Save your Show!

One thing I would have done with Voyager is have them cross the Prime Directive line "out of necessity" in the season 2 finale, and have the dramatic tension of season 3 being "do we go on doing it?" And "was Janeway right to do so?" Resolve the Marquis issue only for new factions to form after Janeway throws the rules out the window in order to survive.

I'd have had thr balls to have ongoing damage/repairs going on, which would have required only chronological episode filming (ie if you set fire to corridor A in episode 10, it's still damaged in episodes 11 and 12 because they were filmed after episode 10). I'd have also have kept Species 8472 as The Threat, because Q always said the Borg was but ONE of the many threats in the big bad Galaxy in QWho, not "the worst threat in all reality".

No Seven (sorry, she's an excellent actor). No "ditch Kes". Play up the "is the EMH alive or a just clever tool?" question.


Have her accept Q's offer of a trip home, only to end up in the middle of the Dominion War.

Be warned. TL;DR incoming.

I had her decisions get a lot of heat from crewmen until eventually at the midway mark of Season 1, her replicator is sabotaged and blows up in her face, nearly killing her outright. It's all kept under wraps to prevent things from escalating out of control, except that one thing leads to another and boom, there's a mutiny. Turns out the man responsible for it is the Betazed psychopath Lon Suder and he didn't do it for any reason other than that she maybe looked at him the wrong way once.

I pinched Steve Lyons's rather excellent idea for Killing Ground with the Delta Quadrant by having the entire sector set up as an interstellar farm for the Borg to assimilate new technologies and add to their ranks. Almost every world in the sector has been scarred in some way by the Collective and there are a few scattered refugee fleets who survive primarily because they have such primitive (and therefore uninteresting) level of applied science knowledge. I actually had Seven join the crew from the start as Annika who is closer to the Seven we see in the first few episodes where she's shy with people and impulsive with her actions, as a child would be. It's only later when she's reassimilated and again freed that she loses the rest of that humanity and becomes the proud wolf, so you get the additional tragedy that Annika "dies" mid-series and becomes Seven of Nine. Neelix would be relegated to the position of a recurring character and Kes would assume a permanent position onboard the ship as their telepath (ala Lyta Alexander from Babylon 5).

I was always very wary about tying together Voyager with any of the other series as I wanted it to stand on its own and really emphasise that sense of isolation and alienness. One of my original ideas was to have one of the ships Voyager discovers was swept across the galaxy by the Caretaker to be a Dominion fighter from before their encounter with the Federation. It was part of that optimistic spacefaring streak that they may be enemies when they get home, but out here the Jem'Hadar and their Vorta leader are some of the best allies they've got. I decided to go with a completely different and previously unseen alien enemy of Starfleet instead because I felt it would be less constraining and arguably more interesting. Also, bringing in a crew who had no absolutely exposure to the Dominion War and seeing its aftermath would have been a fascinating clash of cultures. The pure science-driven exploration of before the conflict vs. the more militaristic and isolationist attitudes of what came after.


I thought the divide would be a lot greyer than simply Starfleet vs. Maquis too, there would be those who sympathised with the Federation but operated against the Cardassians and then there'd be those in Starfleet who sympathised with the Maquis cause but never joined up. That said, there would be different ways to do things with Janeway and Chakotay butting heads over their methods. I think the argument would often be self-sufficiency vs. seeking the assistance of others with Janeway stalwart in her opinion that they can handle things on their own and Chakotay always wishing to stick around for a bit and go native. I actually felt that it would be a neat idea if when Voyager is destroyed that each slowly come around to the other's way of thinking while living in exile.

One of the lines I really latched onto when I was watching the show was Janeway saying that she "wasn't just the captain, she was also the leader of a community," which led me to think that after four or five years there would be an inevitable shift towards a more homely atmosphere. The dress code would maybe get a little more informal, there'd be bits of the ship which have been retrofitted to suit whatever needs they had at the time and shipboard protocol would mould itself to suit their situation. One idea I had was to have the command areas of the ship are restricted to personnel with specialised bioscanners who are the few capable of deactivating the forcefields and opening the doors, similar to the security methods on Moonbase Alpha where selective areas are only accessible with a radio code. I thought that they'd quickly become known as the C-Red Passages (or the Condition Red Passages) amongst the crew and their visitors and are treated quite a lot like security checkpoints aboard the ship.

Game of Thrones for me. To be blunt, I don't think the show's killed quite enough people, honestly. Too much plot armor and things are much too predictable - it feels more like a traditional fantasy show than it does George R.R. Martin. So, I'd probably axe off some of the current fan favorites, add some more unpredictability to the mix.

That and I'd probably rewrite some parts of the show to include storylines from the books - the Dornish Master Plan, Young Griff, etc.