Here is a previous thread on this subject:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/did-they-ever-release-the-god-thing.303228/
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/did-they-ever-release-the-god-thing.303228/
How much interest is there in "The God Thing" being completed and released?
- Thread starter Leathco
- Start date
Plus, the opening to X-Men: Apocalypse had Jesus dragging the cross... at an angle... making an X...
So it's gotta be Megas-Tu powers Kirk vs. Mutant Jesus.
So it's gotta be Megas-Tu powers Kirk vs. Mutant Jesus.
I groaned so much at that.
Long long time ago, back when fan film creators were allowed to speak what was on their minds and share concepts without getting their eyes poked out, Patty Wright sent me a seven or eight page? incomplete script. Patty used to write back and forth with Walter Koenig and my dear friend Amy Beth. Just read it, jot down your thoughts and don't share. This was like 20 years ago but a captain that finds himself in a room with fireplace and he doesn't know how he got there and now he's looking for clues. My Note was something like, "It needs a lot of work which would be right up Amy's alley".
I never asked who or what the project was for, At the time phase 2 was doing a lot of work attempting to complete Gene's next adventure of Star Trek.
I might ride the way back machine to the old Phase 2 blog site.
Sounds more like the worst parts of STV:TFF to me. On steroids. And I don't even want to think about mixing Star Trek with the whole sordid Left Behind franchise.
I'd pay real money to see Captain Kirk deliver a flying leg kick to Kirk Cameron!
Umm... is there a kind of kick that isn't a leg kick?
Oh. Then "flying-leg kick" would make it clearer.
Unless it gives a definitive answer to "What does God need with a starship?", I'm not interested.
Wow, that sounds really bad. The more I hear about what unfiltered Gene Rodenberry would have been like, the more I'm glad he managed to surround himself with other, more talented people. I know he deserves respect for creating the franchise, but the more I hear about the guy, the more I realize that most of the best parts of the franchise came from other people.
I've been saying that for years. The pilot episode that got TOS on the air was written by someone else. Klingons, Romulans, tribbles, almost everything about Vulcan biology and society, Spock's family, Khan, Edith Keeler, Harcourt Fenton Mudd and Cyrano Jones, Kor, Koloth, and Kang, none of it from Roddenberry's pen. And after TOS, he did one movie and some of the worst episodes of one of Star Trek's worst seasons (TNG's first), and he reportedly rewrote a lot of the others. And it's no secret that a lot of TNG was developed by other people, including David Gerrold.
I wanted to read The God Thing for years, which was why I created a web page about it in 1997, but I don't think I ever thought it would be good.
Well, that's not entirely fair. "The Cage" wasn't rejected as a pilot because of its writing, but because it had been oriented more toward proving Desilu's capability to produce a complex science fiction series, so it had higher production values than a typical episode and thus wasn't representative of what a typical episode would cost, which is a large part of what pilots are made to demonstrate. So "The Cage" was made to sell the studio, while "Where No Man" was made to sell the show.
Granted, another part of the reason NBC asked for a second pilot was that Roddenberry had failed to deliver on his promise of a multiethnic cast, aside from a token Asian transporter tech. But other than that and the budget issue, "The Cage" was a strong enough story to convince NBC it was worth making a second try. Personally I think it's Roddenberry's best solo script for ST by a wide margin.
That's true, but then again, it was not at all atypical for TV of the era to be more freelancer-driven than showrunner-driven. But all those stories were written under his supervision and approval, and he did the final rewrites on just about everything. It's true that, like George Lucas, he did his best work as a collaborator and supervisor of others' work rather than a solo creator. But the final creative decisions rested with him, so he does deserve his share of the credit for the final product.
I draw a line between TOS-era Roddenberry and TNG-era Roddenberry. The latter was in deteriorating health and under the toxic influence of people like Leonard Maizlish and Richard Arnold, who were probably the ones really responsible for a lot of the decisions attributed to Roddenberry at the time.
Although it's clear enough from Roddenberry's 1970s work that he continued to be better as a collaborator than a solo creator. His solo-written Genesis II was mediocre, while Planet Earth (with Juanita Bartlett) was significantly better and The Questor Tapes (with Gene L. Coon) was the best of them all. Though Spectre (with Samuel A. Peeples) was a mixed bag.
Roddenberry started it but what he wrote wasn't long enough to be published as a novel. Susan Sackett, Michael Jan Friedman, David Alexander, and Walter Koenig all had access to some or all of GR's material and did at least some work on expanding it to novel length, but it seems that none of them had access to each other's efforts, some of which didn't get very far at all.
From my old website, as linked above:
Anonymous Collector, November, 2009
Anonymos Collector said:
So begins the manuscript purchased by a collector who prefers to remain anonymous. (He hasn't given me a copy and he probably won't give you one either, so don't ask.)
The collector writes that he saw the manuscript listed on eBay and won the auction. (Frankly, it never would have occurred to me that this manuscript might show up there, so it's no surprise that I missed it.) Here's what he won:
- Kirk on leave in Africa
- mention of Egypt Israeli Museum
- Spock on Vulcan (Gol) training, seeking to eliminate the last vestiges of his human half when he senses the entity
- Enterprise in space dock being refit after completion of 5 year journey
- Kirk promoted to Admiral
- Transporter accident killing a crew member, this one beaming with Kirk
- Starship (Potemkin) destroyed by entity
- Entity approaching Earth
- Kirk reassembling our familiar crew and taking control of Enterprise
- McCoy left StarFleet and became a veterinarian. Similar quip by McCoy as to why he became a vet - "it's the only field of medicine that has completely sensible patients (a line like this appears in the first draft of Star Trek: In Thy Image)
I asked the collector whether he could confirm the presence of some specific scenes described by various sources, like the big confrontation between the entity and Kirk in which the entity presents itself as different images before appearing to be Jesus Christ, and, for that matter, the odd kinky scenes Susan Sackett describes.
Another sample from the manuscript:
And the manuscript ends with this paragraph:
The collector included some photos, with much of the text blurred; he's worried about violating copyright. In this case, given the use of only three paragraphs from a manuscript of 152 pages, and given the more or less scholarly nature of this web page, I'm confident that we are well within the bounds of fair use.
Based on the information and the samples, in addition to all the information gathered over the years, it looks very much like publication of the manuscript would be something of an anticlimax, given the similarities to The Motion Picture and Roddenberry's lack of experience writing prose fiction. That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to have a copy, whether just a photocopy or an edited and revised published version.
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