Barge of the Dead
Stardate not given: B’elanna puts herself at great risk to retrieve Voyager’s only remaining unmanned probe from an ion storm, which does more damage to her shuttle than it does to the probe. After an emergency landing, a piece of debris is found imbedded in her shuttle’s hull – a piece of metal with the symbol of the Klingon Empire on it, which Chakotay presents to B’elanna. She disregards the object – which has been determined to be several centuries old – until it appears to bleed, and she hears voices speaking Klingon. This potentially important archaeological find inspires a Klingon celebration – and some odd behavior, at least from B’elanna’s perspective. Tuvok, while demonstrating hitherto unknown prowess with the bat’leth, injures B’elanna with it and embarks on an uncharacteristically vehement lecture about her dishonor of her culture. During the party itself, B’elanna is helpless to watch as Klingon assassins appear in the crowd, slicing her crewmates down one by one. And then she is dragged to the Barge of the Dead, which ferries dishonored souls to Grethor, the Klingon hell – and B’elanna is not alone, for her mother arrives shortly afterward. But when B’elanna suddenly awakens in sick bay, it turns out that everything – even the crash-landing of the shuttle – was part of an elaborate vision, a near-death experience triggered by the real ion storm. B’elanna can only deduce that her mother has died, and it is now up to the engineer to retrieve her from Grethor and deliver her to the gates of Sto’vo’kor.
teleplay by Bryan Fuller
story by Ronald D. Moore & Bryan Fuller
directed by Mike Vejar
music by David BellGuest Cast: Eric Pierpoint (Kor’tar), Sherman Augustus (Klingon), Karen Austin (Merab), John Kenton Shull (Brok’tan)
LogBook entry by Earl Green
Inspired by his fascination with science fiction, mythology, and his Mormon roots with their emphasis on tracing family history, television producer Glen A. Larson created one of the definitive SF series of the 1970s, and one of the few such series to thrive – even briefly – on American TV during that time. Originally conceived as a six-hour miniseries with a possible series to follow, Battlestar Galactica came into being by arriving on the heels of an unexpected cinematic phenomenon. 20th Century Fox and George Lucas ushered in the era of the high-budget big screen blockbuster in May 1977 with Star Wars, 
and Universal – the studio for whom Larson created and guided new projects – saw the seasoned producer’s pitch as timely and profitable. Universal was able to sell the potential miniseries to ABC, though the network and the studio were both enthused enough by the project to greenlight not a six-hour event, but a three-hour pilot followed by a full weekly series.
neither were the writers and producers he brought in to create more stories. Special effects legend John Dykstra signed on as a producer as well, overseeing the look of the show. But it was that look – flashy optical effects on a scale never before seen on TV – that would prove to be the show’s downfall. Those effects were not only prohibitively expensive even for a major motion picture – more than anything, they were time-consuming. This early era of motion control and blue screen photography was still in its infancy, and it was highly unorthodox to see a movie lean so heavily on those effects – let alone a TV series, which would need new effects produced on a weekly basis.
Larson set about assembling a cast for what he envisioned as the drama of an extended family in space. His biggest coup in casting was undoubtedly in landing the legendary Lorne Greene – late of the hit western series Bonanza – for the lead role of Commander Adama. Wise, wily, and occasionally crotchety, Adama would give the show and its characters their emotional and moralistic core. His son Apollo would handle much of the series’ action, along with a devil-
may-care hotshot pilot named Starbuck – very much, it could be argued, set in the mold of Star Wars‘ Han Solo. Dirk Benedict quickly stepped into the boots of the cigar-chomping Starbuck, while Apollo took longer to cast; a young actor named Richard Hatch had been sent the script, but he had declined an invitation to audition. Hatch was set on finding more prestigious, serious projects to pursue and further his career. Finally, he was persuaded to try out for the role of Apollo and landed the part with Larson’s assurances that Galactica would handle its storytelling more seriously than the TV science fiction that had come before it.
The cast was rounded out with film veterans and newcomers alike – model Maren Jensen and child actor Noah Hathaway Jr. won the parts of, respectively, Adama’s daughter Athena and Apollo’s adopted son Boxey. Herbert Jefferson Jr. filled out the ranks of Galactica’s pilot squaron as Lt. Boomer, while Terry Carter would take on the role of Colonel Tigh, Galactica’s first officer. Hollywood veteran John Colicos would be the villain of the piece as the traitorous human Baltar, while an uncredited Patrick MacNee (The Avengers) 
provided the voice of the Cylons’ Imperious Leader and the third-person narration that opened almost every episode; MacNee would later appear in the flesh in a more substantial and sinister role. Finally, well on her way to being dubbed the “miniseries queen,” a young Jane Seymour signed on for the pilot and two additional hourly episodes, though members of both the cast and production crew later regretted not contracting her as a series regular.
the production a great deal as well. Their chrome-plated plastic armor had to be specially molded to be worn over black bodysuits, and the producers insisted on casting actors at least six feet tall to literally heighten the Cylon menace. The helmets of foreground Cylons included a pulsing, rotating red light, and their voices were dubbed with an early generation of speech synthesis equipment – equipment that wasn’t cheap. Not that anything else about the Cylons was inexpensive, either: when “stunt” Cylons were fitted with explosive squibs for laser battles, the plastic armor was frequently damaged beyond any hope of reusing that portion of the costumes. 
Though special lighting and careful camera work made the Cylons a formidable foe on film, their all-conquering ranks would eventually be extinguished by the series’ rapidly-dwindling effects budget.
only one problem: the demands on the show’s budget and the production crew’s time threatened to make several episodes miss their network delivery dates, let alone their broadcast windows. Much of the prep work had been done assuming that Battlestar Galactica would be a miniseries, and the first half of its freshman season was weighted down with expensive two-part epics, featuring visits to forbidding environments like an ice planet, massive confrontations between huge starships and their attendant fleets of fighters, and enormous sets. Big-name guest stars like Lloyd Bridges, though a draw for the audience, were an added expense. 
Battlestar Galactica’s budget was already nearly exhausted, even with the judicious reuse of special effects elements.
trigger of a nuclear arsenal). One of these episodes, Experiment In Terra, gave co-producer Donald Bellisario a chance to try out an interesting storytelling device in which a member of Galactica’s crew would infiltrate a more primitive society, but would appear to those people as one of their own. This concept only appeared once in Galactica, but Bellisario would later create an entire series around that premise and call it Quantum Leap.
format. Apollo, Starbuck, Boomer, Boxey and the other familiar characters would vanish in the second season, as would the expensive interplanetary voyages. Instead, Galactica would find Earth in the second season premiere – but it would be modern-day Earth, something that could be represented with relatively inexpensive location shooting. The Cylons made only the briefest of appearances, and of the original cast only Adama remained. The bulk of the show involved members of Galactica’s crew interacting with Earth people of the year 1980. Larson washed his hands of the show and instead concentrated all of his efforts on another project he had recently started, a modern-day retelling of 
the Buck Rogers comics. Fans looking forward to the continuation of the first season’s promising tapestry of stories abandoned the new season in droves. The final episode was written by Larson himself, and guest starred Dirk Benedict as Starbuck, with a Cylon in tow, trying to tie up some loose ends from the first season – and still failing to draw viewers back to the show. Galactica: 1980, as the show had now come to be known, was quietly cancelled – and given the sweeping changes to the show, there was no fan outcry to save it.
Channel’s original schedule was heavy with Universal-produced shows including Galactica and Buck Rogers. A fan favorite on the convention circuit, actor Richard Hatch – who had originally turned down the role of Apollo – began to hatch his own ideas for a revival of the series. In the intervening years since production had wound down, Lorne Greene had died, so Hatch naturally assumed that Apollo would now be leading Galactica’s mission. A short pitch reel detailing the premise for new Galactica adventures was produced and shopped around to Universal Studios and Glen Larson, and shown during Hatch’s convention appearances in the 
1990s, and many fans were eager to see him revive the show – but Universal held out, not granting Hatch the rights to do so (partly due to an extended legal custody battle with Larson to determine who really held the rights in the first place). Hatch was able to get permission to begin co-writing a series of officially licensed novels continuing the Battlestar’s voyages, and despite not being limited by Lorne Greene’s death, he essentially reused the plotline laid out in his new series proposal, with Adama having died and Apollo assuming command.
eventually picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel. At first, Bryan Singer, director of the recent hit movie X-Men, was behind the project, but he and creative partner Tom DeSanto dropped out of the project very early on. Ronald D. Moore, who had launched his writing career with a spec script submitted and produced in the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and had continued through the end of that show and then worked on the latter four seasons of spinoff series Deep Space Nine, signed on to produce and co-write the new script, based loosely on Larson’s original pilot. The new Galactica would be darker, grittier and more realistic, Moore promised – and less camp. In the background, Richard Hatch – backed up by a vocal segment of fandom – protested the new direction for the show, but they were ultimately ignored.
When reports began to surface that more significant changes were being planned, however, it appeared to some fans as though Hatch might have a point. The first, and most frequently touted, change was for the fan favorite character of Starbuck – rumored early on to be a cigar-chomping hotshot female pilot. Again, vocal fans questioned the changes and some even proposed a boycott, but when Sci-Fi premiered the lavishly-produced miniseries pilot in December 2003, Battlestar Galactica was again a ratings winner, beating out most of the network’s other original 
programming that year, surprising some of the fans and disappointing others, and meriting a 13-episode series production order in 2004.
Galactica is slated to be a movie, ensuring that somewhere out there, there’s still a ragtag fleet looking for a shining beacon called Earth; in the meantime, Syfy (formerly Sci-Fi Channel) continues to attempt a successful continuation to the Moore series, though finding a series formula that wins the kind of ratings that the remake did has already taken them through one cancelled prequel (Caprica) and another prequel with a troubled production history (Blood & Chrome).
This is a syndicated series; airdates seen in this guide are the first day of the “week of” broadcast window, and episodes may have aired on different days in your area.
only a limited interest in Roddenberry himself having a hand in that expansion. The creator of Star Trek was viewed as something of a liability; the first and most expensive Star Trek movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, was regarded in hindsight as an extraordinarily expensive example of excess with Roddenberry at the helm. In actuality, however, the expense legendarily associated with The Motion Picture is actually an example of creative accounting, Hollywood style: that movie began life as an attempted TV revival in the 1970s, which followed on from two failed attempts to get an early ’70s Star Trek movie into production. By charging all of the previous unfulfilled projects against The Motion Picture‘s budget, that movie – despite a huge box office take upon its premiere – magically became a money-loser in Paramount’s books, handily accomplishing two things: it gave the spendthrift studio the ammo it needed to relieve Roddenberry of any real decision-making power in the franchise’s future, and by failing to show a profit, kept pesky residual payouts to its key players down to a dull roar. From Star Trek II onward, Gene Roddenberry was reduced to a creative consultant whose advice could be taken on 
board completely or ignored at the whim of the producer behind the increasingly successful movie franchise, Harve Bennett.
Academy” idea on the small screen… unless, of course, the creator of the original series could come up with something better.
bible) and might, at most, feature a descendant of an original Enterprise crew member, though eventually even that idea fell by the wayside.
new Star Trek as a syndicated show that would never run on a specific network, instead offering the first right of refusal to the stations already carrying the ’60s show. Though there were skeptics aplenty in the broadcast industry, in fandom and in the press, most of those stations who already had Star Trek signed on for the new show.
overseeing things from the safety of the Enterprise. The chief medical officer would be Doctor Beverly Crusher, who would have her bright daughter Leslie in tow, while the security of the Enterprise would be overseen by Lt. “Macha” Hernandez, a tough-as-nails security officer inspired by Roddenberry’s recent viewing of the 1986 hit movie Aliens and its gun-toting Lt. Vasquez.
Sturgeon, George Clayton Johnson and Harlan Ellison. If anything was proving elusive, it was the shape of the future itself: how far would technology have advanced in the 24th century, when in 1986 the standard medium of data storage was a floppy disk strikingly similar in shape and size to the “computer tapes” in use aboard the Enterprise as filmed in 1966? Numerous avenues were considered and abandoned, such as having a transporter pad on the bridge itself (nixed in favor of having a relatively long elevator ride and walk to the transporter, during which conversations could take place between characters), and having the new Enterprise almost completely computer controlled, with the crew only seen to operate manual controls during the most extraordinary situations. Also to be considered was the technology of the original Star Trek: how woud it have evolved in almost a century? The idea of miniaturizing the cell-phone-like communicators of the ’60s series down into something 
that would fit within a touch-operated uniform insignia was already on the table. What of phasers and tricorders?
Riker and Troi inherited the slightly-cooled-down relationship originally devised for Decker and Lt. Ilia in the series bible for the aborted ’70s Star Trek revival, while Data inherited some of the character DNA developed for the never-made show’s Vulcan science officer, Xon. A blind crewmember, Geordi La Forge, would pilot the Enterprise, while another allusion to the calming of relations with the Soviet Union was added in the person of another security officer, Lt. Worf – the first Klingon to wear a Starfleet uniform, originally suggested by Bob Justman as a “Klingon marine” who would be a recurring character rather than a regular. The lineage of the Enterprise was both nailed down and left tantalizingly open by designating Picard’s ship as NCC-1701-D: what had happened to the “B” and “C” models of the Enterprise? And since NCC-1701-A had only 
come about as a result of the original Enterprise’s destruction, what had become of Kirk’s brand new ship in the interim?
rectangular monitors peeking through circular openings in the set, especially when the graphics on those monitors made no sense in a circular format), got him a call to work on the new show full-time. Andrew Probert and Rick Sternback, both veterans of the last Enterprise redesign in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, were on hand to design the Enterprise’s newest descendant. A young executive from Paramount’s longform entertainment division, Rick Berman, was recruited by Roddenberry to help run the show. Younger than Justman (who was already expressing a desire to return to the retirement he had left to help launch TNG) and Milkis (who would be returning to retirement as soon as TNG’s 
pilot was completed), Berman would be Roddenberry’s right-hand man, with a keen eye for detail and quality control, taking over Milkis’ role after the filming of the pilot. Overeeing the creative side of the show was producer Herbert J. Wright, a veteran producer of such shows as Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, The Six Million Dollar Man, Hunter and Stingray.
disagreements with Roddenberry over an AIDS-themed script, Blood & Fire. Gerrold and several other writers were also at odds with Roddenberry over unauthorized rewrites and script editing being carried out by Leonard Maizlish, Roddenberry’s attorney. Though there were some impressive episodes in the first two seasons, the evolving continuity of the Star Trek universe led to some inconsistencies. Denise Crosby was dissatisfied with what she saw as a lack of development for her character, Tasha Yar, and asked to be released from her contract; the character was killed off.
The first season ended with two mild cliffhangers, though the lack of the words “to be continued” may have led the audience to believe otherwise. The dark, violent episode Conspiracy introduced an alien threat that had gained a foothold within Starfleet Command, trying to erode the fabric of the United Federation of Planets from inside. The story ended with an obvious hint of a rematch that, in seven years of TNG and many years of its descendants, never happened. The season closer, The Neutral Zone, introduced the idea of entire colonies and outposts vanishing without a trace, the first calling card of a powerful new enemy for the Federation. The Romulans also showed their hand, appearing in a massive new Andrew Probert-designed starship. It was Herbert Wright’s intention that the unseen enemy attacking Federation and Romulan colonies would be a relentless insect race with an all-controlling hive mind, 
to be revealed early in the second season. Toward the end of the season, the show’s producers decided to drop Gates McFadden from the cast as Dr. Crusher, reportedly unhappy with both the actress and the development of the character. Diana Muldaur replaced McFadden for the second season as Dr. Katherine Pulaski, a curmudgeonly doctor cast from the mold of the original series’ Dr. McCoy.
own: Fox’s Cops and America’s Most Wanted became hits during the gap in scripted shows. With the end of the writers’ strike, the opener for the second season of TNG was The Child, a hastily-revised script left over from Roddenberry’s 1970s attempt to relaunch Star Trek on TV.
Tired of the grind after the first two seasons, Wright left TNG after headhunting his own replacement, writer Michael Piller. Having served as a journalist, a network Standards & Practices censor and a writer on such series as Simon & Simon, Piller brought a new focus on TNG’s characters to the third season, making it clear to prospective writers of the show that their scripts not only had to be about something, but about someone in show’s regular cast of characters. It was a frequent folly of ’70s and ’80s TV to bring in a guest star as a one-shot character who was more memorable than the rest of the show’s cast; Piller wanted to ensure that the same fate didn’t befall the Enterprise crew. Piller also drew from TNG’s unique-in-Hollywood open script submission policy: any unagented writer, even those who had never written a television script before, could submit a full-length script to Star Ttrek: The Next Generation after signing legal paperwork that protected Paramount from legal action in the event that a similar script went into production. This led to the discovery of writer Ronald D. Moore, who was soon 
hired as a full-time staff writer for TNG and heavily publicized as the show’s Cinderella story, encouraging thousands of other would-be Star Trek scriptwriters (the author of this essay included) to send in their own stories; having gone from obscurity to a full-time career as a TV writer, Moore later gained nearly universal acclaim as the architect of the Sci-Fi Channel’s renowned 21st century revival of Battlestar Galactica. The third season even brought back Denise Crosby as a one-off Tasha Yar from an alternate timeline, and concluded with the return of Herb Wright’s Borg in a cliffhanger that achieved the impossible: it generated enough word-of-mouth and speculation that TNG was on the edge of breaking into mainstream viewing, despite being a syndicated show that aired on a different day and time in nearly every major city in the country.
writer after a promising collaboration with Ronald D. Moore early in the season. Season five saw the brief return of Herbert Wright as a co-producer, but the contrast between his style and the stability that Michael Piller had brought to the show’s writing staff was striking. After rallying for the show’s scripts to include more “weird shit” and science fiction concepts, Wright was gone again halfway through the season, finding that the kinder, gentler writing staff at TNG was too kind and gentle for his tastes. An example Wright often cited later was that Worf was truly alien in the first two seasons, whereas the fifth season Worf was “dealing with the problems of a single father.” Season five also saw the appearance of Leonard Nimoy as the 100+ year old Spock in a heavily-promoted guest shot during the all-important November ratings sweep. The story, and Nimoy’s appearance, tied directly into the upcoming movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which revolved around the beginnings of peace with the Klingons as seen in the TNG timeline, and featured a cameo appearance by Michael Dorn as an ancestor of Worf. Another sign of TNG’s position of prime importance in the Star Trek franchise, Trek VI was conciously designed to be the 
swan song for the original Star Trek cast. This unprecedented mingling of old Trek and new came as a sad footnote to the death of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in October 1991.
the cast and characters of Star Trek: The Next Generation would launch themselves again on the big screen; prior to that, another Star Trek spinoff would premiere on TV, carrying the franchise forward on television.
beginning, with Paramount rolling the dice on reviving a franchise that was widely seen as a TV failure and an unlikely movie success story. When NCC-1701-D made its final flight, however, Star Trek was Paramount’s biggest success story, and a cornerstone of the studio’s next major venture, the United Paramount Network.
