The Pegasus

Riker has been doing naughty things with a cloaking device

Picard is suffering the great annual torture of ‘Captain Picard Day’, looking at children’s crude drawings and crumby models of the good Captain under a banner clearly painted by an adult in the style of a child. Fortunately, a Priority One transmission arrives, so Picard kicks out the rest of the crew to learn about a mysterious assignment.

At the rendezvous, they take on board an old superior officer of Riker’s, Captain - now Admiral - Pressman. It seems they were up to nefarious deeds aboard their old ship, The Pegasus - not coincidentally, the title of the episode. The two spend much of the episode sniping at each other behind closed doors and playing cat and mouse with the Romulans... it eventually comes out that The Pegasus was conducting illegal experiments with cloaking devices - an incident that lead to mutiny on the ship, and the death of the majority of the crew. But will the Enterprise-D end up with a similar fate? Well, it’s going to illegally deploy a cloaking device at the very least.

Words

This episode finally puts to bed the question of why the Federation doesn’t use cloaking devices. Writer Ronald D. Moore had always been annoyed with the resolutions offered to this issue - that cloaking technology was harmful to humans, or that they wouldn't work on the Federation ships because of their architecture, or even just because Gene Roddenberry insists that “our people are scientists and explorers – they don’t go sneaking around.” Moore’s motivation for wading in on this? He was sick of being asked about it at conventions! Thus the invention of ‘the Treaty of Algeron’, which makes its debut in this episode, and plays a significant role in later seasons of DS9.

Moore’s inspiration for this story was the novel (and movie!) Raise the Titanic! from which he used the premise of a mysterious ship from the past that holds a buried secret. Moore immediately had ideas:

It’s a classic sort of tale and right from the get-go I thought maybe Riker could have been on that ship. What is he protecting...?

He was also chuffed to get to write yet another loopy StarFleet officer:

I am proud to say that I’ve written another insane Admiral. They must put something in the water at Federation Headquarters.

The episode explores similar themes to Moore’s earlier episode “The First Duty”, in terms of honour and duty. Here, it’s Riker who has committed an error of judgement - but he has his excellent service record to help compensate for his mistake, while Wesley has nothing but his smugness to protect him in the earlier episode.

The amusing teaser was a substitute since Michael Piller didn’t like the original opening, which had Data, Riker, and Troi rehearsing the George Bernard Shaw play, Pygmalion. The idea of ‘Captain Picard Day’ came about because Jonathan Frakes had an amusing impersonation of Patrick Stewart as Picard, and Moore was keen to work it into an episode somewhere!

All the entries you see in this scene were created by two elementary schools near the Paramount studios - except for a few contributions from the kids of property master Alan Sims.

Another change from Moore’s draft screenplay was the ending. Moore had Riker punished severely for his conduct during the Pegasus incident - sentenced to thirty days in the brig and given a formal reprimand that would end any chance of him being promoted to captain. This was felt to be too severe, so the final version of the script toned down his wrist-slapping.

Technobabble in this episode was courtesy of André Bormanis, who modelled ‘duonetic field’ on the duotronics of Richard Daystrom in classic Trek’s “The Ultimate Computer”. Fortunately, the technobabble doesn’t intrude upon the character stories or the plot, which flows very smoothly, as you might expect from Moore.

Acting Roles

The production crew were so impressed with Terry O’Quinn's performance as Admiral Erik Pressman that Michael Piller wanted to bring him back in DS9, but this never did come about. He makes an excellent pairing with Jonathan Frakes’ Riker here, and the chemistry between the two keeps the episode charged with a tense energy. As you can see from this behind-the-scenes shot, though, they were pretty relaxed around each other (below left)!

Also check out episode director LeVar Burton (above, middle) getting a hug from Patrick Stewart!

Quinn has had a whopping career of more than two hundred roles, although he’s probably most famous as John Locke on Lost. He also played Peter Watts on Millenium, Reilly on Earth 2, the Mayor in Tombstone, Howard Hughes in The Rocketeer and - you guessed it! - he appeared in L.A. Law the year before appearing in this episode.

Although his role is rather small, Michael Mack’s Sirol makes Trek history by being the first black performer to play a Romulan - which weirdly ended up with the SFX team lightening his skin with make-up. Director LeVar Burton was thrilled to have Sirol on the show - here they are behind-the-scenes when they first met.

Mack also appeared as an Ensign in Star Trek: Generations. He broke into acting as Kevin Jackson in the PBS ‘issues for young people’ show Powerhouse, and has done a lot of voice acting for Elder Scrolls videogames.

Support comes from Nancy Vawter as Admiral Blackwell (below left)... it’s a weird performance, but I rather like it - it’s certainly unique! She only has five roles to her credit, but guess what she was doing before this one? That’s right, she was on L.A. Law as associate lawyer Dorothy Wyler, a role she played for fifteen episodes (her only recurring role).

And below decks, non-speaking recurring role Ensign Gates, played by Joycelyn Robinson, actually gets a speaking line this episode (below right)! The screenplay has this line assigned to Brent Spiner’s Data, but apparently Spiner pointed out that the helm and not the ops officer would be the one to say “Course plotted” (Robinson appropriately appends, “Sir” to the line as written). I’m reasonably sure that this is her only speaking line ever!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

The beautiful Romulan Warbird model is back, and it’s not all stock footage - take a look at this weird manoeuvre!

While the screenplay doesn’t specify anything about the Pegasus (except that it’s “FUSED into the rock of the asteroid” which is “a bizarre sight”), they had originally intended it to be a ‘Cheyenne-class’ starship. This unofficial class had been created for the ‘ship’s graveyard’ scene in “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”. As Michael Okuda recalled about this:

This was a scaled-down Galaxy saucer with four nacelles, arranged in a manner similar to the Constellation. Ed made the nacelles from marker pens.

Here’s the kitbash for that ship:

However, while this worked at the small scale that it had to appear in the previous episode, to show it on the larger scale required here would have necessitated an expensive new studio model, and one unlikely to see much use either on TNG or DS9, so the more familiar USS Grissom studio miniature created for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and appearing here for the seventh and final time in TNG.

However, in the scene in the Pegasus’ main engineering, one of the Okudagrams still shows power being routed to four-nacelles!

All in all, this is a cracking episode, with some solid special effects, great guest stars, and an unexpectedly juicy plot line that actually performs some significant character development for Riker. Season seven continues to have this weird dynamic of having great episodes alongside some real clunkers, but this one at the very least is a hit!

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