The Deep Space Nine episode, “In The Pale Moonlight,” turns 25 years old this month. The hour of television was a controversial one, and a recent article breaks down how one of its most memorable conceits came to be.
The Hollywood Reporter just published an oral history of the making of the episode, which sees Sisko (Avery Brooks) grabbling with the morality of what he’s done in an effort to win the war against the Changelings of the Dominion. (For a full rehash of the episode, check out our post here.)
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Some Desperate Glory
It turns out that Ronald D. Moore did an uncredited rewrite on the script penned by Michael Taylor, where the former shifted focus from Benjamin Sisko’s son, Jake, to the captain himself.
“It was going to be about how Jake would find out his dad is up to something with Garak, and father and son would be at odds,” Moore told THR. “And [the writers] felt that it was false to have those two in conflict. We were so deep into the Dominion War at that point, and putting Jake in the center of it, as I recall, just felt like the wrong impulse.”
The final cut of the episode has a drunk Ben Sisko progressively losing his clothes as he looks back at the events that ultimately unfold. The decision to take this approach, according to Moore, took place after his own night of drinking.
“It came in the same kind of epiphany of ‘let’s do it all in flashback.’ Because once I had that frame, it kind of then defines everything within the [episode’s] structure,” he said. “So the whole business about him taking off the clothes, I don’t remember where that came up, but it was a great metaphor for the whole thing. And as I set through the script in that framework, I knew that each scene was a step to hell for Benjamin Sisko in the past, because he was already in hell at the beginning.”
You can read the entire oral history from The Hollywood Reporter here. This episode is also currently streaming on Paramount+.
