Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Sarek

Weirdly enough, despite his pedigree amongst Star Trek relations, Sarek would only appear once in TOS's original run. That's not to say that attempts weren't made to bring him back, with nobody working harder to do so than Journey To Babel writer D.C. Fontana.

In Season Three's The Enterprise Incident, Fontana's original intention was to have Sarek on a diplomatic mission into Romulan space, negotiating with the male Romulan Commander to buy time for Kirk and McCoy's surgical alteration and covert mission to steal cloaking technology which did make it to the final episode.

However, upon submitting her story outline to co-producer Robert Justman, Fontana was talked out of the Vulcan Ambassador's involvement in the episode. Whilst distracting the Romulan Commander served a noble purpose, Justman felt that Sarek's appearance would only serve as fan service, and would take attention away from the main plot. The decision was made to install Spock as the primary point of contact with the Romulans, and to change the Commander to a female, allowing exploration of Spock's more emotional human side.

This would not be Fontana's last effort to bring back Sarek, as we would see in years to come.