10 Star Trek Behind The Scenes Horror Stories
1. Gene Roddenberry's Sexist Rant
Herbert J. Wright worked in the writers' room on this first season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He voiced his opinion off the bat that simply re-doing the trope of a matriarchal society shouldn't be the way forward. He wanted to use the script to highlight apartheid, with the men on the planet being the stand-ins for the Black population in South Africa.
However, he claims in The Fifty-Year Mission: The First Twenty Five Years that once Roddenberry got involved with the script, adding scenes of a sexual nature was a foregone conclusion. Added to this, he recalled a particularly troubling outburst of "we also don't want to infer that it would be a better society if women ruled".
His voice becoming increasingly louder, Roddenberry continued that this was because women were untrustworthy, "vicious creatures," which he angrily blurted out in a torrent of hateful verbiage. After this, Wright claims that Roddenberry simply changed the subject and returned to other elements of the script.
Angel One is considered one of the poorest episodes of The Next Generation's first year, though the sexism was far from confined to that episode alone. The original plan for Deanna Troi would have seen her with four breasts, for no other reason bar the obvious.