DC TNG Annual “A House Divided” and the DS9 episode “Invasive Procedures”

[ryan123450]

I’ve almost reached the end of reading everything on the Complete Comics DVD. Today I read the DC TNG Annual ‘A House Divided’ and the similarity with the DS9 episode ‘Invasive Procedures’ was striking. Both feature the evacuation of a station due to a stellar phenomenon, and a rogue Trill using the opportunity to do some host shuffling, regardless of the safety of our heroes.

I assumed while reading that one of two situations occurred; either the comic was written as a way to tell the same story as the episode, though with a TNG twist, featuring Odan, or the comic came first, and the idea was then used as inspiration for the episode.

But then I looked up the dates. The comic- September 1993. The episode- October 1993. I know perhaps there was a long lead time with the comic story, but seems too close to be anything but a coincidence. Anyone know anything more?

 

[Christopher]

Contrary to what people tend to think, coincidences like that happen all the time when different creators are working with the same premise, continuity, and characters. It's natural that different people working with the same concepts and situations would arrive at similar ideas for what to do with them. I pitched for DS9 once and Voyager twice back in the '90s, and submitted a TNG spec script before that, and in almost every instance, one of my ideas was similar to a story they were already doing or would do later -- or in one case, similar to a movie spec script the producer I pitched to had written! It really does happen by accident all the time.

Laypeople see similarity as evidence of copying, but it's usually the other way around -- the only way two such similar stories would both get done is if the creators didn't know about the similarity and it happened by accident. Because it wouldn't be allowed to happen on purpose. If a DC author submitted a proposal similar to an episode already being done, Paramount would've rejected the proposal or required it to be changed.

Conversely, as a rule, the producers of the shows paid little attention to the novels or comics. They had their own well-established process for developing stories in-house and soliciting pitches from freelancers. There are only a couple of ways a comics idea might've come to their attention -- if the author pitched it to them through the normal pitching process, or if the DC editor had contacted them and suggested it, as John Ordover did with the Day of Honor concept he developed for the novels. But I'm not aware of any instances of that happening with the comics.

As for lead time, I don't think the lead time on a comic is that much longer than the lead time on a TV episode -- certainly less than the lead time for a novel. However, a comic with a September cover date would have hit the stands as early as May. Five months is enough time to develop an episode -- maybe a bit tight, but possible -- but I doubt it. An episode from that early in the season would probably have been developed pretty early in the process of breaking the season, with more lead time than an episode from later in the season after schedule delays and whatnot.

Anyway, in this case, I see no reason to doubt it was coincidence. Given how Trill symbiosis works, it's natural enough to arrive at the premise of an aspiring host wanting to steal another host's symbiont.

 

[Stevil2001]

I see the Sept. 1993 date for TNG Annual #4 on Memory Alpha, but I wonder where that comes from. The GCD (which I would rate as extremely reliable) gives an on-sale date of 9 Dec. 1993.

 

[Christopher]

I see the Sept. 1993 date for TNG Annual #4 on Memory Alpha, but I wonder where that comes from. The GCD (which I would rate as extremely reliable) gives an on-sale date of 9 Dec. 1993.

I've found that you can identify the release month of a DC annual or special by its ads, which tend to be the same ones as those in the regular issues from that month. I compared the ads in Annual #4 to the monthly issues from late '93, and its ads aren't quite the same, but it has most of the same ads as TOS #55 from December 1993, as well as TNG #54, which was dated Late November 1993 (because they were coming out twice a month at that point).

The GCD date is for the direct sales edition. It doesn't give release dates for the newsstand editions, but if it was released in the same months as the December issue, it would probably have gone on sale around August or September, so maybe that's where the date comes from. And if the episode came out in October, that means it was already written and probably already filmed by the time the comic hit the stands. So yeah, almost certainly the kind of coincidence that's inevitable when different creators are working independently with the same concepts and characters -- the kind of coincidence that happened quite a lot with Trek tie-ins in those days.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I've found that you can identify the release month of a DC annual or special by its ads, which tend to be the same ones as those in the regular issues from that month.

The Annuals are usually also promoted in the lettercols. I know I often found it frustrating when an annual was a month earlier or later than every 12 issues, wrecking my filing system, or when an Annual popped up midway through a story arc.

 

[DS9forever]

The final draft of the episode is dated July 23 1993.