How a speculative script made it through the Roddenberry rules

I said, 'Look, I want to see every bit of material you can find. Anything that's in the old scripts, any abandoned scripts, any speculative material.'

Somebody came up with a script that had been sent in by a young fellow named Ron Moore, who was going to go into the Marines any second. And it was called The Bonding. It had a great premise to it and, obviously, it was a raw piece of work by an amateur writer, this guy had never written before.

But it was about a woman who was killed on an away mission and a child of that woman who must get over her death in a traumatic way. And in the story that was told, the aliens provide a mother substitute for this child to bond with. And ultimately it's a story about how the child has to move on.

Well, Gene said, after he read our description of this, that this show wouldn't work for him, because children of the 24th century have learned that death is a part of life and, as such, children would not mourn the loss of a parent in that circumstance.

Well, I came back from that meeting and the staff sort of looked at me with smirking sort of smiles, saying, 'OK, now you see what we've been dealing with.'

And I said, 'Now, wait a minute. Alright, this is what Gene says about it, so how do we deal with this?' And we talked for a while, and we said, 'Alright, what if we use Counsellor Troy in this situation, and ultimately we have the kid not mourn the death of the parent. And, in fact, it is the 24th century education of children that has taken away the emotional context of the loss of a parent, and Troy is saying, before this kid can move on with his life, he must learn how to mourn the parent.' Now we're dealing with Gene Roddenberry's 24th century, we're staying within the rules, but, ultimately, the story's about getting through that, to get to the heart of our emotional feelings, and that made it a much better story.

Gene loved it, he accepted it, and it was an extremely powerful episode. It showed me what Gene was doing � I used to call it 'Gene Roddenberry's box,' he wouldn't let you out of the box, he can put all these nice little controls on us. And we had to learn to tell stories in different ways than we have been used to telling them, as writers, and that made us be more creative when we confronted them directly rather than trying to fight them.

I always felt that Gene's rules were interesting and challenging and made us better writers. I always encouraged the writers to listen to those and not to fall back on easy solutions to story problems.