Gene Roddenberry better be glad he's dead because I would cyberbully him to an early grave if he were alive rn

Yup.

Mr. Vision was, honestly, a jackass.

He should be listed as the creator of the series alongside Gene Roddenberry. The defining elements of TNG that mark it as distinct from its predecessor were, nearly, all David Gerrold’s ideas.

In very, very early publicity for the series, like Entertainment Tonight’s earliest pieces on TNG, David Gerrold is not just another guy in the writing room; he is treated as a showrunner by the publicity of the series (though that term obviously was not in widespread use in 1987). And this is not just my opinion, either: there’s actually a complaint with the Writer’s Guild that David Gerrold was essentially assigned producer duties, but was not paid as a producer – a suit that Gerrold won to the tune of six figures.

This early piece here in Starlog says that David Gerrold wrote the series Bible for TNG: 

What’s more, many of Next Gen’s unique elements are Gerrold ideas. In David Gerrold’s World of Star Trek essays in the 1970s, which were widely reprinted, Gerrold called for the following changes to Star Trek:

• The first officer should lead away missions, not the captain (Gerrold preferred the term “contact team” in the 70s, though he later used the term “away team”)
• Since deep space missions are non-violent and require a great deal of time (possibly a decade or more without seeing a starbase), families should live on the ship alongside the crew.
• The Klingons will, probably in the future, become allies of the Federation, and we may see a Klingon serve in Starfleet. Gerrold’s phrasing was “today’s foes are tomorrow’s allies.”
• If families serve on a ship, it therefore stands to reason that mental health would be significant, and an important officer would be a ship’s therapist or counselor, who would be in on meetings and consulted. 

To be clear, Gerrold’s essays were not obscure little memos in Paramount. They were widely read in the fandom world. If you’re old like me, you probably remember reading them back in the day.

David Gerrold had a lot of other ideas that were only partially used. For example, he believed fashion would be totally intersex (which explained why, in early TNG episodes, there were men in miniskirts), and that homosexuality would be widely accepted in the future (in fact, Gerrold wrote an AIDS-analogue episode that was rejected that may be one of the most famous unmade episodes of TNG’s first season, which would have had gays in Starfleet as early as Next Gen season one). “Blood and Fire” is to TNG what Ellison’s “Perils of the City” is to the original series, better known as a script and lore. 

Not all of these ideas were that progressive. Some were kinda…loopy.  David Gerrold also wanted dolphins and whales to be a part of the crew, used as navigators, in sections set aside as their own tanks. Like the idea that the captain would only make decisions with his therapist beside him on the bridge, talking dolphin crewmembers seems to be the idea that dates TNG most firmly to the 1980s. You can kinda tell that Gerrold lived his whole life in California. 

One character in particular was David Gerrold’s idea above all else: Lieutenant Worf. Here’s a publicity image from early TNG. Notice anyone who’s missing? Worf was not anything other than a background character, until at Gerrold’s insistence, he was elevated in the script. 

Gene Roddenberry in particular did not like Worf as a main character (as a background bit, that’s fine), but Gerrold guided him into a main character role.

To be clear, not every TNG idea was Gerrold’s. No show is ever just the vision of one person. The holodeck was mentioned in Gene Roddenberry’s original proposal for the original series in 1964, but they only had the ability to show it come the animated series in the 70s (as all true trekkies know, the animated series, not TNG, introduced the holodeck). Gene L. Coon made many additions to Trek lore, but that one was all Roddenberry’s. Emergency Saucer Separation also was mentioned in the original series as well, as an emergency tactic. The Q were the most Gene Roddenberry idea of all: a godlike alien race that puts mankind on trial for barbarism (and to his credit, the original writing room thought he wouldn’t work). 

Data actually came from an unaired Roddenberry pilot about a robot searching for his creator who becomes best friends with a human engineer, the Quaestor Tapes (in fact, the robot there actually says “I am fully functional” and I almost fell out of my chair). Troi and Riker are essentially reskins of Ilia and Decker from Star Trek the Motion Picture. Andrew Probert created the Ferengi, the look of the TNG Enterprise, and the idea that the bridge is more of a “hangout spot” due to automation, since the operation of the ship could be counted on to work without someone manning stations like in a submarine. Love him or hate him, the Borg were mostly producer Maurice Hurley’s idea. 

Gerrold left after the first season, but don’t feel bad about Gerrold, though. It feels like every other superhero project draws from his Man Who Folded Himself, about a guy who time travels so often that he splits the timeline over and over and interacts with endless variations of himself. His alien invasion series, War Against the Cthorr, was fascinating in that it was an alien invasion that is ecological in nature, with a hostile alien ecosystem that replaces our own. In other words, he is a great writer independent of Trek and it rubs me the wrong way people call him the “tribble guy” still. And he is still very much alive, although, tragically, he has succumbed to being extremely online. 

David Gerrold called it.

“I did a lot of the heavy lifting for the first six months of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I wrote the bible for the show. I brought in writers to do scripts and things and then they started bringing in other people,” he said. “Gene [Roddenberry]’s lawyer came aboard and started taking apart everything that we had created. And it was a very unhappy experience. But the straw that broke my back was Gene had promised we were going to do gay characters in the crew. We were going to have a gay crew member. And he had promised it in front of an audience of 3,000 fans. And then he had said it again in a staff meeting. So I knew he was serious.”

He continued, “[Producer] Rick Berman wrote a three page memo listing all the different issue stories we could tell. And the third one on his list was AIDS. I've been big on blood donations because of my friendship with Robert A. Heinlein, and so I said I wanted to do a story about how the fear of AIDS has cut back blood donations. So the story was about a disease, some of the crew members were infected, and the only way to save their lives, was to donate blood because they had run out of artificial blood. The show could put a card at the end of the episode saying ‘You can be a hero, too. Go and donate blood.’ I thought that if we did that then the next day, the next week, blood donor-ship would go up 100% because all of the Trekkies would run out [to donate blood]. And Star Trek would get credit for it. It would have been good publicity for the show, but it would also save human lives. I thought it was perfect. That's Gene Roddenberry's universe.

So by the time I got to the script, they approved the outline and I said ‘Oh, you know what? These two characters, they're boyfriends! Or married! Or whatever!’ And so there's four lines of dialogue in the script. — ‘How long have you two been together?’ ‘Since the academy.’ — That's it! Now, if you're under 12 — ‘Oh, they're good friends!’” And if you're older than that, you realize, ‘Oh my gosh, they just put gay crew members on this.’ So you might say ‘hooray!’ but it created an uproar of biblical proportions. As you would say, in Ghostbusters — ‘dogs living with cats’.”

Gerrold went on to tell me about a follow up memo that he had received, saying that he had to take the gay characters out of the show due to the threats and angry letters from mothers that they were bound to receive, to which Gerrold responded in the best way: ”Let them write letters then! The Streisand Effect is free publicity!”

“We went through two or three different rewrites and the script didn’t get any better. [Producer] Bob Justman finally realized that we needed to go back to my original draft, but by then it was too late,” he remembered. “That made me realize that if we didn’t do that script then not only is Gene a hypocrite, but I’m also a hypocrite for staying aboard this show when we’ve broken a promise and I let them straight-wash my script. If I do that, then I’m not doing what Star Trek is supposed to do.”

David Gerrold discusses the discourse of his attempt to include gay crew members on the show during the AIDS epidemic and his eventual departure from Star Trek: The Next Generation

One of 12 extant copies! #fairuse #copyfight #SDCC2019