November 14, 2002

I'd like to share a few memories about a writer I knew and worked with for almost fifteen years. Hilary Bader left us, last week, a victim of cancer.

Hilary was one of those writers who walked into the Star Trek: The Next Generation offices without literally any professional credits, as I recall. But she had gone to the trouble of writing a spec script which showed promise and it got her in the door and she never left. Over the years she would write for all the Star Trek shows and was in to pitch The Dead Zone not long ago, too.

Hilary was a sparkplug kind of writer — she had one idea here and if you didn't like that one, she had twelve others right behind it — pop-pop-pop-pop-pop ... try this, how about that ... sometimes the ideas flowed so quickly, her own mouth couldn't keep up. And there was this resilience in her eyes, behind spectacles, "you can't knock me down with your objections" kind of look — a flash of excitement when the next new idea sprung from her brain — the glasses almost seemed to shine with her internal sun.

I liked her a lot.

I always wanted to do a story about Deanna Troi losing her powers and going "blind" but I wanted to find a way to avoid blind story cliches. Hilary solved it for me in the story for "The Loss."

My favorite Bader TNG story was one about a boy who wanted to squeeze all the hurt and pain out of his soul aspiring to live an Android existence like Data (who of course yearned to feel the emotions of humans). "Hero Worship" touched a lot of people who could understand how that kid felt because we've all felt that way from time to time.

I believe Hilary created the alien race known as the Cairn for "Dark Page," another Troi story in which Deanna saves the life of her mother.

In all, Hilary's credits appear on eight Star Trek episodes including the notable "Rules of Acquisition" for Deep Space Nine and "Eye of the Needle" for Voyager.

There's an intimacy that comes from helping someone launch a career, call it paternal, whatever, I don't know. But each writer you guide as a producer becomes part of your extended family and I've lost a member of the family this week. The open spec script policy that introduced Hilary to us has ended now at Paramount due to new legal restrictions. Had it not been in existence then, I may never have met her, those eight Star Trek stories would never have been written, her career may have taken an entirely different turn. I can't help thinking today what a loss it would have been for me and for our industry if the door to Hilary Bader had never been opened.

No one on Star Trek ever truly dies, we always like to say in jest. But today, we cannot deny death. We cannot lose the hurt and pain in our souls as Hilary's young character in "Hero Worship" tried so hard to do.

— Michael Piller