Time for another installment of: what the fuck is happening in the star trek novels

I swear to God I’m going to fucking scream

Now there’s a passage I haven’t thought about for a while. It’s extremely pleasant to see it again. 😌

Meanwhile, some notes:

The above isn’t from a Star Trek novel. It is from one volume of the 1970s paperback series Star Trek 1-12. (Scroll up that page for more info.) Almost all the adaptations in these volumes were written by the (then) relatively well-known SF writer James Blish.

So, these volumes being adaptations, the question immediately arises: Where exactly did that language (and the sentiment behind it) come from? Because adaptations of filmed material might normally be expected to hew fairly closely to that.

One important thing to keep in mind here is that these adaptations weren’t done from shooting scripts. Jim Blish had not seen the filmed episodes, and (unusually, when compared with best practice for adaptation these days*) was working from drafts that might have been early or late—and how early or late, we’ve got no way of telling. The ST 1-12 adaptations routinely contain varying amounts of material that doesn’t appear in the filmed episodes.

So the next question becomes: who wrote that script?

The material shown above comes from Blish’s adaptation of ST:TOS episode s3e6, “Spectre of the Gun,” written by the tremendously-respected Trek producer Gene Coon. Coon was, for all effects and purposes, the ST:TOS showrunner (the quasi-title not yet having been invented)—a man routinely associated with some of the best ST: TOS episodes, and one who’s sometimes been described as “the keeper of the soul of Star Trek”. If anyone from that period of Trek production could be said to know what was really going on with the core characters of TOS at their own cores, it would have been Gene Coon.

…Now then. What’s a certainty is that the dialogue that appears above (and more along the same lines that occurs in that part of the adaptation) does not appear in the filmed episode. Some that comes kind of close to it definitely does. But not exactly that. So is the above dialogue something James Blish came up with, or does its source lie elsewhere?

The nature of the rest of the episode’s dialogue—dialogue that that does appear in “Spectre”—kind of gives us a hint. (A full transcript of the filmed episode is here.) Right throughout the episode, an unmistakeable poetry breaks out here and there, over much already-graceful phrasing. Something else makes itself noticeable, too: a rawer-than-usual sense of how very close the core characters are, and how much they care about each other, particularly when all their lives are on the line. …And the filmed dialogue that’s a near-miss of the above—as well as other accompanying story elements, including some that carry recognizable core messages of the Trek “microgenre” itself—that all comes from Gene Coon.

So. Somewhere along the line, the version of the dialogue that appears above fell out of what finally went in front of the cameras. This kind of thing happens all the time in production… and in this case, who knows why? Maybe someone felt the extra lines (or those versions of the lines) were a little too soft, or a little too florid. Maybe the script was simply running long. Maybe the writer (also being the showrunner, and looking at the material from two different angles) had second thoughts along the less-is-more axis.

…There’s no telling now, unfortunately: Gene Coon died in 1973 of lung cancer, too damn young. (Leaving some of us condemned to wonder forever what his effects on ST:TNG might have been if he’d survived to be involved.) …But what matters is that at some point in the script’s development, those lines, spoken by those characters in that way, were in “Spectre of the Gun”. And the source of them was, not some bought-in SF novelist with fanfic urges oozing out of their pores**, but “the forgotten Gene”, the man who you could make a case knew those characters best: the keeper of the soul of Star Trek.

So as for what all this implies…? As another (if distant) associate of Star Trek says, “I’ll leave you to your own deductions.” 😏

*Though it still does happen. @petermorwood and I wrote the novelization of the first episode of SeaQuest DSV without ever seeing any filmed material. We worked entirely from (a) a script that was still being edited/rewritten—an experience like trying to nail mercury to a lab table—and (b) the smudgiest and least legible faxed images you can possibly imagine. It was a nightmare. It got to the point that when the fax machine would go off, we would shudder in horror. …Ah well: it got better…

**Like, well, me… 😁