6 Star Trek Tie-In Novels That Should’ve Been Films
2. Maximum Warp Dead Zone & Forever Dark
Movie to be replaced: Nemesis
Yes, another novel two-parter. I chose this one for much the same reason as The Dominion War novels theres literally nothing else published before Nemesis that featured the Enterprise-E. Thats partly due to the editorial mandates of the time, which seemed to include avoiding anything that might step on the toes of ongoing series. Thankfully, they decided to publish one post-Dominion War story with the TNG crew, which wouldve been infinitely preferable to Nemesis.
Maximum Warps plot revolves around a mysterious force thats destroying subspace, ruining communications and travel throughout the Alpha Quadrant. The Enterprise-E crew and Spock team up with a Romulan war criminal to figure out whats going on. Eventually they find out that an ancient alien machine thats keeping an inhabited planet from falling into a black hole is causing the problem and Picard is faced with a dilemma: save the planet and doom the Alpha Quadrant to a dark age, or doom the planet and save civilization as they know it?
Its hard to say whether Maximum Warp (which would probably be renamed) would wind up being a better theatrical film than Nemesis. The novels have pretty much fallen off the map since their release, which means theyre pretty middle of the road in terms of quality (then again, there are hundreds of Trek novels, so that might not mean anything). One area where theyre obviously superior than Nemesis is the plot, which is a massive improvement over the Wrath of Khan ripoff we got. But could Stuart Baird and John Logan not messed the whole thing? Who knows, especially with Paramount and the producers giving Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner whatever they wanted. But at the very least, if they had to kill Data, having him sacrifice himself to save the Trek universe as we knew it wouldve been a better exit.