Star Trek’s Best Character Has A Secret Tie To James Bond

This strange Star Trek tale goes all the way back to the first season TNG episode “The Big Goodbye.” Picard recreates a Dixon Hill investigation on the holodeck and is joined by both Dr. Crusher Data for what is meant to be a campy adventure filled with film-noir tropes. However, in what would become a major Star Trek tradition, our characters get trapped inside the holodeck with the safety protocols turned off and must play their fictional characters perfectly in what has now become a life-or-death struggle.

What might seem obvious (at least, if you’ve watched enough old movies) is that this episode is filled with homages to film noir, which is why it calls back to such cinematic classics as The Maltese Falcon. Originally, screenwriter Tracy Tormé wanted Trek’s fictional detective to be named “Dixon Steele” because that was the name of the lead character in his favorite Humphrey Bogart movie, In a Lonely Place. An homage to Bogart wasn’t a problem, but the Star Trek writers ultimately changed the name because it closely resembled the title of a popular show featuring future Pierce Brosnan, who would later famously play James Bond.

Before he brought everyone’s favorite British spy to life on the big screen, Pierce Brosnan became a household name thanks to the success of his TV show Remington Steele. That show had a very cheeky premise: when a female private investigator had trouble finding clients due to general misogyny (it was even more abundant than cocaine back in the ‘80s), she developed a fictional male investigator named Remington Steele. You guessed it: Pierce Brosnan (who plays a con man as charming as he is conniving) embodies this persona, and he and the real investigator begin a professional partnership that eventually turns romantic.

Captain Picard’s favorite fictional detective would have had the name Dixon Steele if not for the success of that other ‘80s show featuring one of the best James Bond actors. The similarities in the names Remington Steele and Dixon Steele were bad enough, but there was also the matter of the similar premise. Remington Steele was a popular show featuring a private investigator, and that show ended the same year (1987) that TNG premiered, so audience comparisons between it and the name of a private investigator on Star Trek would have been inevitable.

While the Star Trek writers were hesitant to draw connections between Picard’s favorite detective and Pierce Brosnan’s hit show, they later had no problem heavily referencing James Bond. In the Deep Space Nine episode “Our Man Bashir,” we find out that the station’s doctor doesn’t like to play detective…instead, he enjoys a holosuite game where he is a debonair secret agent in the vein of James Bond. Less than two years after this episode premiered, Pierce Brosnan would make his debut as 007 in Goldeneye, ushering in a new golden age for a franchise that had stalled out after the disappointing box office of 1989’s Licence to Kill.

The Picard show may have ended, but weirdly enough, the franchise is very likely to channel James Bond yet again even without this Dixon Hill superfan. We don’t yet know the plot of the upcoming Section 31 movie featuring Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh, but there’s a good chance we’ll see her engaging in secret agent antics as she tries to keep her activities hidden from other Starfleet personnel. If we’re really lucky, we’ll get at least one instance of Yeoh introducing herself to a character by saying “The name’s Georgiou…Philippa Georgiou.”