The Torch Has Passed Off-Camera, Too

By Michael Walsh

WHAT BECOMES A LEGEND MOST? FOR RICK BERMAN, who teamed up with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in 1987 and inherited the franchise mantle after Roddenberry's death four years later, the challenge has been to honor the creator's concept while also moving it forward. The original series was set in the 23rd century, The Next Generation in the 24th; but the century Berman has to worry about is the 21st.

"Star Trek was never, and hopefully never will be, my vision of the future," says Berman, 48, a former documentary filmmaker and children's TV producer. "It's Gene Roddenberry's vision that I agreed to uphold." The job is trickier than it might seem. Berman, a vice president at Paramount when Roddenberry tapped him as the producer of The Next Generation, has had to sail his enterprise between the Scylla of Roddenberry's own "prime directive" -- a stricture against any conflict among members of Starfleet -- and the Charybdis of mass-market appeal.

"I went through a rather strenuous apprenticeship," recalls Berman, a workaholic with few outside interests other than his wife Elizabeth and their three children. "I learned what was Star Trek and what wasn't. I learned all the nomenclature, all the rules and regulations. I learned the difference between shields and deflectors -- that was a day right there. Slowly, Gene began to trust my judgment and also to trust that I would adhere to the rules, that I would not be someone who would want to change Star Trek."

Still, he says, "there were some things that existed with Roddenberry that were very frustrating to us. Not to have conflict among your characters makes it very difficult, because all the conflict has to come from outside. On The Next Generation, with the exception of an android and a Klingon, pretty much everyone was human, and they weren't allowed to be involved in conflict, so that was very frustrating for the writers."

So frustrating that in the first two seasons TNG writers came and went like Tribbles as Roddenberry assiduously rewrote nearly every script to conform to his notion of futuristic collegiality and his distaste for warfare. He had written for such popular shows as Dragnet and Have Gun Will Travel, and candidly envisioned the original Star Trek series as a "Wagon Train to the stars." In his quintessentially '60s view, the final frontier may have been full of hostile Klingons and dangerous Romulans, but they were generally susceptible to a pep talk -- only occasionally augmented by a punch in the nose -- from Captain Kirk. "Everyone always wants me to do space battles," Roddenberry remarked in 1989. "Well, screw them. That's not what Star Trek is about."

Conflict, however, is the stuff of drama, and space battles are what the paying public wants to see, especially on the big screen. Since Roddenberry's death, Berman has evolved Star Trek into something darker, more elemental and more mysterious. "Rick was a little more broadminded about what I was permitted to explore as a character," observes Patrick Stewart, TNG's Captain Picard, and the new shows are stretching the Star Trek guidelines even more. On the current Deep Space Nine, set on a remote space station, Starfleet officers tangle with the alien races who share the outpost. And in the forthcoming Voyager series (which features the first female starship captain in a leading role, albeit in a form-fitting uniform), Federation stalwarts must make an uneasy truce with a contentious band taken on board in a distant part of the universe. "This way," explains Berman, "you have a core group of people who were not all brought up on Gene Roddenberry's 24th century Earth. They don't have to follow the rules."

Whether that reasoning will pass muster down the line remains to be seen, since Trek fans are notoriously alert to any noncanonical deviations from Roddenberry's holy writ. "The laws of Star Trek are totally fictional but are held by the fans with such reverence that they have to be followed as if they were Newton's," says Berman. "You have to treat them very carefully, because there are people who for 25 years have considered them sacred." Even so, there are times he contemplates heresy: on his desk sits a bust of Roddenberry, its eyes and ears covered by a blindfold. "Things are sometimes said in this office that he probably would not like to hear," Berman says.

With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles