Fontana Is Happy To Keep On Trekkin'

"It was great to return to the original series universe and deal with those characters again," D.C. Fontana said of her work on the fan series Star Trek: New Voyages, for which she wrote the screenplay for "To Serve All My Days", an episode featuring Walter Koenig reprising the role of Chekov.

"The idea behind 'New Voyages' is that it’s set after the end of the original series' third season – they want to complete the five year mission – so it was a lot of fun to pick up from where we left off," Fontana told the UK's Star Trek Magazine (via Sci Fi Pulse). "It was a bit like getting into a time machine and travelling back to 1969! But the project also presented some interesting new challenges, since we had to find ways to do Star Trek within this medium that were affordable and still tell what I think is a great story."

Fontana wrote the original series scripts "The Enterprise Incident" and "Charlie X" and the animated series' "Yesteryear". She was invited by Star Trek: New Voyages to write a 40th anniversary episode in which Chekov prematurely ages due to a radiation burst, a follow-up of sorts to "The Deadly Years". Fontana noted, "The wonderful thing about returning to the original series is that there are always new aspects of those characters to explore...they were fresh and new when we made the original series and when I go back to them now, I still find freshness and great possibilities for storytelling and character growth."

It was recently announced that Fontana is writing for Bethesda Softworks' upcoming games. "I always seem to be involved with something that's related to Star Trek," she said. "It keeps coming back...Star Trek is the thing that stands out in most people’s minds." Asked why she thinks that is, Fontana explained, "The original series deals with themes and questions that continue to be relevant today and most of the stories we told were of an extremely high quality; they’re complex stories that have validity, a message and a lot of action, and are just well done...the love of the fans keeps the iterations and the original series coming back and back and back."

StarTrek.com has a preview of a Fontana interview in the upcoming premiere edition of the US version of Star Trek Magazine. These excerpts from the UK edition are from Sci Fi Pulse.

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