Risa

An early story meeting about this episode was attended by Patrick Barry, Gene Roddenberry, and Herbert J. Wright. Wright was wary that the concept of a matriarchal society had been too overdone. "So one of the major issues that we didn't want to do was an Amazon Women kind of thing where the women are six feet tall with steel D cups," he recalled. "I said, 'The hit I want to take on this is apartheid, so that the men are treated as though they are blacks of South Africa. Make it political. Sexual overtones, yes, but political.' Well, that didn't last very long. Everything that Gene got involved with had to have sex in it. It's so perverse that it's hard to believe. The places it was dragged into is absurd. We were talking about how women would react, and Gene was voicing all the right words again, saying, 'Oh, yes, we've got to make sure that women are represented fairly, because, after all, women are probably the superior sex anyway, and it's real important we don't get letters from feminists, because we want to be fair and we don't want to infer that women have to rule by force if they do rule, because men don't have to rule by force.' Very sensible stuff. All of a sudden something kicks in and he changes: 'However, we also don't want to infer that it would be a better society if women ruled.'" His voice becoming increasingly louder, Roddenberry continued that this was because women were untrustworthy, "vicious creatures," which he angrily blurted out in a torrent of hateful verbiage. Concluded Wright, "Then he looks out the window, looks at the outline, and says, 'Okay, on page eight…' and continues like that didn't even happen." (The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, p. 83)