In our last installment we got a bit of the backstage of the show, what it takes to create a show with sets and props and stuff. This time we finish with some more story ideas, to really wow the suits…who don’t really care about science fiction or stories. They just want to see if they’re going to make more money. A rant for another time, perhaps.
In previous guides and pitches, seeing what crosses over from the concept to the final product has always been the most interesting plot. Getting to see what was intended versus what we got gives us trivia we didn’t have before. In Batman: The Animated Series we learned Mr. Freeze was originally going to get his comic origin rather than the one everyone today knows. In Star Trek: The Next Generation we confirmed Stardates are worthless, and just there to be in the future.
There are four pages of potential story ideas in the pitch alone, plus one more for a final bit of set-up. So let’s try to finish here and go to the guide next week.
Specifics on the SS Yorktown…
As with GUNSMOKE’s Dodge City, KILDARE’s Blair General Hospital, we may never get around to exploring every cabin, department, and cranny of our cruiser. The point being–it is a whole community in which we can anytime take our camera down a passageway and find a guest star or secondary character (scientist, specialist, ordinary airman, passenger or stowaway) who can propel us into a story.
Not to mention all the aliens, other Starfleet members who show upon the ship or they meet at some Starbase, and so on. I don’t think we need to see every room, just ones that make sense on the ship and are needed either for a story or a good character moment.
Now and then a story will take place exclusively aboard the Yorktown, i.e., such as the tale of strange “intelligence” which has made its way aboard and is working to take over the minds of certain key crewmen. Or the transportation of a person or material which poses a mounting jeopardy to the ship and our characters.
In the business these are referred to as “bottle episodes”, where everything takes place in one location, either with one set designed for it, or just in the group of set for, in this case, the same ship. It not only saves money due to not needing more sets than the ones you already have, but gives the ship itself a chance to become a character. It’s too bad Doctor Who never did more bottle episodes in the TARDIS.
The interior construction is utilitarian rather than exotic with a few appropriate indications of advanced controls and instruments. There are galleys, recreation rooms, a library, a hospital unit, and scientific laboratories, in addition to expected items such as the bridge, communication room and crew quarters always with a slight naval flavor.
We never really got the labs, though McCoy and Spock both clearly used them. I wonder if a set was ever designed?
Now we get to the fun part. There are a bunch more episode ideas they hit the studio with. I wonder how many I can recognize? How many can you recognize?
Other story springboards…
THE PERFECT WORLD. Landing on this particular planet, Captain April and the STAR TREK reconnaissance team find a civilization approximating earth circa 1964. But with some unusual exceptions–seeming perfect order, no crime, no social problems, no hunger or disease, a place of charming and completely adjusted people. In fact, so pleasant and well ordered that something has to be wrong. Investigation in this direction finds Robert April seized and subjected to incredible police barbarism, even more shocking by its contrast. Only slowly does it become apparent that our wanderers have stumbled upon an example similar to the novel “1984” but with all the rough edges removed, i.e. completely efficient, also completely despotic communism carried to its extreme.
I think the closest we go to that was the Llandrew computer putting everyone into a more puritan cult state except for once a year when they go crazy for “festival”. I wonder if that inspired The Purge? I hope not, because I don’t want to hate that episode for such a sin.
MR. SOCRATES. The most unusual world in the universe, a society secretly in telepathic contact with earth for centuries, selecting and duplicating in intelligent, lifelike form, th emost unusual intellects produced in mankind’s history. On a single street one might meet such people as Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Florence Nightingale, Genghis Khan, Thomas Jefferson, Carry Nation, and Adolf Hitler. What at first seems like pure fantasy to the STAR TREK principals suddenly becomes a very real and very deadly game as they begin to realize this is a form of “Roman Colosseum”, and that the participants are all “Gladiators” the stakes are life and death, and the games are about to begin.
I wonder if Florence Nightingale took take Adolph Hitler? I’m kind of glad we didn’t get this exact story, though there are minor elements that ended up in other episodes of both the original and animated series, plus comics and novels. I suspect the first half would feel more like a sitcom, or that Clone High series, and I don’t know how you’d pull that off. Is Caesar going to be Napoleon’s wacky neighbor?
THE STRANGER. After taking off from a planet, the S.S. Yorktown proceeds to another planet in the same solar system. Not until then does it become apparent that an alien intelligence has made its way aboard with the aim of taking over the minds of key crew members–purpose to use our Cruiser to attack a rival civilization on the other planet. Actually a “horror” tale, we emphasize the subtleness of this attack on intelligence, reaching a point where mutual suspicion is endangering the entire ship.
Somebody read or watched Invasion Of The Body Snatchers before writing this. (The originals came out in the 1950s, so it’s possible.) Oddly, the first half sounds more like a Next Generation episode, as far as the villains’ plot anyway. Instead he gave the ship amnesia to trick them into attacking his enemies.
THE MAN TRAP. A desert trek story, taking members of our band from one point on a planet to another. But what appears to be a pleasant totally earthlike and harmless world, rapidly develops into a hundred miles of fear and suspicions as Captain April and crew begin to encounter strange apparitions. Actually more than apparitions, these are wish-fulfillment traps which become as real as flesh and blood. Whatever a man wants most will appear before him, i.e. water, food, a female, a long-dead parent, gold, or even a way to power. The traps become increasingly subtle to th epoint where our crew nearly destroys itself out of a total inability to separate the reality they must have from the apparitions which will destroy them.
Certainly not the “Man Trap” episode we got. There are elements of other episodes, with “Shore Leave” and the animated sequel episode “Once Upon A Planet”. I don’t think you could make that episode on a TV budget.
CAMELOT REVISITED. A planet of Hermes II, and incredible social order which is thoroughly modern in many respect but retains the knighthood, armor, and other trappings similar to our middle ages. A touch of “A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court”. As our star wanders stop briefly to investigate and then become increasingly embroiled in a web of archaic social practices, finally reaching the point where they too are engaged in lance and sword play to preserve their own skins.
I can’t think of a single episode this matches up with. Too bad. Sounds interesting.
100 A.B. Or, “A Century After The Bomb”–a terrifying parallel as we examine what might be our world a few decades after an atomic holocaust.
There’s probably a few episodes you could match this up to, maybe “The Omega Glory”, with a plague standing in for the atom bomb?
KENTUCKY, KENTUCKY. An earth colony on a planet in the Sirius group is visited by the S.S. Yorktown fifty years after colonization. An attack by the viking-like savages has destroyed and scattered the colonists, reducing them to a “frontier” log-fort life. Unwilling to risk the S.S. Yorktown, Captain Robert April attempts, with a small band, to regroup and lead the colonists in defense.
Yellow Submarine! Not that kind of band? Oh. All kidding aside, someone wanted access to a Western fort set, but are any of these something we’d recognize. Did they keep nothing besides what this pitch started out with?
REASON. In the Isaac IV group, a world where intelligent life has died, leaving a perfectly functioning robot society. Long speculative speculative [yes, it’s written twice in the document] problem on earth, this requires detailed investigation and analysis, even at the risk of the Cruiser’s reconnaissance party pretending to be robots themselves. Can a robot be capable of emotional feeling? Can it be capable of reasoning in human terms? What happens when an efficient robot society discovers alien flesh and blood spies in their midst?
REASON II. An extension, possibly the second part of the previous tale, portraying the struggle of the last human survivors, aided by our Cruiser’s reconnaissance party, outmatched and relatively defenseless as they attempt to reseize possession of their planet. Can a man, ragged and miserable, still be master?
That could have made for an interesting story, but while our crew ran into a world of robots once, it wasn’t anything like that. It had Harry Mudd. I’m just going to go through the list until we find something that matches.
A MATTER OF CHOICE. Another entrapment story, i.e., a planet in which the intelligent life has achieved no great material success but instead, has learned the power to live and relive over and over again in different ways, any portion of their past life they choose. This is a starring vehicle for Captain Robert M. April as he is presented with the chance to do those things all over again.
THE RADIANT ONE. A love story, the passion of a crew member for an angelic female on a ‘Garden of Eden’ planet–the one hitch being her chemistry includes radium in lethal quantity. The man who became her lover would live six weeks to six months, no longer.
THE TRADER. Satunii, a planet of incredible oriental splendor mercilessly ruled as emperor by a space trader turned renegade. Like a visit to the court of Ghengis Khan [their typo, not mine].
A QUESTION OF CANNIBALISM. Visiting the earth colony on Regulus, April’s sortie party became aware of the cow-like creatures raised on the ranches there are actually intelligent beings. But the colonists, who have built their empire largely on the supply and sale of this meat, rebel at the attempt to free their “cattle”.
THE MIRROR. Near collision with another Yorktown on an exact opposite course. Not only is it the same cruiser, it is manned by exactly the same crew. Could you face yourself after discovering survival depends on killing yourself?
We sort of have something here, but not here. The Next Generation and Voyager both played with this, but only with the captain and it involved time shenanigans.
TORX. The first major menace to Earth. An alien intelligence, claiming to be pure thought and no body, which “devours” intelligence, leaving behind a helpless idiot. Near starvation for eons, it has been frantically seeking precisely the type of “food” the Earth could supply in quantity.
THE PET SHOP. Exactly duplicating St. Louis, 1916. a city where women are so completely the masters that men have the status of pets. Something of a satire on “people and dogs”, this story shows men treated in that fashion, caged in kennels, others clothed and perfumed and treated as lapdogs, as long as they continue to faun, appreciate, and selflessly love.
I could see a lot of people in modern Hollywood reading that and salivating to tell that story. Thankfully they don’t read this site.
KONGO. The “Ole Plantation Days” of the South, with the slight exception of it being white savages who are shipped in and auctioned at the slave mart. Part of our crew is trapped, thought to be runaways, and sold as plantation and household hands.
Speaking of stories modern Hollywood would love to make, but with a lot more viciousness than the show would have. The next one is a curious animal, because the animated series actually gave us this one. It’s also a sci-fi cliché at this point, the siren’s song situation. Even G.I. Joe did a version of it.
THE VENUS PLANET. The social evolution process here centered on love–and the very human male members of our crew find what seems the ultimate in amorous wish-fulfillment in the perfectly developed arts of this place of incredibly beautiful women. Until they begin to wonder what happened to all the men there.
INFECTION. A female crew member discovered to be pregnant, and the growing realization it could be the larvae of an alien, using her body like some insects plant their eggs in other living insects.
There’s an episode of The Next Generation that kind of gave us this episode, but none of these really made it to the original series. Oddly, we started the pitch on story ideas that we actually got. This is how the pitch ends, with no further comments. Well, clearly they did something right. Desilu, looking for something without co-owner Lucille Ball involved, took on the project, sold it to CBS, and the rest is history.
So that’s the pitch. When this series hits the next installment, we go to the guide. This is what they told the studios, but what did they tell the writers to make? Maybe we’ll get more story ideas that were never used? Join me next time and we’ll find out together.
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