Revealed: A theological twist in original Star Trek scripts
Star Trek’s expansive scifi antics always opened the door for a little weirdness: whether brawling with giant man-lizards, or getting drowned underneath a pile of Tribbles AKA breathing hairballs.
It’s hard to know exactly where Star Trek would draw the line; though The Hollywood Reporter has now revealed that line started at Captain Kirk fistfighting Jesus. Which is good to know.
Part of an excerpt from The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete Uncensored Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek — The First 25 Years, by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, details creator Gene Roddenberry’s attempts to pen a screenplay for the first Star Trek film in the 1970s, as Paramount toyed with the idea of bringing the popular TV series to screen.
One of those ideas was entitled The God Thing, focusing on the Enterprise crew’s attempts to stop a force heading to Earth with claims of being God; though it turned out to be a living computer invented by a race cast out of its own dimension and into ours, with the computer eventually granting the crew a miraculous newfound youth and returning them to their original five-year mission.
“Gene had written a script for the first Star Trek movie,” Michael Jan Friedman recounted, who had once attempted to adapt the treatment as a novel. “Certain elements showed up in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but most did not. So there was this mysterious script floating around that people talked about as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls. After I had written several successful Trek novels, Trek editor Dave Stern asked me to turn Gene’s efforts into a novel called The God Thing.”
“To the best of my recollection, I received both the script and a short narrative version of it. Naturally, I jumped at the chance to translate and expand it. Gene was — and still is — one of my heroes, for God’s sake, no pun intended. As he had already left the land of the living, this was a unique opportunity to collaborate with him.”
But when I read the mate- rial, I was dismayed. I hadn’t seen other samples of Gene’s unvarnished writing, but what I saw, this time, could not possibly have been his best work. It was disjointed — scenes didn’t work together, didn’t build toward anything meaningful. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy didn’t seem anything like themselves. There was some mildly erotic, midlife-crisis stuff in there that didn’t serve any real purpose.”
“In the climactic scene, Kirk had a fistfight with an alien who had assumed the image of Jesus Christ. So Kirk was slugging it out on the bridge. With Jesus.”
Unsurprisingly, the script was rejected by Paramount; as associate producer Jon Povill explains, “It probably would have brought Star Trek down, because the Christian Right, even though it wasn’t then what it is now, would have just destroyed it. In fact, Gene started the script under one Paramount administration and handed it to another... to Barry Diller, who was a devout Catholic. There was no way on Earth that that script was going to fly for a devout Catholic.”
“Actually, it wasn’t God they were meeting, but someone who had been born here on Earth before, claiming to be God,” Roddenberry elaborated in the past. “I was going to say that this false thing claiming to be God had screwed up man’s concept of the real infinity and beauty of what God is. Paramount was reluctant to put that up on the screen, and I can understand that position.”
Nevertheless, the Star Trek universe continues; the newest installment in the second cinematic generation continues with Star Trek Beyond, while a new TV series is preparing to debut on CBS.
Star Trek Beyond will be released 22 July. THE INDEPENDENT