The Fifty-Year Mission Quotes

“I think a franchise is definitely showing its fatigue when you do an evil twin story.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“I don’t think seeing Spock endlessly slugging somebody captures the idea of Spock as a character; it just seems kind of dopey.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“And Uhura stopping an important mission to bitch at her boyfriend I thought was insulting to everyone and not just the women.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“Well, Gene Roddenberry was also a fan of drama, so I think he would have agreed with that up-front.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“That could be a nice bonus to our incredible integrity-filled decision to keep him alive at the end.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“There was one thing the Star Trek movies did well, and that’s the action sequences always had something going on and were character motivated.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“The producers broke one of their own rules: Star Trek has become pop culture, but there is never pop culture within Star Trek, because it punctures the reality.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“Among the best elements of Star Trek since the original series have been characters that Gene Roddenberry believed held a mirror up to humanity.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“I used to call it “Roddenberry’s Box,” and I loved being in it, because the restrictions forced us to be more creative than going into the routine melodramas that we often see in SF television.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“I think you would have gotten tired of that after a while, because it was an external mystery and you can only appease the audience for so long and then you start building traps for yourself.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“But one of the things I was proudest of with Deep Space Nine is that I began to realize that it takes a great deal more courage to stay and deal with problems that don’t get solved than it is to go in, meet somebody, change their lives or have them teach us something, and then zoom out to the next person.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“We did politics awfully well. The problem with that is there may have been something to the fact that people would rather watch space monsters, enigmas, and anomalies than politics.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“gave Garak some of the best years of my life.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“We had learned from him and from experience that stories that combine science fiction with philosophy with optimism, with a comment on social issues and an exploration of human values, are the stories that work for Star Trek.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“The reason that that episode is a bore, in my opinion, is that there is no allegory. It is on the nose. It is a fastball down the middle, and it feels preachy. Suddenly, you’re not deriving the meaning from the episode, the meaning is clobbering you over the head.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“From that experience, I learned that Roddenberry’s “box” forced us to be more creative and to tell stories in more interesting and different ways than we would have in any other typical universe, so I loved that box.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“When Star Trek is hitting its stride and doing what it’s supposed to do, it can be very provocative, but because it’s reaching so high and trying to live up to its own expectations, it fails more than most shows.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“To some people, The Beatles are just Paul McCartney’s band before Wings.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“And Star Trek is not an action TV series. It’s about a lot more than that,”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“So when you see Captain Picard or Commander Sisko decide that logic, reason, and communication are the way to solve problems and not turn to violence, then we were telling something to our audience that needs to be said on a regular basis.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“Our series was designed to have the same uplifting messages—and would deal with the same metaphorical way of approaching the future that both of Gene Roddenberry’s series did previously.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“Gene would be the first to tell you it doesn’t matter what alien race you’re talking about, how hideous they seem to be. There are no bad aliens; each of them has a culture that must be defined, recognized, and appreciated for what it is.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“MICHAEL PILLER As soon as I started, I said, “I need to see every script, every abandoned story, and every submitted piece of material that’s sitting around, because I have to have something to shoot next week.” Somebody gave me a script called “The Bonding,” by a guy named Ron Moore who was about to go into the Marines, and it was a very interesting story about a kid whose mother goes down on an away mission and gets killed. The kid is obviously torn apart by the death of his mother, and seeing how much he’s suffering, aliens provide him with a mother substitute. The writing was rough and amateurish in some ways, but I thought it had real potential to tell an interesting story. I went to Gene and pitched him the story, and he said it didn’t work. I asked him why, and he said, “Because in the twenty-fourth century, death is accepted as a part of life, so this child would not be mourning the death of his mother. He would be perfectly accepting of the fact that she had lived a good life, and he would move on with his life.” I went back to the writing staff and told them what Gene had said, and they sort of smirked and said, “Ah-ha, you see? Now you know what we’ve been going through.” I said, “Wait a minute, let’s think about it. Is there any way we can satisfy Gene’s twenty-fourth-century rules and at the same time not lose the story that we have to shoot on Tuesday?” I finally said, “Look, what if this kid has in fact been taught all of his life not to mourn the death of his loved ones, because that’s what society expects of him? He’s taught that death is a part of life, so he loses his mother and doesn’t have any reaction at all. That’s what Gene is telling us has to happen. Well, that is freaky, that is weird, and that’s going to feel far more interesting on film than if he’s crying for two acts. What if the aliens who feel guilty about killing his mother provide him with a mother substitute and the kid bonds with this mother substitute, and it’s Troi who goes to Picard and says, “We have a problem? The kid is not going to give up this mother substitute until he really accepts and mourns the death of his real mother, and we’re going to have to penetrate centuries of civilization to get to the emotional core of this kid in order to wake up his emotional life.” So the show becomes a quest for emotional release and the privilege of mourning. Well, Gene loved the idea. It respected his universe and at the same time turned a fairly predictable story on its ear, and it became a far better story and episode than it would have if Gene had simply signed off on the original pitch. SANDRA”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years