How to create Drama in a perfect world

The biggest problem with writing Star Trek is the fact that Roddenberry created a type of human that was pretty perfect. His idea of a 24th century human was a person that had very little conflict with other humans. So, if there's no conflict within your characters, you've got a lot of trouble as all the conflict has to come from outside, and conflict is what drama is about.

When it came to Deep Space 9, we thought, how can we create conflict without breaking Gene's rules? We decided to put our people into a very inhospitable environment, a Cardassian space station that's kind of spooky and uncomfortable where things didn't work quite right. We also added a lot of non-humans. We had Cardassians, we had Bejorans, we had Ferengi, we had Odo, who's a shape shifter; we had a lot of non-humans that could help us create a little conflict on the show.