Star Trek: 5 Great Storylines The Show Left Hanging

2. The Stolen Romulan Cloaking Device

Introduced: "The Enterprise Incident" (TOS, Season Three)Last Seen: "The Enterprise Incident" (TOS, Season Three)In "Balance of Terror," a Romulan Bird-of-Prey leads an assault on several Federation outposts along the Romulan-Federation border. Eventually, they're foiled by Captain Kirk and the Enterprise, but they're able to evade capture for much of the episode due to an "invisibility screen" which renders them invisible. The Romulans make a brief, stock-footage assisted appearance in the second season episode, "The Deadly Years," but it is the Romulans' reappearance in season three in which their cloaking technology again takes center stage. In "The Enterprise Incident," Kirk takes the Enterprise into the Romulan Neutral Zone, where the ship is immediately surrounded by Romulan vessels. There, he fakes mental illness and -- with the help of Spock and an inventive use of the made-up Vulcan Death Grip -- subsequently fakes his own death. Why the elaborate ruse? It turns out Kirk is on a secret mission to steal the Romulan cloaking technology. With the help of some cosmetic surgery from Dr. McCoy, Kirk is altered to appear Romulan and sneaks onboard a Romulan vessel. Kirk soon finds the cloaking device, beams it onboard the Enterprise, and Scotty begins installing the technology aboard the Enterprise. At the last minute, Scott is able to activate it, and the Enterprise safely escapes from the Romulan fleet. The stolen cloaking device, however, is never mentioned again. Why devote a whole episode to the Federation acquiring cloaking technology only to completely drop the idea? Some have suggested that series creator Gene Roddenberry wasn't comfortable with the Enterprise using cloaking technology. Indeed, various sources quote Roddenberry as saying, "Our heroes don't sneak around," although the origin of this statement is unclear. A much later episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Pegasus," would eventually reconcile this inconsistency by establishing that a treaty had been signed between the Federation and the Romulan Empire which prohibited Federation research and development into cloaking technology. The stolen Romulan cloaking device did show up again in at least one Star Trek novel. In Michael Jan Friedman's "Crossover," an aged Scotty hauls a Constitution-class starship out of a museum and uses the device to sneak into Romulan space.