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

3. The Dominion War €“ Behind Enemy Lines & Tunnel Through the Stars

Movie Being Replaced: Insurrection

This might seem like a repeat of the stunt I pulled for Star Trek V€™s replacement, since I€™m using two books here, but this is a different situation. The two TNG novels for this entry are the two halves of a single story that ends shortly after Deep Space 9 is recaptured from the Dominion in Sacrifice of Angels.

So, what€™s the story here? In a nutshell, Picard and Geordi go on a potential suicide mission with Ro Laren to keep the Dominion from finishing an artificial wormhole. Along the way, they meet up with two guys from the TNG episode The Lower Decks, run into pirates and space grave robbers, and are nearly killed by a changeling. Meanwhile, Riker and the rest of the crew (except for Data, tailing Geordi and Picard in a shuttle) get to explore the human toll the war is taking on Starfleet.

So, how would this be an improvement over Insurrection? For one, it would allow the TNG crew to be heroes, instead of dooming billions by depriving them of a useful medicine for the benefit of 600 technophobes on a backwater planet. It also explains what the Enterprise was doing during the Dominion War, which is one of the really big holes in Trek lore that the novels have tried to plug. Unfortunately, this is one swap that might not work €“ the two books were published shortly before Insurrection was released and since the lead time for writing a book is way shorter, there wouldn€™t be enough time to go through the usual drafting process unless Paramount pushed back the release date and no other TNG novels published that year covered Dominion War material.