I urge you to riffle back through and up ahead in this long self-defense, and log in the number of times Roddenberry repeated these canards, though he admitted he was wrong in the Brennert letter. When it served his ego, he always conveniently “misremembered”—and most times he was called on it by someone in an audience or in print. But it didn’t stop the myth from continuing in fandom.

As for that miserable lie he told Video Review about how I “only wrote the first draft,” well, you’ll find several sections of later rewrites off my second and third drafts, published right here in these pages. As they say in Latin, res ipsa loquitur, “the matter speaks for itself,” which makes Roddenberry’s endless repetitions of the lie, as they say in Latin, res judicata, “a matter already settled.”

Yet…

I am driven, compelled, maddened, to bombard you with the evidence, so no smallest rat-hole is left through which a rabid apologist for the way Roddenberry dealt with me—as he did so many others—can scuttle, to cobble up some rationalization for his remarks. To that end, here is an inventory sheet from the previously-noted UCLA archive of Roddenberry’s papers.

Kindly note how many different versions of the script, as written by Harlan Ellison, appear in this log.

“Harlan Ellison wrote the first draft of it, but then he wouldn’t change it.”

Speak no ill of the dead. But it seems the dead, in this case, goes right on speaking, repeating the same lies enjoyed in his life.

[9] That Source of All Wisdom, the recently-married Alan Brennert, has apprised me—subsequent to my having written those lines about Roddenberry plagiarizing Lucas and Foster—that Roddenberry’s claim about the origin of “In Thy Image” is at least partially correct. Alan’s belief is that it originated as a story idea called “Robot’s Return” in the bible Gene did for the Star Trek II series. Alan Dean Foster picked that as the episode he wanted to write, which became “In Thy Image.” But Roddenberry still stole it from John Lucas’s Nomad. This attempt at being punctilious about the facts comes to you through the courtesy of the Auctorial Honesty Network. At the tone, the time will be ten forty-two, and thirty seconds.