In the early 1980s, I was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia (UVA). Like many universities, UVA had a speaker's series, and on one occasion, the invited speaker was Roddenberry. Given my affection for Star Trek, it is not surprising that I decided to go hear him speak. To be honest, I don't remember the speech itself, but I do remember quite clearly Roddenberry's response to one of the questions posed to him at the end of the talk. At that time, the second of the first two Star Trek movies (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan) had been released. A student asked Roddenberry which of the two Star Trek movies he preferred--Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan or the previous movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Roddenberry replied that he had preferred the latter.
I found his answer to be quite illuminating. The plot of the first movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, focuses on an old space probe from earth (supposedly NASA's Voyager spacecraft) that in its travels through the galaxy over the centuries has acquired self-consciousness and immense powers. The probe is facing an identity crisis--it wants to know where it came from. The plot of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan resurrects a character from the original TV series, a villain with superhuman powers who is on a vendetta against the commander of the spaceship Enterprise, Captain Kirk.
I personally had preferred the Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, in part because it lacked what I saw as the philosophical pretensions of the prior movie. That Roddenberry himself preferred the first movie suggested to me that he thought of Star Trek as being more than just a television show. Unfortunately, he was not the first, nor, I am sure, the last, creator of a work of popular entertainment who imagined himself as being a philosopher or a Great Writer of some sort. Yes, Star Trek was sometimes a thought-provoking program, but still, it was fundamentally a means of entertainment. Perhaps Roddenberry would have been better off if he had accepted that reality and had been satisfied with being the creator of one of the most enduring television series of all time. Sometimes it is best to be satisfied with what we are, rather than to aspire to be something that we can never be. This, I would say, is a sort of wisdom.