Could you tell us about the work you did on The Next Generation?

The Next Generation was a lot of fun for a while and then it wasn't a lot of fun. The reason it wasn't a lot of fun was that this one was going to be a guaranteed hit. The original Star Trek was never a guaranteed hit.

They didn't even know how good it was until it went into syndication and the ratings took off. Even to this day if you talk to people at NBC they say, "We're so sorry Star Trek got away from us".

With Next Gen everyone knew it was going to be a big hit, so everybody wanted to be a part of it. We got a few people on board who didn't know Star Trek at all but they wanted to be a part of a hit show. They wanted the money, they wanted the power, they wanted the glory. The office politics got out of control because where we were originally all having fun doing this really great show, twenty years later here was this thing guaranteed to be a hit and everybody wanted to be the boss of it.

Gene's health was failing. He didn't have the strength to control the show and into that vacuum [came] were a lot of people who weren't plank holders from the original starship, so there was a lot of tension. But I will tell you in the early days when we were actually deciding who was going to be on the crew, Gene said, "David, I want you to write the bible," and so I said, "Well, who are the characters?" He said, "Who would you put on the Star Ship?'

I said, "Well, it's an enormous responsibility you've just handed me, let's try something different." Let's have an older captain, more thoughtful, who stays on the bridge and doesn't put himself in danger because Starfleet doesn't want him doing that any more. The first officer, the number one, beams down to the planet and he's head of the mission team, and he takes with him specialists who are just for the mission so you can have lots of different guest stars on your away team.

Gene liked that because it gave us two heroes, in a sense two captains, and it let us play more of an ensemble cast, so that was the way that happened.

Now I and about fifteen other people suggested, "Let's add a Klingon to the crew." [To show] that we'd made friends with the Klingons. Gene was adamantly opposed to it. I'm going to tell a tale out of school now.

It got to the point [where] new people would come on the team and one of the first memos they'd write was, "How about a Klingon as part of it." We finally just started warning people, "Gene has adamantly said no Klingon." I don't know why Gene felt that way at the time.

The first draft script of the first episode came out and Dorothy Fontana had written the ship split[ting] into two parts. That actually was part of the original Star Trek. The starship was supposed to have that ability, but we never used it. We decided we'd use it here, that the living quarters would go this way and the battleship part of the ship would go that way. Dorothy needed to know, "Who's the captain of this part [of the ship?"

Gene hadn't answered the question so she created a woman officer and put her in charge. I think she was testing Gene. Gene was supposed to do the re-write on that pilot so he created Q. Dorothy had done 90 minutes because he told her to do 90 minutes, and then he expanded it to 120 minutes by adding Q. When the ship breaks apart, suddenly Dorothy's female character has gone and there's Worf, a Klingon bridge officer, who should actually have been on the other part.

That's the way Worf got created, because Dorothy had a woman in charge. Gene would stand up and make all of these great speeches about he was in favour of this and that and the other but when it came to the writing, something old-school kicked in for him. He was never able to give a woman the lines for putting her in charge of this ship.