I knew next to nothing of any of this... and yet I'm entirely unsurprised that some of the most important ethical and creative aspects didn't came from but in spite of the Great Man At The Top. It's not often the other way around.
I'd add that this happens even in post-post-post-production. Much of my enjoyment of and enrichment from TV and comics franchises have come from engagement with fandom writers and artist that explored potential the canon material just didn't want or dared to.
💯 I fortunately have never read Roddenberry's novelization of The Motion Picture, but I listened to Women at Warp's review of it and thought, "Wow, this is not a man to look up to." His sexualization of women and focus on that as the only useful aspect women truly possess was throughout the entire Original Series. It was really hard for me to get through those shows. I saw them after I had watched all other '90s era Trek and I just could not get past the awful sexism in the whole series as well, but not nearly to the same degree. At least they didn't call crew women "girls" in 90s Trek. All that to say, I am so 100% with you on the fact that there is nothing to look up to Roddenberry for aside from the initial vision that launched the series. And I love your point that it's actually Dorothy Fontana who initially gave us the things that truly made Star Trek shine.
One of the low-key great moments in Star Trek history was when an exasperated and/or wise Paramount exec took Nicholas Meyer aside during the filming of Wrath of Khan and said words to the effect of: "look, Roddenberry's contract says he has the right to read your script and give you notes; it doesn't say you have to READ those notes."
I read this novel as a kid and was confused by how obsessively horny it was. Like, if I remember correctly, there’s a moment where Kirk runs into an ex and we’re treated to a description of his sudden partial erection, that kind of thing.
Also, I completely agree with the reading where Dorothy Fontana is the real genius of Star Trek.
I read it a while back too, in a similar effort to try to get closer to the wellspring, to which my response was 'huh, that was a thing.' I find myself of two minds, though, much as I find myself of two minds about The Motion Picture itself, and, for that matter, the first two season of TNG:
1) That was very '70s in a way that was usually grosser than it was fun
buuuuuut
2) At least there was a swing for something different there?
The breaks we can detect in Trek when Gene had less sway (and the quality upticks that are absolutely correlated with those breaks) also seem to be when there's less active consideration of the future actually being socially distinct from the present.
Absolutely, granted, most of that distinction seemed to be a pretty shallow 'what if the hotties were fucking?' in a way that, in a room full of nothing but white male producers, was doubtlessly exhausting, but, I dunno, what if the hotties *were* fucking? The close of that chapter meant that the closest anyone got to articulating the idea that the future might be more fun was that there was a lot of time to catch up on Shakespeare and piano, and that you could occasionally go the the Vegas planet. It might just be a half-assed gesture born of too many Est seminars to imagine that Earth is mostly populated by the adherents of a 'new human' social movement, but at least there's a social movement?
I dunno. Obviously TNG S1 is roooough and S3 rules, the novelization is not a thing I would wish on anyone who wasn't actively engaged in an archaeology project like this, but a small part of me, looking around at a pop culture moment that is vigorously anti-libidinal, misses utopian-means-horny Trek.
Maybe Riker stands as the last remnant of that attitude, taking on the burden of horniness for everyone. Certainly his behavior would often seem inappropriate in our time, but no one seems to regard him as "problematic" in his own milieu.
Riker certainly was structurally, he and Troi being the reworked Decker and Illia, but by the end I feel like even he was pretty much in the hard start/stop serial monogamy that characterizes essentially all episodic TV relationships. He more straightforwardly likes being a sexual being, but he still gets married to what amounts to his college girlfriend and so it goes. Same for Dax- making the woman with too much experience to take all this too seriously and inclined to live a little basically go through the motions of a conservative marriage because she's bored was a backdoor way to wrangle their one horny character into a more conventional channel.
And even after making Bashir an obnoxious horndog in the early seasons, they didn't have the courage to hook him up with Garak and instead basically made him prey on vulnerable patients (Melora, the Augment woman...) -- returning to the "bad" version of the free love dynamic I see in the TMP novel. I guess they had to squeeze in at least one tribute to Roddenberry to keep DS9 from being a total betrayal of his vision.
He wanted to be a bargain shelf L. Ron Hubbard. As an accompanying note, if you go work through all the episodes that Roddenberry wrote, they are overwhelmingly garbage, with possibly a couple exceptions (I can’t remember them all).
One of the reasons I love “Lower Decks” is that it regularly took on that attitude, especially in the last season. I don’t know about anyone else, but every time I heard Mariner talking about “interpersonal conflict,” I HOWLED.
It has made me wonder, how did the Star Trek fan community react to the fact that the Sisko story wrapped up in such a way that Sisko is, for all intents and purposes, Bajoram Jesus?
I read Roddenberry's TMP novel years ago, and I didn't remember that content. Thanks for pointing it out. Diane Duane is also one of my favorite ST novelists. She's amazing!
There's a difference between "nuanced" or "not everyone is perfect" and "Starfleet is made up of the galaxy's rejects who aren't smart enough to cope with our advanced society."
I have long thought that Roddenberry started to take himself waaaay too seriously in that space between the end of TOS and the production of TMP. The Great Bird of the Galaxy stuff and being treated like he was a philosopher made his head grow two sizes too big. He deserves credit for laying a foundation, but as noted, a lot of other people helped create the universe. DC Fontana deserves a ton of credit!
The empirical evidence of how much better the movies and TNG S3 were after his direct removal from being the guiding force of the franchise speaks volumes! The obversation about DS9 is also apt in this regard.
I think, too, that a lot of the philosophical notions ascribed to TOS are often ex post facto creations that ignore the actual content of the show.
Off the top of my head:
1. Kirk lived on a colony as a child wherein the governor executed part of the population to deal with famine.
2. The miners in "Mudd's Women" aren't exactly living in a post-scarcity utopia.
3. The planet Ardana, which was an authoritarian society that essentially ensalved part of its population, was a member of the Federation.
4. Captain Tracey, of the "Omega Glory" hardly lived up to Starfleet expectations (the episode was written by Roddenberry).
On religion, Kirk mentions something to the effect that "the one God is plenty" in "Who Mourns for Adonais?" And in "Bread and Circuses" the whole bit about them having Caesar and Christ/the sun/son worshippers was treated with reverance (co-written by Robddenberry with Gene Coon).
I reread TMP novel about a year ago and yes, knowing what I do now about Gene really gave me a lot of 'yeah that makes sense' moments from it. Apparently Gene and Majel would have 3somes in his office at Desilu studios, including one time where they tried to recruit Nichelle but she declined. I this they talk about it in the doc Chaos on the Bridge (can't 100% recall though).
The weirdest/horniest part of TMP for me was a one off comment about how I guess there's some sort of sex-pod set up in the recreation area, where you can hop into for privacy and a quickie while people just waltz on by? Gene was so damn horny.
I knew next to nothing of any of this... and yet I'm entirely unsurprised that some of the most important ethical and creative aspects didn't came from but in spite of the Great Man At The Top. It's not often the other way around.
I'd add that this happens even in post-post-post-production. Much of my enjoyment of and enrichment from TV and comics franchises have come from engagement with fandom writers and artist that explored potential the canon material just didn't want or dared to.
💯 I fortunately have never read Roddenberry's novelization of The Motion Picture, but I listened to Women at Warp's review of it and thought, "Wow, this is not a man to look up to." His sexualization of women and focus on that as the only useful aspect women truly possess was throughout the entire Original Series. It was really hard for me to get through those shows. I saw them after I had watched all other '90s era Trek and I just could not get past the awful sexism in the whole series as well, but not nearly to the same degree. At least they didn't call crew women "girls" in 90s Trek. All that to say, I am so 100% with you on the fact that there is nothing to look up to Roddenberry for aside from the initial vision that launched the series. And I love your point that it's actually Dorothy Fontana who initially gave us the things that truly made Star Trek shine.
One of the low-key great moments in Star Trek history was when an exasperated and/or wise Paramount exec took Nicholas Meyer aside during the filming of Wrath of Khan and said words to the effect of: "look, Roddenberry's contract says he has the right to read your script and give you notes; it doesn't say you have to READ those notes."
I read this novel as a kid and was confused by how obsessively horny it was. Like, if I remember correctly, there’s a moment where Kirk runs into an ex and we’re treated to a description of his sudden partial erection, that kind of thing.
Also, I completely agree with the reading where Dorothy Fontana is the real genius of Star Trek.
I read it a while back too, in a similar effort to try to get closer to the wellspring, to which my response was 'huh, that was a thing.' I find myself of two minds, though, much as I find myself of two minds about The Motion Picture itself, and, for that matter, the first two season of TNG:
1) That was very '70s in a way that was usually grosser than it was fun
buuuuuut
2) At least there was a swing for something different there?
The breaks we can detect in Trek when Gene had less sway (and the quality upticks that are absolutely correlated with those breaks) also seem to be when there's less active consideration of the future actually being socially distinct from the present.
Absolutely, granted, most of that distinction seemed to be a pretty shallow 'what if the hotties were fucking?' in a way that, in a room full of nothing but white male producers, was doubtlessly exhausting, but, I dunno, what if the hotties *were* fucking? The close of that chapter meant that the closest anyone got to articulating the idea that the future might be more fun was that there was a lot of time to catch up on Shakespeare and piano, and that you could occasionally go the the Vegas planet. It might just be a half-assed gesture born of too many Est seminars to imagine that Earth is mostly populated by the adherents of a 'new human' social movement, but at least there's a social movement?
I dunno. Obviously TNG S1 is roooough and S3 rules, the novelization is not a thing I would wish on anyone who wasn't actively engaged in an archaeology project like this, but a small part of me, looking around at a pop culture moment that is vigorously anti-libidinal, misses utopian-means-horny Trek.
Maybe Riker stands as the last remnant of that attitude, taking on the burden of horniness for everyone. Certainly his behavior would often seem inappropriate in our time, but no one seems to regard him as "problematic" in his own milieu.
Riker certainly was structurally, he and Troi being the reworked Decker and Illia, but by the end I feel like even he was pretty much in the hard start/stop serial monogamy that characterizes essentially all episodic TV relationships. He more straightforwardly likes being a sexual being, but he still gets married to what amounts to his college girlfriend and so it goes. Same for Dax- making the woman with too much experience to take all this too seriously and inclined to live a little basically go through the motions of a conservative marriage because she's bored was a backdoor way to wrangle their one horny character into a more conventional channel.
And even after making Bashir an obnoxious horndog in the early seasons, they didn't have the courage to hook him up with Garak and instead basically made him prey on vulnerable patients (Melora, the Augment woman...) -- returning to the "bad" version of the free love dynamic I see in the TMP novel. I guess they had to squeeze in at least one tribute to Roddenberry to keep DS9 from being a total betrayal of his vision.
"taking on the burden of horniness for everyone" is the greatest sentence I am going to read this week without a doubt
He wanted to be a bargain shelf L. Ron Hubbard. As an accompanying note, if you go work through all the episodes that Roddenberry wrote, they are overwhelmingly garbage, with possibly a couple exceptions (I can’t remember them all).
One of the reasons I love “Lower Decks” is that it regularly took on that attitude, especially in the last season. I don’t know about anyone else, but every time I heard Mariner talking about “interpersonal conflict,” I HOWLED.
So I just finished my binge watch of DS9
It has made me wonder, how did the Star Trek fan community react to the fact that the Sisko story wrapped up in such a way that Sisko is, for all intents and purposes, Bajoram Jesus?
Certainly DS9's treatment of religion was very contrary to what Roddenberry would have wanted.
I wrote about that in my post here. After Roddenberry died, there was a more positive take on religion, especially in DS9:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-157343968
I read Roddenberry's TMP novel years ago, and I didn't remember that content. Thanks for pointing it out. Diane Duane is also one of my favorite ST novelists. She's amazing!
completely with you on the sex stuff - weird and cringe.
but why do you dislike the introductory note? is it because it goes against the TOS canon?
i’m asking as I dont actually mind a more nuanced universe - the likes of TNG and DS9 - where not every starfleet officer is perfect etc
There's a difference between "nuanced" or "not everyone is perfect" and "Starfleet is made up of the galaxy's rejects who aren't smart enough to cope with our advanced society."
yeah the look down on starfleet bit was certainly a surprise. thx for elaborating
I cannot say how often I have wished that Duane and John Ford’s vision of Romulans and Klingons, respectively, had been adopted as canon.
I have long thought that Roddenberry started to take himself waaaay too seriously in that space between the end of TOS and the production of TMP. The Great Bird of the Galaxy stuff and being treated like he was a philosopher made his head grow two sizes too big. He deserves credit for laying a foundation, but as noted, a lot of other people helped create the universe. DC Fontana deserves a ton of credit!
The empirical evidence of how much better the movies and TNG S3 were after his direct removal from being the guiding force of the franchise speaks volumes! The obversation about DS9 is also apt in this regard.
I think, too, that a lot of the philosophical notions ascribed to TOS are often ex post facto creations that ignore the actual content of the show.
Off the top of my head:
1. Kirk lived on a colony as a child wherein the governor executed part of the population to deal with famine.
2. The miners in "Mudd's Women" aren't exactly living in a post-scarcity utopia.
3. The planet Ardana, which was an authoritarian society that essentially ensalved part of its population, was a member of the Federation.
4. Captain Tracey, of the "Omega Glory" hardly lived up to Starfleet expectations (the episode was written by Roddenberry).
On religion, Kirk mentions something to the effect that "the one God is plenty" in "Who Mourns for Adonais?" And in "Bread and Circuses" the whole bit about them having Caesar and Christ/the sun/son worshippers was treated with reverance (co-written by Robddenberry with Gene Coon).
I reread TMP novel about a year ago and yes, knowing what I do now about Gene really gave me a lot of 'yeah that makes sense' moments from it. Apparently Gene and Majel would have 3somes in his office at Desilu studios, including one time where they tried to recruit Nichelle but she declined. I this they talk about it in the doc Chaos on the Bridge (can't 100% recall though).
The weirdest/horniest part of TMP for me was a one off comment about how I guess there's some sort of sex-pod set up in the recreation area, where you can hop into for privacy and a quickie while people just waltz on by? Gene was so damn horny.