Like I said yesterday, I’ve got a whole mess of topics I’ve wanted to write about but haven’t gotten around to because of various distractions (like work — curse the necessity of having a job, anyhow!) Unfortunately, some of these things are pretty old news by now.<\/p>\n
For instance, you’ve probably already heard that George Takei, the actor who played Sulu on the original Star Trek<\/i>, is gay<\/a>. I don’t have much to say about that, except that it certainly does explain a few things<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You may not have heard, however, that one of the primary creative voices behind the later versions of Star Trek<\/i> has died. Michael Piller started as a writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/i>, and eventually became an executive producer on that show as well as the co-creator of its subsequent spin-offs, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine<\/i> and Star Trek: Voyager<\/i>. He also co-wrote one of the Trek<\/i> feature films (Insurrection<\/i> — not one of the better entries in the series, unfortunately) and created with his son Shawn a non-Trek<\/i> TV series called The Dead Zone<\/i>, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name.<\/p>\n Piller is most revered in fan circles for writing the two-part Next Gen<\/i> episode “The Best of Both Worlds,” in which our noble Captain Picard is kidnapped and “assimilated” by a race known as The Borg. This episode is often hailed as the best of that series, and it represents a major turning point for a show that had struggled until then to find its own voice. I myself was only an occasional (and highly critical) viewer of Next Gen<\/i> until this episode. Although I personally find “The Best of Both Worlds” disappointingly anti-climatic in its second half, it was good enough to convince me that the show as a whole was worthy of my steady attention. It wasn’t the original Star Trek<\/i>, no, but with this episode, it had finally stopped trying to be and was instead on its way to becoming its own animal.<\/p>\n Piller died of cancer<\/a> on November 1st, at the age of 57. If you’re interested, Ron Moore, a writer who was discovered by Piller, worked with him on Next Gen<\/i>, and has since gone on to launch the highly acclaimed remake of Battlestar Galactica<\/i>, wrote a long and heartfelt rememberance<\/a> on his Battlestar Blog<\/a>, while Javier Grillo-Marxuach of Lost<\/i> fame wrote<\/a> of the one time he met Piller — and promptly stuck his foot in his mouth by being a fanboy.<\/p>\n