Star Trek: 10 Episodes That Wasted An Incredible Premise
Sometimes, despite their best efforts, these ideas in Star Trek don't stick the landing.
"All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by" (John Masefield not Herman Melville, in case you were wondering, Doctor McCoy). In essence, that's the incredible premise at the heart of Star Trek which has kept us watching week after week for over 50 years. 'Star' 'Trek' is the great idea; the rest is making the most of it. And, of course, space stations more than count too, with the Masefield quote on the Defiant's dedication plaque.
Such is the nature of the creative process and of television that even some of Star Trek's now most celebrated episodes didn't go from concept to screen unchanged. For what was the best of The Best of Both Worlds, writer Michael Piller admitted in Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages that, "We had no idea it was really a Riker story when we started out," and that it took a while to think up Locutus.
The reverse, then, is also true. Sometimes the most extraordinary premises fail to come to fruition in the episodes they've been given. Worse, there are those ideas that should have shaken the galaxy, and the franchise, to its core, but were never spoken of again (new episodes pending). The mystery of The Preservers was wasted on whatever The Paradise Syndrome turned out to be, and the mind-blowing revelations from perhaps the same species in The Chase were relegated to archaeological curiosity.
None of the above makes for a bad episode either, just a lost opportunity. In the end, we should all just be glad that A Briefing with Neelix/Good Morning, Voyager was apparently axed.
10. That Hope Is You, Parts 1 & 2
From what had been a pretty awesome second season, Star Trek: Discovery took a jump to 3188. It was a bold idea, ripe for storytelling. The 32nd was a previously unexplored century, and there were hundreds of years of largely unknown history to fill in before it.
In the first act of the first episode of the third season in this new century, we learnt of an event called 'the Burn.' Basically, when all dilithium suddenly went inert around 3069, every active warp core exploded, causing death and destruction on a massive scale, radically altering the political and technological landscape of the (now much less) spacefaring galaxy. In hindsight, however, That Hope Is You (Part 1) got our hopes up. The premise of the Burn was incredible; its explanation stretched belief.
One of the main problems was that the why of the Burn was left to a protracted investigation throughout Discovery's third season. During the wait for an answer, theories abounded from those genuinely excited by figuring it all out in advance. To say that the solution, given in That Hope Is You, Part 2, was disappointing would be putting it mildly. With so many opportunities to link the Burn to other parts of the canon, or to innovate with something new to match the stakes, the lone Kelpien option was truly a waste of a great premise.