Moore was a self-identified “trekky” who dropped out of
college and was working as a receptionist at an animal hospital when his
girlfriend invited him to tour the set of Start
Trek, where she was currently working.
The night prior to the tour Moore stayed up late writing a script for a
possible episode and then managed the next day to slip it into the hands of an
employee on the set. The script was passed around, and the producers loved it.
Within months Moore was hired as a writer for the show he grew up
idolizing.
In the coming years Moore would prove to be an incredibly
gifted screenwriter who would play a leading role in the creation of some of
the most memorable Star Trek TV series
and films while winning a Peabody award for his re-creation of the cult classic
Battlestar Galactica. Moore’s life
has been, as I said, storybook material.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter of his life however was
the one in which he had the opportunity to write the script for the film Star Trek Generations; the film through
which his own pen authored the death of Captain Kirk, his childhood hero.
An essential aspect of growing up always includes the
putting away of old and unnecessary things. Clothes that don’t fit, toys that
are no longer age appropriate, blankets that can now stop coddling us, books
whose themes fail to challenge us any longer, games that we wake-up to discover
have grown too simple for our aging minds. Seasons in which, as the Apostle
Paul would say, we learn that milk alone is simply no longer sufficient to
sustain us.
Ironically of all of these things we might declare childish,
the last to slip from our hands are often our heroes. Those celebrities who we
have adored and whose shadow looms over us with epic proportions reminding us
constantly that anything is possible, and that our greatest potential is only
constrained by the limits of our dreams.
But childhood heroes can also play a less noble role in our
lives if we allow their stories to become our own instead of living the life we
have been given.
Heroes provide inspiration for life, not the invitation to vicariously
experience one.
I imagine that before he became a screenwriter Ronald Moore
spent most of his days walking half-dead through a job that was headed nowhere
only to return each night to an empty home where a poster of Captain Kirk was
enshrined on the wall. In the lonely hours of the evening he would cope with
his emptiness by watching endless loops of Star Trek, imagining himself to be an
inspirational leader who was commanding the destiny of the human race. He would
fall asleep on the couch with his TV flickering across the room and wake the
next day to re-live the cycle.
And then he woke one morning and decided to take
responsibility for his own life by killing his hero Kirk.
At some point all of us need to say goodbye to Santa or
Superman or the fairy tales that always seem to end “happily ever after” so
that we might take a step towards those around us with real flesh and real
blood and real pain and real stories that can’t be put back together again
within the tidy confines of a weekly broadcast.
Growing up can be painful. It can difficult to say goodbye
to those things, which, in the past, had been a source of comfort, or joy, or
escape. It is normal for children to have imaginary friends, to pretend they
are someone they are not, or to take on the identity of another. But if you
find that you are 30 years old and still convinced that you can fly or be in
the NFL or that you are commanding a flying saucer through a distant galaxy,
many would consider you in great need of psychological support. Yet, for some reason
we think nothing of spending hours each day trolling through the stories of
celebrities and athletes and artists in an unquenchable search for meaning and
purpose and life.
Do you have a hero you
need to bump off before you can truly begin to live?
