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selenakBecause I've been meaning to do this for a while now: A Ron Moore retrospective. Not complete, just the part of his work I'm familiar with. You can find all his credits here.
Let's start with Star Trek: The Next Generation, which gave him his break in tv, and look at some of the gems he wrote there. Yesterday's Enterprise, for example. TNG never did a mirrorverse episode (as opposed to DS9), but they created their own canon AU. Well, actually several of them, but the one I'm talking about now was the darkest thing TNG had done up to that point (this was before Picard got Borgified). Our Heroes go through the space turbulence of the week and end up in a universe where the Federation is at war with the Klingons because there never was a Khitomer accord, everyone is on edge and things have started to get really desperate. Tasha Yar, the original security officer killed off early on is alive Worf for obvious reasons isn't there at all, and the only one who remembers this isn't how things are supposed to be is Guinan. And then they meet the Enterprice-C which isn't supposed to be around, either. Yesterday's Enterprise was in many was a pre-runner for what happened during the later seasons of DS9, and should be watching duty for anyone complaining TNG only ever did bright and cheerful.
Not that Moore can't do bright and cheerful. He also wrote Data's Day, definitely a love declaration to everyone's favourite android (before the emotion chip), and containing such lovely character stuff as Beverly Crusher teaching Data how to dance, Data composing an ode to his cat, and of course Miles O'Brien marrying Keiko. One of TNG's strengths was the family vibe of the ensemble, as opposed to the traditional leading man and two sidekicks structure of TOS, and Data's Day showcased it beautifully.
And speaking of family: he wrote Family. Aka the very first Trek episode exclusively devoted to dealing with the emotional aftermath of the horrible traumatic thing that happened in the previous Best of Both Worlds two-parter. I knew Picard was my favourite Starfleet Captain even before I heard Patrick Stewart's terrific voice (at that point I was still watching the dubbed German version) when I saw him going home to France, obviously NOT able to carry on as if nothing had happened the way TOS had Kirk behaving, and then finally having his breakdown in the mud, with this very, very restrained man crying.
But of course, what Moore in his early Trek days was most famous for were the Klingon episodes. The Klingons went from one dimensional baddies in TOS to getting their very own culture on TNG, and Moore is largely responsible for this, writing such stuff like Reunion (Key'lahr! Worf going beserk at her death! Oh yeah, and Gowron got chancellor in that one). Less famous, somewhat unjustly, is that he had a great hand in writing Q. Our Man Moore wrote Tapestry, aka the one where Q takes Picard back to his youth and the two have better dialogue than anywhere else on the show. In the light of later endeavours, Q's opening salvo ("Hello, Jean-Luc. You're dead. And I'm God") and Picard's retort ("You're not God, because I refuse to believe the universe is that badly designed") might be instructive. Suddenly I know that once![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
andrastewhite gets the Multiverse2005 challenge going, I'm going to request a crossover in which Q tries that one on Six. And/or Baltar.
Anyway. This is also the episode about which Moore said that Q was in love with Picard. As if we needed the confirmation, what with Q showing up in the Captain's bed. Thank's anyway, Ron.
Lastly, Moore left TNG in style with co-writing the finale, All Good Things.... Still my favourite finale of any Star Trek series. (The DS9 finale being spoiled for me by certain stupidities I've ranted about elsewhere.) He showcased his flair for writing Picard and Q together again, and also gave a wonderful tribute to the show overall by choosing the three different time frames structure, showing us Our Heroes as they were when we met them, as they are "now", at the end of seven seasons, and as they will be in the future. And left us with just the right feeling for this particular show - it might have ended, but the story went on. Picard's final word as he joins the poker play, "And the sky is the limit!" sum it up.
Next, Moore went on to become of the main writers of my favourite Star Trek show ever, ST: Deep Space Nine. His debut there was one of the weaker episodes (The Search, 1), but all is forgiven because the second ep he wrote was House of Quark, showcasing my favourite Ferengi. DS9 did for the Ferengi what TNG had done for the Klingons, i.e. developed them from a stereotype into a real people, and House of Quark, with its Ferengi/Klingon culture clash, epitomizes that. Quark winning the day with his own kind of courage, beating the bunch of big tough macho warriors in ethics and smarts, is still one of my favourite moments of the show.
Rejoined famously gave Trek its first f/f on screen kiss, but forget about the statistics here - it's a beautiful, sensitive love story, quintessential for Dax fans. The reassociation taboo works as a metaphor for homosexual relationships while at the same time nobody says "but you're two women", thus establishing that it's taken for granted in this universe two people of the same gender can hook up together without anyone blinking. (Yes, it would have been nice if we had gotten more of that on screen, but hey. Every step counts.)
Our Man Bashir: or, how the Bond movies ought to have done it. It's DS9's Bond parody with a better grip on the Bond formula than many a Bond film, it's Bashir and Garak at their slashiest (also, alas, the last time these two would ever get an episode with them in the leads together), and the entire cast having obvious fun playing Bond villains and Bond girls. How anyone cannot love this romp is beyond me, though I knowdeborah_judge didn't (but she had just started the show, and this works better if you're familiar with the characters). "Kiss the girl, get the key - they never taught me that in the Obsidian Order" and assorted other lines remain eminently quotable.
For the Cause had Moore exercising his talent for darker stories again. This was where we saw Sisko going obsessive about something not Prophet-related, and making his first ethically questionable (to put it mildly) decision in order to achieve victory. I mean, the man uses biochemical weapons to poison a planet's atmosphere. It also made Michael Eddington my favourite Maquis by a long shot (sorry, B'Lanna - and surely you understand why Chakotay the Wooden and Sisko's old pal from season 2 aren't even in the running). There should be more Eddington fic. There should be. Why isn't there? Because he's not pretty. *insert usual rant about looks-obsessed fellow fen*
Speaking of regulars doing shady things, Moore gave us Darkness and the Light, where the highly pregnant Kira kicks all kind of behinds and in a supreme irony defeats her foe and saves her life because her enemy has more compassion than she did (and does). DS9 has always acknowledged that Kira wasn't the Robin Hood kind of freedom fighter, somehow managing only to kill heavily armed bad guys. The backstory of this episode, detailing that she and her group blew up a Gul's house not caring about the civilians and servants also inside, showcases this beautifully. Pre-BSG, I used to declare that this was why a show like DS9 couldn't be produced today, let alone with a character like Kira painted sympathic and among the leading regulars. Of course, then Moore had to go and prove me wrong by letting Starbuck torture a Cylon. (About which he wrote extensively in his most recent blog, and no, we weren't meant to cheer Kara on.)
Back to DS9: Our Man Moore wrote the Klingon eps here, too, naturally. Most memorable of those probably were Looking for Par'mach in All The Wrong Places (Quark's Klingon ex Grilka comes back, and Dax literally has to jump Worf before he gets a clue - this is a great episode for interspecies sex and dialogue with double entendres), Soldiers of the Empire (aka what a Klingon spin-off would look like - Martok deals with the aftermath of his time in a prison camp, Dax showcases her ability to understand Klingons perfectly, and we get several memorable one-shot characters), and Tacking Into the Wind (last episode before the DS9 finale, and Ezri Dax shows how she's different from Jadzia by telling Worf not just that the Klingon Empire is in the process of falling apart, but that, as the old Empire, it deserves to fall - oh yeah, and Worf creates yet another Chancellor by killing the previous candidate).
This last belongs to the later DS9 arc-heavy episodes (after they got a clue from B5 that this might work). Moore was excellent at those, one of the best examples being stuff like Rocks and Shoals, the second of the Big Six which open season 6, and the one which gave us the most sympathetic Jem'Hadar ever, and put Kira in a situation where she realized she had become what she most despised, a collaborator. There weren't any good solutions for anyone in Rocks and Shoals - Sisko had to ally himself with a man he loathed and to kill a man he respected, Kira had to watch a Vedek commit suicide - and it played on DS9's strenghts - making war a theme without making it look glamourous. Inter Arma Silent Enim Leges did the same for politics. Anyone who's unfamiliar with DS9 and watched BSG and thought Roslin's way of getting Starbuck to do what she wanted was Machiavellian? Pshaw. You should have seen how the head of the Federation's unofficial secret service gets our idealistic Dr. Bashir to save a repellent double agent's butt by utterly ruining the life of a brave and sympathetic woman, all the while believing he's helping her people and his, until he figures it out in the end. Pitchblack dark episode.
Oh, and Moore proved his flair for screwed up pairings with religious issues long before Six and Baltar came along, too. His Strange Bedfellows pairs up Winn Adami, the Bajoran pope, at the moment of her great spiritual crisis with Dukat, who after spending some time in the "ambiguos character" department in previous seasons was firmly moved to the "archivillain" one in the last one and a half seasons. Between talking theology and schemes, they also have great sex, and Moore strikes a blow for women over 50 on tv that way. (According to interviews, 'twas him who insisted that Winn and Dukat shouldn't just have the spiritual seduction/breakdown/alliance/backstabbing going, but also a sexual affair.) Thank you, Ron. That was far more daring than Rejoined.
Of course, I would be fibbing were I not to mention that Moore also wrote the episode that marked the change from Dukat as a three dimensional character to Dukat as a one-dimensional Evil Madman (tm), Waltz. By itself, it's a good, creepy two characters piece. In context, it's one of my few enduring complaints about DS9. Mind you, the chief producer, Ira Behr, probably had more saying in the direction, but still, Moore did the deed. However, I forgive him because then he came up with...
...takes a moment to breathe for proper stentorian announcement....
Brother Justin. Kind of. In the way that counts. The one who invented the guy was the creator of Carnivale, a show set in the 1930s, Daniel Knauf, but in Knauf's original pilot for the show, Justin was nothing but an Evil Preacher (tm). When, after the end of his Trek years and after some stint in Roswell, Moore was called in to become co-head writer for Carnivale's first season and to rewrite pilot and subsequent storyarc, he came to the conclusion that EVIL!Justin was dull and not interesting and had nowhere to go. Which resulted in season 1 Justin being presented as an essentially good man with a passion for justice and helping, who gradually, through a series of visions and events, comes to the conclusion that he's destined to be the antichrist. After an almost-suicide and a stint in an asylum, he accepts that calling. Which is ever so much interesting, and Moore's influence in the second season of Carnivale was much missed (and not only because of the Justin characterisation).
His two outstanding Carnivale episodes were Pick a Number and The Day that was the Day. Pick a Number ends with the creepiest, scariest, tearing-your-emotional-guts-out image ever, which it would be a sin to spoil for anyone who hasn't seen the show, so I won't say what it is. But aside from the horror of that final image, which lies in the implication (there aren't guts and gore spilled, if that's what you're thinking), the episode also offers an emotionally true take on a family's reaction to the sudden violent death of a member, how this starts to tear them apart. The family in questin, the Dreyfus clan, starts to get their extensive characterisation here, and goes on to become one of the pillars of the show.
The Day that was the Day is the season 1 finale and brings all of the storylines developed in the course of the season to a climax. There are so many great moments here for everyone - the hero of the show, Ben being manipulated into killing Lodz by Management (did I mention Moore is good with characters manipulating each other?), the conflict between Rita Sue and Felix "Stumpy" Dreyfus that started when one of their daughters died resolving in an unexpected and immensely moving way, the heroine of the show, Sofie, managing to ruin not just one but two of her main relationships at once by wanting to avenge herself for perceived betrayal, oh, and attempted infanticide and actual raising from the dead. And that's not mentioning the wonderful scene between Justin and and his adopted father, Norman, which ends with Justin begging Norman to kill him. What a finale that was.
Then the creative Mr. Moore went on to create and produce the new Battlestar Galactica, the praise of which you find extensively elsewhere in these pages. (Also in my memories.) Now I had only seen the pilot of the old show, plus the Pegasus episode with Cain and Sheba. This background would not have made me tune in to the new series. I was curious about it because of Ron Moore's involvement. And this little summary was an attempt to demonstrate just why.
Let's start with Star Trek: The Next Generation, which gave him his break in tv, and look at some of the gems he wrote there. Yesterday's Enterprise, for example. TNG never did a mirrorverse episode (as opposed to DS9), but they created their own canon AU. Well, actually several of them, but the one I'm talking about now was the darkest thing TNG had done up to that point (this was before Picard got Borgified). Our Heroes go through the space turbulence of the week and end up in a universe where the Federation is at war with the Klingons because there never was a Khitomer accord, everyone is on edge and things have started to get really desperate. Tasha Yar, the original security officer killed off early on is alive Worf for obvious reasons isn't there at all, and the only one who remembers this isn't how things are supposed to be is Guinan. And then they meet the Enterprice-C which isn't supposed to be around, either. Yesterday's Enterprise was in many was a pre-runner for what happened during the later seasons of DS9, and should be watching duty for anyone complaining TNG only ever did bright and cheerful.
Not that Moore can't do bright and cheerful. He also wrote Data's Day, definitely a love declaration to everyone's favourite android (before the emotion chip), and containing such lovely character stuff as Beverly Crusher teaching Data how to dance, Data composing an ode to his cat, and of course Miles O'Brien marrying Keiko. One of TNG's strengths was the family vibe of the ensemble, as opposed to the traditional leading man and two sidekicks structure of TOS, and Data's Day showcased it beautifully.
And speaking of family: he wrote Family. Aka the very first Trek episode exclusively devoted to dealing with the emotional aftermath of the horrible traumatic thing that happened in the previous Best of Both Worlds two-parter. I knew Picard was my favourite Starfleet Captain even before I heard Patrick Stewart's terrific voice (at that point I was still watching the dubbed German version) when I saw him going home to France, obviously NOT able to carry on as if nothing had happened the way TOS had Kirk behaving, and then finally having his breakdown in the mud, with this very, very restrained man crying.
But of course, what Moore in his early Trek days was most famous for were the Klingon episodes. The Klingons went from one dimensional baddies in TOS to getting their very own culture on TNG, and Moore is largely responsible for this, writing such stuff like Reunion (Key'lahr! Worf going beserk at her death! Oh yeah, and Gowron got chancellor in that one). Less famous, somewhat unjustly, is that he had a great hand in writing Q. Our Man Moore wrote Tapestry, aka the one where Q takes Picard back to his youth and the two have better dialogue than anywhere else on the show. In the light of later endeavours, Q's opening salvo ("Hello, Jean-Luc. You're dead. And I'm God") and Picard's retort ("You're not God, because I refuse to believe the universe is that badly designed") might be instructive. Suddenly I know that once
andrastewhite gets the Multiverse2005 challenge going, I'm going to request a crossover in which Q tries that one on Six. And/or Baltar. Anyway. This is also the episode about which Moore said that Q was in love with Picard. As if we needed the confirmation, what with Q showing up in the Captain's bed. Thank's anyway, Ron.
Lastly, Moore left TNG in style with co-writing the finale, All Good Things.... Still my favourite finale of any Star Trek series. (The DS9 finale being spoiled for me by certain stupidities I've ranted about elsewhere.) He showcased his flair for writing Picard and Q together again, and also gave a wonderful tribute to the show overall by choosing the three different time frames structure, showing us Our Heroes as they were when we met them, as they are "now", at the end of seven seasons, and as they will be in the future. And left us with just the right feeling for this particular show - it might have ended, but the story went on. Picard's final word as he joins the poker play, "And the sky is the limit!" sum it up.
Next, Moore went on to become of the main writers of my favourite Star Trek show ever, ST: Deep Space Nine. His debut there was one of the weaker episodes (The Search, 1), but all is forgiven because the second ep he wrote was House of Quark, showcasing my favourite Ferengi. DS9 did for the Ferengi what TNG had done for the Klingons, i.e. developed them from a stereotype into a real people, and House of Quark, with its Ferengi/Klingon culture clash, epitomizes that. Quark winning the day with his own kind of courage, beating the bunch of big tough macho warriors in ethics and smarts, is still one of my favourite moments of the show.
Rejoined famously gave Trek its first f/f on screen kiss, but forget about the statistics here - it's a beautiful, sensitive love story, quintessential for Dax fans. The reassociation taboo works as a metaphor for homosexual relationships while at the same time nobody says "but you're two women", thus establishing that it's taken for granted in this universe two people of the same gender can hook up together without anyone blinking. (Yes, it would have been nice if we had gotten more of that on screen, but hey. Every step counts.)
Our Man Bashir: or, how the Bond movies ought to have done it. It's DS9's Bond parody with a better grip on the Bond formula than many a Bond film, it's Bashir and Garak at their slashiest (also, alas, the last time these two would ever get an episode with them in the leads together), and the entire cast having obvious fun playing Bond villains and Bond girls. How anyone cannot love this romp is beyond me, though I know
deborah_judge didn't (but she had just started the show, and this works better if you're familiar with the characters). "Kiss the girl, get the key - they never taught me that in the Obsidian Order" and assorted other lines remain eminently quotable. For the Cause had Moore exercising his talent for darker stories again. This was where we saw Sisko going obsessive about something not Prophet-related, and making his first ethically questionable (to put it mildly) decision in order to achieve victory. I mean, the man uses biochemical weapons to poison a planet's atmosphere. It also made Michael Eddington my favourite Maquis by a long shot (sorry, B'Lanna - and surely you understand why Chakotay the Wooden and Sisko's old pal from season 2 aren't even in the running). There should be more Eddington fic. There should be. Why isn't there? Because he's not pretty. *insert usual rant about looks-obsessed fellow fen*
Speaking of regulars doing shady things, Moore gave us Darkness and the Light, where the highly pregnant Kira kicks all kind of behinds and in a supreme irony defeats her foe and saves her life because her enemy has more compassion than she did (and does). DS9 has always acknowledged that Kira wasn't the Robin Hood kind of freedom fighter, somehow managing only to kill heavily armed bad guys. The backstory of this episode, detailing that she and her group blew up a Gul's house not caring about the civilians and servants also inside, showcases this beautifully. Pre-BSG, I used to declare that this was why a show like DS9 couldn't be produced today, let alone with a character like Kira painted sympathic and among the leading regulars. Of course, then Moore had to go and prove me wrong by letting Starbuck torture a Cylon. (About which he wrote extensively in his most recent blog, and no, we weren't meant to cheer Kara on.)
Back to DS9: Our Man Moore wrote the Klingon eps here, too, naturally. Most memorable of those probably were Looking for Par'mach in All The Wrong Places (Quark's Klingon ex Grilka comes back, and Dax literally has to jump Worf before he gets a clue - this is a great episode for interspecies sex and dialogue with double entendres), Soldiers of the Empire (aka what a Klingon spin-off would look like - Martok deals with the aftermath of his time in a prison camp, Dax showcases her ability to understand Klingons perfectly, and we get several memorable one-shot characters), and Tacking Into the Wind (last episode before the DS9 finale, and Ezri Dax shows how she's different from Jadzia by telling Worf not just that the Klingon Empire is in the process of falling apart, but that, as the old Empire, it deserves to fall - oh yeah, and Worf creates yet another Chancellor by killing the previous candidate).
This last belongs to the later DS9 arc-heavy episodes (after they got a clue from B5 that this might work). Moore was excellent at those, one of the best examples being stuff like Rocks and Shoals, the second of the Big Six which open season 6, and the one which gave us the most sympathetic Jem'Hadar ever, and put Kira in a situation where she realized she had become what she most despised, a collaborator. There weren't any good solutions for anyone in Rocks and Shoals - Sisko had to ally himself with a man he loathed and to kill a man he respected, Kira had to watch a Vedek commit suicide - and it played on DS9's strenghts - making war a theme without making it look glamourous. Inter Arma Silent Enim Leges did the same for politics. Anyone who's unfamiliar with DS9 and watched BSG and thought Roslin's way of getting Starbuck to do what she wanted was Machiavellian? Pshaw. You should have seen how the head of the Federation's unofficial secret service gets our idealistic Dr. Bashir to save a repellent double agent's butt by utterly ruining the life of a brave and sympathetic woman, all the while believing he's helping her people and his, until he figures it out in the end. Pitchblack dark episode.
Oh, and Moore proved his flair for screwed up pairings with religious issues long before Six and Baltar came along, too. His Strange Bedfellows pairs up Winn Adami, the Bajoran pope, at the moment of her great spiritual crisis with Dukat, who after spending some time in the "ambiguos character" department in previous seasons was firmly moved to the "archivillain" one in the last one and a half seasons. Between talking theology and schemes, they also have great sex, and Moore strikes a blow for women over 50 on tv that way. (According to interviews, 'twas him who insisted that Winn and Dukat shouldn't just have the spiritual seduction/breakdown/alliance/backstabbing going, but also a sexual affair.) Thank you, Ron. That was far more daring than Rejoined.
Of course, I would be fibbing were I not to mention that Moore also wrote the episode that marked the change from Dukat as a three dimensional character to Dukat as a one-dimensional Evil Madman (tm), Waltz. By itself, it's a good, creepy two characters piece. In context, it's one of my few enduring complaints about DS9. Mind you, the chief producer, Ira Behr, probably had more saying in the direction, but still, Moore did the deed. However, I forgive him because then he came up with...
...takes a moment to breathe for proper stentorian announcement....
Brother Justin. Kind of. In the way that counts. The one who invented the guy was the creator of Carnivale, a show set in the 1930s, Daniel Knauf, but in Knauf's original pilot for the show, Justin was nothing but an Evil Preacher (tm). When, after the end of his Trek years and after some stint in Roswell, Moore was called in to become co-head writer for Carnivale's first season and to rewrite pilot and subsequent storyarc, he came to the conclusion that EVIL!Justin was dull and not interesting and had nowhere to go. Which resulted in season 1 Justin being presented as an essentially good man with a passion for justice and helping, who gradually, through a series of visions and events, comes to the conclusion that he's destined to be the antichrist. After an almost-suicide and a stint in an asylum, he accepts that calling. Which is ever so much interesting, and Moore's influence in the second season of Carnivale was much missed (and not only because of the Justin characterisation).
His two outstanding Carnivale episodes were Pick a Number and The Day that was the Day. Pick a Number ends with the creepiest, scariest, tearing-your-emotional-guts-out image ever, which it would be a sin to spoil for anyone who hasn't seen the show, so I won't say what it is. But aside from the horror of that final image, which lies in the implication (there aren't guts and gore spilled, if that's what you're thinking), the episode also offers an emotionally true take on a family's reaction to the sudden violent death of a member, how this starts to tear them apart. The family in questin, the Dreyfus clan, starts to get their extensive characterisation here, and goes on to become one of the pillars of the show.
The Day that was the Day is the season 1 finale and brings all of the storylines developed in the course of the season to a climax. There are so many great moments here for everyone - the hero of the show, Ben being manipulated into killing Lodz by Management (did I mention Moore is good with characters manipulating each other?), the conflict between Rita Sue and Felix "Stumpy" Dreyfus that started when one of their daughters died resolving in an unexpected and immensely moving way, the heroine of the show, Sofie, managing to ruin not just one but two of her main relationships at once by wanting to avenge herself for perceived betrayal, oh, and attempted infanticide and actual raising from the dead. And that's not mentioning the wonderful scene between Justin and and his adopted father, Norman, which ends with Justin begging Norman to kill him. What a finale that was.
Then the creative Mr. Moore went on to create and produce the new Battlestar Galactica, the praise of which you find extensively elsewhere in these pages. (Also in my memories.) Now I had only seen the pilot of the old show, plus the Pegasus episode with Cain and Sheba. This background would not have made me tune in to the new series. I was curious about it because of Ron Moore's involvement. And this little summary was an attempt to demonstrate just why.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 08:12 pm (UTC)Patrick Stewart is divine, pure and simple.*g*
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 08:17 pm (UTC)And I'd had no idea that Ron Moore wrote so many of those.
And I didn't even list all.*g* Check out the link above, if you're curious, they list all by title.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 05:44 pm (UTC)The end.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-06 12:49 am (UTC)S1 of Carnivale was television at its best. Much of S2 could easily have played out on the Fox netowrk after some stupid reality show featuring people eating bugs.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-06 05:09 am (UTC)The irony is, it's not like we weren't warned. The very first speech of Samson's in the pilot announced a strict good versus evil battle, and this is probably what Knauf always wanted it to be. Hence the throwing subtlety out the window the minute Moore had left the building, so to speak.
If you want to have a look, here is me trying for satire (http://www.livejournal.com/users/selenak/148163.html) about the whole thing, then there is a serious take on the season finale and the second season in general (http://www.livejournal.com/users/selenak/150078.html) (and I'm trying to be fair, there was some good stuff as well), and finally, this isn't strictly about Justin but about tv villains in general, trying for humour (http://www.livejournal.com/users/selenak/147248.html).
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 06:07 pm (UTC)Are you trying to say that Ron Moore was only following orders? And that with someone else writing it might have been even worse?
...sorry. couldn't resist.
But it 'Walz' is all we have to blame him for, I think RM is still officially a Good Guy and Not Evil. And you're right, 'Waltz' in itself is a perfectly fine episode, if only it weren't taken as the bottom line on the character.
I hadn't realized that RM had also written the 'Sisko going wacky over Eddington' line. Hm. So maybe he didn't intend us to take Sisko at face value in 'Waltz.' Hm. RM is the king of moral ambiguity, which makes it even more wrong that he wrote the episode that seems to end Dukat's.
I really like Eddington as well. I'd read fanfic about him, although I'm unlikely to write it.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 08:20 pm (UTC)He. Excellent point, too.*g*
RM is the king of moral ambiguity, which makes it even more wrong that he wrote the episode that seems to end Dukat's.
Yup. But on the bright side, he did give us Winn/Dukat!
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 08:43 pm (UTC)*sigh* I gotta dust off some of my old Next Gen tapes. It really is my first true love, as far as TV goes. My actual *first* true love was Darth Vader; when I was three I kept stealing my brother's action figure.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 08:50 pm (UTC)Dax: belongs with Quark. Only she never realized, the foolish Trill. But yes, there were a couple of great moments with her and Worf, including that. And at least you could see them together, unlike Worf/Troi. (Worst idea in any of my fandoms for a pairing until Angel did Angel/Cordelia.)
no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-06 04:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 09:57 pm (UTC)I should really get to watching the eps again, in English.
First, I have a whole list of what to see. Babylon 5 season 5 is up front, then Alias, Desperate Housewives (tough I watched some already), Lost and then: TNG. Maybe some DS9. Space: Above and Beyond would be nice too, but that's impossible to get.
< / lengthy TV talk >
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 09:41 pm (UTC)Thanks for doing this! I wondered what exactly was Ron Moore's contribution to Trek, as a lot of little things seemed familiar. It turns out that he wrote pretty much all my favourite episodes. When I first saw the Eddington speech in 'For The Cause' I, er, kissed the TV screen, because it was about time someone called the Federation on their smugness. Also it was a very bold meta-statement on the canon so far. No wonder he has such well-motivated 'villains' in BSG.
Also 'Tapestry', 'Our Man Bashir' and 'House Of Quark' (the divorce!). Aw.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 05:10 am (UTC)(One reason why I'm always disgruntled when I read, say, British Sci-Fi magazine SFX declaring that watching BSG, you can't believe Moore is coming from Star Trek. It always makes me yell "did you watch his Star Trek episodes? Did you watch ST in general after TOS?)
no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 02:43 pm (UTC)Although I've been watching first-series TNG on repeat and it's a bit dull. They've been shoeing it in a double-bill with TOS, and TOS is winning.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-18 12:18 am (UTC)The best thing I like to hear from a show-runner is "We made a few mistakes last year", even if they pick the wrong 'mistakes'.