Moore Thanks Star Trek For Shaping His Life

Ron Moore, the former Star Trek producer who has since reinvented Battlestar Galactica, has written an editorial declaring his appreciation for the original series and explaining how Star Trek changed his life.

In Monday's New York Times, Moore admitted that "to say that any television show has changed one’s life is to invite both mockery and pity for a poor, shuttered geek", but said that Star Trek "informed the way I look at the world."

"Kirk, for me, embodied an American idea: His mission was to explore the final frontier, not to conquer it," stated Moore. "Week after week, he confronted the specters of intolerance and injustice, and week after week found a way to defeat them without ever becoming them." Moore lamented that Kirk is often sadly reduced to his paunch today, but added, "Jim Kirk may have beat up his share of bad guys, but you could never imagine him torturing them."

Star Trek's "noble, heroic vision of the future" provided Moore with a moral framework for his adolescence, he said, considering issues such as humanity vs. technology and the obligations of a free society to help the needy. "I treasured 'Star Trek' as a dream of what my country could one day become — a liberal and tolerant society," he wrote, quoting a favorite monologue: "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 won’t kill today."

Moore went on to describe his ten years writing for The Next Generation and subsequent series, saying he believes that the move toward darker science fiction on television is in part because "'Star Trek' set the gold standard for the idealistic vision of tomorrow and no one has successfully challenged it." He said that he tries to keep Star Trek in mind as he writes Battlestar Galactica.

The full editorial is here.

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