Was Ron moore trek's greatest writer

[Saul]

MattJC said:

saul said:
He was one of the best.

JiNX-01 said:

MattJC said:
I don't hate the guy, but he made the Klingons too damned irritating for my tastes. By the time DS9 ended, I was sick to death of them.

I'm with you. They were so overused I was actually ticked off when I saw Enterprise's premiere featured a "Klingot..."

Moore isn't responsible for their overuse. That would be Berman.
"Everyone loves Klingons" - Berman's reason for bringing on more Klingons in DS9s 4th season.

Moore, from all the information I've read, was the one responsible for devloping the Klingon culture.
This includes TNG.

Yes, I was just addressing the point that he was not the one who put them in Enterprise or in DS9.

 

[MattJC]

No, but he did make him annoying, and he also has a hand in killing off Kirk, whether those who think Moore can do no wrong want to admit it or not.

 

[Sharr Khan]

MattJC said:
No, but he did make him annoying, and he also has a hand in killing off Kirk, whether those who think Moore can do no wrong want to admit it or not.

Something he admits was a mistake... or at least he realizes his writing chops weren't ready to go there.

Yes he killed Kirk - but then as I understand it that was part of "the plan" regarding TNG at that time: "Lets make a Next Generation film, bring Picard and Kirk together and be sure to bury Kirk at the end" this basically was the logical extension of GR's own attitude toward TOS.

Of course even heroes die so I can't really fault him for the act of killing Kirk - only that it shouldn't have been falling off a freaking cliff that did the deed.

Sharr

 

[Saul]

MattJC said:
No, but he did make him annoying

Compared to what? Leaving them the same as any other alien race with no culture or identity? Check out ST:TSFS, they were already annoying.

and he also has a hand in killing off Kirk, whether those who think Moore can do no wrong want to admit it or not.

It wasn't his idea to kill Kirk, but he did write how Kirk died. He admitted his faults in how he did it. He also admits when he makes mistakes in BSG. The guy has humility, unlike others.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I'm pretty sure it was More's idea to kill Kirk (I remember him talking about how he got the inpiration to do so). Has he said it was a mistake? I know Braga has, but I wasn't sure about Moore.

 

[Seven of Five]

Star Trek was blessed with a lot of talent throught each of the series. Ron Moore certainly wasn't the best, but he was definately a good guy.

 

[Navaros]

Ron Moore did take responsibility for fubaring Kirk's death and the Generations movie as a whole although he also points out some outside factors that contributed to that.

Ron Moore takes responsibility for fubaring Kirk's death

More from Moore regarding Kirk's death

 

[Anthony]

Moore? That ^&%#$# didn't get them at all. Moore Klingons: A bunch of drunken, howling, Viking cardboard cutouts, far removed from the devious, calculating, intellectual and philosophical originating in Classic Trek. Much like the proverbial machete versus the silent dagger in comparison.

MT Klingons are just like everything in it: Overplayed, overblown, overused, overexposed and overrated. He bled those characters to death, as much as Paramount bled viewers and moviegoers out of their patience and money until they became little more than backdrops. Oh, and the Vulcans behaved like Romulans, and the Romulans looked and behaved like vampires. The best thing about it is they never really cared for any other CT race, so they didn't get a chance to butcher them, I'm glad to say.

Thank God.

 

[Anwar]

The TOS Klingons were a bunch of one-note generic "space pirate" bad guys, with only tso or three exceptions and even THOSE ones (Kor and Kang) were still of the same type, the only thing they had going for them was that they were played by great actors.

Mara was an exception, but then again she wasn't much of anything other than the "Single rational one" cliche.

 

[ShamelessMcBundy]

Moore is a great writer, but for Trek, i have to go with Coon or D.C. Fontana.

 

[JD]

TheMasterOfOrion said:
The best Star Trek writers : That would be Roddenberry, Gene Coon, Michael Piller, Peter Allan Fields, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Fontana


Ron Moore wrote a few great episodes but he could also be quiet average, and he wrote some terrible episodes


What's much worse than his average episodes was his rudeness and arrogance to a number of well established scifi shows/fandoms, he has been know to call Larson's Galactica a Starwars rip-off while calling his own re-imagined series the best thing since Roddenberry's original Trek.


Ron Moore on Voyager


"I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true. Voyager is not true. If it were true, the ship would not look spic-and-span every week, after all these battles it goes through. How many times has the bridge been destroyed? How many shuttlecrafts have vanished, and another one just comes out of the oven? That kind of BULLSH*TTING the audience I think takes its toll. At some point the audience stops taking it seriously, because they know that this is not really the way this would happen. These people wouldn’t act like this."

I hate to admit it, but he did kind of have a point about the original BSG and Voy. Even though I like Voyager, I agree that there were deffinitely a lot of things they could have done differently. As for TOS BSG, I've watched about 6 or 7 episodes and I'm sorry to admit it, but it was pretty cheesy.

 

[Anwar]

The stuff he blamed VOY for not doing weren't even the writers' fault really. According to Michael Piller, it was the UPN higher-ups who told the creative team to ditch the whole Maquis/Fleet tensions, and not to do continuing stories (meaning no lasting damage or real arcs).

Moore is kind of spoiled, he's never had to work for a show where the Network were the ones really in control and not the Producers (like with TNG and DS9) and thus the one time he WAS part of a network (not syndicated like TNG and DS9) show, he quit only after a little while.

With nuBSG, Sci-Fi doesn't really interfere with its shows, so again Moore is in absolute control. He just doesn't know what it's like to do a show where the Network is in control, and if you refuse them (like Behr did with Berman) you get shut down. If DS9 had been a UPN show and Behr refused them, the show would've been cancelled.

 

[Crewman6]

Since I am less familiar with TOS and the contributions of its writers, I will say at least that Moore is definitely the best of the modern Trek writers, by far.

Even as good as many of his colleagues were, his track record contains an astonishingly high number of great episodes as well as only a very tiny margin of bad ones (as opposed to, say, Ira Behr who kept writing shitty Ferengi episodes year after year, never quite getting that he WASN'T FUNNY.)

 

[AOQ]

TheMasterOfOrion said:
What's much worse than his average episodes was his rudeness and arrogance to a number of well established scifi shows/fandoms, he has been know to call Larson's Galactica a Starwars rip-off while calling his own re-imagined series the best thing since Roddenberry's original Trek.

I'd want a citation before I accepted that. In all the comments he's made on the BSG podcasts, he's said that he and many of the nuBSG writing staff are fans of Larson's version.

I'm not going to try to compare the talents of writers who worked on shows with a different character that were made twenty-five years apart. (Although if forced to pick a favorite [if not "best"] writer I'd say that I'm personally partial to Fields and Wolfe.)

 

[MrLuisSantiago]

AOQ said:

TheMasterOfOrion said:
What's much worse than his average episodes was his rudeness and arrogance to a number of well established scifi shows/fandoms, he has been know to call Larson's Galactica a Starwars rip-off while calling his own re-imagined series the best thing since Roddenberry's original Trek.

I'd want a citation before I accepted that. In all the comments he's made on the BSG podcasts, he's said that he and many of the nuBSG writing staff are fans of Larson's version.

I'm not going to try to compare the talents of writers who worked on shows with a different character that were made twenty-five years apart. (Although if forced to pick a favorite [if not "best"] writer I'd say that I'm personally partial to Fields and Wolfe.)

MooreRon is the kind of guy who never knows when to keep his mouth shut, his rude or controversial comments are well known. Even better than citations you can see some of his remarks youtubed from interviews and conventions. In season 1 and mini series extras you can see how Moore has made claims that Larson was simply cashing-in on the George Lucas buzz and the hype during the Star Wars era, and in other clips you can see how he talks about how his reimagined series turned chesse into gold.

Ron Moore may be a talented writer but he is very blunt and his controversial remarks are well known in the scifi world. His comments on Voyager were very disrespectful, in Voyager he was one of the producers. If he thought something was wrong with the show, he could have tried doing something positive and tried to change it's direction. Instead he started throwing temper tantrums sayings how the writers were 'bullshiiting the fans' rather than trying to do something good and change the show for the better.

 

[TGTheodore]

MrLuisSantiago said:
His comments on Voyager were very disrespectful, in Voyager he was one of the producers. If he thought something was wrong with the show, he could have tried doing something positive and tried to change it's direction.

He did. Frequently.

And his parting e-mail the day he left the lot was EXTREMELY respectful and complimentary of the talents of the people he had just worked with.

Research a little.

--Ted

 

[stj]

^^^Didn't he only work on Voyager about six weeks?

If you want to research a little, there's this six page "interview," mostly on Voyager, he put out about a year later, when he got the Roswell job. It was completely crazy and makes him look spiteful and dishonest. If I remember right, he even had some line blasting actors on DS9 about how they didn't understand the character he was writing for them!

Nonetheless his personal failings still don't change the value (if any) of his work. He is infamous as the main creator of the modern Klingons. His DS9 episodes should also be considered. One that sticks in mind is Waltz. For some reason this is popular but it is fatuous.

Since others were over him at DS9, in one sense his real work is stuff like a season of Roswell, Good vs. Evil, Touching Evil (US version,) Carnavale and BSG.

I don't know anything about Roswell and Carnavale, but the others in my opinion are dreadful.

 

[AOQ]

MrLuisSantiago said:

AOQ said:

TheMasterOfOrion said:
What's much worse than his average episodes was his rudeness and arrogance to a number of well established scifi shows/fandoms, he has been know to call Larson's Galactica a Starwars rip-off while calling his own re-imagined series the best thing since Roddenberry's original Trek.

I'd want a citation before I accepted that. In all the comments he's made on the BSG podcasts, he's said that he and many of the nuBSG writing staff are fans of Larson's version.

MooreRon is the kind of guy who never knows when to keep his mouth shut, his rude or controversial comments are well known. Even better than citations you can see some of his remarks youtubed from interviews and conventions. In season 1 and mini series extras you can see how Moore has made claims that Larson was simply cashing-in on the George Lucas buzz and the hype during the Star Wars era, and in other clips you can see how he talks about how his reimagined series turned chesse into gold.

I actually took the bait and took a quick spin through the S1 extras. I didn't see Moore saying anything even remotely like that. (YouTube searches mainly turned up episode clips and promotional stuff.) Everything I've seen from him suggests that he's fond of the original show, but finds some flaws that he tried to address with his version (i.e. the handling of civilian leaders). Anyone have something to the contrary?

 

[TheMasterOfOrion]

It's there all right, or its on veoh or youtube. Santaigo ain't lying. Many of us went out and bought the Euro verison of the mini series as the series was first released on British tv. In the mini series extras you can see cast members like Mary, Jamie Bamber talking. You can also see Ronald D. Moore going on about how the orginal was soo cheesy and over the top and he bascially implies Glen Larson made Galactica because only wanted to cash in on the whole Starwars vibe during the 70s .

 

[CaptJimboJones]

stj said:
If you want to research a little, there's this six page "interview," mostly on Voyager, he put out about a year later, when he got the Roswell job. It was completely crazy and makes him look spiteful and dishonest.

I've read that interview, and I honestly wondered whether he was stoned or drunk when he gave it. He sounds utterly unlike himself - mean, bitter, and more than happy to stab former longtime co-workers in the back. He essentially said that everyone working on Voyager were hacks, including both writers and actors, and none of them "got it" the way that he did and they didn't recognize his brilliance. Now, he may indeed think this way and their even may be some truth to that, but no professional worth his salt is going to actually say that in public, at least not if he wants to keep working in Hollywood.

He also famously said that "Rick Berman hates Captain Kirk" which, as much as I often despise Berman's work, seemed like a ridiculous thing to say.

To my knowledge, no one ever responded to the things Moore said during the interview, and he and Brannon Braga, who he particularly blasted, seem to be big pals these days (just listen to their Generations commentary, they're like BFFs.)

So I tend to take that interview with a very large grain of salt. Either it's fake, or they happened to catch him at a very odd time when he was willing to make all sorts of wild statements that don't seem to hold up over time, given his professionalism otherwise.