What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

[Bad Thoughts]

Brannon Braga explained the policy of no on set changes to the dialogue on an episode of Shuttlepod Show. The policy came from Roddenberry as a means of maintaining the timelessness of the script, and Berman embraced it because it would mean that there would always be clarity and concision in the complicated stories laced with fantasy technologies.

(That said, I think Picardo had some leeway, but I could be wrong.)

 

[Rahul]

A "no add-libbing" rule makes a ton of sense in speculative fiction to be honest.

Imagine someone saying "Jesus Christ" in Lord of the Rings. It's super easy to accidentally break continuity.

There's some famous stories about Harrison Ford changing some dialogue lines on Star Wars. Considering how small the changes & how big the stories are - it seems George Lucas didn't regularly allow any changes as well.

 

[Mage]

Didn't Frakes also comment on that? After the SNW/LDS cross over? How he remembered acting and directing in/for BermanBraga Trek and how things were set in stone, while there was a lot of addlib and free acting on SNW.

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[Richard S. Ta]

Dead letter perfect.

It wasn’t a writers guild thing. Definitely an in-house thing.

Interesting that there’s folks from several shows of the era there, and they all say the same thing.

I’m surprised that Shimmerman wasn’t an ad-libber TBH.

 

[Jayson1]

Also I take that it might also be a issue of time as well. Soon as someone wants to change a line they eventually have to go see if Berman will approve and then wait for his response. Meanwhile everyone I guess is left to do nothing but stand around instead of filming.

 

[knightgrace]

The early concept of TNG was "technology unchained": the ship would be so powerful and intelligent that it would run itself with minimal intervention from the crew.

The early bridge sketches are basically a conference lounge.

It should have been running itself. Not at ninety percent, nor at 99 percent. But one hundred percent, with a few suggestions from the Bridge crew...

This should have been true for the TOS Enterprise as well.

In essence "Spam in a can."

 

[1001001]

(That said, I think Picardo had some leeway, but I could be wrong.)

I don't know about ad-libbing, but he told me that he often had his lines written out and taped on the bio-bed (unseen by us, of course) to manage the difficult medical dialogue he had.