Bob Justman suggested hiring Walter Koenig for Star Trek: The Next Generation

Walter Koenig spent two years as Ensign Chekov on Star Trek: The Original Series before continuing on in the movies that followed.

By the time Star Trek: The Next Generation was getting underway, Walter Koenig had been portraying Pavel Chekov for twenty years. Needless to say, he knew about the technobabble and how things worked aboard a fictional starship. And Bob Justman, who was a producer for The Next Generation, thought those traits as well as others justified hiring Koenig to help the new crew.

Trek docs shared a copy of an internal memo from Bob Justman to Gene Roddenberry dated October 28, 1986 wherein Justman forsaw the need for a dialogue coach when The Next Generation got into production. And he thought the person should have an acting background as they could serve several functions, including going over the dialogue with actors between shots, sitting with the director and cast during scene set-ups, which helped during the filming of Star Trek: The Original Series, and checking spoken dialogue against written dialogue which would have freed up the script supervisor.

Bob Justman suggested Walter Koenig for a dialogue coach not only because of his time on Star Trek: The Original Series

Though Koenig’s time aboard the Enterprise was certainly a big selling point as he knew what Star Trek was all about, Justman also said the actor had other “laudable attributes,” which included sensitivity and intelligence.

There’s no follow-up memo or any existing information to conclude that an offer was made or not, and a review of the cast and crew on The Next Generation’s IMDB page has no mention of a dialogue coach. So it’s safe to assume the series didn’t utilize one, but one does wonder what Gene Roddenberry had to say about this suggestion and why it never came to fruition.