10 Star Trek Deleted Scenes You Must See
Please note that the footage of these scenes is not due to arrive until Tuesday.
There are plenty of reasons for a scene to find itself sacrificed to the cutting room floor (or bin for those less messy editors) – at one time as a lonely strip of film, but now likely relegated to the back-end of a hard drive. A scene might be unnecessarily expositional, slow, tonally inapt, not quite family-friendly, out-and-out bad, or simply redundant full stop. When the film/episode is already too long, certain moments may get the chop more easily than others. We didn’t really need to see Hoshi learning the Denobulan for 'xiphoid process' in the Enterprise season two episode Minefield, or Captain Picard spilling food all over himself in Insurrection, for example. Both segments were best left as curiosities for the collector.
The reverse is also true. Invoking a sense of 'let’s-have-a-look-at-what-you-could’ve-won' as part of the special features, certain deleted scenes really should have made it to air or to the cinema in the first place. We are left wondering why they were cut when they help explain key plot points. Other scenes have only seen the light of day decades after their celluloid severance, such as the material found in the 'Roddenberry vault' to be discussed below.
As fans, we can already feast on director’s cuts, remastered looks; steelbooks, special ('ABC') versions, box-sets, theatrical excursions; Blu-rays, 4Ks; standalones or stream from homes. With these comes a wealth of material that never made it to screen. Here are 10 such deleted moments that you really need to see.
10. Baby Spock (Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo)
First, sorry not sorry for getting that song stuck in your head.
Second, we’ve all seen one birth of Spock – The Final Frontier Sybok guilt-trip hallucination version – but another does exist. In a deleted scene that was originally meant to open Star Trek (2009), we find ourselves in Shi’Kahr on Vulcan as the cries of a new-born baby echo across the desert. Designed to be somewhat cryptic for the novice (much like the Kirk birth scene), an unnamed human mother (Amanda, of course) is joined by an unnamed Vulcan father (Sarek), who muses, "I had a thought that we might name the child after one of Vulcan’s early society builders. His name was Spock".
Whilst the scene was cut from the film, excerpts showing baby Spock were used in various trailers and TV spots. It was removed from the movie proper to avoid a certain heavy-handedness when it came to the rest of the young Spock and baby/young Kirk scenes.
Given that Spock’s birthyear is stated as 2230 in the movie (although it was 2233 according to The Animated Series episode Yesteryear), and that Kirk’s established birthyear is 2233, the baby Spock scene on Vulcan in Star Trek (2009) must have taken place before the split in the timeline. The scene clashes a little with how Spock’s birth is depicted in Star Trek V – in a cave-like setting – but, in theory, we are in effect seeing both Prime and Kelvin baby Spock in Abrams’ version.