Gene Roddenberry had been seriously ill for a long time. Even so, it came as a shock to the cast and crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation when people were summoned to Michael Piller’s office at three o’clock on the afternoon of October 24, 1991 and the announcement was made that he’d died. He had not been a day-to-day presence on the show for some time, but everyone understood how central he had always been.
Five years before Roddenberry’s death, Star Trek had been an increasingly creaky-looking Sixties TV show on endless reruns and a movie franchise where the cast weren’t far off retirement age. Now, it was a vibrant, highly lucrative property with a bright multimedia future.
Gene Roddenberry had died a rich man, but he also died at a point where it was clear Star Trek was going to have a long and lucrative future. The Next Generation’s fifth season was just underway, and it had a couple more seasons to go, but plans were already in place to make the seventh Star Trek movie a Next Generation one. The end of Star Trek VI fell over itself to make the point, with Kirk making a final log entry that modified the original series’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before” to The Next Generation’s more inclusive “Where No One Has Gone Before,” and the movie ended with him and his crew literally flying off into the sunset, before the actors signed off—the end credits featured the cast’s autographs.
In May 1992 Roddenberry’s first wife Eileen went to court to clarify exactly what “Star Trek” was. In 1969, when their divorce settlement was reached, the definition had been easy: it was a canceled TV show. She was entitled to half the profits of a series so far in the red that it looked impossible it would ever show a profit. Now, Eileen took the estate to court arguing that “Star Trek” meant the whole franchise—movies, The Next Generation, all future Star Trek projects, and the associated merchandise.
Majel Roddenberry’s legal team wanted the court to rule that “Star Trek” meant what it would have in 1969, when the settlement was reached—the three seasons of the original TV show. Their argument was that after the divorce Gene and Majel had made a strenuous joint effort to support the show, and that the “unprecedented” revival was a result of that. Having recorded the strenuous circuit of Star Trek lectures Roddenberry undertook in the 1970s and the mid-1980s, the documents state that “By 1975 the efforts of Gene, Majel and loyal Star Trek fans were beginning to pay off. Paramount wanted to do something based on Star Trek and finally decided on a big budget feature film.”1
The estate argued that Eileen had actually been overpaid, as some of her money had been a share of Gene’s payments for work done—consultation fees, writing scripts, advances—rather than “profits.”
Susan Sackett—unceremoniously sacked so soon after Roddenberry’s death that when she went back to her office from the announcement, she found studio security guards there to prevent her from entering—helped Eileen Roddenberry’s team assemble a video montage that was shown in court. It showed parallel scenes of the opening titles, phasers and tricorders, Klingons and Vulcans, and the two captains stressing the importance of the Prime Directive. The aim was to demonstrate that Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation were “indelibly intertwined.” The judge, Macklin Fleming, had never seen Star Trek before. The first round went to Eileen, with the court ruling that she was entitled to a 50 percent share of all the profits Gene (and now his estate) earned from The Next Generation. Next, a jury decided the level of compensation, and Eileen was awarded $4.5m in overdue residuals and profits, and $900,000 in punitive damages from the estate for withholding them.
Leonard Maizlish had been Roddenberry’s lawyer at the time Norway and Lincoln Enterprises were set up. He’d negotiated the divorce settlement, he’d advised Roddenberry what he should pay Eileen in the eighties. The jury found him guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud for his part in withholding earnings from Eileen, although they assessed no damages against him. Maizlish was very ill by this point, and died September 7, 1994.
However, when the jury did not award Eileen any participation profits from the animated series, the movies and merchandising, she eventually appealed to the California Supreme Court, which refused to hear the appeal. This left intact a state appeals court ruling in favor of Gene’s estate. Also, the estate appealed the lower court’s decision and had Judge Fleming’s judgment overturned as well, ruling that Eileen was entitled to a share of the profits from the original series, but nothing else.2
The appellate court overturned the jury’s decision on April 16, 1996, agreeing with the Roddenberry estate’s argument that what was at issue was not whether Star Trek: The Next Generation was Star Trek, but that payment should be based on language in the settlement that said Eileen was entitled to one-half of all the income from Star Trek, “so long as that income was earned on account of services already performed, as distinguished from income for services to be performed.” In other words, Eileen was entitled to profits from the original series, but nothing after that. The court ruled that the estate had withheld some money Eileen was due, but after four years of legal action, it was a big win for Majel Barrett.3 Two months later, the estate successfully argued to disinherit Dawn, Gene’s younger daughter.
The will left $300,000 to Gene’s sister and his mother (who survived her son), and $175,000 to Susan Sackett. Nothing was left to his brother, Bob. Roddenberry bequeathed $500,000 to each of his three children and set up a trust fund which would share the estate between them on Majel Barrett’s death—half to his son, the other half split between his two daughters. The vast majority of the rest of the estate, estimated to be worth a little over $30m, went to his widow.
As executor of the estate, Majel Barrett had considerable power. Engel states, “the terms of the will enable the executor to pay down the costs of the will’s administration using these cash gifts . . . even if the costs reduce the value of the gifts to zero.”4 Dawn began a legal action against the estate early in 1993, claiming that her father had always told her he would split things equally between his three children. Suggesting that he had been in no fit state to understand the consequences of revisions to his will made in August 1990, she succeeded in an early hearing in having Majel Barrett temporarily removed as executor of the estate. In November 1993, though, Dawn withdrew the case when her husband was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer (he died in May 1994). Susan Sackett reports that she had also become wary of newspaper coverage of the case: “One of the tabloids had printed a sleazy, misinformed story that claimed Gene’s daughter was branding him a drunken sot. Dawn cried for weeks over this one-sided defamation of his character, she was determined not to let it happen again.”5 The Roddenberry estate’s lawyers then successfully argued that by disputing the case, Dawn had fallen foul of a clause that stipulated “if any beneficiary under this will in any manner, directly or indirectly, contests or attacks this will or any of its provisions, any share or interest in my estate given to that contesting beneficiary is revoked,” and she was cut out of the inheritance.6
With lawsuits settled, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry was now in firm control of Gene’s estate, including the intellectual property, the Norway Corporation and Lincoln Enterprises. Star Trek was at a peak of popularity. Other shows were starting to emulate The Next Generation’s “first run syndication” model, and home video could be very lucrative, so there were a variety of new ways to get a television series on air. It was well known in fan circles that Gene Roddenberry had plenty of unfinished projects and ideas for shows that hadn’t seen the light of day. Barrett-Roddenberry took a leaf from other family managed literary estates, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s and particularly J.R.R. Tolkien’s. She would cooperate with existing business partners (Paramount on Star Trek, in her case), while touting Gene’s “lost” work to other studios and publishers. She would seek to ensure her late husband’s “values” were preserved in work bearing his name, and she would make very sure that name appeared prominently. Central to this was making clear that, for what it was worth, Gene’s power to give the Roddenberry seal of approval had passed exclusively to his widow.
Paramount owned Star Trek, and however optimistic Barrett-Roddenberry was about the prospects for other projects, she understood that Star Trek would remain her bread and butter. There was an abundance of Star Trek in the decade after Gene Roddenberry’s death: the Next Generation movies were made; Deep Space Nine was joined on television by Voyager, both running for seven seasons; and soon after Voyager ended, Enterprise started its run. All appeared with the credit “Based on Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry,” and the estate was paid fees and a share of the profits. These were substantial. Unlike the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation was in profit by the time it ended. The studio confirmed this a few months later, in January 1993, and an initial payment of $6.8m was made to Roddenberry’s estate, followed by multimillion-dollar payments every six months since.
At some point in the last twenty-five years, it’s likely that the Roddenberry estate’s accountants and the studio’s bookkeepers have quibbled over definitions or line items of royalty statements, but if so, they’ve done it in private. The Roddenberry estate never seems to have sued the studio, although that’s an almost routine part of doing business in Hollywood. Both parties seem happy with the deal.
The artistic direction of the Star Trek franchise was firmly in the hands of Rick Berman. Having been executive producer—what’s known informally now as the “show-runner”—since the third season of The Next Generation, he would remain in place until the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005. The sequel shows were all credited as co-created by Berman and one other person: Michael Piller for Deep Space Nine, Jeri Taylor for Voyager, and Brannon Braga for Enterprise. He was producer and got a “story” credit for all four Next Generation movies.
It had long been rumored among fans that Gene Roddenberry didn’t like Berman, and David Gerrold stated categorically that was the case:
“Yeah, now Rick Berman was not . . . Gene didn’t like Rick, at all. But Rick was installed on the show by the studio as a way to keep a control on the show. To keep it from getting out of hand . . . And so they put Rick in place to try and make things work. To work around Gene, to make it work. Well, Rick was busy playing studio politics, and he and the lawyer would work together to get rid of everybody who was a threat to their power. And nobody knew from one day to the next who Gene was friends with, because Gene didn’t even remember who he was friends with from one day to the next.”7
When Deep Space Nine was announced in January 1992, some fans were suspicious about the timing. It came mere weeks after Roddenberry’s death, and the way Berman described it to Entertainment Weekly—“It’s going to be darker and grittier than The Next Generation, these characters won’t be squeaky clean”8—didn’t sound at all like something Gene Roddenberry would have approved of. Ten years later, Susan Sackett still “wondered if it was just a coincidence that Paramount decided to go with a new Star Trek project less than one week after Gene’s death. To my knowledge, Gene had never given his blessing to the spin-off.”9 Star Trek fans were early adopters of new technology, and Deep Space Nine led to a “flame war” on the internet, five years before most people even knew there was an internet. Berman and his team found themselves on the defensive, insisting that they’d started work on the show before Roddenberry’s death, that he’d known about it and had been fine with it, and that fans should rest assured that while the situation the Federation characters were in on Deep Space Nine would be grim, they still personified the utopian values Star Trek fans had come to expect, and that they wouldn’t be breaking the rule that Starfleet officers didn’t argue with each other:
“we compromised by not having conflict among the Starfleet characters. That’s why we created a first officer, Major Kira Nerys who is a Bajoran, and populated the cast with a Trill, a shapeshifter and a Ferengi, and put them all in a sometimes very inhospitable environment filled with everything from bar drunks to temple priests. The combustible mixture allows for conflict, but the solidarity of the Starfleet officers is always maintained. So everybody was happy.”10
The controversy proved that the studio had been right to think for all those years that Star Trek needed Gene Roddenberry’s imprimatur to be fully accepted by many fans. It also showed that Star Trek fandom was not some monolithic bloc. Those in favor of a “grittier” approach felt it was possible to be a Star Trek fan and tell Star Trek stories without slavishly following Roddenberry’s thoughts on what Star Trek was and wasn’t. Indeed a section of Star Trek fandom had emerged that was openly hostile to Roddenberry. The irony was that while Roddenberry purists felt Rick Berman had strayed too far from the original, Berman’s opinion was very clear, and far more favouable to Roddenberry than, say, fan favorite Nicholas Meyer’s movie version:
“Star Trek is not my vision of the future, it’s Gene’s, and it is my responsibility to keep it that way . . . you can not fight this vision. You must embrace it. Melinda Snodgrass, a second and third season writer on ST: TNG went off and wrote [about her experiences] what a ridiculous vision this was and that [TNG] would never work. Well, guess what? That vision happens to be the reason the Star Trek shows do work. . . . Gene wanted it to be light. He wanted Earth to be a paradise. As far as I’m concerned, the commitment to honour his vision also forces us to be more creative, to find new ways to tell stories.”11
Berman understood the formula. Deep Space Nine and Voyager may have looked away from Starfleet’s flagship, and a crew who were the crème de la crème, to slightly seedier corners of the Star Trek galaxy. Even so, the ensemble of characters didn’t stray very often from the “types” established by Gene Roddenberry. There was always an outsider fascinated by the human condition, the sterling commanding officer and the irascible doctor. The casts were diverse, the stories tended to be self-contained moral dilemmas.
For his part, Roddenberry told Yvonne Fern, “My people are all good people. Rick Berman in particular. I trust him to produce my show. And he does. But I still look at everything. I make my evaluations and put my stamp of approval on everything.”12
As for what Berman thought . . . in First Contact, the eighth Star Trek movie, he, Brannon Braga, and Ronald D. Moore came up with a story about the Next Generation cast accidentally going back in time to meet the inventor of the warp drive, Zefram Cochrane. Cochrane had appeared in one episode of the original series, as a handsome young man in the 1967 episode “Metamorphosis.” The man Picard’s crew find is old, drunk, with wandering hands, and can’t get his brilliant idea to work. The Next Generation crew idolize him and love the future he’ll bring about. They’re disappointed he’s not the mythical figure they’ve read about, but they fix his creation, make it fly, and Cochrane gets all the credit.
COCHRANE: I’ve heard enough about the great Zefram Cochrane. I don’t know who writes your history books or where you get your information from, but you people got some pretty funny ideas about me. You all look at me as if I’m some kind of . . . saint, or visionary or something.
RIKER: I don’t think you’re a saint, Doc. But you did have a vision. And now we’re sitting in it.
COCHRANE: You want to know what my vision is? Dollar signs! Money! I didn’t build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity. You think I want to see the stars? I don’t even like to fly! I take trains. I built this ship so I could retire to some tropical island filled with naked women. That’s Zefram Cochrane. That’s his vision. This other guy you keep talking about, this historical figure? I never met him. I can’t imagine I ever will.
Even by Star Trek standards, the message is hidden in plain sight. For the record, while Gene Roddenberry had been a pilot, he didn’t like to fly.
Majel Barrett had no say in the artistic direction of Star Trek, and consistently had no pretensions towards one. Just before her husband died, she had been asked if she would be interested in directing a Star Trek movie. “Are you out of your mind?” was her reply. And what about writing? She declined that idea also, saying, “I can barely sign my name to the bottom of a check.”13 She remained a frequent guest at Star Trek conventions and was, naturally enough, frequently asked about her own thoughts on the current Star Trek shows, as well as whether she thought her late husband would have approved. She usually batted such questions away, but when she offered a strong or constructive comment, she occasionally gave an answer expressing the wish that the shows had stronger female characters. Ten years later, she was able to say: “I have absolutely nothing to do with the Star Trek franchise. I haven’t had for many, many years. Gene sold out all of his rights to Star Trek way back fifteen, almost twenty years ago. So, they ask nothing. I volunteer nothing. They invite me to a few of their shindigs. I’ll bet you I haven’t been on that lot in two years.”14
She did have a way of making her presence known in new Star Trek projects. Barrett had played, uncredited, the voice of the Enterprise’s computer since “Mudd’s Women” in the original series—an episode filmed before her debut as Christine Chapel, but broadcast later. She did not play any computer voices in the original-cast movies (although she made two brief appearances as Chapel). For The Next Generation, though, she was used in well over half of the episodes and all of the movies, and she played the voice of other Starfleet computers in all of the Star Trek shows and movies that followed. This was up to and including the first of the “reboot” movies, J.J. Abrams’s 2009 Star Trek, for which she recorded her lines ten days before she died. She felt that this gave the projects a sense of legitimacy.
Barrett took on an almost ambassadorial role. When Deep Space Nine launched, it was in competition with another show, Babylon 5, that was also about human officers trying to keep the peace on a space station packed with a weird collection of scheming aliens. Fans of both shows accused their rival of copying them. It was, of course, possible to like both shows, and behind the scenes, there were plenty of links. Walter Koenig had a major recurring guest role in Babylon 5, Andreas Katsulas played a recurring Romulan admiral in The Next Generation and an alien ambassador in Babylon 5. Peter David, one of the more prominent Star Trek novelists, wrote Babylon 5 scripts and novels, too. Majel Barrett herself appeared in the third-season episode “Point of No Return” (1996), rather pointedly as the widow of an alien emperor. The press release Babylon 5 put out was titled “The First Lady of Star Trek Makes A Royal Visit to BABYLON 5 The Week of February 26, 1996,” and quoted the show’s creator, J. Michael Straczynski:
“We’re very pleased to have Majel appearing on Babylon 5. Because as the wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, her appearance on our show will help dispel the notion—held by some—that one cannot be a fan of both series. Majel and I discussed this between us, and we both view this rivalry as unproductive. We are both extending our hands across our respective fictional universes in a show of solidarity. So we’re very happy that she has chosen to endorse Babylon 5 in this way, and hope that science fiction viewers of all stripes will check out the series.”
Most of Barrett’s Star Trek-related activity, though, involved the running of Lincoln Enterprises. In the early Nineties, this still consisted of herself and “two or three” assistants. After something of a lull in the Eighties, with retailers remembering that tie-ins to The Motion Picture hadn’t done well, the Nineties saw a massive surge in the quantity and range of Star Trek products. The market was flooded with items, from magazines that cost a few dollars to upscale replicas of the three-dimensional chess set, and limited edition plates. Pocket Books were issuing a Star Trek novel a month, and over twenty-six million were sold in total.15 There were multiple comics titles, the movies were reissued in different editions and as boxsets, there was plenty of apparel like hats and T-shirts. Toys and models of virtually every starship seen in the shows and movies appeared in a range of scales. The market sustained all of this, and if the release of new lines of action figures slowed down, it was simply because only the most obscure character variants—La Forge as Tarchannen III Alien, Sheriff Worf, Cadet Beverly Crusher—remained to be made.
Lincoln Enterprises had been the only game in town at the dawn of the Star Trek phenomenon, but now it was being left behind. Its boss was keen to expand. Asked in 1993 what role her company played, she said:
“Since we have the only legal place in the world to buy Trek scripts I would say that they do want a lot of scripts. But everything varies. There’s a lot of jewelry and the pins and the communicators and stuff that is worn; there’s a lot of interest in patterns, for example. We sell patterns to the costumes so fans can make their own. There are places that make them, but they’re terribly expensive and we’ve always kept our prices down way, way, way low because Gene felt as though he wanted everyone to be able to have them. So we’ve kept it way down. We really haven’t geared ourselves in all these twenty-seven years toward a profit and we’d like to change that.”16
The company had tended to produce its own items, now it began offering licensed Star Trek products bought from wholesalers. Aware it would be undercut by more traditional retailers on common items like books and action figures, the company began endorsing high-end prop and costume replicas. Their niche was, and remains, exclusive items, generally the sort of things that sell well at conventions, such as limited edition badges and posters, high-quality Starfleet uniforms, and screen-accurate Starfleet badges and other insignia. These days, products are carefully coordinated with Paramount, and the Roddenberry.com website offers everything from $5 Starfleet logo patches to a $500 replica tricorder made from the same mold as the ones from the TV show. The latter comes in a presentation box embossed with a replica of Gene Roddenberry’s signature, rather than the Star Trek logo. The prime directive of the Roddenberry estate has been to protect the family name—it’s trademarked, and Roddenberry.com is registered to them.
David Alexander’s authorized biography of Gene Roddenberry, many years in the making, came out in 1994 but had to share a shelf with Joel Engel’s far more salacious unauthorized biography. After Roddenberry’s death, and as part of the general merchandising boom, virtually every member of the original series regular cast and a number of members of the production team wrote or co-wrote books about their time on the show. Some produced more than one, with William Shatner responsible for eight or nine titles examining aspects of the Star Trek phenomenon, including his own life story, but also Get a Life! (1999), a book about the business and culture of Star Trek conventions, and I’m Working on That (2002), about how scientists and engineers have been inspired by the show’s technology. There have been a plethora of guidebooks and histories of the show, magazine interviews, and so on. A very common angle for this material has been to examine the truth of the Roddenberry myth. During his lifetime, the majority of Star Trek fans saw criticism of Roddenberry as ingratitude or sour grapes, but it’s now widely accepted that there are places where Roddenberry’s own account of events is guilty of error, oversimplification, and telling omissions. Three common threads run through what the cast and crew have to say when it comes to Gene Roddenberry, with a different emphasis depending on which particular ax they have to grind. The first is a level of thanks to Roddenberry for employing them and coming up with a format that has endured, and which was a smart show. The second is to note that Star Trek was a team effort, and Roddenberry doesn’t deserve all the credit. The final thread is to note that the man himself could be rather troubled. The books all tend to set Roddenberry up as vitally important to Star Trek, but serve to “set the record straight.”
Majel Barrett was one of only two major cast members who never wrote an autobiography or authorized someone else to write her life story. The other was DeForest Kelley, who played “Bones” McCoy, and who died in 1999. Majel had a firm opinion on the genre:
On the emergence of “tell-all” biographies by members of the original series cast and crew, Roddenberry states, “I think they’re awful.” She points out that they contradict one another, and adds, “I was there!” . . . While she doesn’t believe that any of the books have tarnished Gene Roddenberry’s reputation, she wants to know why the actors didn’t voice any complaints while he was alive. “I just despise actors who think they’ve done it all themselves,” she notes. “I don’t have any bad experiences with any of them, but I really despise the way some of them have taken out after Gene. I’m not going to be doing that kind of thing—I think our private lives in the first place are our private lives, and I don’t want to slam into anybody else because while I can refute things, I don’t like to be negative. The accolades have already been there, and I’m busy going into the future myself right now with this project of Gene’s.”17
And what would Gene Roddenberry have thought?
“Gene would never have got mad at the naysayers. He never acted strongly to anything. He probably would have said ‘let ’em go ahead and say what they want.’ Of course, were he alive he would be able to get back at them with his own statements. But, then, most of the inaccuracies would never have been written or said because no one would have ever done it to his face. They all waited to attack until he was gone. I’m sure Gene would have said ‘consider the source’.”18
In 2006, Paramount’s parent company Viacom split its movie and television divisions into two separate companies: Viacom (which owns Paramount Pictures) and CBS Corporation. Star Trek, referred to internally as “the Franchise,” was a major Viacom asset—and now Paramount Pictures have the rights to make Star Trek movies and, independently, CBS Television Studios have the rights to make Star Trek television shows. Paramount Pictures moved quickly to produce new Star Trek movies under the aegis of J.J. Abrams, and there have already been three: Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Star Trek Beyond (2016). CBS have announced plans to produce a Star Trek television show; its executive producer is to be Bryan Fuller, known for the shows Hannibal, Wonderfalls, and Dead Like Me, but who wrote twenty-two episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager at the start of his career. CBS soon announced that Nicholas Meyer would be involved with the series again for the first time since Star Trek VI, a quarter of a century ago. History repeats itself: the plan is for this Star Trek to be the centerpiece of a new channel, this time on streaming video.
Gene Roddenberry’s only substantial claim to fame is that he created Star Trek. Add to that the fact that the studio became so concerned with the way Roddenberry was running the show that they took it away from him, and handed it to a new executive producer, no less than three times—the original series, the movies, and The Next Generation—and the drumbeat from the various autobiographies and tell-alls builds until it sounds like a lot of the creative decisions were not made by Roddenberry, were even bitterly opposed by him. Much of the success of the show is the result of investment in their roles by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart, and other actors. Roddenberry didn’t write the theme music, design the USS Enterprise or the costumes. He didn’t invent the Borg or the Klingons. He never even wrote the line “Beam me up, Scotty,” and when he attempted to come up with wording for the opening voiceover, his attempt was missing something: “This is the story of the United Space Ship Enterprise. Assigned a five-year patrol of our galaxy, the giant starship visits Earth colonies, regulates commerce and explores strange new worlds and civilizations. These are its voyages . . . and its adventures.”19
In some ways Roddenberry is hoist by his own petard. Fans tend to love the idea that television has showrunners, that J. Michael Straczynski, Chris Carter, Joss Whedon, Aaron Sorkin, J.J. Abrams, David Simon, Nic Pizzolatto, or Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat are bringing their personal vision to the screen by sheer force of their individual will, that anyone else with input in the process is an obstacle and compromises the final product. The core of the case Gene Roddenberry made for himself was that he was keenly and consistently a visionary, in a constant battle with “network executives” and “naysayers,” and most imperfections in Star Trek are their fault.
At the heart of the case against Roddenberry is the idea he’s a one-hit wonder, that he only ever came up with one show that worked, and that most of the best things about Star Trek are demonstrably the work of people who aren’t Gene Roddenberry.
The obvious way to counter that would be to prove that Roddenberry had a wealth of other ideas and his problem was that he was ahead of his time, that Star Trek is merely one part of a “Roddenberry universe.” Majel Barrett seems to have taken that literally—that Questor, Genesis II, and Star Trek were all part of what fans would call the same “continuity” or “canon”—saying, “everything is within Gene Roddenberry’s universe . . . within Star Trek’s universe, like Questor was, like Planet Earth.”20 The phrasing is a little ambiguous, but in terms of the fiction, this could all fit together. In the twentieth century, operatives like Gary Seven (from Assignment: Earth), and Questor were working for advanced alien races invested in guiding the human race to the next level. In the twenty-first century, humanity was threatened by “genetically superior” humans like Khan from Star Trek and the Tyranians from Genesis II, and civilization fell. Organizations like PAX ensured that the best of humanity would survive and emerge from this dark, lawless time in the twenty-second century into a beautiful, garden-like Earth. Humanity had shed its old ways, and was primed to take to the stars and form a utopian United Federation of Planets, as seen in Star Trek’s twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries.
Legally, the idea that all the Roddenberry shows are part of the same project was a minefield—the pilots for Questor, Genesis II, and Planet Earth were picked up and paid for by three different networks, and if any of them had an explicit story link with Star Trek, it would give grounds to Paramount to declare it just another Star Trek prequel. The Roddenberry estate wanted to be able to tout original Roddenberry intellectual property, say that there was a lot more to him than Star Trek, and they wanted to be able to sell things to lots of different media companies. Roddenberry’s projects would share values like diversity, a commitment to a better future, an optimistic, humanist approach.
The Nineties saw an attempt to revive Roddenberry’s project “The God Thing,” with Michael Jan Friedman completing it. The book was advertised and a cover designed, but it has still not been published. The first product actually to appear was a comic book. Gene Roddenberry’s Lost Universe ran for sixteen issues from 1995 to 1997. The eighth issue continued the story, but changed the title to Gene Roddenberry’s Xander in Lost Universe and started with a new #1, a common tactic in the comics industry, as first issues tend to attract new readers, and collectors who treat comics as speculative investments. No one got rich investing in Lost Universe—twenty years on, it’s easy to pick up a complete set for less than cover price. The publishers, Tekno-Comix, were a new venture seeking to make money from the comics boom of the early Nineties, and to take advantage of new computer technology in a way that seems quaintly incoherent these days:
These comics, hand drawn and computer-colored will be available in print, on interactive CD-ROMs and comic videos. Fans will be able to communicate with the developers, see extracts from upcoming issues of the range (which includes Leonard Nimoy’s PriMortals and Neil Gaiman’s Mr Hero), and read their letters to the editors on the CD-ROMs.21
Their range consisted of titles that included famous names: as well as Roddenberry, Nimoy and Gaiman, those names included Isaac Asimov, Mickey Spillane, and Anne McCaffrey. The comics themselves were written by other people, so Lost Universe was written by Ron Fortier. Tekno-Comix arrived on the scene just in time for a crash in the comics market. It served the Roddenberry estate’s purpose of getting a Gene Roddenberry property out into the world, but any hope that it would spark interest in a Lost Universe TV show or movie was quickly dashed. A novel of Xander in Lost Universe by John Peel (who’d written Doctor Who and Star Trek novels, among many others), was advertised, complete with cover image, but the book itself was never released.
Lost Universe starts with the Deliverance, a spaceship that looks somewhat like the USS Enterprise, arriving at the planet Malay, a large world settled by humans and by billions of alien refugees who have fled a galactic war in Andromeda. The ship has been sent by Plan*Net, an organization that is basically the Federation from Star Trek, but with an inverted Prime Directive—their First Command compels them to improve individuals, civilizations, and environments they encounter, strictly with the consent of the other party. Contact with Malay has been lost, and the Deliverance is to investigate. Our hero is Alexander Grange, a human native of Malay, who is shocked to learn that a great deal of time has mysteriously passed, and the once advanced world has degraded into isolated settlements menaced by weird creatures. Within a few issues, he discovers a body in a cave filled with alien machinery—and a capsule containing Alexander Grange, stored in suspended animation. The person we’ve been following is a clone, an artificial being with Grange’s memories (the clone becomes known as Xander).
That certainly sounds like Gene Roddenberry had his hand in it. Various short interviews and features in the issues of Lost Universe explain some of the thinking behind the series, though they’re a little reticent about exactly what Roddenberry created, when he developed the project, and how far he got with it. There looks to be a clue in the credits: initially, Lost Universe states it’s “based on a concept created by Gene Roddenberry with additional character creation and development by Majel Barrett Roddenberry and story development by D.C. Fontana,” but with #6 this switches to “Featuring Xander created by Gene Roddenberry.” An interesting insight came from an interview with Majel Barrett right at the start of the process, when Lost Universe was called “Ranger”:
Gene thought up a bunch of characters for a television show . . . Ranger is the character . . . The character has been shifted around an awful lot since he put it together. [Dorothy Fontana] and I were in at the beginning of this phenomenon called Star Trek. If anybody in the world can write Gene Roddenberry she can.22
Lost Universe feels “Roddenberryesque,” in the sense that elements of it are very similar to his work. The Black Ghosts who show up are hooded figures like the Archons from the Star Trek episode “Return of the Archons,” and there are secret immortals and ancient alien energy beings. There’s a dash of Virtual Reality, in the form of a holographic recreation of memories, and the Deliverance’s computer can create a hologram to talk to the crew. It is, in other words, a mashup of various other Roddenberry projects—Questor as part of an Away Team from Star Trek exploring the world of Genesis II.
All the “lost” Roddenberry projects have a similar feel. One reason is that Roddenberry worked mainly in television, and television is episodic and formulaic. Another is that he returned to many of his ideas in different projects: before long, there’s always going to be some wry outsider commenting on the human condition, some emergent artificial intelligence, savage mutants who are either bestial or superhumanly beautiful, and a confrontation with a godlike being that turns out to be a computer, conman, or child.
Mainly, though, the reason these “lost projects” feel a little like they’re Roddenberry magnetic fridge poetry is that he left very few complete, honed television and movie treatments. There are no banks of unused pilot scripts.
Roddenberry had worked on ideas for TV shows and movies his whole career, coming up with most of them in the decade between the cancelation of the original Star Trek and the start of production of Star Trek II. He clearly oversaw substantial development work for The Questor Tapes, Genesis II, and the Star Trek II TV series. Those projects were commissioned by television networks; time and money was spent developing treatments and scripts (not all of which were written by Roddenberry). Pilot episodes were shot; documents laid out where Roddenberry saw the show going from there.
Elsewhere, though, when Roddenberry wrote down his ideas for series, they weren’t much more than single-page summaries. The “pitch” for “Battleground Earth” was a single, half-page paragraph that outlined the setting and briefly explained the dynamic at the heart of the show. Aliens have arrived, and seized control by “taking over the minds” of the world’s leaders. The show would have followed a group who resisted the state of docile slavery accepted by the rest of the human race. When it came to the characters, all Roddenberry said was that he wanted
a group of mixed type story characters, not too unlike our seven Star Trek roles, perhaps each one a specialist and led by an unusual man. While being able to root for our characters as “good guys,” we get the full dramatic spectrum of them being hunted as criminals, saboteurs, spies, revolutionaries, etc. etc. The series should see them begin to slowly, but very slowly, begin to win.
There was no substantial interest when Roddenberry came up with “Battleground Earth” in the Seventies, but it was picked up by the Canadian production company Tribune and ran for five seasons in first-run syndication from 1997. Renamed to avoid confusion with L. Ron Hubbard’s 1982 novel Battlefield Earth (a movie version of which was in pre-production at the time), it was pitched as Gene Roddenberry’s Earth, but was retitled Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict.
Paul Gertz, one of the writers on the show, says Roddenberry’s contribution was “written on a napkin in a lockbox full of obscure notes written on things like receipts, scraps of paper.” The names of the characters, and the key idea that the aliens had saved humanity from hunger and disease, but at the cost of some basic freedoms, were added as the show was developed in the Nineties.
A list of nineteen questions has also been published that are said to be topics Roddenberry wanted to tackle in “Battleground Earth.” None of them are specific to the project, and he asked many of them elsewhere (and, frankly, a few of them are so banal they have one-word, even yes/no answers). If we’re in a generous mood, these are the vital components of the human equation that Data tried to resolve. If we’re feeling more cynical, then this is a list of what we might call Generic Roddenberry. Either way, the list is worth reprinting, as they are the core questions that Roddenberry dealt with, sooner or later, in all his projects:
How can we overcome prejudices? What is Death? Should we orchestrate war? Is patriotism a disease? What is the difference between sexuality and love? When does duty end and morality begin? Should there be government? Who’s ethics pre-dominate in a relationship mine or yours? [sic] What does it mean to be human? Do machines live? What use is religion? Is love the exclusive property of heterosexuals? Just because we can do something, should we? What is the difference between dreams and reality? What is consciences? [sic] Is there a case for drug dependency? What is the difference between male and female power? Are ethics the same as morals? What does it mean to be human?
In May 1999, Tribune announced that they were developing two more series based on Roddenberry’s work, intended for first-run syndication: Andromeda and Starship. The latter was originally a novel, one that Roddenberry wrote “a few chapters” of around 1974.23 The show itself was never produced, but was described in the original press release as follows:
A futuristic action hour in which a peaceful Earth is run by an organization of artists, scientists, and teachers working to bring harmony throughout the universe, Gene Roddenberry’s Starship chronicles the exploration space vessel Starship that serves as home to a team of Galactic trouble-shooters led by Captain Dylan Hunt. After leaving Earth to study the far reaches of the universe, where a long and brutal territorial war between aliens takes place, Hunt and his crew discover worlds that are vastly different from the humanistic and civilized society they left behind.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of these ideas were folded into Andromeda, a series with a premise perhaps best summed up by the season two opening voiceover: “He is the last guardian of a fallen civilization, a hero from another time. Faced with a universe in chaos, Dylan Hunt recruits an unlikely crew and sets out to reunite the galaxies. On the starship Andromeda hope lives again.”
The show was developed by Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who’d written for five seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Dylan Hunt was of course the name of the protagonist of Genesis II/Planet Earth, and the show is essentially Genesis II in Space. The Tyranians are now the Nietzscheans, but still proud of their “genetic superiority.” Hunt still has a teammate called Harper. Robert Hewitt Wolfe wasn’t working from a pilot script or series bible written by Roddenberry, he was pulling together concepts from a number of undeveloped pitches, combining them into something new.
Majel Barrett was never dishonest with fans about how the process worked. She spelled it out: “We stole parts of Starship deliberately for Andromeda. We stole names, we stole titles. They were all Gene’s, so it didn’t matter. We’ll be doing that probably until my deathbed. If something works with a particular story, let’s use it here, and save this other element for another place.”24
The star of Andromeda was Kevin Sorbo, who’d played Hercules in the very popular first-run syndicated show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994–9). Andromeda was built around him, and he requested a show set in space. Wolfe obliged, even though that effectively ruled out Tribune making Starship. Andromeda ran for 110 episodes over five seasons (2000–5), and was the top-rated syndicated show of its time.
A year after Tribune’s announcement, another company, Stan Lee Media, announced that they would make Starship, “based on a lost collection of Roddenberry’s original notes and drawings recently discovered by his widow.”25 The project never materialized. The plan had been to produce “innovative interactive storytelling” (images and text features on a website) that would spark demand for an animated movie. When Majel Barrett was asked how this version of Starship was going, she conceded there had been substantial changes:
“The original idea was about a bunch of scientists, but that was when they were people—they’re no longer people! We always end up with a captain and a crew, there will be in this case. But remember this: we only have one or two humanoids in it. We’ve got a bug for a lead! I really can’t tell you a Starship plot summary because that particular part of it is changing daily. The last time I went to a meeting, Stan said, this is not really going to work with what we have in mind for over here, so the story hasn’t been turned in yet.”26
Majel Barrett died at home, at the age of seventy-six, on December 18, 2008, having been diagnosed with leukemia a few months before. She’d scaled back her convention appearances a little, but had attended an event in Las Vegas that August. Leonard Nimoy’s tribute to her was not exactly overflowing with personal warmth: “She worked hard, she was straightforward, she was dedicated to Star Trek and Gene, and a lot of people thought very highly of her.” Elsewhere, the loss of the “First Lady of Star Trek” was marked by many of the thousands of fans she’d met during thirty-five years on the Star Trek convention circuit sharing stories online of her generosity, and the time she’d taken to make them feel special. Her death was marked by reports and obituaries in all the major national newspapers.
Gene Roddenberry’s elder daughter, Darleen Roddenberry-Bacha, was killed in a car crash in Las Vegas, almost four years to the day after her father died, on October 29, 1995. She was forty-seven, and had been married four times. The Roddenberry estate therefore went to Gene and Majel’s only child, Eugene Wesley Roddenberry Jnr.
TMZ reported that Rod Roddenberry, as he prefers to be known, would inherit the Bel Air mansion, along with $6m, to be followed by additional payments of $10m at the ages of thirty-five, forty and forty-five (an age he will reach in February 2019). His total net worth is “over $100m” according to one estimate,27 meaning the estate has more than trebled in value since his father’s death, when Roddenberry was reported to have left $30m.28 The most eyecatching headline, though, was that Majel Barrett left a $4m residential trust for her dogs, and $1m to “a domestic employee named Reinelda Estupinian” to look after them.29
Rod Roddenberry had been CEO of Roddenberry Entertainment since 2001.
The Roddenberry.com site continues, and pushes new projects like Rod and Barry, a running three-panel strip about a pair of aliens who are sent to Earth to scout it for invasion, but who fall in love with science fiction television and constantly delay their boss, Hu’Dec (after Majel Barrett’s birth name). There’s also the graphic novel series Days Missing, written by Phil Hester, about the Steward:
Since the dawn of time, a being has existed whose interaction and interference with mankind has shaped human development. His powers of time and intellect have allowed him to secretly remove certain critical days from the historical record. Their stories have never been told. Their details have never been documented. Their existence is not remembered. But the occurrences of these days have forever changed the course of humanity’s evolution. These are the DAYS MISSING from our existence, and they are about to be revealed . . .30
In 2010, the Hollywood Reporter announced that Rod Roddenberry was working with Ron Howard and Imagine Television to develop The Questor Tapes, with Tim Minear, who had worked on The X Files and Dollhouse, as producer. Little has been heard since about this project.31
In January 2016, it was reported that data recovery specialists DriveSavers had successfully read two hundred 5.25-inch floppy disks full of documents written by Gene Roddenberry using an early, customized word processing program. When Roddenberry died in 1991, the capacity of data storage was minuscule by today’s standards. Added together, those disks only account for “two or three megabytes” of data. In the Eighties, Roddenberry had been aware how computer capacity was improving exponentially. Star Trek: The Next Generation futureproofed itself by expressing computer memory in terms of “gigaquads,” without explaining how much data a “quad” was. Roddenberry’s disks could contain the equivalent of about five hundred pages of text. As yet, we have no idea what was on those disks, and how much of it is previously unknown or unpublished material.32
Gene Roddenberry’s son has ambitions to use the family name as more than a selling point for a few new television formats. His epiphany came when, in the course of making a documentary, Trek Nation (2011), he spoke to a number of people associated with Star Trek in its various incarnations. Rod was seventeen when his father died, and as he admitted, he never knew him all that well:
“[My father] was on such a pedestal that it was hard for me as his son to identify and connect with him. In fact, I never really got into and understood Star Trek until after he passed away in 1991, and as I witnessed the power of his thoughts and ideas as they lived on, I began to crave a deeper connection with him. I spent the years following his death slowly coming to understand not just Star Trek, but how far its ideologies had penetrated into society. All over the world, I spoke to fans, from politicians to religious leaders, doctors to teachers, astronauts to athletes, and everyone in between. They all believed in the Star Trek ideal of a future where humanity works together for the greater good.”33
He found himself converting to the cause, and established the Roddenberry Foundation in 2010. The foundation
“honors Gene Roddenberry’s legacy by funding game-changing discoveries that will make the world a better place. We genuinely want to work for the greater good of humanity and celebrate (not just tolerate) its full diversity. We want to support institutions doing cutting-edge work that will solve problems, not simply put Band-Aids on them. Our support focuses on four pillars: science/tech, environment, education, and humanitarianism . . . In the end, the Roddenberry name gives me access that I wouldn’t otherwise have, and I’m using it to look for ways to further our foundation’s mission. I’ve got a lot of learning, growing and evolving to do myself, but I’m doing what I can to bring about the world my dad envisioned.”34
The foundation donated $5m to establish the Roddenberry Center for Stem Biology and Medicine at the J. David Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. It supports a $10m prize to the first person or team to develop a real-life tricorder, defined as “a mobile platform that most accurately diagnoses a set of fifteen conditions across thirty consumers in three days. Teams must also deliver this information in a way that provides a compelling consumer experience while capturing real time, critical health metrics such as blood pressure, respiratory rate and temperature.”35
On January 3, 2013, William Shatner received the following tweet from astronaut Chris Hadfield on the International Space Station: “Standard Orbit, Captain. And we’re detecting signs of life on the surface.” And when Leonard Nimoy died in 2015, the occasion was marked by a Vulcan salute from an astronaut on the space station, not to mention a personal statement from President Obama. The President was an acknowledged Star Trek fan who three years earlier had been pictured in the Oval Office sharing a Vulcan salute of his own with Lieutenant Uhura, Nichelle Nichols.
These are moments that speak to the cultural footprint of Star Trek, and any fair account of Gene Roddenberry’s life has to embrace his role in establishing its iconic status. It is generally easy to be cynical about the world, and Roddenberry made cynicism about himself very easy. He wrote memos about Ferengi sex positions, popped a lot of pills and flopped around a paddling pool covered in baby oil with his secretary trying to simulate sex in zero gravity. Roddenberry also created something that has had a genuine, measurable inspirational effect on generations of people who strive to make the future a better place. As Majel Barrett put it, “I’m looking forward to a Gene Roddenberry world, a better, kinder, more gentle world. I don’t think he believed that’s the way it was going to be either, but suddenly we have enough people who are trying desperately to live in a world like that. And sooner or later maybe we’ll all evolve into that.”36
Roddenberry told Susan Sackett in the late Seventies, “I would like to write and create other things. I would hate to have just Star Trek on my tombstone.” But—of course— very few people reading this book are doing so because they are fans of The Lieutenant or Questor and are wondering what else the creator of those shows got up to.
“Creator of Star Trek” is not a bad epitaph. A quarter of a century after Gene Roddenberry’s death, we can say with confidence that Star Trek will still be running when the first astronauts set foot on Mars, and when we build a computer brain so advanced we’ll need to establish whether it’s alive.
About that tombstone, though . . .
The space shuttle Columbia took a portion of Gene Roddenberry’s ashes into space in 1992 for the first ever space funeral (a short humanist service was performed and the remains were returned to Earth). A gram of his ashes was sent into orbit by the private company Celestis on April 12, 1997. A third sample, this time alongside a gram of Majel Barrett’s ashes, was sent up in early 2009. Roddenberry’s public social security records spell out the remarkable journey his life took:
Born: 19 August 1921, El Paso, Texas;
Died: 24 October 1991, Santa Monica, California;
Buried: 1997, outer space.