Entertainment
This Forgotten Star Trek Episode Pits Captain America Against Captain Picard
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
If you didn’t already know, Star Trek has had some truly weird team-ups with Marvel over the years. In Star Trek/X-Men, we got a one-shot comic in which Charles Xavier’s band of merry mutants crossed through time and space to fight alongside (and sometimes with) Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew. In the later book Planet X, the X-Men had a similar encounter with Captain Picard and his Enterprise-D crew. Of course, these adventures are non-canonical, and we never really got to see any fun live-action crossovers (and no, having Patrick Stewart play Professor X doesn’t count!).
However, in a forgotten Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, we got the closest thing to a live-action crossover with Marvel. In “The Hunted,” the crew must match wits with Roga Danar, a former soldier and fugitive on the run. He ends up being a one-man wrecking machine who fights practically every officer on the entire Enterprise, singlehandedly. How did he pull off such a feat? It turns out that he was a biologically enhanced super-soldier, and this episode was Trek’s way of secretly giving us Captain Picard versus Captain America!
Captain America Comes To Star Trek
“The Hunted” begins with the Enterprise visiting Angosia III, a planet angling to join the Federation. The planet’s prime minister asks Captain Picard for help with a seemingly routine matter: apprehending an escaped fugitive. This proves easier said than done, and after the crew finally captures this man, Roga Danar, he reveals that the planetary government provided biological enhancements to turn him into a super-soldier. But they were also given psychological conditioning that made them unsuited for peacetime, so when the war was over, they were forcibly resettled. Eventually, Danar frees some fellow soldiers and attacks the capital, and Picard refuses to intervene, claiming this is an internal matter for the planet.
He only appears in Star Trek for a single episode, but Roga Danar is one of the coolest characters in the entire franchise. Once the Enterprise tries to catch him, the former soldier seems hopelessly outmatched. But with strength, speed, and cunning, he frequently foils the high-tech security measures of the Enterprise-D. By the time he’s captured, he goes down swinging: it takes no less than five of Worf’s best security officers to drag this man to the brig (plus, he successfully busts out later). As recorded in Captain’s Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Star Trek Voyages, even showrunner Michael Piller agreed that “the best soldier ever created bringing the Enterprise to its knees is a little hard to believe.”
Redshirts Versus Supersoldier
What made him so unstoppable? While Roga Danar is naturally brilliant and has extensive wartime experience, he also has an ace up his sleeve: he was biologically enhanced by the government of Angosia III to be one of their nearly unstoppable super soldiers. While it’s not name-checked in the episode, this seems like the kinds of Khan-esque genetic modifications that are completely banned in the Federation. That explains why the Enterprise D had trouble catching this guy. To them, he’s a one-of-a-kind soldier. In this way, he is arguably the closest thing that Star Trek has ever had to a Captain America, with this episode foreshadowing some of the Marvel hero’s later onscreen adventures.
What are the parallels between Roga Danar and Captain America? First, each one has been transformed into a super-soldier in order to win a war. Second, each has trouble integrating into society after the war. Danar is forcibly resettled to a different planet, and Cap is put on ice, only to awaken decades later into a very different world. Additionally, Danar discovers he was betrayed by the government. The same thing happens to Cap in the comics when he discovers the president is part of the evil Secret Empire, and in the MCU when he discovers Hydra’s infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D.
A Soldier On Ice
In the Civil War arc of both the comics and the MCU, Cap also has some Danar-esque clashes with otherwise good people because of disagreements about how the government treats enhanced beings like himself. In that regard, at least, Star Trek offers a more optimistic ending. While Cap’s onscreen Civil War struggle ended with his friends in jail and him on the run, The Next Generation showed how Captain Picard tacitly supported Danar’s revolution against his own corrupt government. Showrunner Michael Piller later admitted that some on the staff disagreed with this decision, but he thought adherence to the Prime Directive was “an important enough theme that I cannot explore enough.”
While Picard’s decision was quite surprising, it was arguably still in line with the franchise’s values of respect, diplomacy, and dignity for all living creatures. Captain Picard might have had to fight a thinly-veiled Captain America stand-in, but he managed to save the day by simply listening to what this supersoldier had to say. That showed remarkable restraint considering how many men Roga Danar beat up in his attempts to escape. As a lifelong fan of both Marvel and Star Trek, I’m left with one question: how far could Danar have made it if he had replicated himself a vibranium shield?!?