So since most of the Star Trek pilots have had something to do with the plot, TOS - Where No Man Has Gone Before (deals with the barrier at the edge of the Milky way galaxy) TNG - Encounter at Farpoint (deals with those weird Alien jellyfish thingys and the encounter with Q) DS9 - Emissary (deals with sisko finding out that he's the Emissary of the Prophets) Voyager - Caretaker (deals with the caretaker entity stranding the voyager in the delta quadrant) Enterprise - Broken Bow - deals with Earth's first contact with the Klingons in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. Do you think Discovery's pilot title will have something to do with it's plot?
Only one of the episodes you've listed ("Where No Man Has Gone Before") is a pilot. Also, Star Trek: Discovery won't have a pilot episode.
Informally, it tends to be used that way, but it's more properly called a premiere. A pilot, strictly speaking, is an episode made before a series is bought, a "demo reel" used to pitch the series and convince someone to buy it. If a show is picked up before any episodes are made, then the first episode might be referred to in vernacular as a pilot, but it isn't one in the literal sense. Still, that's kind of splitting hairs. Most people today understand "pilot" to mean any series premiere episode, and it's clear that that's the sense in which you meant it. In regard to that, I am hoping that all episodes of Discovery including the premiere have individual, descriptive titles. I hate it when a series pilot/premiere is just titled "Pilot" as so many of them are.
"The Cage" and "Where No Man Before" were both pilots. NBC found the show promising but didn't think "The Cage" really worked as a pilot, so they ordered a second one. The thing is, Desilu at the time survived mostly by renting its facilities to other studios; the only show they had in production themselves was The Lucy Show. And now they proposed to tackle the most technically ambitious production in the history of series television. So for the first pilot, they had to pull out all the stops and do a feature-quality film to prove they were up to the task. But a pilot needs to be an example of a typical episode of a show, so the network can assess how much they could expect the series to cost and whether they could fit it into their budget. So they ordered a second pilot that would be a more modest, typical production. Essentially, the first pilot sold the studio, the second sold the show. Plus there's the fact that NBC didn't like most of the characters in the first pilot, and that Roddenberry had failed to live up to his promise to deliver a multiethnic cast, something networks were keen on at the time because recent studies had shown the buying power of minority viewers. So the second pilot was also about taking a second stab at the characters and casting. It's often been claimed that ST was the first show that ever had a second pilot ordered, but our own Harvey did research that debunked that a while back: http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/2016/04/second-pilot-episodes-before-star-trek.html
Thank you for the correction! This is really interesting. I'll also have to start following that blog you linked to. Looks handy.
I think it's weird when shows that never actually show the title of the episode on the screen still have episode titles. Kor
Ah, come on. It's so much more interesting to talk about "The Savage Curtain" and "The Corbomite Maneuver" than "S3 E22" or "Episode 10."
Friends got it right: The One WIth Balok. The One About The Romulan Ship. The One About The Organians. The One With Spock's Parents. The One On Vulcan Where Spock Thinks He Killed Kirk. The One With The Giant Green Hand In Space. The One WIth Alexis Carrington Playing That Woman Kirk Falls In Love With In The 1930s. The Doomsday Machine.
We should have a game thread where every poster names the next episode/movie in the Friends fashion. From The Cage to Beyond Edit: and through the power of thread creation http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/the-one-with-the-friends-titles.285464/
It's because the titles are for the benefit of the people in the production, for record-keeping and organizational purposes. And of course these days we have home video and online references and the like, so there are more places for the audience to see the episode titles than within the episodes themselves.
I hope they have imaginative titles for this series. Enterprise's and Voyager's were often so bland that I find it a lot harder to remember them than other series.
Imaginative titles like "Court Martial", "Arena", "The Cage" , "The Empath" , "Justice", "Evolution", "Haven", "Clues", "Parallels", "Babel", "Rivals", "Visionary" or "Covenant'?