In 1977, Star Trek was gearing up for a comeback. After being canceled in 1969 and enjoying a brief return as an animated series in 1973, the beloved sci-fi series was finally coming back to live action. History will tell you this resulted in the 1979 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but before that, there were very serious plans for a sequel TV series, generally referred to as Star Trek: Phase II. This show was fully in pre-production throughout much of 1977, and when the plug was pulled, the show morphed into the first feature film; all 13 episodes that were proposed at that point vanished, like Scotty beaming a person into space.
Well, almost. Two stories from Star Trek: Phase II actually survived and rematerialized as episodes of The Next Generation. “The Child” from Season 2 of TNG is the most famous, as it's a tear-jerker in which Troi (Marina Sirtis) has an alien baby. But the forgotten 1977 reboot from Phase II that sometimes gets overlooked is the 1991 TNG Season 4 episode, “Devil’s Due,” which got a much wilder rewrite than you might think. On February 4, 1991, this quirky episode dropped, with a very strange origin baked into its premise.
