Mortal Thangs

Several months ago, in the last gasp of pre-blog Scribblings, I serialized a Star Trek: The Next Generation spec script I wrote and submitted in 1993 called Mortal Pangs. Until I spent the better part of an evening reformatting the entire script so that it would display properly on a web browser, I hadn’t laid eyes on Mortal Pangs in several years. And after revisiting it?
I’m both really happy with it, and embarrassed beyond all belief. There’s a certain therapeutic element about the whole thing that makes me cringe just a little bit; I’m a bit surprised how much of my own internal turmoil at the time was on display. It may well be something that I really needed to write, just to get it out of my system, but I’m not sure it’s a story that needed to be inflicted upon another living soul.
And at the same time…with the benefit of a little distance, I enjoyed it. There are some plot contrivances in there (that handy comet was almost as convenient as Data having to leave his crewmates to control a bunch of torpedoes), and there are some things that really should have been explored or explained better (like, maybe, that whole freakin’ alien culture there). But for the most part I got a kick out of it. I feel like I got the characters’ voices right, and for some reason I really dig the Crusher/Riker scene. And as contrived as “everybody controlling a torpedo or two” was at the end, it’d be hard to argue that the script didn’t give everybody something to do. (One could argue that the attempts to give everybody something to do in the post-series movies have been at least as plausible.)
Overall, it’s really not extraordinary in any way, and that’s almost certainly why it didn’t go anywhere: even with rose colored glasses and a bit of “parental” pride, I can see that Mortal Pangs had great potential to be…well…a highly average episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It fit in pretty well with the shows that were airing at the time I wrote it: there was some kind of out-of-the-blue return of one of the regulars’ family member with the attendant conflict, an off-the-wall scientific McGuffin B-story, and an alien race with one notable characteristic who we’d never see again. In a way, I can look back now and see that it was a synthesis of quite a few staple elements of the show at that time. With my own anxieties, neuroses and uncertainties tacked on for good measure. (Sorry about that.)
I tried and tried to come up with a decent spec for Deep Space Nine after getting the rejection letter from Paramount for Mortal Pangs, but with the benefit of hindsight, I have to say that nothing I was working on (the best of which was something hinting at a prejudicial social class system determining who got a Trill symbiont, which is an obvious avenue the show explored anyway) would have fit in with the brilliance that was exhibited during DS9’s run. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. Ironically, it wasn’t until Enterprise that I came up with an idea for another spec – and naturally, by then, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had closed the doors on the unsolicited spec script program for the first time since Michael Piller instituted it in 1989. And that was heartbreaking – watching what Manny Coto was doing with the show in the fourth season, my story would have fit right in perfectly in terms of re-examining existing aspects of Trek stories past; in this case, there would’ve been a solid connection to a Next Generation episode, not a Classic Trek story. (Though to even mention what that connection is would give it away – it’s a no-brainer that also probably would have been done eventually, and hell, it even would’ve justifiably grafted some extra Temporal Cold War crap onto the saga. Why not?)
And despite the show’s end, I’m actually still tinkering with writing it out, in teleplay form, and posting it here for your amusement. I like the teleplay format. I thought about trying to flesh it out in prose and maybe entering it in one of the Pocket Books Strange New Worlds short story contests, but here’s a little secret: I hate my own prose with a passion. There’s a reason I write factual and/or opinion essays and reviews, and not fiction. I don’t like my own handling of fiction. It reads like a mish-mash of other people’s fiction, usually whoever I’ve read most recently. I’d rather just tell the story in dialogue, descriptions and stage directions with the assumption that everyone knows who the heck I’m talking about. (I think this is also why, for the most part, I’ve abandoned the licensed-property-novel ship, even though there’ve been some brilliant ones – i.e. Paul Cornell’s Doctor Who New Adventures, and Kate Orman’s too – that have transcended the usual mandate of a licensed property novel.)
So might my dramatic-comedic-time-twisting mini-epic ever see the light of day? One never knows.