“I Believe in Humanity”: The Defiant Optimism of Gene Roddenberry
by Thomas Walker-Werth
Thousands of people—entrepreneurs, scientists, activists, diplomats, even astronauts—thank one TV series for inspiring them to pursue those careers: Star Trek.[1] I count myself among that number; Star Trek inspired me to pursue my career in studying and teaching rational philosophy.
Although many people played vital roles in creating the forty-eight seasons of TV and fourteen movies that now comprise the Star Trek franchise, none of it could have existed without the vision of the original show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry. He was a freethinking maverick and a determined producer who overcame a childhood steeped in religion and traditionalism to embrace an optimistic belief that humanity will one day widely embrace logic and reason. He survived the Pacific Theater and numerous traumatic experiences as an airman and policeman to finally find his calling as a television writer and overcame a host of other personal and professional challenges to get his vision for an optimistic show about a better future for humanity into production in the rigid world of 1960s television. His personal choices did not always reflect the values he sought to project in his stories, but through his dogged refusal to accept defeat and his productivity when he applied himself, he created TV shows that conveyed a clear vision of the future he thought humanity could achieve. His story is inspirational—an example of how one man who knows what he stands for can change the direction of a culture.
Finding His Values
Roddenberry was born in 1921 into a Southern Baptist family in El Paso, Texas, that soon moved to Los Angeles. He rejected almost immediately the religious ideas that surrounded him as a young boy, as he later recalled with regard to a sermon he heard at the age of fourteen:
I remember complete astonishment because what they were talking about were things that were just crazy. It was communion time, where you eat this wafer and are supposed to be eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood. My first impression was, “This is a bunch of cannibals they’ve put me down among!” For some time, I puzzled over this and puzzled over why they were saying these things, because the connection between what they were saying and reality was very tenuous. How the hell did Jesus become something to be eaten?
. . . I guess from that time it was clear to me that religion was largely nonsense —largely magical, superstitious things. In my own teen life, I just couldn’t see any point in adopting something based on magic, which was obviously phony and superstitious.[2]
Roddenberry later said that “religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all.”[3] This view would significantly shape the future he would one day project in his most impactful work. Indeed, he came to dread Sundays because of his family’s expectation that he attend “boring” church services. He found escape from his mystical surrounds in adventure and science-fiction radio shows including The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and Buck Rogers, as well as books and short story collections such as John Carter of Mars, Amazing Stories, and Astounding Stories.[4] The projections of heroic adventurers and technological marvels in these stories appealed to his developing values in a way that church services and Christian parables never could.
But Roddenberry did not entirely reject his family’s influence. His father had become a cop in the Los Angeles Police Force after their relocation, and that traditionally heroic career choice inspired the young man to study police science at Los Angeles City College. During his studies, however, he decided to register for the government’s civilian pilot program, drawn to it by an interest in aviation likely spurred on by his avid consumption of science fiction. He qualified as a pilot, and by the end of his studies, Roddenberry could have stood at the beginning of a career in either policing or commercial aviation. Instead, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps barely six months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—a pathway that fused both the heroism of policing and his interest in aviation.
Brushes with Death
Roddenberry’s wartime service was a formative part of his life. Early in the war, he married Eileen Rexroat, whom he had met during his studies at Los Angeles City College. His tours of duty meant that they often were apart, however, and reports indicate that both engaged in a number of intimate relationships outside of their marriage during the war—a vice Roddenberry continued for many decades.[5]
While on tour, Roddenberry experienced death up close, participating in battles and bombing missions against Japanese forces. On top of that, his piloting skills saved him from death on two occasions—first, when an aircraft he was copiloting rapidly lost altitude while caught in a thick storm, and again when another plane he was piloting developed a fault during the takeoff roll. That time, he decided to abort, which caused the aircraft to overrun the runway and crash into the forest beyond, killing two of the servicemen onboard. The grief following the crash sent Roddenberry into a period of reclusion and contemplation.[6]
Roddenberry’s wartime experiences led him to develop a somewhat pacifistic philosophy, although he still recognized that violence sometimes is necessary—his stories typically depicted heroes who abhorred violence but were not afraid to use it to repel aggressors. During his service, he kept up his fervent reading, mixing in poetry and stories from World War I that further contributed to his antiwar leanings. He also began to write his own work, including a poem that was published in The New York Times.[7] After returning to the United States to work as an air accident investigator, he attempted to pursue an education in writing, but the requirement to move with his work prevented him from completing it.
After the war, he quickly transitioned to the commercial aviation he originally had trained for, only to narrowly survive a third near-death experience when the Lockheed Constellation he was flying suffered a multiple-engine failure, caught fire, and crashed in the Syrian desert. Seven crew and eight passengers died in the crash, and Roddenberry helped rescue some of the survivors.
This close brush with death prompted Roddenberry to refocus on his personal life. Shortly after, he and Rexroat bought a new home in Los Angeles (they had been living in New York), and a little more than nine months later, their first daughter, Darleen, was born. The investigation into the accident blamed it on Pan Am’s neglect in repairing the aircraft, which caused Roddenberry to lose trust in the airline industry and ultimately contributed to giving up his career as a pilot. Turning to his other certification, he followed his father’s footsteps into the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).
Finding his Calling
Despite the apparent pivot away from the writing career Roddenberry had hoped to pursue, joining the LAPD actually provided the launching pad for his true vocation. While he was working as a traffic officer there, the department’s public relations chair gave him the chance to become the then-scandal-ridden force’s press-release writer. This gave Roddenberry the opportunity to demonstrate his writing ability in speeches and press releases.
But Roddenberry still wanted to write fiction, and he used his policing knowledge to craft and submit numerous script ideas for Dragnet (a show that purported to be based on real LAPD cases). None were accepted, but his break came when he was offered the chance to become the LAPD technical adviser on another crime series. He immediately started submitting script ideas using the new connections he garnered in this role, and they soon began to be accepted. For the next few years, he balanced his police responsibilities with an increasing pool of television writing jobs, mostly working on police procedural shows but also penning his first few science-fiction episodes for anthology shows such as Stage 7 and Science Fiction Theater. In time, he built up enough work to leave the police force and turn to writing scripts full-time, becoming a guest writer on shows such as Have Gun–Will Travel, for which he wrote more episodes than any other writer. He later remarked that the series’s unusually intellectual (for a Western) protagonist, Paladin, was “something of a science-fiction character,” independently traveling across the West and adopting a calm, rational approach to the people he meets. Roddenberry imbued Paladin with many of the values that would later typify his Star Trek characters, including a worldly curiosity and hunger to learn as well as an aversion to violence except when unavoidably necessary.[8] He also regarded the character as an atheist and lamented being unable to bring this out more in the stories.[9]
But Roddenberry was never satisfied with writing episodes for other people’s shows—he wanted to create his own series. He offered networks a range of pilot scripts, some of which were filmed and at least one of which was aired, but none led to a series. Eventually, however, with a friend’s help, a modified version of his script about a young marine corps lieutenant navigating Cold War life was picked up for a full series. This became The Lieutenant. The show, which Roddenberry also produced, ran for a single season between 1963 and 1964.[10] Despite its short run, The Lieutenant was a turning point in Roddenberry’s career, establishing his name in the TV business and introducing him to many of the people who would help make Star Trek a reality.
As producer, Roddenberry was specific about the form he wanted the show to take, often rewriting others’ scripts extensively to fit his vision for the series and its characters—a habit that would cause him problems throughout his career. His ideological influence can be seen throughout the series; many episodes deal with such issues as the importance of loyalty (both to friends and to senior officers, recurring themes in his later work), the moral imperative to judge individuals on their values and character, and the need for men to be free to make the right choices. The last point is the focus of the episode “The War Called Peace,” which repeatedly references and directly quotes George Orwell’s 1984.
The series initially enjoyed the support and consulting services of the Department of Defense (DOD), which regarded its generally positive portrayal of the military as good marketing. Roddenberry, however, had reservations about producing a show that functioned to some extent as military propaganda and spoke little of the series after Star Trek’s success. The DOD, after earlier concerns, withdrew its support when Roddenberry penned “To Set It Right,” an episode depicting racial abuse in the army. The story shows a racist officer gradually learn to overcome his prejudice, and both he and his victim learn to find common purpose and grow to respect each other. NBC initially refused to air the episode, which may have contributed to the show’s early cancellation.[11]
By the time The Lieutenant went into production, Roddenberry’s relationship with Rexroat evidently was breaking down. The promiscuity he had displayed during his military service continued during his time in the LAPD (where he was known to have had relations with several secretaries) and seems only to have increased following his move to television. Rexroat had opposed his career change (despite the larger income it brought the couple), and production staff on The Lieutenant reported hearing them arguing nightly. Although it’s understandable that Roddenberry was frustrated with a relationship that didn’t align with his new career path—one that enabled him to express his values far more than had his previous ones—his habitual infidelity pointed toward a much deeper issue. Throughout his life and career, Roddenberry struggled with low self-esteem, experiencing a sense of inadequacy and what would now be called impostor syndrome about his status and popularity as a writer. He remarked, “I feel, as I wake up every morning, ‘I hope today isn’t the day they find me out.’ I have no feeling of having it ‘made.’”[12] It’s likely that his liaisons—which he made no effort to hide and even conducted in publicly visible spaces on set—provided him with a false sense of success and esteem from others to offset his self-doubt.
Although his previous extramarital relations had always taken the form of one-night or short-term liaisons, Roddenberry began a much more serious relationship with an actress he met on the set of The Lieutenant, Majel Barrett. Unlike Rexroat, Barrett supported his career as a television producer and shared his interest in science fiction. The two quickly became strong advocates for each other to the extent that their supposedly secret relationship became widely known among their friends and industry colleagues.
Star Trek: Roddenberry’s Vision Made Manifest
At this point, Roddenberry was keen to develop a new series that would give him more of a chance to express his worldview—in particular his love of exploration and curiosity, as well as his dismay at the widespread racism in 1960s America and desire for a society in which individuals are judged for their merits and not their background. Believing that humanity is capable of moving past racism to “learn to take a delight” in the differences between races and cultures, he began pitching an idea for a show about a group of multinational, multiethnic voyagers exploring the world by airship.[13] Discussing it with friends and colleagues, he quickly decided to move the show’s setting to the future, enabling him to tell stories like the science fiction he’d loved as a young man that might find a wider audience in the 1960s due to the widespread interest in the space race. Thus, his pitch for a “Wagon Train to the Stars” was born. (Wagon Train was a highly successful Western series following a wagon train that encountered various travelers and settlements along its journey into the frontier.)
He began trying to sell the concept that would become Star Trek to various networks, but as with the script that had become The Lieutenant, interest was not forthcoming until Roddenberry found an advocate—this time, Lucille Ball (of I Love Lucy fame). Ball, who had taken control of her and her ex-husband’s production company, Desilu Studios, in 1960, loved Roddenberry’s idea for a Western set in space and had a pilot commissioned.[14] This became “The Cage,” an esoteric story about Captain Christopher Pike of the starship Enterprise being taken prisoner by a race of telepathic aliens who make him think he’s rescuing the survivors of a crashed ship. The episode is light on action, focusing mostly on Pike’s efforts to retain a grip on reality and the aliens’ motivations for deceiving him.
To try to resist the widespread sexism of the time, Roddenberry made Pike’s second-in-command a woman (referred to in the episode as “Number One”) and insisted on having his then-mistress, Barrett, cast in the part. Studio executives believed audiences would reject the idea of a woman being first officer of a military vessel, a fact acknowledged in the episode when Pike remarks that he’s still having trouble getting used to “having a woman on the bridge.” He also wrote Number One as a coldly logical character displaying little emotion, which may not have helped her audience reception. On the crew alongside Pike and Number One was the alien science officer Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy.
When “The Cage” was shown to executives at Desilu’s network partner, NBC, in 1964–65, they rejected it. The exceptionally expensive episode was, they felt, not the “space western” they had been promised but, rather, a slow-paced, “cerebral” story that would be lost on most viewers. Starting with The Lieutenant, Roddenberry had been keen to tell stories in which victory was determined by means other than physical conflict because he rejected the notion common in Westerns that “battle is the true test of a man.”[15] NBC also believed that audiences would reject not only Pike’s female second-in-command but also Spock, who they thought looked “satanic” with his pointed ears and eyebrows.[16]
Star Trek looked like it would never see the light of day, but Roddenberry was not prepared to give up on his idea. His efforts to reverse NBC’s decision would likely have been futile, however, if not for Ball continuing to throw her considerable influence behind him (NBC was keen to keep one of America’s most popular household names happy). Thanks to her advocacy, something almost unheard of in network television happened: NBC commissioned a second pilot for Star Trek.
The 1966 pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was a marked departure from “The Cage.” Written by another writer with Roddenberry’s input and approval, it was far more action-oriented, with William Shatner’s young, physical Captain Kirk leading the Enterprise in place of the older, more pensive Pike. In the story, Kirk must face the fact that he must kill one of his officers to save the ship after that officer develops godlike abilities and becomes addicted to the power over others he’s obtained. Although the episode still deals with a weighty moral question, Kirk’s physicality is key to the resolution, which includes an extended fight scene. This was against Roddenberry’s wishes—he said that after Have Gun–Will Travel, “I was tired of writing for shows where there was always a shoot-out in the last act and somebody was killed. Star Trek was formulated to change that.”[17] But for “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” a return to a typical fight-scene ending seemingly helped get the show on the air.
Joining Kirk were other new characters, including Scottish engineer Montgomery Scott and Japanese physicist Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu. Both characters served to give the Enterprise a more international flavor, reminding viewers that this show is set in a future in which national origins make no difference to a person’s opportunities. Including a Japanese character was particularly bold a mere twenty years after World War II.
Roddenberry fought bitterly to retain the two characters the network had rejected—Spock and Number One—but executives would only let him keep one. He chose Spock, whom he intended to use to explore storylines about being an outsider (Spock being one of the few aliens on a mostly human ship), as well as to regularly remind viewers that the show was set in the far future and that the Federation (of which Earth is a member) is not just multiracial but multispecies. The executives had regarded Barrett’s Number One as being too cold and domineering for a female character, so Roddenberry gave those characteristics to Spock to explore storylines about the role of emotion in human life.[18] Thus one of Star Trek’s most significant alien races—the logical, seemingly emotionless Vulcans—was born.
The studio, which was much happier with the second pilot, gave the green light to produce a full series. Relatively few changes were made this time—few enough for the episode to be included in the broadcast series, unlike “The Cage,” which would not be shown to the public until 1988 (although parts of it were reused as flashbacks in the later episode “The Menagerie”). The first regular episode, “The Man Trap,” introduced Star Trek’s iconic mission statement, spoken by Kirk over shots of the Enterprise flying at warp speed before the opening credits and immediately capturing the essential spirit of the show:
“Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange, new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.”
The most notable changes for the series were recasting the ship’s doctor and communications officer. From “The Man Trap,” DeForest Kelley was cast as Doctor Leonard McCoy, a highly emotional counterpoint to Spock’s cold, calculating nature. This gave Kirk two opposing influences, enabling Roddenberry to depict the excesses and deficiencies of guiding action by emotion, with Kirk serving as the rational integration of reason and emotion. Spock and McCoy would often insult (though grudgingly respecting) each other’s character during arguments while Kirk tried to extract and integrate useful advice from both of them. This interplay among the three leading men became the show’s core relationship dynamic and one of its most memorable elements.
The other notable introduction was Nichelle Nicholls as communications officer Uhura. Although the studio had nixed Roddenberry’s plan for a female second-in-command (and for her to be played by Barrett), he was still keen to have a woman on the bridge and decided he wanted to cast a black actress in the role. Against strong opposition, he succeeded in casting Nicholls—with whom he had also been romantically involved during her appearance on The Lieutenant. (He also managed to get Barrett recast in the less prominent role of Nurse Chapel.) In 1960s America, depicting a black woman serving on the bridge of a military vessel was unprecedented, and numerous black scientists, astronauts, and members of other professions credit Star Trek with inspiring them to believe that they could pursue those careers despite the popular attitudes and barriers to black people pursuing such careers at the time. Nicholls was unaware of how much her role inspired people—in fact, she was considering leaving the show until, at a dinner in 1968, none other than Martin Luther King Jr. told her that it was the only show he let his children watch late at night because of its depiction of a black person living and working as an equal alongside her shipmates.[19]
Star Trek debuted to strong ratings, consistently drawing 19–20 percent of viewers in its time slot in the first three weeks, despite airing opposite ABC’s smash hit Bewitched. Early in the first season, Star Trek ranked as the 33rd most-watched program in the United States; it fell to 52nd by the end of the season (partly due to competition from CBS’s Thursday night movies), placing it at risk of cancellation.
Critical reaction was mixed. Some reviewers praised the show’s exploration of moral and philosophic questions and its optimistic portrayal of the future while others criticized its visual style, acting, and sometimes outlandish storylines. The season’s penultimate episode, “City on the Edge of Forever”—in which Kirk falls in love with a woman while time-traveling to 1930s New York, only to have to let her die to avoid catastrophically changing the future—won a Hugo award for “best dramatic presentation” and a Writer’s Guild of America award for “best written dramatic presentation.” Roddenberry had extensively rewritten the episode, still widely ranked as one of the franchise’s best stories.[20]
For the second season, Star Trek was moved to Friday night, further harming its ratings. NBC also cut the show’s budget.[21] Accordingly, expenses such as guest stars, sets, and location shoots had to be reduced. This did, however, inspire interesting stories that could be filmed entirely on existing sets or ones borrowed from other productions. These include “Mirror, Mirror,” which pits the Enterprise crew against evil versions of themselves from an alternate universe in which Earth is the center of the dystopian Terran Empire; and the Roddenberry-penned “The Omega Glory,” in which Kirk tries to stop another starship captain who is interfering in a war on a pre-technological planet to make himself a powerful leader. As well as introducing Roddenberry’s concept of The Prime Directive—a rule preventing the Federation from interfering in societies that haven’t yet developed faster-than-light travel—the episode exemplifies how Roddenberry was then a strong believer in the American conception of individual liberty. The planet’s citizens worship “holy words” (a version of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance) and Kirk rounds out the episode by teaching the inhabitants that contrary to the other captain, the liberties spoken of in that document must apply to all the planet’s inhabitants.
The pro-American spirit of Star Trek, with its “USS” starships and regular references to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, had drawn criticism from the Soviet Union’s state-run newspaper, Pravda, which called it “typically capitalistic” and asked why its multiethnic vision of the future, despite including a black woman and a Japanese man, did not include a representative from Russia, the nation then leading in space exploration. Ignoring the anticapitalist slur, Roddenberry responded by making the Enterprise’s new permanent navigator for season 2 a Russian. This further demonstrated Roddenberry’s belief in a future wherein all the nations of Earth become part of an alliance of free societies at a time when it was widely believed that the Soviet Union would endure as a communist state for hundreds of years. (Whether the writers of Pravda realized that their suggestion, once implemented, would imply that the Soviet Union was not part of Roddenberry’s future is interesting to speculate about.)
With cancellation almost certainly looming for what was a very expensive show, the season’s final episode, “Assignment: Earth,” was aired as a pilot for a potential spin-off series following a time-traveling agent investigating science-fiction occurrences in contemporary America (which would have been simpler and cheaper to depict). However, perhaps unbeknownst to NBC, Star Trek had attracted a fiercely loyal—if not especially large—fan base. Even during the first season, fans concerned about the show’s future had begun staging small-scale demonstrations outside the NBC offices, for which Roddenberry thanked them by sending film clips from the series. But when cancellation seemed assured at the end of season 2, fan couple Bjo and John Trimble took matters into their own hands and created a pro-forma letter for concerned viewers to send to NBC. They sent it to about 150 fans, telling each to send it to ten others. Before long, NBC was inundated with between 200,000 and a million letters—at least four times more than the 50,000 letters they typically received in a year—some from figures as notable as Isaac Asimov.[22] NBC’s president and vice president personally received 115,000 letters.
NBC quickly dropped plans for Assignment: Earth and renewed Star Trek for a third season, but not without moving it to a later time on Friday nights, regarded as a “death slot” for which few viewers would stay home. Accordingly, the third season saw a large drop in viewers, combined with what many regarded as a drop in quality after the budget was cut further. Despite another letter-writing campaign in 1969, the series was cancelled after a total of seventy-eight episodes.
Although Roddenberry directly penned relatively few episodes of the series, he rewrote other writers’ work extensively. He rewrote “City on the Edge of Forever” substantially enough that its original writer, Harlan Ellison, left the series in protest. Roddenberry was adamant that all the episodes should express the overall values of optimism, science, rationality, loyalty, and freedom, as well as accurately depict all the major characters and their relationships. One story Roddenberry did write was the only two-part episode, “The Menagerie.” This award-winning story reused large parts of the original pilot, “The Cage.” It depicts Spock going on trial for apparent mutiny in his efforts to save his former captain, an example of Roddenberry’s preference for stories that emphasize the values of loyalty and friendship.
Fundamentally, Star Trek expressed Roddenberry’s belief that contrary to cold war pessimism about humanity’s future, human beings have the potential to build a peaceful, rational society. Rather than regarding his era as the end of history, he saw it as humanity’s infancy, saying, “I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We’re still just a child creature, we’re still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We’re growing up, we’re moving into adolescence now. When we grow up—man, we’re going to be something!”[23]
His vision of the future was one in which humanity widely embraced reason and rejected mysticism, and he refused to have any depictions of religion in the series, later remarking, “People were saying that I would have to have a chaplain on board the Enterprise. I replied, ‘No, we don’t.’ I think I learned somewhere in those years what many humanists learn: that if you argue with those types of people, they will ensnare you.”[24] Roddenberry’s reason-driven characters also favored nonviolent solutions to crises where possible but never shunned using violence when necessary, such as defending the Federation or innocent people from imperialistic powers such as the Klingons and Romulans. He often advocated plots in which characters used logic and intellect to defeat an enemy. This led to several stories in which Kirk defeats artificial intelligences that have “gone insane” or taken over planets by tricking them into self-destructing with logic puzzles, which has become something of a meme and is repeatedly referenced in the recent animated comedy series Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Roddenberry’s own stories tended toward indulgence in science-fiction concepts at the expense of drama, but when he found writers he could work with effectively—such as Ellison and stalwart Star Trek writer Dorothy Fontana—their combined efforts were often outstanding. However, Roddenberry’s intense level of work on the series took a toll on his personal life. His relationship with Barrett was public knowledge, and he was planning to divorce Rexroat during the first season. But he did not believe he could commit enough time to both the series and the proceedings, so put it off, eventually hurriedly completing the divorce just in time to marry Barrett in a ceremony in Japan in 1969.
Roddenberry entered the 1970s without a show to produce but at last in a formal relationship with the woman who had been his primary partner and support for the past decade. Barrett would remain loyal to him for the remainder of his life and promote and take an active role in the production of his work after his death. Nonetheless, the two—as well as several of the Star Trek cast—faced serious financial hardship in the years following the show’s cancellation, compounded by a $2,000 monthly alimony to Rexroat (equivalent to $16,000 today). Roddenberry was deeply bitter about the way Star Trek had been sidelined by the network and claimed he would never write for television again. In 1971 he wrote and produced his first and only film outside the Star Trek franchise, Pretty Maids All in a Row. An attempt to step into the world of mainstream cinema, it was poorly received, and Roddenberry longed to continue creating science fiction instead.
In retrospect, cancellation was probably the best thing to happen to Star Trek. During the show’s production, Desilu had become part of the Paramount group, which regarded the show as a major loss maker. Keen to recoup some earnings, they sold it to affiliated local distributors including Kaiser Broadcasting. Noticing that the show’s main audience was young males, Kaiser scheduled Star Trek opposite other networks’ 6 p.m. news programs, which that market was less likely to watch. The move was a huge success for Kaiser, and other networks rapidly began buying the series. Before long, it was showing nightly on local stations across the United States.[25] At the same time, dismayed fans were looking for new ways to enjoy the show following its cancellation. After a few smaller events, fans organized the first Star Trek convention in New York City in early 1972, with Roddenberry in attendance. A few hundred fans were expected, but more than three thousand turned up, overwhelming the venue and causing some to be turned away.[26] Such conventions, as well as college tours, became Roddenberry’s main source of income in the early- and mid-1970s; he loved meeting and engaging with fans of his work, whose admiration may have helped offset his doubts about his value as a writer.
In a few years, Star Trek had gone from an obscure loss maker to a nationwide phenomenon. Realizing that they had a moneymaker on their hands, NBC began rushing to produce something new to capitalize on the interest. But they were still reluctant to invest the large budget that the original series had cost. So, they commissioned an animated continuation of Star Trek with the show’s main cast, Roddenberry as producer, and several of its regular writers returning to continue the Enterprise’s five-year mission. The 1972–73 animated series provided some relief both to Roddenberry’s finances and to his and fans’ desire to continue the show, but its rushed production was beset with problems. The animation was of generally poor quality (its awkward expressions and movements have been the subject of much parody and meme-making in subsequent years), and the main voice cast had to provide many of the guest roles as well. Although a few episodes stand out—notably the Emmy Award-winning “Yesteryear,” which delved into Spock’s childhood and the rituals of Vulcan society—the series was widely considered an inadequate continuation of its progenitor.
Failed Genesis
During production of the animated series, Roddenberry realized that he missed writing for television and reversed his earlier embargo. He set about writing the pilot for a new show. The story, titled Genesis II, depicted modern-day astronaut Dylan Hunt being frozen in suspended animation for 150 years. Waking up in the 2130s, he finds himself in a postapocalyptic world where the small, pacifistic PAX civilization is under attack from the totalitarian Tyranians. Hunt joins the PAX, and after being kidnapped by the Tyranians, leads a revolt in their society and overthrows their government. The PAX abhor Hunt’s actions, which he regards as clearly moral, and the story ends with him rejoining the PAX on the provisional agreement that he will not use violence again—but Hunt clearly believes that will be necessary in the future.
The story, much like “The Cage” and later Roddenberry pilots, is a cerebral morality play, which clearly sets up a debate between Hunt and the PAX about pacifism and the appropriate use of force that would’ve played out had the series been continued. CBS made Genesis II into a pilot movie but passed on a series in favor of a TV adaption of Planet of the Apes. Roddenberry, still passionate about the idea, reworked the episode into a new story called Planet Earth. This story, offered to ABC, replaces the Tyranians with the matriarchal Confederacy of Ruth (a seeming reference to the contemporary women’s lib movement). ABC also produced the pilot but passed on a series, although they reworked the pilot into a third movie based on the story, Strange New World.
Frustrated by the networks’ interference in his story, which he barely recognized by this point, Roddenberry declined to be involved in this third iteration. He developed two other show pilots in the 1970s: The Questor Tapes, which follows an android with missing memories who is searching for the meaning of his existence; and Spectre, a supernatural take on the Sherlock Holmes format. Again, neither came to fruition, leaving Roddenberry with ever-growing resentment toward the television industry and the intense pressure for shows to fit into a mold of what’s considered likely to be popular to get produced and broadcast.
One ray of hope did emerge during this time. In 1975, Star Trek’s ever-growing fan base launched yet another letter-writing campaign—this time directed at NASA, which was developing a new type of manned spacecraft. This futuristic “Space Shuttle,” which more closely resembled an airplane than a traditional space capsule, seemed like a piece of science fiction brought into the real world. NASA planned to call the prototype Space Shuttle Constitution, but the ever-vocal Star Trek fandom succeeded in getting it named Enterprise instead.[27] Roddenberry and the Star Trek cast attended a highly publicized unveiling ceremony for Enterprise, which only served to boost interest in a proper Star Trek continuation.
Paramount, by this time, was keen to capitalize on Star Trek’s unexpected popularity. They had made several attempts at producing a film version in the early 1970s, initially working with and then trying to replace Roddenberry, much to his annoyance. Eventually, after these projects fell through, they announced a new live-action series in 1977, Star Trek: Phase II. Roddenberry agreed to produce the show in return for complete artistic control and took a two-week vacation to deal with his emotions about his past projects so he could go into producing the series without negative associations. He was keen to do things he had been unable to do the first time around, notably depicting how Earth appeared in the show’s time frame and having a greater proportion of women on the Enterprise crew. He also wanted to explore the moral and social issues of the 1970s, including the rise of nationalism and how people become convinced to carry out terrorist attacks.
Unfortunately, Roddenberry’s desire to update the series for the 1970s—visually as well as thematically—and to depict such elaborate things as the cities of twenty-third-century Earth rapidly overran Paramount’s budget expectations, and the series was in jeopardy before production had even begun. Keen to save face after announcing but failing to deliver several Star Trek films by this point, Paramount kept production underway through 1977 while looking for an alternative way to recoup its investment. At the same time, an outlandish space-adventure movie from a little-known director, George Lucas, was debuting in a limited run in forty-three U.S. cinemas. Quite unexpectedly, the film—titled Star Wars—was a worldwide word-of-mouth sensation and rapidly became the highest-grossing movie at that time.[28] It triggered an explosion of interest in new science-fiction films, and Paramount decided to adapt Roddenberry’s Phase II pilot for the big screen to cash in on the Star Wars mania, dropping the eleven other episodes that had been scripted for Phase II.
Onto the Big Screen
Such was the rush to capitalize on the success of Star Wars that the Phase II pilot, which had been titled “In Thy Image,” became the unimaginatively titled Star Trek: The Motion Picture without much alteration. The biggest change was reintroducing Spock, who had been absent from the Phase II plans because of a dispute between actor Leonard Nimoy and both Roddenberry and the studio over merchandising royalties.[29] Otherwise, the film that was rushed in front of audiences in 1979 was essentially another of Roddenberry’s cerebral television pilots with a big-screen budget.
Whether moviegoers were expecting either something like Star Wars or something like the 1960s Star Trek, what they saw didn’t meet those expectations. Instead, The Motion Picture more closely resembled Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In it, Earth is threatened by a mysterious cloudlike structure that destroys anything in its path, from Federation research stations to heavily armed Klingon battle fleets. It is an exceptionally slow film, featuring several extended musical and visual sequences that both pad the story to a cinematic run time and show off the stunning visual effects (produced by Star Wars effects house ILM). The movie’s extended conclusion is a dive both into the cloud’s interior and into the mind of the sentient robot at its heart that is, much like the protagonist of Roddenberry’s The Questor Tapes, simply looking for its creator and the purpose of its existence.
Although The Motion Picture was a financial success, more than trebling its production budget in revenues, the popular and critical reception lambasted its intellectual storyline, slow pace, and lack of action. Paramount, which blamed this on Roddenberry’s frequent rewrites of the film’s script, pressed forward with plans for more Star Trek movies but rejected Roddenberry’s sequel ideas. Mainstream audiences wanted the action and adventure they’d tasted in Star Wars, so Paramount brought in screenwriter Nicholas Meyer and producer Harve Bennett to create what would become Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Roddenberry was given the role of consulting producer, meaning that he would receive royalties and could contribute notes on the scripts and production, but Bennett largely ignored these. During this time, Roddenberry became increasingly bitter about the studio system and increasingly turned to drink and other vices, likely to escape his feelings of rejection and self-doubt. The Wrath of Khan was received much more favorably by critics and audiences than The Motion Picture had been and is still widely regarded as one of the franchise’s best installments.[30] Accordingly, Paramount continued producing Star Trek films without Roddenberry’s involvement for the rest of his life.
The Next Generation and Roddenberry’s Final Years
Star Trek continued to be a major hit on the big screen, but with the films’ continued success came ever-increasing salaries for lead actors Shatner and Nimoy. Paramount wanted a new way to make money from the franchise on a lower budget, so, in 1986, they decided to begin work on a new Star Trek series with a new cast. Keenly aware that many fans would already be predisposed against a Star Trek series without the original actors, they sought to reassure them that this would be genuine Star Trek by inviting Roddenberry back to create and produce the new show.
By this time, the aesthetics of the original series already looked dated, as did some “futuristic” technologies depicted in it, so Roddenberry moved the new series’s time frame forward an additional century to give the show a more futuristic look while keeping the time line consistent with the original series. This was a bold move. Whereas many would’ve expected a new series to feature the original characters played by younger actors, Roddenberry asked fans to accept a wholly new, very different crew. In place of the swashbuckling Kirk, this Enterprise would be headed by Captain Jean-Luc Picard, a reserved, thoughtful, and sometimes curmudgeonly Frenchman, fiercely moral but far more traditional and stricter than the rogueish Kirk.[31]
The new series depicted a future much-changed from that of the original series, with new technologies such as an immersive environment simulator called a “holodeck,” a sentient android on the crew, and notably, a Federation now at peace with its former arch-enemy, the Klingons. In the original series, the Klingons had been Roddenberry’s metaphor for the Soviet Union, and the depiction of them as reformed allies of the Federation predated by half a decade the reset of relations between the United States and Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Next Generation even features a Klingon on the bridge crew, an interesting parallel to the addition of Chekov to the original series cast and a reflection of Roddenberry’s belief that even the most seemingly intractable conflicts can be resolved if enough people in those societies are willing to change their philosophies. The Klingon character Worf enables a range of stories probing the clash between his warrior culture and the Federation’s peace-loving philosophy, and later the gradual reformation of Klingon society.
The philosophy of The Next Generation is also significantly different from that of the original Star Trek. Roddenberry, by this point, had become utterly disillusioned with the profit-driven studio system, and his political ideas had drifted from the fervent Americanism that characterized the original series to a worldview that embraced elements of socialism. The main effect of this on the series is the introduction of the idea that the Federation is a moneyless society in which all citizens’ material needs are met (how exactly is never fully clear, but the advent of “replicators” that can produce food and equipment out of thin air is a key element). When asked what motivates people to work in this society, Roddenberry answered, “Why does someone become a baker? Because the family is going to starve to death? No. People become bakers because certain people love the smell of things baking.”[32] He believed in people’s motivation to pursue their highest values—as he had done in his own career—but did not understand money’s role in enabling people to assign value to each other’s work, perhaps because of the low value studio executives and audiences had sometimes assigned to his.
Roddenberry was even keener for the inhabitants of his future to be morally ideal than he had been during the original series. He said that “we can’t have a lot of dramatics that other shows get away with—promiscuity, greed, jealousy. None of those have a place in Star Trek.”[33] (By this time, he seemingly had accepted the common conflation of seeking what belongs to others and the acquisition of wealth by one’s effort under the concept of “greed,” though the original series had depicted the Federation as an American-style trade-based society with a system of credits for currency.) He also pushed for The Next Generation to depict a future in which gender has become far less important in society, and early episodes feature background male characters wearing skirt-like uniforms, although this was quickly dropped. The series also introduced the idea that families and children live aboard the Enterprise, stressing Roddenberry’s vision that Starfleet (essentially the Federation’s naval wing) is primarily exploratory, not a military force.
Many early Next Generation stories revisit ideas and concepts from the original series, many of which Roddenberry felt that he could now broach more confidently. The opening two-part episode, “Encounter at Farpoint” (another slow-paced, intellectual Roddenberry pilot), explores the idea that we may encounter in space entities that don’t appear alive or conscious to us but are actually intelligent, self-aware life forms. It’s a recurring theme in The Next Generation and a callback to the original series’ famous catchphrase, “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.” The moral debates that such episodes raised—“Farpoint” shows Picard and his crew juggling the rights of a gigantic jellyfish-like creature with those of the human colonists who had been living on it—are routinely discussed in “conference room” scenes in which the main characters debate the matter at hand and offer evidence, moral perspectives, and possible solutions before Picard decides what action to take. Roddenberry later told Humanist magazine,
I’ve been sure from the first that the job of Star Trek was to use drama and adventure as a way of portraying humanity in its various guises and beliefs. The result was that Star Trek—in the original series but even more powerfully in [The Next Generation]—is an expression of my own beliefs using my characters to act out human problems and equations.[34]
Unfortunately, during this time, Roddenberry’s health was in decline, accelerated by his growing dependency on alcohol following his financial and professional troubles since the 1970s. Adamant that he not lose control of his creation once again but also unable to work as feverishly as before, he had his lawyer, Leonard Maizlish, brought into the production process to ensure that his interests were protected. As Roddenberry continued to fade, Maizlish took it upon himself to rewrite scripts, intercede in production meetings, and even secretly search the offices of writers and other production crew.[35] This created an atmosphere in which many felt unable to work, which ultimately caused the departure of Roddenberry’s longtime friend and writing associate Dorothy Fontana as well as main cast member Gates McFadden (although the latter returned after Maizlish was banned from the set during the second season).[36]
By 1989, Roddenberry’s health had declined so far that he could no longer carry out the responsibilities of producer. For The Next Generation’s third season, Roddenberry was relegated to an advisory role. Following this change, the show noticeably returned closer to the style and values of the original series and rapidly grew in popularity to become the most-watched syndicated series in the United States.
Roddenberry died in October 1991, just after seeing the release of The Undiscovered Country, the sixth and final Star Trek film with the original cast. He was survived by Barrett; their son, Rod; and two daughters from his first marriage. The Next Generation continued to run for seven seasons and four subsequent movies. It also spawned three spin-off shows alongside a host of other Star Trek series and movies.
Legacy
Barrett’s devotion to her husband and his work continued long after his death. She played a recurring role as well as voicing the ship’s computer throughout The Next Generation’s run and voiced the computer in its spin-off series Deep Space Nine and Voyager, doing so for a final time in the 2009 Star Trek reboot movie. She also oversaw the posthumous production of two new shows based on Roddenberry’s ideas: Earth: Final Conflict in 1996 and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda in 2000. Both shows drew on elements of Roddenberry’s unrealized Genesis II pilots and other story concepts from that era. Following Barrett’s death in 2009, their son Rod Roddenberry has become the standard bearer for the Star Trek franchise, serving as an executive producer on all series from Star Trek: Discovery onward.
Today, Star Trek is a far cry from the obscure curiosity Roddenberry originally created. It is now a media empire consisting of twelve TV shows, fourteen movies, and innumerable books, comics, audio adventures, and video games. It and the ideas conveyed in it have inspired astronauts, scientists, politicians, entrepreneurs, writers, actors, musicians, thinkers, and inventors. At Roddenberry’s funeral, The Next Generation guest star Whoopi Goldberg remarked that people across the world loved Star Trek because “they know that, somehow, the world can actually be better because of this one man’s vision.”[37]
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.
[1] Eric D. Snider, “50 Things That Happened Because of Star Trek,” Vanity Fair, September 8, 2016, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/09/star-trek-50th-anniversary.
[2] “The Humanist Interview with Gene Roddenberry,” Humanist, March/April 1991, https://thehumanist.com/features/interviews/humanist-interview-gene-roddenberry.
[3] Kevin C. Neece, The Gospel According to Star Trek (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2018), 13.
[4] David Alexander, Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry (New York: Roc, 1994), 38; Lance Parkin, The Impossible Has Happened: The Life and Work of Gene Roddenberry, Creator of Star Trek (London: Quarto), 4.
[5] Joel Engel, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man behind Star Trek (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 15, 48.
[6] Steve Birdsall, “Gene Roddenberry’s Near-Death Experiences in the Pacific War,” Army Times, November 7, 2019, https://www.armytimes.com/military-honor/salute-veterans/2019/11/07/gene-roddenberrys-near-death-experiences-in-the-pacific-war.
[7] Parkin, The Impossible Has Happened, 5.
[8] Michael John Petty, “Before ‘Star Trek,’ Gene Roddenberry Made His Mark on This Classic Western Series,” Collider, June 28, 2024,
https://collider.com/gene-roddenberry-have-gun-will-travel.
[9] “The Humanist Interview with Gene Roddenberry.”
[10] Engel, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man behind Star Trek, 14–17.
[11] Martin Connolly, “Catching Up with Gene Roddenberry’s The Lieutenant, and What It Can Tell Us about Star Trek,” Core, https://files.core.ac.uk/download/229096090.pdf.
[12] “Gene Roddenberry Quotes,” Inside Trek, https://insidetrek.com/Gene-Roddenberry-Quotes (accessed December 1, 2025).
[13] Steve O’Brien, “The Complete Guide to Gene Roddenberry,” SciFiNow, August 9, 2022, https://www.scifinow.co.uk/blog/the-complete-guide-to-gene-roddenberry.
[14] “How Lucille Ball Helped Star Trek Become a Cultural Icon,” StarTrek.com, August 6, 2023, https://www.startrek.com/en-un/news/how-lucille-ball-helped-star-trek-become-a-cultural-icon.
[15] “The Humanist Interview with Gene Roddenberry.”
[16] Nick Ottens, “The Cage: The Star Trek Pilot That Wasn’t (Quite),” Forgotten Trek, June 18, 2016, https://forgottentrek.com/the-original-series/the-cage-the-star-trek-pilot-that-wasnt-quite (accessed November 30, 2025).
[17] Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, “An Oral History of ‘Star Trek,’” Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/oral-history-star-trek-180958779 (accessed December 1, 2025).
[18] Ottens, “The Cage.”
[19] Simon Hattenstone, “Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols: ‘Martin Luther King Was a Trekker,’” The Guardian, October 18, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/18/star-trek-nichelle-nichols-martin-luther-king-trekker.
[20] David Tilotta and Curt Mcaloney, “‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ Is Remembered as One of Star Trek’s Best,” StarTrek.com, April 6, 2019, https://www.startrek.com/en-un/news/city-edge-forever-remembered-one-treks-best.
[21] Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (New York: Pocket, 1996), 342.
[22] Ed Gross, “Meet the Fans Who Saved the Original ‘Star Trek’ From Cancelation, Not Once, But Twice,” Woman’s World, August 6, 2025, https://www.womansworld.com/entertainment/classic-tv/how-star-trek-fans-saved-the-show.
[23] “10 Helpful Quotes to Celebrate Gene Roddenberry’s Birthday,” StarTrek.com, October 24, 2021, https://www.startrek.com/en-un/gallery/10-hopeful-quotes-to-celebrate-gene-roddenberrys-birthday accessed November 30, 2025).
[24] “The Humanist Interview with Gene Roddenberry.”
[25] Solow and Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, 418.
[26] Troy Brownfield, “The First Star Trek Convention,” The Saturday Evening Post, January 21, 2022, https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2022/01/the-first-star-trek-convention.
[27] Enterprise never flew in space. It was used to test the Shuttle’s launch structures and was released mid-flight from another aircraft to test its landing systems.
[28] Top Grossing Movies of 1977, The Numbers, https://www.the-numbers.com/market/1977/top-grossing-movies.
[29] Joshua M. Patton, “Why Did Leonard Nimoy and Gene Roddenberry Feud on Star Trek?,” Comic Book Resources, February 27, 2024, https://www.cbr.com/leonard-nimory-gene-roddenberry-star-trek-feud.
[30] Owen Williams, “How The Wrath of Khan Saved Star Trek,” Empire, October 21, 2022, https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/how-the-wrath-of-khan-saved-star-trek.
[31] Despite the character’s French name and background, Patrick Stewart plays Picard with a strong British accent, and most of his habits and characteristics are more British than French.
[32] Yvonne Fern, Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation: A Dialogue with the Creator of Star Trek (New York: Pocket, 1994), 163.
[33] Hal Schuster, The Trekker’s Guide to the Next Generation Complete, Unauthorized, and Uncensored (Shreveport, LA: Prima, 1996), 14.
[34] Darcee L. McLaren and Jennifer E. Porter, Star Trek and Sacred Ground: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion, and American Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 2016), 15.
[35] Chris Snellgrove, “The Star Trek Lawyer that Nearly Got Everyone Sued,” Giant Freakin Robot, https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/star-trek-lawyer.html.
[36] “Gene Roddenberry’s Lawyer: 5 Facts You Need to Know,” Entertainment Now, December 19, 2024, https://entertainmentnow.com/star-trek/eonard-maizlish-gene-roddenberry-lawyer.
[37] Engel, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man behind Star Trek, 4.
Roddenberry to his credit didn't live entirely in his head, which is often the case with science-fiction obsessives. His experiences as a pilot and a cop clearly helped to round out his understanding of the world.
Good to read about "The Defiant Optimism of Gene Roddenberry"
The world needs that sort of optimism today!
Thank you!