35 Years Ago, Star Trek Rebooted A Lost Episode From A Canceled Series With Wild Results
What if Kirk, not Picard, had beaten the Devil?
In 1977, Star Trek was gearing up for a comeback. After being canceled in 1969 and enjoying a brief return as an animated series in 1973, the beloved sci-fi series was finally coming back to live action. History will tell you this resulted in the 1979 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but before that, there were very serious plans for a sequel TV series, generally referred to as Star Trek: Phase II. This show was fully in pre-production throughout much of 1977, and when the plug was pulled, the show morphed into the first feature film; all 13 episodes that were proposed at that point vanished, like Scotty beaming a person into space.
Well, almost. Two stories from Star Trek: Phase II actually survived and rematerialized as episodes of The Next Generation. “The Child” from Season 2 of TNG is the most famous, as it's a tear-jerker in which Troi (Marina Sirtis) has an alien baby. But the forgotten 1977 reboot from Phase II that sometimes gets overlooked is the 1991 TNG Season 4 episode, “Devil’s Due,” which got a much wilder rewrite than you might think. On February 4, 1991, this quirky episode dropped, with a very strange origin baked into its premise.
Mild spoilers ahead.
In The Next Generation, “Devil’s Due” is a delightful, fairly simple story about a woman named Ardra (Marta DuBois) who claims to be the literal Devil, relative to the inhabitants of a planet called Ventax II. (Why do these people use a number designation to refer to their home planet? A quirk of the universal translator?) The long and short of it is this: A thousand years prior, the population made a deal with the Devil for an era of peace and prosperity, and at the end of that time, Ardra would come back and take total legal possession of the planet. Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) is having none of this, and assumes, quite correctly, that Ardra is a con artist, and sets out to prove that she’s simply using modern 24th technology in clever ways to fool the Ventaxian population, who have intentionally throttled back their tech over the course of a millennium.
Ardra claims to be an all-powerful Devil-like figure. But nobody buys it.
Interestingly, this episode, on paper, presents a story concept that mainstream future-tense sci-fi rarely tackles: When far-out sci-fi concepts are a fact of life, how can you fool anyone into thinking magic exists? As author Arthur C. Clarke famously stated: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but what about to a group of technologically savvy people who should know better? Ardra startles Worf (Michael Dorn) when she morphs into the faux-Klingon deity Fek’lhr, even though, surely, Worf knows that holograms can make people look all sorts of different ways. She even uses a cloaking device to make it seem like the Enterprise has disappeared, a fact which Geordi (LeVar Burton) sorts out in the last 15 minutes or so of the episode.
So, in theory, there’s not much tension in “Devil’s Due.” The audience never thinks Ardra is the real Devil; Picard doesn’t think so either, meaning we’re only really worried about a space con artist enslaving an entire population because she read some old religious texts and decided to use those myths to her advantage. And, it's in this way that “Devil’s Due” is actually secretly awesome: Like the Bene Gesserit in Dune, Ardra is attempting to walk into a religious belief and become the flesh-and-blood version of an entire populace’s hopes and fears.
Interestingly, though, in the original 1977 story treatment, written by William Douglas Lansford — which you can read in the book Star Trek: Phase II: The Making of the Lost Series — the idea that a con artist is at work is pretty much absent. Instead, Kirk and the crew encounter an old man named Zxolar, who, in this version of the story, created the myth about an eventual judgment day to get his planet in line. In the Phase II version of “Devil’s Due,” the twist isn’t that the deal-with-the-devil is being exploited by a con artist, but instead, was created by a one thousand-year-old man, who is still around in the present. On top of that, in this version, the Devil, in this case, named Komether, is a literal being who comes from Zxolar’s mind; kind of like the basic premise of Forbidden Planet.
In the original take on “Devil’s Due,” Captain Kirk would have put the faux-Devil on trial.
In short, the first Trek take on “Devil’s Due” had a literal energy being that was acting as the Devil, and relied on a twist that this entity was created by a person’s mental projections. When rewritten by Philip LaZebnik (and some input from the TNG writers’ room at that time), the story became much smarter. Instead of a science fiction twist that involves powers beyond what the Enterprise crew is familiar with, the final version of “Devil’s Due” has a more subtle message: Even if you know that fraud or fakery is happening, there’s still a burden of proof to undo it.
The idea that the android Data (Brent Spiner) stands as an impartial judge comes from the original script, though. In that version, the Enterprise computer was the judge of the trial which found Captain Kirk debating Komether. In both cases, Star Trek presents what is one of its oldest and most enduring tropes: Distrusting technology is a good default toward restoring humanity. Except, of course, if it's technology you already rely on, trust, and incorporate into your daily life.
Neither in 1977 nor in 1991 could anyone have seen the implications of the themes being presented here. Ardra is like someone who uses AI slop to make herself into a religious icon and con people out of money. But the truly unbelievable thing in this case isn’t that she’s defeated by good-old human brainpower, but instead, that a different form of AI, a different kind of technology, is the thing that delivers the final verdict.
