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Ron Moore - Writer on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.

Science and Star Trek
  By the time of Next Generation there was a full time science advisor employed on Star Trek. Was that an indication that science had become a serious input into the show?

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s you couldn’t really get away with as much as you could in the original series and Gene felt strongly that the science on the show should be based in something truthful and real. You could extrapolate it from there, but that it had to have some real understanding.

There had been so much science fiction between the original series and Next Generation that you had to go with the times. It had to be smarter, you had to be more sophisticated. Audiences knew what the space show was and they had seen pictures from Mars. When the original series was on we hadn’t even landed on the Moon yet.

Attack of the techwaves
  How much contact you would have with someone like Andre (Boramis, science adviser on The Next Generation)?

Typically in a script of mine a sequence would happen where there’s an action sequence and the enemy aliens have hit the Enterprise with a techwave. I would just write in the script the word TECH. A techwave has hit us, Captain. And then Commander LaForge, increase the TECH by 15%. Captain, the shields are failing by TECH percentage, we need to activate the auxiliary TECH and increase the TECH by TECH percent. Then I send that to Andre.

I knew what the scene needed to accomplish. I want the particle something wave to hit the Enterprise, I want it to knock the engines offline and I want the primary hull to explode in ten minutes unless Captain Picard can make it all the way down to some special room on the Enterprise where he has to do something cool.

Then I call Andre and say, "Okay, now where’s that room on the Enterprise? What deck is that on? What kind of particle wave could hit the Enterprise?" "Well, particles don’t fly in space Ron, you need a sub-space this and that." "Oh, okay, that’s cool." I would know the dramatic idea of what I needed to accomplish and then I needed someone like Andre to get me something that sounded neat. He’ll fill in the words and then I would then bastardise the words even more to make them fit in peoples’ mouths.

Not a techy bunny
  Did you enjoy writing those technical lines? Were there any that you’re particularly pleased with?

I did not enjoy the technical aspects of the show. I would just confuse myself more than anything else. The various technomysteries and quantum physics things I was never that in love with. I think I’m probably proudest of the lines that people would just laugh as because they would publish them as literally, Captain, the TECH is TECHing. Well, TECH the TECH would be the answer. People would read this and go what, are you kidding? I’d promise, in the second draft I’ll fix all of that stuff.

Science fiction versus conventional drama
  How does writing science fiction, having things like malfunctions of the transporter as a dramatic device, compare to writing conventional drama?

It’s freeing. What I like about science fiction as a genre is that it allows me to paint on a larger canvas. There’s more possibilities, more things I can do to the characters to see how they’ll respond. Ultimately, it’s about how people react if something happens.

In science fiction that question of what is going to happen to them is much larger. They can travel through time, they can meet duplicates of themselves, they can have their personalities split into two people, they can meet aliens who read their minds. There’s just so many more possibilities that tell me about a person in science fiction. There’s more opportunity as a writer to explore the human condition because you have a lot more colours in your palette, if you will.

I liked time travel. I thought the possibilities were always endless and it’s a fascinating idea to the audience. It was intriguing to play with the possibilities of changing or not changing history, what the ramifications would be if you changed this one event in history, how different are the people as a result?

Yesterday’s Enterprise was one of my favourite episodes, and there you see that one event in the past changed the entire future. Our crew were still recognisable as Picard, Riker, et cetera, but they all had different life experiences and were in a war and a darker place. They were still on the Enterprise, but everything had changed.

Things fall apart, and a good thing too
  It’s just as important for techology to break down isn’t it?

Yeah. The technology is so good and so advanced that if it keeps working every week you seldom have stories. It has to break down, you have to have enemies that could get behind your walls and destroy things and you need viruses that crop up in strange ways and screw up all the medical science. You need those devices for dramatic story telling.

It’s one of the Star Trek conventions that the engineer is going to fix everything, Scotty’s going to get that power at the last minute and Geordi’s going to come up with the techno whizz-bang solution. It’s just that’s one of the things that is Star Trek.

Too much technobabble
  How much feedback do you get from the actors about them getting very technical lines to learn?

The only feedback you get is that there’s too much of it. It’s really hard for them to memorise this stuff especially because so much of it is made up science and uses words that don’t even exist until we’ve invented them.

It’s not really like learning police jargon or cowboy jargon or whatever, which you can study and get familiar with. With us, god knows what I’m going to come up with next week. The tachyon framastat particles, that the actor then has to say and make into an English sentence.

The actors would get frustrated at how much technobabble there would be. Especially poor guys like LeVar Burton and Brent Spiner who, because of their roles in the show, would end up carrying a great deal of technobabble. Whereas somebody like Michael Dorrn really wouldn’t get that much of it because it wasn’t so much his character.

We'd rather have the Federation than NASA
  Do you think Star Trek compensates for the general disappointment in the space programme?

I think Star Trek is a blessing and a curse to the space programme. It has inspired a lot of people to want to go into science and to become astronauts. It really gave people a sense of what if, and oh god I want to do that, and wouldn’t it be great if we as a people and a planet went out into space.

But I think it also raised such an expectation of what space travel is, that the reality of the space shuttle, which is like a glorified truck that goes into orbit and delivers things, the sort of step by step process once you had landed on the Moon, let people down because they wanted Star Trek.

Different shows for different eras
  Can you talk about the basic premise of each of the series and how they built upon each other?

The original series was a wagon train to the stars. It’s the new frontier, it’s bringing democracy to the universe. Captain Kirk is the American ideal of a captain who goes out and solves people's problems and is a hero for our time.

Years later Next Generation takes place in a different era. It’s very much an ‘80s show. Only in the 1980s would they have put a therapist on the bridge next to the captain. To me that spoke volumes about the era that that show was produced. It’s more diverse, less warlike, still informed by the Cold War but it’s not chained to it in the way that the original series truly is.

When you get to Deep Space Nine it’s suddenly questioning some of the underlying fundamentals of Star Trek and what the Federation believes. Conflicts are no longer so simply defined and you’re dealing with the Bajorans and the Cardassians, a people analogous, maybe, to the Palestinians or other people that have been subjugated. There’s peace making and peace keeping and trying to make your way in a complex world as after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Then Voyager comes and tries to recapture the glory of the past era. It tries to take you out there. Let’s forget about all those messy things and let’s go back and recapture what was once great. It’s almost nostalgic. Then will come Enterprise which expands even further along that idea.

It’s interesting to me because they speak more strongly about us and our time and how we see ourselves than they really do about what the future will be like.

Writing the alien
  When you create a new alien, do you write a whole cultural background before you can write them into the script?

The only time I ever sat down and really wrote a treatise on a culture was early in third season Next Generation. Michael Piller asked me to just sort of write a couple of pages on the Klingons and the Romulans because Mike was still getting to know the show and I was the old Trekker who knew the original series really well. We were going to do a show about going to Worf’s home planet and he wanted me to define the Klingons.

I wrote a couple of pages of my take on the Klingons and it was an interesting exercise because I decided to think of the Klingons as a cross between 15th Century samurai and Vikings. Or, at least, our popular conception of Vikings. They’re samurai in that they’re very honour-bound and they have an intense code, all these little rituals and then they’re Vikings who party and drink hard and bash heads together and they’re crazy. That became sort of the paradigm of the Klingons.

The problems of being too good
  Where did the idea of the Borg come from?

Maurice Hurley did those in the the second season in Q Who? Then they were just a cool, one shot alien race that you couldn’t beat.

They were just such a good villain, they had such a cool look and were the unstoppable foe. It seemed natural to bring them back at some point and the idea of turning Picard into a Borg and sending him over to the dark side was just a great idea. That’s how they started to come back.

When did you decide to create a species that could actually beat the Borg?

That was on Voyager, I wasn’t really involved with that. The trouble with the Borg is that they’re unstoppable and yet the Enterprise keeps stopping them week after week. That was the dilemma you kept running into as a writer. You say they’re unstoppable and that’s what makes them cool and mysterious, but every week you have to somehow defeat them over and over again.

Looking at the competition
  Talking about the movies Generations and First Contact, what else was out there when you were making those films?

Independence Day came out close to First Contact, and set a new level in special effects and action in science fiction projects. It really sort of raised the threshold of what an audience expects and I think it might have hurt First Contact, and the Star Trek features as a whole, because Star Trek’s just never going to spend that kind of money on their feature movies so they always are going to kind of suffer in that comparison.

Same with Star Wars. The Phantom Menace came out the year after Insurrection, and the special effects work is just at such an order of magnitude bigger than Star Trek that it makes Star Trek look an also ran in visual effects, which is too bad.

The advantages of being static
  What did the space station format of DS9 allow you to do that you couldn’t do in a ship?

Most fundamentally, the Enterprise comes to an alien planet, sees a problem, solves it and moves on. The space station doesn’t go anywhere and that means the story lines continue week after week in some fashion. It’s still mostly episodic but Bajor is there every week, the Cardassians ain’t going anywhere, the people in the station are going to be there every week. It gradually, bit by bit, became more of a continuing story.

You couldn’t just leave problems behind you and fly away from them. You could go out and visit planets and not go to those planets again, but the core of the series, the heart of the show, was something that was going to continually evolve and change over time. That’s a very different format than The Next Generation or the original series.

Evolving plotlines
  Is it more satisfying as a writer to be able to work on something that had the structure of Deep Space Nine?

I enjoyed it much more because it meant the characters and the station could evolve. The mission could evolve. You could change things gradually, and see how relationships played themselves out. On the truly episodic level of Next Generation you just got a sense of "I wish I could follow this story more."

With DS9 and Sisko you could keep returning to things that were established in the pilot like his relationship with the prophets, and his position as the emissary to the Bajorans. How he grew into that role was something you could take your time to develop. The only thing you could really do like that on Next Generation was the relationship between Riker and Troy. Even that was in very small doses.

When we did Sins of the Father with Worf, that was the first time Trek had ever really done a continuing story line and it was a departure for them. I really liked it because I wanted to keep coming back to the tale of Worf getting his honour back and what that meant.

Something to be proud of
  Are you particularly proud to be associated with a show that’s credited as inspiring many, many thousands of students to take up science?

Oh absolutely. I’m very proud of that, and I’m proud of being associated with a show that’s watched by Stephen Hawking. He came to the sets when I was on Next Generation and I was blown away. He’s a fan of the show. I got to write the teaser to an episode that he appeared in, and I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren about that.

So I’m very proud of my association with Star Trek. It’s meant a lot to a lot of people, it’s inspired them in a lot of different ways in science and technology and writing and acting and it’s an amazing thing to be a part of.