A closer look
Paramount Pictures actively developed a script in the 1970s for a Star Trek feature film where the crew of the Enterprise encounters an alien claiming to be Jesus Christ. Titled The God Thing, this wildly unhinged concept featured Captain Kirk and Spock entering another dimension to essentially punch out the messiah, who was supposedly just an advanced extraterrestrial testing humanity. Studio executives wisely realized that having their beloved sci-fi heroes engage in a fistfight with the Christian savior might alienate a tiny portion of the American heartland. It is a genuine tragedy that we were robbed of seeing Leonard Nimoy using the Vulcan nerve pinch on the son of God, but at least we got the incredibly slow-paced motion picture substitute instead, which put audiences to sleep rather than sending them to church
