“Civil Defense”
Written by Mike Krohn
Directed by Reza Badiyi
Season 3, Episode 7
Production episode 40512-453
Original air date: November 7, 1994
Stardate: unknown
Station log: As part of Jake’s apprenticeship to O’Brien, he’s assisting O’Brien in converting an ore processing unit, which was used to process uridium during the occupation, to a deuterium refinery. Sisko shows up to take Jake to lunch, but before they can go, Jake is having trouble deleting one file. It just won’t go away—and it’s got no file name, no indication what it is.
O’Brien tries to set it aside, and it triggers an alarm indicating that an unauthorized use of the ore processing computer and asking for an access code. O’Brien’s access code doesn’t work, and even as he and the Siskos are locked into the ore processing center by blast doors, a recording of Dukat appears on the screens urging the Bajoran workers who are revolting (ahem) to lay down arms or security countermeasures will be put into effect.
Dukat’s message was heard all over the station. Kira tries to beam O’Brien and the Siskos (the name of my next band) out, but the computer asks for an access code that they don’t have to operate the transporter.
Odo tries to use his old Cardassian access codes to get through, but he only has level six clearance. Quark shows up to annoy Odo (well, really, to find out what’s going on, annoying Odo is just a fortuitous side effect), and gleefully announces that he has a level seven clearance. Quark also decides that, until the crisis is past, he’s staying with Odo where it’s safe. (He will regret this decision.)
Sisko tells the computer that he’s the leader of the Bajoran rebellion and that he surrenders. The recording of Dukat urges them to wait for Cardassian security to take them into custody. This only buys them a few minutes, since Cardassian security won’t be by to give the all-clear. There’s a tube through which molten uridium used to be poured to the secondary processing unit. It’s skinny enough for Jake to fit through, and he crawls through to open a hatch that only opens from the inside so that all three of them can leave the room. He does so just as the counterinsurgency program, not having been told by Cardassian security that the rebels are in custody, releases neurocine gas into the ore processing center.
Their escape leads the program to put the station on lockdown. All the doors to Ops close, and the recording of Dukat threatens to kill every Bajoran on the station if they don’t surrender.
The Siskos and O’Brien make it to a loading bay where the uridium was separated from rock and dumped down the chute they just crawled through to the processing center. The room is sealed, and now they can’t communicate with anyone, either. Ops is similarly cut off, as the doors are all sealed, and when Kira phasers the door control in order to get it open, a force field goes up in the doorway. (Dax points out the irony: Ops is sealed to protect them inside from the hordes of Bajoran rebels.) A similar force field is in place around Odo’s office, trapping him and Quark inside.
Dax tries to get at the main computer, but her attempt triggers a force field (which gives her second-degree burns on her hands, making her manually useless for the rest of the episode), and the program now thinks that Ops is compromised and triggers level two. Dukat’s recording now says that the habitat ring will be flooded with neurocine gas in five minutes. (This raises the question of why the neurocine gas is still in the life support system after two and a half years. Why didn’t O’Brien get rid of it? Why didn’t anyone notice the tanks of gas during all the maintenance and upgrades they’ve been doing?)
Garak comes into Ops, his old access code allowing him access through the force field. (He’s amused that a Bajoran space station is the only place his code still works.) He can’t evacuate anyone, as the force field pops back into place the moment he walks through it, but he does suggest destroying the life support system to disable the gas. Doing so will cause everyone to suffocate and die in twelve hours, but twelve hours is a lot more than five minutes, so Kira whips out a phaser and destroys life support.
Unfortunately, that triggers level three, which assumes that the rebels have taken control of Ops. In two hours, the station will be destroyed—the extra time is to give Dukat’s fellow Cardassians time to retake the station. Garak’s access code only gives him access, not the ability to do anything. Dukat appears to be the only person who can stop the program. Dax and Garak try to technobabble their way into fooling the computer into thinking that Garak is Dukat, but it doesn’t work and level four kicks in, which creates a disruptor blaster in a replicator. Everyone has to hide in order to avoid being killed (one redshirt isn’t so lucky).
Then Dukat himself beams into Ops. “Let me guess—someone tried to duplicate my access code.” He’s very amused by the fact that he received a distress call from himself alerting him to a Bajoran insurgency on Terok Nor. He can simply enter his command code and end this whole thing—but he wants some concessions first. As a good faith gesture, he enters a code that eliminates level four, and then tells Kira that he’ll end the counterinsurgency program if Kira agrees to let him put a garrison of Cardassian troops on the station. Kira, naturally, says no: first of all, the Federation and the Bajoran government aren’t about to honor an agreement made under a death threat, and secondly, Kira will blow up the station before she lets there be a Cardassian presence on it again.
Dukat still has a half hour of negotiating time, and he orders a beam-out to let them think it over. But nothing happens, and another recording appears in Ops, this of Legate Kell. Kell says that if Dukat is seeing this, it means he tried to beam out when the self-destruct was activated, which means he’s lost control of Terok Nor. His command codes have all been rescinded, and he’s just gonna have to die like a Cardassian.
Now Dukat’s in the same boat as everyone else—and Garak and Dukat are stuck in Ops, as Kell’s program wiped all security codes out. The self-destruct works by overloading the fusion reactor that powers the station. The nearest location whereby one can shut down the reactor is on level 34, but the only way to get there is to shut down all the force fields at once. Dax suggests overloading the power grid, and Dukat suggests using the emitters for the security force fields, which are still in place, but were shut down when the Bajorans took over because they prefer non-lethal security measures. But that means they weren’t affected by the counterinsurgency program, so they can use the emitters to overload the grid. (It’ll also eliminate turbolifts and transporters, but they’re not very useful right now, anyhow…)
Using raw uridium and an electrical charge, Sisko, O’Brien, and Jake are able to blow a hole in the door and get out of the loading bay. But the force fields are keeping them trapped in a corridor. They try to climb a turboshaft, but then Dukat and Dax get the emitters going and the power grid overloaded. Communications are back online, and Kira brings Sisko up to speed. Sisko’s on level 29, closer to where they need to be, so he, O’Brien, and Jake (the latter basically insisting that he go with his father) head down to shut off the fusion reactor.
Sisko, O’Brien, and Jake are sauntering casually down a corridor in a station that’s five minutes from blowing up. (Really? Not running?) The way to the junction is blocked, of course, and the maintenance crawlway alongside it is filled with plasma fires. Only Sisko makes it through—O’Brien gets hurt—and he jimmies the deflectors so they’ll absorb the explosion.
The door to the security office opens, and Odo and Quark are finally freed (the force field remained active even after the power grid overload). They walk onto a Promenade that has people calmly walking about in a well-lit corridor—neat trick for a station with no life support, no power grid, and no fusion reactor…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Lotsa technobabble in this one, mostly from Dax when she jiggers with ODN conduits and reroutes secondary whozamadingitzes, and so on. We also get a smattering from Dukat and Garak (and surprisingly little from O’Brien). Also, as just indicated, it’s pretty neat that the station can lose life support, the power grid, and the fusion reactor, and yet the lights and doors still work….
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko shows a heretofore unseen propensity for engineering (though given that his previous post was to be in charge of the Starfleet shipyard at Utopia Planitia, it’s not really a surprise) by jiggering the fusion reactor explosion so that it’s absorbed by the shields.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: With Sisko stuck belowdecks, Kira’s in charge in Ops. Even at the climax when Dukat’s trapped with the rest of them, there’s no doubt that Kira’s the one in charge. It’s also amusing to see that twice (to get the door open and to eliminate life support) Kira’s solution is to whip out her phaser and shoot something.
The slug in your belly: Not Dax’s finest hour, as her attempt to get control of the computer results in her hands being badly burned and her attempt to trick the computer into thinking Garak is Dukat fails. Having said that, she’s also the one who comes up with overloading the power grid and comes up with a method to stop the fusion reactor from exploding.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: The force field around the security office is on a separate power grid from the rest of the station. Odo speculates that the Cardassians put it on a separate system because they didn’t entirely trust Odo. It never occurs to him or Quark that maybe it’s there to keep anyone imprisoned stuck on the station no matter what.
In an uncharacteristic show of sentiment, he tells Quark that, while he’s known Ferengi that are more successful, he’s never known one more devious. Quark is touched right up until he reads Odo’s security file on him that refers to him as someone who isn’t as clever as he thinks he is. Odo admits that he was being nice because he thought they were going to die, and then proceeds to list all the Ferengi he thinks are cleverer than Quark, including Rom, his cousin Gaila, his uncle Frin, the grand nagus, etc.
Rules of Acquisition: Quark laments that he didn’t listen to his father, who told him to stay on Ferenginar where there were plenty of business opportunities, instead of following the 75th Rule: “Home is where the heart is, but the stars are made of latinum.”
Plain, simple: The bad history between Garak and Dukat that was hinted at in “Cardassians” gets more play here, as apparently there was some manner of interaction between Garak and Dukat’s father that ended with Dukat père being put on trial (and as we know from “The Maquis, Part II” and “Tribunal,” Cardassian trials always end the same way). And just in general, Dukat and Garak spend a lot of time sniping at each other, including Dukat saying the whole trip was worth it to see Garak cowering in a corner to avoid the disruptor fire, while Kira spends a lot of time telling them to stop comparing dick size and actually work at solving the damn problem.
For Cardassia! Concerns about the Bajoran resistance led to Dukat creating an entire counterinsurgency program that would automate the process of putting them down. Cardassia also has many lethal security measures from containment fields that kill (removed by Bajor and the Federation) and neurocine gas throughout the station (inexplicably never removed by Bajor or the Federation).
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Dukat preens for Kira’s benefit and is called out by Garak. For her part, Kira looks nonplussed by the very notion (an underreaction, if anything), while Dukat protests a bit too much when Garak gives him a hard time (ahem) about it.
Keep your ears open: “I should’ve listened to my father. He always warned me this was going to happen.”
“What, that you’d spend your final hours in jail? I could’ve told you that.”
Quark and Odo when they think they’re going to die.
Welcome aboard: The only real guests are recurring regulars Marc Alaimo as Dukat and Andrew J. Robinson as Garak. Danny Goldring also appears as the recording of Kell.
Trivial matters: This is the first of five episodes directed by the late Reza Badiyi, a veteran TV director who also designed the opening credits sequence for Get Smart, Hawaii Five-O, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Kell appears in the novels The Art of the Impossible by your humble rewatcher and the Terok Nor novels Day of the Vipers by James Swallow and Night of the Wolves by S.D. Perry & Britta Dennison.
The history between Garak and Dukat’s father, Procal, is seen in Andrew J. Robinson’s “autobiographical” Garak novel A Stitch in Time.
Quark makes the first reference to his cousin Gaila, who’ll be mentioned several more times, and then finally appear in “Business as Usual” in the fifth season.
While Mike Krohn got sole credit for the episode, the entire writing staff wrote uncredited drafts of the screenplay, as apparently the gestation of the storyline was a difficult one.
Odo’s belt is no longer part of his uniform. Rene Auberjonois was the one who lobbied for it after “Crossover,” but after a few episodes, he apparently thought it looked too “Buck Rogers,” and asked for it to be removed. Kira will comment on its disappearance in “Crossfire.”
Walk with the Prophets: “And now your integrity is going to get us both killed. I hope you’re happy.” I first heard about this episode long before it aired thanks to being friends with John J. Ordover. I first met John in 1990 when he was an associate editor at Tor Books, I was a producer/host of a public access talk show on genre stuff called The Chronic Rift*, and we were introduced by Greg Cox, also an assistant at Tor and a previous guest on the Rift. The three of us spent about an hour talking about The Flash TV series, and more than two decades later, the three of us remain close friends.
* The Rift lasted four years on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. In 2008, we revived the Rift as a podcast, and now it’s the flagship of a huge-ass network of pop-culture podcasts, including my own semi-regular podcast Dead Kitchen Radio. But I digress….
Anyhow, by ’94, John had moved on to Simon & Schuster, where he was one of the editors in charge of the Star Trek novels. (It would be another five years after that before John would invite me to submit a proposal to him, eventually leading to Diplomatic Implausibility, my first Trek novel, which I signed the contract for in 1999.) One of the perks of his job was to get scripts ahead of time, and when the script for this particular episode came across his desk nineteen years ago, he just went on and on about how awesome it was.
When I finally got to see “Civil Defense,” I adored it also. It’s a delightful little action set piece, and I love the fact that every single thing the crew does makes matters worse—yet every action they take is necessary. Plus there are so many delightful moments, from the Garak-Dukat bickering to Kira casually whipping her phaser out to solve pretty much anything to Garak no longer even bothering to try to make anyone believe he’s anything other than a disgraced spy to Sisko urgently pointing at the chute to tell Jake to get his ass in there when the recording of Dukat announces the neurocine gas will hit in a few minutes to the always-delightful Odo-Quark banter. Marc Alaimo is particularly fun in this one, preening his way across Ops, snarking Garak, taking absolute delight in his total control of the situation. The second best moment in the episode is when he casually flicks Sisko’s baseball off the desk.
The best moment, though, comes after Dukat spends the better part of an act lording his superiority over everyone, only to try to beam off and getting a nasty comeuppance from his former CO, who traps him on the station with an embedded program of his own. It’s an excellent reversal, made even more entertaining by Garak going “Neener neener” at him afterward.
Rewatching it now, though, I find myself picking out all the flaws—and there are a lot more than I remembered.
We start with the entire premise of the episode. In the first season, this episode would’ve worked perfectly. The station was a mess, O’Brien was spending all his time fixing things, and there were tons of systems that hadn’t been dealt with. But now? It’s the third friggin’ season and they haven’t done a thorough going-over of the computer? This should’ve been found ages ago.
Even if you accept that this file with no name and no description snuck by everyone, why is there still neurocine gas all over the station? I find it impossible to credit that they never noticed the tanks of gas any of the times they’ve crawled around the station. Making this worse is the establishment in this very episode that they dismantled other lethal Cardassian security measures, so why not this one?
And then there are the structural problems. As with TNG’s “Disaster,” the crew is separated during a setting-wide disaster, and as with the TNG episode, it doesn’t all work. In particular, Odo and Quark stuck in the former’s office is a total mess, for all that most of the episode’s best lines come from that segment. It adds nothing to the plot, and doesn’t even make sense within the story’s setup. Worse, the episode ends, not with a coda involving Dukat, or even a token mention of putting the station back together after blowing up life support, the power grid, and the fusion reactor, but a cheap joke at Quark’s expense.
Also, the episode’s middle has nothing for Sisko, O’Brien, and Jake to do. They set the story in motion, and they do the oh-noes-there’s-only-five-minutes-to-destruction-and-the-only-path-to-the-control-room-is-on-fire! climax, but between those two things, they’ve got bupkuss to contribute, so the act of getting out of the loading bay—which should be taken care of in a single scene—is stretched out over three acts. And the climax itself is so painfully rote that all suspense is drained out of it, despite the best efforts of Avery Brooks to look really anxious as he shifts rods from one slot to another.
Finally, I really hate that they play Dukat’s flirting with Kira for laughs here. It’s like Hitler flirting with Anne Frank, and really shouldn’t be seen as anything other than repugnant. (Dukat’s leering over Kira will be dealt with more maturely as time goes on, and be given a rather brutal twist in “Wrongs Darker than Death or Night.”)
Having said all that, when the episode is focused on the gang in Ops trying to fix the problem and only partially succeeding, it works as a nice little romp.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Philcon 2013 this weekend in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, doing panels, a reading, an autographing, and a self-defense workshop. His full schedule is here.
I actually love it every time they come back to the idea that Sisko is actually an engineer, at heart. In my head, I always felt (despite no evidence to support it, really) that Sisko fell into the command track almost by accident. Either way, the character always seems happiest when he’s tinkering with or building something.
One thing that struck me in this episode (and, admittedly, back in “Crossover” and “Necessary Evil”), where did they get the uridium ore they needed to process? It’s not like Terok Nor was built around an asteroid where they could mine it. Also, why does it need to be processed in space? Is it because of the instability? The raw ore isn’t even that unstable, if it needs a strong electrical charge to go off (something that would be more likely to be found on a space station than a land-based processing station). Speaking of the ore, did anyone else think it was odd that the ore blew a perfectly round hole in the wall, despite the fact that it was all layered on the ground? And what about the “fuse” they used to set it off? Was that just uridium dust? (Wait, that actually makes sense, never mind).
And why didn’t they think to call for Dukat sooner? I mean, it’s pretty obvious from the get-go that he’s the only one who could stop the program. (Kell’s contingency notwithstanding…)
So yeah, it’s a fun episode to watch, but it kind of loses something in the analysis.
Yep, definitely would have worked better in the first season. I can almost handwave the neurocine gas, though: there aren’t canisters of the stuff, but rather small replicator nozzles scattered around the station and programmed to produce the stuff until told otherwise. Not that it really helps the episode overall.
Despite all the flaws it’s still one of my favorite season 3 episodes to watch.
Perhaps the gas should’ve been a knock out agent instead of a lethal weapon. If it was just a sleep gas that would give more leeway to the mechanics leaving it there on the back burner.
@@.-@: If it was just sleep gas, where would the tension be? O’Brien and the Siskos could have just let themselves be knocked out and retrieved later.
I doubt there are tanks of neurocine gas all over the station. More likely, the computer sent a command to the replicators to create the gas. That would be consistent with the level of technology seen in TREK.
Also, as for the lights being on at the end — even in modern buildings there is emergency lighting that activates during power failure. certainly a 24th century space station would have something similar.
Techno-handwave: Maybe the neurocine gas isn’t stored in tanks, but is synthesized by the atmosphere processors when the station goes into lockdown mode — analogously to how the replicators are suddenly able to create lethal weapons. Real-life nerve gases tend to be organophosphates, made of hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sometimes carbon, nitrogen, or sulfur, so the majority of the raw ingredients would be part of normal atmospheric gases, and the phosphorus or sulfur could come from the waste reclamation systems. So if we assume some sort of advanced chemical-processing technology is used to break down toxins in the air and water, it could potentially be readjusted to create them instead.
When I got a pitch packet from DS9 prefatory to writing my spec script for the show, the sample script they included was for this episode. The title page of the script lists 13 revisions. So yeah, they must’ve gone through a lot of drafts.
@2: Remember, Terok Nor was originally in orbit of Bajor; O’Brien moved it out to the wormhole in the pilot. The whole reason Cardassia occupied Bajor was to strip it of resources; the uridium was mined from the planet surface using Bajoran slave labor, then processed and shipped to Cardassian worlds. Perhaps it was processed on the station because it was going to be shipped through there anyway and it was more efficient that way.
This is a fun action episode and I still enjoy it, warts and all. I also like that everyone gets a little screen time here. The interplay between Garak and Dukat is one of the highlights for me. I also enjoy seeing O’Brien and the Siskos together. I think they have good chemistry.
Bobby
I enjoy this episode for all the snark and I think it’s funny that Dukat comes to save the day and gets just as trapped as everyone else.
I actually misremembered that this was a first season episode. When I read the title just now I thought, “No, that’s not the one I’m thinking of, is it? We’re too far along in the series.”
I still love the episode, though, because all the great moments easily outweigh the plotholes.
6? Oy. This is one of my favorites! :P
I guess I’ll have to never rewatch the episode, because I really did enjoy watching all the snark and a chance to see Dukat ham it up and then end up in the same boat as the rest of them!
Although, thanks for reminding me of how vile it is for him to be bantering with Kira. As I said, I really, really want to like Dukat…I have to mind myself, no, actually, he’s a horrible person. Funny how easily people will take to a character becuase they are funny or witty. Well, it IS magnificent bastards week!
Don’t care, still one of my favorites. It’s a classic farce. “Attention Bajoran workers….”
@11: That’s the thing, though… evil is often alluring. The reason so many awful people are able to gain power is because they know how to make people like them. I gather that Hitler and Idi Amin were both quite charming fellows socially. So sure, Dukat had charisma and made us want to like him, but that was part of what made him so dangerous.
@12, 14: I guess Dukat is not evil, ontologically. It is he makes evil choices and does evil acts. However not everything he does is evil, and indeed he sometimes does good. He is complicated, and that makes him fascinating, as you both write. As you say, he is charming, alluring, socially adept. We can add seductive, attractive and confident to those categories. And loving, in his own way (his sons, Kira’s mother, the Ziyals). But we can also add egotistic, murderous, and a host of other things. Cardassians at their best: wonderfully complex rather than the often cardboard characterisation of leading Romulans (a race rather close to Cardassians in TNG-era Trek).
I think, following on from Dukat’s bad-good-bad arc in DS9, Treklit has sometimes had issues with Dukat and how to play his good and evil acts and habits. I think some of the Ghemor-as-Kira events in the Treklit, including the sexualised captivity, were too much for even this character. It felt unsubstantiated by the series, and perhaps too much an extrapolation from some of the early season 6 Dukat. But I guess that story idea can be set within the attitude Krad mentioned in the review, of Dukat as Hitler (or, I think as the DS9 companion put it, Rudolf Hoess). So that he had to be shown to be completely monstrous (whose onscreen flirting and sexual passes could be a sexually violent core) to viewers/readers that thought too well of Dukat. Sorry to mention it again (I won’t too much), but I loved the fight in The Never-Ending Sacrifice between Rugal and Tora Ziyal, over their different views of Dukat. Ziyal saw only the good and the love, Rugal the manipulative, murderous and monstrous…. somewhere in the middle was the true complex measure of the man. Check it out on Googlebooks.
It’s fitting that this week AV Club’s DS9 rewatch got to Waltz, at the other end of the Dukat arc (and perhaps the last complicated look at the character, depending on your view of his Pah Wraith activiites).
I love that there is a description of how the self destruct works, I have always wondered.
Also for enterprise I am never sure why they included a self destruct feature when building the ship, here it makes sense in the banjoran prisoners context.
@16: A Starfleet vessel has been established (in “A Taste of Armageddon”) as having enough firepower to lay waste to an entire planet surface. That’s not something you want to allow to fall into the wrong hands. Hence, the self-destruct. We saw this in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” where Kirk insisted that he would destroy his ship rather than let it fall into hostile hands.
@16, @17: Also in STII:WoK, where Kirk actually DID destroy the Enterprise. Also, see Enterprise’s “In a Mirror Darkly” for an example of a Starfleet vessel falling into the wrong hands…
P.S. CLB@7: Thanks for that explanation. When you put it that way, it does make sense. Also, does DS9 ever get that deuterium refinery, or did they scrap that plan after this debacle?
@18: It was ST III where Kirk destroyed the ship — using the same destruct codes from “Last Battlefield.” You’d think that after so many years they’d have changed the passwords. I always felt that compromised credibility for the sake of fanservice.
I was a bit surprised at the beginning to see that Jake was still apprenticing O’Brien even after he’d told his father he didn’t want to go into Starfleet. But yeah, I loved the part where Dukat’s old superior came on and stuck him on the station too.
@16: Another reason for the self-destruct on a starship would be that it’s extremely easy to implement: you just have to lower the containment field around the anti-matter, making it a simple software feature.
@21: Well, TNG: “Contagion” made a point of saying that there were dozens of redundant safeguards making it almost impossible for a warp core breach to happen, which was a crucial clue that some external influence had caused it to happen. Unfortunately, once the idea of a core breach had been established, writers fell back on it as a lazy crutch for generating danger, so later episodes trampled over this common-sense notion in favor of the idea that starship warp cores are so incompetently designed that they’ll blow up if you look at them funny.
@22, not to mention the exploding console problem, first seen in TOS, continuing through TNG/DS9, and I believe still unsolved as of the time of the Nemesis events….
There are some pretty weird issues here, I agree, but it’s a fun little one-off episode. I never understood why they didn’t just rip out the Cardassian computer cores and replace them with Starfleet ones, but as far as disaster episodes go, it was better than TNG’s attempts. We had actual character arc progress (Garak is a spy- check, Odo and Quark bicker- check, Dukat is a smug bastard- check) and the episode isn’t so bizarre that we are left with our heads scratching next week as to how everything got reset.
One little thing which our intrepid recapper missed- why is it that the life support system- the thing which keeps everyone from suffocating, heated, etc. is so easy to take out and has no redundant backups. Seriously, the entire system can be taken off line with one phaser blast? If it’s that fragile, I’d put it somewhere more heavily armored where ticked off Bajoran militia officers can’t just shoot it.
As far as Dukat goes, I’ve often said that the evil side of him doesn’t come out until it has an opportunity. If Dukat’s interests are aligned with yours or he needs something (or for that matter, when he’s just sort of passing through) he’s a charismatic individual who is pleasant and likeable, but the moment he has an opportunity to get something, he takes it. That’s what makes him the best Star Trek villain (imho)- because he’s just not full time bad. He does evil things because they are how he gets his way. In this case he had a chance to get a foothold back in Bajoran space so he tried to take it. Whereas another character might just turn off the self-destruct because it’s the right thign to do, Dukat sees it as an opportunity.
There are some pretty weird issues here, I agree, but it’s a fun little one-off episode. I never understood why they didn’t just rip out the Cardassian computer cores and replace them with Starfleet ones, but as far as disaster episodes go, it was better than TNG’s attempts. We had actual character arc progress (Garak is a spy- check, Odo and Quark bicker- check, Dukat is a smug bastard- check) and the episode isn’t so bizarre that we are left with our heads scratching next week as to how everything got reset.
One little thing which our intrepid recapper missed- why is it that the life support system- the thing which keeps everyone from suffocating, heated, etc. is so easy to take out and has no redundant backups. Seriously, the entire system can be taken off line with one phaser blast? If it’s that fragile, I’d put it somewhere more heavily armored where ticked off Bajoran militia officers can’t just shoot it.
As far as Dukat goes, I’ve often said that the evil side of him doesn’t come out until it has an opportunity. If Dukat’s interests are aligned with yours or he needs something (or for that matter, when he’s just sort of passing through) he’s a charismatic individual who is pleasant and likeable, but the moment he has an opportunity to get something, he takes it. That’s what makes him the best Star Trek villain (imho)- because he’s just not full time bad. He does evil things because they are how he gets his way. In this case he had a chance to get a foothold back in Bajoran space so he tried to take it. Whereas another character might just turn off the self-destruct because it’s the right thign to do, Dukat sees it as an opportunity.
Ah its good to be back. Had fallen behind in my rewatch. Anyhow, this was one of those episodes that reminds all that yes this station is home, but, as Kira points out, home was built by Cardassians. So the various plot holes in this episode didn’t and don’t bother me at all. The way I see it, the Cardassians were on the station for two decades, and at this point Starfleet and the Bajoran Militia controlled the station for two years, so its still plausible that O’Brien and his teams hadn’t found every booby trap on the station. As the episode demonstrates, Cardassians design booby traps within booby traps, purely for the exercise.
Who’s to say the gas still exists? Only Dukat’s program says that it does, it is obviously never released so we can’t know for certain.
Where did Dukat beam from? A Cardassian ship near the station? Why didn’t that ship do anything to help them?
KRAD, Gaila would also appear in The Magnificent Ferengi. Dukat must think he’s station commander again with what he does with Sisko’s baseball (one wonders why Kira didn’t catch it before it fell off Sisko’s desk and put it back where it belonged).
DS9 had already done an episode like this in its first season with Babel, KRAD which may have been why they waited to do a similar one. Sisko, O’Brien and Jake stuck in the loading bay reminded me of Geordi and Beverly stuck in a shuttle bay in Disaster, but they didn’t save the Enterprise at the 11th hour like Sisko, O’Brien and Jake with DS9.
2: How could they contact Dukat with the station in lockdown? I feel bad for Dukat the way victory is cruelly snatched from his grasp. It would happen again in The Sacrifice of Angels and the cost would be his very sanity! 20: Jake must have something to do until his writing aspirations take off. 24/25: Ripping out the Cardassian computer core would take years. 27: The gas must exist because look what happened in the loading bay. 28: There was probably a dampening field that prevented anyone beaming to or away from DS9.
I’ve always believed, and still do, that they should have made Jadzia be the station’s counselor instead of science officer. This episode confirmed it. Jadzia is really not very effective as a science officer as she doesn’t seem to provide many scientific solutions to problems on the station and her engineering skills don’t seem very good either.
Someone with 7 lives of experience would have made a very good counselor, especially with her straightforward and understanding personality.
@31/RMS81: But the problem isn’t with the character of Jadzia, it’s with the writers for not using her well as a science officer. Which may have been a matter of male writers not knowing how to write a female scientist effectively.
CLB @@@@@ 32 – The sad thing is, all they would have to do is write a scientist effectively. In most cases, gender shouldn’t matter…
One thing that is amusing is at least the Cardassian computers systems have some kind of security. Unlike star fleet who apparently only uses voice commands, Data can commandeer enterprise and Obrien gets framed by voice only (although on the same base but i attribute that with star fleet overwriting the cardassian security with their crappier version), this base knows the difference between people by scanning who is giving the commands. I guess star fleet is to trusting. :)
You mean people are more trusting in societies which are not literally slave-driving totalitarian cruel autocracies? That is a hell of a flaw for Starfleet; they need to start executing more officers, stat.
random22’s point is well taken, but so is Justin’s. It seems to me there should be some kind of happy medium where Starfleet computers aren’t so readily vulnerable to sabotage……………..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@36. They did show Starfleet using alphanumeric passwords and two person verification for the selfdestruct codes, I think that still gets hacked in one episode too but I cannot for the life of me remember which one.
Computing power and general technology in Trek is so darn near omnipotent at times that it is difficult to see how they could come up with a proper foolproof system. Even in this episode I always took Dukat’s failure to see himself being outgambitted as just another expression of his own narcissism. If he had been less of a smug egotistical ass then he would have considered that his superiors might screw him like he screwed others, and have put in a work around for their work around. Dukat’s ego would never let him consider that anyone might seriously plot against him or yank his own leash (despite how often it actually happened) and left himself high and dry.
You are right though, Starfleet should try a bit harder. I don’t hold it against them when it is Data or a technologically superior alien species that hacks them, but technologically inferior aliens and scruffy terrorists should not be able to get away with half as much as they do.
This was a great episode just to see Dukat and Garak go at it. It took me a while to get a feel for the Cardassians, I didn’t know what to make of them, but then I read somewhere Ira Steven Behr described them as something like “a race of people that talks like the people in Russian novels” and I started to find the monologues and bickering delightful. They just go on and on an on. They’re gonna die in a few minutes but each one needs to be sure they’ve delivered the most self-satisfied monologue, or the cleverest insult. To die like a Cardassian is to die knowing you got the last word in like an internet troll from space. And that’s what really makes them such great villains.
I loved the set design in this episode. Up until this episode, DS9 to me was only a former mining station because the writers said it was. The only other hint I can remember of continuity in this matter was Season 2’s Crossover. Aside from that, it was ops, corridors, crew quarters, cargo bays, airlocks, the promenade and it’s amenities. (If I’ve missed something, forgive me, I’m doing this from memory, haha)
The Ore Processing plant was a brilliant set from it’s concept, to Jake crawling around through it’s inner workings to save his dad and O’Brien. I agree with krad that a bit too much screen time was devoted to the ore cart scene at the top of the chute, but nonetheless, I liked that set too.
One thing that bothered me more than the gas were the sleeves on the uniforms of Sisko and O’Brien going thru the plasma fire. They removed the lower halves and used them to protect their hands from the fire. And they didn’t tear them off, they just slipped off. No one has designed a sleeve like that, ever.
Lockdown rewatch.. Another excellent episode if the previous episode was DS9s take on TNG’s I Borg then this is their take on Disaster, but works much better. The action in Ops is universally excellent, you aren’t going to go far wrong pairing Dukat and Garak, they even manage to kill off a red shirt. The Sisko, O’Brien, Jake scenes work almost as well but I felt Jake’s actions at the end had a little whiff of “Wesley saves the day” about them but they just about get away with it, The only bit that doesn’t work for me is the Odo and Quark scenes in Security, this pairing is usually gold but it seems a little trite to have them forced together for no real reason and does nothing for the plot, I would much rather have seen Odo in Ops and Quark locked in the bar with Rom. All that said this is really good and the Ops scenes alone earn this an 8.
@40/Brent Lee Leatherman:
Not that I don’t agree that it’s a little odd, but how do you know that’s not a built in feature of Starfleet uniforms? You say sleeves have never been designed like that, ever? Since DS9 is set in the far future, your comment makes no sense.
@41/chadefallstar:
Hmm, interesting perspective. I understand what your saying, but I have to disagree. I know you said only a whiff of Wesley, but I don’t even think it’s in the same ballpark. I thought they used Jake in extremely believable ways in this episode. He was the only one able to get into the lower ore chute because of his lean body; but he wasn’t Superman, he panicked and his dad had to calm him down a bit. Later, when they had to set up the shield grid to absorb the explosion, Jake played no part in the saving of the station, he simply pulled O’Brien to safety.
I agree it was contrived the way they became trapped together, but I thought their banter was as entertaining as always. No tarnishing of the gold (pressed latinum) for me.
After a phaser was generated by the replicator in ops and managed to vaporize somebody, I don’t know how anyone could eat out of that particular food slot again.
Kira’s Bajoran phaser prop is just wonderful for episodes like this one. I had the toy as a kid.
Just to go on record saying, this episode and The House of Quark are so far my two favorite episodes of DS9. It feels like real stakes, and real characters, and yet both are also so savagely funny. Glad I held on till this season. It wasn’t that hard to do, but now it’s joy.