In the beginning, the new series didn’t even have a name. In an October 24 memo, Justman suggested forty-four series titles. Star Trek: The Next Generation was not on the list, although a couple came close: “The New Generation” and “The Second Generation.” The first-draft series bible of November 26 carried the ST:TNG moniker, but another Justman memo, dated December 15, suggested nineteen more possible titles. Earlier, on October 31, he had even suggested just keeping the title Star Trek and letting the obvious differences between the two shows clear up any confusion.
Creation in Flux
As good as the original Star Trek had been, even the most devout fan had to admit it was far from perfect in both execution and concept. Even as Roddenberry faced the challenge of making The Next Generation click, he was aware that few creators ever got a chance to improve on their earlier successes. The problems of time, budget, and censorship might have disappeared, but how could he improve the series itself?
David Gerrold, writer of the classic Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles,” pointed out many of the original Trek’s problems in his book The World of Star Trek. For one, there was the folly of beaming a starship captain right into the middle of an unknown, possibly dangerous situation week after week. Not only did it make the drama too easy, it simply wasn’t very practical—or prudent. Then there was the duration of the ship’s mission and its impact on crew members of both sexes. How did humans, single and married, deal with such a career? Still another plot device overused for jeopardy’s sake was the failure of technology on a recurring basis, including the good old transporter. Why would anyone want to use devices with such a high failure rate?
Roddenberry and his team also had to deal with the “simple” problem of updating the starship, the technology, and the crew. How much of the old series’ familiarity had to be retained to make it Star Trek? And how many changes had to be made, especially with a new set of character relationships, to make TNG stand alone?
To sound out his ideas, Roddenberry first gathered around him a small circle of people he knew he could depend on, those who had helped spark the triumph of the original Trek. That group included Roddenberry’s former co-producer, Bob Justman, as well as Eddie Milkis, a onetime Trek associate producer who had gone on to produce hit series like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley and numerous films. David Gerrold was also on Roddenberry’s team. The new think tank hit the ground running, screening SF films like Blade Runner and Aliens and meeting for daily brainstorming lunches at the Paramount commissary.
Memos began flying back and forth between the two small offices TNG then occupied in Building L on the Paramount lot. On October 17, 1986, alone—barely a week after the new series was announced—Justman proposed three concepts: a so-called Noah’s Ark premise that involved crew members bringing their families along; the use of an android as a regular character, and an idea that would grow into the holodeck concept. The next day he was summarizing the group’s suggestions for developing new hostile or friendly alien races while also surmounting Roddenberry’s aversion to retreads by suggesting a Klingon marine as a regular character. On October 20 he wondered if his android character might provide a Spock-like mystique for the new series.
From those early brainstorming sessions came a few ideas that, in hindsight, might be labeled as clinkers: on October 18 Justman suggested a female science officer in the mold of Sean Young, possibly part Vulcan and Spock’s great-great-granddaughter, or a recent Academy grad who is Kirk’s great-great-granddaughter.
“It was a very homogenous kind of thing,” Milkis said of the creative mix at work. He recalled that it was Justman who always kept and filed the memos. “We all had input and built off the ideas of each other. Nobody really takes particular credit for anything.”
“Gene was very wise,” Justman said. “He would listen to people—[some] that he trusted and some that he didn’t know—but he would make up his own mind about everything. And if he liked something, then he’d make use of it, and if he didn’t he’d throw it away. But Gene had definite ideas; he always had definite ideas!”
After weeks of listening—and working with Gerrold on the text—Gene Roddenberry emerged on November 26, 1986, with a twenty-two-page writers’ bible that described and explained the characters, sets, and terminology and laid down the format the series would follow.
Actually, some of the flaws in the old series, made obvious to fans and critics alike by fifteen years of reruns, were to have been corrected in the abortive 1970s series Star Trek II. That show, for example, was to have fought the old captain-in-danger weakness by having First Officer Will Decker lead most landing parties while Kirk stayed aboard. So, in a November 8, 1986, memo, Justman proposed that this Starfleet directive be credited to Jean-Luc Picard, who recommended it when he was first officer of Stargazer after his captain was killed in a tragic beam-down. The scenario was never fully fleshed out, but finally mentioned in Season 6 (“Tapestry”/241).
Roddenberry was also adamant in his insistence that the new series would not rely on failed technology as a plot device week after week. “Although this creates some additional difficulty in maneuvering our people into danger,” he wrote in the infant writers’ guide, “story believability demands that our twenty-fifth-century technology be at least as capable as our twentieth-century technology in this area—perhaps not such a difficulty if one realizes that twenty-fifth-century villains are no doubt capable of technological countermeasures.”
His mention of the twenty-fifth century, by the way, was no mistake. At this stage the new show was set in that time frame.
The starship in the new series was first designated as NCC-1701-7, but the generational notation was later changed to a letter, following the pattern established in the recently released feature film Star Trek IV. The new ship was made the eighth Enterprise, NCC-1701-G.
One sign of the changes that had occurred between Kirk’s era and Picard’s was on page 1 of the new writers’ bible, where it was stated that 19 percent of the Milky Way galaxy had been charted in this new century, compared to only 4 percent in Kirk’s time.
But, more important, GR had always insisted that people be at the heart of any Trek yarn, and it was in the arena of human interaction that the differences in TNG would be most striking. While Kirk’s crew was on a five-year mission, the new starship was to be outfitted for an assignment of ten years or longer. Because of that, officers and crew would be allowed to bring their families along, and that in turn created the need for a ship twice as long and eight times the volume of the original Enterprise. This new ship would have a whole community of services to support its population. More than ever before, the starship truly would be a city in space.
“Most twenty-fifth-century humans believe that ‘Life should be lived, not postponed,’” the new bible stated, reiterating Starfleet’s view that “people need people … in both family and community life, as well as other agreeable forms of human bonding.” Of course, this wasn’t a new concept. “The old navy sometimes took families along,” Roddenberry later pointed out. “The wagon trains going west took families, of course.”
Star Trek’s creator also coined the term “Technology Unchained,” referring to it as a concept used by twenty-fifth-century poets to describe how technical improvement in their era had moved beyond developing things that were smaller or faster or more powerful, in favor of concentrating on quality of life improvements. The Great Bird of the Galaxy further emphasized this point in the design of a new larger, brighter, and less “battleship-sterile” starship, with the original Enterprise’s dials and gauges largely replaced by flat, programmable supercomputer access panels.
TNG’s holodeck (shown here in the episode “Code of Honor”) was a concept refined from earlier Trek incarnations.
One unique and dramatic use of technology to improve the quality of shipboard life was the holodeck. This had its roots, again, as far back as a never-realized concept postulated for the 1960s series—a holograp
hic entertainment center. This idea, called the “rec room,” was a major plot point in one of the animated Star Trek shows, “The Practical Joker,” but the idea of combining transporters and replication with a hologram system was not fully developed and finally filmed until TNG was born.
Finally, the writers’ guide opened with the familiar “These are the voyages” prologue, another link to the past, but it ended by promising to go “where no one has gone before,” a far less sexist phrase than the famous “no man” tag line that was still being used in the Trek films of the 1980s.
Assembling the Team
With a writers’ guide in hand, Roddenberry turned to filling out a production staff to further flesh out the writers’ bible and get the series pilot rolling. Trek veterans Justman, Milkis, and Gerrold were soon joined by newcomer Robert Lewin as a writing producer. This new position represented the division of responsibility needed on a complex show like Star Trek—a division that Roddenberry had first conceived of for the 1970s series.
Lewin, the first top-level staffer on the new series not associated with original Trek or any of its film sequels, joined the staff in January after being recommended by Justman, who had worked with him on The Man from Atlantis. The producer of The Paper Chase and the writer of hundreds of episodes for series like Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, and Rawhide told his new boss he didn’t know much about Trek or about science fiction and was told that he was wanted as a good character writer.
Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana, who served for two years as story editor on the original Trek and penned the introduction of Spock’s parents in the popular “Journey to Babel” episode, was hired by early December of 1986 to write the series’ two-hour pilot script. She later became an associate producer at GR’s invitation after he assured her the tone of this series would follow a new trail, not that taken by the movie features.
The initial design staff was also assembled from a crew of familiar names. Andrew Probert and Rick Sternbach, who were artists and fans as well as Trek movie contributors, were among the first to be signed on. Sternbach recalls pulling his car off the freeway when he heard the news of Trek’s revival on the radio. He called Susan Sackett, GR’s personal assistant, from the first available phone.
Probert, who was responsible for the final look of the starship Enterprise in the first film, had also worked on Battlestar Galactica, Airwolf, and Streethawk, and on the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Sternbach was assistant art director for Carl Sagan’s Emmy-winning Cosmos series on PBS and later worked on TV’s Greatest American Hero and the movies The Black Hole and Halloween II.
From the field of television commercial production in his native Hawaii came scenic artist Michael Okuda. His design submissions had impressed the producers of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and led to his being added to the TNG staff later in 1986 as a scenic artist. Okuda was in charge of designing the distinctive graphic look of consoles, computer readouts, door labels, and so forth for Starfleet and for alien cultures.
What was seen as merely a bonus in the beginning—the background in science and aerospace that all three men brought to their TNG jobs—later turned out to be a great asset. Their contributions eventually went far beyond their job descriptions. They helped enliven one of Gene Roddenberry’s oldest maxims by offering viewers some real science, without hitting them over the head with it.
GR tapped original Trek costume designer Bill Theiss to plan Starfleet’s new look, and Milkis and Justman helped bring in art director Herman Zimmerman.
“Bob and I together work[ed] very well,” Milkis recalled. “He and I totally supervised the development of the physical look of the show and hired the people. And then things would reach a point from time to time where we’d take them in to Gene and get his okay.”
As the team began feverishly working on the first-draft bible, memos that had been flying since October were being updated in light of the new questions that popped up daily. Lewin had a box taped to his desk just to hold them all.
Early in the process, egged on by fan and press reaction to the thought of a new Trek without the old cast, Roddenberry decided to completely avoid such original-series aliens as Romulans, Klingons, and even Vulcans. That worry proved groundless by midway through the first year, however, as new races, both friendly and hostile, began appearing. By the time the first revision of the writers’ guide was completed in February 4, 1987, some 907 officers and family members were said to be aboard the new Enterprise, now designated as the fifth one so named, NCC-1701-D. The final first-season writers’ guide of March 23 later increased the number of shipboard personnel to 1,012, its final mark, and honed the time frame to seventy-eight years after Kirk and Spock.
Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach view the Mordan city, the last landscape model built for TNG.
By mid-January 1987 Fontana’s first draft for the two-hour pilot telefilm “Encounter at Farpoint” was well underway. While it was the staff’s chief concern, advance scripts for the early first-season schedule were already being prepared by Gerrold and John D.F. Black, another veteran of the original series.
After working in separate quarters and one-on-one for weeks, the new series production team met as a full unit for the first time on February 18, 1987, having just received Fontana’s first draft for “Farpoint” only a few days earlier. Gathered around the table with Gene Roddenberry were Justman, Milkis, Lewin, Fontana, Gerrold, Theiss, Sackett, GR’s attorney-business manager Leonard Maizlish, Zimmerman, Probert, Sternbach, and Okuda; Herb Wright, another writing producer like Lewin, would soon be added. The staff discussed details of the show—such as the look of the new communicators, phasers, and tricorders—and specific production problems stemming from Fontana’s pilot script.
Finally a fifty-five-page first-season writers’ and directors’ guide was issued on March 23. This, too, was largely assembled by Gerrold and the staff and then polished by Roddenberry himself.
Of Stars and Starships
As the heart and soul of the new series continued to evolve over that winter of 1986-1987, so did its physical presence on the Paramount lot. Mindful that the budget constraints could be even more of a problem than they were in the sixties, Milkis and Justman as early as October were scrounging all they could from the existing inventory of Trek’s feature films, even to the point of merely redressing sets and miniatures and rehashing optical effects.
Justman recalled the day the two men were allowed to view the movies’ standing sets to see what use they could make of them. “Cats inhabit studios. They live on the stages,” he said, laughing. “And since this stage hadn’t been shot on in a long time it was shat on by a whole bunch of cats!”
“It was horrendous,” Milkis agreed. “You couldn’t even walk on the stage!”
Eventually, as Gene Roddenberry’s new concept of “Technology Unchained” evolved, a new Enterprise became a necessity. Though many of the film sets would be refurbished, the new look and feel of the twenty-fourth century would be fully symbolized by the bridge set, historically the most-filmed area aboard the starship.
The Great Bird had originally wanted a huge forward viewscreen four times the size of its predecessors, with a conference table right on the bridge,4 but those ideas gradually changed over the winter. A large open command area replaced the table, and the observation lounge became a separate room just “behind” the bridge.
The final layout reflected Roddenberry’s belief that the Enterprise’s basic functions should be automated. The simple conn and Ops (for “operations”) forward stations left their operators free for less mechanical tasks such as discussion and investigation. Probert had also designed a transporter just off the bridge, but GR wanted the characters to have conversations en route to the transporter room, so that idea was dropped.
In a memo dated November 9, Justman first proposed creating a captain’s ready room, a space close to the bridge where the crew could have private conversations. (Similar areas are used by today’s navy). Roddenbe
rry initially agreed with Probert, who proposed placing the office so that it opened onto the upper bridge level for more dramatic impact. But it was eventually moved down to its current location to provide a shorter, more direct route to the command chair.
In addition to the center seat, Probert included some other touches that would ring true to longtime fans: a dedication plaque and ship silhouettes on the walls, and a red warning sensor flasher at the base of the viewscreen. Improvements over the old design included more than one turbolift shaft and, in response to gibes about its ancestor’s comfort, a bathroom! Though no actual set was built, a door labeled “Head” was tucked out of sight in the aft starboard alcove leading to the conference lounge. The ready room got a private washroom as well.
The result was an Enterprise bridge set that, thanks to its nine-foot-tall viewscreen and sprawling overhead window, seems immense. In reality, however, it’s only thirty-eight feet wide, the same width as the original, but it is two feet longer and has a fourteen-foot ceiling. The side ramps and various levels add to the illusion of height.
Next, Probert turned his attention to the starship itself. Having done the final reworking of the TV-to-film refit of the old Enterprise, he largely based its Galaxy-class cousin—as the new design came to be called—on a “what if?” painting of an all-new starship he did shortly after the first film. Here again, the lines of the final model suggest that art and technology have merged into a design of sleeker, rounder contours, with windows—lots of them, in various sizes and shapes—to keep the crew and passengers in touch with their environment. Still, the overall design is dominated by the familiar sublight-driven saucer section and the battle module with warp nacelles.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 2