'Star Trek: The Next Generation' Writer Rene Echevarria Explains How He Approached Writing The Series
Star Trek: The Next Generation writer Rene Echevarria explained how he approached writing Star Trek and science fiction in general.
In a 2004 interview with Screen Writer’s Utopia, Echevarria was first asked how his attitude toward literature influenced him as he wrote episodes for Star Trek.
He answered, “Again, I try to tell my stories in a fresh way, that isn't on the nose and obvious. I try to illuminate new aspects of these characters--continuing characters that I haven't created--but I have to try to listen to their voices and make them richer and find depths to them that are consistent with everything that's come before.”
“Sometimes it involves being truthful to a character you may not agree with. Worf, for example, has all sorts of cultural attitudes that I don't agree with, yet it's part of my job to illuminate him as faithfully as I can, to try to get under his skin,” he explained.
“I did a show a couple of years ago ("Birthright") where Worf goes to a sort of prison camp, and for his own sort of racist reasons he turns the place upside down. You know, some people would criticize the episode--’Worf came in and ruined a perfectly good thing’--but that's what he would do; I'm not sure that it was a perfectly good thing anyway--they were not allowed to leave and they did not know the truth, and Worf did say that those who want to leave should be allowed to. That's all he really did, and no one ultimately was hurt,” he added. “But his racist attitudes drove him and led him away from a woman that he was attracted to. So that's something that I try to keep in mind, that my politics can't drive me completely. . .”
Later in the interview, he also shared how he focused on the series main characters and created scenarios to develop them rather than them going and moralizing to the character or planet of the week.
He explained, “As the author, you've got a lot of cards in your hand when you're doing science fiction because you can create a universe that illustrates something about human nature or about society that you think is important. That has a tendency sometimes, though, to become didactic and obvious and heavy-handed, and it's relatively easy to do parallels to, you know, stories about slavery or things like that. But our challenge on Star Trek is that this is a show about our characters, these 7 or 8 people, and about their lives, how they interact with these other worlds. We try not to do shows about the ‘guest’ planet and the ‘guest’ culture and the ‘guest’ star, and their problems and how they do things, where we are just bystanders.”
“I think you saw more of that in the first couple years of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and it wasn't until Michael Piller became executive producer that he insisted on bringing the focus more to our own characters--he says all television is about the continuing characters, that's what people tune in for week after week, and just because it's science fiction doesn't mean that this story can't be about these people,” he elaborated. “So we rarely do shows where we come to a planet where, for example, the men are slaves or whatever, because then our storylines become stories where our characters come and show them the error of their ways and then leave, but we haven't learned anything in the process--our characters haven't learned anything. So the challenge is to keep it focused on our people.”
Following his work on Star Trek: The Next Generation, he continued on to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He also created The 4400 and Carnival Row and was the showrunner on Terra Nova. Additionally, he worked on Medium, Castle, Dark Angel, and Now and Again. Most recently he worked on The Faithful: Women of the Bible for Fox.
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