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Ronald D. Moore Talks About the Problems with Star Trek Continuity

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By GustavoLeao / 20:05, 12 June 2008 / General Star Trek

TrekMovie.com posted the first part of an extensive and exclusive interview with Battlestar Galactica producer Ronald D. Moore, in which he talks about his work on Star Trek The Next Generation and Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Here are few excerpts of the interview.

TrekMovie.com: Regarding continuity you were recently quoted saying something to the effect of "Star Trek has too much continuity."... Do you find it ironic that you were the guy back in the 90s saying "let's put more continuity in this thing" and are now the one saying there is too much?


Ron Moore:
Yah I do think that is ironic. I can appreciate that. When I started, you have to remember there were exactly three seasons of the Original Series and six movies and two seasons of Next Gen. It wasn't that hard to keep it all straight. You could sit in the writers room and keep it all in your head. By the end of Next Generation we able to do that. As we got deeper into Deep Space Nine it started to become more and more difficult to do that. And as Voyager started to get up and going and it was running concurrently with Deep Space Nine, we all started to get a little stir crazy with it. Because as a writer you want to be able to create things in the moment. You want to be able have something happen on the page. You want a character to talk about an experience that they had and be able to introduce a starship captain and introduce them into a scene and have them start talking about a mission they went on twenty years ago and they remember encountering the Romulan ambassador on a certain outpost and having this strange adventure with them. And you want to be able to invent that. It gets to a point now when you try and invent some scene and everyone goes "I'm sorry but twenty years ago the Romulan ambassador would not be at place" and you go "it doesn't matter how about the Tholian ambassador," "up no sorry, in episode so and so and this episode on Voyager determines the Tholians would be over here..." You start getting caged in. You start getting more and more aware of the strictures of what you can and can't do. And back stories and anecdotes and personal histories have to all fit within this vast map of all these intersecting points of continuity and it becomes incredibly straight jacketed.


The lack of creativity is profound and you start worrying more and more about just coloring between the lines than you are making new and engaging stories. Plus the simple fact that you can't keep it straight. We started having tech advisors on the set - in the art department, like the Okudas, keeping all the continuity for us. And they were becoming more and more useful. But it is frustrating to be in the writers room and tossing out stories then having to stop yourself and go ‘does this work?' ‘does this violate continuity?' And having to call people and check encyclopedias and look up information. You want to have it all in your head and just play. The Trek universe has got to the point where you can't play anymore. It just becomes forbidding. I think it is even more forbidding for a new audience to try to  come in and get involved in this new universe. Where do you pick up and how do you understand all these references. It is impenetrable at a certain point. So I was a big advocate of just wiping the slate and starting over. OK this was version one of Trek. Love it. Celebrate it. Watch it forever if that is your cup of tea, go ahead. Let's have version two...let's have another Starship Enterprise with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and let's tell a different version of the event's. Look at Shakespeare. How many versions of "Cleopatra" can the world stand? As many as you can think of. Let's just do a different take on it and get energy out of it and not worry about all the back stories and not get caught up in what is the first time we supposed to have seen the Romulans. Really we have to now say that we can never do any other back-story with the Romulans except that the first time a human being saw them they looked like Spock's father. We are wedding to that for now on even though it is kind of creaky and there is probably a better way to tell the Romulan story than to rely on that notion. It just seems like you want freedom. You want Trek to be fun. So make it fun.

The full interview (plus an audio version) can be found at TrekMovie.



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RE: Slavish | Report this post to moderator
By: gerbil (Odo's file, contact) @ 20:14:42 on Jun 13, 2008

I can blame the fans for forcing the writers into a corner. Do you remember when Enterprise was airing? I'd switch off the TV and turn to the TrekBBS or Trekweb and see a litany of complaints. I can write off the, "Argh, this episode was terrible!" complaints as opinions or jaded viewers. It was the replies along the lines of, "This episode was pretty good, but it violated continuity," were maddening.

It's it a good episode, if it accomplished what it set out to do, made you think, made you feel, or entertained you; what consequence is a continuity violation?

The concept of a sacred canon in fiction is relatively new. Moore is right in pointing to Shakespeare as an example. Look at James Bond, which has remained wildly popular. It constantly reinvents itself.

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RE: Slavish by TRexx @ 05:16:39 on Jun 14
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