‘Arrow’ Creator Releases His ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ Episode Pitch

Years after the end of Star Trek: Voyager, and long after becoming a sought-after writer, producer, and showrunner in his own right, Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim took to Twitter earlier this year to share his spec script for Voyager.

You can check it out on Scribd at the link he tweeted.

It is likely, given that the tweet is dated from early October, that Guggenheim released the script in response to a story on Vulture that lumped his Voyager script in with a number of other unproduced Star Trek spec scripts from well-known writers.

In the script, as reported in the initial story, Captain Chakotay and the crew of the Voyager encounter a temporal anomaly that turns out to be a Federation ship from the future, on which they find Captain Janeway in stasis, twenty years older and now an Admiral. Janeway offers the crew a way home with the help of future technology, but before long, Chakotay and Tuvok discover that Janeway and her crew are actually shapeshifters merely impersonating a Federation Starship. The shapeshifters take the crew hostage, and the Voyager crew must work together to stop the shapeshifters and save the real Captain Janeway.

Guggenheim shared the script without comment, allowing fans to provide some commentary and context, including one who joked, “This was exactly tonight’s episode of [Star Trek: Discovery]. What a coincidence.”

A spec script, or speculative screenplay, is an unsolicited, unpaid screenplay. Most are written in the hopes of having the script optioned and produced, but they are also commonly used to judge a writer’s flexibility by giving them the “rules” of a familiar property and watching how they operate within the confines of those rules. In other words, a Star Trek: Voyager spec script might have been intended for that show’s producers but might just as easily have helped Guggenheim get work elsewhere.

While he never did get that Star Trek script made, Guggenheim has had pretty decent luck with franchise characters even beyond his TV work, having written The Flash for DC and X-Men for Marvel, among many others.

Arrow will return on January 18 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, following the midseason premiere of Supernatural.