By day, he’s a character sculptor and designer. Born in the Midwest, but interested in
robots, molding, casting, and camera work, Greg Dykstra’s busy creative
background seems like the perfect environment to formulate a story for STAR TREK CONTINUES.
Early in his career, Dykstra worked in a photo lab and made
Super 8 films. But it was the lure of
the film industry that brought him from rural Indiana to California.
This Dykstra is not related to John Dykstra, who did special
effects work on STAR WARS and STAR TREK:
The Motion Picture. But Greg Dykstra
admits that it didn’t hurt to have a famous name in the small circle of
Hollywood.
“’Oh, he’s the Dykstra who isn’t John’ is what I heard,”
said Greg, whose own work can be seen in “Honey,
I Shrunk the Kids,” “Ghostbusters II,”
and “Nightmare before Christmas,” and
more recently in a host of animated films including “Brave,”
“Up,” and “Finding Nemo.”
Greg and his wife Cherri became fans of
STAR TREK CONTINUES and he contacted Vic Mignogna to express their
love for the show. A meeting with Mignogna led to a discussion about the
stories that propelled the original series, and the sorts of stories that were
needed for future STC episodes.
“One of the biggest challenges we have as a production is
developing good stories – not just scripts that include all of the gadgetry and
villains of STAR TREK. We really want our episodes to have a message
and to have something that you remember.
We want stories that make you think.
Greg proposed an idea, and I asked him to develop a treatment,” Mignogna
explained.
“This story comes out of things in my personal
experience. My grandfather was like the
father figure in this episode. I
witnessed, firsthand, the effect that this had on our family. One of the things I looked at was how a lot
of abusers feel like there’s a better person inside that they wish they
were. But they are controlled by a monster,
a paranoia. They think that everyone is
trying to undermine them. It plays out
as fear, and anger that is released blindly.
Some people overcome it. Some
people grow up in an abusive household – and some become abusers themselves,”
Dykstra said.
“My grandfather has been dead for some time, but I know that
my grandmother had been through a lot. I
was talking to her once, and she gave me a lot of detail. I was interviewing her for a genealogy
project. So I know all this stuff had
gone on, and she revealed the details.
It was just horrifying. But I
still loved him. And that’s often the
case with children who go through this.
I did have a very hard time forgiving him.
“And that was the idea that I wanted to start talking about
in this episode. I wanted to explore the
reason that these people love -- the reason that a child loves a father and the
reason a wife loves a husband (even as an abuser.) And abusers may not know how much they
children or loved ones care about them.
“Certainly, this is a heavy subject and giving it classic STAR TREK action adventure element help
a lot. You have a monster that comes in
and turns out to be a child. His dad is
a monster in space,” Dykstra said.
Before writing Episode Six, Dykstra helped behind the scenes
on a previous episode.
“STC is such a family kind of operation. We eat lunch together, and we go out to
dinner at night. We don’t disperse like
a lot of productions do. We can’t make a
profit, and nobody is here for the money."
