6 Star Trek Tie-In Novels That Should’ve Been Films

6. Spock Must Die!

Movie being replaced: The Motion Picture

Back in the late 1960s, during TOS€™s first run on TV, a series of novelizations were commissioned and published by Bantam Books. Written by John Blish, a well known scifi writer in his own regard, these books were based on early script drafts and ultimately led to Blish writing his own original Trek novel, Spock Must Die! The very first original Trek novel by Bantam (and probably the first ever), it suffers and benefits from being one of the first books in the Trek EU.

The plot revolves around the Klingons declaring war out of nowhere, which shouldn€™t happen due to the Organians (energy beings with godlike powers), who stopped a Federation/Klingon war back in TOS€™s Errand of Mercy. In order to find out what happened without taking the Enterprise to Organia, Scotty whips up a transporter that can beam Spock from the Enterprise to Organia (yes, this novel invented transwarp beaming), which results in Spock being duplicated. And as it turns out, one of the Spocks is evil and working with the Klingons.

While the plot is horrifically derivative when seen by modern eyes, it was pretty original when the book was first released (1970). The main thing it has over TMP is an actual story full of characters, dialogue, and plot. While TMP has all of those things, there€™s only enough to fill an hour long TV episode at best and the rest of the film is visual effects used as padding. Spock Must Die! does have its own problems with length (the 1999 reprint I bought at a book fair is only 118 pages) and has a terrible opening (a philosophical discussion about the transporter while the Enterprise is on a mission), but with the right writer creating a brand new opening, Spock Must Die! would€™ve been a far superior film debut for the franchise.