10 Star Trek: The Original Series Episodes That Were Almost Made

Lightning did not strike twice for Barry Trivers, who wrote the memorable “The Conscience of the King” for Star Trek’s first season. His sophomore effort was this proposed episode in which the Enterprise visits another “planet of hats” ⁠— on this one the hats they’re wearing are American Civil War caps — but the “twist” on this world is its blacks enslaving whites.

Kirk is captured as a runaway but nothing much happens and no points are made other than the obvious one that slavery is bad. No kidding. NBC wasn’t having any of it and said “hell no,” not even approving the story outline to go to script. But Roddenberry had Trivers to do a first draft anyway, but that was as terrible as his two story outlines. Trivers doesn’t deserve all the blame for this one, though. Gene Roddenberry came up with the noxious story premise, which he called “Kongo,” as part of his initial pitch for the series in 1964.

Many sources claim Trek’s heavy-handed “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” was an evolution of this story, but the two are nothing alike, and “Battlefield” is arguably better, which gives you an idea how wretched a “Portrait” this was.

Mad Men seems to have been poking fun at this in its fifth season episode, “Christmas Waltz,” when a character in that 1960s-set show wrote a script for Star Trek called “The Negron Complex,” which sounds suspiciously like “Portrait.”