THE QUESTOR TAPES Addendum: The draft script

Back in 2014, I posted a review here of Gene Roddenberry’s 1974 pilot movie The Questor Tapes, including a discussion of D.C. Fontana’s novelization, which told an expanded, differently structured version of the latter half of the story with a subplot that wasn’t in the film. I just discovered a fan site for the Star Trek episode “Assignment: Earth” (basically an earlier version of the same concept of Questor, a cool, intellectual superhuman sent by aliens to gently and clandestinely guide humanity), and it turns out to have PDFs of script drafts for three of Roddenberry’s 1970s pilots, Genesis II, The Questor Tapes, and Spectre. The G2 script looks pretty similar to the final pilot, and I’ve only seen Spectre once and can’t really compare. But the Questor second draft, dated December 12, 1972, has some interesting differences. For one thing, it’s credited entirely to Gene L. Coon, with Roddenberry only credited for the “Story and Series Concept,” even though the final movie credits…