3. He Walked Among Us (Star Trek: The Original Series)
For such an unreligious show, Star Trek: The Original Series liked to talk about God in metaphors quite a lot. A staple plot was some sort of robot is a god-like entity on a planet. Then of course you have the canned film project Star Trek: Planet of the Titans where the Enterprise crew are effectively God themselves, giving fire to mankind and of course Star Trek V: The Final Frontier with that bid disembodied head. Star Trek doesn't really do God, with the exception of the Bajoran religion in Deep Space Nine (and as I said in a previous article, even there they had to show that the gods actually existed they weren't allow to have blind faith in the future). Even there they were prophets and they never said the big "G" word. So He Walked Among Us should have slotted right into the normal framework, especially considering that it was written by Norman Spinrad who won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation for his 1968 episode The Doomsday Machine said to be one of the best episodes of the series. Essentially the plot was roughly that a Federation scientist loses it on a new planet and after using advanced technology, the local inhabitants consider him their god. Actually, that sounds familiar... I'll re-watch Into Darkness at some point, I'm sure. Anyway, the staff did a re-write and made it funny. Spinrad didn't take kindly to his script being re-written into a comedy and told them to pull it. They did. The End. Which is a shame because Spinrad was a good writer, and I'm sure they could have gotten another episode out of him before the end of the series if they'd gone with his script. Who knows, maybe we could have missed out on Turnabout Intruder.