JEAN LUC PICARDS greatest nemesis and eventually his greatest defender and savior the space god Q John de Lancie was there at the beginning when Star Trek The Next Generation debuted on September 28 1987. In Encounter at Farpoint the series two hour inaugural episode Q puts the crew of the Enterprise and all of humanity on trial. But this defining moment almost did not happen. As first written Encounter at Farpoint did not feature Q at all until a pivotal rewrite from Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.
After retooling many of his own ideas for Phase II Roddenberry hired some his collaborators from Star Trek The Original Series to help fill out the writers room. For the pilot episode, he got Dorothy D.C. Fontana the former script editor on The Original Series and The Animated Series and author of such Trek classics as Journey to Babel TOS and Yesteryear (TAS).
Fontanas assignment was to write an episode about the Enterprise and the mystery of Farpoint Station. Spoiler alert The station is really a giant jellyfish alien. But when Paramount demanded that Roddenberry turn the one our pilot episode into a two hour premiere things got contentious. D.C. Fontana and others claimed that Roddenberry swindled her out of extra money to write the extra pages whereas Roddenberry and others claim Fontana could not do the extra writing due to the tight turnaround. While Roddenberry duplicitous business practices are well documented the result of this kerfuffle is slightly more interesting than finger pointing about writing payments. Because Gene Roddenberry added a frame to the story of Farpoint Station and that rewrite defined all of The Next Generation.
Essentially what was not in Fontanas version of Encounter at Farpoint was Q. The notion of an all powerful flippant and amoral space god challenging Picard and the USS Enterprise was a classic Star Trek set up. In The Original Series Captain Kirk bested false gods constantly and Roddenberry liked scenarios in which humanity had to be analyzed in extreme terms. While Roddenberry did not invent the idea of a human being defending our entire species in a courtroom run by super advanced aliens that concept appeared in the 1958 Robert Heinlein novel Have Space Suit Will Travel he did perfect the Star Trek version of it.
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