Star Trek writers and executives have had a lot of ideas, but most get red-shirted before
they hit the airwaves.
It's too bad, because some sounded awesome.
Here are some great Star Trek projects we never got to see.
In 1992, the city of Las Vegas drew up an ambitious and, we have to say it, enterprising
plan to bring more families to the Strip and boost the gambling revenue: They would pull
tourists away from the flashier casinos, with a full-size model of the Starship Enterprise.
The original plan spared no expense.
The Enterprise would be built exactly to the fictional specifications of the TV show, omitting,
unfortunately, the phasers and photon torpedoes, making it look like the old gal plopped down
right in the middle of Vegas.
Guests could tour the ship and witness faithful reproductions of the sets from the TV shows
and movies, and with no exterior supports (to keep the reproduction faithful) the ship
was a minor engineering miracle, something that would have made even Scotty proud.
So what happened?
Basically, Paramount killed the project for being too audacious.
According to the Paramount CEO, if they made a bad movie…
“Reroute emergency power.”
“The whole sequencer was damaged by phaser fire.”
“Transferring controls to manual.”
... everybody would forget about it in a year.
If this tourist trap didn't pan out, however, it'd be around forever.
That was the nail in the coffin.
Vegas went with the less-spectacular Fremont Street Experience, and millions of Star Trek
fans cried more than they did when Spock died.
Less than a year after Star Trek premiered, the show was already in trouble, and Gene
Roddenberry had no clue whether his show would survive.
Preparing for the worst, he started developing a new show called Assignment: Earth.
At first, Assignment: Earth had nothing to do with Star Trek.
It told the story of Gary Seven, a time traveler who traveled to the past to make sure Earth
history ran the way it was supposed to.
Accompanied by a present-day secretary, a super-computer, and a shape-shifting cat,
Seven would fight off evil aliens trying to mess up Earth history.
"Would you mind telling me who that is."
"That, Ms. Lincoln, is simply my cat."
Fortunately — or not, depending on how stoked you are about a show that was basically Trek
meets Doctor Who —the tides eventually turned and Roddenberry soon realized he could only
get the new show going if it was connected to Star Trek.
He retooled the idea as a spin-off, making the dubious decision to use an episode of
Star Trek as a back-door pilot for the proposed series.
This ended up being the second season finale of Star Trek, basically ending the season
as an advertisement for a different TV show with an episode barely featuring Kirk and
Spock.
To add salt to the wound, NBC passed on the series, making the lame crossover episode
even worse.
The original Star Trek was canceled after three seasons, but in the following years,
it was hugely popular in syndication.
In 1977, Paramount decided to take advantage of that and regrouped around a new Star Trek
idea called Phase II.
Right from the start, Paramount planned to give the show the budget the original series
never had, and 13 episodes were fully scripted by some of the best sci-fi writers of the
era.
As Phase II was about to enter production, however, Paramount decided out of nowhere
that they should make a movie instead, and put all the money into Star Trek: The Motion
Picture.
Tons of elements from Phase II were reused in the film and a couple of scripts were eventually
adapted into episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation during a writers strike, but the
rest of the 13-episode season was left on the shelf when Phase II was phased out.
Since the '90s, fans have wanted to see what the Federation was like after The Next Generation.
We'll finally be seeing a little of it when Star Trek: Picard hits in 2020, but CBS almost
gave us what we wanted in 2006 with the groundbreaking Star Trek: Final Frontier.
Instead of a live-action TV show, Final Frontier was a web-only animated series by Zero Room
Productions, exploring the dark future of the Federation centuries after Picard and
his crew.
During a war with the Romulan Empire, mysterious explosions of Omega Particles rendered huge
chunks of space impossible to travel via warp, essentially cutting the Federation in half.
Anybody trapped in these regions of space would take hundreds of years to travel anywhere
else, which stranded starships, including a run-down Enterprise, in vast nothingness.
Even worse, political instability forced the Vulcans to leave the Federation, destroyed
the Andorians, and allowed the Romulans to occupy the Klingon Empire.
It's not exactly the utopian future viewers were used to, but CBS wanted to parallel the
global upheavals following 9/11.
Eventually, though, the network lost interest, which is probably for the best.
When it's all you see on the news, most people don't want to think about the miserable realities
of global conlict and terrorism when they watch Star Trek.
The proposed designs and storyboards made it online, though, and it turns out that those
are actually pretty good.
When you never actually make the show, it's pretty hard to screw it up.
Before J.J. Abrams rebooted the franchise on the big screen, Paramount was looking at
developing Star Trek: The Beginning, a darker take set during the Earth-Romulan War, decades
before the original series.
The Romulans conduct a gigantic sneak attack on Earth and, in a not-so-subtle reference
to the Nazis, demand that all Vulcans are turned over to Romulan extermination camps.
The United Federation of Planets sends Tiberius Chase — a hotshot pilot and ancestor to
Kirk — out on a secret war against the Romulan fleet.
Unsurprisingly, the show had some truly insane elements.
Tiberius Chase's family are a bunch of xenophobes living in Antarctica, and Paramount wanted
to play up the obvious Holocaust parallels.
With Tiberius conducting a guerrilla war against the Romulans, it seems like this was a mixture
of Inglourious Basterds and Star Trek, and if done well, that could actually be pretty
awesome.
Eventually, though, Paramount decided The Beginning was a little too dark, and the project
was shelved.
Instead, Paramount went for J.J. Abrams and the opposite of darkness: lens flares.
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