In The Chimes at Midnight in the second Myriad Universes anthology, Echoes and Refractions: It involves a certain apparent contradiction in Klingon behavior, and a scene that I imagine would have taken place many, many times, and finally we see it in print. Spoiler: The Chimes at Midnight and the scene I wanted to see When Maltz starts talking about honor when they're interrogating David, Kruge bites his head off! (figuratively, in case there's any confusion). "Do not lecture me with platitudes about honor! You have been a constant thorn in my side with your spineless compunction!Why don't you show your honor by protecting the entire Klingon race from this scheming human petaQ?!" Go Kruge! Testify, loDnI' ! I'm also glad to see Thelin used. I know in the Crucible trilogy he died back in the TOS era, but the Crucible books have their own continuity, and what happened there doesn't necessarily have to have happened in other TOS- or TOS-movie-era stories (hint) Anyone else had scenes you'd envisioned and then later had them pop up in a novel or story?
There was one novel - can't remember which one - which has a scene where parts of "Balance of Terror" are revisited. They get to the briefing room scene where Scotty says 'Their power is simple impulse', and Sulu thinks to himself that this can't mean that the ship itself can only travel at sublight, and that it's perfectly obvious that the BoP still has some form of warpdrive. And of course there's the novelization of ST II, which states that Chekov really *was* on the ship during "Space Seed" (he was a security guard).
The "B" plot of "Black Fire" (with a human Commander Thorin) was similar on about 14 counts to the "A" story of my first Commander Therin fanfic, published in 1982. The novel came out in January 1983, so there's no way Sonni Cooper saw my story. Weird deja vu reading that one! Subterranean cave dwellings on Andor - almost exactly as I imagined them in the early 80s - turned up in "Andor: Paradigm", and then icy canonical ones in "The Aenar" (ENT). The ambiance of "Ex Machina" was exactly what I wanted from a post-TMP novel.
The first time I pitched to the producers at DS9, one of my stories involved Sisko and Jake, who because of some kind of [tech] accident, could not both exist simultaneously in this time-space continuum -- i.e., if Ben was present, Jake disappeared into some alternate void, and vice-versa. It was rejected for being too close to something they already had in the works. A couple weeks later, "The Visitor" aired, and it was 100x better than anything I could have come up with.
My TNG spec script had a very similar premise to "Quality of Life," which aired 10 days after I sent in the script. The plot involved Data discovering and defending a new form of pseudo-cybernetic life, and he even caught on to the idea that it was sentient the same way in my script that he did in the episode -- because of a comment Geordi made as a joke. (Fortunately, I was able to recycle the concept of the life form, in modified and much more interesting fashion, in Greater Than the Sum.) And one of my first DS9 pitches was "Terok Hel," which was a thriller set on a station of the same design as DS9. The next season, they did "Empok Nor." That made me go "hmm" a bit, but I realized I was probably far from the first person who pitched "Let's do a story set on a duplicate of the station so you can save money on sets."
Thanks, EmperorKalan. It's often difficult to reconcile the behavior of the TOS Klingons with the more "honorable" TNG variety. But one of the story's themes is to examine what honorable people are often willing to do when they feel their culture/security is under attack, which explains the conundrum rather well.
Didn't Dayton Ward explain that in In the Name of Honor? Interesting.... Hey, Chris, ya think you could recycle that idea some day, only set it on Empok? Or was the story too similar to the episode?
I still remember when I read Dreadnaught!, Diane Carey's book. She established that the insubordinate jerk from "Galileo 7", Lt. Boma, got busted out of the fleet by Scotty! Myself, I had envisioned, right after the events of the episode, Boma apologizing to Spock... and resigning his commision, as he has realized that he cannot work with people with opposing philosophies.... Still, when I read Carey's book, I was very satisfied, because justice had been served. Also, I loved Mike and Andy's making the analogy to NATO, when describing the Coalition of Planets. ("The Good That Men Do")
I could have sworn there was something, but now I can't think of it. For years I had wanted to see Star Trek do Die Hard and then they did Starship Mine, although it was nowhere near as violent as I would have liked it. Although I still crack up at the final scene.
The violence of "Starship Mine" was what I hated about it. I thought it was gratuitous the way the scriptwriter deliberately engineered the situation to ensure that all the boarders would be killed, and I thought it was contemptible that after taking all those lives, Picard was shown just joking around about his saddle rather than having to deal with the emotional cost of what he'd had to do.
Gratuitous, perhaps, but why would Picard incur an 'emotional cost' from it? Given the length of his career, I'm sure it wasn't the first time he'd been obliged to use lethal force to defend himself and his ship. Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Maybe it's just because it's been some time since I saw Starship Mine so my memories are a bit fuzzy, but I can understand where Christopher is coming from. Yes, they were thieves, but they also had set it up so that their thieving wouldn't harm anyone, stealing during the sweep that had the ship emptied. And then Picard goes and kills all of them. They weren't cold-blooded killers.
They cold-bloodedly killed old Calvin Hutchinson down on the surface. IIRC, Kelsey cold-bloodedly killed Neil after his usefulness came to an end. Kelsey was planning on selling the trilithium resin to people who would use it for cold-blooded violence. These people were not to be handled lightly.
Even so, you'd have to be a sociopath not to feel some regret at the necessity. Hell, it's even an established part of Picard's character -- recall the final log entry in "Conspiracy" where he expressed regret at the loss of life he had to inflict. And just in general, I dislike it when writers treat the death of human beings (or in this case, sentient beings) as some casual, unimportant thing. Death is a loss that should be acknowledged, never trivialized.
I can't remember the specific episodes but I know in TOS there are at least a couple times where during the course of the show some red shirts have died and the final scene is the main crew yukking it up on the bridge. I always thought that was pretty lame.
I always wanted to see two things - namely, that Starfleet realise projectile weapons would probably trash some Borg and get some into production, and a Borg trying to assimilate a Founder. So yeah, thank you Lesser Evil! I'll never understand why the hell they took those guns out of service they were clearly brilliant...
^^Any weapon that works against the Borg is only going to work once, or a few times at most, because then they'll adapt to it. The value of any given weapon in fighting the Borg is not in the weapon's intrinsic abilities, but in its novelty.
Actually, Picard did feel some regret. When he hears that one guy screaming because he was getting incinerated by the baryon sweep, Picard stops short, and tightens his lip. And when Kelsey's ship blew, Picard stared at the safety chip he had swiped, and if memory serves, he gives a little sigh.
Yeah, those are both nice moments, but I get the feeling they come more from the contributions of Patrick Stewart and the episode's director than necessarily from the script. Then again, what do I know?