A Brief Guide to Star Trek (39 page)

The arrival of
Enterprise
saw a return to a looser commissioning structure and so resulted in a higher number of well-developed ideas that never made it to the screen, most of them apparently coming from
Star Trek
cast members past and present.

According to Hoshi Sato actress Linda Park, her co-star Connor Trinneer proposed a story inspired by the Quentin Tarantino movie
Pulp Fiction
, told from the point of view of an alien race. The alien perspective would have been depicted through the
Enterprise
crew talking incomprehensible gibberish until a method of communication was discovered (some might say many
Enterprise
episodes were ‘incomprehensible gibberish’ anyway).

Following up on his story pitch of 1966, William Shatner was set to return to
Star Trek
by appearing in an
Enterprise
two-parter. Fourth season showrunner Manny Coto recalled that the plan was to feature Shatner in a mirror universe-set tale written by Shatner’s friends and novel co-writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, who were also staff writers on the final season of
Enterprise
. The story pitch came from Shatner himself over lunch with Rick Berman, Coto and Brannon Braga. The mirror universe featured a device called the Tantalus Field that disintegrated targets remotely. The writers wanted to revise this, making it instead a time travel device that sent prisoners back in time to a penal colony. The
Enterprise
discovers the prison colony, finding mirror-Kirk (called Tiberius) imprisoned. Tib -erius sees the ship as an opportunity for escape, but he discovers that in this time period the mirror universe does not yet exist. Tiberius and Archer work together to investigate what creates the mirror universe, only to find that it is their own actions that bring it about. Although the ideas were well received, Berman had an alternative take from Mike Sussman, one of the producers on both
Voyager
and
Enterprise
, that would see Shatner playing the chef (perhaps riffing on his presenter role in TV
show
Iron Chef
) on board the earliest
Enterprise
, a comic equivalent to
Voyager
’s Neelix. As neither Shatner nor Paramount could agree terms for his appearance, the ideas progressed no further, although ‘In a Mirror, Darkly’ saw the return of the mirror universe with an alternative explanation of its origins. Coto’s exploration of the links between his show and the 1960s
Star Trek
resulted in a handful of other aborted ideas. Coto became fixated on returning a little known character, Colonel Green – an eco-terrorist involved in the third world war and seen in the episode ‘The Savage Curtain’. Coto planned to have his
Odyssey 5
star Peter Weller (best known as RoboCop) play Colonel Green in an episode that returned to some of the issues explored in the earlier 1960s instalment. Both Weller and (briefly) Colonel Green would appear in the
Enterprise
episode ‘Demons’. That same episode featured the idea of terraforming Mars, home of rebel separatist Paxton (Weller), which had its origins in a Coto story dealing with the independence of the Earth colony on the red planet. Coto envisaged an attempt to change the atmosphere of Mars using comets that would instead be aimed at Earth by terrorists, an incident Coto described as the Cuban Missile Crisis in space.

Some of the more unusual unused ideas for
Enterprise
featured Captain Archer’s dog, Porthos. Stories pitched included Porthos becoming intelligent and conversing with the crew, the dog being the only one able to communicate with an alien canine race and Porthos becoming captain of the
Enterprise
. While these stories were inherently silly, the official reason for their rejection was that the showrunners did not want Porthos becoming the star of the show, in the way that some robotic sidekicks of the 1970s (such as Twiki on
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
or robot dog K-9 on
Doctor Who
) had done. Many of these story claims came from Andre Bormanis in a DVD extra on the box set of
Enterprise
season four, resulting in some fans believing he’d actually just invented them . . .

The lost voyages of
Star Trek
, from the 1960s birth of the show to its final end (on television at least) at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, provide a secret history of the series. It’s a glimpse into an alternative world – a kind of mirror universe of
Star Trek
storytelling – in which everything is not quite as we know it in the stories we experienced across four decades as
Star Trek
viewers. It’s certainly a fascinating byway in
Star Trek
history.

Unmade scripts and story ideas were not the only unseen alternative
Star Trek
s: alongside and beyond the airing of
Enterprise
, several prominent creative people proposed new takes on the series’ basic concepts to Paramount (which became CBS Paramount in 2006 as a result of a corporate merger) to continue the franchise beyond
Enterprise
. The fact that their ideas were quickly rejected suggests the studio focus was on bringing
Star Trek
back to cinemas rather than television. Jonathan Frakes, Commander Will Riker on
The Next Generation
, was behind one failed pitch: ‘I had a
Star Trek
[series idea] that I developed for TV’, Frakes told website UGO in 2011, ‘and we were told in no uncertain terms that they said no to a Bryan Singer television
Star Trek
, they said no to a William Shatner television
Star Trek
. They feel at CBS Paramount that they don’t want to make the same mistake that’s been made before, which was watering down the brand by having a TV show and a movie [at the same time]. That’s what happened with
Star Trek Nemesis
, and that’s why I think
Star Trek: Enterprise
didn’t last the way they expected it to. It was the classic corporate greed of “we’ve got something good, so let’s continue to milk it” and [they] milked it so dry that the fans had no appetite for a movie. So I think what they’ve done by taking time off before the Abrams’
Star Trek
, and they’re doing it again [with] the second one, is a much smarter business plan. Much to my chagrin! Not that I wouldn’t love the
Titan
, or the
Rikers in Space
, or any of those shows on the air.’

Star Trek: Titan
was a spin-off series of novels published by Pocket Books, starting in 2005, that drew on the fact that Riker ended
Star Trek Nemesis
as captain of his own ship, the USS
Titan
. It seems likely that Frakes’ idea for a new
Star Trek
TV show was based around these further adventures of Riker.

As mentioned by Frakes, both
The Original Series
star William Shatner and film director Bryan Singer (
X-Men
,
Superman Returns
,
Valkyrie
) had also developed new
Star Trek
series ideas. Shatner’s notion would have sounded very familiar to
Star Trek
movie producer Harve Bennett. Called
Star Trek: The Academy
, his proposed series would have followed the adventures of teenage versions of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. The actor had worked up his proposal with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, but this time he bypassed Rick Berman, pitching directly to Paramount chief Sumner Redstone. Once the concept was rejected, the Reeves-Stevens instead turned it into a planned two-novel series, but only the first (
Star Trek Academy: Collision Course
(2007)) ever appeared. In the novel, the first meeting between Kirk and Spock takes place in a strip club where Kirk is hiding out while Spock is trying to sell off Vulcan artefacts. Facing time in a penal colony, Kirk and Spock opt to join Starfleet Academy instead, with Kirk giving his Vulcan friend the nickname ‘Stretch’.

Movie director Bryan Singer was a lifelong
Star Trek
fan who’d made a minor cameo appearance in
Star Trek Nemesis
as a Starfleet officer on the bridge of the
Enterprise
. He’d been involved in a stalled attempt in 2001 to revive
Battlestar Galactica
(a feat eventually achieved by
The Next Generation
’s Ron Moore in 2003). Singer claimed his proposed version of
Star Trek
would have been ‘Big . . . it would be very big’, according to an interview with iseb.net in 2005. Set just beyond the thirtieth century, Singer’s proposed TV series would have been called
Star Trek: Federation
. It would have featured a less warrior-like and more political depiction of the Klingons, while Vulcans and Romulans would be pursuing their reunification away from human contact. The Federation would have spread far and wide across the galaxy, making communication a difficult and time-consuming process. Distant areas of the galaxy would therefore provide new frontiers for exploration, cut off from the support that Starfleet and the Federation normally supply (echoing the set-up of
Voyager
– although unlike
Voyager
, Singer seemed
intent on exploring genuinely new and unknown worlds). Singer’s
Star Trek
essentially proposed a fresh start for the franchise, devoid of any connections with the previous series, while also being a back to basics, ‘starship facing the unknown’ show. It would have one clear connection to
The Original Series
, the
Star Trek
founding myth. The sole survivor of the USS
Sojourner
(a victim of the mysterious ‘scourge’) would have been Lt Commander Alexander Kirk, co-opted onto the crew of an allnew
Enterprise
(the first in 300 years), sent out in search of the unknown malevolent enemy. Other crewmembers would have included The 76th Distillation of Blue, a gaseous alien who uses a ‘motion suit’ to interact with humans and goes by the name Diz, and M.A.J.E.L., the ship’s sentient computer (named after Roddenberry’s wife – and voice of the
Enterprise
computer – Majel Barrett).

A proposal document for the series was drawn up after a lengthy dinner conversation between Singer, writer Christopher McQuarrie (
The Usual Suspects
, which Singer had also directed) and Robert Meyer Burnett (director of
Free Enterprise
). The document recognised that television storytelling had changed since
Star Trek
had originally been created, promising ‘more complex, serialized stories . . . compelling stories about our world today. Let
Star Trek
breathe. Let’s grapple again with the issues of the day – diversity, government power, gender frictions, a controversial war on foreign soil’. The proposal sets out to ‘acknowledge what’s come before, [but] turn the
Star Trek
universe upside down’.

Burnett claimed the first draft outline was never submitted to Paramount as the J. J. Abrams movie was announced instead. ‘It was meant to be a jumping off point for further discussion’, he told website i09, ‘not to ever be sent anywhere, certainly not to any network. There are things in the pitch I still quite like. I wanted to see more “hard” sci-fi concepts addressed directly in
Trek
.’

There was another big-name, more fully developed
Star Trek
pitch dating from 2004.
Babylon 5
creator J. Michael
Straczynski and UFO-conspiracy series
Dark Skies
creator Bryce Zabel co-authored an unsolicited TV series pitch en -titled ‘
Star Trek
: Re-boot the Universe’. The fourteen-page document was sub-headed ‘A Proposal For Re-Imagining the First Five-Year Mission’.

The pair had met when sharing a flight between Los Angeles and Vancouver (where many American TV shows are shot). Later, when working together on an ultimately unmade TV mini-series called
Cult
, their conversation turned to the current state of
Star Trek
, as
Enterprise
was reaching its final stages. ‘We wanted to start over, use Kirk, Spock and McCoy and others in a powerful new origin story about what it was that bonded them in such strong friendship, and show them off as you’d never seen them before. It was, admittedly, pretty audacious’, Zabel later wrote on his website.

In their resulting document – after singing the praises of
Star Trek
as a concept – the authors then lamented the state of the franchise in 2004. ‘There’s trouble in the
Star Trek
universe. Ratings have declined, demographics have stagnated . . . Can
Star Trek
be saved?’ The difficulty of telling new stories within the overgrown, complicated, established
Star Trek
universe was summed up with the following responses to proposed story ideas: ‘It’s been done, it’s being done or it would never be done’. The most recent
Star Trek
spin-off shows were characterised as ‘a copy of a copy of a copy’, and the blame for
Star Trek
’s decline lay with the fact that ‘the all-too-reasonable desire to protect the franchise may now be the cause of its stagnation’.

The answer proposed by Straczynski and Zabel? ‘The best solution is to go back to the original and start again. It’s time to re-boot the
Star Trek
universe.’ Their concept for twenty-first-century
Star Trek
was a return to the 1960s setting and characters but combined with ‘the kind of storytelling that audiences of 2004 are used to seeing in modern prime-time television. Hard-hitting. Exciting. Character-driven. Innovative.’ Straczynski had demonstrated his undoubted ability to achieve all of that with the groundbreaking
Babylon 5
during the latter half of the
1990s. Now he wanted to apply those storytelling techniques to
Star Trek
.

His starting point would have been ‘the three best things in the
Star Trek
universe: Kirk. Spock. McCoy’. These three characters would be reimagined and sent off on a brand new five-year mission to explore strange new worlds and new civilisations, free of all the baggage that
Star Trek
had built up over almost forty years. ‘It is time to go boldly back to the original’, the authors wrote, ‘reborn and retooled for a new millennium’.