
	Justin B Rye 1991–2002

The DIY Star Trek Script Flowchart

Have you ever wondered what kind of adventures the Starship Enterprise under Captain Kirk would have run into in the fourth year of their five-year mission, if it hadn't been cancelled after three? You have? Well, stop it! We all know perfectly well what they'd have run into – more of the same, as generated from the standard formula reproduced below.

To create a new Star Trek (TOS) plotline, simply run through the table from the top, following any path you like as long as you only go downwards or across within a cell, and assemble its output into an episode synopsis! All resulting scripts are guaranteed to contain at least 20% authentic-style Roddenberry flavouring and are practically indistinguishable from real episodes of the Original Series, not to mention the Animated Series (ever).

Whilst
boldly going where no man has gone before	ferrying bigwigs about	on leave	investigating a							carrying out a vital mission of mercy	taking a shortcut through the Neutral Zone
boldly going where no man has gone before	ferrying bigwigs about	on leave	doomed world	strangely familiar world	time warp	space warp	form of energy never previously encountered		distress signal	carrying out a vital mission of mercy	taking a shortcut through the Neutral Zone
…
Captain Kirk		Spock		Bones		Scotty	the crew of the USS Enterprise			the guest star
…
…					falls in love	gets brainwashed	is put on trial	starts aging rapidly	apparently dies	falls ill	gets lost
…					when the Enterprise
encounters
an apparent											…
conman	monster	duplicate of							madhouse	paradise
conman	monster	Kirk	Spock	an old friend	a human being	Abraham Lincoln	some historical period on Earth	the Enterprise	madhouse	paradise
which is							which is
in fact						in fact
an android		a shapechanger		not what it seems
…
…		– as well as
		…
		something		a horde of little things		a godlike		a gang of superbeings		a Klingon	a Romulan
		shapeless	huge	a horde of little things		computer	being	a gang of superbeings		captain with a
		which tries to ingest				which pisses them about				grudge	new secret weapon
		them		everything		as a test		for fun		who ambushes them
		and [pick one or more]
		drains the dilithium crystals		hijacks the Enterprise		picks off the security guards		isolates the landing party		depletes the shields to 5%
…
but their opponent turns out to be										…
…	mad	all alone		well meaning		misled		just a kid
…	and
vulnerable to								…
gibberish	a show of emotion		a cunning bluff		a good talking to		violence
and
dies,		leaves,		so
				the guest star dies a heroic death,		Kirk delivers a		Bones develops a vaccine,	Spock does		Scotty juryrigs the engines,
				the guest star dies a heroic death,		speech,	right hook,	Bones develops a vaccine,	something seemingly illogical,	a mindmeld,	Scotty juryrigs the engines,
which means everything turns out okay,
and the planet is saved in the nick of time.			give or take a few personal tragedies.			and everybody forgets it ever happened.			though a few regulations have been broken.
Then, finally
Kirk		Spock		Bones		Scotty		Sulu		Chekov
says something
smug			witty			worthy			snappy
and they leave at warp factor [2d6−1].

Sleevenotes (January 2002)

This precursor to my Star Trek Rant was on my webdesign back burner for years! The original 1991 version was published as a centrefold in Edinburgh SF 'zine New Dawn Fades (NDF#10 also featured Ken MacLeod and Dave Green before they were famous, namedrop namedrop). Then ever since I started moving things from dead-tree to electronic format, people who'd stuck my ST:TOS Plot Generator on their bathroom walls have been on at me to put it online. However, I didn't want to force it into the black-box press this button to see another combination model that's standard on the web… and besides, I don't trust JavaScript and Demon don't trust Perl. So I spent years hesitating between option A, giving up and scanning the whole thing in as a bloaty great piece of text-as-graphics, and option B, tormenting the layout into something compatible with standard HTML markup. In the end I settled for the table you see above; ironically enough it still won't work in non-graphical browsers like Lynx, which can't handle such fancy cell-layouts!

Postscript (July 2005)

Those still wondering what this would look like implemented as a script (in the computing sense) can now find out thanks to John Sensebe's PHP version!

Star Trek: Mark Two	JBR Home Page	Babylon Five: Mark Two