For writer Ron Moore, taking 'Star Trek' into unexpected, sometimes darker directions made for a better show.

As reported by TrekMovie.com, working on Star Trek: The Next Generation meant trying to be original and to avoid the usual clichés. "There was a bit of fight," said Moore. "I was sort of always fighting to take stories into darker directions or to go out on more ambiguous notes or to make the Enterprise lose occasionally. A lot of it was just in service of doing things different. I think I was looking for molds to break. We were doing so many episodes a year, twenty-six a year which right now seems unfathomable.

"You were doing so many episodes," said Moore. "We used to have this big board that were the 'Star Trek' clichés. After every pitch session, because we were taking endless amounts of writers coming to pitch, the writers would all sort of gleefully go to the cliché board and we would log in how many of the Trek clichés we heard that day: Data becomes man, Data becomes god, they discover a planet and the planet is alive, you know there were just all these categories and we would just tally each one to keep ourselves sane. Because of that and because there were so many Trek clichés and so many patterns doing shows, I was always looking for the show that was different."

Moore enjoyed the fact that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine went in a different direction than the other Star Trek series. "We kind of prided ourselves on being the bastard stepchildren of the Trek franchise," he said. "We were the only one that was truly different. Every other series was essentially about a starship boldly going somewhere, and we weren't. We were proud of that. And we were kind of proud of that fact that we didn’t get the same publicity and that we were the forgotten ones. It was something we sort of wore as this badge of honor among the writers."

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