Would this ST episode have developed Sulu more?

Sulu would have been shown more in one episode of Star Trek

George Takei portrayed Lt. Sulu on Star Trek: The Original Series for fifty-two out of the seventy-nine episodes, but viewers never really got to know much about him. The stories were mainly written for series stars, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley, but one episode in season two of the show would have “helped to develop” Sulu more, according to an old interview the actor gave to Starlog Magazine in 1977.

Originally, in “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” Sulu would have been taken captive along with Captain Kirk and Lt. Uhura and forced to fight in games to entertain the Providers. But when the episode was shooting, Takei was in Georgia filming “The Green Berets,” a war movie with John Wayne. Though Takei thought he would be able to get away, he had to shoot a scene for the movie in which there was an explosion. The shoot didn’t come out right so the scene had to be delayed, which kept Takei from filming Star Trek.

But would the episode have really developed Sulu?

Because Takei was unable to appear in “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” Walter Koenig’s character, Chekov, was used in his place. And though Takei said in the interview that one episode “would have helped to develop Sulu very much,” that wasn’t the case for Chekov as we didn’t really learn anymore about him than we already knew.

There’s no way to know if the script had originally been different for Takei’s part in the episode, but if the dialogue and the action had been the same, “The Gamesters of Triskelion” wouldn’t have developed Sulu anymore than it did Chekov.

Perhaps we would have seen more fighting ability or maybe even learned something about his past, but with the way the series was written in the sixties, there wasn’t much of anyone’s past that was explored. And even if something had been revealed about Sulu, it’s doubtful that it would have made a difference in future episodes. At the most, it would have simply given Takei something more to do for that one episode. That was simply the way Star Trek worked back then.