5 Lost Episodes Of Star Trek: The Original Series You’ve Definitely Never Heard Of
The 79 episodes of TOS sometimes feel like the Old Testament of sci-fi. But what if there had been different episodes?
For the first 20 years of Star Trek’s existence, the entire canon consisted of 79 episodes of the classic show, which fans held up as a kind of modern scripture. Yes, there was The Animated Series in 1973, and the first four films, but in many ways, before The Next Generation, the individual episodes of The Original Series served as the bible for the Star Trek experience.
But what if those 79 episodes had been different? What if certain episodes were made that we never saw? There are countless paths not taken in the long and winding warp of Star Trek history, but lost episodes of The Original Series represent a truly bizarre world of pop culture that is almost impossible to imagine.
If you delve deep into old interviews and out-of-print books about Star Trek — like Allan Asherman’s 1989 volume The Star Trek Interview Book, or Stephen E. Whitfield’s 1968 book, The Making of Star Trek — you’ll find all sorts of evidence of discarded episodes and concepts. Here are five Treks not taken from the classic era that have remained fully invisible, even for many hardcore fans.
5. “Joanna”
Written by Star Trek maestro D.C. Fontana, the script for “Joanna” eventually became the much-derided space hippies episode “The Way to Eden.” In the original script, Dr. McCoy’s estranged daughter Joanna would have been part of the troupe of hippies. Oddly enough, even though Joanna McCoy never appeared in this episode, Fontana’s script, as written, was never filmed; Joanna did become part of Star Trek canon. Bones mentions his daughter in “The Survivor,” an episode of The Animated Series. As it stands, the character of Irina Galliulin is what we got instead, but the alternate world, in which Joanna was a major guest star in TOS, feels slightly better than the timeline we live in. (That said, maybe we dodged a creepy romance storyline with Captain Kirk?)
For more non-canon appearances of Joanna McCoy, check out the novel Crisis on Centaurus (1986) by Brad Ferguson, as well as Shadows on the Sun (1993) by Michael Jan Friedman.
4. “Mother Tiger”
This one was from “Mirror, Mirror,” penned by Jerome Bixby, a veteran sci-fi writer, who basically adapted aspects of the parallel universe concept from his own short story, “One Way Street,” which was published in Amazing Stories in the January issue of 1954, which would have been on newsstands in late 1953. Other than “Mirror, Mirror,” Bixby is arguably equally famous for penning the famous 1961 Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life.” He only wrote one episode for the original Star Trek, but he pitched several others before “Mirror, Mirror,” including the unmade episode “Mother Tiger.”
The idea of “Mother Tiger” would have involved finding a ship with one woman in suspended animation, who would have been, essentially, the alien mother and last survivor of an entire alien race, which was close to the premise of “The Devil in the Dark.” However, “Mother Tiger” would have featured a decidedly more humanoid alien. “I always found that a rather curious coincidence [the Gene Coon script for “The Devil in the Dark”] six months after I submitted ‘Mother Tiger,’” Bixby told journalist Allan Asherman in 1988.
That said, classic Trek had several episodes with similar premises. Maybe “Mother Tiger” would have been a gem.
3. “Deep Mudd”
As it stands, outside of Rainn Wilson’s version on Discovery, the wily intergalactic con man Harry Mudd only appeared in two live-action episodes of TOS and one episode of The Animated Series. Played by Roger C. Carmel, Mudd debuted in the wild episode “Mudd’s Women,” written by Stephen Kandel, and was on a short list for a possible second pilot episode for The Original Series. While Mudd returned in the better-loved android romp, “I, Mudd,” which aired in Star Trek’s second season, Kandel did have another Mudd story in mind, called “Deep Mudd.” The story would have involved how Mudd escaped from the robot planet in “I, Mudd,” but would have also been about him finding himself, by accident, with “a cache of scientific equipment and weapons,” presumably left behind by the advanced aliens who made the androids. In 1988, Kandel said that this episode never got past the story treatment phase, but that it would have involved him getting “tangled with the Enterprise.”
It’s a shame that we never got a version of this episode, but the Rainn Wilson Short Treks Mudd-centric episode in 2019, “The Escape Artist,” comes close.
2. “He Walked Among Us”
Writer Norman Spinrad famously gave us the script for “The Doomsday Machine,” but he had one episode that was never filmed called “He Walked Among Us.” The basic premise revolved around a character named “Bane,” an outcast from society, who tried out various sociological experiments on a distant planet. At one point, the story was rewritten by Gene Coon, but it never materialized into an episode of TOS. Spinrad also claimed that Coon took the social commentary of the concept into a more comedic direction, which didn’t quite work out.
That said, in 2010, Spinrad did publish a version of the story as a novel, without the Star Trek elements.
1. “Rock-A-Bye Baby”
The notion of the Enterprise becoming self-aware is something that was eventually explored in the TNG Season 7 episode “Emergence.” But right at the beginning, one writer, who also wrote the first-aired episode of Star Trek, “The Man Trap,” had a very interesting script all about the Enterprise gaining the personality of a child and viewing Kirk as its father figure.
Along with William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson wrote the seminal novel Logan’s Run, which became the 1976 film of the same name, and later, a 1977 Logan’s Run TV series, on which D.C. Fontana was the story editor. So, clearly, Johnson had something about his writing that was connected to the ethos of Star Trek. And when you think about it that way, it’s almost shocking that “Rock-A-Bye Baby” was never made.
