Entertainment
Star Trek Planned To Have Captain Archer Meet Sisko And Kirk During Tribble Troubles
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
As a nostalgic English professor, I often think about these wise words from John Greenleaf Whittier: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’” No matter what current events are bringing you down (and boy, do you have a lot to choose from right now), nothing will be quite as tragic as the idea that things could have turned out better. That’s not just true of personal or global events, either. In this case, it’s also true of Star Trek: Enterprise.
At this year’s TrekTalks (the annual livestream telethon that raises money for the Hollywood Food Coalition), several Enterprise writers and producers were reunited, including Brannon Braga, Mike Sussman, Phyllis Strong, André Bormanis, and Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. During the stream, they dished on some of the coolest Enterprise episode pitches that were rejected. Some of them (including a Borg Queen origin story and a crossover with both The Original Series and Deep Space Nine) would have been amazing, and making those episodes could have done what once seemed impossible: saved Star Trek’s most hated spinoff from getting canceled.
Hey, You, Get Off Of My Cloud
Star Trek: Enterprise was a show that, to put it mildly, couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be. Sometimes, it was a proto-Original Series frontier adventure, and other times, it was a post 9/11 nataionlistic parable. By Season 4, showrunner Manny Coto had transformed Enterprise into a must-see Star Trek show, but the damage was already done, and the show was canceled. That made it the first Trek show since The Animated Series to get fewer than seven seasons, and Enterprise was deemed a failure. However, the assembled writers and producers who reunited for Trek Talks revealed some rejected episode pitches that might have saved this underappreciated series.
For example, André Bormanis pitched a prequel to the Original Series episode “The Cloud Minders,” which featured an upper class of citizens literally living in the clouds while an underclass labored in the mines below. Bormani pitched an episode that would have shown the city in the sky being built while social unease and income inequality grew worse. Coto wanted to shoot this episode for Season 5, but Enterprise was canceled before that could happen.
From The Romulan War To World War III
Speaking of the Coto and his scrapped plans for Enterprise, he was really keen on finally portraying the Romulan War onscreen. Mike Sussman confirmed that the late showrunner wanted to finally show the audience the Earth/Romulus conflict that had only been referenced in passing back in the Original Series. Brannon Braga chimed in and alluded to Coto having this planned out for Season 5, confirming that the early cancellation of Enterprise took yet another awesome story away from us.
Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens confirmed they had pitched an episode where Colonel Green (previously seen in the TOS episode “The Savage Curtain”) would survive and torment the descendants of those who fought him, with the audience discovering that Reed’s grandfather supported Green. In case his name doesn’t ring a bell, Green is the war criminal generally credited with starting World War III. Bringing him into an Enterprise episode would have shed light on Star Trek’s most mysterious and generally unexplored time period, but this episode was rejected because it was too similar to storylines involving the Khan-like Augments, themselves a remnant of WW3-era Earth.
Borg Queen Origin Story
This same writing duo also pitched an episode where Alice Krige plays the head of Starfleet Medical and willingly chooses “to join the Collective.” For better or for worse, this would have provided an origin story for the Borg Queen, a character that many Star Trek fans feel has never made much sense.
This would have been a high-risk, high-reward story because it would either finally nestle this strange character into existing canon or ruin the Borg altogether. However, Reeves-Stevens have a great track record(they also wrote some of the best fiction and non-fiction books in Trek history), so if anyone could pull it off, it’s them.
Archer Meets Both Kirk And Sisko Amid The Trouble With Tribbles
The husband/wife writing duo’s final rejected Enterprise pitch was, far and away, the most ambitious. Had the show made it to Season 7, they wanted to feature one last Temporal Cold War episode in which Captain Archer and his crew would have to return to space station K-7 during the events of “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
There, they’d run into both Kirk’s crew from the original episode and Sisko’s crew from “Trials and Tribble-ations.” In retrospect, such an ambitious episode would have been far better than the Enterprise finale, which turned the show’s final story into Commander Riker’s bizarre holodeck simulation.
The Path Not Taken
That series finale was so bad that many Star Trek fans are grateful that Enterprise was canceled before it could get any worse. However, aside from the finale, Season 4 was a high point for this controversial show, and these rejected stories reveal the series’s still untapped potential.
Now, I can’t help but wonder if these episodes could have turned the metaphorical ship around, getting both fans and the network on board for more adventures with the franchise’s quirkiest crew. Had that happened, Enterprise would not have been canceled, and the future of Star Trek might not have landed in the hands of the creative world’s most fearsome villain: Alex Kurtzman.
Entertainment
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
Entertainment
How A Fantasy Box Office Bomb Lost $200 Million In Theaters, And Suddenly Became A Streaming Hit
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For the last decade as streaming has taken off in homes around the world, it’s become possible for films that lost historical amounts of money in theaters to find success, even if it might be the post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 trend of “so bad it’s good.” That’s why a massive flop, for example say, Morbius, and films that slightly missed the mark like The Fall Guy can turn it around and become a streaming success.
What’s even more impressive is the amazing turnaround of 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which lost Legendary Pictures an alleged $200 million, only to end up topping streaming charts in 2025.
The Classic Fairy Tale With A Twist
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the classic fairy tale about selling a horse for magic beans and climbing a beanstalk to find a giant living in the clouds. It’s simple, contains multiple morals, and can be easily adjusted to turn Jack into the villain, but Jack the Giant Slayer instead asks, “What if there was no moral, and instead of one giant, there was an entire army of evil giants?” The movie is the classic story, as you’ve never seen it before, and it almost works.
Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, the young man who finds himself trading his horse to a monk in exchange for beans that he can’t allow to get wet, ever. Like the rules in Gremlins, it’s not long before Jack accidentally gets the beans wet and a beanstalk grows under his house with the princess, Isabell (Eleanor Tomlinson), trapped inside as it grows into the sky. All the king’s men gather to rescue the princess, including Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who, thankfully, Jack the Giant Slayer makes obvious is very evil, very quickly.
It’s up to Jack, Isabell, and the loyal Knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to save the kingdom and stop the invasion of giants led by Roderick and the giant two-headed General Fallon (Bill Nighy). If there’s one thing Jack the Giant Slayer does better than every other adaptation, it’s the third act featuring a full-blown war between humans and giants, with a touch of humor and absurdity. Watching a giant toss a windmill like the glaive from Krull is the perfect amount of off-beat to distract from a surprising amount of body horror in both the giant’s designs and Fallon’s ultimate fate.
A Movie For No One
Jack the Giant Slayer looks too good, and the star-studded cast is having way too much fun for it to be a truly bad movie. The problem is that the pacing is off: it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff, then it feels a little too rushed, and though it is a fun adventure, it’s also, like the source material, simplistic. It’s not like the movie wasn’t watched in theaters; it made $197 million worldwide, which would be a great haul except it cost $185 million to make, and that’s not including the extensive marketing campaign.
The push and pull of director Bryan Singer’s vision of a dark take on the fable, complete with actual people-eating on screen, and the sanitized version that hit theaters, which was still too dark for children, since the film is surprisingly rated PG-13, meant it ended up being a film for no one. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings, of 52 percent from critics and 55 percent from the audience, are proof that the final product is not great, but not bad; it’s a movie that will keep you watching for a few hours and then leave no lasting impression. These days, Lionsgate and Sony wish they’d release a movie that is that well-received, as even Jack the Giant Slayer looks like a masterpiece compared to Borderlands or Kraven the Hunter.
Streaming is the perfect home for Jack the Giant Slayer, and 10 years later, it no longer matters that the movie lost hundreds of millions in theaters. It finally gets to stand on its own as a fun, if unremarkable, fantasy adventure.
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