As they contemplated a sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Paramount were faced with the same problem they’d encountered when making the first movie: finding a story that revolved around a big idea, but one that would allow for action and spectacle. They also wanted to keep costs firmly under control. There was talk of making the sequel a TV movie, but it quickly became clear that Shatner and Nimoy were only interested in coming back if it was shown in cinemas.
Gene Roddenberry pitched a story in which the Klingons went back in time to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy, forcing Kirk to ensure history stayed on track. It was swiftly rejected. While Roddenberry hadn’t been responsible for every disaster that had befallen Star Trek: The Motion Picture, he certainly wasn’t blameless, and the studio executives were happy to make him a scapegoat. He had redeemed himself a little by being a passionate and effective publicist for the movie in Star Trek fan circles. As before, it was felt that his “blessing” (Paramount actually used the word in memos) was vital to any Star Trek project. He was made executive consultant, a title that meant his name was featured prominently on the poster and credits, and that he was paid “a fee comparable to his producer’s salary on the first film—and a percentage of the net profits.”1 He would receive the script, and his notes would be passed to the director. The making of the movie would be left to others. It was in both Roddenberry and Paramount’s interest to portray Star Trek’s creator as deeply involved in the creative process. Publicly, Roddenberry was overseeing each movie, ensuring they conformed to his vision. In reality, he had next to no involvement. This is the deal that applied to the five Star Trek sequels made in Roddenberry’s lifetime.
Barry Diller, chief executive at Paramount, turned to Harve Bennett to take Roddenberry’s place. Bennett had worked in television, creating series that included The Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman. At a meeting with Diller and Charles Bluhdorn, head of Paramount’s parent company Gulf+Western, Bennett said he thought the first movie had been boring, and when he was told how much it had cost, said he could make five movies for the same money. A handshake later, and Bennett found himself in charge of making the sequel. When he was told of Roddenberry’s role as executive consultant, Bennett “asked if that meant I had to report to him. The answer: ‘absolutely not. Just consult with him; give him that to do.’ That is all I was told.”2
In November 1980, Bennett wrote a one-page synopsis of a story that involved Kirk discovering he had a son while fighting a revolution instigated by his old enemy, Khan. Within a month, Jack B. Sowards had developed this into a treatment where Khan plotted to steal the Omega System, a bomb the Federation was testing that could destroy a whole planet. Sowards was commissioned to write a script, and this first draft (delivered in February 1981) included Spock. Leonard Nimoy hadn’t wanted to return to the role, but was lured back with the promise that the character would be dramatically killed off early in the movie. Spock was to have a protégé, a young Vulcan called Mr. Wicks, who would take Spock’s place. Art director Mike Minor suggested that instead of a giant bomb, the Federation would create a device that transformed a world into an unspoiled, green paradise . . . even if it was used on an inhabited planet. Sowards’s second draft, completed in April, renamed Spock’s protégé “Savik,” and showed the new recruit losing a no-win scenario in a flight simulator. In this version Spock died at the end of the first act, and it ended with an epic space battle and the formation of a new planet. Bennett still wasn’t happy, and he brought in both Theodore Sturgeon and Samuel A. Peeples. In July Sturgeon wrote an outline featuring a female version of Savik (slightly renamed as “Saavik”), pairing up with Kirk’s son. Peeples delivered a full script in August that didn’t feature Khan, but introduced a subplot with Sulu and Chekov serving on a different Starfleet vessel. After a year’s labor, there were five versions of the script, and none of them was working.
Nicholas Meyer was hired to direct in late August 1981. Meyer had written the smart, revisionist Sherlock Holmes novel The Seven Percent Solution (1974) and the screenplay for the 1976 movie version, and he’d adapted and directed the time-traveling Jack the Ripper movie Time After Time (1979). He admitted from the start that he knew nothing about Star Trek except that it was set in the future, what the USS Enterprise looked like, and that there was a character with pointy ears. (The movie would begin with an in-joke to that effect: it started with a caption announcing it’s the twenty-third century, a display of the Enterprise on a screen, and a closeup of Mr. Spock’s ears.) After that, Meyer was in uncharted territory. He had found The Motion Picture colorless and solemn, and although the sequel had a tight budget, he insisted on redesigning the Starfleet uniforms, and making the technology a little clunkier and more cluttered.
The studio’s postmortem on Star Trek: The Motion Picture had concluded that essentially all the problems could have been avoided if there had been a completed script, and if the special effects team had been given a clear list of effects sequences early on, in order to have the time to carefully plan, test, and then integrate their work with the rest of the movie. When Meyer was hired, there was no approved script, and the movie had been booked into cinemas for a June 1982 release. The studio wanted the special effects team to start in two weeks. They suggested Meyer pick a favorite from the scripts, polish it, and make it, but Meyer had a proposal: “Why don’t we make a list of everything we like in these five drafts? Could be a plot, a subplot, a sequence, a scene, a character, a line even . . . and then I will write a new script and cobble together all the things we choose.”3
Meyer did this in twelve days, weaving together sequences from the various different drafts—the “no win” simulator sequence, Chekov’s service on another vessel, Khan’s search for the Genesis Device, Kirk learning he had a son, an epic space battle and Spock’s death saving the Enterprise. Some things fell out of the mix entirely—in Sowards’s script, Khan was to have developed psychic powers and drawn Kirk into a dreamscape where they fought hand-to-hand. Khan and Kirk never meet each other in final movie—Meyer brushed this objection aside, noting that Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots never met, either. A romantic plot involving Dr. McCoy was dropped entirely. There are places in the final movie where the seams show a little—the story starts with the Enterprise being used as a training ship, and is manned with cadets, but there’s very little to remind us of this once the Enterprise is underway. Khan steals the Genesis Device, but doesn’t have a use for it beyond it being bait to lure Kirk to him. Kirk finds out he has a son and reunites with his lost love, but that storyline barely moves beyond the reunion.
Meyer brought out themes Bennett had been keen on from the start, such as an acknowledgement that the characters were aging. The movie had a clear villain, out for revenge. It had fun literary references—the heroic sacrifice of Spock echoes Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, the book Spock gives Kirk as a birthday present at the start of the story; and Khan’s famous “Klingon proverb,” “revenge is a dish best served cold,” is taken from Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The whole movie is a rough remake of Moby-Dick, at least the Gregory Peck movie version, with Khan’s obsession matching Ahab’s. Khan dies stealing Ahab’s last words: “From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”
William Shatner wasn’t happy with the script, a fact that horrified Meyer. Bennett had more experience dealing with lead actors, and after they met, he was able to assure Meyer that Shatner was merely protective of the character, that he wanted Kirk to be initiating the action, to be, in Meyer’s words, “the first through the door” at the start of every scene. Meyer made some very minor rewrites, and Shatner was delighted with the results.4 Nimoy enjoyed the script, recognizing that in this remake of Moby-Dick he was the exotic Queequeg, somehow prescient of his own death. George Takei and DeForest Kelley were unhappy that Sulu and McCoy had so little to do, and both hesitated to sign up.5
Meyer delivered his first draft on September 10, 1981, a second draft on September 16, and the third on September 29. Principal photography began at the start of November. Rewrites continued, and the studio, happy with what they were seeing, authorized an increase in the special effects budget. The Enterprise bridge set had never been dismantled after the filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It served as the ship’s bridge, a starship training simulator and— slightly re-dressed and with some elements moved around—as the bridge of the starship Khan steals, the USS Reliant. The scenes on the Reliant were filmed first, meaning Ricardo Montalban, reprising his role in “Space Seed,” completed his work on the film before most of the regulars had even started. While the regular cast once again spent almost all their time on the bridge set, and the action concentrated on Kirk and Spock to the near exclusion of everyone else, the actors were far happier with the pace of filming. Walter Koenig and James Doohan had interesting subplots (Doohan’s, involving Scotty’s nephew being assigned to the ship and dying in Khan’s first attack, was cut from the cinematic release, but restored for most of the home video versions).
Although he claims it was entirely by accident, Meyer had written a script that had no scenes requiring crowds of extras or complicated and time-consuming matching up of live action and special effects. The bulk of the filming was completed on January 29. Two quick reshoots were made after a test screening. A scene was inserted clarifying that Kirk had known about his son, but had honored his mother’s request to stay out of his life (the movie remains a little confused as to whether David always knew he was Kirk’s son), and the final scenes were rejigged so the movie ended on a hopeful note, rather than a funereal one. The studio also rejigged Khan’s last scenes without Meyer’s consent.
The only big tussle with the studio was over the title. Meyer’s first draft was titled “The New Frontier,” but he wanted to call the movie The Undiscovered Country, a quote from Hamlet about death and a title he would use a decade later, when he returned to make the sixth film in the series. The studio ruled that the title would be The Vengeance of Khan. Very late in the day, rival studio Fox announced that the next Star Wars movie, released in 1983, would be called Revenge of the Jedi, and Paramount amended the name of their movie to The Wrath of Khan. The packaging for a few toys carrying the “Vengeance of Khan” title had already been printed. In the event, six months after The Wrath of Khan was released, the title of the Star Wars film was amended to Return of the Jedi.
Fans now hold The Wrath of Khan in very high regard, either citing it as the best of the movies, or knowing they have to carefully enunciate why they hold a dissenting opinion. The makers of subsequent Star Trek movies have been somewhat too enamored of it, with the tenth and twelfth, Nemesis and Into Darkness, being acknowledged near-remakes that manage to clutter up the simple story of the original. While Star Trek fans criticize the first movie for retreading the old episode “The Changeling,” they don’t seem to worry that The Wrath of Khan is pretty close in places to “Balance of Terror.” And while most fans cite Gene Roddenberry’s “optimistic vision” as the unique selling point of Star Trek, there is absolutely nothing utopian about Bennett and Meyer’s version of the twenty-third century. There’s no political message, philosophical or satirical allegory in The Wrath of Khan at all. It’s a straight-up adventure story about a battle of wits between a seasoned naval officer and a mad pirate.
Meyer met Gene Roddenberry once during production, saying “our contact was limited to a brief meeting at which we shook hands.”6 Harve Bennett knew Star Trek’s creator from their TV days and met him a few times. Those face-to-face meetings were very cordial.
Roddenberry hated The Wrath of Khan at every stage of development, and hated the final film. Copied in on every outline and draft of the script, he issued long, often derisive memos. Bennett understood why Roddenberry put up what he characterized as “stiff-necked resistance”7 to the interlopers who were making Star Trek without him; he considered every point made by Star Trek’s creator, and even altered a few details, usually those that touched on Roddenberry’s understanding of the characters or established lore of the show. Roddenberry was quickly disabused of the notion that he had any power to insist that all the changes he put forward would be made. Some of the objections were old bugbears. Roddenberry didn’t want space battles, and the last third of the movie was an extended battle between two Federation ships. He objected to a scene where Kirk used his phaser to vaporize an alien mind control worm that had crawled from Chekov’s ear— Roddenberry felt that Kirk ought to be fascinated by the creature and would want to capture it and have it studied in a lab. He baffled Bennett and Meyer by objecting that Kirk and his crew were behaving like they were in the military. Meyer recalls that Roddenberry
was emphatic that Starfleet was not a military organization but something akin to the Coast Guard. This struck me as manifestly absurd. For what were Kirk’s adventures but a species of gunboat diplomacy wherein the Federation (read America, read the Anglo-Saxons) was always right and the aliens were—in Kipling’s queasy phrase—“lesser breeds”? Yes, there was lip service to minority participation, but it was clear who was driving the boat.8
Bennett was not a Star Trek fan. Having been given the job of making a Star Trek movie, he’d sat down in a studio screening room, watched all seventy-nine episodes in order, and made extensive notes. Of course Starfleet was a military organization. The people in Star Trek wore uniforms and had ranks like captain and lieutenant, they were flying around in a ship that was armed to the teeth, and every week Kirk got into a fistfight with some bad guy. What Bennett wasn’t aware of was how Star Trek had evolved after its cancelation. Roddenberry had embraced and built on those changes, and now saw the series as a projection of humanist views into a utopian future. His memos asserted that by the twenty-third century, every member of the human race would have resolved all personal and interpersonal conflicts. Bennett watched an old TV show where Starfleet crewmen bickered, defied orders, fought over women, behaved arrogantly and selfishly—some rogue officers even became tyrants or warmongers. Meyer and Bennett have independently said they shrugged, then made what was essentially a Hornblower seafaring tale set in outer space.
Roddenberry particularly hated the death of Spock, feeling that killing such a central character was a mistake that would undermine the series. Leonard Nimoy was keen to leave, but Roddenberry was more familiar with the actor than Bennett, and understood Nimoy had blown hot and cold over playing the character in the past. Roddenberry was, of course, right—after all the fanfare and tears shed, Spock was resurrected in the very next movie. But the death of Spock was part of the plan from the earliest days of the sequel. It had appeared in the very first outline Bennett wrote, as a shock twist at the end of the first act. Roddenberry made his position clear. The studio stood by Bennett’s decision.
News spread like wildfire through the convention circuit that Spock was to die in the forthcoming Star Trek film, and fans were encouraged to write to producers to protest. Harve Bennett strongly suspected Roddenberry’s involvement, and would later discover Lincoln Enterprises selling copies of the movie outline.9
Meyer felt that the story would work better if Spock’s death came at the climax, but was faced with the prospect that his grand finale would be no surprise to a large chunk of the audience. While they were filming the flight simulator sequence that started the film, a way out of the no-win scenario presented itself: Spock—and almost every other regular—would simulate being “killed off” as part of the exercise. Fans would think they’d been hoodwinked, and breathe a sigh of relief . . . until the very end of the movie, when Spock heroically sacrificed himself.
Roddenberry was never confronted about his role in the leak and the subsequent fan campaign, but Bennett and the studio never had any doubt he was the culprit. Nowadays, studios go to great lengths to control movie scripts, routinely watermarking them so that the source of any leak can be traced, printing them using paper and ink that make the pages hard to scan or photocopy. Because the Star Trek II script had fallen into the hands of fans, two years later Star Trek III would have the distinction of being the very first movie where something like this was done. Everyone’s script was secretly given a unique mark, so that the studio could see whose copy had been duplicated. The twist of the third film was going to be the destruction of the Enterprise. Roddenberry was as angry about that as he had been about Spock’s death. Bennett was not particularly surprised to learn that, within days of the script being circulated, fans started writing letters complaining about this development—and that they’d somehow acquired copies of Roddenberry’s version of the script.
The second Star Trek movie beat the record for the highest grossing opening weekend at the US box office, and ended up taking just under $79m during the course of its run. This was a little less than the first film’s $82m, but it was impressive for two reasons. Sequels very rarely did as well as the first movie—a sequel was expected to make half the box office of the original, and was deemed a notable success if it made two-thirds of the previous film’s total, as The Empire Strikes Back and Superman II had. Secondly, of course, the movie had cost far less, $11.2m compared with, for the sake of argument, $35m. The studio had spent far less promoting the movie (although they’d also received far less from merchandise licenses). The production process had been smooth. The studio, crew, cast, fans, and reviewers were almost all far happier with the end result.
The magic formula had been discovered. There would be a third (1984), fourth (1986), fifth (1989), and sixth (1991) movie, and following those, there would be four films continuing the story of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Budgets rose over time, but were subject to strict spending caps. Star Trek IV ended costing a million dollars less than the $22m the studio had allocated for it, but on Star Trek VI, there wasn’t enough money to give the Starfleet uniforms trouser pockets.10
An unexpected windfall came from the emergence of home video rentals and sales in the 1980s. The Motion Picture had been released in October 1980. At the time, video cassettes were almost all sold to video stores to be rented out, and copies of Star Trek: The Motion Picture retailed for $80. They were quickly joined by five tapes each featuring two episodes of the original series. The studio probably anticipated that avid Star Trek fans would be renting these titles over and over again. What surprised them was how many fans were prepared to buy the tapes at that price. For The Wrath of Khan, they experimented with much lower pricing—$40, hoping to sell 60,000 copies in the first year. They sold more than twice that.11 The price of Star Trek III was dropped further, to $30, and the studio began releasing all seventy-nine episodes of the original series on tape. Steady sellers since the dawn of home video, Star Trek titles have always been among the first “back catalog” releases on new formats from Betamax and VHS, through DVD to Blu-Ray. The shows are now stalwarts of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. The original series movies have all generated more money for the studio on home video than they did in the cinema.
The studio stuck with the team that made The Wrath of Khan. Harve Bennett produced the first four sequels, and made a cameo appearance as the admiral who gives Kirk his mission at the start of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. After that, he left Paramount. Nicholas Meyer co-wrote the screenplay for the fourth movie, and wrote and directed the sixth. Leonard Nimoy became an important behind-the-scenes figure. He agreed to return to Star Trek III if he could direct it, and the studio were so impressed by his work that he took the helm of the fourth movie, too. After that, Nimoy went on to direct the hit comedy Three Men and a Baby (1987).
Because William Shatner and Nimoy’s contracts specified they were to receive exactly the same billing and benefits, Shatner was now entitled to direct two Star Trek movies. He approached the task of making Star Trek V with great gusto, and he made the most Roddenberryesque of any of the Star Trek sequels: the story, in which the Enterprise travels to the heart of the galaxy to encounter God, was reminiscent of a specific idea of Roddenberry’s, “The God Thing.” This fact was not lost on Roddenberry, who vetoed the original idea that the crew would really meet God. Shatner and Nimoy had become good friends by this point, but this didn’t stop Nimoy fighting to preserve his interpretation of Spock and demanding rewrites.
The result was disastrous. The Final Frontier was not a good movie. Shatner’s analysis over a quarter of a century on is that “Between the demands of the studio, the authority of Roddenberry as protector of the canon, Leonard’s Spockiness, and the limited budget I was given, the script never reached its potential.”12
It’s an action-packed movie, there is a big idea at the heart of it, and it’s easily DeForest Kelley’s biggest and most nuanced role in the Star Trek movies. The money, though, clearly ran out at some point before the special effects were completed—Industrial Light and Magic, who’d worked on the previous films, were busy on other movies, and it’s missing their expertise. Star Trek IV’s fish-out-of-water comedy had found its way to a more general audience. Star Trek V sank in a summer crowded with blockbusters— Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II, Dead Poets Society, and towering over them all, Tim Burton’s Batman. There was, by that point, a new Star Trek television series with a fresh crew, and the original series—and its cast—were looking increasingly creaky.
Roddenberry’s role diminished with each movie. His official biographer says,
Gene’s files tell the story. There are several storage boxes holding material from the first film. The amount of material generated by his consulting diminishes with each successive film. By Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, there was less than half a small storage box of material, mostly scripts and script revisions.13
By now he’d told a number of friends and family he was reconciled to stepping away from Star Trek.
One important factor may have been that his starship had finally returned to port laden with treasure. By Paramount’s calculations, the original series was now in profit: “between June 1984 and July 1987, [Roddenberry] received five profit participation payments for the original series totaling approximately $5,300,000,”14 and money continued to come in regularly after that. Half went to his ex-wife, as had been agreed in his divorce settlement, but a substantial sum remained. While his role on the movies came with little to no influence over the product, it gave him an additional seven-figure sum every couple of years, both his consultation fee as executive producer and his share of the profits.
Roddenberry turned his thoughts to writing a science fiction novel, Report from Earth. This was the third novel he’d started in five years, following the unfinished Star Trek novel The God Thing and the novelization of The Motion Picture. It was a form of writing that allowed him control over the story, and he’d not sold the book to a publisher, so he had no pressing deadline. His authorized biography states he worked on it “sporadically” from early 1981.15 Report from Earth was about Gaan, an alien who’d placed its consciousness in an artificial human body in order to explore our world. The idea was that the book would be told as a first-person narrative, Gaan struggling a little with fluent English and figures of speech. In November 1985’s issue of Starlog, Roddenberry went into some detail, and considered it a current project, although over four years later, it was clear progress had been slow and he was still in the preliminary stages. “I’m in a period of growth and expansion. I’m taking long, hard looks at the world and what’s happening in it and analyzing and thinking. I’m trying to become acquainted with the universe—with the part of it I occupy—and trying to settle, for myself, what my relationship with it is.”16
It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to articulate an idea like this. Creating an artificial body to investigate humans is exactly what V’Ger does in The Motion Picture when it duplicates Ilia. If we couldn’t guess already, Gaan was another variation on the Spock/Questor character—the latest, and not quite the last, of Roddenberry’s logical philosophers who are always polite, but have poor social skills and an outsider’s perspective on the human race, and who wonder if such a prejudiced, immature species is likely to survive. Gaan’s quest resembled Roddenberry’s own. At the start of the Starlog interview he says, “Gaan finds us to be remarkable creatures, although he believes us to still be in childhood—or just barely getting into adolescence. But considering all we’ve achieved, we’re remarkable!”17
At the end of the same interview, he gives his own view, and it’s difficult to see much distance between him and the protagonist of his novel: “What we face is the excitement of evolving as a lifeform. We’re still a very young form, and it seems to use that we make terrible mistakes and do so much wrong. But really, we’re just growing out of childhood.”18
Star Trek fandom had a word for it. In 1973, Paula Smith had written a story for the fanzine Menagerie that was a parody of a sub-genre of Star Trek fan fiction in which a plucky female character arrives on the Enterprise, everyone loves her, Kirk (or Spock) seduces her and then she saves the day with her amazing skills. The character in the parody was called Lt. Mary Sue, and the term “Mary Sue” caught on as a way of describing characters who were conveniently super-competent. As many early Star Trek fan fiction writers were young women—as were so many Mary Sues—the term soon evolved to mean a character who was a blatant, always idealized, version of the story’s author. The term was perhaps a little sexist, and more than a little ironic, given that Roddenberry freely admitted that Lieutenant Rice, Captain Kirk, and Mr. Spock were all examples of him putting an idealized version of himself into his fiction (and he wasn’t done yet: Star Trek: The Next Generation would manage to incorporate three Gene Roddenberry surrogates).
In lectures and interviews, when he talked about a problem—personal, professional, or political—Roddenberry was fond of using some variation of the phrase “if a Martian had just arrived on Earth, he would see what we do and be unable to explain why we do things this way.” Roddenberry felt a little like a wry, philosophical alien himself. In the Starlog interview, he admitted that not all the notes he was making would end up in Report from Earth. Asked when he would finish it, he said, “I’m a couple of years away, I think about these things, and I make notes. Being a computer nut, I put them in my computer and file them away and database them, so I’m accumulating a great deal of information.”19 Susan Sackett says that “he only completed about seventy pages,”20 almost exactly as much as he wrote of The God Thing.
Roddenberry was ill. He continued to make many appearances at Star Trek conventions and for television interviews, and was reasonably good at hiding his poor health, but as he hit sixty, his lifestyle was catching up with him. He had always drunk heavily, chainsmoked tobacco, and since the mid-Seventies, he’d frequently smoked cannabis. He’d started using cocaine during the production of The Motion Picture, and this had become a habit. For twenty years, he’d popped all sorts of pills: amphetamines to increase his workrate, and various legal, illegal, prescription, and non-prescription antidepressants, painkillers, stimulants, and sleeping pills. He rarely exercised, barring a few short bursts of attempting to get in shape, and was overweight. Susan Sackett reports he was impotent. He had high blood pressure, and took medication for it that didn’t sit well with alcohol or the other pills he was taking.
Roddenberry turned sixty-five in August 1986, Star Trek’s twentieth anniversary year. The fourth movie in the series, The Voyage Home, was in production, and would be the most successful to date at the box office. The original series was selling strongly on VHS, there was a vibrant series of original novels and a monthly DC comics series. There were Star Trek conventions all around the world, and the biggest were huge affairs, run professionally. Star Trek had never been more popular or high profile. Star Trek was firmly part of the pop culture world, with Roddenberry’s role prominently acknowledged. The only slight cloud on the horizon, in fact, was that Star Trek was occasionally portrayed by the studio as coming solely from the mind of Gene Roddenberry, and other people who had worked on the series bristled a little at that.
Roddenberry played golf, a sport Majel had introduced him to. His wife was a great deal better at it than he was, one friend saying, “Majel was a great golfer. She won a lot of the putting events over the years.” She was less than serene on the course. At Barrett’s memorial service in 2009, “Regular golf companion Sue Anderson got a laugh from the crowd when she noted the first time she met Roddenberry at the Bel Air Club and how she ‘had never heard a lady speak that way on a golf course before.’”
Roddenberry wasn’t pushing for TV or movie projects anymore. He confided to friends that he didn’t think he had the energy for the twelve or fourteen hour working days that making a television show required. He understood and accepted that his executive consultant role on the Star Trek movies was limited. Roddenberry was, in other words, easing into retirement.
Then, almost without warning, he was invited to create and produce a sequel Star Trek television show.