Given how much Star Trek there is, let's check out how much there isn't!
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00:00 Hello my friends, Sean Ferrick here for Trek Culture and today's video is brought to
00:03 you by Star Trek Fleet Command. Hooray! More on that now in a second.
00:07 When Star Trek first hit the screens in 1966, there were a lot of ideas that were swirling
00:12 around this brand new show and what Roddenberry's team of writers could come up with. Ideas
00:17 and suggestions abounded, with entire fleshed out proposals dismissed and hastily rewritten.
00:22 Plot threads and episode ideas were hashed out and rehashed out over and over again until
00:27 a finished product could be brought to screen. While some stories and ideas would fall foul
00:32 of creative differences, some would be discarded due to scheduling conflicts and production
00:36 difficulties. This is true of almost every television show, but given just how vast the
00:41 franchise of Star Trek has become over the decades since Captain Kirk first sat in the
00:46 Captain's chair, there's a lot that was left on the cutting room floor.
00:49 With a fanbase as passionate as Trek's, it's no surprise that many of these details have
00:53 been dug up and discussed at length. So with that in mind then, I'm Ellie with Trek Culture
00:58 and here are 10 abandoned Star Trek ideas that would have been incredible.
01:03 My friends, just before this video starts, I just want to take a quick second to shout
01:06 out and thank our sponsor Star Trek Fleet Command. Fleet Command is a free to play game
01:11 available on both iOS and Android and it's available via the link in the description
01:16 to this video. You may be wondering why I'm dressed this way while talking about Fleet
01:20 Command. I think you know where this is going. Star Trek Strange New Worlds is coming to
01:26 Fleet Command. Yes, that is true. To coincide with the launch of the show on Paramount Plus,
01:31 it is launching in game. What does that mean? It means you get to use the souped up Enterprise.
01:36 It also means you get to use the holodeck, which is a little bit cool. But we have new
01:41 characters coming. Those characters including Captain Pike, you've got Lieutenant Spock,
01:46 and you've got Lieutenant La'Anne Noonien-Singh, who I would follow into battle in a heartbeat.
01:52 Of course, as you know, the game itself is open world. It's constantly evolving, so there's
01:55 always new games, new things to do. In fact, there's more than 25 new missions on the way
02:00 with Strange New Worlds as well. There's also a little bit of a surprise for those of you
02:05 who feel he didn't get his due. While he's not Strange New Worlds exclusive, there is
02:09 a rare Reginald Barkley that you can play as. Now initially, he's only going to be available
02:14 on PC before he extends into the mobile game as well, so make sure that you grab him while
02:19 you can. Just to say again, thank you so much to Fleet Command. It is available via the
02:22 description in the link to this video. Straight away, let's go.
02:26 Number 10, Maurice Hurley's plans for Q
02:29 After the tumultuous production of the Next Generation's first season, head writer Maurice
02:33 Hurley was ready to pack in the whole bridge crew and start afresh. He had said in an interview
02:38 with William Shatner that he had hoped to kill off the main cast and build the second
02:42 season around finding a new crew for the Enterprise. Pretty drastic. Maurice Hurley eventually left
02:47 the show at the end of the second season, and the 1988 writer's strike put paid to many
02:53 of his plans. Many of the episodes that he had intended weren't produced, and those that
02:57 did make the screen were often last-minute replacements to scrapped plans. Hurley's plans
03:01 for Q would have been extensive. The idea was that early in the second season, Q would
03:06 pay another visit to the Enterprise to torment Picard and warn him of the dangers that were
03:11 out there. Because of this, Q would be stripped of his powers and have to live on the Enterprise
03:16 for a time, until he was able to regain his abilities.
03:19 If all of this sounds familiar, it's because this plot was condensed into two episodes,
03:24 Q Who and Deja Q. The missing Q arc was essentially Q having to adjust to humanity and learn how
03:29 to get along with Picard as an almost equal.
03:32 Ronald D. Moore later commented that Hurley's plans were more plot-focused, and after his
03:37 departure from the series, the show became much more character-focused. He stressed that
03:41 they didn't want to overuse characters like Q, which this arc may well have done. Pivotally,
03:46 however, there was one difference in Q Who that didn't make it into this arc. Q wouldn't
03:51 have introduced humanity to the Borg; that would have been something else entirely.
03:56 Number 9. Maurice Hurley's plans for the Borg
03:59 Q wasn't the only Season 2 plan that Maurice Hurley had to leave by the wayside. Initially,
04:05 his plans were for the first season finale episode, "The Neutral Zone," to be the
04:09 first of two parts. The second part would focus on the Enterprise and the Romulans being
04:14 forced to work together to unravel the mystery of the missing colonies in both their territories.
04:19 The answer to that mystery? A migratory, insectoid, hive-mind species called the Borg.
04:25 That's right, in the eyes of the man who came up with them, the Borg weren't meant
04:28 to be a race of cyborgs; they were meant to be Space Army ants. They were extracting all
04:33 materials from planets in their way. The Enterprise would discover that they were heading deeper
04:38 and deeper in the Federation and would have to scramble to collect allies in facing off
04:42 against this threat. The Romulans and Klingons would be among them.
04:46 This plan would have seen the complete defeat of the Borg at the conclusion of the second
04:50 season. Just think on that for a moment. The Borg were only meant to appear for a single
04:54 season and they weren't introduced by Q. Perhaps it's for the best that the writers
04:59 strike through these plans asunder because afterwards Maurice Hurley left the show and
05:03 it took a very different direction. A better one? Perhaps not, but a fascinating one, certainly.
05:10 8. Giant Ferengi
05:12 A script by Stephen DeKnight for Deep Space Nine was simply going to be called "Giant"
05:17 and would have placed a humorous bent on Ferengi evolution.
05:20 Worf, while accompanying Jadzia Dax for a drink in Quark's bar, would have found a
05:24 Ferengi hitting on Jadzia and angrily dismissed him. He would have uttered the line "There's
05:29 no honor fighting a single Ferengi" only to hear "I'd say the same thing about Klingons"
05:34 from behind him.
05:35 Worf would then be faced with a Ferengi who was at least his equal in height and body
05:40 mass, and the two of them would engage in a traditional barroom brawl. Eventually, it
05:44 would turn out that these two Ferengi, one little and one large, were brothers on the
05:48 run from Ferengi space.
05:50 Worf and Dax would have been tasked with escorting them back there, discovering that the two
05:54 of them had discovered a scientific formula to activate the genes for physical strength
05:58 and prowess that was deep within the Ferengi genome. They explained that Ferengi were once
06:03 large and strong but had developed down an evolutionary path to be smaller, sneakier,
06:08 and thus not considered a threat by larger species. When the four of them were attacked
06:12 by Jem'Hadar on the way, they'd all have to work together to survive. Eventually, Worf
06:16 would have to acknowledge the history of the Ferengi as warriors in their own right. Could
06:21 have been fun.
06:22 7. Ronald D. Moore's obsession with musicals
06:27 Yes, before Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit us with its beloved musical episode, Ronald
06:31 D. Moore wanted the next generation to have a musical episode. When the idea didn't go
06:36 over particularly well there, he attempted to get it made on Deep Space Nine, and was
06:40 again shot down.
06:42 Ron's ideas were never fully fleshed out. His desire sprang simply from thinking that
06:45 making a musical episode for either show would be fun. He's quoted as saying,
06:49 "There's some tech virus that infects the crew and they can only communicate in song,
06:53 you know? And just do it and have a ball."
06:55 Alas, nobody was interested in pursuing it, and the idea went nowhere. Coincidentally,
07:00 Linda Park pushed to have a musical episode on Enterprise as well, given that she was
07:04 a trained singer, as were Jon Billingsley and Scott Bakula. This idea didn't go anywhere
07:09 either.
07:10 Given the enduring popularity of Buffy's Once More with Feeling, maybe it might have
07:14 been wise to cash in on the musical vibe. Also, has anyone attempted to adapt that Buffy
07:18 episode into a stage show yet? If not, why not?
07:22 6. The Literal Year of Hell
07:25 Scuttlebutt would have us believe that the plans for Voyager's Year of Hell were much
07:28 more extensive than the two-part episode that we eventually received. While this two-parter
07:33 was sufficiently brutal as we witnessed the degradation and crippling of our beloved Voyager
07:38 over an extended period of time, it could have been more.
07:41 The plans for the Year of Hell were for it to have spanned an entire season, with the
07:45 Crennim temporal ship haunting them for more than 20 episodes. Voyager would have accumulated
07:50 more and more damage as time went by, as there would be nowhere for the ship to repair itself
07:55 and they would slowly lose crew members.
07:57 The two-part episode did do an excellent job of conveying the damage that Voyager is continually
08:02 subjected to, but picture that breakdown spread over a whole season. Picture the sense of
08:06 loss and isolation that could have been worked into the very fabric of the show as it progressed,
08:11 mirrored by the increased frustration of Anorak's as he tries to shape an entire quadrant to
08:16 his liking until it's unrecognizable.
08:18 The ultimate conclusion of the season would still have been the same, with Janeway destroying
08:23 both the crippled Voyager and the Crennim time ship in a spectacular final space battle.
08:27 Eventually, the plans for the season-long arc were reduced to the two-part episode we
08:31 watched. Jerry Taylor and Brandon Braga felt that a season-long investment that would be
08:35 reversed at its conclusion was too much for the audience to bear.
08:39 Voyager, for all of the excellent solo episodes that are within it, overall lacked cohesion
08:43 as a series, and this missed opportunity could have paved the way for more overarching stories
08:48 - the kind that Voyager's very premise demanded. But it wasn't to be.
08:53 Number 5. Who's Killing the Great Voyagers of the Delta Quadrant? And why, yes, that
08:58 title is directly taken from Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe.
09:02 The premise of this episode, put forward by Brian Fuller, was to follow the adventures
09:05 of several alternate reality Voyagers. These different Voyagers are being systematically
09:10 hunted down and destroyed by an unknown force that can somehow jump between these realities.
09:16 This included a completely Klingon version of Voyager, where the Klingon Empire had defeated
09:20 the Federation back in Kirk's day, complete with Kate Mulgrew in full Klingon makeup,
09:25 and a version that was completely crewed by holograms as well as a few others.
09:29 Eventually, our Voyager and her captain Janeway would discover what's happening. They would
09:33 be confronted by another Voyager, this one commanded by Chakotay, whose Marquise crew
09:38 had overwhelmed the Starfleet crew. This alternate Chakotay had become convinced that Janeway
09:43 was responsible for them being stranded in the Delta Quadrant. And while he had found
09:47 a way to jump timelines, he hadn't yet found a way to cross the vast distance to return
09:51 home.
09:52 While this episode never panned out, it would have given Chakotay a lot more to do and probably
09:56 would have been pretty fun. We'd already seen Worf jump from timeline to timeline in the
10:01 Next Generation episode "Parallel," so why not a rampaging alternate Voyager?
10:05 4. The Tantalus Prison of James T. Kirk
10:09 You all remember the Tantalus device, yes? It was a minor plot point in the classic original
10:13 series episode "Mirror, Mirror." When Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Uhura, and Scotty are transported
10:19 to the Mirror Universe by a freak ion storm, Kirk discovers a device in his opposite number's
10:24 quarters. This is the Tantalus device, something that could simply make a selected target completely
10:30 disappear. This device later cropped up in the palace of Emperor Georgiou when she used
10:34 it to keep an eye on a wayward Michael Burnham.
10:37 Frequent Star Trek novelist Judith and Garfield Reeve-Stevens had pitched a two-part episode
10:42 for Star Trek Enterprise that featured the Tantalus device, where it would have been
10:46 revealed that it didn't kill people at all. It simply transported them back in time, about
10:51 150 years, to an isolated penal planet.
10:54 Since Mirror Spock, resplendent in his goatee, had used the device on Mirror Kirk just after
10:59 the end of Mirror, Mirror, this means that Kirk could still be there in the 2150s, when
11:04 Captain Jonathan Archer and his crew would find him.
11:07 You see, in the original pitch for this episode, the Mirror Universe hadn't been created by
11:11 the 2150s. It didn't exist yet. Mirror Kirk and Archer would have tried to figure out
11:16 what happened to it, and somehow, in some grave experiment, they would have accidentally
11:20 created it.
11:22 Yes, the plans for the Mirror Universe episode "In a Mirror Darkly" originally included
11:26 a role for the evil version of Captain Kirk. While the episodes we did receive were amongst
11:31 the strongest of Enterprise's fourth season, just imagine having had Kirk in the mix as
11:35 well.
11:36 3. The First Season of Enterprise
11:39 So, the first season of Enterprise could have turned out very different from the one that
11:43 we watched. The pitch by Rick Berman and Brandon Braga was for a show that was set entirely
11:48 on Earth, for the first season at least. Much of the premise still made it into pilot episode
11:53 Broken Bow, but some of the plot points from the fourth season, such as anti-alien resentment
11:58 amongst some humans, would have made it into this storyline.
12:01 Essentially, the series would begin with first contact with the Klingons, which would have
12:05 left Starfleet Command scrabbling to finish their first warp-five capable ship. So far,
12:10 so familiar, but there was no temporal Cold War in this proposal, and humanity would have
12:14 stumbled at the first hurdle.
12:16 The brand new Enterprise would have been destroyed in its first attempt at a launch, leading
12:20 the design team to go back to the drawing board. Eventually, this idea was rejected,
12:24 and the show we got was a lot more like its predecessors in the original series, The Next
12:29 Generation, and Voyager.
12:30 Eventually, Enterprise would shake up its format with the Zindi War, but the first two
12:34 seasons were not what they could have been.
12:37 2. The Godhead
12:39 A scrapped episode from the third season of the original series, The Godhead was meant
12:43 to be the 26th episode. This would have put it to be the very last, beating out the somewhat
12:49 troublesome turnabout intruder.
12:51 In this episode, the crew of the Enterprise would have discovered an ancient alien race
12:55 that had discovered a way to accumulate all of their vast knowledge and place it inside
12:59 a single person. While the details of who this single person were to be weren't released,
13:03 it was likely to have been one of the crew, but unlikely to have been either Kirk or Spock.
13:08 Whoever they turned out to be, the Godhead themselves would have been driven mad with
13:12 power and would have become determined to use the Enterprise to conquer the galaxy.
13:17 This story was actually put into the first stages of production, but the final two episodes
13:21 of the third season were cancelled by NBC, and this one never saw the light of day.
13:26 The Godhead is one of many original series episodes that could have been. In fact, our
13:30 very own Bri has made a whole video talking about them, which includes some Oscar-worthy
13:35 acting by Adam Cleary, so be sure to check that out. But for now, number one.
13:40 Star Trek The Beginning
13:41 The tentative title for an eleventh film that never came to pass, The Beginning was meant
13:46 to be the first of a trilogy of films that bridged the gap between Star Trek Enterprise
13:51 and Star Trek The Original Series. A full treatment was approved and multiple versions
13:55 of the script were written, but the project fell apart in favor of going with J.J. Abrams'
13:59 reboot film in 2009.
14:02 Set four years after the events of Terra Prime, the United Earth's Stellar Navy is being folded
14:07 into Starfleet, and a few officers are resentful of the move. One called Tiberius Chase has
14:12 family ties back to the Terra Prime movement, who wanted to drive all alien influence from
14:16 Earth. Somewhat suddenly, a massive Romulan attack fleet emerges from behind Earth's moon.
14:22 They demand for Earth to turn over all of the Vulcans living on the planet, to which
14:26 Admiral Gardner refuses and manages to rally Starfleet and UESN forces.
14:31 When the Romulans are just barely driven off, it's discovered that the Romulans are planning
14:35 to regroup with reinforcements. Tiberius Chase and his band of survivors track down the nuclear
14:40 stockpile of an isolationist group, then hijack the USS Spartan from its dry dock in Saturn
14:45 and attempt to bring the war to the Romulans.
14:48 This would be the opening moves of the much-talked-about Earth-Romulan War, during which the two sides
14:53 did not see each other face-to-face. The war was fought entirely in ships, and a subsequent
14:58 Neutral Zone Treaty was negotiated over subspace transmission.
15:02 In one final detail, Tiberius Chase would be sending letters to Penelope Gardner, the
15:06 daughter of Admiral Gardner, who was a schoolteacher in Iowa, where a certain captain was born.
15:12 While the 2009 reboot of the franchise seemed like a better bet, the franchise lost a lot
15:17 by not following through with this project.
15:19 But given how much of Star Trek there is, we, its faithful fans, must always remember
15:23 that there were so many more ideas out there. Many would have sucked, but so many would
15:28 have been just awesome. In theory, out there in an alternate timeline, they all got made
15:33 for our viewing pleasure. Just think on that one.
15:36 And that concludes our list. If you can think of any other examples, then do let us know
15:39 in the comments below. And while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe, and tap
15:43 that notification bell. Also, head over to Twitter and follow us there, and I can be
15:47 found across various social medias just by searching Ellie Littlechild.
15:50 I've been Ellie with Trek Culture. I hope you have a wonderful day, and remember to
15:55 boldly go where no one has gone before.
15:57 [MUSIC PLAYING]