Star Trek: Ronald D. Moore Talks Deep Space Nine Season 8, Possibility of Returning to the Franchise

Star Trek was a part of Ronald D. Moore’s childhood. Then he grew up and made it part of his professional career. Moore wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation. When that series ended, he moved on to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He returned to that world for a day as part of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season Eight writer’s room, a segment in the documentary What We Left Behind: Looking Back on Star Trek Nine. For the segment, Deep Space Nine showrunner Ira Steven Behr assembled a group of Deep Space Nine alum, including Moore, to brainstorm a hypothetical eighth season premiere for the series. Speaking to ComicBook.com over the phone, Moore reflected on how much fun it was to play in the Star Trek universe again.

“It was really fun,” Moore said. “I knew going in, when Ira and I first talked about it, when he pitched it to me, I was like, ‘That’s a really cool idea. I wonder what that’ll be like.’ And then going in, it took a little while to kind of sink into just talking about it as a show again. Because at first, you’re just kind of catching up and you’re kind of trying to remember the names of characters and what we’d established and, ‘Oh wait, where did we leave the dominion and what was this?’ And after an hour or so, it just became another writer’s room.

“By the end of that day, our biggest disappointment was that we had just broken a story that wasn’t going to get made. It was like, ‘Wow, this was cool and this was fun.’ The next step should be somebody writing the story outline, somebody who’s going to get to write the script. It was like, ‘Oh, but no, we just did this for fun.’ The fun stopped once we realized that it wasn’t going to get made, but it was great. You just lost yourself in it. You just really, at a certain point, you’d forgotten it was an exercise and you really were debating story and tossing ideas and pitching things, wrestling around structure… It was really fun to be back in that for a day.”

Moore also says that he wouldn’t be averse to returning to Star Trek in a less hypothetical scenario, though his current contract with Sony Television means that’s not going to happen anytime soon. “No, I can always see myself going back to it,” he says. “I’ve been away from it now for quite a while and it could be fun again to do it. It’s not something I can do currently. I’m on a deal at Sony Television and my time is kind of tied up, so I couldn’t do it. I work for a different company. But yeah, it would be fun to play in that universe again, whether it was on TV or a movie or a book or whatever. It’s still something that speaks to a very personal part of me and I don’t think I’ll ever be really, really done with it.”

Would you like to see Moore return to Star Trek? Let us know in the comments. Moore’s latest project is For All Mankind, an alternate history television series about the space race. You can watch it on Apple TV+, where new episodes become available on Fridays.

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