12 Abandoned Star Trek Ideas That Would Have Been Incredible
4. The Tantalus Prison Of James T. Kirk
You all remember the Tantalus Device, yes? It was a minor plot-point in the classic Original Series episode Mirror, Mirror. When Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Uhura and Scotty are transported to the Mirror Universe by a freak ion-storm, Kirk discovers a device in his opposite number's quarters. This is the Tantalus Device, something that could simply make a selected target completely disappear. This device later cropped up in the palace of Emperor Georgiou, where she used it to keep an eye on a wayward Michael Burnham.
Frequent Star Trek novelists Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens had pitched a two-part episode for Star Trek Enterprise that featured the Tantalus Device, where it would have been revealed that it didn't kill people at all. It simply transported them back in time (about 150 years) to an isolated penal planet. Since Mirror Spock (resplendent in his goatee) had used the device on Mirror Kirk just after the end of Mirror, Mirror, this means that Kirk could still be there in the 2150s, when Captain Jonathan Archer and his crew would find him.
You see, in the original pitch for this episode, the Mirror Universe hadn't been created by the 2150s, it didn't exist yet. Mirror Kirk and Archer would have tried to figure out what happened to it and somehow, in some grave experiment, they would have accidently created it.
Yes, the plans for the Mirror Universe episodes In A Mirror, Darkly, originally included a role for the evil version of Captain Kirk. While the episodes we did receive were amongst the strongest of Enterprise's fourth season, just imagine having had Kirk in the mix as well.