A Brief Guide to Star Trek

Although much work was done on his script for ‘The Neutral Zone’ (unrelated to theseason 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’mgoing 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,