10 Most Messed Up Deaths In Star Trek: The Next Generation

No good deed, or mutiny with the best of motivations, goes unpunished. Captain (at the time) Erik Pressman's plan to outmatch the Romulans by ignoring the Treaty of Algeron was less than solid, and, as a result, a good number of the crew of the Pegasus who stood up to him ended their lives as a rock. Unfortunately, in this case, they weren't just going through a phase!

One might be tempted to say that such a fate is still better than the one afforded These Are The Voyages… A certain Floridian would no doubt agree. However, no matter the method by which Commander Riker made his conscience-assuaging decision, it wasn't going to bring back anyone from inside that asteroid. Everyone who hadn't picked up a phaser to defend the unworthy Pressman had died 12 years earlier.

In 2358, when a test of the experimental (and illegal) phasing cloak went horribly wrong aboard the USS Pegasus, only eight of the crew — including Ensign Riker — who didn't join the rebellion made it off the ship with Pressman alive. From the vantage point of a coward's escape pod, it then looked as though the Pegasus was destroyed in a warp core explosion.

In fact, what they'd seen was plasma from overloading relays igniting in space. The damaged USS Pegasus then drifted in a phased state, only for the cloak to fail at the worst possible moment, killing everyone who had remained on board. The rest was covered up and classified, until Riker faced his very own kind of 'rock and a hard place'.