Bearclaw and Sherwood to the Surak would also work.
My thinking stems from how the film franchise developed between 1982 and 1986. Star Trek II feels like the beginning of a move to pass the torch to a new generation of characters, and Mike W. Barr's original characters grow out of that. But by the time we get to Star Trek IV four and a half years later, we've retrenched (classic) Star Trek on the Big Seven. The youthquake of 1982 has rumbled away. David's dead, Saavik's written out, there are no youthful faces anymore. There is a need for familiar faces among the junior officers, since the Big Seven cannot provide them, but in a situation where there's no stable writer, writers are usually going to gravitate to the familiar (the Big Seven) than develop the minor original characters.
Yeah, I agree. Although I love the accidental trilogy of STII-IV, the one thing that's kind of a drag is the way they write out TWOK's next generation of Saavik and David. That's when the Trek movies became (as Roger Ebert wisely observed) more family reunions than new stories, and they missed the opportunity to have a smooth transition into new characters who could carry the franchise forward.
Yes, absolutely. And there's no guarantee that a new writer would automatically want to develop the original characters created by somebody else. Or maybe they only like Konom, but find Bryce and Bearclaw boring. (I'm not saying this happened. I'm only picking a random hypothetical example.)
Writers, for the most part, are more interested in telling their own stories than continuing the ones started by someone else.
Your rationale for speculating on possible directions the series could have gone in makes sense,
@Allyn Gibson. With no stable writers, the series might be more recognizable in the older, disconnected, anthology type format of the original 60s television series. Guest writers could introduce their own new guest characters, only seen in their own stories. It would even make sense to transfer all of Mike Barr's characters.
It is a shame, as
@JonnyQuest037 says, I too have mixed feelings about the accidental trilogy of TOS movies. I love them, they're my favorites, and yet I do acknowledge that there is that tragedy of the new characters being whittle away. Nancy, Konom, and Bearclaw transferring out of the series is a very logical next step (I'm sorry to say, Sherwood just hasn't made an impression on me). It even smooths out the transition between DC TOS Volume 1 and DC TOS Volume 2, given what I know about Volume 2's re-calibration of focus. Characters don't disappear in the transitional space, since they would already be phased out.
Saavik on the
Surak comes from a different place, though. It's about putting a recent and familiar canon character on the ship, since there are so few of those around. "Few"? I may be overcounting...
Then when you put the two together -- MWB OCs and Saavik on an original ship -- the spirit of their creation, the Youthquake of 1982, lives on. At least for another few months.
I have a feeling they wouldn't last long on their own. The inclusion of Saavik might be a draw, perhaps. And I imagine the planning of the proposed two issues per year would need a guideline of one issue will be a Bearclaw-focused storyline, the other would be a Nancy and Konom focus narrative (Nancy and Konom are kind of a package deal, at this point in my reading). I don't know if that would move their characters along to the point they are now in the actual series that exists.
Despite the outcome with the Surak, and the roller coaster quality of writing, I'm still glad the series exists. It's been great to explore a version of Star Trek where we can see the crew staffing the Excelsior while Kirk is still an admiral, and I'm also glad to read additional stories about Kirk's second Enterprise.
