[Zardoz]

Originally Posted by Damage75

I never knew he wasn't associated with the 3rd season of TOS. And great point about Berman. Were such authors as Michael Jan Friedman & Peter David ever approached for anything TNG or later? And for that matter, were any of the writers for TOS ever approached or used?

You'll see a few TOS episode authors in the scripts for TNG season 1. David Gerrold was even in on helping to create TNG, until in usual Gerrold fashion, he threw a hissy because they wouldn't film his Gay/Aids realted Trek story in 1987! (That was a big no-no for even the most popular show of the time, let alone a new start up show.) So he left.

In fact Gerrold has retooled the story for Star Trek New Voyages/Phase II as "Fire and Blood", their next episode.

[Elizadolots]

Originally Posted by Zardoz

But Trek in alot of ways was never really about SF, but about people. Some of what your saying I am agreeing with, Berman was not perfect, even by his own estimation, he made mistakes. I am critical of some of his choices, yes. But I feel the same way of GR.

Most Science Fiction is really about people. The point is "people in the future". Roddenberry hired Science Fiction writers to theorize about how things would be in the future. It doesn't see like much now, but the mere idea that there would be computers everywhere was a radical, novel concept. The idea that individual computers could be networked together to facilitate communications (among other things) was novel. Communicators seem clunky now, but the idea of wireless communications devices was novel. Non-invasive medical scanners are another concept that was radical at the time, but commonplace now (though...we still haven't gotten to the bed you lie on that scans you without emitting something at least potentially dangerous). Star Trek was full of new ideas. It presented improvements on the life we were leading that captured the imagination. None of the subsequent series did that. Rick Berman was quite content to have little or no technological improvement. You can't even credit him with holodecks because that idea was from an Animated Episode of Star Trek.

But GR did offically pass on Trek to him before he died..

We all make mistakes. Berman apparently thought paying homage to the original series was enough. Where Roddenberry asked "what will happen in the future?" Berman asked "What happened in Star Trek?"

I think time will eventually be kinder to Berman.

I doubt it.