Gene Roddenberry’s Abandoned Star Trek II Film Concept

Gene Roddenberry and Harve Bennett on the set of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

After the success of Star Trek: The Motion Picture at the box office, Gene Roddenberry immediately got to work on a sequel. Little did he know that Paramount was in the process of sidelining him into a consulting producer role and his story for Star Trek II would never be made. However, we have details of his concept and it just may surprise you. Kirk meets JFK? Spock is the man on the grassy knoll?

Gene Roddenberry put together a sixty-page treatment for a sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture in the Spring of 1980, according to The 50 Year Mission by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman. Despite TMP making $139 million worldwide, with $82.2 of its gross being made domestically, Roddenberry was stung by criticism of his first outing on the silver screen.

Roddenberry’s Idea for Star Trek II

Roddenberry decided to write a sequel that got back to the elements that had made Star Trek so popular: the Klingons, time travel, the Guardian of Forever, and Sarek and Amanda. In the story, the Enterprise returns to Earth to find bodies floating in space. They eventually discover that history has been changed by the Klingons and the Federation no longer exists. As to why the Enterprise still exists when the Federation does not, well the answer is that anyone traveling at warp speed when the change in the timeline occurred is immune.

With the Federation never having existed, Earth is populated with a savage race of protohumans. The crew learns that the Klingons used the Guardian of Forever to go back in time and change history. When more Klingons arrive at Earth, the Enterprise hides behind the moon to evade detection.

In San Francisco near the site of what would have been Starfleet Headquarters, Amanda is brutally raped by the Klingons and Sarek sacrifices his life to save Kirk and Spock. The crew returns to the planet where the Guardian is located to go back in time and reverse the damage that the Klingons had done.

When a Klingon ship attempts to block a much larger Guardian portal, the Enterprise crashes through the Guardian and ends up crashing in Canada in the 1960s. A U-2 spy plane mistakes the crashed Enterprise for an alien spacecraft, which causes U.S. President John F. Kennedy to cancel his trip to Dallas in November 1963. This prevents JFK from being assassinated, thus altering the timeline.

Realizing that they were the ones who altered the timeline, Captain Kirk visits JFK in the Oval Office. However, Kirk is not forced to ask the President to sacrifice himself to correct the timeline. Instead, the crew repair the timeline (mysteriously) that the Klingons disrupted and return to the 23rd century. To their surprise, Dr. McCoy returns to a wife due to the changes the Enterprise crew had made in the past.

Further Revisions

Eddie Egan, the unit publicist on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, stated that there was a revision that made the events of Roddenberry’s Star Trek II similar to the classic Original Series episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” In order for history to be restored, Kennedy had to die. In this version, Spock appeared behind a fence and fired the fatal gunshot that assassinated JFK. This proposal reportedly horrified Paramount.

Fans even began a letter-writing campaign based on rumors that Spock would be the shooter on the grassy knoll. These angry letters basically said “if Spock is the shooter on he grassy knoll, I will never watch again.”

Paramount Grows Tired of Gene

Roddenberry was promoted by Paramount in the early 1980s to the role of Executive Consultant, essentially cutting him out of creative input in the Star Trek film franchise. According to long-time assistant Susan Sackett, Paramount was looking for a scapegoat for their failure to hold back costs in the production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and they wanted anyone else but Roddenberry. TMP had run $10 million over budget, which Sackett contends was Paramount’s fault. Sackett, for her part, felt that Gene’s JFK story was “damn good,” and she does not know why they never did it.

The Wrath of Paramount

As a result of TMP’s budgetary issues, Paramount Pictures turned to Harve Bennett, the head of Paramount’s television division, in 1980 to produce the sequel to TMP. Bennett and Roddenberry reportedly clashed intensely during the production of The Wrath of Khan, even to the point where Bennett had Roddenberry thrown off the set after a particularly bitter dispute one day.

For this story, and many others from the history of making Star Trek, check out Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross’s two-volume history, “The Fifty Year Mission.”

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badass

That’s a heck of a story. Would be interesting to have seen it. Similar, in fact, to Stephen King’s 11/22/63.

Could easily resurrect the story for an episode of Discovery.

Rather then Spock killing JFK, a similar idea to Forever, would have been their lack of action resulting in his death. You could spend the film dramatically expressing why the crew absolutely cannot tell anyone in the past the truth, only for Kirk to meet Kennedy and tell him everything, providing him the gravity of the situation. Perhaps Kirk says Kennedy must go to Dallas because the “meeting” there is so important to the future. Kennedy agrees to go.

Seeing Shatner play Kirk talking Kennedy into unwittingly going to his death would have been remarkable, I bet.

All of this talking him into it angle was covered in a NEW TWILIGHT ZONE ep in the 80s that had Andy Robinson playing JFK. PROFILE IN SILVER is I think what it is called. And that was way before RED DWARF did its hilarious take on it.

“It’ll drive the conspiracy nuts crazy. They’ll never figure it out!”

I host 11/22/63: An Event Podcast, and we spoke about both Profile in Silver and Tikka to Ride (Red Dwarf) in our most recent episodes. Check em out if you care to: http://barrenspace.com/112263/category/podcast/
Also, this sequel idea sounds AWFUL.

Why couldn’t it be JFK’s life model decoy?

I guess that would explain why JFK’s brain went missing during or after the autopsy, if they didn’t have one ready in sickbay.

The problem is that it’s not like the situation where Edith Keeler had to die for the sake of humanity. It was very dramatic because she would have kept the US out of WWII long enough for the Nazis to get the bomb first. Not clear what the argument is for Kennedy’s death or, alternatively, his survival, having such a dramatic impact on humanity. What was so important for the future? LBJ passed the Great Society program after JFK’s death, including policies that JFK failed to implement. I think you could make a better argument for a plot where Hinckley succeeds in killing Reagan. The USSR doesn’t dissolve within a decade and eventually Chairman Putin allies the Soviet Union with the Klingons.

Every now and then, Paramount makes the right decision. They saved Star Trek from Roddenberry with this one.

Of course, Wrath of Khan started out not looking much like the movie we actually got, it took Meyer taking the best bits of several different ideas (Genesis, David, Khan, Saavik) and blending them into one story. That would certainly have been necessary with this movie, beginning with eliminating the assassination part at the end.

This movie sounds more than a little like First Contact, with Klingons replacing the Borg.

Joel Engel’s book about Roddenberry says that he had dementia during the last several years of his life. This storyline sounds like one of the symptoms. :-)

Joel Engel’s book was a crock; a hack job (like all of his books).

@Anthony Thompson

Agreed.

Anyone who’s read Gene’s notes on the later movies and the final interviews he gave knows Gene was thoughtful, funny, kind, and even profound right up to his death. Gene was prone to profound fits of stupid like anyone else. It doesn’t mean he was demented.

This is so horrible that merely publishing this story may kill Star Trek!

hyperbole, much?

No he’s right herby kerby

Most of the story sounds like a good idea except for Protohumans, whatever that is and mostly of all going with the conspiracy theory of the green knoll shooter and Spock being it. Could have been a situation similar to Edith Keeler except Spock has to let Oswald shoot Kennedy despite wanting to save him.

Spock shooting JFK was DOA on the spot. Anyone would have known that.

Oy Vey.
Sounds like it would have made “Planet Earth” look like Citizen Kane by comparison.

Khan, the space battles, the expanded Kirk character (cheater, old man, failed husband and father), all the things that made Wrath of Khan (one of) the best sci-fi movies of all times are not in this script.
Thank god Paramount kicked Roddenberry out.

Wow – that is just terrible.

I’m not so sure this story is accurate. I recall Lincoln Enterprises selling this script by Roddenberry in the 70’s.

He could have gone back to an older script and tried to pitch it for Trek 2. Either way, it sounded terrible.

I think AT is referencing the GR TREK IV treatment somebody else linked to – THAT story was definitely written in the mid 70s by GR and Povill. The killing JFK thing didn’t show up anywhere I know of before it was reported in STARLOG, which happened post-TMP.

Kevin, the synopsis I recall was different than the above in that somehow the Trek crew *saved* Kennedy from being assassinated. I remember it being in the Lincoln catalog but didn’t purchase the script because I thought the story idea was ridiculous.

I apologize and stand corrected. Are you sure that was from the 70s and not the 80s? I remember a friend (he posts here as vokar) back then who got hold of a lot of the stuff Lincoln put out, like RETURN TO GENESIS and at least one of the IN THY IMAGE drafts, and I keep thinking he’d have snatched this up too if he’d seen it listed.

You know, I saved a lot of material from the early days. I have a couple of boxes full, in fact. I’ll go through them and see what I can find.

The thing I really want to find from the old Lincoln Enterprises days is a copy of GR’s 1950s TV script, “The Secret Weapon of 117” aka “The Secret Defense…” or better yet, the filmed episode, since it starred Montalban.

As for JFK and 11/22/63 stuff, the only worthwhile/realistic film is PARKLAND, which wisely and sanely steers clear of conspiracy theory nonsense.

Wait a Second…An hostile race alternates the timeline and erases humanity, the Enterprise goes back in time to correct that mistake by allowing a historical important event to happen? Sounds like a movie I had my first contact with back in 1996…

Nahhh — that was an entirely different Enterprise ;-)

That proposed script was terrible. It would have killed Star Trek for good.

Old story for us original fans, maybe something for the newbies to ponder.

Well at least Roddenbery wasn’t so far off the rails then that the evil imperialistic Klingons weren’t replaced with the capitalist Ferengi. How bad would that movie have been??? To be honest this movie sounds better than most of his projects post – “Wagon Train to the Stars” where his mandate seems to switch from trying to write pro-US entertainment (with some sex appeal) to stories about how I’m the socialist utopian messiah.

The Ferengi, as portrayed in TNG, were such a vile stereotype, you’d think Goebbels had created them.

GR’s Star Trek IV film concept too:

http://www.roddenberry.com/media/vault/ST4-Outline.pdf

LLAP

Beautifully written but it ends before the story ends. Missing pages, I wonder? Or perhaps Roddenberry never completed the story.

That ST IV outline, just going by the first graphs, sounds awfully familiar — word for word as I recall — from a Roddenberry/Povill treatment from the mid 70s, the one that preceded development on PLANET OF TITANS. Somebody who knows Povill should give him a holler about this, he never mentioned GR re-pitching that as a feature (maybe he never knew?)

This concept sounds so bad that I find it had to believe Gene or anyone else would take it seriously. If it is true I’d take the Voyage home over this time travel story any day.

The ‘amanda raped by klingons’ should have been enough to get a meeting ended right away. I’ve got your ‘optimistic future’ right here, Gene-baby. Kee-RIST!

kmart,

Re: amanda raped

After the recent Bertolucci reveal, I’m not so sure? I certainly have to consider that the mind rapes of Valeris and Troi in the movies may indeed be, yet again, STAR TREK’s way of getting the actual thing in — and Roddenberry had absolutely nothing to do with either. I’m simply not sure what to make of all that. One can certainly imagine the two characters feeling at least “a little raped” after the way their ordeals were portrayed on screen? Of course, that was acting, and I am in no way trying to diminish Schneider’s very real ordeal — just trying to get a handle on the psyche of this whole thing and the need to get it on screen.

Also, 139 mil and 82 figures for TMP, while widespread for the last couple decades, don’t reflect what was stated to be the figure AT THAT TIME. 175 mil worlwide was the very common figure, but that was before Shatner & co threatened Paramount with an audit in the mid80s. Have always wondered if TMP’s gross and rental numbers (the rentals for domestic alone were 55 or 56, which suggests 120 just in domestic) got downgraded because of the threatened audit.

Wow. I am glad it was not made in first place. Gene’s idea was the craziest one that I had ever seen regarding to Star Trek movies.

That book (and vol. 2) chronicles GR’s slide into foggy reality. Honestly, Paramount did him and his legacy a favor.

I see most people hated this story. But keep in mind, this would have been far from the finished product.

Obviously Spock killing JFK was not going to happen. Klingons raping Amanda wasnt going to happen.

It was another US-centric story. But there is merit to it. Firstly, time travel always seems the most interesting scenario. The fact “Forever” was one of the best Trek scripts of all time certainly lends itself to re-visiting.

TUP

Re: But keep in mind, this would have been far from the finished product.

I’ll say.

People forget Meyer signed on to this film with 9 scripts deemed no more filmable than they suspect of Roddenberry’s.

I think Harve narrowed them down to 5 he thought had something by way of a hook but were not adequate to start filming.

People should try to ponder what might have been if Gene’s script were on that pile?

Well, I don’t think I’ve ever heard NINE storylines for TWOK, where is that from, the Meyer memoir?

There’s Sowards’ THE OMEGA SYSTEM, which has the destructive power of Genesis without the positive qualities of the device, which arose out of Bennett’s WAR OF THE GENERATIONS outline, plus the Sam Peeples version that dispensed with Khan, and may-be something else from Ted Sturgeon? (that was a rumor way way back, no evidence to support that.) I think Sowards was on long enough to have done a couple passes maybe, but I don’t see the number of stories and scripts as being that voluminous. Still miraculous that Meyer pulled what he did out of them in the time available, but let’s not exaggerate (that’s Spock’s shtick.)

kmart,

Re: Nine storylines

Well, there’s enough misinformation on II starting with Bennett, who had a Trekker girlfriend, supposedly not knowing a single thing about STAR TREK going in that I’m not sure 9 scripts IS an exaggeration or that they necessarily represent 9 clearly distinct storylines.

I base my count on adding up two script tales which together actually give indications there were likely more scripts (TMP had 12) but how separate their storylines actually were is an unknown. All that is known is that Bennett had 4 things that he told Meyer were drafts and one more, a fifth, “draft” outstanding. Meyer asked to see the final “draft” upon completion. Bennett delays forwarding it. Meyers asks what’s the deal and Bennett confesses the drafts weren’t drafts at all but 5 separate individual attempts to get a II story with the proper scope which none of the scripts have.

The other version says there was the rejected Roddenberry script. Then there was a TV movie decision and the script for that which got Shatner to sign. Bennett tries to advance an outline of his through treatment for a motion picture script consideration, but is frustrated with his results, so hires Soward to get it there. He generates 4 more scripts. Soward makes Bennett realize that Harve’s story development was Spockless and they are going to have to deal with the matter of Spock. Soward comes up with selling Nimoy on signing by promising him a magnificent death scene. Nimoy signs based on some rough script with Spock’s death that Soward shows him. Paramount rejects all the scripts and their drafts generated this far. A desperate Bennett does a Hail Mary and hires 3 more writers, one of them Sam Peeples, in the hopes one of them can generate something with a motion picture scope. Two more scripts are produced with an additional one outstanding. Bennett hires Meyer. Bennett confesses to Meyer. Meyer asks Bennett to send him the scripts that contain things that he loves and would like to be in the movie, and promises to cobble together something in 12 days using the best bits of each. Bennett sends Meyer 5 scripts written by 5 different authors. Meyers writes THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. Bennett loves it. Paramount loves it. Shatner hates it. Myer creates another draft that gets Shatner on board. Some other unnamed actor has problems with Meyer’s script and another draft is generated.

Burn the whole pile

Actually, a better version of this idea would be if the JFK assassination was being stopped by the Klingons, only that it was a part of a smoke-screen for their real objective: the assassination of John Christopher (TOS: Tomorrow is Yesterday). Gary Seven (TOS: Assignment Earth) would show up as a time traveler, assisted by the plunky assistant Roberta Lincoln, who would be the one to do the grassy knoll.

Reminds me of the plot of the Red Dwarf Series 7 episode Tikka to Ride!

But could be adapted into a future Star Trek show/movie?

This reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode where they accidentally prevented Kennedy’s assassination and destroyed the future. In that one, Kennedy ended up travelling back in time and shooting himself from the grassy knoll.

The Altman/Ed Gross “25 Year Mission” book, both volumes are quite remarkable. I highly recommend them to any fan of the franchise.
Respectfully, Gene Roddenberry had many great skills. His imagination played a huge role in the birth of “Star Trek”. He hired the right people who helped build the legend and who wrote the incredible stories.
Had this story been produced, it would have been the end of “Star Trek” and it would have put a bad taste in anyone’s mouth who once liked “Star Trek”.
Gene Roddenberry is to be commended because he would go on to make many good decisions in the birth of “ST:TNG” and thanks to Rick Berman, the show would evolve and improve to become a huge success.
In retrospect, its amazing Paramount allowed him to run the show again..and its equally amazing that Susan Sackett thought that Gene’s script was great. She must’ve been smoking whatever Gene was smoking.

David Gerrold did most of the work pulling TNG into shape. It should have been a disaster, given it essentially recycled Questor, Decker and Ilia as major characters.

Dom,

Re: recycled Questor, Decker and Ilia

Don’t forget Gene was using this new STAR TREK to get his rejected GENESIS II Pax philosophy a platform too.

Sometimes I wonder if the main reason Star Trek has been so popular and good over the years is because they had one guy trying to write overly offensive or disarming stores and another group trying to be overly conservative and safe. The result was a balancing act between the two that resulted in the best of both worlds.

I am glad they changed it. The Wrath of Khan sounds more interesting. I have no emotional connection at all to JFK. Politician of a foreign country, who died long before my birth. Old boring history. Even back then it happened nearly 20 years ago.

And whose crap idea was it to shown Amanda getting brutally raped? Did they really wanted to show a 70 or even older woman get raped by Klingons just for stupid shock value? They should have rather let her sacrifice herself together with Sarek to rescue Kirk and Spock. That would have been tragic enough and she would have gotten a heroic death, too.

Well I remember that just before news of this idea showed up (around 1980), that GR had mentioned he wanted to get deeper into Klingon culture in the TMP followup. I assumed that was going to be more a matter of giving them breadth and character, but instead perhaps all it was was giving them a Hell’s Angels at Altamont kind of forum for extended mean badassedness. KITUMBA from p2 was better written than this notion, and Ford’s THE FINAL REFLECTION novel from the early 80s is still better than everything else ever written about Klingons IMO.

I will note it seems odd that Spock was considered unacceptable to the production in the role of the one that ensured EK’s historical death but as JFK’s death ensurer? No problem!

Allowing Keeler to die came down to restraint and cold, calculating logic, which was right in Spock’s wheelhouse. Pulling the trigger on JFK, being an active participant in his death, is a bit extreme for our favorite peace-loving Vulcan. Even though it made story sense, it still would’ve left a bad taste. And I doubt Nimoy would’ve allowed it anyway.

It sounds like Gene had pretty much run his creative well dry. This was borne out over the first two seasons of The Next Generation. The pilot was good, thanks DC Fontana, but it was for the most part a car wreck you couldn’t turn away from, just hoping you’d see something to pique the interest- which
happened only occasionally.

Similar to this…

If they had made a movie with GoF in it, I wonder how Harlan Ellison would have reacted to that.

Harlan would have gotten his lawyer on speed dial

This story can come back to life,
in the reboot version.
Killing JFK would not be as horrific now,
than in the early 80’s when it was relatively
still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Elements of this story were used in the Star Trek New Voyages episode “In Harm’s Way”
http://www.stnv.de/ihw

This reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode ‘Tikka to Ride’. In that, Lister and the gang go back in time to get some curry only to unwittingly knock Lee Harvey Oswald out the window of the book depository. They then *SPOILERS* have to go back and make sure that JFK shoots HIMSELF from the grassy knoll so that his reputation is intact and nuclear war is averted.

If anyone wonders why Star Trek has more or less stuck to “villain of the week” revenge pics like WOK, Nemesis, and the reboots, it’s crap like this. Jesus, Amanda is raped, Spock kills Kennedy? This is like the worst fan fiction. Following up the film version of Ambien with this would have killed Trek long long ago.

Sounds utterly awful, a half-breed of Genesis II and every other third-rate crass conspiracy time travel episode of a TV show ever made. Even Red Dwarf VII (arguably the worst season of that show) had better ideas. No wonder they binned it!

Unfortunately, the Star Trek II that did get made has become the franchise’s equivalent of Watchmen; a standard-setting psychological barrier that every film since has struggled to overcome, often ending up merely imitating it.

I suspect Harlan Ellison would have blocked use of the Guardian and everything else sounds plain silly. TWOK, as a ‘soft reboot,’ led to a long running film franchise. Star Trek II: The Search for the Grassy Knoll would have killed the series stone cold dead for 20 years.

Yes, Star Trek is rooted in the sixties, for better or worse. But to make a JFK-centric movie twenty years later would have driven that fact home a little too much.

“We must follow them back, repair whatever damage they’ve done!”

After thinking about it, Gene’s Star Trek 2 is reminiscent of Star Trek: First Contact of seeing history has been changed and the Enterprise had to follow them back to restore the timeline.

But one criticism over Gene’s Star Trek 2, a little too reminiscent of City On The Edge Of Forever, a damn good episode that I don’t think anyone should mess with.

The Guardian is worth re-visiting. Just have to find the right story. I mean…this power of that thing is immense. How is it being protected? Is every other species in the galaxy trying to access it? Is some dark part of Starfleet or the Federation trying to utilize it?

Quantum Leap did a Kennedy episode. The twist was that the first time Oswald shot both Kennedy and Jacquie. Imagine if Bakkula had pulled the trigger? These kinds of stories are never satisfying. 11/22/63 wasn’t terribly satisfying, and there have been probably at least a dozen what-if Kennedy assassination movies, or TV episodes over the years, and they all tend to fall flat, because the fiction and entertainment value pales against the spectacle of the real thing. Considering how underwhelmed audiences were after TMP, a pseudo crime-drama/thriller set around Trek probably wouldn’t have inspired audiences either; and unlike COTEOF, the driving force of that story, the connection between Keeler and Kirk would not have been there. Kirk might have known about Kennedy as a matter of being a student of 20th century history, but he could not have possibly had even the same kind of platonic connection with Kennedy as he did with Keeler, as it would be like having a strong emotional connection with King Arthur — much less resonating with audiences. Having Spock do it would have been an even greater disconnect. What Trek needed is what they got — a pseudo swashbuckling adventure pitting two opposing forces against each other, where the emotional investment, the sacrifice and death of another was personal. Just like Edith Keeler, Kirk knew there was no other choice than the one Spock made, and ultimately despite the great sacrifice had to accept it. Was that movie perfect? No, but it kept the emotional focus on our heroes, where as the plot revolving around Kennedy would have put the focus shallowly on a non-Trek character.

@Curious – solid perspective. I just finished 11/22/63 and I felt deflated by the ending. Although I very much enjoyed the series and hope they re-visit it.

The problem with doing a “stop Kennedy from dying” story is that either in the end, you fail to stop the shooting. Or you succeed and everything is bad. The message is always the same – that a good thing and good man had to die to make the world a better place. So that is a negative ending always.

Perhaps a series exploring the perspective of the conspirators that Kennedy had to die would be more interesting.

And ofcourse, what also helped make “Forever” great was the focus on this one average person as a cornerstone of the future of mankind. Its easy to accept that Kennedy living would have changed history as we know it, but some soup kitchen manager? That was interesting.

Speaking of which, how has Quantum Leap not been rebooted!

Curious Cadet,

It boggles that in Ellison’s script Gene couldn’t accept Spock’s cold logic as the only thing that could ensure Keeler’s needed death but gives it back to him for JFK?

The other thing that boggles is why the ship needs GOF to go back in time at all?

And of course, with the ship’s technology back then why would they have to actually kill JFK? Isn’t their technology capable of convincingly faking his death for 1960s’ forensics and history?

In the end, it’s far more powerful having Kirk do the right thing than letting Spock do it who has no emotional stake in the decision. That’s the easy way out. That’s the same problem with Kennedy. No matter who does it, they simply can’t have the emotional stake in the decision that can result from a direct, relate-able, personal decision.

As for GOF, my bet is once Ellison caught wind of this story, they would have quickly changed that to sling-shotting around the sun, or a cold-implosion engine start, both of which methods could have been discovered by Klingon spies. And that would have changed a lot going forward with the franchise, maybe even starting that stupid temporal cold war long before ENT came up with it…

Truth must be told. I believe, that for americans, JFK is a venered person, and you tust don´t kick those beliefs just to make your look better.

The story is epic; like the Guardian and Klingon involvement. I remember the criticism of Spock as the assassin in the early 80s. Interesting how elements of Roddenberry stories — giant probes, god beings (The God Thing) and time travel — found their way into both STIV and V. With some tweaking this could have been good, but it would never have been cheap, and Paramount had spent the farm on Trek I. Trek II was good, but it basically ended any big scale, exploratory missions of the USS Enterprise (she turned into a training ship!).

The scary thing is that there is an alternate reality where this abomination was filmed and it killed the whole Trek franchise.

It seems Roddenberry read too many Gold Key comics

I’m always interested in these never made Star Trek movies.

Do a comic book version idw

Wow, what a mess that would have been.
Gene had the one good idea and it made his career.

Wow, what a great idea, Gene…less than 20 years after Kennedy was shot & killed, make a film based on a property beloved by millions in which one of the star (and favorited) characters is the killer. Brilliant.

Makes as much sense as someone suggesting taking the “Kelvin timeline” crew today & having them go back in time to correct the timeline by having them be responsible for destroying the World Trade Center towers.

Interesting. Sounds like a reworking of City On The Edge Of Forever to me. By stopping McCoy, Kirk might as well had pushed Edith Keeler into the oncoming traffic. Spock,always the warm hearted voice of reason, stated that Edith Keeler must die. Roddenberry just reaaranged the deck chairs a litte. Spock knows JFK must die. It’s decision based on logic, and no one should be surprised that Spock is perfectly capable of pulling the trigger. I can see what Roddenberry was doing, can’t say I blame him…if you’re going to “borrow”, borrow from the best.

“Spock appeared behind a fence and fired the fatal gunshot that assassinated JFK.
This proposal reportedly horrified Paramount.”

For ONCE, I agree wholeheartedly with a Hollyweird studio.
That storyline borders on psychotic.