Honestly, I find Q more interesting than the Farpoint mystery.
On paper, Q is a stupid idea. He's basically The Great Gazoo from
The Flintstones, an advanced being who hangs around with primitives so he can insult them, and who performs magic with a snap of his fingers. It's an absurd concept that works against the plausibility Roddenberry claimed he wanted for
Star Trek. And it's a rehash of an overused TOS trope, advanced godlike beings putting humanity on trial. The only thing that made Q work was John DeLancie's charismatic performance. With a lesser actor, it could've been a disaster.
My memory on this is fuzzy, but I *think* the argument made at the time was that TNG was just a continuation of the prior series. In fact, there was a suggestion at one point to just call it Star Trek and not even give it a different name. It seems somewhat preposterous, but it obviously worked as the Guild awarded him the sole creator credit.
Granted, a lot of TNG is a reworking of the
Phase II revival idea that became
Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Picard is based on the older, more seasoned Kirk who was a mentor to Decker, Will Riker and Deanna Troi are Will Decker and Ilia, and Data is a cross between
Phase II's Xon (the young, logical science officer eager to learn more about human emotion) and the title android from Roddenberry's
The Questor Tapes. So perhaps that was a factor.
Still, if that was the basis for the ruling, it was very much the exception to how those things are usually done. Even direct spinoffs usually give creator credit to the developers of the spinoffs instead of limiting it to the creators of the original (for instance,
Angel credits both Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt as its creators, and
AfterMASH credited four creators, not just
M*A*S*H developer Larry Gelbart.
Also, let's be honest. It's not as though WGA mandated credits always reflect reality. Nick Meyer wrote the screenplay for TWOK, but it's credited to Jack B. Sowards. Roddenberry wrote a lot of the screenplay for TMP but only Harold Livingston got credit. Michael Piller wrote a good chunk of "Yesterday's Enterprise" but voluntarily removed his name because of WGA rules about how many writers can be listed. Etc.
Yes, but as you say, there are rules dictating why that happens. And as I said, the explicit WGA rule in writing -- I've read it -- is that if you write the series bible or the pilot episode, you're entitled to creator credit. So the mystery is why the rule was made an exception to in that case.
Didn't she write the original one hour pilot (i.e. 45 minutes of script), which was then doubled to a two-hour slot at Paramount's insistence, resulting in the final 90-minute script?
No, it was originally meant for a 90-minute slot (meaning about 70 minutes minus commercials) but then expanded to a 2-hour slot (meaning about 90 minutes minus commercials). That's why 3/4 of "Farpoint" is the Farpoint/Bandi plot that Fontana wrote and 1/4 of it is the Q subplot that Roddenberry wrote.
I suspect that
War of the Worlds: The Series, TNG's sister show in its syndication package in 1988-90, was also intended to have a 90-minute pilot that was expanded to 2 hours, because it has a subplot involving the lead character's breakup with his fiancee that takes up about 1/4 of the runtime but has no relevance to the larger story and isn't even mentioned in the rest of the plot.
