By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
“This doesn’t really feel like Star Trek.” This is a statement countless fans make every day, especially while watching the latest episodes of Strange New Worlds. Most of the time, these statements are dismissed as simple nostalgia…the pangs of emotion from nerds who miss when life was simple and carefree. But back during the Golden Age of Star Trek, you could honestly make this statement about several episodes because they were originally written for a different show. In the case of “Devil’s Due,” this episode took decades to see the light of day because it was written for two different shows before becoming an iconic Next Generation story.
“Devil’s Due” was a Season 4 TNG episode with a fairly wild premise. The Enterprise must help a planet whose population thinks the world is about to end. Why? Because they believe they made a deal with the devil to end all wars and ecological disasters. The catch? They would all become slaves a thousand years later. Now, a woman claiming to be that devil has shown up, and she has the apparent powers to back it up. Fortunately, we get the return of Lawyer Picard, who (with the help of the Enterprise) reveals this woman to be a criminal running a con on a planetary scale.
One Hell Of A Hottie
It’s an insanely fun episode, but it doesn’t really fit the mold of The Next Generation. After all, when you think about Picard, you don’t think of a guy who has to match wits with the devil. Of course, this wasn’t originally meant to be Picard; it was meant to be Kirk! Back when Gene Roddenberry was first creating pitches for The Original Series, he sketched out a loose idea of this storyline. Obviously, that episode never got made back in the ‘60s, but it almost got made in the ‘70s. You see, it was earmarked as a possible story for Star Trek: Phase II, intended to be the first live-action spinoff series.
The runaway success of Star Wars convinced Roddenberry to bring Star Trek to the big screen. As a result, Phase II was scrapped entirely, though the characters of Decker and Ilia were memorably recycled into The Motion Picture. However, Roddenberry wasn’t quite done recycling. The success of the Trek movies inspired him to make a second attempt at a live-action spinoff series. That show became The Next Generation, which also borrowed heavily from Phase II. Riker and Troi, for example, are intentional echoes of Decker and Ilia. And certain episodes were reused for TNG, including “Devil’s Due.”
Starring Data As The Devil’s Advocate
So, what would the Phase II version of this story be like? Remarkably similar, actually! The devil character was male, which is more in line with the devil character Kirk infamously ran into in The Animated Series. In the original version, the Enterprise computer served as the judge for the big legal showdown; in TNG, the android Data serves as arbitrator instead. Otherwise, the episode plays out very much the same way, with Kirk sticking up for planetary residents who are being swindled by a cosmic con man.
There you have it, boys and ghouls: “Devil’s Due” is a Star Trek episode that took decades to write. It was almost brought to life by two different series before becoming one of the most iconic (and not to mention weirdest) episodes of The Next Generation. While it may have been out of character for the show, it was admittedly great fun to see Picard match wits with a seemingly godlike beauty who knew exactly how to put him in his place. Sadly, they never ended up in bed, meaning we never got an answer to the real question: whether she keeps the Klingon devil face on when (ahem) making it so.
