Deltan Lieutenant Ilia floating lifelessly in a plasmastream in an alien spaceship, while her look-a-like robot replacement threatens the Enterprise

5: The reality behind this: Believe it or not: everything is true, as I didn't claim the scene in the plasmastream was ever filmed. It was in the original script, though!

4: As the series was never done, she was never rescued. As she was an esper (sort of low level telepath), her role got replaced by Dianna Troi in TNG, as did a lot of episode exposés. Oficially, Ilia remains missing. That spurned a lot of contradicting apocryphic reintroductions of her in comics and Star Trek books. In one version she becomes the Borg Queen.

3: Therefore, in the original script, she was not presumed to be destroyed when the robot replaced her, but kept on board the alien spaceship in a plasmastream. To be rescued eventually to return for the series. With her, Gene Roddenberry finally could ignore the previous 1:3 rule (female-male cast), he could re-introduce a female commanding officer (after the back then never shown original Star Trek pilot) and do away with her hair, which went against the grain at the time.

2: That's how the new prominent crew members came about in the movie: Ilia, Decker and David Gautreaux as Commander Branch. The latter was origingally to have been Spock's replacemant Vulcan Xon in the series. Of all the characters, the producers wanted to replace Spock! Gautreaux got a play-or-pay contract and could therefore stay for the movie. But when Spock returned, Gautreaux asked for a different role: Branch. Decker and Ilia eere supposed to have been major new characters in the series.

1: Building TV-sets, writing episode scripts, hiring actors. At first none of the crew knew about the fakeness of the production. Only at the end of October 1977 did they tell the main cast and crew about the real production of the movie. When the press got wind of this, the producers even kept lying, claiming to double the number of episodes. Only in January 1978 did even the director learn about it. Still they kept lying to him, not to worry. But of course they replaced him with a bigger director...

Fantastic 😍

I already commented everyone personnally (this is the advantage of a smaller challenge) but I still wanted to Do a general message. Great entries. Congratulations to Everyone, especially Neelix and VintagePix for their first and third place. Beautiful images. Some great surprises I wasn't expecting. Awesome voting. Nobody under 3! It really makes me happy since for me 1 or 2 should only be for off theme or very badly done. This could have been my last Star Trek challenge but the results tell me we're not done. There Will be a new different scifi challenge to start in this chatrooms later today but expect a new Star Trek challenge starting on sunday with voting on Tuesday. Live long and prosper!

Beautiful! I was sure you would Do better. I really liked the Idea!

magic