Inappropriate Content: Geekage

I've not really written much about the demise of Star Trek on this blog—it would make me sound like a geek, after all. But as my friends know, I spent the final four years of Trek complaining about her last incarnation, Enterprise, usually in a long rambling rant that included the phrase "sickening to watch the same show that showed us TV's first interracial kiss reduced to having a black chauffeur and a Japanese chick taking messages" and would cap with a passionate round of personal abuse directed at producer Rick Berman.

In the interest of fairness, Berman has his defenders, who point out that he co-wrote the story for one of the better episodes of Deep Space Nine, and co-wrote the script for the Next Generation episode to feature Spock. These defenders rarely point out that both times, the vastly more talented Jeri Taylor and Michael Piller were working with him.

Berman is also the man that has kept gay and lesbian characters out of Star Trek. Beginning with the Next Generation, Paramount gave Gene Roddenberry, and later Berman, nearly complete creative control. Ron Moore, a producer on DS9 before creating the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, has said that "'Tell me why there are no gay characters in Star Trek,' is one of those uncomfortable questions I hate getting when I was working on the show, because there is no good answer for it. Paramount left us alone. They always left us alone. They let Next Gen do whatever it wanted. God knows it let Deep Space Nine do whatever we wanted. There is no answer for it other than people in charge don't want gay characters in Star Trek, period." Later, Kate Mulgrew, who playedCapitann Janeway, put it plainly: "Rick Berman, who is a very sagacious man, has been very firm about certain things."

I'm going off on a rant. As I said, I try to spare you my geek outrage, but I was a bit put-out this morning to discover that in the early years of Next Gen, while he was helping to make one of the most intelligent, mature television shows ever produced, Berman would occasionally take time out of his day to complain about teenagers who swear too much.

Grr.