Star Trek: Enterprise’s “Twilight” was originally a Star Trek: Voyager episode.
I’m biased, but “Twilight,” from Star Trek: Enterprise‘s third season, is among my favorite Star Trek episodes period, regardless of the franchise. It’s got the unexpected time jump, a dystopian future, a romance built on admiration and love, and Captain Charles “Trip” Tucker.
It’s awesome. It was brilliantly carried by Scott Bakula and Jolene Blalock as Captain Arche and T’Pol respectively but despite their brilliance, I always wondered what this story would look like with other characters. After all, Bakula and Blalock’s chemistry in their sorrow-filled love story really helped stick the landing.
She stayed by his side and never left him, even as his memory was reset every day. It was sad but beautiful.
You really can’t get that type of chemistry from many other performers. Except two, and it was these two who the episode was originally written for; Kate Mulgrew and Robert Beltran; aka Star Trek: Voyager‘s Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay.
Star Terk: Voyager was originally going to make “Twilight”
Mike Sussman wrote the script for “Twilight” but it wasn’t meant to be about Archer and T’Pol but instead Janeway and Chakotay. In his version, the same things happen but it’s Janeway who’s afflicted, and Chakotay who stays behind to be her caretaker.
Telling Star Trek.com in 2010;
"It was my attempt at writing a love story for those two, but I couldn’t sell the Voyager producers on the idea. It turned out to work better as an Archer and T’Pol story anyway, with the background of the Xindi war upping the stakes."
That was always one of the issues with Voyager was that Mulgrew didn’t want Janeway engaged in any romance storylines. In hindsight it made sense, she was alone in the Delta Quadrant with just her crew, who was she going to share a bed with? A subordinate?
Fans already make her out to be a villain simply because of her being a woman, surely that would have only enraged those small-minded fans even more.
Personally, I know she and Chakotay were meant to be together and this storyline would’ve been a beautiful thing to watch. Similar in mind to Voyager’s season two episode “Resolutions”, where Janeway and Chakotay are stranded on a planet in an attempt to save their lives.