#35 The New Age Generation, part 3
The concluding part, examining some more key behind-the-scenes figures.
V
In parts 1 and 2 of this essay I discussed episodes from the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The matter of a New Age sensibility on TNG only really concerns the opening season and the one following. Season three saw a major change of style and content, with The New Age Generation entering, well, a new age. The questions I’ll explore in this final part are, firstly, how that big change came about, and, secondly, why that very interesting mystical theme I’ve been elucidating did not survive into the new era.
I wrote of my fondness for the first two seasons of TNG in part 2. For me, there are episodes in these seasons that, while often lacking polish, evoke a sense of mystery and the weird to a degree rarely achieved in later years. There’s also less political correctness and more sly, cheeky humour. In general, the earlier episodes have less of an air of predictability about them. Unlike episodes from season three onwards, they don’t feel like they conform to a house style, and on balance I like it better that way.
Part of the distinctiveness of seasons one and two is, of course, this New Age current I’ve been describing. Ron Jones aside, it’s quite difficult to identify whose contributions created that current on early TNG. Why? Well, something that comes through loud and clear in the behind-the-scenes literature is that a lot of script rewriting took place on the show. Only rarely do we know precisely who was responsible for any given part in a rewritten script.
Gene Roddenberry did a lot of rewrites, especially in season one. This caused the writers who were getting rewritten (which was probably most of them) considerable frustration. Roddenberry was pedantic about what was, and was not, Star Trek. He was obsessively concerned that his vision be faithfully represented on the show. If anyone else’s idea of Star Trek contradicted his, their contribution was to be rejected. And, in most cases, that individual was fired.
G.R.’s conception of the 24th century was singular. Humanity has risen above trivial desires and petty conflicts. Earth is close to a paradise, with violent conflicts between peoples and nations a thing of the past. This utopia has been achieved through a combination of moral and technological progress.
What that vision translated into in practical terms were Roddenberry’s dictums for TNG, chief among them being “no conflict between the main characters.” Many writers understandably found this dictum in particular maddening. They argued—quite rightly, of course—that conflict is fundamental to drama. Ways of getting around it were found; for instance the use of guest stars. An abrasive visiting Starfleet officer, like Kosinski in “Where No One Has Gone Before”, was always a reliable source of friction. Another trick was to place a main character in a completely different environment, as in season two’s “A Matter Of Honor”. There an officer exchange programme sees Riker serving aboard a Klingon vessel. Yet another solution, rarely employed for obvious reasons, was to explore an alternate timeline. This was done most memorably in season three’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, which takes place in a darker timeline in which the Federation is at war with the Klingons and losing. A fascinating aspect of this episode is seeing the alternate Picard and Riker at loggerheads, clearly irritated by each other.
Gene Roddenberry was a difficult character to work with, as many people had found out on earlier projects. On TNG he was, if anything, even more of a pain in the neck than he’d been previously. The dictums could be frustrating enough in themselves, but to make matters worse Roddenberry was inconsistent in his enforcement of them. Writer Hans Beimler (“The Arsenal of Freedom”, “The Schizoid Man” and several other episodes):
It was tough, because Gene was very tough to get a story by very often. Gene kept thinking that these were better people; his view of the world was, this was a better world and these were better people than we are. And that was a fundamental problem.
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Many times Gene would blow up a script because he said, “We wouldn’t do that, because we need to be better than that.” And that was always a frustrating wall to run up on. It was a wall that sometimes wasn’t always there, and that also made it difficult because it was inconsistent.1
I noted in part 1 of this essay how one of Roddenberry’s dictums for Star Trek was “no religion”. Yet, as we have seen, mystical and spiritual themes are present on TNG in seasons one and two. It could be these themes crept in because of Roddenberry’s inconsistency when it came to enforcing his dictums. Or maybe he judged the ideas explored in ”Where No One Has Gone Before” and ”Where Silence Has Lease” to be spiritual, but not religious (to use a phrase New Age has done much to popularise).
Whatever the case, I think few would disagree Roddenberry’s main thematic preoccupation on TNG was the enlightened nature of his 24th-century civilisation, the moral strides that had been made since our present. New Age-type mysticism wasn’t really on his mind, but he doesn’t seem to have objected if it made it into the odd episode or two. What he very much did mind were deviations from his utopian take on the future.
The imperiousness of the obsessive yet mercurial Roddenberry meant the first season of TNG especially saw a high turnover of writers. The original script for “Where No One Has Gone Before” was penned by Trek and Young Adult novelist Diane Duane alongside screenwriter Michael Reaves. Neither of the two would go on to write again for the show. The “WNOHGB” script was also extensively rewritten by writer-producer Maurice Hurley (more on whom below)—though not to such a degree that the story, an adaptation of Duane’s TOS novel The Wounded Sky (Pocket Books, 1985), was changed in its essentials.
One of the two credited writers on “Skin of Evil”, Hannah Louise Shearer, had a longer Trek career, accruing six credits on TNG and one on DS9. “Skin of Evil”’s chief writer, Joseph Stephano, was however not invited to contribute any more scripts. To add insult to injury, his script for that episode ended up being tampered with by, of all people, Roddenberry’s lawyer Leonard Maizlish. A long-term associate of G.R., and someone who seems to have taken it upon himself to act in Roddenberry’s stead when his client was not around, Maizlish appears to have made quite a nuisance of himself, and a lot of enemies, in the first season (a subject for another essay, perhaps).
The revolving door slowed down in the second season, but certainly didn’t stop. The man responsible for “Where Silence Has Lease”, screenwriter Jack B. Sowards, was among those who exited through it. Despite Sowards having made a vital contribution to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan six years before (he’d penned the script on which director Nicholas Meyer had based his rewrite), his services were not sought again.
Such was the turnover of writers on TNG that a “memorial wall” was set up at the Paramount offices, with the names of the departed listed on it. Some of them had resigned. Others had been fired, typically by Roddenberry. In his old age, “The Great Bird Of The Galaxy” had become even more prickly, difficult and capricious than he had been previously.
VI
Irish American Maurice “Maury” Hurley (1939 - 2015) was another difficult, abrasive character (by his own admission), but more reasonable and consistent than Roddenberry. Like his boss he carried out a lot of rewrites of others’ scripts (including many Roddenberry had worked on and left in a subpar state). Hurley was a key figure in the first and second seasons. He and veteran screenwriter Robert Lewin (1920 - 2004) were hired early in the first season to fill the shoes of TOS stalwarts D.C. Fontana (“Charlie X”, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” and others) and David Gerrald (“The Trouble With Tribbles”, “The Cloud Minders”), the outgoing head writers. The latter two had resigned after being treated very shabbily by Roddenberry and Leonard Maizlish.
Like Roddenberry, who’d been a B-17 pilot, an airline pilot and a policeman before starting to write and produce for television, Hurley had had a varied pre-TV career. He’d served in the US Air Force, been a rancher and a shoes salesman. He’d moved into media with a stint producing documentaries and industrial films. He’d decided to become a screenwriter at the age of forty-two. After being story editor on Miami Vice he’d worked as supervising producer on The Equalizer, his last job before the move to TNG.2
Maurice Hurley worked with supervising, later executive producer Rick Berman (b. 1945), previously mentioned in part 2 of this essay (where I supplied some background information). Berman and Hurley had something in common, being both former documentarians. As Trek fans will know, Berman is one of the most important figures in the TNG story, and I’ll be returning to him later. For now here he is discussing his relationship with M.H.:
Hurley was the head writer, and I was in charge of everything else. Gene, for some reason, put me in a position slightly over Maury, although we looked at each other as pretty much equals. And we got along. He was a very strange guy. He was a golfer and he had done a lot of television writing. He was an unusual character. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. He found Roddenberry a pain in the neck most of the time, but he knew how to deal with Gene so that Gene was not unhappy with him.3
In interviews after his stint on TNG, Hurley made it clear he’d never believed in the utopian vision Roddenberry had had for the show. For instance, in William Shatner’s 2014 TNG documentary Chaos On The Bridge (CotB), he dismisses that vision as “wacky doodle”. There are also these comments in The Fifty-Year Mission:
Gene sees this Pollyanna-ish view of the future where everything is going to be fine. If we keep going in this world the way we’re going, there is no future, and the idea that humanity is going to go from its infancy, which is what he currently considers it to be in, to its adolescence in the next four hundred years, I don’t believe.4
Regardless of this, Hurley was, like Berman, a stickler for Roddenberry’s dictums, as the head writer explained:
Star Trek has absolute rules that cannot be broken and nobody knows that until they get into it.
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They wanted writers who could take the Star Trek parameters—Gene’s vision—and put a shine on it, button it, and not change anything.
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Some people thought they had a better idea, and God love ’em, they may have, but that’s not the point.5
When, in the first year, the talented (and late) Tracy Tormé (1959 - 2024) submitted the script for “Conspiracy”, Hurley slammed the dark, horroresque story as “not Star Trek” and tried to stop it being produced. It seems Rick Berman viewed Torme’s effort more positively, and overruled him.
Nevertheless, Hurley was usually more successful at enforcing the Trek dictums. There were even occasions when he and / or Berman stopped Roddenberry from breaking them.
Writing inside Roddenberry’s “box” (as later showrunner Michael Piller called it) was a vital skill for a Star Trek writer, and Hurley had it. Some memorable teleplays flowed from his pen.
In “11001001”, written with Robert Lewin, a race resembling a benign version of the Borg, the Bynars, steals the Enterprise-D from a starbase. The theft is key to the aliens’ desperate bid to save their homeworld. I like the surrealism of the theft sequence, with only Riker and Picard aboard the hijacked ship. It feels like the kind of happening you only meet with in the first and second seasons.
“The Neutral Zone” sees the return of the Romulans and hints at the Borg, whom Hurley was developing as a primary antagonist for the Enterprise crew. Hurley also manages to insert some barbed political commentary into a subplot involving the revival of cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century. Among the revived is a cartoonish country musician, the episode’s comic relief. His sexist talk and the affectionate pat he gives Beverly Crusher’s rear no doubt antagonised the real-life owner of that rear, Gates McFadden. The actress was not happy generally, objecting to what she saw as TNG’s sexist writing in the first season. She and Maurice Hurley did not get on at all as a consequence. Among McFadden’s complaints was a claim that she and the other actresses were never given much to do.
“Time Squared”, in which Picard meets his own double from six hours in the future, is notable for its eerie atmosphere—a real rarity for TNG, and indeed for Star Trek generally. In one chilling scene the crew watch the destruction of the Enterprise in a short, grainy video clip from the future.
“Q Who?” is arguably Hurley’s best episode. Featuring both John de Lancie’s highly popular trickster, Q, and the unsettling first appearance of the Borg, this powerful episode is surprisingly dark and pessimistic.
With the exception of “Time Squared”, each of these episodes is enhanced by an imaginative Ron Jones score. The exception was scored by Dennis McCarthy, who did a competent job. The composer’s output could be melodic and memorable when his style wasn’t being cramped by Berman, as perhaps best demonstrated by season one’s “Haven”. Unfortunately it increasingly was after that episode.
The bad blood between Hurley and Gates McFadden had its consequences at season one’s end.
Roddenberry, his health worsening, was minded to step back somewhat from TNG production. He allowed Berman to make “Maury“ showrunner for season two. Hurley then wielded his increased clout to get McFadden fired from the show. There were rumours Patrick Stewart had also found her acting wanting, but according to Berman this is untrue:
Patrick had absolutely nothing to do with it. Maurice hated Gates. He disliked the whole character of Dr. Crusher and he wanted to get rid of Gates and replace her. He didn’t like her acting and he didn’t like her. He went to me at the end of season one, and I said I thought it was a bad idea. Then he went to Gene and he managed to convince Gene. It was all part of the fact that he was the last man standing at the end of the first season and he was going to be moving into the second-biggest chair over in the writing area next to Gene. This was a request he was making, and Gene decided he would honor it. So, Gates was let go and we went through a whole casting procedure and ended up with Dr. Pulaski, who was played by Diana Muldaur.
The Pulaski character was conceived of as something of a retread of Bones McCoy. She was mature—about Picard’s age. Irritable if not irascible, Pulaski was something of a Luddite, mistrustful of transporters as well as of androids. Just as McCoy had liked to tease Spock, this new doctor had a penchant for bullying Data. But as the android could not defend himself this behaviour came across as merely mean, not funny or amusing. It was a misjudgment on someone’s part—probably Roddenberry’s or Hurley’s. Quite why they thought the replacement doctor should be McCoy 2 isn’t clear, but L.A. Law’s Diana Muldaur, who’d appeared once on The Original Series, did a decent job with the role. Pulaski is mostly very watchable. You wouldn’t know Muldaur never really enjoyed herself on TNG. By all accounts there was little chemistry between her and the rest of the cast, a circumstance probably not helped by her salary being much more than theirs (Patrick Stewart’s excepted, I imagine). Also the fans never took to Doctor Pulaski. One of the letter-writing campaigns Star Trek fandom is famous for kicked off, demanding the return of Gates McFadden’s Doctor Crusher.
One season two newcomer who did prove a hit with the fans was Whoopi Goldberg. The star of the highly-regarded period drama The Color Purple played the mysterious Guinan, the bartender of Ten-Forward, a lounge added to the Enterprise-D for the second season (though we’re clearly meant to understand it’s always been there). Arguably the longest-lasting vaguely New Age element on the show, the guru-like Guinan appears intermittently for the rest of TNG’s run, makes it into two of the four TNG feature films and even pops up in the recent Star Trek: Picard. Unlike that other guru, The Traveller, Guinan does not have any reality-challenging philosophy to impart. The advice she gives the Enterprise’s crew members is typically of a much more down-to-earth sort, even though Guinan herself is a highly enigmatic figure. “Q Who” seems to indicate she has extraordinary Q-like powers, abilities she simply declines to use. Goldberg had joined the show because she was a huge Star Trek fan, having found Nichelle Nichols an inspiration as a child. Her character is, it must be said, an example of the tired “mystic wise black woman” archetype (the female equivalent of “black science man”), but Goldberg is so magnetic in the role that it really doesn’t matter.
While Maurice Hurley could take a little of the credit for Guinan, he had to take all of the blame for Pulaski. The character’s failure brought his judgement into question. Adding to the new showrunner’s woes, an industry-wide writers’ strike meant production for the second year started late, with the delay having a lasting impact right up to end of the season. Throughout the year production was playing catch-up. That, combined with the budget cupboard looking a little bare after the lavish Borg episode “Q Who?”, meant the season ended up running to only twenty-two episodes instead of the usual twenty-five (season one) or twenty-six (season three and later). What’s more, the Hurley-penned season closer “Shades of Gray” was a money-saving clip show, an episode that recycles footage from previous episodes. Hurley freely admitted the extremely rushed finale—in which Riker is rendered unconscious and relives past experiences—was “terrible, just terrible”. He’d written the script on his way out the door, having become disillusioned with TNG, in particular with Roddenberry. In the end The Great Bird of the Galaxy had proved too difficult even for him to work with. In CotB Hurley tells Shatner Roddenberry was simply crazy, “a cuckoo bird.”
Hurley had tried, in concert with Berman, to set the TNG house in order, but had achieved only limited success:
After his departure… Hurley talked about the story-writing system, which he had tried to change during his tenure. This system included a pattern of memo-writing among the story staff. “In the beginning there was a lot of [plot] clutter,” Hurley said. “Too many ideas being thrown into one script…. There was a tendency to do a real quick wrap-up. Too much in the bag, trying to fill the bag too full.”6
Whether Hurley left TNG entirely of his own volition is an open question. Diana Muldaur’s character flopping and the time and budget problems at the end of that truncated second season must obviously have displeased Paramount. In CotB, Shatner says “Maury’s” contract was “not renewed”. But in the behind-the-scenes literature, the way everyone tells it, whether truthfully or out of politeness, it was Hurley’s decision to quit. Whatever the case the split seems to have been fairly amicable, as the ex-showrunner contributed a further script to TNG, season four’s “Galaxy’s Child”, and received a story credit for five’s “Power Play”. He was also invited to submit a script for the movie Star Trek: Generations, though what he produced was ultimately rejected in favour of a script by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, by then firmly established Trek writers.
As regards New Age beliefs, Maurice Hurley seems to have been too tough of a character to set much store by them. Yet he clearly wasn’t averse to explorations of mystical themes, as his final version of the “Where No One Has Gone Before” script shows. Hurley remains somewhat mysterious, an enigmatic figure. Here’s supervising producer and director David Livingston:
I love Maurice Hurley. He was outside the box. He marched to his own drum and that was good in my mind. He was a bit of an outsider, and he brought a different perspective to the show that I thought was good. Especially the Borg. Without the Borg, we would have never gotten to the point we did. He’s always played it really close to the cuff. I was very fond of him. He always seemed like he had something going on in his head that he wasn’t going to share with anyone else, but he did it with a smile.7
VI
With Hurley’s departure and Roddenberry’s further retreat from the show, the way was open for Rick Berman to consolidate control in season three. He knew he had to take the show in hand and impose order on the still-ongoing chaos. His first move was to say goodbye to Diana Muldaur (who was likely relieved to go) and to rehire Gates McFadden. He also ordered changes to the uniforms and various other cosmetic changes. William Ware Theiss, creator of the TOS uniforms, had been brought back in the mid Eighties to design uniforms for TNG. He’d opted to use a very Eighties material: Spandex. Theiss’s TNG outfits look better than their replacements in my opinion (the male miniskirt version excepted), but due to the choice of material were uncomfortable. They were stretched tight with a strap around the boot, and the resulting tautness proved hard on actors’ backs. From Memory Alpha:
Patrick Stewart claimed that the change from this Starfleet uniform to the new version after the second season of TNG was thanks to his chiropractor, who recommended Stewart sue Paramount for "lasting damage done to [his] spine." Evidently, the producers wanted to have a smooth, unwrinkled look to the Starfleet uniforms, which put strain on Stewart's shoulders, neck and back after two seasons in a lycra costume that was one size too small.
The work of Robert Blackman, the new uniforms were woollen and much more comfortable. They added a collar and formed “Eisenhower silhouettes” with broad shoulders—a little too broad for my tastes. The overall look was less utopian, more militaristic. Somehow it got past Roddenberry.
Berman has always maintained that, in his capacity as head of Star Trek from 1991 to 2005, he saw it as his duty to ensure the franchise remained faithful to Roddenberry’s vision. It’s certainly true he insisted writers adhere to the Trek dictums, and right from the beginning in 1987. After Gene Roddenberry died in 1991 it became a question of Rick Berman’s interpretation of those dictums. TNG, DS9 and Voyager writer Ronald D. Moore:
He took the Gene thing too seriously, in my opinion. After Gene passed away it became Rick’s mission to become the guardian of the flame. I just think he didn’t really believe in it. It wasn’t like he had drunk the Kool-Aid and believed that this is really the twenty-fourth century and this is how people will be. He didn’t believe it on that level, but he felt that that’s the way Gene said it and that’s what we have to do.8
Naturally, Berman’s hirings and firings reflected his vision (of Roddenberry’s vision) for the franchise. By far the most significant hire Berman made occurred early in season three, when he brought on Michael Piller (1948 - 2005) to head the writing team. Another candidate, Michael Wagner, had lasted only three weeks (he hadn’t been able to handle Roddenberry).
Now, there’s clearly insufficient space here to consider in depth the contributions to Star Trek of Berman and Piller. I’ll only try and sketch the basics. Plus I'll consider how the two seem to have put an end to the mystic / New Age current on TNG.
A former journalist and onetime censor for CBS, Michael Piller was a disciplined man with a systematic approach. He was the one to finally impose order on TNG story-writing. The memos and informal chats in corridors and offices made way for something a lot more structured:
We had a process that we call “breaking a story,” where we put all the writing staff in a room and we look around and whatever the writer came in with serves as only a starting point. Everybody sits down and we go to a board and break it down into acts and scenes and we try and see how the show is going to lay out. I told everyone that in this room it is a safe environment and that they are to speak out with whatever ideas they have, even if it’s stupid or wrong, because it may spark an idea in someone else that leads us to the solution of a particular problem in a script.9
This process was also known by a charming alternate name, “gangbanging”.
Another key change instigated by Piller: scripts became less plot-driven and “monster of the week”, more character-driven. So a script would be written with a view to making a Data episode, or a Picard episode, or a Worf episode, or what have you.
Piller certainly didn’t stop there. Another initiative involved the tapping of a couple of under-exploited creative resources: freelance writers and the fans. Both amateurs and professionals were invited to submit “spec” scripts. That is how Trekkie Ronald D. Moore became not only a TNG writer, but one of the most respected TNG writers of all. The full-time writing staff heard a lot of pitches from amateur writers like Moore. Though the vast majority were unusable, a handful were good enough to be bought and made into episodes.
The revolving door still did not halt in season three—Piller did clash with some writers—but the new showrunner managed to build up a fairly stable core writing team consisting of himself, Ira Steven Behr, Ronald D. Moore, Brannon Braga, René Echevarria and Naren Shankar. It was a pretty young group—most of them were gen Xers, and broadly speaking lacked the boomer interest in counterculture spirituality that had informed some of the first two seasons’ episodes.
Such is the impact Piller had on the series that he is sometimes viewed as “the man who saved The Next Generation”. He continued on in the position of showrunner until the end of season five, when he left to steer Deep Space Nine alongside Rick Berman and, later, Ira Steven Behr. His place on TNG was taken by Jeri Taylor.
What sort of piller was the showrunner of TNG seasons three through five, DS9 seasons one and two, and Voyager? A redpiller or a bluepiller? In my view, Michael Piller was not wholly either, but more the latter than the former. Considering his casting choices on Deep Space Nine and Voyager he was clearly a progressive, though not exactly a cheerleader for utopia the way Roddenberry had been. He seems to have been under no illusions about the likelihood of the sort of conflict-free human civilisation envisaged by G.R. coming into being. At the same time, he had no interest in breaking the Star Trek dictums:
From that experience [working with G.R. and his dictums], I learned that Roddenberry’s “box” forced us to be more creative and to tell stories in more interesting and different ways than we would have in any other typical universe, so I loved that box. Ironically, I became dedicated to preserving the box as much as I possibly could, and as time went on it sort of became Piller’s box.
With Piller and Berman in agreement on the importance and even the value of the dictums, the two designed Deep Space Nine, the first post-Roddenberry Trek venture, in such a way as to maximise the potential for conflict—considered essential for drama—while respecting the Great Bird’s “box”. Though conflict between the human characters was to be minimised, there’d be human-alien and alien-alien strife aplenty.
Now, I don’t think either Piller or Berman was interested in exploring mystical questions or New Age themes on Star Trek. It was probably a matter of temperament, but the way they interpreted Roddenberry’s “no religion” dictum likely also had much to do with it. I do not by any measure mean to imply either of them was a soulless bugman. Piller, for instance, had an abiding interest in Zen Buddhism. Here’s his wife, Sandra Piller:
Writing was a very Zen thing for Michael. He would give all of the writers on the staff of whatever show he worked on, Zen and the Art of Archery or some sort of Zen book, because that always got to him. So he did enjoy the writing; he would hear those voices. He got to know the voices and it would just start coming out. He’d start writing early in the morning. Before computers, we had an old typewriter and, let me tell you, he’d be typing early in the morning, click-clack, click-clack in my brain. He was very passionate about it.10
Some readers might point to Deep Space Nine as evidence Piller and Berman became interested in exploring religious themes when Roddenberry was no longer around. I think my response to that would be “well, yes and no”. I say “I think” because my experience with DS9 is quite limited, while I’ve watched almost all of TNG. So the opinions I offer below should be regarded as provisional, subject to revision.
As regards Bajoran spirituality, the impression I’ve formed—from the literature as well as from the episodes I’ve watched—is that it was included as an element on the show to add another kind of conflict to the mix. For obvious reasons, no prior Star Trek series or film had explored religious conflict in a sustained way. Thus the passionate religiosity of this alien race brought something fresh to Trek. Even so, my hunch is that the Bajorans were not made a religious race to allow DS9 to seriously explore spirituality per se. Here’s Piller:
…Bajoran spirituality does not go against the atheist beliefs of Gene. If he were still with us—and he was on our shoulders as we thought about these conceptual issues—I don’t think it would bother him one bit. What he felt very strongly about is that humans, and to some degree Federation members, had a humanist attitude. His humans do not overtly celebrate religious beliefs. What we had simply done in creating an environment that brings conflict to our people, which we desperately wanted to do, is to put a group of people with a group of aliens that are different than we are, who had a difference and a conflict with our humanist beliefs.
Giving them strong spiritual mystical orbs and prophet worship forced our humanist people to deal with another alien race that is as different from us as the Klingons are.11
Also Berman, in an interview with the official Star Trek website:
Going into DS9 -- with a space station, stories about war, politics and religion, a fractious crew and a commander of color -- how ready were you for the backlash from the portion of the fan base that felt the show wasn’t their father’s Star Trek?
Berman: At that point, our biggest concern was to do something different. We had a show that was on the air. We had no idea how long it was going to be on the air, but we knew that it was going to continue to be on the air for at least another few years. We didn’t want to send another crew out on a spaceship at the same time the TNG crew was out on the Enterprise. Michael (Piller) and I spent a long time thinking about this.
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One of the big problems that Michael and the writing staff (on TNG) had was Gene that believed that in the 24th century there wouldn’t be any conflict between the major characters. Mankind had reached a point where the kind of human conflict that exists today had subsided, and the writers all believed very strongly, in fact, that drama is based on conflict, and they were very frustrated by that. And they were frustrated very often by notes they got from Gene about how he didn’t want conflict between anyone in Starfleet, primarily the main cast of the show. So, what Michael and I felt was that if we placed the show on a Bajoran space station we would have characters like Odo and Quark and Kira, who were regular characters, who were not only not human, but they were also not Federation, and thus conflict could exist among the series regulars.
The religious elements you mentioned were not really part of our initial thoughts. That was stuff that evolved. But the idea of a wormhole that led to another part of the galaxy gave us new fodder.
Now I might be wrong, but it seems to me there’s nothing especially challenging about the Bajorans’ Prophets, aka the wormhole entities—they are fully contained within, and can be explained away by, the conventions of science fiction. Do the challenging and subversive elements of “Where No One Has Gone Before” and “Where Silence Has Lease” have any equivalent on Deep Space Nine, or on any of the later Trek series or films? It seems to me that they don’t (although I’d be happy to be proved wrong). As slickly made as DS9 undoubtedly is, I’ve not encountered much of a sense of strangeness or otherness in the episodes I’ve watched. Maybe I will find something if I persevere.
Returning to TNG.
By contrast with the more conventional Berman and Piller-ruled era, the brief period Maurice Hurley presided over was, as I’ve said, studded with episodes that could evoke something strange, eerie or other. Hurley could pull that off; so could Roddenberry, on a good day. Of further interest to me are the apparent political differences between all these men. While Roddenberry, Piller and Berman were clearly liberals, more bluepilled than red, Hurley strikes me as a right-winger by temperament: a lucid sexist, a reactionary character. A redpiller. Having said that, it’s worth noting Hurley had a mixed-race marriage and was liked and admired by the undoubtedly progressive Tracy Tormé—at any rate until the two writers fell out (over TNG-related matters, not politics).12
My impression of Berman and Piller is that they weren’t mavericks like Roddenberry and Hurley. They were more—though by no means entirely—conventional. It seems plausible to me that their Jewishness made them Hollywood insiders, and thus more minded to follow the prevailing conventions13, while the WASP Roddenberry and the Irish-American Hurley were always destined to be outsiders no matter what they did.
However, I think it important to point out that I’m not one of those fans who hates Rick Berman. I don’t blame him for the decline of the Star Trek franchise, as many fans do. I’d say he did a pretty fine job for many years. While not all of his creative and executive choices are ones I would’ve made, he still presided over the creation of many, many hours of high-quality television.
I think the fascinating New Age / mystical current in the first two seasons of TNG was tied to the Eighties zeitgeist, and was never going to continue on into the Nineties. And that’s okay. We know, every one of us I think, what must happen to all good things.
Taken from Gross and Altman’s The Fifty-Year Mission - The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams: The Complete, Uncensored, and Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek (St. Martin’s Press, 2016). Part One, specifically the chapter entitled “A Matter of Honor”.
ibid.
ibid.
ibid.
ibid.
Larry Nemecek’s The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion (Pocket Books, 1991, 1995, 2003), the chapter entitled “First Season”.
The Fifty-Year Mission - The Next 25 Years, “A Matter of Honor”.
ibid, except Part Three, the chapter entitled “Far Beyond the Stars”.
ibid, except the chapter entitled, “Magic Mike”.
ibid.
ibid, except Part Three, the chapter entitled “Far Beyond the Stars”.
I do believe passionate, creative individuals can have an appreciation for each other that transcends political differences. Consider for instance the film director Jean-Pierre Melville, a self-described “right-wing anarchist”. Melville was friends with certain prominent left-wing Parisian figures of his day, men like Jean-Luc Godard and Yves Montand.
It’s notable that TNG was always politically correct from season three onwards (though not gratingly so the way shows are now). The amusing, occasional flashes of sexism or right-wing humour that enlived the Hurley era did not repeat after his departure.
Even so, Berman has sometimes been criticised for not including a gay character on TNG. He has clarified that this was not due to any policy of the studio’s. Maybe Berman had judged that a gay relationship on screen—still a somewhat rare thing in the Nineties—would hurt ratings. However, TNG did cautiously explore issues of sexuality and gender. For instance, in the season five episode “The Outcast” Riker falls in love with an androgynous alien. The Commander’s girl/boyfriend was however played by a female actor—Berman was continuing to play it safe.