I wasn’t going to go here, but since you did…
Agreed. Profoundly spiritual. It took you to a place where science and rational thought press up against spirit, the nature of mankind, and his dilemma in relation to the cosmos.
But let’s talk about the spirit behind the show for a second:
There are two shows that aired within the first decade of this century that were very abruptly canceled without much explanation, leaving audiences in the lurch in the midst of incredible unfinished story arcs. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, and my thought was they must have been flying too close to the sun. They were touching on too great of truths to be allowed to continue to air.
In 1988 the girlfriend of a young Cornell dropout and aspiring writer noticed the Captain Kirk posters on her boyfriend’s wall. She worked in production, and recognizing his life long love of Star Trek she was able to arrange a tour for him of the Star Trek: The Next Generation set. While on the set he managed to hand off a script he had written to one of Gene Roddenberry’s assistants. The encounter led to the production purchasing his script and hiring him to write the season opener for season 3 of ST:TNG. His childhood dream came true, and he was subsequently brought on the show as a writer, and later a producer. He worked on the show all the way to the end, even writing the Emmy nominated final episode.
The writer’s name is Ronald D. Moore.
Ronald was brought on to STNG shortly before Gene Roddenberry had to step away somewhere near the end of season 2. So he managed to slip in and touch base with the creator right before the show was put in the hands of others.
After The Next Generation, the producers went on to make two seasons of Deep Space Nine without Ronald, before hiring him on as a writer and executive producer on season 3. I tried watching the first season of Deep Space Nine and could not get into it at all. The few times I’ve ever talked about that series with people who liked it my sense was that it was always later seasons they were referencing, but I don’t know much about it.
Ronald wrote the screenplays for the Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact movies, somewhere in here developed Mission Impossible 2, and after DS9 was brought onto Star Trek: Voyager as a writer and co-executive producer by his writing partner. There was a massive betrayal. Ronald had what was probably a much more interesting vision for the show, and my guess is that his partner felt like he was in a position to take all the glory and was maneuvering behind the scenes to cut Ronald out of the process. He walked away after working on Voyager for only two weeks. After watching the Voyager pilot I was pretty much done with Star Trek. The whole thing began to feel empty and the style passé.
After Voyager he worked on a couple of smaller productions before being hired as the showrunner for the HBO series Carnivàle.
Carnivàle is the first of the two shows I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
It was around this time that Ronald D. Moore was also creating the new Battlestar Galactica series. He left Carnivàle after the end of the first season to run Battlestar, and Carnivàle was canceled out of nowhere at the end of it’s second season.
Let that sink in…
In my opinion the animating spirit that was inspiring Star Trek through Gene Roddenberry found new life and ground in Ronald D. Moore. Ever since Ronald walked away from Star Trek the studio has been hoping that nobody notices they are playing with the corpse of Star Trek, animated by some other spirit masquerading in it’s skin.
Battle Star Galactica is Star Trek resurrected.
The timing of that show, and everything it was bringing right at the beginning of the century… what a deed by Ronald D. Moore.
We want things to always stay the same, but nothing ever does. Life evolves, and being able to tolerate, discern, and follow the evolutionary metamorphoses beneath the surface of history is not only a survival skill, but touches on the deepest potentials of humanity. Things are not always what they appear, and the the thing we are looking for may not appear the way we are expecting it to.
