Well, Gene called me up one day and said, “The Enterprise has to be in danger. Big danger.”

I replied that the focus of the show was not on the Enterprise, which existed in a timeless place frozen in the chrono-stream till Kirk and Spock could either set time in the past back the way it was supposed to be…or change the future, in which the ship might not even exist.

“No, no,” Gene said, getting troubled that I was arguing with him, as if I knew what I was doing, “we have to have a great threat to the ship in every episode. The network is asking for it.”

“But it’s beside the point, Gene! It only wastes time and takes the viewer’s focus off the love story, which is what this is all about.”

“You’ll have to do it!”

So I did it. To Gene’s order, I created a sub-plot about the Enterprise being thrown into an alternate future where they had become, gulp!, space pirates. It was an unnecessary, foolish, redundant distraction…but Gene thought it would placate the suits over at NBC. (Eventually, of course, it was dropped. But it helped contribute to the myth that I had written this unshootable, incredibly expensive teleplay. Horse puckey.)

And there was, of course, the opening, in which I had one of the ship’s complement getting a weak-willed officer to do something crooked, by tempting him with Jewels of Sound, a kind of futuristic hallucinogenic narcotic. Oh no, I was told, we can’t possibly have anyone on the Enterprise doing anything as scummy as that. Our people wouldn’t act that way.

That was the first time I ever heard that miserable excuse for hackneyed formula writing. Our hero wouldn’t act that way. Our lead won’t allow her character to act that way. Our people wouldn’t act that way.

No, indeed not. What they can do is act the same damned predictable way each and every week, in each and every new situation. Never mind that human beings are irrational and unpredictable and an amalgam of good and bad and smart and dumb, never mind that the most universal reason that most of us do anything, even if it gets us in trouble or messes us up, is that It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. Never mind that making these characters unchanging gave them about as much depth as a saucer of oatmeal. Never mind that common sense tells us that if you jam a mixed crew of approximately 450 people into an interstellar tunafish tin, for extended periods, that maybe, possibly, whaddaya think someone might get just a touch cranky with someone else? You mean to tell me, I said to whomever would listen, including Gene and John and Herb Solow (then head of the studio), and Bobby Justman, who was, at the time, associate producer—all of whom tell wonderful stories about how I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and how each of them, according to them, saved this script—that all 450 of these spacefaring men and women are saints, without flaw or natural human instincts or crankiness or rotten spots in their nature? No, I was told, Gene believes in the ultimate perfectibility of the human race. (Yeah, but all them third world aliens, who were nothing more than surrogates for ghetto minorities, they could be miserable rotten sonsabitches. Talk about your White Man’s Burden.)