Basically, but it was before that movie.
If not Space Seed...
- Thread starter Jedi Marso
- Start date
Some award-losing ideas:
* it's almost TOS's version of the tasty crawdad critters that invaded in "Conspiracy" (only inverted), an episode of which also never got a follow-up and for the same reasons: The open door wasn't big enough for mass audiences to connect to, or so common perception believes. Just like Mr Ed when getting his blinkers on prior to going to the vet.
On edit: Minor clarification for "The Apple"
- "The Paradise Syndrome" -- Salish is rather a terrific villain, though his situation would require a lot more plot convenience to get him out for Kirk's blood for good.
- "A Taste of Armageddon" -- Ventikar vs Eminiar unite over these intergalactic sheepdips that stopped by then destroyed their way of life
- "The Apple" -- crap episode or not, the main theme is still not bad and, yup, Kirk waltzes on in with Spock and McCoy bickering over what's right. There's got to be more to Vaal than its Papier-mâché veneer*.
- "The Corbomite Maneuver" -- again, for reasons similar to the previous ones (too esoteric when considering both established fans and a chance to rake in a bunch more with something genuinely compelling), I wanna know if Balok got Mr Bailey loaded with Bailey's Tranya and then dissected him, found humans to be medically useful and/or tasty and then come amass in their big balled ships.
- "The Gamesters of Triskeleon" -- Weren't there something like five thousand episode guide books that existed at the time? We last saw Kirk dining and ditching Shahna, and the Providers promising to keep their word. Who wouldn't bet 5 Quatloos that they backtracked the moment Kirk and co fizzled away, with Shahna - after the doe-eyed expression left - realized what a snotball Kirk was. The Providers use verbal persuasion to get the Thralls to work for a greater good: To invade the Federation and revenge, on James T. Kirk.
* it's almost TOS's version of the tasty crawdad critters that invaded in "Conspiracy" (only inverted), an episode of which also never got a follow-up and for the same reasons: The open door wasn't big enough for mass audiences to connect to, or so common perception believes. Just like Mr Ed when getting his blinkers on prior to going to the vet.
On edit: Minor clarification for "The Apple"
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Similar to that idea, I would've like to have seen the return of Gary Mitchell. If Mitchell really didn't die on Delta-Vega but continued to mutate, his powers would've been off the scale ten to fifteen years later.
That's also assuming that Gary Lockwood would've been willing to reprise the role.
The problem there is that they were barely able to handle him the first time. Fifteen years later with that exponential power growth he would have essentially been Q.
It would be epic, but the problem there is writing yourself into a corner you can't get out of.
Do we know what episodes were mused on/picked for consideration? Guessing not?
The Doomsday machine was probably mused on but then discarded because 'audiences would think it's a death star' thing.
Where No Man Has Gone Before. Gary Mitchell would have made a fantastic movie villain.
It wasn't in the movie era, but that's essentially what John Byrne did in his first Star Trek: New Visions story.
They could gone around the Paramount lot and visited another parallel developed planet or something. Planet Mommie Dearest or Planet Heaven Can Wait in Quadrant 78.
As someone who has occasionally done just that, I couldn't agree more. It's probably one of the reasons why no one at Paramount ever attempted this idea. It would be a very difficult scenario to find a resolution to. Even if it had been set just few months after the events of TMP, say, that would still be close to six or seven years that Mitchell would've had to mutate into something completely unstoppable.
Still, the potential of the idea continues to intrigue me to this day.
Or suppose the Galactic Barrier was really the "wall" of the sim we all live in. Mitchell was one of the few who slipped through the cracks when the overload in the sim tried to turn everyone back, and keep them all "under." After a couple days, Mitchell and Dehner might break through their confusion and realize they are actually "users" logged into the sim, and thus have god-like powers over the simulation—powers normally suppressed by the rules of the sim...
When Irish Eyes Are Smiling...
I know—all the way back to the allegory of the cave in Plato's Republic. I wonder if the Wachowski's got any of their inspiration from James P. Hogan's Realtime Interrupt which was published just a handful of years before The Matrix? The novel is a close parallel to the movie, including a climactic scene where the "Neo" character flexes his user muscles by altering gravity and other dynamics of the simulated environment. The scenario was much more credible than using people as thermal batteries.
I've always said that we could have gotten Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kang with very few changes to the script. Just Kang's motivation (he could have been dishonorably dismissed and banished because he dared to suggest peace or some such). Ansara would have been excellent as well.
My understanding is that the Wachowski’s original idea was the humans connected to the Matrix were involved with the Machines’ computer processing, but the suits thought that might be too difficult for audiences to understand, so they came up with the battery thing. The beauty is the Wachowski’s could have their cake and eat it too, since everything that Morpheus and Zion knew was essentially a lie coming from the previous version of the One, so using humans as batteries doesn’t need to be true and you can use the human CPU explanation if preferred.
Oddly enough, when ST2 came out, where I lived hadn’t aired TOS for a few years and I didn’t remember who Khan was, so assumed, because of the name beginning with “K” that the movie was going to feature a Klingon adversary. It wasn’t until they found the “Botany Bay” belt that my memory was properly triggered.
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