A Brief Guide to Star Trek (37 page)

With the creation of so many stories for the ongoing
Star Trek
universe, it was inevitable that many often fully developed ideas for scripts would fall by the wayside. From the earliest days of the original
Star Trek
pilots through to the abandoned plans for the fifth season of
Enterprise
and beyond, to series ideas that were never progressed, storylines, characters and plots were developed that would never see the light of day. Perhaps the largest body of abandoned work came during the development of
Star Trek: Phase II
and
The Motion Picture
(discussed in
chapter 5
), but there have been many more untold adventures of Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer (and several other captains) through the years that now only exist as scripts filed away in Paramount’s archives.

There were enough abandoned episodes from the three years of the original
Star Trek
series between 1966 and 1969 to have filled two additional seasons on air. Almost sixty storylines and script ideas were developed, some not far beyond just the basic idea stage, while others were fully written storylines, meaning that writers and producers put some significant effort into trying to shape and prepare the material for production.

Gene Roddenberry’s initial outline for
Star Trek
contained
several episode ideas that were little more than one- or two-line concepts, some of which were developed into finished episodes (such as ‘President Capone’, which became ‘A Piece of the Action’ in the second season, and ‘The Mirror’, sowing the seeds for ‘Mirror, Mirror’).

Many of the more developed ideas that have since come to light were from David Gerrold, writer of ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’ and one of the co-developers of
The Next Generation
. Although he only scripted the single episode for the original
Star Trek
(and provided the story for ‘The Cloud Minders’), he also supplied two scripts for the 1970s
Animated Series
and story-edited much of the first season of
The Next Generation
.

Although ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’ (itself developed from an idea originally called ‘The Fuzzies’) was his only
Star Trek
episode actually to be produced, Gerrold had worked on a var -iety of other ideas. Among them was a 1967 idea entitled ‘Bandi’, which probably influenced his Tribbles concept. The title character is a critter brought on board the
Enterprise
as a kind of mascot, but which causes much disruption among the crew due to its empathetic nature, leading to the death of a crewmember. Spock eliminates the creature and frees the crew from its malign influence. Gerrold later adapted the story for a
Star Trek
manga (Japanese comic).

Gerrold was also behind the never-produced episode ‘The Protracted Man’. During an experiment to establish a faster than ever ‘warp corridor’, the pilot of a shuttlecraft is beamed to the
Enterprise
just in the nick of time. However, the man is ‘protracted’ – split in time. The concept was to be depicted by having three images of the man moving seconds apart, and displayed in the primary colours, blue, red and yellow. The affected man maintains himself by drawing energy from the
Enterprise
itself, thus becoming a threat to the ship. As the ship travels at warp speed, the man’s triple images become further adrift in time from each other. Eventually, the protracted man has to be reintegrated using the ship’s transporter. Gerrold claimed he had been influenced by a similar graphic sequence
of images in Robert Wise’s movie
West Side Story
(1961).

This was certainly a strong, original science fiction idea, but one that would have been complicated to realise on screen with 1960s television technology (although not impossible, just time-consuming and expensive). It would perhaps have been more suited to
The Next Generation
era, when scientific puzzles and easier to achieve special effects were more in vogue.

One of Gerrold’s earliest outlines was a sixty-page storyline called ‘Tomorrow Was Yesterday’ (unrelated to the episode ‘Tomorrow Is Yesterday’). Planned as a two-part tale, in order to ration the show’s resources, the story saw the
Enterprise
discover a long-lost generation starship (a ship sent into space long ago in which generations of crew have grown, lived and died due to the slow pace of early space travel). Those on board have long forgotten their origins and have even lost the knowledge that they are on board a spacecraft. The idea was similar to one
Trek
writer Harlan Ellison would develop (and then disown) in the 1970s TV series
The Starlost
. Gerrold reused the idea himself several times, in his 1972 novel
Starhunt
and again in the 1980
Star Trek
novel
The Galactic Whirlpool
.

It had always been Gene Roddenberry’s intention from the beginning of
Star Trek
to involve science fiction prose authors in the creation of stories. This ideal was often hard to achieve, as many novelists were unable to adapt their ideas to the limited format of a weekly television show. However, several did get involved and made multiple, ultimately futile, attempts to crack
Star Trek
.

A. E. van Vogt had been high on Roddenberry’s wish list to work on the series. He developed at least two story ideas – ‘Machines Are Better’ and ‘The Search for Eternity’ – that ended up on the shelf. There has been much speculation that van Vogt’s
Voyage of the Space Beagle
from 1950 was an influence on Roddenberry when he created
Star Trek
, especially given this speech from a character called Von Grossen: ‘The Beagle is going to another galaxy on an exploration voyage – the first trip of the kind. Our business is to study life in this new system’. It’s
close to the opening narration of
Star Trek
as a mission statement, and the episodic novel includes a crew embarked on a perilous exploration of unknown space. However, the author himself found it difficult to tailor his ideas for
Star Trek
.

Philip José Farmer was another science fiction author who contributed a variety of story ideas, but failed to get an episode on air. His first proposal was titled ‘Image of the Beast’ (a title he also used for an erotic horror novel with no connection to his
Star Trek
idea). That, and another called ‘Mere Shadows’, didn’t get past the story outline stage. However, a third attempt, ‘The Shadow of Space’, appears to have progressed further. Farmer’s idea saw the
Enterprise
escape the confines of the physical universe altogether – truly going where no man had gone before. Although the outlandish idea was rejected, Farmer published it as a short story, stripped of all the
Star Trek
content. It appeared in the magazine
Worlds of If
and later in one of Farmer’s short story collections. He did the same with a fourth rejected idea, ‘Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind’. According to Farmer, his ideas were rejected as Gene Roddenberry found them ‘too sophisticated’ for the general television audience. He told
Starlog
magazine in 1990: ‘[Roddenberry] said his criterion is what his little old maiden aunt in Iowa would understand, and he said, “She would not understand these.” “Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind” originally involved a little idol that Captain Kirk had picked up in the ruins of a planet. It turns out to be a device that makes you lose memory two days in a row and you keep going backwards . . . eventually it’s a year before, and he’s in a new situation . . . I don’t think they could put “Sketches” across’. These ideas, and a fifth known as ‘The Uncoiler’, all remained unproduced.

Authors Norman Spinrad and Theodore Sturgeon did succeed in getting episodes on air (‘The Doomsday Machine’ for Spinrad, the Hugo Award-winning ‘Amok Time’ and ‘Shore Leave’ for Sturgeon). Spinrad’s other script, co-written with writer–producer Gene L. Coon, was titled ‘He Walked Among Us’ and concerned a health food fanatic from the
Federation taking over a planet and breaching the Prime Directive by reshaping its society according to his beliefs. As the inhabitants perceive the man as a god, Kirk finds it very difficult to remove him without also disrupting the planet’s society. It was an idea that would be returned to in
The Next Generation
instalment ‘Who Watches the Watchers?’ and the
Deep Space Nine
story ‘Accession’.

Spinrad recalled he’d built the episode around an available standing set of an old village on the studio back lot. Additionally, the instalment was conceived by its co-author Gene Coon as a vehicle for entertainer Milton Berle, who would probably have fitted right in as one of
Star Trek
’s long list of would-be God-like beings, although Spinrad wasn’t keen on the casting. ‘I had Milton Berle and this village’, he explained. ‘I know that Berle can be a serious actor, but he likes weird get-ups. [Coon] rewrote a serious anthropological piece into something played for laughs.’ Unhappy with Coon’s rewrite, Spinrad asked Roddenberry to drop the script: ‘I killed my own script rather than have it presented in that way.’ He’d also eventually write a script for the aborted
Star Trek: Phase II
series.

Sturgeon’s third script for
The Original Series
was to be ‘The Joy Machine’ (also called ‘The Root of All Evil’). Although based on a story outline by Sturgeon, the full teleplay was eventually written by Meyer Dolinsky, also the writer of ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’ and three episodes of the 1960s anthology show
The Outer Limits
. In a tale similar to ‘This Side of Paradise’ (which probably led to the abandonment of ‘The Joy Machine’), Kirk and co visit a ‘perfect’ world where hard work is rewarded by a regular ‘payday’ session with the ‘joy machine’. Induced to abandon their ship, the
Enterprise
crew are co-opted into the society of the joy machine. The unmade tale was written up as a novel by James Gunn for Pocket Books in 1996. Also outlined by Sturgeon in 1968 but never made was the self-explanatory ‘Shore Leave II’.

Jerome Bixby wrote four episodes for
Star Trek
in the 1960s (‘Mirror, Mirror’ – introducing the mirror universe concept and a Hugo Award-winner – ‘By Any Other Name’, ‘Day of the
Dove’ and ‘Requiem for Methuselah’), but even he had other ideas rejected, including ‘For They Shall Inherit’, ‘Mother Tiger’ and ‘Skal’, about which few details survive.

George Clayton Johnson, one of the few regular writers for
The Twilight Zone
other than Rod Serling, developed a story under the imaginative title ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby, or Die!’ following his initial episode, ‘The Man Trap’. His second attempt at a
Star Trek
script saw a juvenile alien being enter the
Enterprise
’s computer system, where it incubated and grew to adulthood. Kirk would have become a father figure to the entity, coaching it through its life trapped within the computer. Gene Coon was not keen on the idea and it was rejected. However, both he and Roddenberry liked Johnson’s ‘The Syndicate’ (drawn from Roddenberry’s ‘President Capone’ idea) well enough to develop it into ‘A Piece of the Action’ (originally called ‘Mission into Chaos’ and written by Coon and David P. Harmon).

Other science fiction authors didn’t fare as well. Comic science fiction writer Robert Sheckley had several ideas rejected, including ‘Rites of Fertility’ and ‘Sister in Space’, although he did write a tie-in
Deep Space Nine
novel in 1995. Larry Niven eventually wrote an episode for
The Animated Series
(‘The Slaver Weapon’, linked to the author’s own ‘Known Space’ stories), but he first submitted ideas to the 1960s show. ‘The Pastel Terror’ concerned a ‘star beast’ plasmoid life form that fed off the energy of stars. The
Enterprise
was to be enveloped by the creature, which was intent on draining the ship’s energy. One method of escape suggested by Spock was to separate the saucer section of the ship (a possibility built in by Roddenberry, but not seen until the 1987
The Next Generation
pilot episode ‘Encounter at Farpoint’ and in the 1994 movie
Star Trek Generations
). Spock replaces Kirk and proceeds with the saucer separation, destroying the secondary hull in an attempt to wipe out the plasmoid life form. The saucer section of the
Enterprise
lands on a remote planet and the crew prepare to establish a colony. Aided by the planet’s giant dragon-like inhabitants, however, they are able to return to the Federation.

Niven himself realised that the special effects required by his story made it virtually unproducable, while Spock’s betrayal of the captain did not go down well with Roddenberry. The rather apocalyptic storyline puts the
Enterprise
crew in a desperate situation and virtually destroys the ship (as eventually seen in
The Search for Spock
and
Generations
). Niven’s outline was eventually published in the
Star Trek
fanzine
T-Negative#17
in 1972. Niven would go on to contribute to the syndicated
Star Trek
newspaper strip, pitting the
Enterprise
crew against his own Kzinti once again.

Even those most closely involved with writing and producing the original
Star Trek
had ideas that failed to be produced. Story editor D. C. Fontana made several attempts to give Dr McCoy a daughter called Joanna, but each story was rejected. The first, simply entitled ‘Joanna’, was heavily rewritten to become the episode ‘The Way to Eden’ (an infamous episode featuring space hippies). The original outline saw McCoy’s free-spirited daughter having a romantic fling with Captain Kirk, much to the horror of her father. Another Fontana script introducing Joanna McCoy and intended for the unmade fourth season of
Star Trek
was called ‘The Stars of Sargasso’.

Associate producer Robert Justman tried his hand at an ori -ginal story with ‘The Deadliest Game’, a riff on the 1932 movie
The Most Dangerous Game
about an insane hunter who pursues the most dangerous game of all: man. Justman gave the setting as a ‘hell planet’, with the
Enterprise
crew trapped aboard a ship like the
Mary Celeste
and on a quest for something akin to the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which turns out to be the fountain of youth.