What's so good about the Next Generation?

It's a wonderful place to live, it's a wonderful place to come back to every week and say, 'You know what? There's hope for the future.'

I always look at the quote by Whoopi Goldberg when she joined the show, which was just before I got there, and, Whoopi used to say how much Star Trek meant to her as a child, to see a black woman on the bridge of the original Enterprise, and she wanted to do the same thing for a new generation. So the idea that a black woman could be not only alive in the future but in a powerful position in the future, meant a great deal.

To me, the appeal of Star Trek in general, and what made The Next Generation such a gratifying experience, was that the exploration of space, was really a metaphor for the exploration of our existence. The best writing that we've done on Star Trek is really exploring who we are as human beings.

As soon as we turn our attention to space monsters and exploding, space ships, we're no better or worse than the other any other science fiction, but what makes Star Trek special is that Roddenberry humanist adventure, finding out who we are.