The Hollywood Reporter published an oral history of “In The Pale Moonlight” in 2023 for the episode’s 25th anniversary. The piece features interviews with episode writers Michael Taylor and Ronald D. Moore (Taylor is the episode’s sole credited writer, but Moore made substantial revisions to his script).
According to Taylor, the idea came from the Zimmermann telegram: in January 1917, the German Foreign Office sent a message to Mexico proposing an alliance should the U.S. enter World War I on the side of the Allied Powers. The note is named for the then-German State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Arthur Zimmermann.
The message was intercepted by British intelligence and made public. In the end, it accomplished the opposite of what Germany wanted: the U.S. joined the Allied Powers in April, and Germany fell alongside the other Central Powers by the following year.
Taylor’s idea was to take this episode of real history and add a sinister twist: “What if this message was faked to get us [America] into the war? What if Sisko did something similar and was behind a concocted forgery?” In this analogy, the Romulans would be the U.S. (the neutral sleeping giant), the Dominion would be Germany (the would-be conquerors), and the Federation would be the British (the “discoverers” of the message who need a new ally).
Moore turned the episode from Sisko’s son Jake (Cirroc Lofton) investigating his father’s actions into its current form, following Sisko Sr. in his moral descent. He suggested to the Hollywood Reporter that an episode this dark got past the powers that be because producer Rick Berman was more focused on “Star Trek: Voyager” than on “DS9.”
Sometimes, it pays to not be the flagship.
