daeedorian

Where do you feel the balance lies between authenticity and manufactured narrative in nature docs?

It seems that it has become common practice to use editing to tell a story that is different from what actually occurred, or editorialize the events via voiceover in a way that might be considered dishonest.

How do you find compelling drama, without completely misleading the audience?

Honestly, I think that your father's legacy among many fans is that his incredible vision was an unshakable foundation, but that his steadfast principles also placed a lot of restrictions on his writers.

Those restrictions at times stood to limit some of the drama.

DS9 is often presented as an example of what the franchise became when those restrictions were loosened--some darker themes, and a more familiar dualistic view of humanity.

Frankly, I feel that modern sci-fi desperately needs more optimism like that which your father built Trek upon.

Morally steadfast characters such as Jean Luc Picard are few and far between in sci-fi because of modern cynicism, which is strange, because genuinely good and moral people exist everywhere.

How did you handle the 100 mile wilderness in Maine?

I agree that there's a middle ground, and I hope to see it realized in the near future.

Today's pop scifi has become somewhat inundated with dystopian visions and anti-heroes, and the other end of the spectrum simply isn't being represented.

I think that depicting genuinely good and morally unshakable human characters is a cornerstone of the Star Trek concept, but characters fitting that archetype can be further explored by contrasting them against the darker aspects of human nature.

I also feel that a key ingredient of the Star Trek recipe is depicting the pragmatism of ethics and morality--that doing the right thing ultimately pays off, even if only in the long term. I'd like to see that again.

People need heroes like Jean Luc Picard.

Star Trek's moral characters don't need balancing simply because this then shows that these people are exceptional within the human race and are not the norm.

The entire point is that Federation society has become exceptional through social development. Federation society may encompass much of humanity, but certainly not all of it.

I've always considered Star Trek, and especially TOS and TNG, to explore the fact that the emotional and mental state of these characters isn't some exception to the rule. That this is just how society in that time was.

Federation society, yes. We know from Star Trek that there are countless worlds and colonies populated by humans and humanoids who are far beyond the reach of the Federation. See: Tasha Yar's homeworld, among countless other examples.

We have this "duality" of "good vs evil" in real life. Star Trek's vision to me is to show that humanity has overcome all of today's current obstacles.

If that were the case, there would be no drama. The concept behind Star Trek's best allegorical stories is that in the future, analogues to "today's current obstacles" still exist, but we as the audience get to see how more socially evolved characters face those obstacles.