Did DS9 and VOY really "wreck" TNG season 7?

[JesterFace]

Some say STNG season 7 is weak.
Some say it's weak because they were running out on ideas.
Some say the upcoming movie(s) took main focus.
Some say Deep Space Nine and eventually Voyager took the best storylines, STNG was left with leftovers?

I wonder how much of this is true.
DS9 was something different and new and had to build their own world, how much can you steal from a show with a starship in it going places?
Voyager, maybe? It's kind of like TNG but still different.

 

[at Quark's]

^Even so, there's no overlap in time between TNG and VOY. So if any stories were 'stolen' I wouldn't expect them to only turn up in, say, VOY S4. Perhaps a few stories in S1?

 

[JesterFace]

^Even so, there's no overlap in time between TNG and VOY. So if any stories were 'stolen' I wouldn't expect them to only turn up in, say, VOY S4. Perhaps a few stories in S1?

I was thinking something like that, perhaps there was a story and it was bounced around, should this go to TNG season 7 or VOY season 1.

 

[Qonundrum]

But for a while, as TNG was wrapping up, there was development for GEN and DS9, with preliminary work for VOY as it would debut in January.

DS9 = 1993 (TNG season 6)
GEN = end of 1994 (written during TNG 7 and as some scripts get rewrites, even up to the time of episode filming)
VOY = January 1995 (had to have been written during TNG 7)

"All Good Things" had a final draft of 3/10/94 - https://www.st-minutiae.com/resources/scripts/277.txt and https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/All_Good_Things..._(episode)

GEN was written concurrently(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Good_Things..._(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)#:~:text=Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga expected Michael,Generations, often confusing aspects of the two. )

"Caretaker" (aka "Hee Haw in Space") was completed in early-September, early drafts started in June: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Caretaker_(episode)

Star Trek: Voyager – Caretaker (Review)

A voyage begins…

them0vieblog.com

(there's a fun review, but I digress...)


In short, for TNG there was little if any overlap, but may have been for GEN and DS9.

Also,

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Yee-haw! Now that's some good knee-slappin' and nose-pickin' Star Trek! (or any generic sci-fi...) The story just doesn't gel and seeing Tom getting turned on by a hologram to go make some potato and onion stew in the cellar really isn't exciting... well, for anyone who isn't a fictional character named Tom... bring in some of that corn and call it "succotash"...

Just read the description as well. Allegedly "upressed/uprezzed" in Topaz AI, it doesn't look much better than bog-standard SD, typical waxy characters with candly matted hair, play-doh barn sets and everything else, and the player is set to 1080 and the usual telltale signs are there... don't let the 560x320 thumbnail fool ya... they probably did too excessive sharpening settings along with overly-aggressive mpeg compression artifact cleanup, ideally less compression artifacting in the source is better but even then... fairly good deinterlacing, though, and pulldown can only fix so much as well and thanks to how film was transferred and edited back then and quality of DVD encode, some series fared worse with overlaid elements, never mind making sure the interlace fields matched up in sync, etc... but some frames did look like two adjacent fields were lumped in, hence a ghostly look, so pulldown and deinterlacing weren't perfect... better than icky patterns of horizontal lines that, when panned, make vertical structurs bend and wobbly in disconcerting ways... Now upscaling VT source material raw with low or no compression, Topaz fares much better. But A VT copy of film, with its grain and telecine added frames atop everything else? Nope, won't look anywhere near as good...

 

[Tosk]

I doubt it. Multiple writers have talked about the pressures of delivery a full season. That if they had a workable idea, it was gonna get used.

I'd be curious to see what eps of DS9 someone might think was actually an idea for TNG. (Not that they could have been told on TNG, that they were specifically TNG ideas first.) VOY was later, so there'd be no "saving" going on. They might re-try an old idea that never flew, but that's different.

 

[Frontis]

Some say STNG season 7 is weak.
Some say it's weak because they were running out on ideas.
Some say the upcoming movie(s) took main focus.
Some say Deep Space Nine and eventually Voyager took the best storylines, STNG was left with leftovers?

I wonder how much of this is true.
DS9 was something different and new and had to build their own world, how much can you steal from a show with a starship in it going places?
Voyager, maybe? It's kind of like TNG but still different.

Hm idk...TNG was still more successful than DS9 and Voyager.

 

[Qonundrum]

I doubt it. Multiple writers have talked about the pressures of delivery a full season. That if they had a workable idea, it was gonna get used.

I'd be curious to see what eps of DS9 someone might think was actually an idea for TNG. (Not that they could have been told on TNG, that they were specifically TNG ideas first.) VOY was later, so there'd be no "saving" going on. They might re-try an old idea that never flew, but that's different.

Maybe "Move Along Home" as it could have fit within TNG too easily?

 

[Qonundrum]

Hm idk...TNG was still more successful than DS9 and Voyager.

VOY did premiere with over 21M viewers, but they never reached that high after that.

DS9 was doing okay, but I always got the impression that VOY became TNG-lite to compensate for the serialized storytelling that DS9 was exploring. Considering DS9 was also loving viewers, that's another likely reason. Granted, ratings kept sloughing off - Trekdom was slowly heading downward after 1995. Here's one reason why:

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Imagine flipping channels having forgotten the premiere of a shiny new network and you tune into that without context and how the hologram (made by the baddie) also reacts with concern when Tom is cornered and brought in! Even with context, I'd still put "Farpoint" above this. Even the pre-credits bit feels more Star Wars than anything. And here it is:

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Hmmm, Darth Torres she is not... or Darth Chakotay... or Darth Soundtrack... Now Emperor Neelix, that might be more fun... But, yeah, this as a TNG season 7 or 8 story would probably have been easier to get into. A lot of VOY season 1 isn't bad per se, but the characters are too new, unestablished, and haven't been solidified yet...

 

[Frontis]

DS9 wasn't a big hit when it started but later many fans called it the best Trek Show.

 

[Qonundrum]

DS9 wasn't a big hit when it started but later many fans called it the best Trek Show.

Yeah, on initial run I was lukewarm to it. Watched periodically, but was "meh". When "The Way of the Warrior" was hyped, I made sure to watch it and my hopes were not dashed. The show felt tighter, Worf's return was inspired, and the show did something to further the Federation with the Klingon alliance ending - something you generally don't do when it came to TV show status quo. TNG would never have done it. Plus, DS9's deeper format allowed a proper exploration of Worf and in ways TNG could never begin to do (TNG set the stage for DS9 to do amazing acrobatic events with). Season 4 was hot stuff and, when revisiting 1-3, it did feel like an improvement. Which is amusing since, with TNG, the later seasons dragged on but when the older episodes were put into repeat broadcast they were more exciting!

DS9 definitely carried the torch from the original the best. A wild frontier. Dangerous big decisions. Character conflict amongst human condition exploration. "Risk is our business". New civilizations and life-forms, for which most were easier to believe than space whales that looked a bit rude... Occasional sci-fi weirdness... and, tangent-time, Brannon Braga's stories I would always scurry to the set to see because he nailed the high concept stuff.

 

[Tosk]

Maybe "Move Along Home" as it could have fit within TNG too easily?

Move Along Home was always a DS9 script. It also was written by people not busy on TNG. (The story was by Piller, who had moved on from TNG already, and the teleplay was by three people, two of which worked on Liaisons for TNG but nothing else. The third was a DS9-only writer.)

Interestingly (IMO) two of the three also worked on Duet. So they worked on the two eps that for many represent the best and worst of season one DS9.

Personally, I always felt that Move Along Home was most like a TOS ep.

 

[Tomalak]

There definitely are DS9 and Voyager episodes that were pitched for TNG.

Homecoming was a Jeri Taylor pitch for a Ro episode, which is why she gets a story credit.

Past Tense and Little Green Men were also ideas that had been kicking around in the TNG days.

Rene Echevarria had an idea for an episode where a ship gets shrunk during his time on TNG. Everyone thought he was insane but he persisted for years, even offering it for Voyager, until eventually it was made for DS9's sixth season as One Little Ship.

I'm always surprised that DS9's Meridian (the one with the Brigadoon planet) is not a recycled TNG idea: it feels so obviously a mid-TNG Troi story that was poorly adapted for Dax, as it's completely out of character.

 

[Tosk]

The Homecoming is a fabulous example, thank you. According to MemAlpha, Piller did specifically feel like the pitch would work better on DS9. And the story as told in the DS9 Companion makes it very clear that it was a calculated, definitive move by Piller to snatch it away from TNG as he felt the tale would work far better as a DS9. (Note, the original pitch was not for a Ro ep, that came later.)

Little Green Men wasn't pitched as a TNG ep. According to the Companion, the writers pitched it to Echevarria specifically as a DS9 episode, even though he was on TNG at the time. They told him, "Quark is the Roswell alien" and Echevarria loved it and took it to the DS9 staff. Piller didn't dig it originally (during DS9's first season) but it came up again in season four and the staff went with it.

I can't find any info regarding Past Tense being a holdover though, can you steer me in the right direction? I did see that Wolfe's first crack at the concept was called "Cold and Distant Stars" and was a DS9 ep focusing on Sisko.

 

[Tomalak]

Little Green Men wasn't pitched as a TNG ep. According to the Companion, the writers pitched it to Echevarria specifically as a DS9 episode, even though he was on TNG at the time. They told him, "Quark is the Roswell alien" and Echevarria loved it and took it to the DS9 staff. Piller didn't dig it originally (during DS9's first season) but it came up again in season four and the staff went with it.

Hmm, the Companion (or Rene's recollection) may be incorrect. Jack Trevino says it originated as a TNG story.

We presented a story of Captain Picard and his crew pursuing four Feringi back to Earth in the mid-1900s. Unfortunately, the Ferengi ship crashes and the military recovers the wreckage and bodies. The task of removing all traces of this extraterrestrial existence falls upon Enterprise-D. Rene was intrigued, but passed on it, primarily due to the fact they were already doing a time travel episode. He said they limited time travel stories to one per season. However, Rene told us not to give up on our writing.

Afterwards, we re-tooled the Roswell Incident into a DS9 story, with Quark as an alien. Toni and I re-pitched the story again, five months later.

The Trek Nation - Writing For Star Trek Part IX: How To Pitch (Part Two)

I can't find any info regarding Past Tense being a holdover though, can you steer me in the right direction? I did see that Wolfe's first crack at the concept was called "Cold and Distant Stars" and was a DS9 ep focusing on Sisko.

Not a direct holdover, but the idea of sending the crew back to riots came up during TNG and later resurfaced as Past Tense.

A plot once suggested by Robert Hewitt Wolfe involved the Watts riots of 1965. "I pitched a story to TNG where Geordi and Picard crash-lands in Watts right before the riots," said Wolfe. Though this concept was never developed for TNG, Wolfe found the idea was influential during the writing of third season Star Trek: Deep Space Nine two-parter "Past Tense, Part I" and "Past Tense, Part II". (Cinefantastique, Vol. 27, No. 4/5, p. 92)

Undeveloped Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes

Numerous undeveloped Star Trek episodes were written for Star Trek: The Next Generation. These stories were submitted or developed for production, but for various reasons never aired. It was prior to 1987 when Gene Roddenberry opened The Next Generation for story ideas from writers, though most...

memory-alpha.fandom.com

 

[Tosk]

Thanks heaps for the added/corrected info. I guess Echevarria only remembers the reworked pitch. (At the time of the interview, at least.)

Even with all that, both eps still seem to be pitches that eventually got picked up as opposed to material that was taken away from TNG specifically to be DS9.

 

[Tomalak]

Even with all that, both eps still seem to be pitches that eventually got picked up as opposed to material that was taken away from TNG specifically to be DS9.

Yes, that's true. I don't think there are many that were specially held over.

What's perhaps more likely is that writers had ideas which they consciously held back for the new show, and didn't consider working up as TNG scripts.

If you look at the first seasons of DS9 or Voyager, there aren't actually that many episodes that could easily have been used on TNG. There are a handful of generic sci-fi filler: Time And Again, Parallax, and Ex Post Facto could have been a Riker episode with Troi in the Tuvok role.

I do have in the back of my mind that one of the O'Brien episodes on DS9 was originally a TNG pitch. Visionary maybe? But the internet suggests not. Maybe there's a comment in the Companion about it being a "TNG type story", not that it was a pitch.

 

[Tomalak]

Oh, I do have one that surprised me - The Storyteller was originally a TNG pitch that Piller kept trying to make, and eventually succeeded when he had no other choice for DS9:

Piller commented, "It was a script that was written for Next Generation on spec by a writer named Kurt Michael Bensmiller, who wrote 'Time Squared'. I had this script in my desk for three years and I bring it out every season and I say should we do this script this year? Everybody reads it and they say let's not do it. They just didn't like it. I needed some shows and I needed to put some things into development." After going two months without buying a story pitch for DS9, Piller was forced to resurrect the Bensmiller script which went on to form the basis of this episode. (Captains' Logs Supplemental - The Unauthorized Guide to the New Trek Voyages, p. 33)

The Storyteller (episode)

Chief O'Brien is appointed spiritual leader of a Bajoran village. Meanwhile, Nog and Jake try to help their new friend settle a struggle between two Bajoran villages. "Station log: Stardate 46729.1. The Bajoran government has asked me to mediate a disagreement between two rival factions: the...

memory-alpha.fandom.com

 

[Tosk]

I do have in the back of my mind that one of the O'Brien episodes on DS9 was originally a TNG pitch. Visionary maybe? But the internet suggests not. Maybe there's a comment in the Companion about it being a "TNG type story", not that it was a pitch.

Are you perhaps thinking of Time's Orphan? That started out as an unsuccessful TNG pitch about Alexander.

 

[Tomalak]

Are you perhaps thinking of Time's Orphan? That started out as an unsuccessful TNG pitch about Alexander.

Maybe, that's another good example!

 

[Farscape One]

I think it was more a case of burning out two of the stronger writers of TNG at that time... Moore and Braga. At the same time, they were working on the TNG finale, the movie, and their regular episodes for TNG season 7.

Michael Piller set his sole focus for DS9 season 2 and development of VOY, but he also was giving Behr more of the DS9 head writer duties, so DS9 didn't suffer because Piller had a solid right hand to keep DS9 going.

Jeri Taylor was the sole showrunner for TNG season 7, and while I do think she writes really good episodes, I don't think she does nearly as well as a showrunner. She also would later split focus into VOY, but she didn't really have a right hand person like Piller had with Behr.