Ron Moore

[Yerushalmi]

On the previous forums, I posted a bit of an analysis demonstrating that, despite SFDebris's occasional complaints that Star Trek relies way too much on time travel plots, he still gives time travel episodes consistently high scores. And, in fact, time travel episodes average significantly higher than other episodes, and are considerably overrepresented in episodes awarded 10s and 9s.

Well, I decided to take a bit of a look at how Ronald D. Moore's output is scored. According to Memory Alpha, Moore worked on 64 installments of Star Trek in one capacity or another: Writing, teleplay, script polishing, uncredited rewrites, etc.

Yes, not all of these have been reviewed yet, but by my count it's at least half. And only three have scores below 5:

* Our Man Bashir
* Take Me Out To The Holosuite
* Star Trek: Generations

That's some pretty impressively consistent quality.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I'm fairly strong in my opinion that Ron Moore was modern Trek's best writer. Even the two DS9 episodes mentioned here have a lot of fans, even if Chuck isn't among them. Generations was bad, but even that had some extenuating circumstances.

Despite the general recognition that his episodes are among the best on both TNG and DS9, I think the dislike that some have for BSG (a show I'm quick to defend) has caused them to underrate his Trek output. From his first script for TNG he gave the characters more life than the writers who actually created said characters, and he was obviously good at creating stories with depth, ambiguity, and moral complexity. Not to mention some of the fantastic dialogue he's written over the years.

I love his writing for the same reason that some hate it- he's willing to challenge the Roddenberry ethos and take risks.

[J!!]

i find it somewhat telling that when people on this forum talk about ways that voyager could've been improved, their ideas are almost always things that would've made it more like BSG.

[Durandal_1707]

I'm fairly strong in my opinion that Ron Moore was modern Trek's best writer. Even the two DS9 episodes mentioned here have a lot of fans, even if Chuck isn't among them. Generations was bad, but even that had some extenuating circumstances.

I dunno, Peter Allan Fields did Inner Light, Duet, Necessary Evil, and In the Pale Moonlight. Yeah, I know Moore wrote the final draft of the last one of those, but still, that's like half of a "best of" list for modern Trek. Moore's a pretty easy #2, though.

[MissKittyFantastico]

I'll happily take a look at anything with Ron Moore's name on it - even where Battlestar faltered, it was more mad ambition running off the rails than any lack of talent. I feel like the TNG and DS9 offices at the time were strong machines, with (give or take the occasional write-off episode) a lot of redundancy to prop up anywhere an individual writer might be coming up short, and Battlestar was a more go-for-broke no-plan-B kind of deal. Moore and Ira Steven Behr on DS9 seemed a bit of a dream team; it's not for nothing I started watching Outlander when I saw both their names attached. (I mean, obviously Caitriona Balfe, but not only.)

[Admiral X]

I think RDM's output quality on Trek was largely due to him being checked by others. On BSG, he didn't have that nearly as much.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I'm fairly strong in my opinion that Ron Moore was modern Trek's best writer. Even the two DS9 episodes mentioned here have a lot of fans, even if Chuck isn't among them. Generations was bad, but even that had some extenuating circumstances.

I dunno, Peter Allan Fields did Inner Light, Duet, Necessary Evil, and In the Pale Moonlight. Yeah, I know Moore wrote the final draft of the last one of those, but still, that's like half of a "best of" list for modern Trek. Moore's a pretty easy #2, though.

Fair enough. I think you could argue that a few writers could stand toe to toe with Moore when it came to their very best, but the volume of quality scripts that he had and the level of positive impact he had on both TNG and DS9 gives Moore the edge for me. I admit that this could be moving the goalposts somewhat. I'm also not much of a fan of Fields' lesser episodes.

Of course, there's also the mystery of how to interpret screenwriting credits and who actually deserves the credit for the good stuff. With The Inner Light, Morgan Gendel is credited for the story, Gendel and Peter Allan Fields are both credited for the teleplay. I have no idea who deserves the bulk of the credit. In the case of Duet, I'm inclined to say it owes most of it's success to Fields and the acting- the story is good, but it's Fields' teleplay that's outstanding. In the Pale Moonlight, we know Moore deserves a lot of credit for that one, but we could just as well be ignorant of the fact that he worked on it at all.

On the negative side, you have somebody like D.C. Fontana. As Chuck discussed in his last TNG review, it seems likely that Roddenberry (and Hurley) really hampered her and the rest of the writing staff. If you took her TNG scripts in a vacuum, you would think that she just wasn't a good writer. Obviously that's not the case.

All that is to say, it's hard to give individuals their due credit (or blame) in a collaborative medium. The best indication of a writer's talent that I know of is if his/her name keeps showing up on the good episodes- which is obviously something that can be said for both Fields and Moore.

[Durandal_1707]

All that is to say, it's hard to give individuals their due credit (or blame) in a collaborative medium. The best indication of a writer's talent that I know of is if his/her name keeps showing up on the good episodes- which is obviously something that can be said for both Fields and Moore.

Yeah, that's the bottom line for me. If I make a short list of the episodes that are my very favorites of the 24th-century era, Fields' name just keeps showing up. That can't be an accident.

[SuccubusYuri]

DS9 was really the dream team, between Behr, Moore, and Wolfe you couldn't really fuck things up. Behr gave vision, Moore gave heart, Wolfe gave structure.

[Yerushalmi]

Here's the breakdown of Peter Allan Fields episodes:

Episodes that SFDebris gave a 10: 3
Episodes that SFDebris gave a 9: 1
Episodes that SFDebris gave a 7: 2

Not a lot of output (6 out of 13 episodes reviewed), but some consistent quality there too.