AUDIENCE MEMBER:  “In other words, show two sides, and let that controversy — then you’ve really get a problem . . .”

WINSTON:  “Well, one time I overdid it in trying to be subtle.  In GODDESS UHURA, I had a scene where Uhura psychologically ‘divorces’ herself from Kirk by symbolically castrating him.  In the scene, she was tossing the supernatural powers she gained through psionics on this huge, phallic-shaped rock.  She fired at it and cut it in half, then psionically lifted herself in the air and stood on the blackened stump.  And, seemingly, nobody caught that.  I don’t think anybody saw that, but they could see by the end of the story that Uhura could say to Kirk, ‘Bye . . .’ and not feel any great regret about it.  The subtlety worked, I think, but—”

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  “Do you sometimes feel like saying, ‘Do you get the point?’  to people?  I sometimes feel like I’ve hit them with a sledge hammer . . .”

JEAN:  “Did you notice that in many — not all — but many of the reviews of ‘STAR TREK:  The Motion Picture’, how many reviewers — who claimed to have seen the television series — complained that the movie did not have a villain, and they all said they wanted a Darth Vader.  They wanted an evil force (groans from audience), and one of the messages of STAR TREK — that, apparently, plenty of people were able to miss entirely — is ‘There are no villains’!

“Every time we saw a so-called villain, he turned out to be some helpless, harmless — now — old man, or a mother protecting her young, or something of this sort . . .”

WINSTON:  “The only one I saw was in Newsweek, which did an article some months before the film came out, pointing out that TREK consistently did stories with monsters that wanted to be understood . . . strange creatures that needed to be understood, demanded to be understood.  The only problem with the movie was that we got a rehash of old episodes.  But we got the same message, that everyone needs to be understood and needs some kind of firm ground they can stand on . . . Yes?”

AUDIENCE MEMBER#3:  “I think it was all summed up in the movie with Dr. McCoy saying, ‘Why is it that whatever we don’t understand is called a ‘thing’?’  When I saw the movie for the first time, I almost felt like applauding that line . . .”

PAT:  “Yes, it was a good line.”