A Brief Guide to Star Trek

and a married, sighted GeordiLa Forge living and working outside Starfleet. Data, as an android, is the only one aware of the different realities, and manipulates Picard into saving the ship. Crusher attempts to stay behind in one of the alternative timelines, but is persuaded to return to ‘normality’.
    Happy to deal with important contemporary themes,
The Next Generation
often dealt with environmental issues, including in a rejected story idea by René Echevarria. Working through many drafts, Echevarria admitted the idea ‘never got off the ground’. Speaking in
Captains’ Logs
, Echevarria recalled ‘smokestacks [were] the cause of blindness and mutations in a tribe kept on a little island called the Island of Tears. They were hidden from view in order for the rest of the society to be able to maintain its mode of production, which was highly exploitive and environmentally unsound. The audience would have guessed at the end of the first act what was going on. What I came up with was a Federation colony that mined dilithium and they’re natives to the planet. The twist was that what was causing the problems were these organisms that had evolved in the presence of electromagnetic fields of dilithium. Its removal was creating mutations.’ His clever idea tied the environmental damage into a core need of the Federation, the dilithium crystals which powered starships – a clear analogy for the Western world’s reliance on fossil fuels. The episode, however, did not progress any further.
    So Piller’s open door policy did bear fruit (other episodes that got made included Ron Moore’s ‘The Bonding’ and ‘Hollow Pursuits’, which introduced the character of Reg Barclay), but it also led to a whole lot of extra work for the writing staff in sifting through thousands of submissions in search of something that would work on
Star Trek
.

    After
The Next Generation
, there were far fewer rejected storylines and scripts that progressed to the stage of substantial written material. There are several potential reasons why both
Deep Space Nine
and
Voyager
had very few unused storylines. Bythat stage the writers and producers were far more comfortable with modern
Star Trek
and knew the kind of concepts and stories that would work, so didn’t waste time and effort developing stories that did not stand a chance of reaching the screen. Also, after seven years in production, the writers had run through many of their best ideas on
The Next Generation
, so material that might previously have been rejected was heavily reworked until it actually made it to the screen.
    Certainly,
Deep Space Nine
was a harder show for outside writers to break into, especially in later years when the war story arcs meant that the show became far more serialised and by necessity the majority of the writing was by staff writers. Even so, there were a couple of ideas that didn’t progress beyond rough storylines, including one dealing with a day in the life of bartender Quark (‘Day at Quarks’) and a seventh season story dealing with Ezri Dax having the Dax symbiont removed (‘Dysfunctional’). Ron Moore’s fifth season episode ‘Soldiers of Fortune’ began life as ‘Klingon Hell’, a very different episode that saw Worf and the crew of the Klingon Bird-of-Prey ship
Rotarran
enter Gre’thor, the Klingon Hell where dishonoured Klingon souls are consigned. The concept lived on, later forming the basis of the
Voyager
story ‘Barge of the Dead’, this time with B’Elanna Torres in a near-death experience instead of Worf.
    Perhaps drawing on the abandoned ‘Q Makes Two’,
Voyager
had in development a storyline concerning duplicates of the lost crew of that starship. The duplicates are actually the biometric life forms featured in the episodes ‘Demons’ and ‘Course: Oblivion’, and they would complete the voyage back to the Alpha Quadrant long before the real
Voyager
, arriving to great acclaim at the
Deep Space Nine
station. Jeri Taylor recalled, ‘Everybody thinks
Voyager
is home and there are celebrations, and they see their loved ones . . . it turns out to be an invasion or a dark plot of some kind.’ Although never fully scripted, the idea hung around through the whole of
Voyager
’s seven-year run. The closest it came to being made was as the third season finale, later replaced by ‘Scorpion’. In order not to waste a good idea,it was revived again for the possible fourth season finale, but the writers couldn’t