Star Trek: The Original Series character Commander Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig) alongside Lieutenant Worf (Michael Dorn) due to the characters' shared Russian heritage. As an orphaned Klingon child, Worf was raised on the farming colony Gault by his adoptive Russian parents Sergey and Helena Rozhenko. 100 years earlier, Pavel Chekov was born in Russia, and he served on the legendary USS Enterprise under Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner).
As the adopted son of a Russian Starfleet officer, it's likely that Worf heard stories about Chekov's adventures on the Enterprise while growing up. This notion formed the basis of two potential storylines that would have brought Chekov into TNG and possibly even Worf in DS9 season 4. If the plans had been successful, Chekov would have ed Scotty (James Doohan), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and McCoy (DeForest Kelly) in the ranks of TOS characters who reprised their roles for TNG. However, one potential Chekov story would have fundamentally changed the character.
TNG's First Worf & Chekov Team Up Idea
In an interview with TV Zone magazine in 1998, Walter Koenig said that the TNG writers had approached him to discuss story ideas for a potential Chekov episode. Apparently, they were keen to avoid stories involving time travel or the family of TOS characters, something backed up by Scotty being preserved in a pattern buffer, and an aging Spock on a Romulan unification mission in TNG. Koenig eventually came up with an idea for an episode that would have paired up Chekov and Worf.
The basis of the episode would be that something had happened to Worf which caused him to see Chekov in hallucinations. Presumably, there would be a sci-fi reason for why Worf saw Chekov in particular, and both of them would work to rid him of his visions. Koenig had finally come up with this idea after TNG ended, so it could have been adapted for DS9. However a meeting between the actor and the writing team ended abruptly due to an undisclosed behind-the-scenes issue, and the idea was never developed further.
TNG Almost Did An Evil Chekov Episode
While Koenig was working on his hallucination idea, story editor Naren Shankar was working on another Chekov episode for TNG's seventh and final season. This was a much darker story that would have given the TOS character a tragic backstory. In the unmade TNG episode, Chekov was a Federation ambassador who was helping to establish relations with a planet on which Chekov had previously been incarcerated as a prisoner of war. Over the course of the negotiations, it would become clear that Chekov was sabotaging them, and intended to use the Enterprise to destroy the planet's capital city in revenge for the horrors he endured.
Worf and Chekov would also have established a friendship based on their shared Russian upbringings and the stories Worf had heard of this legendary Starfleet Officer. The friendship between the two men would prove that, despite becoming a Starfleet traitor, Chekov was not irredeemable. Instead, he had lost his way, because his ordeal had made him bitter about being abandoned by Starfleet. If the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode had been made, it would have surely provided some redemption for Chekov by the end. Unfortunately, Shankar's fascinating insight into the beloved Star Trek: The Original Series character never went any further than an outline.