A Brief Guide to Star Trek

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
containedseveral 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 sequenceof 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