For any Star Trek fan who’s up in arms over the addition of a young Spock to season two of Star Trek: Discovery, you should know that the exact same situation nearly took place on Star Trek: The Next Generation three decades ago.
This revelation comes to us from the @trekdocs Twitter account, which unearthed a four-page story outline TNG writer Tracy Tormé penned in 1988 that features Leonard Nimoy’s Spock meeting a younger version of himself after stepping through the Guardian of Forever portal. The storyline, which Tormé had titled “Return to Forever,” was meant to act as a continuation of the classic TOS episode “City on the Edge of Forever” while also bridging the gap between the two series. “They were going to go back to what was now the most forbidden place in the galaxy, which was that time portal,” Tormé said at the time, according to Syfy Wire, “and they were going to have to actually violate the rules about non-interference, and it was going to create a Pandora’s box with a whole terrible, unforeseen thing which only the Spocks from two different time periods coming together could actually fix.”
Sadly, the story never came to pass, though Nimoy did eventually guest star as Spock on TNG in 1995’s “Unification.” The original Star Trek reboot film of 2009 also involved a somewhat similar premise to Tormé’s story, with Nimoy’s older Spock meeting the younger version of himself, as portrayed by Zachary Quinto.
If you’d like to imagine what could have been, you can read Tormé’s full treatment from 30 years ago on the @trekdocs Twitter account.
