The first time they introduced the Eugenics Wars set in the 1990s, Spock called it the last world war. Pike in SNW elaborated that it was part of the escalating conflict that went nuclear as WW3 decades later.
I’d say TNG mostly stopped exploring new frontiers halfway through season 1. Farpoint promised exploration, but soon the ship is ferrying diplomats and scientists and answering Federation distress calls. The worlds are new to the audience, but not the characters.
TNG also had Vulcan extremists (trying to recover ancient psyonic weapons) and Sela must have expected a fifth column ready to defect once her thousand troops landed and gave them an excuse.
He wrote a book about making it. The section on studio interference implies that it was all egregious, but it lists Paramount trying to fix most of the problems that were still in the final film.
She directed episodes of both “Enterprise” and Star Trek: Enterprise", which each lasted two seasons. The stealth name change was surprising back then.
The idea was that the Klingons had joined the Federation and we’d see Klingon Starfleet personnel in the background. When they did add Worf, he was to be more frequently Data’s relief than Yar’s.
If you read the initial material, Data is drastically different. There is no explicit mention of being unemotional, just that he tends to speak more formally. He’s supposed to be more like the Ilia probe than Spock.
Worf didn’t exist at first, so Geordi the teacher with bionic vision would be the most “other” character. If they’d seen any of the early press material for Phase II, Spock’s replacement there was a very junior officer.
There was a spinoff pitched during TOS called Hopeship featuring M’benga. The pitch for NBC/RCA was that instead of introducing expensive colorful sets, they could stay shipboard and have expensive alien makeup and costumes.
A Quality of Mercy also showed Una in prison, and Those Old Scientists implied she’s revered. Did sending that letter prevent Pike from recruiting her lawyer? Things are already not heading down the exact timeline we saw Ortegas alive in.
It’s definitely an industry change. Frakes has talked about how when he directs an episode now, the show’s director of photography tells him to keep the camera moving.
Wesley’s mom, a main character, was initially going to be the ship’s teacher. They shifted her over to the empty doctor position without changing much about her. Then they made a new teacher who was also changed to be a bridge character, as the ship’s pilot.
While Riker and Troi are adapted from Decker and Ilea, Beverly was more extrapolated from yeomen Colt, Smith, and Rand.
Edit: specifically, their bios were mostly about a potential relationship with the captain, how competent they were (making them reasonable mates for him), and having the “walk of a striptease queen.”
TOS had a proposed spin off for him, which would have ended up about his brother (played by the same actor) as first officer of a medical ship.
It would be astoundingly different after SNW.
And the TOS theme does have lyrics, though they’re terrible and Roddenberry just wrote them to unapologetically steal half of Courage’s royalties.
Ilia’s theme from TMP also had lyrics.
The new producer took over for season 2. Season 3 is clearly what he imagined 30 years after All Good Things to be like, undoing Generations, and in season 2 he focused on changing the parts of Picard’s character that were too major to stuff into season 3.
Voyager wasn’t syndicated, it launched UPN, which was Paramount’s hope for Star Trek since the 70s. Then Enterprise rode out the network almost to its dissolution. We wouldn’t have had a project ready to morph into TMP without Phase 2 and the planned and then abandoned network.
I’ve always thought the Romulans weren’t just the Vulcans who rejected Surak’s teachings, but also any who didn’t have the physical ability to follow them.
Originally it was just based on Romulans not expressing any psychic abilities, but Picard also established that sharing personal details publicly as a major taboo. That would track with them being a mix of former enemies who are concerned with suppressing the rivalries that lead to nuclear war.
I thought that point about the season finale was the whole point of the episode. Pike and his style weren’t right for the situation. He was like a caricature of Picard without the tactical superiority to back it up.
It also might be another reason Enterprise was the ship kept out of the Klingon war.
From what we’ve heard, about the only thing Roddenberry liked about the idea for Captain’s Holiday was that in addition to the heterosexual couples in the background , he could have gay couples. The writer thought it would get the episode dropped, and in Chaos on the Bridge, Berman was very direct about having to stop that in its tracks.
If it was Roddenberry and not his power tripping lawyer or Paramount who killed Blood and Fire, I expect he was being petty about how Gerrold went from adoring him to arguments and mutual disrespect during the calamity that was TNG season 1.
And when Enterprise did that, there were fans who insisted it was a retcon. It’s something people beleived since TOS even though it was contradicted pretty soon after the Federation was even established.
There are several other things that fans have been certain of since the 60s (like saucer separation being irreversible in the field or Vulcans only having sex during Pon Farr) that weren’t the production intention, but this one was blatantly impossible and it’s very strange.
She played the captain of the Lakota later in DS9, Captain Benteen.