After Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry Wrote the Plot to a Sci-Fi Masterpiece That Challenged an ’80s Classic

The success of Star Trek: The Original Series, arguably, pigeonholed Gene Roddenberry with his works afterward. His wasn't galactic battles, robots, and spaceship dogfights, but rather a hopeful optimism for peace, found through a shared interest in exploring the universe, placing diplomacy above violence. It's a theme that's present in the TV movies Genesis II, Planet Earth, Strange New World, and The Questor Tapes, and in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the only Star Trek movie featuring the original cast where he had an active role in its production. So it would be understandable, then, if he tried to break out of his self-imposed creative box and work on something a little less Star Trek-y, which he did: Earth: Final Conflict. But he would never see it come to fruition.

Strange New Worlds Come to Earth in 'Earth: Final Conflict'

Following the cancellation of Star Trek: The Original Series, Roddenberry crafted a few projects, as mentioned above, which didn't go beyond TV movie treatments. Then there was one, Battlefield: Earth, that Roddenberry conceived in 1976 as a series for CBS. It was Star Trek's polar opposite (but not its "evil twin"), where instead of humans going out to meet new civilizations, those new civilizations, or at least one, the Taelons, would come to us. They arrive as benevolent beings, and with their superior technology, they would eradicate famine, disease, and war, bringing the world the peace that Roddenberry's other works strove for. But they have a secret and terrifying ulterior motive, and it's up to an underground resistance group to stop them.

But then Star Trek's first big-screen adventure, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, was greenlit, and Roddenberry put Battlefield: Earth on the back burner, intending to pick it up again down the road. Roddenberry never did, of course, passing away in 1991 before ever seeing the pilot he wrote hit the air. But, as his wife, Majel Roddenberry, explains (per Los Angeles Times), she went through all his stuff after he died and came across the treatment, and with "some changes to make it a little more updated," the pilot script was used as a blueprint for the series. That series, renamed Earth: Final Conflict to avoid confusion with L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth (and the god-awful movie it begat), would premiere in 1997, six years after Roddenberry's death, finishing what he had started 20 years prior.

Roddenberry's 'Earth: Final Conflict' Draws Comparisons to 'V'

Earth: Final Conflict would air for five seasons, becoming Roddenberry's first non-Star Trek success, before falling to a number of setbacks and, ironically, Andromeda, another show that Roddenberry conceived before his death. Interestingly, the series ultimately came to pass thanks to the blockbuster success of Independence Day, banking on the alien invasion aspect of the film to garner interest in the series (per Cinefantastique). But Earth: Final Conflict actually bears more than a passing resemblance to a miniseries that aired well before 1997: 1983's V.

In fact, the similarities are so striking – hostile aliens come to Earth under the guise of friendship, share their advanced technology, and are confronted by a resistance group – that anyone unaware of Earth: Final Conflict's pedigree would be fair in claiming it to be a direct rip-off. But as producer Stephen Roloff pointed out (per Cinefantastique), "Gene [Roddenberry] had written the original premise for the show in 1976, long before V debuted on NBC."

The comparison between Earth: Final Conflict and V may not be entirely fair, but it is certainly far better than the comparison that was made between the former and 1990s phenom Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Given Roddenberry had only written the pilot for Earth: Final Conflict and some other notes regarding it, the original storyline was only going to play out for so long before Roddenberry's posthumous input ran dry. As a result, Season 5 saw the introduction of a new alien threat for the Resistance to fight: the Atavus. The Atavus were a race of vampire aliens that awoke, conveniently, after the Taelons had departed Earth. Seeing Resistance agent Renee (Jayne Heitmeyer), a blonde woman, fighting alien vampires hewed a little too close to the Sarah Michelle Gellar-led series for the taste of the fanbase (per Collider), and stands as another reason why the Season 5 finale served as the series finale. But its ignominious end doesn't change the fact that we, as fans, got to see one of Roddenberry's final projects come to pass. Even if he didn't.