Jimmy Diggs

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Jimmy Diggs (2 September 1955—) is a freelance writer of several episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Jimmy Diggs is a veteran from the Vietnam War and served aboard one of the ships that helped in the evacuation of Saigon. The storyline for "Elogium", the first story he pitched to Star Trek, was based on his experiences aboard that ship which was actually followed by a school of fish.

Diggs also worked as a firefighter, an aeroplane conductor, a technician in the Navy, and a security guard and background actor on Renegade.

Early in his life he had two wishes: either to work as ground controller for NASA or start a career as science fiction writer. In 1993, NASA didn't hire new personnel, and so he began learning how to write. His first contact with the show business was as a security guard on the set of Renegade. He was invited by the show's producer Nicholas Corea to pitch a story, as "... a favor from one Vietnam vet to another (so Corea later admitted to Diggs) until the producer discovered that he liked Diggs's idea." (Rip Rense: "Trekking: Jimmy Diggs". In: emmy Magazine.) When the show was cancelled later, producer Corea referred him to Paramount Pictures and Rick Berman.

In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, Diggs compares himself to Julian Bashir's father Richard, with a variety of jobs in his resumé. It was Ronald D. Moore who told him he had been successful in his pitch of "Doctor Bashir, I Presume". Diggs initially thought it was one of his friends playing a practical joke on him over the phone, but soon realised it was Ron Moore.

Diggs' daughter has a learning disability, but this did not form the basis of Bashir's similar difficulty when he was younger. In the Companion, Diggs notes that reading that in the script touched him deeply, and he questioned if he would have made the same decision Richard and Amsha Bashir did.

At the request of Jimmy Diggs, one of the characters at Star Trek: Voyager was named after Samantha Wildman, the seven-year-old kidney donor for his wife Linette.

In 2003, he and D.C. Fontana pitched an H.G. Wells based series about the HMS Victory to the Fox Network. That same year, he wrote a feature length screenplay entitled Star Trek: The Lions of the Night which he intended to be the first CGI animated Star Trek adventure. The crew of the Enterprise-B under the command of Captain Sulu had to stop the Kzinti who started an invasion of Federation space. Jimmy repeatedly tried to pitch further stories to Deep Space Nine and Voyager using his screenplay and additional materials like ship and Kzinti sketches created by Court Jones to be used for production. Amongst the material was also a guide, written by Diggs, about using the Kzinti in Star Trek which included a timeline approved by Larry Niven and D.C. Fontana. Further persons who granted him support were Majel Roddenberry and Nichelle Nichols.

In April 2004 he wrote an article for issue #149 of the Star Trek Communicator in which he describes seven Star Trek villains, each representing one of the "Seven Deadly Sins." He proposed that Kzinti could represent the seventh sin, lust. The article is illustrated with one of the images created by Court Jones.

When Manny Coto became executive producer of Star Trek: Enterprise, he had Josh Finney from Glitchwerk Studios create a CGI model of a 2150s Kzinti starship adhering to the specifiations Jimmy Diggs created, with further input by André Bormanis, Manny Coto, Doug Drexler, Jim Vanover, and Mike Okuda. Furthermore, he commissioned sculptor Clint Burgin to create a 45 cm maquette of a Kzinti and rewrote his 36-page-long guide that he originally created for The Lions of the Night to be used in the new show. His script for season five's "Kilkenny Cats" was based on a story by Neal Hallford and Jana Hallford, and should have introduced the Kzinti in the show as another main villain.