En route, a damaged ship's recorder of the SS Valiant, an Earth spaceship lost 200 years earlier, is found.
Its record is incomplete, but it reveals that the Valiant had been swept from its path by a "magnetic space storm," and that the crew had frantically searched for information about extrasensory perception (ESP) in the ship's library computer.
Mitchell becomes increasingly arrogant and hostile toward the rest of the crew, declaring that he has become godlike, enforcing his desires with displays of telepathic and telekinetic power.
Science Officer Spock comes to believe that the Valiant crew members might have experienced the same phenomenon, and destroyed their ship to keep the power from spreading.
He kills navigator Lee Kelso by telekinetically garroting him and escapes by knocking out Kirk and Spock, taking with him Dr. Dehner, who has now developed ESP powers of her own.
The show had been sold to them as a "Wagon Train to the stars", and they thought the first pilot did not match the adventure format they had been promised and was "too cerebral" for the general audience.
However, NBC, having been persuaded by Desilu management (and reportedly by Lucille Ball herself), maintained sufficient interest in the format to order a second pilot episode in March 1965.
Lloyd Bridges and Jack Lord were considered, but William Shatner was finally cast as Pike's replacement, Captain James Kirk.
Roddenberry went on to muse that, had he done it the other way around, he could not have then married the losing actor (Majel Hudec, who changed her surname to Barrett and returned in the role of Christine Chapel).
Apart from Captain Kirk, the episode introduced two other regular characters to the show: James Doohan, a friend of director James Goldstone, was cast as the Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott (the name chosen after Doohan had tried various accents, and had decided that an engineer ought to be Scottish)[6] and George Takei was cast as the ship's physicist.
Lieutenant Uhura and Dr. Leonard McCoy do not feature; the ship's doctor is instead Mark Piper (Paul Fix), who lost the role to DeForest Kelley.
Commander Gary Mitchell, had starred in the title role of Roddenberry's earlier series on NBC, The Lieutenant; Sally Kellerman was cast as Dr. Elizabeth Dehner.
[4] Ernest Haller, who had won the Oscar for Best Color Cinematography on the movie Gone with the Wind (1939), served as director of photography for the episode.
[2] During the filming of this episode, a wasp's nest high in the rafters of the studio was somehow disturbed, and many cast and crew members suffered stings as a result.
As this happened on a Friday, the weekend break allowed time for the swelling to go down; Shatner, however, required additional makeup to hide the stings during shooting the following Monday.
In total almost five minutes of footage was removed to accommodate the original series' 50-minute network broadcast format to allow for commercials.
[1][14] In 2009, a German film collector discovered a print of it and brought it to the attention of CBS/Paramount, which then released it under the title "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" – The Restored, Unaired Alternate Pilot Episode as part of the TOS season 3 box set on Blu-ray.
[20] The Galactic Barrier is later associated with the Q in the 1994 novel Q-Squared by Peter David and the 1998 Star Trek: The Q Continuum trilogy by Greg Cox.
The 2005 Star Trek: Vanguard book Harbinger is set immediately after the events of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and features a troubled Kirk musing on his friend's death.
[19] Gary Mitchell (portrayed by Daamen J. Krall) appears in the alternate timeline depicted in the 2006-2008 mini-series Star Trek: Of Gods and Men.
[30] This included the color version of "The Cage", "Where No Man Has Gone Before", "Encounter at Farpoint", "Emissary", and "Caretaker" with a total runtime of 379 minutes.