absorb the entire universe within their brains. Another idea, ‘The Lost Star’, echoed the episode ‘The Apple’, in that an entire race of people are held in subjugation by either a priestly elite or a malfunctioning computer, as seen in several
Star Trek
episodes.

Even the cast of
Star Trek
got in on the act, developing or suggesting ideas for storylines, more often than not revolving around dramatic events concerning their own characters. Gene Roddenberry seriously entertained a few of these ideas, including one by William Shatner, another by Nichelle Nichols and one by DeForest Kelley. Shatner’s 1966 idea was called ‘The Web of Death’ and was described in
TV Guide
of October that year as having a ‘good flow’. The story outline saw the
Enterprise
discover the long-missing ship
Momentous
, encased in a web-like substance from a massive ‘space spider’. The spider attacks the
Enterprise
, but is repelled by a poison developed by Kirk, who uses the dead-in-space
Momentous
as a decoy to save the
Enterprise
(a gambit later used in ‘The Doomsday Machine’).

DeForest Kelley’s story idea was to feature him as McCoy and Nichelle Nichols as Uhura trapped on a planet dominated by a dark-skinned race who subjugated the lighter-skinned people. Kelley noted, ‘there was a great racial problem, only reversed. The fact that I am a Southerner and she is black, and that we’re trapped on this planet together’ would provide the drama. According to David Gerrold, in
The World of Star Trek
, the script idea was ‘written, rewritten, and rewritten. Either the premise was too touchy for television or nobody could quite make it work. The script never reached a form where Roddenberry or Coon wanted to put it into production.’ A similar idea would be eventually explored in the conflict between the half-white, half-black and half-black, half-white Cheron race in ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield’.

These were by no means all the unproduced ideas for the original
Star Trek
. Many did not get beyond thoughts or writer pitches that were never followed up. What they do show, though,
is the depth of thought and experimentation that was going into
The Original Series
, that so many workable ideas did not progress to the screen in that initial three-year period of invention.

While there are not as many surviving unproduced story ideas for
The Next Generation
as there were for the original
Star Trek
, across its seven years on air there seem to have been at least enough unrealised ideas for an entire additional season.

Michael Piller began writing for
The Next Generation
during its second year, becoming the show’s lead writer during its third. Uniquely across the
Star Trek
series he implemented an ‘open door’ policy, inviting anyone who thought they could write a
Star Trek
teleplay to have a go. This led to a huge number of submissions, the vast majority of which were quickly rejected. However, the policy did pay some dividends, resulting in several episodes including the very popular ‘Yesterday’s
Enterprise
’. Writers who got their start from Piller’s policy include Ronald D. Moore (
Carnivàle
,
Roswell
,
Battlestar Galactica
), René Echevarria (
The 4400
,
Medium
,
Castle
) and Brannon Braga (
Threshold
,
24
,
FlashForward
).

One teleplay that resulted was ‘Deadworld’, from journalist (and
Star Trek
chronicler) James Van Hise. ‘I wrote the story in 1987 at the behest of a mutual friend of Gerd Oswald’, said Van Hise. ‘Oswald had directed a couple of
Star Trek
episodes in the 1960s (“The Conscience of the King”, “The Alternative Factor”) and I’d spoken to him while he was directing an episode of the new
Twilight Zone
for CBS when I visited that studio in 1986. Oswald was looking for a story he could take to Paramount for
The Next Generation
which he could attach himself to as director. He read this outline but rejected it as being “too depressing”. I told my friend that Gerd, who was then in his 70s, was obviously a man who had never come to terms with his own mortality’.

The Next Generation
creative consultant Greg Strangis tried to get an original story of his own on air. Although much work was done on his script for ‘The Neutral Zone’ (unrelated to the
season one finale of the same title, although some of Strangis’ ideas did surface in ‘Too Short a Season’), the episode failed to be produced. The story featured a misanthropic, wheelchair-bound Federation security expert called Billings, who was charged with opening negotiations with the antagonistic Romulan Empire. All the
Enterprise
crew who have had contact with Romulans are assigned to the mission, including Worf, who dislikes them. A sabotaged transporter causes tension among the two groups, while Dr Crusher works on a cure for Billings.

Even ‘the Great Bird of the Galaxy’ himself had story ideas rejected by his replacements at Paramount. ‘Ferengi Gold’ was a two-part tale by Gene Roddenberry intended for the second season of
The Next Generation
. Many of Roddenberry’s tried and tested themes featured in the draft screenplay, including an alien world, a developing civilisation that parallels one from Earth’s history, and the ultimate perfection of the Federation. His idea of the Ferengi posing as gods and lording it over a less developed civilisation (an idea that would have fitted right in with the 1960s
Star Trek
) later turned up in the third season
Voyager
episode ‘False Profits’.

Sometimes ideas or concepts defeated the combined efforts of the writing staff of
The Next Generation
, as was the case for René Echevarria and Jeri Taylor on ‘Q Makes Two’, an episode planned to feature the mysterious Q (John de Lancie). During the fifth and sixth seasons of
The Next Generation
, various writers on the staff wrestled with the idea. The story featured Q duplicating the
Enterprise
crew for his own nefarious ends. According to Brannon Braga: ‘There was a sense of doom from the moment we started “Q Makes Two”. I think we broke it [worked out the basic elements of the story] three times. René [Echevarria] wrote two drafts and it was ultimately abandoned. It’s an interesting notion that Q comes onboard and Picard’s saying people are inherently good and we have managed to get rid of our darker elements in the twenty-fourth century, we’re better people. Q says, “So you don’t think you have dark com -ponents and you think you’re better without them? Well, I’m
going to show you a thing or two.” He extracts the darker components and puts them into doubles. The clean, good components suffer and so do the darker components and neither function without the other. We see that dramatically, but for some reason we made it more complex than it needed to be. The image in my mind that we never really got to was the two
Enterprise
s shooting at each other – that’s what you want to see!’

Taylor described the experience as a ‘nightmare’, dragging attention away from important work on other episodes for which the deadlines were more imminent. The idea of dividing the starship in two later came to the screen in an episode of
Voyager
called ‘Deadlock’. To some, the plot also recalled the early original
Star Trek
series episode ‘The Enemy Within’, which saw Captain Kirk divided into his ‘good’ and ‘evil’ halves due to a transporter accident.

Another rejected Q episode had the clever title of ‘I.Q. Test’. It would have seen Q going to war with another member of the Q Continuum, drawing the
Enterprise
and her crew into the conflict. The episode would have seen the two Qs pitting their own teams in a metaphysical Olympics, putting the humans from the
Enterprise
up against the alien Zaa-Naar species. It was even hoped that
Terminator
actor Arnold Schwarzenegger would appear as a representative of the superhuman Zaa-Naar race. Although it was a story from a new writer, Michael Piller killed it off. Ron Moore later noted in an internet Q and A, ‘In defence of Michael, the Q-Olympics story was ludicrous and needed to be deep-sixed.’

Actress Vanna Bonta (
The Beastmaster
) pitched a time travel story to
The Next Generation
, perhaps in the hope of being cast in a role in her own episode. The
Enterprise
receives a distress signal from a starship lost in the space equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. This area is made up of ‘energy rings’, with each ring enclosing a different period of time. Travelling through the rings, the
Enterprise
crew experience different variations of their own history that include a beard-wearing Picard, Beverly Crusher’s husband Jack still alive, and a married, sighted Geordi
La Forge living and working outside Starfleet. Data, as an android, is the only one aware of the different realities, and manipulates Picard into saving the ship. Crusher attempts to stay behind in one of the alternative timelines, but is persuaded to return to ‘normality’.

Happy to deal with important contemporary themes,
The Next Generation
often dealt with environmental issues, including in a rejected story idea by René Echevarria. Working through many drafts, Echevarria admitted the idea ‘never got off the ground’. Speaking in
Captains’ Logs
, Echevarria recalled ‘smokestacks [were] the cause of blindness and mutations in a tribe kept on a little island called the Island of Tears. They were hidden from view in order for the rest of the society to be able to maintain its mode of production, which was highly exploitive and environmentally unsound. The audience would have guessed at the end of the first act what was going on. What I came up with was a Federation colony that mined dilithium and they’re natives to the planet. The twist was that what was causing the problems were these organisms that had evolved in the presence of electromagnetic fields of dilithium. Its removal was creating mutations.’ His clever idea tied the environmental damage into a core need of the Federation, the dilithium crystals which powered starships – a clear analogy for the Western world’s reliance on fossil fuels. The episode, however, did not progress any further.

So Piller’s open door policy did bear fruit (other episodes that got made included Ron Moore’s ‘The Bonding’ and ‘Hollow Pursuits’, which introduced the character of Reg Barclay), but it also led to a whole lot of extra work for the writing staff in sifting through thousands of submissions in search of something that would work on
Star Trek
.

After
The Next Generation
, there were far fewer rejected storylines and scripts that progressed to the stage of substantial written material. There are several potential reasons why both
Deep Space Nine
and
Voyager
had very few unused storylines. By
that stage the writers and producers were far more comfortable with modern
Star Trek
and knew the kind of concepts and stories that would work, so didn’t waste time and effort developing stories that did not stand a chance of reaching the screen. Also, after seven years in production, the writers had run through many of their best ideas on
The Next Generation
, so material that might previously have been rejected was heavily reworked until it actually made it to the screen.

Certainly,
Deep Space Nine
was a harder show for outside writers to break into, especially in later years when the war story arcs meant that the show became far more serialised and by necessity the majority of the writing was by staff writers. Even so, there were a couple of ideas that didn’t progress beyond rough storylines, including one dealing with a day in the life of bartender Quark (‘Day at Quarks’) and a seventh season story dealing with Ezri Dax having the Dax symbiont removed (‘Dysfunctional’). Ron Moore’s fifth season episode ‘Soldiers of Fortune’ began life as ‘Klingon Hell’, a very different episode that saw Worf and the crew of the Klingon Bird-of-Prey ship
Rotarran
enter Gre’thor, the Klingon Hell where dishonoured Klingon souls are consigned. The concept lived on, later forming the basis of the
Voyager
story ‘Barge of the Dead’, this time with B’Elanna Torres in a near-death experience instead of Worf.

Perhaps drawing on the abandoned ‘Q Makes Two’,
Voyager
had in development a storyline concerning duplicates of the lost crew of that starship. The duplicates are actually the biometric life forms featured in the episodes ‘Demons’ and ‘Course: Oblivion’, and they would complete the voyage back to the Alpha Quadrant long before the real
Voyager
, arriving to great acclaim at the
Deep Space Nine
station. Jeri Taylor recalled, ‘Everybody thinks
Voyager
is home and there are celebrations, and they see their loved ones . . . it turns out to be an invasion or a dark plot of some kind.’ Although never fully scripted, the idea hung around through the whole of
Voyager
’s seven-year run. The closest it came to being made was as the third season finale, later replaced by ‘Scorpion’. In order not to waste a good idea,
it was revived again for the possible fourth season finale, but the writers couldn’t make it work, feeling the return of a ‘fake’
Voyager
crew would undermine the return of the real team later.