Trivia / Star Trek S3 E20 "The Way to Eden"

• The Cast Showoff: Charles Napier not only sang the songs in this episode, but also wrote them. Deborah Downey, an accomplished singer, also did her own vocals.
• Creator Backlash: James Doohan said this was the only Original Series episode he didn't like. Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Rand from season one) likened it to "Spock's Brain" as one of the worst the show ever aired. Walter Koenig thought it was out of character for the youthful Chekov to act as an "establishment-loving conservative," in contrast to the hippies, and called it a low point for his character. D. C. Fontana was unhappy with the rewrite of her original script, and requested to be credited under her pseudonym "Michael Richards". This is the episode that was changed so much she got fed up and left the show.
• Dawson Casting: Charles Napier and Phyllis Douglas were both thirty-two at the time, playing "Space Hippies", most probably in their early twenties.
  • However, avoided with Deborah Downey, who was only eighteen at the time.
• Playing Against Type: Laid back musician Adam is a quite shocking departure for Charles Napier, who almost always played stiff military types. He would even come back to the franchise as exactly that in Deep Space Nine!
• Prop Recycling: The space cruiser Aurora is the Tholian spaceship model from "The Tholian Web", with a pair of nacelles added. The "Remastered" set replaces it entirely with a CGI ship.
• What Could Have Been: The original concept for this episode, by D. C. Fontana, was entitled "Joanna" and was to have introduced Joanna McCoy, Bones' daughter (whom Fontana and DeForest Kelley had created between production of the first two seasons), who was to have been college-aged and (inevitably) fallen in love with Kirk, driving a rift between the two friends; the episode was intended as an allegory of the "generation gap" which was being widely discussed at the time.^note Between the Baby Boomers, the eldest of whom were in their early twenties and would have been about Joanna's age (and who were also Star Trek's core audience), and their parents, whom we now call the Greatest Generation, who had fought in World War II and were middle-aged (and gradually losing their dominance over American culture — Boomers would take over by The '70s). The episode would have also established Bones as having been divorced (acrimoniously) from Joanna's mother, which was reused for Star Trek (2009). It only got as far as the outline stage before the story was radically rewritten under the regime of showrunner Fred Freiberger and story editor Arthur Singer. The changes to the script, particularly the removal of Joanna from the story (her part was transformed into that of Irina Galliulin, and her romance with Kirk transferred over to one with Chekov), led to Fontana asking to be credited under the pseudonym Michael Richards.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Dr. Sevrin looks suspiciously like that wannabe Hitler from the Nazi episode "Patterns of Force."
  • Victor Brandt played an engineer in "Elaan of Troyius" and Phyllis Douglas played a yeoman in "The Galileo Seven".

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