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Acknowledgements
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(Dorothy Catherine Fontana 1939– ). American writer.
Also: story consultant, Star
Trek (1966-68); script supervisor, The
Sixth Sense (1972); story editor and associate producer, Star Trek (animated tv series) (1973-74);
story consultant, The Fantastic Journey
(1977); story editor, Logan's Run
(1977).
Although she stumbled into a lifelong association with science fiction
through the happenstance of working as a secretary to Gene RODDENBERRY,
which led to her writing first for his series The Lieutenant (1963-64) and then for Star Trek, Fontana had no real aptitude for
science fiction. She certainly didn't know much about science, as
evidenced by the trite Kirk-outwits-the-computer plot of "The Ultimate
Computer," mortifyingly naïve even in the context of the embryonic
technology of the 1960s. Neither could she intelligently employ the
genre as a vehicle for social or political commentary, as evidenced
by the melodramatic "The Enterprise Incident," which grew out
of her bright idea to retell the then-controversial story of the Pueblo
incident in science-fictional guise. At her best, she could concoct
entertaining fluff like "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," the only episode
with her name on it that stands up to repeated viewing. But more often,
Fontana would sidestep her difficulties with the genre by transforming
the Enterprise into a starfaring General Hospital, a gaudy setting for soap-opera
scenarios of personal conflict: the cold, unemotional Mr. Spock falls
head-over-heels in love (twice); Spock is alienated from, then reconciles
with, his father; a troubled boy with dangerous powers seeks to escape
from his alien mentors; the chieftain of a primitive tribe is killed,
leaving a beautiful widow to raise his infant son; a planned invasion
from the Andromeda galaxy is foiled because its advance agents become
embroiled in emotional discord. While Fontana has often spoken about
her special affinity for Spock, Theodore STURGEON's
single episode ("Amok Time") did more to make the character interesting
than all of Fontana's soapy sagas—because Sturgeon, as an experienced
science fiction writer, could develop and present some intelligent
and novel ideas about the physiology and culture of an alien humanoid,
while Fontana could not. To further document Fontana's woeful inclination
to drag a genre with grand aspirations down to dull domesticity, consider
that Harlan ELLISON created a time machine
which Captain Kirk employed to avert a disastrous change in human
history making Hitler victorious in World War II ("The City on the
Edge of Forever"); later, Fontana borrowed the same machine so
that an adult Spock could go back in time to ensure his own existence
and comfort his childhood self about the death of a beloved pet ("Yesteryear").
What more needs to be said?
I cannot be confident that I have tracked down all of
Fontana's many adventures outside of and after Star
Trek, which reportedly include episodes of The Big Valley, Bonanza, Dallas,
The High Chaparral, Kung Fu, Lonesome Dove, The Streets of San Francisco, and The Waltons, as well as a television movie entitled A Special Act of Love (1973)—all venues
better suited to her mundane talents. But her credits in science fiction
suggest a certain pattern of behavior: every time a new science fiction series
was announced, she would come knocking on the producer's door, holding a résumé
with the words "STAR TREK" splashed on the pages in big bold letters, and
the producer, hoping to capture a bit of the Star
Trek magic for his own project, would often be happy to hire her as
a writer or consultant. Then, either the series would die a quick death, or
Fontana would wear out her welcome and find that her services were no longer
required; even Star Trek: The Next Generation
managed to drive her away after she helped to make its first season very
uneven, though she later returned to her old territory to write "Dax," an
episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Perhaps invited back on board to develop in some innovative fashion the
character of Dax, a woman with an alien implanted in her body and merged with
her personality, Fontana instead offered a characteristically contrived
scenario of a murder charge against the alien's previous host, a tense
courtroom trial, and a last-minute exoneration when a general's wife testifies
that she was having a romantic rendezvous with the accused host at the time of
the murder. As for her work outside of Star
Trek, if her episodes of The Six
Million Dollar Man, Land of the
Lost, The Fantastic Journey,
Logan's Run, Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth
Century, War of the Worlds,
Babylon 5, Hypernauts, and Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict were in any way
especially memorable, that information has somehow been omitted from the
chronicles of science fiction television.
In the 1990s, Fontana kept milking her Star Trek connection by writing a Star Trek novel about Spock and a Star Trek-related episode of the animated
series ReBoot. However, she has
received more attention for authoring the still-unavailable computer game,
Secret of Vulcan Fury, featuring the vocal talents of the original Star Trek cast. Once scheduled for release
in 1998, the extended delay in its appearance represents either a company's
foolish suppression of a brilliant interactive drama or its wise business
decision to avoid wasting money on promoting a boring mess that would never
succeed and would only serve to embarrass its distinguished participants. Based
on D. C. Fontana's track record, one scenario seems more likely than the other.
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