“Nor the Battle to the Strong”
Written by Bruce R. Parker and Rene Echevarria
Directed by Kim Friedman
Season 5, Episode 4
Production episode 40510-502
Original air date: October 21, 1996
Stardate: unknown
Station log: Jake has gotten his first writing assignment, a profile of Bashir, which includes going with him in a runabout to a medical conference. To Jake’s regret, a profile of Bashir mostly involves listening to the doctor drone on at great length about medical minutiae that Jake can’t even follow a little bit. One of Bashir’s diatribes is cut off by a distress call from Ajilon Prime, a Federation colony that’s been attacked by Klingons. (“So much for the cease-fire,” Jake mutters.) Bashir is reluctant to respond, as it will put his commanding officer’s son in danger, but Jake points out, with all the assurances of an 18-year-old who thinks he’s bulletproof, that he’s been in danger plenty of times on the station and he can handle himself.
The Farragut is a day and a half away, and Bashir promises Sisko that he’ll take Jake and leave as soon as the Farragut arrives. (The Defiant is three days away.) The hospital was destroyed, so they had to move to a cave system. The caves are laced with magnesite, so they can’t beam through it, and Bashir doesn’t want to leave the runabout in orbit in any case. He lands and immediately is tossed into chaos as he helps Dr. Kalandra and the rest of the medical staff with the wounded who are pouring in. Jake mostly is in the way, but he does get to watch people die.
One human comes in with what he says is a disruptor blast on his foot, but upon examination, Bashir realizes it’s a phaser burn. The battle got bad enough that he shot himself in the foot rather than continue to fight.
Left with nothing to do, Jake goes off to the side to take notes, but then a doctor calls him over to keep an eye on someone while he gets plasma. Soon, he’s pressed into service as an orderly, even putting on scrubs. When one patient dies, Jake helps carry him to the makeshift morgue, and he’s appalled to see how many dead there already are there.
The Farragut is destroyed en route to Ajilon Prime. As soon as Sisko hears this, he preps the Defiant for departure.
When things calm down, Jake and Bashir sit down to eat, and—after all that—it’s the act of cutting meat that makes him puke. He and Bashir talk about the ensign who shot himself, who also told Jake that two of his fellow officers ran away. They’ll probably all be court-martialed. Jake doesn’t understand how Starfleet officers could run like that.
Bashir and Kalandra talk, and he informs her that a fleet is regrouping to retake the Archanis sector, led by the Rutledge and the Tecumseh. It turns out that Kalandra’s husband is a science officer on the latter ship.
Jake and Kirby, the other orderly, start gossiping. Kirby has heard about the Farragut’s destruction, and rumor has it that the Klingons will completely take the settlement before any other ship can arrive. Jake has trouble sleeping that night—he’s been under fire before, but this is the first time it’s happened when his father wasn’t around.
Then everyone’s awakened by the destruction of the generator, which won’t be repaired for three hours. The portable generators are being used to keep the shields up, but Bashir offers the portable generator on the runabout. He and Jake head out, only to find themselves under fire by Klingons. Jake panics and runs away. He trips and falls right on a Klingon corpse, and then finds himself in a clearing that is full of Starfleet and Klingon corpses both. So he runs away even farther, only to fall down a ridge.
Also at the bottom of the ridge is a Starfleet officer named Burke, who’s badly wounded. He stayed behind so that his platoon could get away. Ashamed, Jake admits that he ran away. Jake tries to find a way to help Burke, but Burke tells him that life doesn’t work like that right before he dies right in front of him.
So Jake runs away again.
On the Defiant, Sisko is occupying himself with busywork. Dax tries her best to cheer him up, and it works to some extent.
Jake returns to the hospital, and Kirby is relieved to see that he’s alive. Jake’s story is that he was knocked out by the shelling and then must have wandered off in the wrong direction. Bashir managed to get the generator back to the caves, though the runabout was destroyed and Bashir himself is badly hurt. When Jake goes to visit Bashir, the doctor is overwhelmed with relief, as he was sure that Jake had been killed. Jake actually snaps at Bashir, who can’t stand that Bashir is apologizing to him for Jake’s cowardice.
Jake brings lunch to the ensign who shot himself in the foot. The ensign says that Jake’s the only person who doesn’t look at him with disdain, and he thinks he should work as a cutter for a mine—the one thing that job requires is good aim with a phaser, and he knows he can do that. He actually did well in battle simulations at the Academy, but the reality broke him, the same way it did Jake.
The medical staff has a particularly morbid discussion about how the Klingons will kill them, and Jake pulls a nutty in the mess hall, ranting about how nobody’s going to remember what happened there no matter how dangerous or crazy or heroic. Bashir tries to talk to Jake, but Jake just wants to be left alone.
The cave is attacked by Klingons, so they’re evacuating to a new location—including taking all seventy patients. Just as the last people are evacuated, two Klingons enter the hospital room. The two security guards are killed, but Jake hides under a table, and uses one of the phaser rifles to fire blindly from his hiding place. His phaser fire collapses the ceiling on the Klingons, and on Jake himself, though he’s protected by the table he’s hiding under. When he comes to, he sees Bashir—and Sisko. The cease-fire has been reinstated and the Klingons have pulled out. Bashir says that Jake’s actions saved the patients, as his collapsing of the cave entrance bought them the time they needed to get the last of them to the hopper.
Jake shows Sisko a draft of the full article, which includes his entire experience, down to the running away. Sisko says that anyone who’s been in battle would recognize what Jake went through, though most wouldn’t admit it.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko remembers when Jake was five years old and clung to him after he scraped his knee. As far as Jake was concerned, Sisko was the only person in the world who could make it better. That memory makes it hard for Sisko to deal with Jake being a sector away in a war zone.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: As part of O’Brien’s ongoing attempt to micromanage Kira’s carrying of his and Keiko’s fetus, he asks Quark to come up with a decaffeinated raktajino. Kira thinks it tastes like ass.
The slug in your belly: Dax tells Sisko about Audrid’s daughter Neema, who was sick for months. Audrid read to her even though she was unconscious, and stayed in the hospital with her day and night. Eventually she pulled through, to Sisko’s relief, since if the story didn’t have a happy ending, he’d have been pissed.
Rules of Acquisition: On Ferenginar, a pregnancy is considered a rental by the female of the male’s property, to wit, the offspring. Kira and Dax are beyond revolted by that particular notion. (Quark refers to Kira as the “lessee”—amusingly, given the surrogate nature of the pregnancy, it’s actually more accurate in this case. But, y’know, still awful.)
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: While pursuing two Yridian criminals, Odo jumps down the stairs, intending to turn into a condor, forgetting that he’s not a shapeshifter anymore. He injures himself. After limping to Sisko to report, he wonders why the Founders refer to non-changelings as “solids” when in fact humanoid bodies are absurdly fragile.
Keep your ears open: “Try not to worry, Captain. It won’t do you or Jake any good.”
“Can’t help it. It comes with the territory.”
“But Jake is eighteen years old. Does your father still worry about you?”
“All the time.”
Odo trying to comfort Sisko.
Welcome aboard: Bunches of guests here: Danny Goldring plays Burke—he was last seen as Legate Kell in “Civil Defense,” and will return as a Hirogen in Voyager’s “The Killing Game” two-parter and as two different ship captains in two Enterprise episodes. Karen Austin—who was one of the finalists for the role of Captain Janeway on Voyager, and who will also play B’Elanna’s mother Miral on that show’s episode “The Barge of the Dead”—plays Kalandra. Daytime Emmy Award winner (for his work on As the World Turns from 1986-1991) Andrew Kavovit plays Kirby. The guest cast is rounded out by Lisa Lord, Mark Holton, and Jeb Brown.
Trivial matters: The cease-fire between the Federation and the Klingon Empire was declared by Gowron at the end of “Apocalypse Rising.”
Having mined country music for the previous episode’s title, this time they went with the Bible, specifically the Book of Ecclesiastes 9:11.
One of the inspirations for the story was to have Jake go through the type of formative experience that Ernest Hemingway did as an ambulance driver in World War I France. Other inspirations include the 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front (particularly the scene with Burke) and the Stephen Crane novel The Red Badge of Courage.
The original story was to be a Cardassian hospital under attack by Klingons, but after “Apocalypse Rising,” and with “Trials and Tribble-ations” coming up, they needed to conserve the budget, and a show with that many people in makeup would prove too expensive.
Two other changes that were made after the first draft: Originally, Rene Echevarria had Jake fall into the ridge with a blind Klingon, but Ira Steven Behr had him change it to a human, as having a sympathetic Klingon dulled the impact of the story. Also, the episode ran short, so Echevarria wrote the second scene with the ensign who shot himself in the foot, which everyone agreed wound up being a critical scene to the theme of the story. (Amusingly, something similar happened with “The Way of the Warrior”—the root beer conversation between Quark and Garak had to be added when the episode ran short, and it wound up being one of the greatest scenes in Trek history.)
Walk with the Prophets: “Listen to me, I’m actually rooting for a plague.” While the influence of various and sundry war stories is obvious in this episode, what I find it reminds me most of is M*A*S*H, particularly episodes such as “O.R.,” “Aid Station,” “Deluge,” “Post-Op,” “Your Hit Parade,” “Dreams,” and most especially, given the setting of this particular episode, “C*A*V*E.”
Although probably the best M*A*S*H comp is “Heal Thyself,” an eighth-season episode where Edward Hermann plays a surgeon named Newsom on temporary duty to the 4077th while Potter and Winchester are ill. After initially performing brilliantly in the operating room, Newsom has a psychotic break and falls completely apart into a catatonic state.
What I particularly like about this DS9 episode is that it shows the many different ways people respond to the horrors of war. Kalandra is doing very much the same thing Sisko does on the Defiant: keeping herself busy so she doesn’t have to think about a family member (although she’s in as much danger as her husband on the Tecumseh). Kirby and the rest of the medical staff engage in gallows humor (some of the most M*A*S*H-like moments are from the staff, particularly the discussion of how they want the Klingons to kill them).
Perhaps the best contrast is between the foot-shooting ensign and Burke. The latter is the stereotypical tough-guy soldier, demanding that Jake sit him up so he doesn’t die facedown in the dirt. He’s the ideal Starfleet officer, sacrificing himself to save others, and spouting a ton of tough-guy clichés while he’s at it. Meanwhile, the ensign is deemed a failure, with everyone looking on in disgust.
But not everyone’s cut out for this. Jake certainly isn’t. He even tries to make sense of what’s happening by trying to contrive an it-was-meant-to-be scenario with Burke—that he was fated to run away so he could save Burke. Burke’s subsequent death spoils that absurd notion.
However, what makes the episode particularly work is Jake’s evolution as a writer, as seen through the voiceovers. We start out in the teaser with musings and complaints about Bashir’s self-centered diatribes, which is followed by his stumbling over trying to write about triage. But as the episode progresses, the voiceovers get more eloquent and assured, to the point where he’s got a decent, if florid, piece of personal journalism describing the Battle of Ajilon Prime. Jake may not be much of an orderly or a soldier or a Starfleet officer. However, he is a writer, and if he can bring the experiences of Kirby and the Kalandra and the wounded ensign and Burke and the nurses and himself to others through his writing, then he’s served a purpose, just like Bashir and Kalandra do as doctors and Burke did as an officer.
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido reminds everyone that his latest Star Trek book The Klingon Art of War is now on sale. You can get the book at your local bookstore or order it online from Amazon,Barnes & Noble,Indie Bound, or directly from the publisher. He’s talked about the book on the podcasts Trek Radio, The G & T Show, SciFi Diner, and The Chronic Rift. He’ll be doing two more signings for the book in May: at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Thursday the 15th and at the Enigma Bookstore (alongside fellow tie-in writers David Mack and Aaron Rosenberg) in Queens, New York on Saturday the 17th, both events at 7pm.
I thought this was a fantastic episode. My opinion is probably shaped by the fact that when this first aired I was a junior officer myself, and the show does an excellent job of showing both the horrors of war, the limits of courage, and the little acts of bravery that define individuals in combat. Not everyone will be a hero, but everyone involved has to handle the fear and the pressure in their own way. It’s a truly formative experience for Jake, and one that will enable him to handle future events (like staying on a Cardassian/Dominion occupied station as a war correspondent).
I loved this episode. This episode, and “The Siege of AR-558” really sell the horrors of war, which, unfortunately, isn’t an old tale even now. Unlike “The Siege,” this episode isn’t entirely focused on the military aspect, but a civilians experience of tragedy, fear, and bloodshed. I really liked this one, perhaps more than “The Siege” because I am a civilian and haver never seen battle myself, and I don’t know if my reactions would be similar to Jake’s or not. It’s tremendous writing, in my opinion.
I loved (from a story perspective) that Burke dyed and it didn’t have this nice symmetrical ‘meant to be’ kind of story line. Sometimes things just suck, and we make decisions we regret, or we’re just not cut out for a given thing.
Interesting – I probably heard wrong, but I interpreted Quark’s statement as that the fetus was the one ‘renting’ the woman’s body. Still offensive, regardless.
I actually had no idea where the title had come from, I had to go look it up. Interesting :)
I don’t think I ever really cared for this one much. I guess it’s partly that I’m not a fan of war/combat stories, and partly because I was never that deeply invested in Jake as a character, even though we’re in the same profession (more or less).
Also I guess I’m not crazy about the lack of futurism in episodes like this, showing combat in a way that’s indistinguishable from any 20th-century war movie except for using animated beams of light instead of blanks and squibs. Where are the combat drones? Where are the armored exosuits, at least? Heck, even at the time this episode was made, soldiers in combat wore more body armor than, well, the complete lack of any body armor whatsoever that Burke was wearing. (Why did TNG and its successors abandon the security armor and helmets established in the movies? Did they really have so little budget to spare for costuming?)
And it’s not just combat — a cutter for a mine? Don’t they have robots to do mining? I can understand the budgetary reasons for not portraying robots as a part of everyday life in the Trek future, but sometimes it really strains credibility to have everything still be done by manual labor.
I liked this one quite a bit, too. Burke dying really does give it a ‘M*A*S*H’ feeling, where not everybody could make it back home, either. Very realistic reactions, too, I think.
I remember the first time I saw this episode it was just after my mother had returned from being overseas. I don’t remember why she was sent, or how long she was away, but I do remember how loudly I complained to my dad about how she wasn’t the same and ‘why wouldn’t she play with me’ (she spent a lot of time in her bedroom in the dark or just…walking around for one reason or another).
I saw this episode, was maybe 11 at the time, and more then any other episode in Trek’s history did it resonate to me. Afterwards I went in and sat with my mom and hugged her, but didn’t say anything else.
Still now when I watch it I get all choked up. Its also what convinced me, 7 years later when I was ready to join the Air Force (after 9-11), that I was not cut out for the military. It was on the night before I went to the recruiter and I didn’t waste a minute before I called and cancelled my appointment. I read and write and even roleplay battle scenarios, but I know deep down I’d react the same way Jake did. And well I’ve come to peace with that.
I gotta agree with CristopherLBennett here: it’s ridiculous that the Federation is shown to have amazing medical technology, amazing space technology, amazing computer technology, but when it comes to ground battles, it looks like they could be fighting in the WWI, only with rifles replaced by phasers. I know the budget limits the things they can do, but I wish they’d at least use a bit of imagination. 24th century warfare shouldn’t look like its 2oth century counterpart.
That said, I really liked the core message in this episode. I loathe the sort of war stories where willingness to fight is “the measure of man”, and wanting to save your life is considered to be cowardice. Running away is a perfectly normal human response to threatening situations, especially among people (like Jake) who never volunteered to fight, and I hate it self-preservation is depicted as “cowardly” or “immoral”. Most people just want to get out of these situations alive, it’s not anyone’s responsibility to be a war hero and sacrifice yourself. So I’m always happy to come across a war story that acknowledges this, as most popular fiction doesn’t.
Having gotten around to rewatching bits and pieces of DS9 again with this Rewatch Series, from this episode on I really started to connect with Jake to a certain degree as he began documenting first the Federation-Klingon War and then the Federation-Dominion War. In the interim since I had last watched the series, I had gotten involved with working in veterans’ oral history*, so I could sympathize with his civilian-eye interaction with military personnel.
(*I’d been working in military museums and archives, having repeatedly failed at attempts to enlist over the course of a decade on account of congenital nerve damage, as my attempt of ‘replacement service’ in lieu of any supersoldier serum)
I think that the federation wouldnt have attack drones for close combat because Starfleet, while military, is mostly a hub of exploration. Sure, they have weapons but when was the last war that dealt with ground troops? When was the last war at all?
The federation uses its resources for other things and until the Dominion War, there really isnt a huge call to arms.
Plus, the Klingons are so invested in their battle prowess that i cant see them fighting attack drones. If Starfleet had any, the klingons would probably just bomb them from orbit.
To me, this attack was chosen particularly because the Klingons would experience “honorable combat.” And when on a planet, that means hand to hand.
It is silly that the starfleet officers didnt have any protective gear but perhaps thats another reason this place is under siege. The klingons knew it wasnt that well defended.
Perhaps this is showing the Federation’s overconfidence in peace time. There hasnt been an all out war for awhile and they have grown lax.
It’s not even fighting at the WW1 level. All combat seems to be between individual soldiers using only hand-held weapons set to fire single, low power shots (I do have a vague recollection that on one TOS episode, something like a mortar was used by Kirk.) There seems to be no equivalent to machine guns, field artillery, etc. And the phasers, which are supposedly extremely destructive at high settings, are never used that way. Of course, it is the budget, but Christopher Bennett and Tuomas A are quite right-the “futuristic feel” is badly damaged.
@10: The mortar was from the Cestus III sequence in “Arena.”
In general, I agree with KRAD on this one. CLB makes some good points about the technological backwardness of the combat, but I at least can disregard that for story purposes. And the story is excellent. Once again, we get more than just brave and fearless Starfleet officers and a real look at what war and combat does to those exposed to it. This episode ought to have aired a week earlier as an immediate follow-up to “The Ship”. That would have been a hell of a one-two punch and then go with “Looking for par’Mach” for a bit of relief.
As I said, I can disregard the “backwardness” of the military technology used here, but I was also a bit disturbed by people’s reactions to the guy who shot himself in the foot. I would expect Starfleet to have a strong understanding of PTSD and recognize that not everyone can handle combat. I imagine that a lot of people signed up for the science and exploration aspects, never expecting to see fighting at all. We’ve heard about small wars with the Cardassians and I think one or two other species, but they don’t seem to have involved many personnel. Except for the Borg threat the Federation has been at peace for quite awhile.
There was a first season TNG episode where they were fighting autonomous drones on some planet. A planet of arms dealers killed by their creations, IIRC.
One thing to remember about the military in Star Trek is that the show has been pretty consistent on showing us across the eras that cultures with standing armies go extinct before reaching space travel due to internal conflict. The cultures that achieve space travel are either Proud Warrior Race guys like Klingons who rush in single-handed, or have survived their own Holoocausts and vowed not to let it happen again (like humanity). When we talk about the militarization of Starfleet (or lack thereof) we’ve got to remember that the Federation in general, and humanity in particular, is a society formed out of species that all have horrible nuclear style wars in their past and are the survivors of those wars. They are not likely to want to repeat the mistake of having a standing military around and risk sparking off another (which this time they may not survive).
Even the Cardassians and Romulans, for all their fascist trappings, have very little actual armed forces. That is one of the reasons the Dominion are such a threat, they actually have a standing army in the form of the Jem’Hadar (and even then it isn’t an experienced army as the Jem’Hadar tend not to live terribly long and must obey the Vorta without question),
I was going over the DS9 Companion just now, and something about this episode’s production always puzzled me. In the book, it says Kim Friedman had experience directing episodes of ER, and even provided Echevarria with a couple of ER scripts, in order for him to learn how to lay out the triage scenes on the script (it supposedly also helped Siddig).
The thing is, Kim Friedman has never directed an episode of ER. I’ve seen all 15 seasons, and know each director’s name by photographic memory. Either someone was lying on their resumé, or writer Terry Erdmann made a mistake in his research for the book.
Having said that, I absolutely adore this episode to this day. A brilliant use of both Jake Sisko and Julian Bashir. And Siddig and Lofton both deliver.
I often wonder what would have occured had The Visitor timeline taken place. Would the events of this episode would have happened at all? In a way, Jake’s growth requires for him to experience some traumatic events besides losing his mother. He may have averted what happened to his father on The Visitor, but that doesn’t mean he gets a free pass from the Klingon war (let alone becoming a silenced reporter under Dominion occupation).
I agree with @14, by the way. Section 31 aside, Starfleet and the Federation were never really built for excessive militarization. They follow on the footsteps of the coast guard, and going by Roddenberry’s box, they would remain as pacifist as they could, while taking minimal defense precautions.
@15: Sure, but lack of belligerence doesn’t mean they’d be stupid enough to go into combat wearing nothing but fabric. Self-protection isn’t the same as aggression. I gather that most people in the US military see themselves as peacekeepers and their mission to prevent violence where possible. But they still wear body armor and helmets when they put themselves in harm’s way, because they’re not suicidal.
Then again, you’d think Starfleet designers wouldn’t be stupid enough to design seats without safety harnesses, shuttles without airlocks (or lavatories), warp reactors without a whole bunch of distance and radiation shielding between them and the engineers, etc.
As for Friedman, perhaps she got those ER scripts some other way and Erdmann just assumed she had them because she’d directed the episodes.
The TV reason of course, is that showing the type a military tech that should exist in this kind of episode is a lot of work for the props department. An in-universe justification could be that large ground force engagements in the Star Trek ‘verse between major powers are relatively rare. If memory serves, Kirk claimed his Enterprise had the capability of sterilizing an M class planet on its own. Once one side can bring a starship into play above a battlefield, the ground battle is over. So ground forces are usually just the equivalent of light infantry, units that can be quickly moved once low orbit supremacy is lost. While it can justify the lack of armored units, it does not explain the lack of ballistic weapons(like mortars) being absent.
@7 Running away in a combat situation is a good way to get the other people in your unit killed. The attitude that succumbing to the instinct for self-preservation in combat is cowardice is an attempt to shame soldiers out of thinking about doing it, but it is, in large part, in the inerest of the unit to foster such attitudes
Just what are we to make of Jake’s voiceover in this episode? It’s not his log, and, at least in the first part of the episode, it’s not the article he’s writing. It’s just his inner thoughts, spoken to the audience via voiceover. The writers occasionally did alternate “film noir” styles of log/voiceover in TNG’s “Suspicions” and DS9’s “Necessary Evil,” but is this the first time we’ve had voiceover without an in-world context?
But, yeah, it’s a great episode. I especially love how the Burke character is so hardcore he uses his dying breath to teach Jake a lesson, instead of the usual “tell my wife I love her” type of cliche.
I first watched DS9 in the company of a former US Navy officer (something that will be more relevant when we get to “Valiant,” but not entirely out of place here), who confirmed what I’d more or less already figured out about military training: one of the main reasons it exists is so that everyone on the battlefield doesn’t do what Jake did. Running away is the basic, instinctive response to immediate threat of injury or death. It takes training and discipline, or maybe just being more afraid of the commander than the enemy, to get a person to stay and fight when things are blowing up all around them.
I’ve seen a number of viewers criticize Jake for how he acted, and I’m glad I don’t see that here because it always makes me sad to see that. I think anyone who’s quick to criticize him probably doesn’t want to face that if they were placed in a similar situation, they’d most likely act the same way. I’ve certainly never seen those kinds of comments from veterans. They know what it took to get them ready for combat, so they know that you can’t reasonably expect a civilian dropped unexpectedly into a combat situation to immediately turn into a good soldier.
@CLB – I don’t have a problem with science fiction stories that show combat as much like it is in the present because I view those stories as being about the present. I can understand not liking combat stories, they’re not to everyone’s taste, but I’m not sure that you could write this episode with plausible 24th century tech and keep the story the same. If you’re wearing an exosuit that wouldn’t be out of place in Starship Troopers, that Klingon swinging a bat’leth at your head becomes a whole lot less scary. As to why they’re not wearing any armor at all, even the kind of armor you see today… still not sure about that one.
When you bring up tasks that could be automated, that puts me in mind of things that are automated today. Maybe it’s unfair to compare anything in Star Trek to the abomination that is the phone tree, but that’s the first thing that comes to mind. Just because something can be automated, doesn’t mean it can’t still be done better by a person. And people like to feel useful. A lot of jobs that are largely regarded as crappy wouldn’t be half bad if it were actually a viable option to stand up for yourself when someone treats you badly.
The only thing I can come up with for not having any sort of armor is that it wouldn’t stop a phaser or disruptor on its highest setting, so why compromise your mobility. Of course, this ignores explosives, Klingon bladed weapons, etc. Or maybe since it was just a colony and not a military installation, they just don’t have much in the way of military equipment beyond a few phasers?
@21 but do we ever see reasonable armor in DS9? I could see it not being feasible to wear something that’ll stop a phaser blast, but shrapnel and other debris makes helmets, at least, a really good idea.
@22 and other armor comments— maybe the armor we saw in Star Trek 3 prooved as ineffective as Stormtrooper armor so they abondoned the idea :)
Let’s not forget we also see that armor on security guards in Star Trek 6 after Valeris vaporizes the pot of Starfleet standard-issue gruel.
@17: Like I said, Star Trek: The Motion Picture established helmets and body armor for Starfleet security (as well as radiation suits for engineers), and the subsequent movies continued to use these same costume pieces. Early TNG recycled a lot of things from the movies — the redressed sets and nearly unaltered corridors, ship miniatures like the Miranda and Excelsior classes — so they could’ve recycled the same body armor, maybe dressed it up a bit to make it look newer. Or, since they had plenty of money to invest in creating whole new costumes and props whose cost would be amortized across the entire series through reuse, they could’ve just established a new design of security armor from day one and kept using it throughout the subsequent series. If the makers of TNG had applied the same basic costume sense that their predecessors in the movies did, then there would’ve been no need to create new body armor for this episode, because it would’ve already been in standard use for nine years.
@19: Maybe the narration was from Jake’s private journal. Trek has been using “personal logs” as a device for narrating characters’ inner thoughts ever since TOS.
@20: “If you’re wearing an exosuit that wouldn’t be out of place in Starship Troopers, that Klingon swinging a bat’leth at your head becomes a whole lot less scary.”
Which is exactly why depicting Klingons as Space Viking-Samurai swinging swords around is something I find rather silly. At least TOS had the basic sense to give them ray guns. The only time we saw them using swords was in “Day of the Dove” when an alien entity took all the ray guns away. I’ll never understand why TNG brought in all the bladed weapons and “honor of hand-to-hand combat” stuff, why they reveled in making the Klingons seem primitive and backward rather than the modern interstellar conquering force they were originally created to be. I mean, sure, the initial conception of the Klingons was basically Space Mongols, a ’60s Orientalist stereotype disguised as something more spacey, but even so, they weren’t portrayed as technologically backward, or having any aversion to using advanced firepower.
Granted, I have learned from prior conversations on this board that bladed weapons are useful for close-in fighting where firearms create too much risk of friendly-fire accidents. But where there’s body armor, there’d presumably have to be a modification in the nature of close-range melee weapons as well. Modern soldiers still use knives and daggers, presumably for targeted strikes at gaps in the armor, but swords have become obsolete.
For that matter, I gather that even the samurai in their prime didn’t rely mainly on swords. They relied on bows and arrows, because of course it’s safer to dispatch your enemies from a distance. If you had to rely on a sword, it meant you’d failed to stop your enemy from getting close enough to endanger you directly. Samurai didn’t begin glorifying their swords until after they’d become more a bureaucratic class, romanticizing their glory days. So I could buy Klingons glorifying their bat’leths and whatnot as symbols of a romanticized warrior past that probably never really existed. But actually relying on them in modern combat against technologically advanced foes is just silly.
@21: They’ve had phasers for two centuries at this point. It’s hard to believe they wouldn’t have developed something that could defend against them. Heck, they’ve also had deflector shields for two centuries, so they should have figured out a way to make them compact enough for personal use. Indeed, in the animated series, they used force field belts in place of space suits, and we saw in “Beyond the Farthest Star” that the force fields could, in fact, shield a person against a very intense phaser barrage. I can buy them giving up the force field belts as EVA garments — it’s incredibly stupid to entrust your life-giving atmosphere to a containment envelope whose main failure mode is ceasing to exist entirely — but there’s no reason they couldn’t have been used as body armor.
The reason (IMO) that they don’t depict combat as it would probably be in the future is that there’s no point. They have to nerf the weaponry that gets used in stories like this or the story would be very short: they all died.
There’s lots of ways the combat itself is wrong. For one, it makes no sense that Starfleet personnel would be ground troops. The real world Navy crews on our ships don’t storm the beaches, that’s what Marines are for. You wouldn’t take someone trained to fly a hideously expensive starship and send them down to the surface with a sidearm to hold off a bunch of Klingon warriors.
And you know what? That’s OK. I don’t watch Star Trek to get realistic depictions of future combat. What matters is the story, and in this case the way the combat is portrayed doesn’t distract from the impact of seeing Jake deal with it. Should Jake have run away? Yes. It has nothing to do with courage. He’s not trained to fight, and even if he tried he’d more likely than not just do something stupid and get a lot of people killed. Which is exactly what happened when he did try and fight. The fact that it was the bad guys killed is just dumb luck.
@25 – How well you think the “space samurai” thing works is a bigger question than I feel capable of addressing here. The bat’leth/katana parallel does hold up well, though. I could give you a long spiel about swords and armor and the availability of iron in feudal Japan (I really like swords), but I’ll boil it down to what I think is the most important point: the one thing Japanese swords were really, really effective for was cutting down unarmored targets. They’d be a last resort when fighting other trained and well-equipped warriors, but they’d be a powerful psychological weapon in putting down, say, a peasant uprising. Nothing quite like lopping off a fellow’s head to demoralize his friends. Dispatching an enemy from a distance is safer than killing him up close, but if the rest of his unit surrenders you’ve ended the fight early.
@26 – I think you’ve got what I was trying to say better than I said it. As to the Navy/Marine thing, it doesn’t seem like the Federation has an equivalent organization to the Marines. It’s just Starfleet, which works in the sense of it not being a true military organization because future space hippies and all.
With technology being advanced as it is on Star Trek, I’d think by the 24th century, the “kevlar” equivelant could simpy be made thin enough so that the uniform IS the armor. Obviosly its not, but it certianly help the budget not having to show robots and exosuts and all that other junk. I’d think it’d be hard to develope good armor to resist hand-held phasers that have the power to level entire building though (level 16 per Memory Alpha)- same articled does mention a material that phasers can’t cut through, but its the material DS9 is constructed of. Personal force fields/shields would seem the best defense if they were going for the realistic approach. Maybe by the time we see any battles on screen the power reserves on personal shields are drained? Would have been nice to see them aknowlege all this on the show, but I agree that it would have gotten in the way of the story to be sure.
In ENT, we did see the MACOs, who were roughly analagous to marines. Although I totally utterly hated that Xindi arc, I did think the MACOs were a valuable addition.
As has been mentioned earlier here, I think the reason the combat we saw in this episode was unrealistic is that this was a largely civilian hospital on a planet unprepared for ground warfare. I imagine that after this episode, Starfleet sent in the “Starship Troopers” equivalent, but for the most part, it does make sense that Starfleet would largely rely on orbital defenses and battles. Ground warfare is increasingly obsolete, especially (as we saw a couple times in TOS) when a ship can pinpoint target with phasers.
The batleth discussion is interesting; I also never liked the prevalence of hand to hand combat in Trek. I did always wonder if there could be some analogue to the Dune universe, where personal shields prevent energy and high speed projectile weapons, but that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
Finally, I think the trauma Jake saw in this episode is a reminder of why I always disliked civilians (especially children) aboard the Enterprise in TNG. Starfleet may be a fleet of peace, but as we see in almost every episode, it’s pretty regularly caught in combat situations. Civilians just don’t belong in that milieu. (BTW, I would have loved to see Jake as an embedded reporter throughout the forthcoming war, accompanying the defiant for the Federation News Service)
Also, CLB, re: your comment on lavaratories in shuttlecraft, I always assumed that, much like the zippers and seams that IIRC exist invisibly on Starfleet uniforms (that’s how Picard can open his uniform jacket), they
How does that work?Do Ferenghi women like being pregnant? Otherwise, why would they take the deal?
With all this discussion about the Klingons’ tendency to use edged weapons, it’s kind of hilarious to remember that in this particular episode, the only Klingons we actually saw were wielding disruptor pistols and using them quite skillfully……
ad: Ferengi women don’t have much by way of rights on Ferenginar….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@31: Which makes the lack of body armor (or personal force fields) even more problematical…
I’m pretty sure that KRAD has misinterpreted who is renting what in a Ferengi pregnancy. Quark says of O’Brien, “As the lessee he does have certain rights.” If O’Brien is the lessee, then it is Kira, as the lessor, who is renting out space to the fetus. Of course, since Ferengi women aren’t allowed to own anything or conduct business, the father is presumably paying himself for this. Or all Ferengi are born in debt to their parents.
Thanks to CLB for identifying the “mortar” episode. Notice that the Borg-presumably an advanced species-do have personal, phaser defeating force fields. You might expect to see these in the federation, if not for individuals, then at least for buildings or fixed defensive structures. Another “unrealistic” touch is the innumerable number of times we have seen soldiers on all side crouch behind rocks, pillars, and other obstructions to shield themselves, when all the attcker presumably has to do is raise the setting on the phaser/disrupter etc. a couple of noches to vaporize both the opponent and the obstruction
@35: Or just vaporize part of the obstruction, turning the rest into shrapnel to tear apart whoever’s hiding behind it. What’s overlooked in the fictional depiction of disintegrating/vaporizing weapons is that instant vaporization is the mechanism behind explosions. Turning a solid into a gas causes it to expand enormously in size, and if that happens instantly, then the expanding vapor forces aside everything in its path. So someone or something shot with a disintegrator ray shouldn’t just glow and disappear; it should become a very large bomb. When Kruge vaporized his gunner in ST III, the explosive force of the event within such a confined space as the Bird of Prey’s bridge should’ve killed everyone in the room instantly.
TNG’s technical advisors actually knew this, though, so there’s a line in the TNG Technical Manual about phasers causing most of the disintegrated matter to “transition out of the continuum” — basically it gets shunted to another dimension. This was actually a plot point in “…Loved I Not Honor More,” my sequel story to “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places.” (The idea was, what if you could access that dimension and mine it for the dissociated particles of valuable elements?)
@33 – This being Ferenginar, most likely the latter. I’m guessing that the fetus is the lessee, while the husband (as the owner of the wife) is the lessor. In this case, there is a conflict of interest, as the lessee is being represented, in absentia, in this transaction by the lessor. At some point, I would expect that the lessee will be required to make payment to the lessor for the rental, in addition to any interest, fees, and penalties (all subject to negotiation – which helps society deterime who has the lobes for business). In the event of default, I further suspect that the FCA would be charged with securing payment or otherwise ensuring the appropriate discharge of the debt. The lessee’s only major leverage would be for a long term care contract, should the agent/lessor later be unable to maintain profit sources at some later point in life. The cases of stillbirth or childhood mortality, are likely covered by insurance, should a sufficient policy and the required due care have been rendered so as to avoid the scenario leading to the requested payout (at some point, insurance may have gotten so restrictive, that many lessors probably began to self-insure).
At least, that’s my theory.
As far as ground combat goes, I’d think once one side gets a ship in orbit, the battle is pretty much going to be won. Barring a Hoth Style shield, if I was in orbit over a hostile target, I’d pull out my own troops and flatten it from orbit. A little aggressive, yes, but if it truly is war (it is) and you’re fighting in a relatively unpopulated area (which we seem to be) then have at it…
That being said, I think there are 3 reasons for ground battles (here and in AR-558) being depicted the way they are. First and foremost is budget. Having exoskeletons/walkers/hovertanks etc would just cost a ton in production dollars. Second, its harder for 20th Century viewers to watch and relate to even more advanced modern weaponry, let alone future weaponry. The proposed Top Gun sequel was going to involve drone pilots- its harder to feel in danger and relate to people working in front of a monitor as opposed to a pilot in a cockpit. Now imagine if the Starfleet crew was directing a bunch of battle droids- it would be hard to not feel like they were the bad guys, let alone that they were supposed to be sympathetic characters. Third, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of tech expert advising the writers. Much like the question of why aren’t transporters used tactically to materialize bombs in the middle of enemy troops, beam people into space, etc the simple answer is that they don’t think of it.
@38: They had plenty of tech advice from people like Rick Sternbach, Michael Okuda, and Andre Bormanis. But generally the needs of fiction are presumed to trump technical realism, and it’s a tossup whether a producer will want to listen to a science advisor. In particular, on a show like this, the makers generally prefer to keep things recognizable to the audience.
@39
And a good thing too.
This discussion (which I’m joining late) reminds me of a comment someone made a number of years ago that has stuck with me in all my subsequent rewatches. Star Trek‘s portrayals of battle (either in space or on planet surfaces) are all somewhat marred by the simple fact that by the 23rd-24th centuries, most functions such as maneuvering, targeting, and firing would all be handled automatically by computers.
The whole notion that a battle would be conducted by having a captain say “fire” while waiting for a tactical officer to press the firing button is patently absurd. It’s sort of like high-speed trading on Wall Street, but with much higher stakes: every milliseconds counts, and there is little room for error. So the idea of it being handled by flesh-and-blood people (aside from higher-level decisions, like target approval) is crazy to say the least.
Even if it came to a battle on a planet, energy weapons would certainly not be used as they are regularly shown on Trek, as more advanced rifles or pistols. I suspect energy weapons would be used more like nets or arrays, or perhaps sent in like drones with their own cloaking/invisibility technology (transparent aluminum, anyone?). Targets would certainly be acquired via computer control, rather than flesh-and-blood eyes and fingers (a bit like that silly scene in Iron Man when he manages to distinguish the civilians from the combatants, and only kills the combatants—I know, it’s highly unrealistic, but it gives a sense of what I’m talking about). With sophisticated tech like that, battles would likely last seconds, rather than hours or days.
Anyway, these critiques have been made before, but we all know the point is to tell a good story, and for me, this episode hits it out of the park. It’s not one I had seen in the original run (I missed most of Seasons 4–7 back in the day), but I would rank it as one of the most emotionally powerful episodes in Trek history.
I was always sympathetic of Jake (even in his wooden dorkiness), so to see him go through this kind of breakdown—especially in the scene when he yells at Dr. Bashir to leave him alone so he could sob by himself in that cave—was simply devastating.
Yes, it felt like an episode of ER or M*A*S*H, and at times, I became too aware of the contrived nature of the story. But it was nice to see Dr. Bashir in crisis mode, demonstrating his Starfleet level-headedness and necessary recklessness, wandering out into a war zone just to get a portable generator. It was also a nice touch to have the story take place so far away from the station, where cuts to Captain Sisko’s mounting worry about his son would resonate more strongly. Keith has often remarked upon the excellent chemistry between these two, so it’s marvelous to watch Avery Brooks convey this connection even in Cirroc Lofton’s absence.
The lack of obvious advances in combat medicine didn’t bother me as much as it seems to have bothered others, since I saw it as a consequence of their desperate, improvised situation (the colony was mostly destroyed, remember). It reminded me that when you’re not on a fancy starship or space station, you gotta go back to the basics (notice that they were all wearing rubber gloves, which we rarely saw in Starfleet facilities except during major surgeries).
But above all, this episode boils down to Jake’s breakdown in the hallway of that back cave. That’s when he simply lost it, and realized he was way out of his depth. But conversely, that was the moment of vulnerability that allowed him to tap into a genuine voice in his writing, in a far more realistic and potent way than the abominable depiction we saw “The Muse.” (Ugh. I am still creeped out by the thought of that one. So bad.)
The best line comes at the end, from father to son: “It takes courage to look inside yourself, and more courage to write it for other people to see.” Indeed.
Has nothing to do with the acting, which is fine, but I’m just not a fan of Jake episodes. The Visitor considered by most to be the finest episode of this series, and yet it left me rather unmoved. I actually prefer this one, but even that’s not saying much. as others have noted, the ground this episode walks on is already well-trodden by MASH and other series. the guy who shoots himself, the brave doctors, the stoic orderlies laughing in the face of death, blah blah Yada Yada. but if it was going for the some sort of message about war is hell, it would have been more appropriate to end of the episode with something other than the nicely gift-wrapped epilogue of Sisko telling his son how proud he is of him, and that awkward long last shot of Jake smiling in his dad’s arms. Blecch
19: Yeah, the dying look on Burke’s face is positively accusatory. There’s no doubt in my mind that he considered Jake a coward for abandoning a doctor to a shelling attack. Siddig el Fadil felt Bashir and Jake should have become closer friends after their shared experience at the Battle for Ajilon Prime, but this isn’t quite the same as Armageddon Game that paved the way for the O’Brien and Bashir friendship. Neither of them did anything questionable in order to survive like Jake.
First we get a “soft porn” episode and now a M*A*S*H episode, heh. This one works very well, too. We’ve seen and heard a lot about wars and seen a lot of fighting scenes. So it serves as a good reminder that in a war there are casualties.
As a casual, not diehard Star Trek fan, I am surprised at the actions of Klingons in these episodes such as this one and “Way of the Warrior.” From what I have seen the Klingons place great importance on honor. At what point did they come to see killing unarmed civilians as honorable?
@45/rms81: We’ve seen plenty of times that Klingons use “honor” to justify whatever they wanted to do anyway. And most Klingon warriors we’ve seen are members of the nobility; they may well apply their concepts of honorable combat only to their fellow warrior elites and consider “commoners” unworthy of consideration.
@46/Christopher: You’re right; the Klingons often seem to use the value system to justify anything they want anyway.
However, I cannot tell if this is intentional or is simply the product of bad writing. Some episodes depict the Klingons as a noble warrior race, and others depict them as genocidal savages who kill indiscriminately. We saw them going after a hospital full of unarmed doctors and patients here, but in other episodes they shame and exile entire families for things like stealing or murder committed by one family member.
Yes, that’s terrible writing, after all. It’s why all humans should be portrayed as all thinking and acting exactly the same way as each other, also.
*sarcasm*
Richard Nixon was raised a Quaker, yet he sent troops to war. I’ve met plenty of Christians who don’t actually follow the tenets of Christianity — and others who follow them, um, religiously. Humans are not remotely monolithic, why should the Klingons be?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad: it is a sign of bad writing if the inconsistency is unintentional. If a writer makes a lot of continuity errors or makes people act out of character, it is. The actions of characters reflect the vision of the writers, so if on one episode the character is depicted one way, and on another episode, another writer depicts him in a completely different way I would call it bad writing.
@49/rms81: But we’re not talking about a single character, we’re talking about an entire civilization. For a single person, yes, it’s bad writing if they act inconsistently without a good reason. But for an entire civilization, the reverse is true — it’s bad writing if they all act exactly the same.
Klingons attacking a hospital that is not Klingon and being exiled for lying to Klingons are obvious signs that they don’t hold non-Klingons in the same esteem.
Lockdown rewatch. I think there is a case for a Saying this is Cirroc Lofton’s best episode of the series he plays Jake’s naivety and then fear really well, it’s not the best Jake episode that’s The Visitor but that’s mainly down to Tony Todd’s stellar work as the older Jake. Alexander Siddig and Avery Brookes lend fine support here as indeed do all the guest stars at the field hospital. A really good solid episode and the final scenes as Sisko and Bashir read Jakes report are really moving.
51: I think Klingons just make up the rules of engagement depending on what mood they’re in at the time.
Isn’t this just the Quickening again? Another doctor episode that could transplant to a non-ST show?
I think you got the Ferengi pregnancy thing backwards. It’s the male renting the female to store his property, making the male the lessee.