RIP: D.C. Fontana
December 4th, 2019 01:05![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alibi_shopWhen I was getting into Star Trek (original series) as a kid, I had weirdly strong opinions about it. One was that whoever this "D.C. Fontana" was, he [sic] seemed smart and seemed to be the head writer for Star Trek, and those episodes had a kind of super-seriousness, which was cool... and they could be scary, like "Charlie X"... except often they were about some kind of grown-up politics and I instantly got bored.
Now, most of those episodes, I hadn't actually ever seen; the syndication schedule was pretty random, so mostly I got them in the form of short-storyizations by James Blish—an author I like a lot. Unfortunately, somehow, something about adapting Fontana's scripts brought out Blish's most boring prose. When I finally watched them—a little older, so maybe I had more of an attention span—I was surprised by how fun the same plots and dialogue were on screen. Prose fiction and drama have such different needs, and Fontana was a really engaging dramatist even when she worked on totally doofy things like the hippie episode (which was among the ones that Blish somehow made boring).
Now, most of those episodes, I hadn't actually ever seen; the syndication schedule was pretty random, so mostly I got them in the form of short-storyizations by James Blish—an author I like a lot. Unfortunately, somehow, something about adapting Fontana's scripts brought out Blish's most boring prose. When I finally watched them—a little older, so maybe I had more of an attention span—I was surprised by how fun the same plots and dialogue were on screen. Prose fiction and drama have such different needs, and Fontana was a really engaging dramatist even when she worked on totally doofy things like the hippie episode (which was among the ones that Blish somehow made boring).
