Fun with words: If Aaron Sorkin wrote Star Trek: The Next Generation

~ Graham Milne
Plenty of room for a pedeconference.

For those weary of the blatant Sorkin-worship on this blog, I promise this will be the last of him for a little while.  But as he often does, he has inspired me to try my hand at something a little offbeat today.  I would never claim to be half the wordsmith he is, but Sorkin does have a particular style that can be mimicked by us lesser mortals who have studied his works a little too obsessively.  Behold then, for your amusement, Star Trek:  The Next Generation as written by Aaron Sorkin.  Hope you dig.  (Sorry about the pdf, but script format doesn’t seem to want to play well here.  And oh yeah, characters copyright Paramount Pictures, no infringement intended, purposes of parody, so on and so forth.)

Aaron Sorkin’s Star Trek: The Next Generation

Yes, as William Shatner would say, I need to get a life.

Published by Graham Milne

My name is Graham, and I am a man of many opinions and talents. On any given day the opinions will exceed the talents by at least a 10:1 ratio. This is my chance to share these observations and thoughts with you. I promise never to be cruel for cruelty's sake and that all snark will be directed only towards richly deserving targets. Because a belly laugh is always more powerful than a hateful scream.

6 thoughts on “Fun with words: If Aaron Sorkin wrote Star Trek: The Next Generation”

  1. I laughed so hard at this! You have really captured the Sorkinese perfectly. I can’t decide if my favorite part is that Riker’s problems really come down to a woman (seriously, how many conversations between important people do you think devolve into conversations about girls on Sorkin shows?) or Picard acting like President Bartlet! My dad is a huge Trekkie. We have very different tastes in TV, but The West Wing is one show we both agree on. I can’t wait to show this to him!

      1. Have you ever done a post for “Rules for Writing Like Aaron Sorkin” or something to that effect? I would be very interested to read what you think are the essentials for good Sorkinese.

        1. Well, I can only take an educated guess at it, but here is what I think would be the basic ones:
          1. Repetition, characters parroting each other back and forth
          2. Arcane historical facts
          3. Classical references (Gilbert & Sullivan a bonus)
          4. As you pointed out, the conversation usually pivoting back to girl problems
          5. Characters weaving in and out of conversations that carry on
          6. Characters nitpicking each other’s grammar
          7. Reversals (eg. “I did not do that, let me be absolutely clear, I did not do that… except, I did do that.”)
          8. Long speeches that build to the affirmation of a profound belief in human integrity and possibility
          9. A sense of optimism
          10. Characters being unusually articulate, even when they are not (eg. “Do you want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing?”)

          From there I think it’s just a matter of writing it and seeing how it flows. I did have a lot of fun writing this – maybe in the future I might do the Sorkinese take on a few other shows.

      2. Thanks for your response! Those seem like essential rules to me. I wonder if Aaron Sorkin has them posted on the wall of his office. (Haha.)

        I’d love to see other shows translated into Sorkinese. I might try it with Superman.

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