The Best Star Trek Showrunner Reveals The Episode He Hated The Most

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 20 seconds ago

For years, anyone who criticized shows like Star Trek: Discovery or Star Trek: Picard was labeled as a narrow-minded bigot who just couldn’t appreciate all of the progressive signaling from the writers. In reality, that signaling was just jangling keys to hide how unprogressive these new shows often were (seriously, when they weren’t killing their gays, they were tokenizing them). Eventually, though, the culture war stuff stopped really mattering. Starfleet Academy got canceled after only one season, and it wasn’t alone; under the leadership of Alex Kurtzman, all NuTrek shows (minus Picard, which was always planned as three seasons) received early cancellations. The reason? Simple: not enough people were watching!

Whether you loved or hated NuTrek, this led to a grim development. Paramount has ceased all Trek TV development and is pivoting the franchise to the big screen. Now, fans of all stripes are returning to the shows of yesteryear and rediscovering the best series of them all: Deep Space Nine. DS9 achieved greatness largely thanks to showrunner Ira Steven Behr, who always pushed the franchise in new directions. Of course, he learned the hard way what does and does not work for the franchise. Case in point: despite it having a nearly perfect script, Behr later declared the TNG episode “A Matter of Perspective” to be the worst Star Trek episode he ever worked on!

Make It “No”

In Season 3, Star Trek: The Next Generation brought us “A Matter of Perspective,” which was a sci-fi murder mystery. When a lab blows up and kills a sketchy scientist, Riker is the chief suspect. Why? Because he was the last person to talk to the deceased and maybe had an inappropriate relationship with the guy’s wife. I say “maybe” because this episode uses the holodeck to recreate different characters’ events of what really happened. Eventually, Riker is exonerated, and in a shocking twist, we discover that the dead scientist accidentally blew himself up trying to kill Riker.

On paper, “A Matter of Perspective” has only a single writer: Ed Zuckerman. However, staff writer Ronald D. Moore (who would later serve as showrunner for the Battlestar Galactica reboot) claimed in a later AOL chat with fans that all of the staff helped with an uncredited rewrite for this episode. One of those writers was Ira Steven Behr, who had a rather elliptical relationship with Star Trek. He started writing for The Next Generation in Season 3, brokering peace between older writers and Michael Piller, the new showrunner. Piller eventually offered Behr the job of showrunner; instead, Behr left the show entirely. 

When It All Blows Up In Your Face

However, Piller really liked Behr and later brought him in to work on Deep Space Nine. After three seasons, Behr replaced Piller as showrunner for DS9. There, he oversaw some of the greatest sci-fi episodes ever created and wrote quite a few himself. Today, DS9 is rightfully remembered as the best Star Trek show ever made. How did Behr maintain such high quality when it came to storytelling? One way was by learning what not to do. For example, on the TNG Season 3 special features, he dubbed “A Matter of Perspective” a “disaster” and his least-favorite Trek episode that he had ever worked on. 

What made this so surprising is that “A Matter of Perspective’ was not a badly-written episode. As recorded in Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, showrunner Piller declared that he was “very, very, happy with the script,” one that was “the best murder mystery I’ve been involved in developing…because every detail falls into place, every line comes together…it really worked from a mystery standpoint.” Furthermore, the story was “very complicated, yet if you take that script apart, nothing falls out of it.” However, he felt “it didn’t translate properly” and ultimately “didn’t think it was great television.” Behr and Moore both agreed, though they were harsher in their criticisms.

“A Matter of Perspective” is a solid hour of Star Trek: The Next Generation, one that uses futuristic technology to tell a very captivating story. Still, Ira Steven Behr was one of many writers who thought they dropped the ball when it came to bringing this tale to life. At the time, this was a minor blip in a career that would eventually be defined by the greatest sci-fi franchise ever made. Once he became showrunner for Deep Space Nine, though, his ability to tell whether a script would work onscreen helped him craft the best Star Trek series ever made. 

As the Department of Temporal Investigations might put it, the rest is history!