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As many Trekkies might be able to tell you, Gene Roddenberry created “Star Trek: The Next Generation” out of spite. When “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” came out in 1979, it was a big swing, taking a rinky-dink science fiction series and blowing it into a massive, psychedelic, $44 million space opera. It was about a gigantic, dangerous space cloud that appeared out of the cosmos and began bearing down on Earth, its mission unknown. The film ended with human beings merging with ineffable machine intelligences beyond our comprehension. It was heady and great, closer in spirit to the previous decade’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” than the contemporary “Star Wars.”<\/p>\n
But when “The Motion Picture” didn’t make quite as much money as Paramount wanted<\/a>, Roddenberry was informally removed from any further involvement in any sequels. A new creative team took over, and made three sequels from 1982 to 1986 that were all much more successful. Roddenberry resented that control of his creation had been wrested from him, and decided to one-up the bigwigs by making a new “Star Trek” series all his own. This time, he would lean even harder into his original show’s utopian themes, and \u2014 most importantly \u2014 retain total creative control over it. In 1986, he had assembled most of what he needed to make “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a series set a full century after the original series.<\/p>\n Of course, as detailed in William Shatner’s 2014 documentary “Chaos on the Bridge,” the first two seasons of “Next Generation” were, well, chaos behind the scenes. Roddenberry would regularly re-write scripts without other writers’ knowledge, and there was a lot of arguing as to who should really be in charge. Roddenberry butted heads with just about everyone and would micromanage everything into oblivion. These tense feelings were recalled sharply by Ronald D. Moore, one of the more celebrated writers of “Next Generation” beginning in its third season. On a recent episode of “The Sackhoff Show,”<\/a>\u00a0Moore said he came on to “Next Generation” in 1988 amidst a lot of animosity and “bad blood.”<\/p>\n