written by Gene L. Coon
FIRST DRAFT, dated April 19, 1967
report & analysis by David Eversole

There’s a lot of excessive dialogue pruning in this 72-page script, but it is still essentially what aired. It is simpler to just list the minor differences.

· The shuttlecraft is called the Edison.

· Scotty is onboard with Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Nancy Hedford. His dialogue is reshaped mostly for Spock. Doohan actually got far more screen time in his two Enterprise scenes than he would have gotten had this version been filmed.

· Commissioner Hedford is not sick as the story opens. Her illness occurs after they land. Something in the air interacts with her O-Negative blood and she begins to suffer a form of accelerated leukemia.

· Kirk tells Cochrane that Humans are on ten thousand planets, not a thousand.

· It is Scotty who is zapped by the Companion as he attempts to repair the Edison.

· In the scenes set on the Enterprise, Sulu has the lines that Scotty has in the aired version. Sulu’s aired lines are written for a "large strong Negro" helmsman named Lieutenant Ackrumba. The script’s Sulu is much more curt with Uhura than Scotty was. When Uhura says that searching every planet could take weeks, Sulu snaps, "Do you have something more important to do?"

· Cochrane takes the news of the Companion’s female gender and her love for him much harder in the script. He calls the Companion an emotional vampire, keeps yelling "nasty" over and over, raves and screams, throws rocks, grabs a club and tries to physically attack her. His angry rage ends Act Three in the script, rather than Nancy Hedford appearing at the door, conjoined with the Companion. This occurs later in the script’s fourth act.

· The tag of the episode occurs after Kirk, Spock, Scotty and McCoy leave in the Edison. During the trip back to the Enterprise, Spock wonders if the fact that Nancy and the Companion share the same body might make Zefram Cochrane a bigamist. Kirk assures him that thought is nonsense.

And that’s the difference between a Gene Coon First and a Gene Coon Final--minor details and a bit of cutting.

The conjoined Nancy/Companion appearance is by far the superior third act ender, though.

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