[CT] Another Star Trek ripoff.

[Daniel Moran]

This is going to be my last post on Star Trek piracy.

As far as I can see, I've been plainly stolen from, by Star Trek, once. 
I've described that incident.

There are three other incidents that are interesting, and none of them have 
anything to do with the current series.

My friend Karl and I pitched together at "Next Generation" twice. We 
pitched two episodes that they quite liked; one of them had a gag where the 
Enterprise had to get to the center of the galaxy to prevent a terrorist 
plot to destabilize the black hole at the center of the galaxy, which would 
cause subspace "shock waves" that would prevent interstellar travel. 
Nothing terribly interesting about the story, except that the mechanism to 
get from A to B was a wormhole. I talked about how that wormhole, once 
established, would permit a series of stories about environments far away 
from the normal Star Trek universe. Within a year DS9 was announced.

The second story was an adaptation of a novel Karl & I are probably going 
to write someday, "The Golden People." The Continuing Time races are, many 
of them, based on DNA (Zaradin DNA, from their common ancestor.) It was 
really an artifact of low budgets that Star Trek had all these 
human/humanoid races, but since they did, I suggested to them that this 
implied a common ancestor -- and more to the point, a merging-together of 
the variant races at some point, of Klingons/Humans/Vulcans/Romulans etc., 
into a better species, a hybrid vigor-enriched "Golden People". They didn't 
lift our story (far as I know) but in a later TNG episode there's a story 
about the ancestor race from which all the Klingons/Humans/Vulcans/Romulans 
etc. are descended -- I'm pretty sure that's from me.

Finally, one of the stories I pitched to DS9 was "The Stopping Point." In 
this story, Bashir dies over and over again. It turns out that a race of 
aliens that _don't_ die are interested in the mechanism whereby other races 
do -- the "Stopping Point." I've never seen the episode, but apparently 
there's a similar Voyager effort where Captain Janeway dies, over and over 
again. (There's a funny story about how I ran into Alexander Siddig, who 
played Bashir, at Fry's Electronics. Karl and I were standing in line right 
in front of Siddig; he was buying a bunch of video editing equipment. I 
introduced myself, identified myself as the guy who'd written the story 
behind "Hard Time" -- and went on to describe to him the story I'd written 
where Bashir got killed, over and over again. He took it well -- "You kill 
Bashir ... over and over again, do you?" "Oh, yeah," I say, and proceed to 
describe the various ways his character dies. He got quieter in the face of 
my cheerful description....)

Those are the biggies. I have heard other people have settled plagiarism 
lawsuits with Trek -- one guy who didn't, and should have, is my 
acquaintance Robert Hurt, who works (worked? Haven't talked to him in a 
couple years) at JPL. He described a story he'd pitched where the ship got 
twinned into a matter/anti-matter pair; he described it to me long before 
the Voyager episode that's plainly based on his pitch finally ran.

Far as I know, nothing in "Enterprise" is mine. Admittedly, I haven't 
watched a single episode.
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