Posted by Joey Peters on Feb 28, 2025
How One Man Took Credit for Star Trek
"He wanted to put a gigantic codpiece on the Ferengi," Wright stated. "He spent 25 minutes explaining to me all the sexual positions the Ferengi could go through. I finally said, 'Gene, this is a family show, on at 7:00 on Saturdays. He finally said, 'Okay, you're right.'"
(Cinefantastique, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, pp. 60-61)
People have this understanding that Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek. On a level it’s true. He pitched it. He acquired funding for it. He assembled the people that made it.
One of the things that reflects badly on our culture is that we attribute large scale works of culture to only one set of hands. There are individual mediums of art but film is necessarily a collaboration. We imagine Dungeons & Dragons sprang fully formed from the mind of E. Gary Gygax, and not that it was an evolved form of Dave Arnison’s Blackmoor games which themselves were fantastic variants of David Wesley’s Napoleonic war game where too many participants showed up and he had to improvise. We imagine Stan Lee invented the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man and Captain America out of whole cloth, ignorant of the labor done by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Joe Simon, Artie Simek and all the rest. For Stan Lee this was a particularly impressive trick, because at least while working on the comics themselves he happily credited his co-creators but as time has worn on the self-aggrandizing legend of Stan Lee grew and grew, and even today people only really know of Jack Kirby from his later fights with Marvel Comics.
Imagining that a special auteur is the source of culture is one of the most perverse artifacts of capitalist culture.
Gene Roddenberry joined the Air Force at the outset of World War 2, ultimately going on to be a pilot. After the war he spent some time as a civilian pilot until a crash in 1947 caused him to drop out of that world. He joined the LAPD in 1951 and spent five years on the force until he broke into Hollywood in 1956. He was one of the best in the world at cheating on his wife.
He was the one who came up with the idea of Star Trek: a starship, a captain, Mr. Spock, and the general idea of how to portray science fiction in a dramatic format in one hour. While this was no small feat, many of the things we think of as Star Trek were created by others.
Gene Coon was another writer brought on early and who contributed many of the aspects we think of as quintessential Star Trek… The Klingons, the United Federation of Planets, Starfleet Command, Zefram Cochrane (the inventor of warp travel), Khan and the Augments. He wrote the beloved episodes “Arena,” “A Taste of Armageddon,” “Space Seed,” The Devil in the Dark,” “Errand of Mercy,” “Metamorphosis,” and “A Piece of the Action,” as well as the much maligned and underrated episodes “Bread and Circuses” and “Spock’s Brain.” This is a real all-killer no-filler collection of episodes, even if “Spock’s Brain” might kill you for the wrong reason. All of these things really filled out the early universe of Star Trek. The Klingons were one of two major rival civilizations our heroes faced off against. Likewise, while the original series had scant references to the civilization that produced the Enterprise and sent it out on adventures many of those had been concretized by Gene Coon. He is likely the source of the humorous tone of much of the original series, as well as the simmering conflict between Spock and Doctor McCoy.
Dorothy Fontana (known generally as D.C. Fontana to disguise her sex) was another incredibly important writer in the development of Star Trek. She wrote “Charlie X,” “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and “Journey to Babel” and after this she worked as a script editor on the series. Outside of Leonard Nimoy, Fontana is probably the most important influence on the early development of Vulcan culture, having developed Spock’s relationship with his father, Sarek. In Star Trek canon the Vulcan species are the major alien culture present in the early franchise, especially the original series and movies. She also introduced the Andorians and Tellarites, who were extremely marginal in the franchise until Star Trek: Enterprise and since then have become core Federation species. That is mostly owing to the fact that they required elaborate makeup to portray and such a thing was not budgetarily possible until the early 2000s. She wrote the classic episode “Yesteryear,” the only one from Star Trek: The Animated Series which is generally considered to be canon, also about Spock’s history and Vulcan culture. Her influence actually outlasted Gene Roddenberry’s—she worked on The Next Generation and even wrote an episode of Deep Space Nine, “Dax,” an early classic in it’s run.
I am mostly trying to skewer the myth of the auter as it relates to Gene Roddenberry, but it’s important to remember that writers are not the only creative minds that worked on the franchise. Star Trek is a group effort of now thousands of people working together for more than half a century. I’ve already hinted at the actors present, but one other major creative voice in the mix was Matt Jeffries. He was brought on early by Roddenberry to design the ship that eventually became the Starship Enterprise. He was the art director throughout the original series (and for the ill fated Phase II, which led into The Motion Picture). More than anyone else he defined the look of Star Trek.
The Legend of Big Rod
Star Trek gets credit for presenting a great progressive future. Some of this is earned. In the original pilot Majel Barrett played Number One, the female second in command under Captain Pike. She was removed from the series by studio interference, with competing claims that TV executives weren’t ready for a woman second in command and the TV executives balking at Gene Roddenberry’s mistress being given a marquee roll because of nepotism. If the second interpretation is accurate they didn’t object to Barrett’s later (much lesser) role as Nurse Chapel. But of course, all of this comes from Gene Roddenberry’s recollection, and it’s a message in service of making him look like a great progressive hero.
Very shortly afterwards, in the second episode of the actual series, “The Corbomite Maneuver” Uhura was added to the Enterprise crew. She was a black woman whose job is clear within the military hierarchy of the ship. She is not a servant, she is another bridge crew member. Somewhat problematically, Nichelle Nichols, the actress who portrayed Uhura, also had an affair with Roddenberry. A pattern is emerging, but also Uhura was probably the most important female role on the original Enterprise. She had about as much to do as anybody who wasn’t Kirk, Spock or McCoy.
And also introduced in “The Corbomite Maneuver” is the Enterprise’s senior helmsman, Sulu played by George Takei. During the original series Sulu is mostly a generic bridge crew member who occasionally gets moments to shine. Interestingly, in the episode where everyone gets space drunk and he ends up swinging a sword around the sword he swings is not a katana, instead a rapier, but Sulu’s ancestry beyond being vaguely Asian isn’t clearly defined until the movies, where we learn he has Japanese family and grew up in San Francisco. But it is important to be said, Sulu is not a walking stereotype.
But that doesn’t mean that the original series never delves into racist depictions of minorities or weird nationalism. The most egregious version of this is in “The Omega Glory.” The Enteprise is dispatched to Omega IV, where they find the Starship Exeter empty in orbit. After beaming over to investigate the crew are infected with some virus that will turn them into powder so they have to go down to the planet for some reason. On the planet they find the captain of Exeter who has become involved in a war between the Kohms and the Yangs. The Kohms are Asiatic stereotypes, while the Yangs are American barbarians that wear the American flag as a cape and surf on bald eagles. Captain Kirk teaches them the constitution and fucks off. And who was the marine who wrote “The Omega Glory?” Why, Albert Einstein—wait, no, I just looked it up. It’s Gene Roddenberry again.
Likewise, the representation of yeomen on the Enterprise undermines the general progressive portrayal of the crew. Here is a description from the Star Trek series bible:
Played by a succession of young actresses, always lovely. One such character has been well established in the first year, "Yeoman Janice Rand", played by Grace Lee Whitney. Whether Yeoman Rand or a new character provided by the writer, this female Yeoman serves Kirk as his combination Executive Secretary-Valet-Military aide. As such, she is always capable, and a highly professional career girl. As with all female Crewman aboard, during duty hours she is treated co-equal with males of the same rank, and the same level of efficient performance is expected. The Yeoman often carries a small over-the-shoulder case, a Tricorder, about the size of a small handbag, which is also an electronic recorder-camera-sensor combination, immediately available to the Captain should he be away from his Command Console.
Yikes. There are some implications that male yeomen serve elsewhere in Starfleet, however in the original series we exclusively see female yeomen who function pretty much entirely to be sex objects and bring Captain Kirk coffee. There’s lip service paid to the yeomen on Enterprise being “co-equal” but that is not how they are portrayed on the series. We never see them be anything but maids and targets of desire.
And this is common with female characters in the original series and even clear through to The Next Generation. Minor female characters often exist to excite one of the male characters and drive their actions through the plot.
The series made important first steps in many regards. It includes the first interracial kiss on television, between a mind controlled Uhura and Kirk (for all their progressive nature they could not allow the kiss to be consensual) and it highlights the problems with how female characters are portrayed.
The culmination of this is in the final original series episode: “The Turnabout Intruder.” It is unfortunate that the series ended here, to say the least. In this episode, penned by Roddenberry himself, one of Captain Kirk’s previous jilted lovers uses a machine to steal Kirk’s body because “women can’t be captains.” Spock immediately recognizes that Kirk is acting strangely and quickly moves to neutralize the woman inhabiting the body of his captain.
In the final analysis, I think Gene Roddenberry did in fact have a progressive vision for Star Trek. He hired D.C. Fontana after all. And Gene Coon was a homosexual, and having him as an important voice among Star Trek was not a problem. But sometimes Gene Roddenberry let his lust for money, fame and, well, lust, get away from him.
Case in point, when Alexander Courage composed the theme song to Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry wrote terrible lyrics for it in secret so that he could scrape up royalties.
After Star Trek was canceled Gene Roddenberry kept the spark alive by building up a strong parasocial relationship with his the Star Trek fanbase. This is very similar to what Stan Lee was doing at about the same time, and what Gary Gygax tried and failed to do in the 80’s. He was trying to create the “brand” of Gene Roddenberry. Star Trek: The Animated Series ran in the early 70’s, a direct successor show with much of the original cast. Gene Roddenberry spent the 70’s running around to fan conventions, telling stories and trying to take the maximal level of credit for Star Trek. By this point Gene Coon had passed away and couldn’t defend his contributions to the canon, which Big Rod happily took credit for. D.C. Fontana, at least, followed along on the convention circuit and maintained her position as another contributor to Star Trek.
As the 70’s wore on Gene Roddenberry nearly got a second live action Star Trek series produced: Phase II. It would feature new adventures on a refit Enterprise with at least some of the original crew. It was constantly on the edge of being greenlit and then falling back until Star Wars came out. At that time space opera came into vogue and studios scrambled to ride the coat tails of it’s success. That is how Star Trek: The Motion Picture came to be.
In the previous decade Big Rod came to believe all the hype he produced about being the big progressive bird of the galaxy. Most of the original crew returned, with a few new characters added for the movie. Lieutenant Ilia is a bald sexy lady from the bald sex lady planet and she had to take a vow of celibacy because she’s too good at sex. Uh oh, Big Rod is up to his old tricks. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the most Gene Roddenberry thing from the Star Trek franchise. It is horny in weird ways that don’t make sense, ponderous in ways that are hard to think about, and it thinks it’s a lot more profound than it actually is. In the wake of Star Wars it was still a moderate success, but all of Gene Roddenberry’s bullshit was starting to become a problem.
For subsequent sequels Roddenberry was allowed an advisory role where he would complain about the supposed progressive values that his franchise celebrated and not be listened to. This was for the best. Pretty much all fans accept the original series of Star Trek movies from Wrath of Khan to The Undiscovered Country are better for his lack of involvement.
But that didn’t mean that he was completely done with the franchise. As the popularity of the movies continued it became inevitable that the series would return to it’s home: television.
Star Trek: The Next Generation is absolutely foundational to how I see the world. The Enterprise-D is a humane meritocracy that tries to live up to all the humanist values Roddenberry attached to himself during the 70’s. Still, Troi and Dr. Crusher are almost always either sex objects or potted plants. Roddenberry himself was getting on in years, but he managed to attach himself to the production and they needed him to maintain an air of legitimacy with the fandom, which would likely rebel against an all new Enterprise and crew. Meanwhile, Rick Berman was brought in by Paramount to maintain control of the project.
But that didn’t happen all at once, and ironically, it was only really cemented as Roddenberry himself was extricated from the production.
The first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation is an absolute mess. The pilot was written by Gene Roddenberry and D.C. Fontana together, although in later years Fontana has maintained that Roddenberry edited a lot of her original writing out. The writers room for TNG was a horror show. Big Rod himself was on the way out physically, almost always either infirm or allegedly out of his mind on drugs. In the ensuring years since the original series Roddenberry promoted Majel Barrett from mistress to wife and he gave her two more roles by way of nepotism, as Lwaxana Troi and the voice of the Enterprise’s computer. Lwaxana is much maligned by the fandom, although I mostly attribute this to her role in the story as being explicitly annoying and the overall science fiction fandom having skewed more misogynistic since the original series, and lacking the narrative analysis to understand what she’s trying to do. Barrett is legitimately great in later episodes of TNG and DS9.
Up until Star Trek: Picard, the first season of TNG was the worst the franchise ever stooped to including a sequel to the space drunk episode of the original series and, worst of all, “Code of Honor.” In “Code of Honor” the Enterprise visits Space Africa. The Space Shaman wants to add Tasha Yar to his harem, which causes his wife to challenge Tasha to a trial by combat where they fight to the death with a spiky bird. The way Space Africa is portrayed Rudyard Kipling would be horrified and ask why it was so racist. In “Justice” the Enterprise visits the Aryan wet dream planet where perfectly sculpted blond haired blue eyed jocks and beach babes walk around with white handkerchiefs carefully dangled over the bits of them that aren’t proper to show on television. Wesley Crusher, Big Rod’s precocious child self-insert character, steps on some flowers and so he’s sentenced to death.
Somewhere during the first season Maurice Hurley was appointed head writer. Meanwhile, Roddenberry’s attorney Leonard Maizlish was running conflicting messages from Big Rod himself. Maizlish drove staffers who came from the original Star Trek series away, but the situation in the writer’s room was enough of a mess that they hadn’t really produced anything too great at any rate. Hurley did his best to maintain an iron grip on the production and maintain Roddenberry’s rules for Star Trek.
Exactly what the rules for Star Trek were isn’t entirely clear. The one that gets cited most often is that humans in the 24th century do not have internal conflicts. Other ones get cited with some regularity, such as no “pirate” stories. Within the TNG series bible there are numerous examples of what not to do, including episodes featuring psychic powers (out of vogue since the 60’s), using fantasy tropes like swords and sorcery, or retreading stories about original series characters or species. The one rule among those that I find extremely ironic is that the Enterprise and her crew should not act as “galactic police.” How about that, Officer Roddenberry?
Frankly, some of the episodes would have benefited from a bit of that. In “Symbiosis” the Enterprise comes into contact with the junkie planet and the drug dealer planet, who have a conflict because a shipment of junk poison was destroyed on it’s way to the junkie planet. Ultimately the Enterprise decides it’s best to not get involved at all and force the junkies on the junkie planet to quit cold turkey, a recipe for good things that would definitely work. This isn’t even me making fun of the subtext of the episode, that’s just what happens. Ideally the Enterprise should have aided the space junkies at least, to hell with your stupid Prime Directive.
Glimmers of what will come later exist. In the episode “The Neutral Zone,” the Enterprise unfreezes cavemen they find from the stupid ages (the 1990’s). One of the cavemen is a rock and roll star who is wowed by being woken up in the 24th century and given a $5 carnival guitar. One of the other cavemen is actually a woman, who was a mother who died young and her husband couldn’t handle it, so he froze her. This character ends up being one of the best fleshed out female characters in early TNG somehow (and rather pathetically). The final one is an evil billionaire who was frozen so he could make more money in the future, who increasingly blows his stack until Picard explains that capitalism has been over for hundreds of years you little freak, enjoy your fucking holodeck.
It’s a miracle that the series continued after it’s first season. As time went on Roddenberry got increasingly “out of it” and his influence on the series waned. There was less sheer chaos and unclear leadership, so while season two was no great shakes, it was a massive improvement over the first season, even though it got disrupted by a WGA strike. But after that Maurice Hurley left as head writer and was (eventually) replaced with Michael Piller.
By season three the show started to get properly good. As much as I hate to admit it, a big part of that is that Rick Berman maintained whatever Roddenberry’s rules were, despite being an evil capitalist that didn’t believe in them. That’s not to say Berman is a great hero of Star Trek. He pushed back on depictions of homosexuality during this period. Many of the cast and crew have horror stories about him.
My most hated TNG episode, yes, it’s not “Code of Honor,” hating “Code of Honor” would be like hating a dog. It can’t help that it’s a horrendous mess. It never had a chance. But at any rate, my most hated TNG episode is “The Outcast” from season five, when The Next Generation was at the height of it’s power. In “The Outcast” the Enterprise is called to help retrieve a shuttle by the J’naii, an alien species without gender. Except… all the J’naii are played by women with only a moderate level of loaf and bad hair cuts. They end up giving the feeling of being the planet of the lesbians. Supposedly, there was talk of hiring male actors but Rick Berman shut it down. Of course Riker meets one of these space lesbians and she reveals that actually she’s straight, but it’s massively taboo in her society to want to fuck men. Her sexual deviancy is discovered and she’s forced through conversion therapy, which works. I understand what it was trying to go for, but the casting completely breaks it. This is Star Trek: The Next Generation at it’s peak. It shouldn't be fucking up this bad.
The lesson to learn from this is that sometimes you have to divorce the meaning of a person from their actual life and experiences. The values Roddenberry espoused but didn’t live up to are good values. We need to build an antiracist, post-capitalist humanist future. I think there’s even probably a place for the weird horniness, but you have to be careful with that one. The actual man was a cop, a scammer and a gross little goblin pervert.