Abraham Lincoln’s death at the hands of the evil faction in The Savage Curtain was a little uninspired: he was stabbed with a spear after a somewhat noisy attempt to rescue Surak.

An early draft of the script also featured his death, but it was a far more dramatic demise: Lincoln was hurled from a cliff, and the audience saw his broken and bloodied body on the ground. Which meant that, at work one day, it fell to Matt Jefferies to envision that fatal plunge.

And I imagine the Art Director enjoyed the challenge, as the script said it was not enough that the poor president drop straight to his death. So Jefferies had Lincoln bang into an outcropping on the way down, bounce off and only then hit the ground. 

I am sure the NBC Standards and Practices folks would have objected to that spectacle. 

Also, Surak was Lvak

Another interesting piece of trivia from the first draft: the greatest of all who ever lived on Vulcan was originally called Lvak.

This was changed to Surak after the good people at de Forest Research, who checked all the TOS scripts, pointed out that the original moniker broke the Vulcan naming convention. In a memo dated December 3, 1968, they wrote:

…during three seasons, the precedent has been established of giving male Vulcans names beginning with the letter “S.” E.G.s: Spock, Sarek, Stonn, etc. To conform, suggest: Savak, Solak, Surak…

I think the producers picked the best of the three de Forest suggestions.