10 Star Trek Episodes That Never Got Made

The original writer of this potential Original Series episode is unknown, but the presence of the pitch document in the Roddenberry archive suggests it was an idea from the series' creator. The episode would have revolved around a temporal scientist on-board the Enterprise whose time experiment accidentally brings aboard an Austrian from the 19th Century. The man is revealed to be Alois Schicklgruber, who would adopt his stepfather's name, Hitler, much later in life. Alois Hitler would go on to father a young Adolf.

The Enterprise crew is then left with one of the most enduring conundrums in time travel fiction. Should they change the course of history by averting the birth of Adolf Hitler? A thorny ethical debate over sterilisation ensues, involving a Jewish geneticist who's a crew member on the Enterprise. They eventually decide to send Alois back to father his son, concluding that it was nurture, rather than nature that made Hitler the monster that he was.

It never developed any further than that original pitch and it's just as well. Given the lingering trauma of WW2 throughout the two decades between the end of the war and the airing of Star Trek, it would be a difficult tonal balance to strike.