We already talked about the problems of saggy villains back in February, particularly with reference to the show Heroes, which has only gotten more and more worrying since then. The show's next chapter is called "Villains," but the producers and stars keep saying, over and over, that it's really about "confronting the villain inside our heroes." Dude, the true villain is within. Right there, under your navel. Really. Just stare a bit harder, and you'll see it. Not to mention the persistent reports that we'll be seeing the "softer side of Sylar" this season.

I love Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but it's similarly villain-deprived. There's one bad Terminator chasing our friends, and he's spent hours and hours searching for John Connor and getting easily thrown off the scent. We need less of Cromartie wandering into boys' locker rooms, and more scenes like the one where he trashes 100 FBI agents. I'm hoping the addition of Shirley Manson as a human villain will give T:SCC a nice extra bit of oomph in the villain department, replacing the standard Eastern-European gangsters who have been the show's human baddies so far.

And think about this summer's other big action movies: they almost all had weak villains. Iron Man? Jeff Bridges was great, but he was more like Tony Stark's corrupt older bro for most of the movie, and then he suddenly developed a sense of menace towards the end. Wanted? Morgan Freeman was Obi-Wan for most of the film, until suddenly it turned out he wasn't really doing the magic loom's will. Incredible Hulk? Tim Roth was like the Wile E. Coyote who keeps chasing the Hulk's Road-Runner, until he finally gets eaten by his own Acme Hulk-busting gizmos. None of those villains had a plan, a clue, an idea, a vision. They were just there to provide a big climactic fight for the end of each movie. At least we didn't have any Spider-Man 3-style villain clusterfucks this year.

How villains lose their shit:

1) They get redeemed. Like Sylar, supposedly. Or, I suspect, like Ben on Lost, who's already becoming a much more sympathetic character. (Although he still has the immoral psycho edge, as when he's willing to kill everyone on the freighter to get revenge on Keamy.) The ultimate example of a redeemed villain who loses his mystique is Darth Vader, whose redemption at the end of Return Of The Jedi presaged his whoah-TMI over-explanation in the prequels, which brings us to...

2) Too much information. Even Doctor Who's archetypal nasty, the Master, isn't immune. He went around killing and wreaking havoc for 30 years without any explanation other than "he's a sick fuck." But "he's a sick fuck" wasn't enough for writer Russell T. Davies, who had to give the Master an origin story that explained how he became evil. It was the weakest point of an otherwise great story. Sometimes, knowing why the villain is a psycho isn't the point. The best part of TDK's Joker is the fact that he keeps telling different origin stories, all of them completely fishy.

3) They become analogs of real-life nasties. It's just way too easy to make your villain just like Bill Gates, or Dick Cheney, or Hillary Clinton, or Ahmadinejad or whoever. (I almost wrote "Hillary Klingon," which I would pay to see.) In a few rare cases, it can make villains creepier — as in the plethora of Margaret Thatcher monsters coming out of England in the 1980s — but most of the time, it's just a cheap shortcut.

4) We see too much of their world. James Callis, who plays Gaius Baltar, said recently that he thought bleak space-opera Battlestar Galactica made a mistake by letting us inside the Cylons' Baseships and showing us their internecine bickering and weird internal decor sense. We stopped thinking of them as the implacable masterminds of human genocide, and started thinking of them more as The Real World: Baseship.

5) Too many defeats. This is one of the things that went wrong with the Borg. (The other one being the ridiculous "Borg Queen" which I think comes under the heading of "seeing too much of their world.") When we first meet the Borg, they're so unbeatable, Captain Picard basically has to beg Q to get the Enterprise away from them. And then the good guys defeat the Borg once, against tremendous odds. After that, every victory gets easier and easier, until finally Captain Janeway is reducing the entire Borg collective to rubble with a few well-placed kicks.

6) Too many victories. This is why I'm somewhat startled that the movie version of the Joker has so much power: he's a dillweed in the comics. The comic-book Joker is a victim of his own success. Where do you go after you've killed Robin and destroyed Batgirl in the same year? Away, that's where. The Joker should have been retired in the comics after "A Death In The Family" and "The Killing Joke," and in fact he did disappear for a year or two. But it was too tempting to keep bringing him back, and he's stuck being a has-been villain who can never top his best (worst) year, which was 20 years ago now. I've read hundreds of Joker comics published since 1988, and none has left much of an impression.

7) The villain that's a reflection of the hero. This is really where Iron Man and Incredible Hulk fail. (Someone emailed us about this a few months ago, and I'm afraid I can't remember who now.) You have a guy in super-powered metal armor? Who should he fight, if not another guy in super-powered metal armor that's a knock-off of his own? A big green guy? Let's create another big green guy from his blood and make them fight.

A unified theory of villainy:

We need good villains, for the health of our society.

Good villains make great stories. A truly chilling villain makes the hero seem more important because the stakes are important, and the hero's actions matter.

More than that, a really good escapist narrative deals with our personal and social anxieties at a right angle, letting us fantasize about being able to crush them with big metal ray-blast-shooting fists. In real life, we're making endless compromises with the forces that want to mangle us into bone origami.

But in our science fictional daydreams, those forces are actually too evil to compromise with. And as a result the heroes we identify with have no choice but to fight to their last breaths. You can't dicker with a giant robot that wants to destroy the world, you just can't. We need that outlet in our heroic stories.

Also, one of the biggest factors in debasing our national discourse is the fact that our leaders and pundits persist in trying to turn arguments into good vs. evil, when they're usually more like shades of gray. It actually doesn't help that our escapist fantasies, which should be about good vs. evil, take on that shades-of-gray ambiguity.

If Sylar's really not such a bad guy, then maybe John McCain — who really isn't a bad guy, just someone you may disagree with — is more like Sylar than we thought. See how this works? More nuance in our fictional battles actually facilitates less nuance in our real-life disputes.

The best villains are political, but only at the level of allegory.

See above, about not making Dick Cheney your movie's villain. A good villain has some kind of political message, but it's subtler and woven into the storyline's subtext. It's not so much, A=B, and much more a subversive undercurrent. Look at Terry Gilliam's Brazil: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan don't turn up in that movie at all, but the vision of a repressive, shallow society (which is the film's real villain) is threaded through with critiques of the materialism and militarism of the Reagan and Thatcher regimes.

Kill all the writers. (Except me, please. Kthx.)

Actors are the best friend of villains, and writers are often their worst enemy. I've lost count of how many interviews I've read with actors where they said something about how much fun it is to play a really nasty villain. They love to be monstrous — sometimes a bit too much, in a few cases I can think of.

Writers, meanwhile, are always trying to be clever. Sometimes by committing one of the sins we mentioned above, redeeming or explaining their villains with too much shading and fancy detail work. But sometimes, they fall into the trap of being too post-modern, with the ironic "spin" on villainy that takes away a lot of the menace. Say what you like about Joss Whedon: his villains almost always have real darkness and threat, even when they're being funny or cute. (Possible exception: the nerd trio in Buffy season six.)

Okay, so maybe you need writers. But they need to be fitted with one of those collar thingies that doesn't let them turn their heads, so they can think in a straight line and create villains who are unrelenting and cruel. The kind of ruthless monster who would put writers in a no-head-turning collar in the first place. Just a thought.

The current Royal Shakespeare Company production of Shakespeare's Danish tragedy stars not only Tennant (in his first of two Shakespeare roles this year; he does Love's Labors Lost later this year, before taking Hamlet to the West End in December) but also Star Trek: The Next Generation's Patrick Stewart as Claudius, and despite concerns over stunt-casting, the production has been winning critics over, with many reviews as positive as this one, from the Guardian:

The big news from Stratford is that Gregory Doran's production is one of the most richly textured, best-acted versions of the play we have seen in years. And Tennant, as anyone familiar with his earlier work with the RSC would expect, has no difficulty in making the transition from the BBC's Time Lord to a man who could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space. He is a fine Hamlet whose virtues, and occasional vices, are inseparable from the production itself.

More importantly, the stars' popularity has brought a new audience to Shakespeare; the AP quotes attendees of the previews professing their love for Stewart and saying things like, "The last thing I lined up for was 'ET' when it came out," and the RSC have been forced to make a statement asking fans not purchase scalped tickets online, according to the Times:

Sci-fi fans have been camping overnight in the hope of return tickets or, at least, a glimpse of the actor between rehearsals. While ten £5 seats are set aside each day for 16 to 25-year-olds, who have to turn up at the box office in person, tickets are changing hands on eBay for hundreds of pounds, to the dismay of the RSC. Chris Hill, the company’s director of sales and marketing, said: “The RSC does not support the selling of tickets at inflated prices on eBay or other internet auction sites. The reselling of any RSC ticket on such sites violates the terms and conditions associated with the purchase of the ticket.”

He cautioned: “We are contacting anyone who lists a ticket to explain that they must remove the listing . . . People who do purchase a ticket in this way run the risk of being refused admission.”

While it may not be as impressive as helping old William fight off witches determined to steal his soul, Tennant's latest rescue attempt does have more real world value; if the demand for Hamlet's end of year run is as great as the current production, does this mean that we'll see more SF faces in "serious" theater to come? If so, I'm holding out until Stargate's Robert Picardo takes on Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Royal Shakespeare Company warning over David Tennant Hamlet tickets [Times Online]

Produced by GITCorp, the DVD will include PDF versions of more than 500 different Star Trek comics from Gold Key's original 1967 series all the way through to DC/Wildstorm's early 21-century efforts (IDW and Tokyopop's more recent series won't be included, but are still in print for you to read the old-fashioned way):

Each issue is being scanned by the company, cover to cover, including all of the advertising, and stored in individual PDF archives. GITCorp is using an interface similar to their prior DVD comic collections to access the PDFs in the collection. The DVDs can be used on both Windows and Macintosh computers.

Putting together a collection spanning four decades has not been an easy task, especially due to the fact that Trek comics have been produced by so many different publishers over the years. According to Ray Pelosi from GITCorp, it has been a daunting to get all the comics and to sort out all the licensing issues required to bring it to market and he thanks CBS Products for all the help they provided to make it all happen.

As someone who still has a deep and abiding love for Peter David's run on the DC series in the early '90s, the idea of being able to re-read all of those issues (and try and get past by fear of Pablo Marcos' art on the Next Generation series of the same period) for $50 is more than a little tempting, I have to admit. Is it too late for me to start believing in Santa again?

TrekInk: First Look At Star Trek: The Complete Comic Book Collection DVD [TrekMovie]

In a universe stocked with sentient robots and faster than light travel, you'd hope that science would have mastered something as mundane as the human reproductive system, yet the fictive cosmos are littered with unplanned pregnancies, bastard children, and all manner of unpleasant critters bursting from one's internal organs. Is any form of contraception safe in world of science fiction? We looked at seven tried and true methods and started to worry that the future we’ve envisioned is one in which we’re all paying child support.

Socially-Mandated Birth Control
How it works: When the world is on the verge of overpopulation and resources are strained, sometimes a government’s got to put the breaks on reproduction and restrict baby-making to the desirable few. After all, after thousands of years spent clawing to the top of the Darwinian ladder, we can’t have every Tom, Dick, and Beowulf Shaeffer dumping his DNA into the newly limited gene pool. Fortunately, there’s a veritable buffet of methods for de-fertilizing the populace. The body-numbing “ethical birth control pills” of Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House make sexual contact utterly uninteresting, while Andrew Neiderman’s The Baby Squad opts for the simpler solution of mass sterilization. The women of Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North are fitted with an outwardly visible IUD, and Brave New World does away with childbirth entirely, making pregnancy the pinnacle of personal disaster and arming women with a birth control utility belt that would make Batman proud.

Why it fails: It turns out that the long arm of the government can only reach so far. In Hall’s book, women occasionally slip off the reservation to join the Carhullan Army, where they’ll take out that contraceptive device post haste. And, despite the looming threat of execution, women in The Baby Squad and Larry Niven’s “Known Space” stories have been known to get pregnant on the sly. Of course, sometimes birth control just plain fails. Even with a lifetime of practice at the Malthusian Drill, Brave New World’s beta Linda still manages to get knocked up, and with nary an abortion tower in sight.

Making it with a Robot
How it works: Assuming you’ve gotten a hold of one of those fully functional models and not one that’s genitally lacking, robots may be the perfect lovers – all that stamina with no messy gametes.

Why it fails: While this might work with entirely abiological specimens, the rules get tricky when your partner’s a Cylon. If you’re a human doing a Cylon, don’t fall in love. If you’re a fellow toaster, then plug away – unless you’re one of the Final Five. Which you might be. On second thought, it’s best just to use a rubber.

Male Birth Control
How it works: As modern researchers are tirelessly working to staunch the flow of sperm, Starfleet has long known the benefits of offering contraceptive injections to men. It reduces the odds of accidents and prevents alien-loving starship captains from leaving little Kirklets across the Alpha Quadrant.

Why it fails: As with its modern female analog, the male contraceptive injection is only good as long as you keep it up. And captains like Ben Sisko are just too busy bringing down evil empires, battling Pah-wraiths, and preserving the timeline to stop by Sick Bay for a hypospray. But not too busy, apparently, to get it on with Kasidy Yates.

Living in a World Without Men
How it works: Maybe all the men died off one day in a mysterious and bloody event. Maybe women have gone off and formed their own society without thinking to take a few Y chromosomes along. Maybe a whole species is kept female to control their breeding. Whatever the reason, the absence of sperm would seem to take pregnancy off the menu.

Why it fails: Even in the face of gendercide, men are not so easy to fell. There are bound to be a few hiding out in secret labs, in orbit, or dangling in straitjackets from the ceiling, ready to impregnate the first female who pounces. Or, as in Jurassic Park, the absence of males may prompt a handful of females to tiptoe across the gender line. And maybe men aren't a necessary component after all; the women of all-female utopia Herland opt for parthenogenesis, making themselves pregnant without the benefit of a partner.

Being Male
How it works: Thomas Beatie aside, it’s unlikely that a man is going to find himself pregnant at the gonads of another human being. Even exclusively male societies, like that in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos, tend to rely on external gestation devices rather than construct a male womb.

Why it fails: While human fetuses find the male body hostile, other species may not be so discerning. From the Octavia Butler’s Tlic to Ridley Scott’s chestbursters to that Alien in Red vs. Blue, there are plenty of extraterrestrials perfectly happy to place their embryos in our bodies, regardless of a uterus.

Abstinence
How it works: We all learned it in school: the only surefire way to avoid pregnancy is abstinence. Or sodomy.

Why it fails: As Deanna Troi and Shmi Skywalker will tell you, keeping your knees shut doesn’t exactly guarantee a baby-free existence. When those microscopic or incorporeal beings want something from you, be it a Force-balancing messiah or a chance at fleshy life, they aren’t going to wait around for a little thing like sexual intercourse.

Death
How it works: In olden times, death generally put a damper on one’s ability to become a new parent. But with today’s medical advances, it’s best to dispose of every last shred of genetic material – ova, sperm, and any gestating alien life forms.

Why it fails: Giving birth to an Alien queen was just the sort of thing Ellen Ripley was trying to avoid when she jumped into a vat of boiling lead. Little did she know that, in the hands of Joss Whedon and a handful of ethically-challenged scientists, even death is no match for the miracles of the reproductive process.

Darth Vader

Godzilla

The Daleks

Skeletor

Megatron

The Borg

Thanks to Lauren Davis for life-saving research help.

It's no coincidence that Prince's cousin started using heroin in the month of June, because there's just nothing on television. It was probably even worse back in 1987, before we had the Sci Fi Channel.

Monday:

The Sci Fi Channel has started showing Star Trek: The Next Generation on Monday nights, with four episodes in a row focusing on the bland life and tragic death of Tasha Yar: "The Naked Now," "The Big Goodbye," "Arsenal Of Freedom" and "Skin Of Evil."

Tuesday:

There are two episodes of Mega Disasters on the History Channel at 8 PM Tuesday night — a rerun about a possible asteroid impact on the Earth, and a new episode about a "Comet Storm." Basically if you want to spend two hours feeling total panic about stellar objects smashing into your backyard and giving us the dinosaur treatment, then it's a date. (With no president Morgan Freeman or oil-rigging Bruce Willis to distract you.)

Wednesday:

There's a new MonsterQuest on Wednesday at 9 on the History Channel. "Vampire Beast" tracks down the truth about a beast that could be more than human. Or not. Here's the description:

In the fall of 2007, residents of Bolivia, North Carolina started losing pets and farm animals to an unknown creature. Is it the same mystery predator with a taste for blood that preyed on goats and dogs in Bolivia more than 50 years ago?

The Day After Tomorrow also airs on Wednesday at 5:30 on FX.

Also, John Cho is on Last Call With Carson Daly. Will he let slip some Star Trek spoilers?

Thursday:

I'm sorry. I'm so terribly sorry. There is a Smallville rerun in which Clark's super-cousin Kara tries out for a beauty pageant, if that helps. I know, not really.

Friday:

Sci Fi Channel has the U.S. premiere of Charlie Jade, a Canadian/South African show about a detective who sees alternate universes, at 8 PM Friday. I haven't yet seen any episodes, but this site says it's very very noir, with a strong Blade Runner/Frank Miller element going on. In a nutshell, a detective named Charlie Jade (my almost-namesake) discovers that there are three different Earths: the corporate-dominated dystopia he lives on, a perfect unspoiled paradise, and "our" world. The corporate-dominated world wants to ravage the unspoiled one, and ours just gets caught in the crossfire.

And then at 9 PM, Sci Fi is showing another new (to Americans) episode of Doctor Who, "The Doctor's Daughter." Humans are stuck in an endless war against bubbly fish people, and the Doctor has a daughter. (It's not a spoiler if it's the title of the episode. I think.) It's a fun episode, but ultimately falls a bit short because it's trying to juggle too many ideas. Our recap is here. Here's a piece of the episode:

And then at 10 PM, there's a new Battlestar Galactica: "The Hub." If the spoilers we ran for this episode a while back turn out to be true, this could be a pretty explosive one that changes everything forever. In any case, we find out what happened to Roslin, and Xena is back.

Saturday:

Saturday at 10, there's a new Spectacular Spider-Man on The CW. It's called "Intervention," and it deals with the Venom symbiote, which is trying to take over Spidey. Meanwhile, Aunt May is in the hospital, and Pete's friendship with Eddie is ruined.

At exactly the same time, on the Cartoon Network, there's a new Ben 10: Alien Force, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" Ben and Gwen discover that their grandmother is an alien. And Gwen has to make a tough decision. And at 10:30 on Cartoon, the new Transformers: Animated has an awesome title: "S.U.V.: Society Of Ultimate Villainy," which we posted spoilers from before. Here is a clip, from its earlier airing in Dubai:

Saturday night, Sci Fi has two different original TV movies: Dog Soldiers and Bloodsuckers.

Sunday:

The Discovery Channel has the first two episodes (four hours worth) of When We Left The Earth: The NASA Missions. It's a bizarre history of NASA's first 50 years, featuring new footage in HD quality. Witness the first ever spacewalk, and the hair-raising challenges of converting an intercontinental ballistic missile into a vessel capable of carrying humans up into space.

Also, the Cartoon Network has new episodes of Venture Bros. and Metalocalypse at 11:30 and midnight, as part of its "Adult Swim" lineup. The Venture Bros. episode, "The Doctor Is Sin," shows what happens when a deal with General Manhowers falls through. Dr. Venture may have to sell the Venture Compound — unless he can turn it into a super-efficient science machine. And then the Metapocalypse episode, "Dethgov," is about Nathan Explosion serving a temporary term as governor of Florida. (Thanks Lampbane!)

Tucked at the end of the press release is the following description of the channel:

SCI FI Channel is a television network where "what if" is what's on. SCI FI fuels the imagination of viewers with original series and events, blockbuster movies and classic science fiction and fantasy programming, as well as a dynamic Web site (www.scifi.com ) and magazine.

The real point of the release is to play up the Ghost Whisperer acquisition, which will play in 4-hour blocks starting next year; Star Trek: The Next Generation goes into permanent rotation next month (June 2nd, to be precise), and no date is given for a return for Ork's favorite hairy human investigator.

Sci Fi Channel Acquires Off-Net Cable Rights to CBS Television Distribution's Ghost Whisperer [The Futon Critic]

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According to Moore, the final season of BSG will tie up the majority of dangling plotlines from the show's previous three seasons, negating the need for any big-screen follow-up. His reason for that? Seeing what happened to Star Trek: The Next Generation when it made the jump to the multiplex:

"I think [Battlestar Galactica] works best as an ensemble TV drama...If it translated into a feature it would be a different animal."

Moore said he's been that route with Star Trek and found that the movies become focused on one or two characters with the rest of the show's characters mostly fading into the background. He said the "Next Generation" movies ended up focusing on Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Commander Data. The others, Moore said, did "one scene for their character and the rest of the time they were essentially support to Patrick (Stewart) and Brent (Spiner)."

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There have been so many Pinnochio-bots in science fiction: Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man, Haley Joel Osment in A.I., Chip in Not Quite Human, Annalee in Alien: Resurrection, NDR-113 from The Positronic Man by Asimov and Silverberg, and Roy Batty (sort of) Blade Runner.But most people would automatically say Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is the purest expression of the Pinnochio-bot mystique. After all, he spent seven TV seasons and four movies exploring humanity over and over again. And his quest took him through comedy lessons with Joe Piscobo (the zen master of comedy), painting, Shakespeare plays and Gilbert & Sullivan comic operas. He probably tried to be a male stripper in between episodes.

But really Data is just a knock-off of the original wannabe human, Questor from The Questor Tapes, Gene Rodenberry's 1974 TV movie. Yet another one of Gene Rodenberry's failed TV series ideas after Star Trek, Questor is about an android who's built by a group of scientists using parts and plans from a mysterious genius Dr. Emil Vaslovik, who's gone missing. The android is a roaring (well, intoning) success, with one problem — his programming is incomplete and he doesn't develop emotions. So Questor goes in search of Vaslovik.

Various people are searching for Questor, and B.J. Honeycutt gets accused of having stolen the android. At one point, B.J. tries to stop Questor, who almost kills him to make his escape. But then Questor realizes that killing is wrong. Yay!

Questor's creator, Vaslovik, who turns out to be a super-advanced android himself, the penultimate model in a long line sent before the dawn of humanity to guide us in the proper course of development, blah blah blah. Vaslovik dies, but not before entrusting Questor to B.J. Honeycutt from M.A.S.H., who promises to teach Questor human feelings: Can you just imagine the weekly episodes, where B.J. teaches Questor another important lesson every week? Actually, you can, because it would have looked a lot like the Data-centric episodes of ST:TNG.

(Note: If I left someone out, chances are it's because I couldn't find any data. Feel free to add your own in the comments!)

The Enterprise-D, from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Power source: matter-antimatter reactor.
Energy output: 6.8 x 10^16 joules, based on the amount of energy it would take for the Enterprise to do significant damage to a Borg cube, according to this guy.

The Narn's Q'Guan Heavy Cruiser, from Babylon 5.
Power source: nuclear fusion.
Energy output: 7.08 x 10^22 joules, according to this site.

Omega Class Destroyer, from Babylon 5.
Power source: four General Fusion 650 high-energy fusion reactors, using gelled deuterium as fuel.
Energy output: 1.83 x 10^23 joules, according to the Cycrow site again.

Colonial Battlestar, from Battlestar Galactica.
Power source: Tyllium reactor.
Energy output: 4.6 x 10^24 joules, according to the Battlestar technical site.

Babylon 5 Station, from Babylon 5.
Power source: eight fusion reactors.
Energy output: 2.5 x 10^24 joules, according to several sites.

Zero Point Module, from Stargate.
Power source: Vacuum energy, from a pocket of subspace.
Energy output: 10^28 joules, according to this guy's back-of-the-envelope calculations.

The Death Star, from the original Star Wars.
Power source: Some kind of "hypermatter" fusion reactor.
Energy output: It would need to generate 2.4 x 10^32 joules of energy to destroy a planet such as Alderaan. Upper estimates of its power run to around 10^38 joules, or as much energy as our sun generates in 8,000 years, according to this site.

Ringworld, from Larry Niven's Ringworld novels.
Power source: Solar energy, collected by "shadow squares."
Energy output: To keep the whole shebang spinning at 770 miles per second, you'd need 1.6 x 10^39 joules, or our sun's output over 130,000 years, according to this site and a few others. We have a winner!

Gerber's other comics work included the miniseries Omega The Unknown (Currently being revived by novelist Jonathan Lethem) and runs on Man-Thing and The Defenders. Outside comics, Gerber worked on the Transformers, GI Joe and Dungeons and Dragons cartoons of the 1980s as writer and story editor. He also co-wrote a second season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Gerber passed in hospital from complications due to his fight with pulmonary fibrosis. He was 60 years old. [Steve Gerber.com]