Template:Realworld Trent Christopher Ganino is the writer who co-wrote the story for TNG's Yesterday's Enterprise together with Eric A. Stillwell. Ganino also appears in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country as Klingon Judge #2.
The story for "Yesterday's Enterprise" was based on a spec script that Ganino wrote and submitted to the TNG writing staff through Michael Piller's open submission policy. Ganino's script featured the Enterprise-C under the command of Captain Robert Garrett -- a character named after Ganino's favorite pizza parlor in his hometown of San Jose, California.
Enterprise-C emerges from rift
In Ganino's spec script, the Enterprise-C accidentally travels 22 years into the future, arriving in the current timeline of Enterprise-D. In his version, however, there was no time change or alternate future. Instead, Picard and company are faced with the moral question of whether or not to return the ship to its own time period, knowing that the ship will be lost in battle, and if they do, whether or not they should warn Captain Garrett and his crew of this eventuality, running the risk that Enterprise-C and her crew might use this knowledge of the future to alter history once the ship is returned.
A cover letter that Ganino included with his script submission suggested that he was following the TNG Submission Guidelines by creating another Enterprise crew, but if he really had a say in the matter, he would prefer the story involve the Enterprise-A featuring Kirk, Spock and other characters from TOS. Years later, after the release of Star Trek Generations, Rick Berman admitted that if he had known in 1989 that they would be making TNG movies in the 1990s, he would have kept "Yesterday's Enterprise" for the first TNG feature film.
Ganino's spec script languished on the shelves of TNG staff writers and only gradually made the rounds to the desks of Melinda Snodgrass, Hans Beimler and eventually Michael Piller.