Just about every popular entertainment franchise has had its share of scandal, and despite
its high-minded ideals, the Star Trek universe is no exception.
Here are the biggest scandals to boldly go where no scandals have gone before.
If you're a fan of Star Trek, you probably have a lot of gratitude in your heart for
Gene Roddenberry, the man who introduced Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk to the world.
But it turns out that the creator of Star Trek may have been a bit of a jerk.
Maybe that shouldn't come as a huge surprise, though.
The original Star Trek, after all, often featured women in skirts so short that bending over
to retrieve a fumbled communicator was never an option.
Furthermore, many of the women in those early episodes weren't exactly the strong, self-sufficient
type.
And that's probably because Roddenberry didn't really respect women all that much.
Before reaching the height of his fame, he was already well-known for having affairs
with secretaries, and once he was firmly established in Hollywood, there was no stopping him.
While married to his first wife, he was having an affair with actress Majel Barrett, whom
he would later marry, and it wasn't exactly a secret.
He also had an affair with Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura.
A former assistant to a Trek writer told the National Review,
"[Roddenberry] would have women walking from [the costume designer's] fitting rooms through
to his office in the skimpiest outfits so he could perv them."
Roddenberry's vision was definitely worthy of respect.
But the man himself, perhaps not so much.
George Takei, who played Sulu in the original Star Trek, is openly and unapologetically
gay and a fearless champion of LGBTQ rights.
With that in mind, actor and writer Simon Pegg decided that the rebooted version of
Sulu, as played by John Cho, ought to be gay, too.
So Pegg wrote a scene for 2016's Star Trek Beyond in which Sulu is depicted raising a
child with a male partner.
"'Cause there really hasn't been an LGBT character in the Star Trek universe, and people have
been very great about it."
It was meant to be a respectful homage to Takei, who came out in 2005.
Everyone thought that he would love the new direction for the character, but alas, he
didn't.
He told The Hollywood Reporter,
"I'm delighted that there's a gay character.
Unfortunately it's a twisting of Gene [Roddenberry's] creation, to which he put in so much thought.
I think it's really unfortunate."
According to Takei, Roddenberry never envisioned Sulu as gay, even though he was a supporter
of LGBTQ rights even before all those initials existed.
When Takei found out about the new plans for the character, he tried to convince John Cho
that a completely new gay character would be a better choice.
After all, if Sulu did turn out to be gay it's pretty clear that he was in the closet
all those years, and it's disappointing to imagine that in the 23rd century there would
still be that closet.
Every major franchise that boasts rabid fans is going to inspire fan fiction.
Some creators love and even encourage it, while others find it endlessly annoying and
call it copyright infringement.
Star Trek tends to lean towards the latter.
There's even a list of guidelines that filmmakers should follow if they want to produce a Star
Trek fan film.
They limit all such films to no more than two 15-minute episodes, no bootleg props or
costumes, no professional actors or producers, no fundraising in excess of $50,000, and no
distribution for profit.
So essentially, you can make a film, but you can't make money off of it.
But you can help enrich the franchise by only using official merchandise.
There's been at least one high-profile case of these rules being broken.
The fan film Axanar was slated to be feature-length, it was supposed to star professionals like
Richard Hatch and Tony Todd, and it had a million dollars in crowdsourced money to back
it up.
Unsurprisingly, Paramount and CBS took the team behind Axanar to court in 2015, and the
filmmakers ultimately lost.
Under the terms of the settlement, Axanar was allowed to go forward, but only as two
15-minute installments.
Gene Roddenberry was rarely happy with any script anyone gave him.
After all, Star Trek was his vision, and it's really hard for other writers to get into
the head of a visionary and produce work that precisely lines up with his standards.
One of the most beloved Star Trek episodes of all time is "The City on the Edge of Forever,"
a time-traveling tale written by Harlan Ellison.
The script accomplished all the things that fans love about Trek, as it featured important
themes and a meaningful story.
But despite Ellison's credit, the script was ultimately largely rewritten by Roddenberry,
as well as other regular Star Trek writers.
"TV Guide called it one of the one hundred greatest moments in television history.
Okay."
Most writers understand that rewrites and editing are a part of the process, and most
of them will happily accept the credit even if the rewrites don't fall exactly in line
with their own personal vision.
Not Harlan Ellison, though.
He went to his grave, more than 50 years after "The City on the Edge of Forever" first aired,
still angry that the script had been edited.
"I think felt that they had mucked it up badly, and it took, I think, six or seven years before
Gene Roddenberry and I even spoke to each other again."
At one point he demanded to have his name removed from the credits.
In 1995, he even published the original version of the script, which included a rambling opening
in which he lamented the, quote, "greedy little pig-snouts" who ruined everything.
Fans have been commenting for a long time about the sometimes-uncanny similarities between
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5.
But until recently, the evidence that one of them stole from the other was mostly circumstantial.
Babylon 5 was pitched to Paramount before Warner Brothers picked it up, but then Paramount
later went on to green-light Deep Space 9.
Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski just ignored the similarities between the two,
mostly because he disliked the idea of spending money on litigation and the general ugliness
that would ensue.
But then in 2013, a commenter on an iO9 article about Babylon 5 came forward with some information.
"Wait! Picking up disturbance.
Trying to get a fix."
The commenter claimed to have been working at Warner Brothers during the time that both
series were conceived.
He said that Warner Brothers and Paramount had actually been planning to launch a joint
television network featuring one science fiction series: Deep Space 9.
But Warner Brothers had already agreed to purchase Babylon 5.
As the commenter put it,
"I was told they purposely took what they liked from the B5 script and put it in the
DS9 script.
In fact, there was talk of leaving the B5 script intact and just setting it the Star
Trek universe."
In the end, though, the joint network never happened.
Ironically, that might be what ultimately saved Babylon 5, since the two shows wouldn't
have gone forward separately if the deal hadn't fallen through.
Today, women have more professional opportunities than ever, and it's generally easier for them
to pursue careers in traditionally male industries, though the landscape is still far from perfect.
Decades earlier, it was even harder, and that was true even in the Star Trek writers room.
In 1960, Dorothy Fontana was an aspiring scriptwriter working as a production secretary on a Western
series called The Tall Man.
Her boss knew about her ambitions and encouraged her to show him some story ideas, which led
to her first sale at the age of 20.
She had a lot of success with The Tall Man, but she was having some trouble selling her
ideas to other showrunners.
As she told Future Science Fiction Digest in 2019,
"People would say, 'I don’t know if Dorothy can write this.'
Up to that moment, I had put Dorothy C. Fontana on my scripts.
So I said, 'I’m going to do this, I’m going to write a script for Ben Casey, which
was a series also on our lot, and I’m going to write D.C. Fontana on the front page.'"
According to Fontana, using initials was her idea, but some sources say she continued to
use them because Gene Roddenberry thought she would get less respect if she wrote under
her own name.
Occasionally, she would even use the male pseudonym "Michael Richards."
The Star Trek universe is a utopia of progressive ideals, but in the harsh reality of the real
world, it was made possible through cheap non-union labor.
According to the book Star Trek FAQ: Everything Left to Know About the First Voyages of the
Starship Enterprise, costume designer William Theiss was under a lot of pressure to produce
enough costumes for the many actors on the original series.
So much pressure, in fact, that he decided he simply couldn't accomplish the task in
a way that was completely ethical.
Theiss spent time looking for weird, futuristic-looking fabrics in discount fabric stores, and then
he would bring them to his regiment of seamstresses working inside the apartment he'd rented near
the studio.
The seamstresses, who were all non-union, would violate union rules by working through
the night in order to get the costumes finished in time for production.
So all those outfits in that progressive, utopian society were basically made in a sweatshop.
Star Trek has never shied away from using sex appeal to get ratings, but at least off-camera
the actors usually got to escape from all the gawking.
Unfortunately for Jeri Ryan, who played Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, nobody ever
got tired of looking.
Her personal life even became a huge political scandal for her ex-husband Jack Ryan, when
he was running for Senate in Illinois against an up-and-coming Barack Obama in the 2004
election.
Attorneys from media organizations obtained the details of the couple's divorce, in which
Jeri said that her husband would often take her to bizarre clubs against her will, and
pressure her to get busy in front of another couple.
Obama, to his credit, said it wouldn't be "appropriate" for him to comment on what was
in those divorce papers.
Ryan ended up dropping out of the race and was replaced by another candidate as Obama
went on to win the election.
Most people who knew Gene Roddenberry acknowledged that he was a genius.
But they also had less flattering things to say about him, like that he was controlling
and apparently quite greedy.
That was clear enough after he hired composer Alexander Courage to write the Star Trek theme
music and then basically stole half the credit.
In the entertainment industry, composers are paid royalties every time their songs are
played on TV.
After about a year of Courage collecting all those royalties, Roddenberry had enough of
some other guy getting the credit for his show's theme song.
So he wrote some lyrics to go along with the tune and was then able to claim half the royalties
as a co-composer, even though the lyrics were never used on the air or anywhere else.
Courage, naturally, was incensed.
Even though the move was legal, it was obvious to everyone that Roddenberry deserved none
of the credit or royalties for the score.
When pressed, Roddenberry simply said,
"Hey, I have to get some money somewhere.
I'm sure not going to get it out of the profits of Star Trek."
Gates McFadden played Dr. Beverly Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
She was a popular character, but by the end of season one she was gone, and no one really
had any idea why.
There were lots of rumors, with McFadden believing that her departure had to do with a male writer-producer
whom she clashed with over what she saw as sexist writing.
Producer Rick Berman wasn't shy about saying who this male writer-producer actually was.
He told Redeeming Culture,
"The head writer on the show during the first season...was a gentleman named Maurice Hurley.
Wonderful guy.
Maurice did not like Gates.
He had a real bone to pick with Gates.
They just didn’t get along.
He didn’t like her acting, he didn’t like her."
Eventually Hurley convinced Berman to fire McFadden.
It didn't last though, and in fact, Hurley was let go himself not long afterwards, and
by the third season Dr. Crusher made a comeback.
McFadden has said that she credited the fans for bringing her back.
"I know how difficult it was for you being away."
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