Star Trek Producer Insults Gene Roddenberry With Bizarre Ritual

How did this strange ritual involving a bust of Gene Roddenberry come about? To understand why Rick Berman would feel the need to symbolically blind the franchise creator, you must first understand that Roddenberry had many definitive visions of what Trek should and shouldn’t do. In the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, this created so many frustrations that a whopping thirty writers ended up bailing out, and Rick Berman was just one of many Trek creators happy to later avoid these restrictions.

One of Gene Roddenberry’s most infamous edicts was that none of the episodes should feature interpersonal conflict between our Starfleet officers. On paper, it sounds like a neat idea showcasing how far humanity has come by the 24th century, but this rule ended up killing countless great story ideas produced by the writers. Many writers who left Star Trek: The Next Generation after its tumultuous first season did so because Roddenberry’s rules were so restrictive that they couldn’t write effective drama.

Gene Roddenberry’s failing health meant he had to relinquish much of his creative control of The Next Generation after season one, and his death in 1991 meant that writers and producers now had more creative leeway with Star Trek than ever before. After Rick Berman became executive producer of TNG by season three, he began exerting more influence on Star Trek, ultimately co-creating Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. This meant he overlooked many sessions with writers and others as they discussed the Dominion War and other storylines Roddenberry would have certainly despised.

To honor the man who had given him so much, Rick Berman always kept a small bust of Gene Roddenberry on his desk. The producer claims that whenever he and others would discuss one of the ideas he knew Roddenberry would find offensive, Berman would blindfold the bust. Taken at face value, this was a method of honoring Roddenberry without disturbing his spirit in the afterlife; more critical fans, however, may read this as Berman deliberately making a show of frequently disrespecting the man who brought Star Trek to life.

No matter how you feel about George Roddenberry or Rick Berman, it’s difficult to deny that this ritual of blindfolding the bust is stranger than anything The Next Generation or its sister shows ever gave us. NuTrek has been out of Rick Berman’s control since he left the franchise in 2006, but the sheer amount of both interpersonal conflicts and gruesome violence in shows like Picard have proven that Trek continues to veer from its creator’s vision. 

Since the upcoming spinoff, Starfleet Academy, sounds like it will be a bunch of teenybopper nonsense, we have an important question for Berman: is it too late for us to borrow that blindfold so we don’t have to see what is happening to this franchise?