Imaginary Worlds - Why Ron Moore Killed Captain Kirk

Episode Date: May 20, 2015

Ronald D. Moore is best known for rebooting Battlestar Galactica for the post-9/11 era, but he got his start writing on Star Trek: The Next Generation. In fact, he really got his start in science fiction by watching the original Star Trek as a kid growing up in a small town in Northern California. His hero was James T. Kirk, and by extension the man who dreamed up this universe, Gene Roddenberry. But Moore eventually discovered that killing your heroes is a right of passing to growing up and finding your own voice. Moore's new show is Outlander on the Starz network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. So one of the reasons I started this podcast is because sometimes in my work, I'll have a great interview with somebody, but I only get to use a few minutes of tape. And the rest of it is just sitting on my desktop for years, and it will bug me. I feel like it's a shame that nobody gets to hear it. Like a few years ago, I interviewed Ronald D. Moore. He's best known for rebooting

Battlestar Galactica and turning that show into a sophisticated allegory for the war on terror. And he was way ahead of the curve in using science fiction to explore how 9-11 had affected us. But I actually didn an interview with him about Battlestar Galactica. So, you know, I have a regular gig working at the show called Studio 360, and they have a series called AHA Moments, where artists talk about a work of art that inspired them to do what they do. And he was talking about Star Trek, the original series. And these AHA Moments are really short, But his story was epic. I mean, it wasn't just about being a fan.

It took on these, like, Joseph Campbell elements of hero worship and growing up to replace your father figures. And he's such a good storyteller. I just kind of stepped out of the way and let him talk. And I'm going to do that again right now. So here is Ronald D. Moore telling his own origin story. My father was a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam. He came home and was medically discharged.

And then we went back to his hometown, Chowchilla. And that's where I grew up. We went back to his hometown, Chowchilla, and that's where I grew up. And I grew up in a household with military memorabilia and lots of books on the shelves that were military history. And that's sort of where my interest in that came from. When I was a kid, I originally wanted to be a pilot and an astronaut. Those were my first loves. I wanted to fly, and I really wanted to be a pilot and an astronaut. Those were my first loves, as I wanted to fly, and I really wanted to be an astronaut. I was very taken with the early moon landings.

One of my earliest memories is watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon when I was like four or five years old. And that experience is what propelled me into science fiction. I started anything that was on TV that had spaceships in it, I wanted to watch. I had become interested in Lost in Space on TV, which was syndicated in my area. So every day when I came home from school, I would turn on Channel 26 in the Central Valley and watch Lost in Space, which was geared for very young audiences and kids. And I was fascinated with it and loved it. It was my favorite show. Less talk, more action, please. Silence, you need it. And then there was this other show that came on sort of afterward called Star Trek and I

eventually started watching that and as I got older into the third and fourth grades, it started to have more meaning for me and I started to really like that show more, and I kind of dismissed Lost in Space as a kiddie show, and Star Trek was my show, and it would be my show from that point into adulthood. Space, the final frontier. Star Trek was originally on the air on NBC from 1966 to early 1969. Three seasons, 79 episodes, and I didn't really start watching it until 1973, 1974. So it was in strip syndication where it was on five days a week, which was even better because then I could watch it every day after school. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it.

We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. I was a Kirk fan. I mean, I thought Kirk was the ultimate hero, and I wanted to be Kirk. He just, he had it all. He had a sense of humor, and yet there was this sort of loneliness of command that they always played, and there was something noble about that and something self-sacrificing, and his only mistress was his ship, and there was something about that sort of romantic idea of a man and his ship

that I always loved and just kind of spoke to when I was a young boy. Welcome home, Captain. I started pirating my own episodes. I had an audio recorder, you know, a standard audio cassette recorder that my dad had that he let me borrow, and I would set it next to the television speaker and record episodes. And many a night, I can remember drifting off to bed listening to episodes of the Starship Enterprise. And to this day, I'll watch an episode from the original series, say, and I'll know exactly what sound cue is coming up.

But I might be surprised by what's actually on screen because I kind of remember it like a radio show. Character to Enterprise. Scotty? Scotty here, Captain. We're ready to beam up. I started writing just little short stories of adventures in the Enterprise. And there were stories that the Enterprise implied that had happened off camera or backstories of the characters that

I wanted to write. My favorite episode of the original series was called Conscience of the King. It was very Shakespearean overtly and metaphorically about a company of Shakespearean actors that come aboard the Enterprise. And Kirk suspects that the lead actor is actually a murderer from long ago who was known as Kodos the Executioner, and he had instituted this mass murder of a bunch of colonists on a colony many years ago when Kirk was a young midshipman and happened to be there, and he's one of the few men that had actually seen Kodos in person. I saw him once, 20 years ago. Men change. Memory changes. What if you decide he is Kodos in person. I saw him once, 20 years ago. Men change. Memory changes. What if you decide he is Kodos?

What then? Do you play God, carry his head through the corridors in triumph? That won't bring back the dead, Jim. And I wrote various versions of the backstories, what I wrote as a kid. I would write all these little short stories of what young Jim Kirk was like on the planet of Tarsus

when Kodos the Executioner killed all those colonists. And I wrote the story in at least a half dozen different ways. He was shipwrecked there in one version. One version, he was assigned there. One version, he followed a girl that led him there. Another version, he was born there and nobody knew it. I spun out all these scenarios about what this backstory could have meant. I don't know that I was aware of the nerdy, Trekkie kind of stereotype for quite some time, mercifully so. And it probably wasn't until I left Chowchilla and I was in college that,

you know, and I had a Captain Kirk poster in my dorm room. And people started going, oh, he's one of those geeks. And I was like, what do you mean? It's like, everybody likes Star Trek, don't you? I left Cornell my senior year. I sort of flunked out, sort of. When you stop going to class completely, they call it flunking out. They ask you to leave. So I left. And I just sort of started life over when I didn't have a future anymore. And I moved to LA and was sleeping on a friend's floor and taking a bunch of odd jobs. And eventually I started dating this girl who found out that I was a fan of the original Star Trek series. And she had a connection to Star Trek The Next Generation, which was in its second season of production at that point. And she said, oh, you know, well, I know people over at Next Gen and I could get you a tour of the sets. And I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And then I just sat down and I took a shot for no real reason. I just decided I was going to write an episode. And I sat down and wrote an episode of Next Generation,

and I tucked it under my arm, and I brought it with me on the set tour. And I conned the guy that was giving me the set tour into reading it, and he liked it. And it turned out he was one of Gene Roddenberry's assistants. I'm literally the person who had the parents say to them, you know, Star Trek's not going to get you a job someday. All this Star Trek stuff, that's all fine and good for now, but it's not going to amount to anything. You realize that.

And like in the storybook ending, eventually I end up on Star Trek. And I wrote The Adventures of the Enterprise week after week. I stood on its bridge, I sat in its captain's chair, and eventually I would kill Captain Kirk. You know, I wrote, co-wrote Star Trek Generations, and in that movie we killed Captain Kirk, and you know, I literally killed my childhood hero. Did we do it? We make a difference. Oh, yes. We made a difference.

Thank you. At least I could, too. You're the captain of the Enterprise. It's a very deep, tender place on some level. I really wanted to do that, to write the last chapter, because then that made him human and made him one of us, and somehow it made him real. I definitely got to a place where I started feeling the restraints of Star Trek.

Gene had set up Star Trek in a very specific universe that was important to him. And it was important to him that there was no religion in the future. It was important to him that there was a one world government, that the Federation was a peaceful place, that Starfleet was an arm of exploration, on and on and on. There were all these sorts of rules. And one of the rules was there was no conflict between the characters, Gene said, and you know, that petty jealousies between members of Starfleet would be gone by the time of the next generation. A lot of things that we didn't buy and didn't really believe. And we kind of felt that Gene had changed his tune since the original show, because the original show was all about conflict between the original characters. And the Federation wasn't always in the right in the old days. But

as Gene had gotten older, and when Gene did the later incarnations of Trek, he had sort of much more ironclad rules about this sort of stuff. And we just started really rebelling against it. And the writer's room became very much, you know, the radicals trying to take over where we were constantly looking for ways to sort of dirty up the Enterprise characters, to make them fight with one another, to have them make bad decisions, to have them encounter more morally complex situations where maybe the right answer wasn't apparent. Another message coming in. It's Captain Picard. Mr. Data, you were ordered to rendezvous with the fleet at Gamma Eridu. Acknowledge.

Stand by, Captain. Mr. Hobson, prepare to fire. Didn't you hear? Captain Picard wants us... Fire! Fire! We pushed the boundaries certainly further than they wanted us to and somewhat beyond, but still there was a fundamental place that we couldn't go. I couldn't get to where I wanted to go,

which was to really challenge the audience, to really have the characters do things that were really scary and horrific and morally questionable and really challenged the audience to think about what we were talking about and what did war mean and what were the reasons worth fighting for what would it do to security what it would do for freedom as of this moment we are at war and in Galactica I just decided to cut against every single thing that I had that frustrated me at Trek, and some just because I wanted change.

I didn't want a captain's chair, and I didn't want a big view screen, and so we're not going to do that. We're going to have a CIC, and there's no place for the captain to sit. You know, a lot of these choices were just, if Trek went right, we're going to go left, because Trek had set the gold standard for sci-fi and TV for so long, and it had just become calcified on a certain level. It had sort of gotten into a groove, and it wasn't changing,

and it felt very constrictive, and I felt the need to break away and set up a new paradigm. The Cylons have the ability to mimic human form. They look like us now. The question of what does it mean to be human was present throughout the original Treks run, through all the subsequent Treks, and was very much in Galactica and in Caprica.

I mean, that's still one of the great questions of science fiction, is how do you define human beings? How do you define a soul? Can you quantify it? Can you digitize it? Can you copy it? At what point does a creation become alive? Is there a point where you accept it as a human being or is there something indefinable that we call a soul that still separates us from our

creations? And I think those sorts of dilemmas, they just go through science fiction. We continue to sort of wrestle with them. There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief. There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief. Ronald D. Moore. His new show is called Outlander. It's on the Starz network. And if you want to hear more from him, he does a podcast after every episode of whatever show he's working on, and he calls it the Smoking Lamp Podcast.

He turns on a lamp, lights up a cigarette, talks about his creative process. Well, maybe the cat runs by or his wife comes in. And I don't even like listening to DVD commentaries, but it's totally mesmerizing. Well, that's it for this week's show. Thanks for listening. You can like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook or leave a comment in iTunes. I tweet at Emalinski. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.

So say we all. I feel that life is but a joke But you and I, we've been through that And this is not our fate So let's not talk about it now The hour is getting late Panoply