WARNING: The following contains spoilers for American Horror Story: Double Feature Episode 9, "Blue Moon," which aired Wednesday on FX.
Actor Neal McDonough has become one of the strongest reasons to tune into American Horror Story this season. The second half of Season 10, “Death Valley,” centers on his President Eisenhower, forced to submit to a horrific bargain with visitors from outer space in the name of keeping his country safe. Besides being a ringer for the former President, McDonough plays his character's fictional Catch-22 with measured balance, retaining his humanity in the face of the show’s outlandish plot and irreversible moral compromise.
Coincidentally, November 22 marks the 25th anniversary of a very different kind of alien invasion. Star Trek: First Contact, pitted the crew of the Enterprise-E against the relentless Borg. Like American Horror Story, it framed the conflict as a struggle for the future between humanity and aliens seemingly possessed of invincible technology. More notably, McDonough was present in First Contact as well, and his character fared even worse then than Ike.
McDonough played Lt. Hawk in First Contact, a new member of the bridge crew assigned to the helm. During its television run, Star Trek: The Next Generation never settled on a single character at the position – it was held by everyone from Geordi La Forge to Wesley Crusher to Ro Laren – which likely made Hawk’s fate predictable. Midway through the film, he’s assimilated by the Borg and killed by his own former crewmates. In one of the film’s quieter jokes, he’s actually a redshirt, his helmsman’s uniform matching the command color of Picard and Riker.
The character didn’t receive much onscreen attention because the film focused (quite understandably) on Picard and the other Next Generation regulars. McDonough filled the space with his presence, as well as providing a figure whom the audience came to know and like beyond just a passing extra. The script also gave him a scary reveal as he turned to the camera to show Borg cybernetics on his face beneath his Starfleet spacesuit.
Eisenhower has more agency, but in his own way, he’s just as much a victim as Hawk. His hands are tied by politics and by the aliens’ impossible options, forcing him to either surrender to their whims or face the likely annihilation of the planet. As hard as he tries, he can’t see a way out of the dilemma. Indeed, if he defies them he might end up dead – the aliens showed no compunctions about murdering anyone who crossed them – and with his vice president Richard Nixon eager to get his hands on the aliens’ advance devices, the extraterrestrials would have a great deal of incentive to get him out of the way. In the end, he acquiesces to the deal and suffers the torments of a permanently guilty conscience in return.
The similarities are all the more striking because both characters are essentially soldiers. McDonough plays them both as men of action and principle, dedicated to facing what appears to be an impossibly powerful opponent head-on. In Season 10, Episode 8, “Inside,” Ike even grabs a pistol and enters a lab where an alien fetus has killed several people, a reminder that the real-life man was a career military officer with a comparatively short political career. For his part, Hawk's very name speaks to a heroic persona, which McDonough embodies effortlessly then and now. Both characters have the morality, principles and physical skills to be considered traditional heroes, and yet both end up as the puppets (in Hawk’s case, quite literally) of the very aliens they attempt to defy.
The Borg were always Star Trek’s closest equivalent to a horror movie – cybernetic zombies instead of undead ones – and First Contact plays into that more than once. Similarly, American Horror Story generates very real scares, but often uses outlandish means to do so: in this case an homage to the same flying saucer craze that ultimately produced Star Trek in the first place. Somewhere in the middle of it all, McDonough found two roles in utterly different projects that matched each other surprisingly well. More than anything, it’s a testament to the actor, who has built a long and successful career in the intervening quarter-century, and who has a strange and wonderful pair of bookends to commemorate it with.
American Horror Story: Double Feature's finale airs next Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on FX.