A brief guide to star tr.., p.26
A Brief Guide to Star Trek, page 26
The unexpected death of Trip Tucker was seen as a pointless stunt that had been pulled with little impact. Again, the Toronto Star noted ‘a major character is pointlessly killed off in service of a pointless plot device’. Even Tucker actor Connor Trinneer said he felt that the death of his character was ‘forced’ and was simply a device to manipulate the fan audience. In general, Enterprise was the most poorly regarded of all the Star Trek TV series, even after Voyager. Melanie McFarland, writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, noted that the series ‘never found the sense of uniqueness within the Star Trek universe that every version that came before it possessed’.
What Berman and Braga failed to recognise was that in re -creating the Star Trek of the 1960s, they were sticking with storytelling techniques that were slow and old-fashioned. Television – and science fiction shows in particular – had developed and changed hugely over the years, drawing inspiration from contemporary movies and science fiction literature of more recent decades. Star Trek had almost stopped being television science fiction and had become a period genre unto itself, with The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all being variations within that fixed, 1960s style of storytelling. For all its attempts to do something ‘different’, because it was still essentially Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, Enterprise was doomed almost from the outset to contain all the positives and negatives of every other Star Trek TV series and movies that had come before it. It couldn’t help itself, and it wasn’t possible for it to be any other way. Those in charge, however, didn’t seem to realise they were not making science fiction television, they were specifically making Star Trek television, a sub-set all its own.
According to Brannon Braga, ‘If Enterprise had continued, we would have kept going with Manny Coto’s unique vision of the show. Also, we would have explored the temporal cold war to its conclusion. We all felt that there were many more Trek stories to tell with that crew, and we were saddened by its premature end. Manny and I speak often about this – the show had really caught fire in seasons three and four.’
Among the ideas planned for the aborted fifth season of Enterprise were the origins and birth of the Federation (partly covered in ‘These Are the Voyages . . .’) and the first moves in the war with Romulus described in The Original Series episode ‘Balance of Terror’, with the Romulans developing as the season’s major villains. Braga even hinted that he and Berman had considered making the mysterious ‘future guy’ of the temporal cold war a Romulan, to fit in with Coto’s proposed story arc.
Following his work on year four, Coto planned to continue to strengthen the connections between Enterprise and the other Star Trek shows. One planned episode was a sequel to ‘The Slaver Weapon’, an instalment of The Animated Series featuring the alien Kzinti race, created by renowned science fiction author Larry Niven. The construction site of the first ever Starbase and the cloud city of Stratos, previously seen in The Original Series episode ‘The Cloud Minders’, were also under consideration as settings to be further explored. An origin story for Voyager’s Borg Queen was also in the works, as was the revelation that T’Pol’s father was a Romulan agent (perhaps tying in with the Romulan war arc). Another mirror universe story was also in preparation, perhaps to focus on Hoshi Sato in her alternate role as Empress of the Terran Empire. This may have taken the shape of a four- or five-episode mini-series spread throughout the season.
Coto even planned for an addition to the Enterprise crew in the form of Andorian Commander Shran (Jeffrey Combs), a recurring character who’d already appeared in ten episodes of Enterprise. The character might have joined the crew, in the words of Coto, as ‘an auxiliary or adviser’.
The cancellation of the series meant that none of these ideas would come to fruition, although in response to the fan outcry about the death of Trip Tucker, tie-in novels were published by Pocket Books, beginning with Last Full Measure and The Good That Men Do (both by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin), which revealed the holographic depiction of his demise was a fabrication covering up Tucker’s involvement with the shadowy Section 31 intelligence agency. According to the novels, Tucker faked his own death in order to be sent undercover to infiltrate Romulan space, aiming to prevent an interstellar war. These novels, and further follow-ups, presented an opportunity for the authors to expand upon the back-story and future of one of Enterprise’s most loved characters. It was an unusual example of those who police the expansion of the franchise in licensed spin-off material allowing an on-screen development to be superseded by ancillary material, a development that played well with Trip Tucker fans.
Almost immediately after the demise of Enterprise, Rick Berman attempted to further prolong the Star Trek franchise by beginning development work on a new film to take place after the events of Enterprise but before those of the original Star Trek TV series. An executive reshuffle at Paramount put paid to Berman’s efforts and he was finally removed from controlling the Star Trek franchise after eighteen years in charge, the most influential person on its development after creator Gene Roddenberry himself.
Berman was a television production professional, responsible for delivering hundreds of hours of technically complicated television on time and to broadcast standard over a period of eighteen years – no mean feat. He was not primarily a creative storyteller himself, but he’d been surrounded by key figures who’d used the Star Trek format in various ways to tell modern, meaningful stories. Key among those whom Berman had supported in their project to reshape Gene Roddenberry’s universe were Michael Piller, Ron Moore, Ira Steven Behr, Jeri Taylor, Brannon Braga and Manny Coto.
The opening episode of Enterprise in 2001 had attracted 12.5 million viewers, but the number of people watching regularly dropped to less than 6 million very quickly. By the final season that number had halved again to under 3 million viewers, with a series low of just 2.5 million in January 2005, resulting in cancellation. Based on the number of viewers alone, the show must be considered a failure, whatever narrative achievements may have been made. It was a downward spiral Rick Berman could not deny. ‘The show certainly had a great start. It got very good reviews and it had a huge audience for the first half dozen episodes and then it started to slip’, he said. ‘I could take the blame for it. I could put the blame into the scripts. I could put the blame into franchise fatigue. I don’t know why it didn’t work.’ Brannon Braga suggested that the reason for the cancellation was viewer fatigue, noting that ‘after 18 years and 624 hours of Star Trek, the audience began to have a little bit of overkill’.
It would take almost exactly four years from the transmission of the final episode of Enterprise, but Star Trek would return – not on TV, but back on the big screen once more – and it would become bigger and more successful than ever before.
Chapter 12
Hollow Pursuits: Unmade Star Trek
‘I think there is a need for the culture to have a myth. People look to Star Trek to set up a leader and a hearty band of followers. It’s Greek classical storytelling.’ William Shatner
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.
