The Star Trek Episode Secretly Inspired By Rambo

By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated 35 seconds ago

When you think about it, Rambo is one of the craziest franchises ever made. The first film was adapted from a novel and served as a poignant commentary on America’s treatment of soldiers returning from the Vietnam War. After it became a box office success, though, subsequent films were all about how John Rambo was the coolest, most unstoppable soldier in the entire world. In this way, the anti-war hero became the most recognizable military mascot of the 20th century. His exploits as a one-man army are basically the polar opposite of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the 1987 sci-fi show, which was all about peace, exploration, and communication.

Against all the odds, Star Trek almost had its own Rambo homage. It happened in the Season 3 episode “The Hunted,” which introduced a very Rambo-like character: Roga Danar, a man transformed into the ultimate weapon by a government that later discarded him. Because of this, this Trek tale already had some shared storytelling DNA with everyone’s favorite ‘80s action hero. However, the episode director later revealed that budget cuts kept him from including a Rambo-like final fight between a bunch of super-soldiers and the government officials who had betrayed them!

One Rambo To Beam Onboard

“The Hunted” begins with the Enterprise making a routine visit to Angosia III, a planet hoping to become part of the Federation. When Picard is asked to help capture one of the planet’s fugitives, he discovers something remarkable: a super-smart, super-strong soldier who inexplicably manages to outwit and outfight almost everyone he encounters. After finally being captured, he reveals himself to be Roga Danar, a soldier genetically enhanced by Angosia III and then forcibly resettled after the war was over. He escapes and returns to the planet to demand justice of the planetary leader who betrayed him. Incredibly, Picard doesn’t stop him, citing this as a clear case of internal planetary politics. 

Aside from Roga Danar’s early cat-and-mouse adventures with the Enterprise, the most exciting part of “The Hunted” is when Danar returns to Angosia III to confront Prime Minister Nayrok. Along with some fellow super-soldiers, he issues a fairly basic demand: he and his wartime compatriots want to come home rather than being forcibly exiled to another planet. Nayrok, however, is worried that, between their psychological conditioning and PTSD, the soldiers will never be able to re-integrate into society. In this way, the episode’s climax is a bit like First Blood. But according to the director, “The Hunted” was originally going to have an action-packed ending more akin to Rambo: First Blood Part II!

An Insanely Violent Ending

Episode director Cliff Bole told The Official Star Trek: The Next Generation Magazine that “The end was again affected by a budget situation. We were going to do a big battle, but couldn’t.” What would this have looked like, exactly? “Originally, Danar was going to come back, and there would be a big confrontation–almost a Rambo-like situation. I thought the loss of that [scene] took away a little from the episode, making it slightly anti-climactic.”

Just how Rambo-like was it going to be? As recorded in Captain’s Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Star Trek Voyages, showrunner Michael Piller claimed that “At first, we were going to have a huge shoot out and have everyone wiped out in the end.” While the budget kept this from happening, Piller thought that was for the best because the original ending “didn’t really make anybody a hero.” He preferred the ending that we saw onscreen because it helped set up Picard’s crowd-pleasing decision to beam up and leave the traitorous prime minister’s fate in the hands of the men he betrayed.

To Seek Out Strange New Rambos

There you have it, fellow Redshirts: the closest that Star Trek ever came to turning into a Rambo movie. This was especially novel in The Next Generation, which showcased the Federation during a time of relative galactic peace. The big-budget action sequence cut from “The Hunted” might have been a better fit for the later spinoff Deep Space Nine, which bucked franchise tradition and spent its last couple of years telling stories about a brutal war with the Dominion. Sadly, that show never got its own proper Rambo homage, though I would have paid good money to see Sylvester Stallone get recruited by Section 31 to go rescue Starfleet POWs on the other side of the wormhole.

First Contact? More like First Blood Part II, y’all!