In 1977, Star Trek was preparing for a return. Following its 1969 cancellation and a short-lived animated revival in 1973, the iconic science fiction franchise was set to resume live-action production. While history records this as leading to the 1979 film, serious plans were initially made for a follow-up television series, known as Star Trek: Phase II. This series was deep in pre-production for most of 1977 before being canceled and transformed into the first movie; the 13 proposed episodes disappeared, as if beamed away by Scotty.
Well, nearly all of them. Two narratives from Star Trek: Phase II endured and later surfaced as episodes of The Next Generation. The most well-known is Season 2’s “The Child,” an emotional story where Troi (Marina Sirtis) bears an alien baby. However, the often-overlooked revival from Phase II is the 1991 TNG Season 4 episode “Devil’s Due,” which underwent a far more radical rewrite than many realize. This peculiar installment premiered on February 4, 1991, with a bizarre origin story at its core.
Mild spoilers ahead.
In The Next Generation, “Devil’s Due” is an enjoyable, relatively straightforward tale about a woman called Ardra (Marta DuBois) who declares she is the actual Devil to the people of Ventax II. (Why does this civilization use a numerical designation for their homeworld? Perhaps a universal translator quirk.) The essence is this: A millennium ago, the populace struck a bargain with the Devil for peace and prosperity, and when that period ended, Ardra would return to claim legal ownership of the planet. Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) dismisses this entirely, correctly assuming Ardra is a fraud, and aims to demonstrate she is merely using advanced 24th-century technology ingeniously to deceive the Ventaxians, who have deliberately limited their technological progress over a thousand years.
This episode intriguingly explores a concept mainstream futuristic sci-fi seldom addresses: when advanced technology is commonplace, how can anyone be tricked into believing in magic? As Arthur C. Clarke famously noted, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but what about deceiving a technologically knowledgeable group who should know better? Ardra shocks Worf (Michael Dorn) by transforming into the fake Klingon deity Fek’lhr, even though Worf undoubtedly understands holograms can alter appearances. She even employs a cloaking device to make the Enterprise seem to vanish, a trick Geordi (LeVar Burton) unravels in the episode’s final segment.
Consequently, “Devil’s Due” theoretically lacks significant suspense. The audience never believes Ardra is the real Devil; Picard doesn’t either, so the concern is merely a space con artist enslaving a planet by exploiting ancient religious texts. Yet, this is precisely why “Devil’s Due” is secretly brilliant: It mirrors how Ardra tries to step into a religious belief and become the physical embodiment of a population’s collective hopes and fears.
Notably, in the original 1977 story treatment by William Douglas Lansford—accessible in the book — the con artist premise is largely absent. Instead, Kirk and his crew meet an elderly man named Zxolar, who originally invented the myth of a future judgment day to control his world. In this Phase II draft, the twist is not that a swindler exploits a devil’s bargain, but that it was fabricated by a thousand-year-old man who is still alive. Furthermore, the Devil figure, named Komether, is a literal entity born from Zxolar’s mind, somewhat reminiscent of Forbidden Planet‘s basic premise.
In summary, the initial Trek version of “Devil’s Due” featured a literal energy being serving as the Devil, with a plot twist relying on the entity being a mental projection. When reworked by Philip LaZebnik (with input from the TNG writers’ room), the story grew more sophisticated. Rather than a sci-fi twist involving unknown powers, the final version conveys a subtler point: Even when you are aware of fraud, you still bear the burden of disproving it.
The concept of an android serving as an impartial judge, however, originates from the original script. In that version, the Enterprise computer presided over the trial where Captain Kirk debated Komether. In both iterations, Star Trek showcases one of its classic, enduring themes: a default skepticism of technology can help preserve humanity. Unless, of course, it’s technology you already depend on, trust, and use every day.
No one in 1977 or 1991 could have foreseen the full implications of these themes. Ardra resembles someone using AI-generated content to fashion herself into a religious icon and defraud people. Yet, the truly remarkable aspect here is not that she is defeated by traditional human ingenuity, but that a different form of AI, another kind of technology, ultimately issues the final judgment.