Iff Ron Moore was put in charge of season 6 of TNG?

When Pillar went off to work on getting DS9 started they basically put Jeri Taylor in charge of the show. What if they had instead put Moore in charge? What do you think the last few seasons would have looked like?


I don't think we would have seen huge changes because even if Moore wanted to make those changes I doubt Berman would have allowed them. I do think we would have more conflict on the show such as we seen in the episode the "Pegasaus." I also we would have seen more straight stories of that nature that play as drama that relay less on sci-fi gimmicks such as time travel. Things like "Chain of Command" and "Pagasus" would be the norm and you proably wouldn't see many eps about shapeshifting dogs or spacial anomolies. I also think we would have seen less technobbabble. The technobabble was at it's worst in the last few years of the show.

I do think the Crusher and Troi character would have been hurt without Taylor around but at the same rate I do think the Worf character would have improved. Like on "Ds9" we would be able to see him act more like a klingon ans less like a human with a bumpy forehead that gets grumpy sometimes.

Jason

 

I'm not a big fan of Ron Moore. He was better during his TNG days, I dislike his latest work, Galactica, and I'm not a big fan of DS9.

Ron Moore usually writes "sci fi drama", which is very popular today, but I'ts not my favorite, not in sf. Like in TNG, it's good to have a few drama episodes in a season, but not too much.
My favorite episodes in 6th and 7th season were episodes like Ship in a Bottle, Timescape, Parallels, All Goot Things, which are in IMO real and excellent sci fi episoded. But those episodes are not the most popular today, obviously.

I don't know if TNG would have been different with Ron in charge. Maybe not too much. Maybe he would have kept all those great episodes, and make 7th season better.
But, actually, I was a bigger fan of Braga, during his TNG days.

I think 6th season was great, and it didn't need any changes, but 7th season could have been improved a bit.

 

I'd've gotten back in to pitch again, or perhaps he'd have just bought the pitch of mine that he heard during season 4 and wanted to go with. He was overruled by Taylor at the time.

And even if he hadn't, I'd've liked the show a lot more. Moore was able to push on occasion against the strictures in place, so any additional pushing would've been a step in the right direction, a la later DS9.

 

What was your pitch?

 

I think that's exactly why they formed such a formidable writing partnership on TNG. Braga provided the bizarre concepts and technobabble, Moore rooted it in the characters. All Good Things is perhaps the prime example, being a wonderful sci-fi concept, yet one that services the characters and the drama rather than the other way around.

Of the two as solo writers, Moore wins easily for me. He can write compelling drama, even if it isn't to your tastes, but I feel Braga got lost in his own vivid imagination.

 

I agree, they were very good together.

 

I had about a dozen, all of which still exist in premise or outline or treatment form, but CROSSES TO BEAR was the first one pitched, and the one he responded strongly to. I've talked about it in old threads, but to sum up, it is something where a child dies aboardship, and the very fact that this could happen on the Enterprise (or in Star Trek) creates a kind of cascade thing in the command structure, with Riker feeling he has failed Picard since the kiddies are supposed to be his responsibility (talk about an impossible challenge.) The idea was that you'd actually see Troi doing some real counselling after Picard gets blown off by Guinan ... I've actually got the whole Picard Guinan scene in my files, and the last time I looked at it, I still liked it. I had written three full specs in the months just before this, one of which got me in to pitch, so I felt I had the character voices solid at that point.

There was a subplot aspect that intersected all this dead kid stuff, so that in order to demonstrate that Picard was dealing with the loss, he finally manages to deal with the subplot thing (I pitched two alternate subplots, one a MUF, the other a baddie ship), so it was very TOS in terms of having a plot and b plot work together instead of apart.

Moore actually argued in favor of buying it for a time after Taylor said, "picard wouldn't lose sleep over that" or words to that effect, but when she repeated it a third time, after he and she had batted it around for awhile as I remained silent, he sat back on the couch and didn't say another word for the next half-hour.

Guess I should have taken the hint, the only thing she wanted to buy was a hokey 'runner' about a surprise bday party for Picard, who always manages to be off the ship when his birthday rolls around each year, but she didn't like any of my a or b stories, so that was that.

 

^Sounds like a good script and does one of the things that I felt TNG should've done more of; deal with the civilian population of the ship. Too bad, Taylor didn't want to have anything to do with the real emotions of the characters. Who is to say that Picard wouldn't react the way he reacts in the script? Sounds like television mentality to me-- i.e. "our character wouldn't do that." Well, humans are helluv a lot more complicated and do things that don't seem in character all the time.

 

I completely agree. That is to say that I don't think characters should just do random things, but at least the writer should know why he/she decided the character would do that particular thing that time.

If Moore ran TNG during the last two years it would have been really cool, but they had others that probably kind of outranked him at the time.

Very cool pitch though. It actually sounds like a better version of The Bonding, which got Moore on the show in the first place. I can see why he liked it. It seems to me that in a show like TNG whoever is best at character development and story arcs should be the show-runner and corral the fresh writers with all the weird ideas by harnessing their creativity and incorporating it into a cohesive dramatic structure.

 

That story just sparked something in my mind.

Whenver I'm critical of the flat, unhuman characters in TNG I'm told the 24th century humans are supposed to be more evolved.
Thats fair enough, and I like the ideal, but I didn't want them to be greedy or petty or aggressive psycopaths like the humans of our time

They could still have had more....depth, and a story like that would have been a good way to explore it.

They did give some characters depth, like Riker, Picard and Worf, but left others untouched like Troi and La Forge and Crusher

They should have had more of Wesley acting like an actual teenager (all be it a very smart one) and definitly missed out not exploring Yars past on the colony somehow.
The falshback of those rape gangs chasin her throught the sewer was pretty scary, they could have gone back there and in true ST fashon made it a subtle commentary on our own time as well as exploring her trauma from the place and guilt at abandoning her sister etc