Paula M. Block - Star Trek: The Next Generation 365

My first encounter with Star Trek: The Next Generation took place in a gas station.

Less than a year into my adventure as a college dropout, I was working as a medical records technician (otherwise known as a receptionist) at an animal hospital, all the while telling myself that I was actually a professional writer simply awaiting my inevitable discovery. After all, I was living in Studio City, whose name alone meant that I must be residing in a genuine film-and-television community, despite its lack of a single studio within its environs. To get to my place of (hopefully) temporary employment, I had to walk through the gas station parking lot, and I usually stopped in for a quick look at the tradesthe Hollywood Reporter and Daily Varietywhich at that time were the dominant sources of information and gossip about the entertainment industry I so fervently wished to join.

On this particular day, sometime in the fall of 1986, I saw a banner headline in Variety that literally made me stop and gasp: Star Trek was returning to television. I fumbled with whatever cash I had in my pocket, bought the paper, and proceeded to read the article over and over again for the next few weeks. All through the 1970s, when I first became aware of (and then obsessed with) The Original Series, my dream had always been that one day Star Trek would return to television. When Star Trek:The Motion Picture debuted in 1979 and spawned the movie franchise, I was of course thrilled, but the real grail was television. The Star Trek moviesby their naturecouldnt really do the kinds of interesting moral dilemmas and character stories that made the weekly series so brilliant. The movies had to be about enormous, galaxy-shaking events that could draw in a general audience. They couldnt just be about a planet with an interesting social problem, or about a half-human, half-alien characters sex drive, or about landing in an alternate reality where the Enterprise was a pirate ship. And it took years to make even one movie!

Star Trek was born as a TV series, and I, and many fans like me, yearned for it to return to its roots and once again provide a weekly voyage of adventure. So when I saw that announcement in the trades, it was the culmination of years of quiet hopes and dreams that one day it would really happen. And one year later, when I sat in my apartment and heard the now British-inflected words Space, the Final Frontier come out of my tiny TV set, I can proudly say that tears of joy rolled down my cheeks as I saw my dream coming true.

I watched every episode and amassed a sizable collection of self-recorded VHS tapes (ask your parents), with every show carefully labeled as to title and airdate. After the initial excitement wore off, I had to admit to myself that I wasnt that wild about that first season. Too many things had changed, too many things were different. Whyd they change the uniform colors? Kids on the Enterprise? Where no one has gone before? Really? Some of the stories creaked, others groaned, some were just bad.

But there were gems, too. The ship in particular grew on me every week. The new Enterprise was big and muscular, yet sleek and graceful. The vastness of her interior spaces seemed to promise something new and exciting to be found around every corner. But what really carried me along were the characters: the bald French captain with the British accent; his tall, stalwart, and gregarious Number One; the exotic counselor; the blind helmsman; the brainy doctor and her whip-smart son; the wide-eyed android; the spunky security officer and then there was that Klingon on the bridge, whose presence both annoyed me (were at peace with the Klingons now? wheres the fun in that?) and intrigued me (when do we get to see the Klingon version of Amok Time or Journey to Babel?). The characterseven wearing the wrong uniform colorspulled me in and gave me something to hold on to, even when the path they trod seemed rocky indeed.

Halfway into the second season, I began seeing a lovely girl named Bekah. (For the next decade I would literally date my life by Trek seasons. To this day, if you ask me about something that occurred in 1993, I have to think, Well, lets see, that was the last season of TNG and the second year of DS9 ) Bekah was sweet and she was kind, and when she somehow deduced that the Captain Kirk poster over my bed meant that I was a Trek fan, she offered to arrange a tour of the Next Generation set for me. She had worked for a time with the casting director on the pilot and she still had friends on the production and they had set tours all the time and it really wouldnt be a big deal to make a call. My heart leaped into my throat at the thought of actually being able to walk the corridors of the Enterpriseand it stayed firmly lodged there until she finally made the call and set up the visit. A long list of people wanted to experience the same thrill, so it would be six weeks before my turn would come. At the time, it seemed like an eternity to wait, but in retrospect, that month-and-a-half delay was the biggest gift of all, because it was during that period that I got the notion in my head to write an episode of TNG and bring it with me in hopes of getting someone on the show to read it and then buy it and produce it.

It was a ridiculous, hubristic fantasy that showed just how naive I truly was about the business I was trying to join. Fortunately for me, I didnt know any of that. Because when I actually brought that script with me and asked the man giving me the set tour to read it, he took pity on my goofy earnestness (and wide-eyed idealism about how Hollywood really works) and actually decided to sit down and read it. And when Richard Arnold revealed that not only did he like the script, but he was, in fact, one of Gene Roddenberrys personal assistants and he would be happy to give the script to an agent hed worked with for formal submission to the show, I still didnt realize how fantastically lucky Id been. Seven months later, when Michael Piller took over the writing staff, found my script in the slush pile, and decided to buy it and produce it, I was ecstatic, but I still didnt understand what kind of odds Id beaten. That realization didnt fully come until Michael brought me on staff midway though the third season and I got a glimpse at how many unsolicited scripts TNG received a year, which at that time was between two thousand and three thousand.

I was lucky and I was grateful and most of all I was filled with joynot only for the opportunity to walk the halls of the Starship Enterprise any time I felt like it, but also for the chance to actually chart some of her voyages myself. A dream come true doesnt even begin to describe it.

The writers worked out of the William S. Hart Building on the Paramount lot, directly across from the production offices in the Gary Cooper Building, while the soundstages were on the other side of the lot. During that third season of the show, the Hart Building felt like a war bunker. Writers had come and gone through a revolving door during the first two seasonsvictims of fights with Gene, or studio politics, or their own frailtiesand Richard Manning eventually made a large poster titled The Star Trek Memorial Wall, on which were the names of all the dead writers who had gone before us.