“In the Pale Moonlight”
Written by Peter Allan Fields and Michael Taylor
Directed by Victor Lobl
Season 6, Episode 19
Production episode 40510-543
Original air date: April 15, 1998
Stardate: 51721.3
Station log: Sisko is dictating a personal log. It’s been two weeks since something happened that he needs to justify to himself, and that he can’t talk to anyone about it, not even Dax—but maybe he can work it through if he spells it out in his log.
Every Friday morning for the past three months, Sisko has posted a casualty list. On one particular Friday, Dax sees one of her Academy instructors, Leslie Wong, now captain of the Cairo, on the list. The Cairo went missing near the Romulan Neutral Zone, the latest in a series of attacks that have happened because the Jem’Hadar has brazenly gone through Romulan space to attack, thanks to the non-aggression pact Romulus has with the Dominion. Bashir mentions how useful it would be to get the Romulans into the war, but Dax points out that they have no reason. They’re not being threatened, and their two biggest rivals—the Klingons and the Federation—are getting their asses kicked.
This conversation flicks a switch in Sisko’s head: he is determined to get the Romulans into the war.
Sisko talks about it with Dax, with the latter role-playing a Romulan proconsul. And she does so very well, pointing out that the Romulans need evidence that the Dominion plans to attack Romulus down the road (which Sisko is assuming, but it’s a reasonable assumption as they’re unlikely to conquer Cardassia, the Federation, and the Klingons and then just leave the Romulans alone). The problem is that any such evidence is on Cardassia Prime—not the most accessible place in the galaxy as Dax points out. So Sisko goes to Garak, who is flattered that Sisko thinks so highly of him. Garak can possibly do it, but it would be a messy bloody business, and force him to call in every single favor he has left in Cardassian space. Sisko tartly says that he’s already in a messy bloody business, and he sees getting the Romulans into the war as the only way to come out of it in one piece. He’s willing to get the Romulans into the war by any means necessary. And man, is he gonna be sorry he said that…
In his log, Sisko quotes the cliché about the road to hell being paved with good intentions, and that meeting with Garak was where he laid the first paving stone for that road.
The Dominion invades and captures Betazed. That puts them in a position to strike Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, and Alpha Centauri. It’s the deepest the Dominion has penetrated into Federation space. However, Garak has been unable to do his part, though not for lack of trying. He spoke to the last few friends he has in Cardassian space, and they were all willing to help—use of past tense because they were all killed within a day of speaking to Garak.
Sisko says he’s sorry and is about to leave, but Garak has a plan B, though he thinks Sisko won’t like it. Instead of retrieving actual evidence, Garak can, instead, manufacture evidence, which would then be presented to Senator Vreenak. Vreenak is an influential senator, the one who negotiated the non-aggression pact, and who continues to be a hardliner in maintaining peaceful relations with the Dominion. He’s also having a diplomatic meeting with Weyoun on Soukara. Garak wants Sisko to request that he make a secret detour to DS9 on the way back from that meeting to present the evidence that Garak will fake.
The forgery will be of an optolythic data rod—a rod manufactured on Cardassia for official records, and which cannot be faked. But Garak, of course, knows someone who can fake one: Grathan Tolar, currently in a Klingon prison awaiting execution. Sisko contacts Gowron to arrange for a pardon, and Tolar is effusive in his gratitude. He’s willing to do whatever Sisko wants—but as soon as Sisko mentions that Garak is involved, Tolar visibly deflates and slumps to his quarters to await further instructions.
Unfortunately, Tolar goes to Quark’s, gets very drunk, propositions M’Pella while she’s working the dabo table, takes her refusal badly, and winds up getting into a fight with Quark, which ends with the latter being stabbed. Tolar claims to be a friend of Sisko’s, which the captain denies—but he is working on a top-secret mission for Sisko, and he can’t have any record of him being on the station. Odo’s willing to go along, but only if Quark declines to press charges. So Sisko has to bribe Quark—which actually thrills him—to keep Tolar’s presence on the station a secret.
In his log, Sisko says that he should’ve ended it there, but when he got to his office there was another casualty list. People were dying every day and it has to stop, somehow. He has to keep his eye on the ball.
Garak has locked Tolar in his quarters, and given him the impression that if he tries to force the door, it will explode. (Garak is cagey on the subject of whether or not that impression is legit.) He has also found a source for the rod. It’s the only source he’s going to find (they’re hard to obtain), and he requires 200 litres of bio-mimetic gel in payment. Sisko comes very close to ending the operation right there, given how it’s a heavily controlled substance, but he gives in—though he can’t get that much gel together. Garak allows as how the amount is negotiable. Sisko’s order to Bashir to package 85 litres for interstellar transport is met with annoyance by the doctor, who insists that the order be in writing, and he’s going to file an official protest with Starfleet Medical.
Tolar has created a very convincing holoprogram of a meeting among Weyoun and several Cardassians, including Damar. It’s taken a few drafts to get it right—the final touch was petty bickering between Weyoun and Damar, which added greatly to its verisimilitude. Tolar intends to leave the station, but Sisko makes it clear that he’s not going anywhere until the rod passes muster. If Vreenak—who is en route to the station from Soukara—buys it, then Tolar will be free. If the senator doesn’t, then Sisko will give Tolar right back to the Klingons. A very frightened Tolar—who is facing both a pissed-off Sisko and a calm smiling Garak (and it’s impossible to say which is scarier)—slinks back to his quarters.
In his log, Sisko thought it was all over at that point. Starfleet Command had signed off on the plan, after all. But he still has to convince Vreenak.
When the senator arrives (with only Sisko and Garak even knowing that he’s there), Garak informs Sisko that he plans to sneak onto Vreenak’s ship and search its databanks for any useful intelligence while Sisko meets with him. Vreenak is arrogant and acerbic and obnoxious, and he makes it clear—in much the same way Dax did earlier—that the Romulans see no reason to enter the war on the side that’s clearly going to lose. Sisko points out that if they do lose the war, the Romulans will be completely surrounded by the Dominion. Then Sisko shows Vreenak the rod’s recording. Vreenak, for obvious reasons, wishes to examine it, and Sisko hands it over.
In his log, Sisko pours himself a drink, talking about how he had to wait. He tried to do paperwork, but it was hard to focus on cargo manifests and reports and such. If Vreenak saw through the fake, it would be disastrous.
Sisko meets with Vreenak, who holds up the rod and declares that it’s a fake.
In his log, Sisko says that it all blew up in his face. All his doubts, compromises, rationalizations—all for nothing. Vreenak was furious and livid and left the station in a huff.
Sisko goes back to work, posting more casualty reports and generally being miserable, when Worf reports that Starfleet Intelligence has learned that Vreenak’s shuttle was destroyed while coming home from Soukara. The Tal Shiar is investigating, but they believe it was sabotage by the Dominion.
Worf, Dax, and Bashir are thrilled. Sisko, not so much. He storms to Garak’s shop and belts him right in the face. Garak planted a bomb on Vreenak’s shuttle as a backup in case Tolar’s work wasn’t all that and a bag of chips. The Tal Shiar will then find the rod and chalk up any imperfections to bomb damage rather than forgery, and since he was coming back from Soukara with the rod, the Tal Shiar will assume that the Dominion destroyed the shuttle because he got his hands on that rod with its revelation that the Dominion plans to invade Romulus. And all this saving of the Alpha Quadrant cost, says Garak, was the life of one Romulan senator (Garak apparently forgot about his four bodyguards), one criminal (Garak had Tolar killed also), and the self-respect of a single Starfleet officer, which Garak declares to be a bargain.
Sure enough, at 0800 the next morning, the Romulan Empire declares war on the Dominion and strikes fifteen bases on the border.
In his log, Sisko holds up his drink, bitterly toasting the entry of Romulus into the war. There’s even a welcome-to-the-war party being held in the wardroom. He’s lied, he’s bribed, he’s an accessory to murder—but he thinks he can live with it. He says it several times to convince himself.
Then he instructs the computer to erase that entire personal log.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Optolythic data rods are only created when needed, and information can only be placed on them once. They’re incredibly difficult to counterfeit.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko at one points credits his father with his usual equanimity in the face of making a decision. When you’re a chef, you have to be calm, because the soufflé will rise or not regardless of whether or not you worry about it. Waiting for Vreenak he finds that patience hard to come by for the first time.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira mostly gets to play messenger in this one, telling Sisko about the fall of Betazed and that the coded subspace signal he was expecting has arrived.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo is willing to bend the rules insofar as he gets the need to preserve security during wartime. But he’s not willing to bend so far that he’ll fail to formally arrest Tolar if Quark presses charges.
The slug in your belly: Dax does an excellent job role-playing a Romulan politician explaining why they’re staying out of the war—and, indeed, a lot of her points are repeated by Vreenak later.
There is no honor in being pummeled: When Dax is complaining about the Romulans’ remaining neutral, Worf is unusually quiet. Given that his parents were massacred by the Romulans, and his animus against them extended to refusing to do anything to save a dying Romulan’s life, his silence is bizarre, to say the least.
Rules of Acquisition: In exchange for not pressing charges after getting stabbed, Quark asks for his own clothes and M’Pella’s to be replaced, five bars of latinum to compensate him for lost business, and some cargo containers Odo is holding back because of import license issues to be taken care of. Once he declares it officially to be a bribe, Quark quotes the 98th Rule to Sisko: “Every man has his price.”
Plain, simple: Garak is initially recruited by Sisko in the hopes that he would be able to perform a covert mission, and things get out of hand pretty quickly—but Garak declares that Sisko wanted Garak involved from jump precisely because he could do things Sisko himself would be repulsed by.
Victory is life: One of the Jem’Hadar’s successful tactics has been to use Romulan space—which Starfleet and Klingon ships are forbidden by treaty from entering—as a staging area for attacks.
What happens on the holosuite, stays on the holosuite: Tolar creates a holoprogram meant to be realistic enough to look like a recording of actual events. It is demonstrated both to Sisko and later to Vreenak in one of Quark’s holosuites.
Keep your ears open: “So you’re the commander of Deep Space 9. And the Emissary to the Prophets. Decorated combat officer, widower, father, mentor—and, oh yes, the man who started the war with the Dominion. Somehow I thought you’d be taller.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“To be honest, my opinion of Starfleet officers is so low, you’d have to work very hard indeed to disappoint me.”
Vreenak greeting Sisko.
Welcome aboard: The great Canadian character actor Stephen McHattie appears as Vreenak. He’ll be back on Enterprise as an alien foreman in “The Xindi.” Howard Shangraw plays Tolar, while Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs, and Andrew J. Robinson are back as Damar, Weyoun, and Garak (the former two as holographic re-creations, marking the second week in a row that Combs has appeared as a fake Weyoun).
Trivial matters: This episode has the Romulans declaring war on the Dominion, marking the first time in Star Trek history that the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Star Empire have been formal allies. The Romulans’ non-aggression pact with the Dominion, which is abrogated in this episode, was established in “Call to Arms.”
Leslie Wong appears in your humble rewatcher’s comic one-shot Captain’s Log: Jellico, which chronicles her first mission as the first officer of the Cairo. While it’s never stated, I intended to imply that, when Jellico was assigned to the Enterprise in “Chain of Command,” Wong was given command of the Cairo, especially since New Frontier: House of Cards by Peter David established that Jellico was promoted to admiral after Picard took the Enterprise back in “Chain of Command, Part II.”
Your humble rewatcher portrayed the Dominion attack on Betazed in the short story “The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned” in Tales of the Dominion War. The Federation re-taking Betazed was chronicled in The Battle of Betazed by Charlotte Douglas & Susan Kearny, a conflict that included both the Enterprise and the Defiant, as well as a resistance on Betazed led by Lwaxana Troi.
Garak mentions Proconsul Neral, to whom Vreenak is an aide, who was last seen in TNG’s “Unification” two-parter.
The Romulan side of the story, told from the perspective of Spock—still working underground on Romulus, as he was at the end of “Unification II”—was shown in Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz’s short story “Blood Sacrifice” in Tales of the Dominion War.
Una McCormack’s Hollow Men serves as a direct sequel to this episode, showing the immediate aftermath of the Romulans’ entry into the war.
The original conception of the episode was to have a horrible secret be exposed by Jake as a reporter, but the writers couldn’t make the subsequent conflict between Jake and his father work. Instead, they focused on the secret thing being exposed rather than actually having it be exposed. The short story “Stone Cold Truths” by Peter David in Tales of the Dominion War posits a future in which the Romulans discover the truth of what happened in this episode and declare war on Earth.
The title of this episode is a reference to the Joker’s line from the 1989 Batman film: “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?”
Vreenak diverts to DS9 from the Dominion base on Soukara—the same planet that was the site of Worf and Dax’s ill-fated extraction mission in “Change of Heart.”
Bio-mimetic gel was first referenced in TNG’s “Force of Nature.” Its controlled status was established in “Distant Voices.”
Though Michael Taylor received sole script credit, the final draft of the script was done by Ronald D. Moore.
A much younger Vreenak appeared in David R. George III’s The Lost Era novel Serpents Among the Ruins, which chronicled the Tomed Incident (first referenced in TNG‘s “The Neutral Zone”). That novel showed the origins of the character’s animosity toward the Federation seen in this episode.
Walk with the Prophets: “It’s a faaaaaake!” It’s interesting that this episode aired right after “Inquisition,” because both episodes are about people who make unethical choices in order to bring about good results—the ends justifying the means. But while “Inquisition” had it as more of a background element to explain the existence of Section 31, we see it played out for realsies here. And we don’t have an organization that claims to be in place for the purpose of doing the nasty stuff like S31 is, we just have a Starfleet captain who is putting up appalling casualty figures once a week, who sees his side losing a war, and who must do something to fix it.
We see Star Trek captains deal with crises all the time, and we see them come up with solutions all the time. But Sisko here is faced with a crisis he can’t fix—or at least not fix easily. But it’s something that absolutely has to get done because people are dying by the shipload.
And at first it seems so simple. Get Garak to pull a rabbit out of his hat. He’s done it before—in “Second Skin,” for example—and surely the former spy can pull a covert op out of that same hat.
Casinos thrive on the fact that the human tendency is to not quit while ahead. Throw that roulette ball one more time. Play one more hand of blackjack. Pull the lever one more time and maybe this one will be the jackpot. When Garak announces that the operatives he contacted were all killed, Sisko’s ethical pot is as big as it’s going to get. Each cost seems tiny on the face of it, worth paying: the political capital needed to get a favor from Gowron, which is sufficiently minor as to happen off-screen, but still not negligible; bribing Quark to keep him from pressing charges against the forger who can’t hold his liquor; ordering Bashir to do something horribly unethical (something Bashir has already refused to do once before, which put him on a Lethean’s hit list); keep his entire senior staff in the dark about his covert meeting with a senator; and finally allowing that senator and four Romulan officers to be killed. Individually, they’re all things you can see happening, decisions Sisko can be seen to have to make in order to carry out his mission. But collectively, they add up, leading to Sisko pacing restlessly about his quarters, trying to purge the experience via reciting a log entry, drink in hand, trying so hard to convince himself that he can live with it that he needs to repeat those words three times.
One of the things I always loved about the character of Jean-Luc Picard is that he always seemed to be one step ahead of everyone else, and always was able to find a solution. We saw it many times throughout TNG, e.g., “Hide & Q,” “The Schizoid Man,” “The Survivors,” “The Wounded,” “Power Play,” “Ship in a Bottle,” the “Gambit” two-parter, etc. (It was also turned on its ear a bit in First Contact.) However, as Sisko himself pointed out in “Q-Less,” he’s not Picard, and that’s a good thing—not that one is better than the other, but it’s good to show different captains with different styles. Where Picard is larger-than-life—and that’s part of his appeal—Sisko is much more down-to-earth—also part of his appeal. He’s just as much a hero as Picard, but he’s more flawed, more fallible, and we see that on display here. He knows he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing, but he keeps seeing those damn casualty reports—not to mention learning of the fall of Betazed. That was a masterstroke, by the way, as up until now the battles away from the Bajoran system have taken place in locations that we don’t have much of an investment in. But Betazed is the homeworld of a Star Trek opening-credits regular and of a character who has recurred on DS9 several times. Betazed falling means something.
The yardstick that matters most, and it’s a terrible one, is how many people are getting killed. For all that The Wrath of Khan tried to invert it, Spock was basically right: more often than not, the needs of the many really do outweigh the needs of the few. War is, as Sisko and Garak both eloquently point out, a messy and bloody business. Sisko can’t save everyone—no one can. But he can do triage, put a tourniquet on the gaping wound, and at least keep the death toll lower, while also giving them a better chance to actually come out of it on the winning side.
He’s done a horrible thing. He knows he’s done a horrible thing, and it’s so horrible that the only person he can talk to about it is himself—and a computer that will gladly erase all trace of what he said. What’s admirable about this episode is not that Sisko did what he did, as it wasn’t admirable in the least, for all that it was probably necessary—it’s that he is suffering for it. Yes, he says he can live with it at the end, but he also repeats those words several times with different inflections. He isn’t saying he can live with it because he actually can live with it, he’s saying it because he’s trying (and failing) to convince himself.
What sells this episode more than anything are the performances of Avery Brooks and Andrew J. Robinson, who are both at their best. Robinson in particular deserves ample credit for his final scene when he lays out the specifics of what has happened, a rare moment of brutal honesty from the obfuscatory tailor, but a necessary bucket of ice water in Sisko’s face. And Brooks is magnificent here, covering a huge emotional range from sadness to anger to depression to annoyance to fury to resignation to frustration. Two bravura performances of a magnificent script that eloquently shows the horrors of war, not by piling bodies on top of each other, but showing the emotional and ethical cost. The war has taken many lives; in this episode, it also claims a soul.
Warp factor rating: 10
Keith R.A. DeCandido has a bunch of new things out, including Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution (reviewed on this very site!), “Time Keeps on Slippin’” in the Stargate SG-1/Atlantis anthology Far Horizons, “Fish Out of Water” in the Jonathan Maberry-edited anthology Out of Tune, “Stone Cold Whodunit” in the superhero anthology With Great Power, and “Merciless,” one of the adventures in the Firefly: Echoes of War role-playing game supplement Things Don’t Go Smooth.
Easily one of the best episodes of all 7 seasons. All the times when Sisko could have said, “Nope, nevermind, forget I said anything,” and he just keeps going.
War is hell on everyone, for all kinds of reasons.
Best. Episode. Ever.
Everything here works so well. Sisko inching into what ultimately happens, his reactions to everything after the fact. But what really makes this fit into DS9 as a whole is that this is just another instance of Garak pointing out that intelligence work is nasty and brutal and usually crosses the line of what most would consider ethical. The assassination of Vreenak (and there have been hints that Garak did some wet work in his past) is really just another point on the line that starts with Garak sneering at Bashir’s pseudo-Bond hologames. This is what spycraft really is.
allowing that senator and four Romulan officers to be killed
Minor quibble, phrasing really, but he does not allow it to happen, he only learns of it after it has happened and then does not reveal the truth. He allows the lie but has little responsibility (but not none) for the actual murders.
I always wondered whether Garak had thought that the Faaaake recording would ever work or if the murders were always the whole point of the plan.
This episode can become a useful parallel to Truman’s decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s not an exact match, but it reminds us that, in the Pacific Theater, things were not going very well and were going to get a lot worse. In order for the U.S. to prevail, Truman had to authorize a historic step forward in warfare that would destroy the lives of tens upon tens of thousands of civilians.
I say this not because I believe the bombs were the right thing to do. I’ve been to Hiroshima and looked at it through a historian’s eyes. I’m also a peace lover, and I am emphatically against the use of nuclear weapons in any situation. I am aware of the consequences had the U.S. not dropped the bomb, or only dropped one, and I am still against their use, in that situation or ever again.
But “In the Pale Moonlight” makes me wonder: what did Truman go through? He had advisors of all stripes, but ultimately he made the decision. He said it was a purely military response – but did he harbor the same suffering in response that Sisko did? DS9 is fiction, of course, and Sisko isn’t Truman, but science fiction is a useful lens to reexamine history.
I could not agree with you more about the differences between Picard and Sisko. When I watch this episode, I’m actually reminded of the end of Chain of Command, when Picard opens up to Counselor Troi about being tortured, and confesses that Gul Madred had ultimately broken him. It was a very poignant moment, but also something uniquely Picard. In other words, I could never envision Shatner’s Capt. Kirk in a similar situation; he was too much of a super hero to either break under torture, or to admit it to his crew (at least in the original series).
Here, we have Sisko agonizing over a moral choice: six lives versus millions. Again, a powerful scene and a powerful performance, but I could never see Patrick Stewart’s Picard acting out this scenario. It is uniquely Brooks’ Captain Sisko and uniquely Deep Space Nine.
This is one I’ve deliberately avoided rewatching – because it’s so good.
I remember the first time I watched it, I was sure that the Romulans would formally join the Dominion after the meeting and was shocked, shocked to realize what Garak had done (with the same feeling and thoughts that Sisko had).
This was my first time rewatching it, and I remembered the Romulans declare war on the Dominion, but forgot how it came to be. My memory was that the holoforgery worked. When the Senator called it a fake, I was astounded at how perfectly the story had been crafted. I didn’t remember the explosion, but I remembered that Garak had one more trick up his sleeve. And I was not disappointed.
Just to be a contrarian, I think Worf’s remaining quiet worked. It showed some of the influence of Jadzia (biting his tongue when he is annoyed) and conveyed a sense of seething anger. I found it well played – but that may just be handwaving on my part.
Thank you, Keith. I see so many people online saying “Sure, Sisko did bad stuff here, but he could live with it.” They’re misreading that final scene, missing what Brooks’s performance conveys: That he’s trying and failing to convince himself that he can live with it. He knows it was wrong, he knows it was a mistake, but the cost of coming clean about it would be too high, so he has to try to live with it, no matter what.
In his defense, though, I see this episode as being mainly about Garak’s choices rather than Sisko’s. Sisko is desperate enough that he lets Garak lead him astray, and doesn’t see how deep he’s being dragged down until it’s too late. Maybe there was a better, more ethical way to convince the Romulans to side against the Dominion, but once Sisko made the bad decision to turn to Garak, he was blinded to other options, because Garak could just be so persuasive. Garak was the Devil that Sisko chose to dance with, and the Devil always leads.
One of the best episodes of not only DS9 but all of Trek. And one helluva war story (without a single on-camera explosion or firefight, mind you), and showing what war can and often does to “the good guys.”
Plus, it shows you don’t need a big shadow entity like Section 31 to tell a story of a human pushing aside his morality to get the job done. Just have him rubbing shoulders with the local scum and villainy and you’ve got something.
One of the best episodes of Star Trek, hands down.
@6 – The difference, I think, is that Sisko was working to reconcile what he felt was wrong with what he felt was needed. He isn’t going to come to peace, but he knows there weren’t any other available options. Picard would have allowed himself to be haunted and questioned it, until the writers needed him not to be haunted.
@@.-@ – I think the murders were always planned. It was a failure proof option. Regardless of the forgery, the result is going to be Romulus attacking the Dominion – because regardless, the data rod is going to be the evidence they rely on and the death is the confirmation. I doubt Garak would ever leave anything to chance.
@5: The thing about your nuclear-weapon analogy, the thing that people tend to overlook, is that they weren’t all that revolutionary in terms of the total amount of destruction they caused. The Allies had been firebombing Japanese cities for quite some time then, and had already destroyed most of the cities in the country, with some of the conventional firebombings doing even more damage to lives and property than the nuclear bombs did in immediate terms (not counting fallout and radiation poisoning, hazards which weren’t understood until later). The atomic bomb was seen as just a more efficient way of carrying out what was already a common strategy in WWII. Maybe the scientists saw the long-term potential for mass devastation, but in the context of a war where entire cities were already being bombed to rubble on a regular basis, I don’t know if the political and military leaders would’ve seen the atomic bomb as that much more horrific.
@6: Kirk a superhero in the original series? Hardly. Maybe in the movies, certainly in fan myth, but in the show itself, Kirk was always portrayed as an everyman with genuine vulnerabilities and doubts. He certainly was broken from time to time — when Edith Keeler died, when Miramanee and his unborn child died, when Rayna Kapec died. The Psi 2000 virus brought out his vulnerabilities and he admitted them to Spock. He admitted his fears and doubts to McCoy in “Balance of Terror” and elsewhere.
@@@@@ 4 and 11
I’ve always thought that Garak hoped the forgery would work, but planted the bomb in case it didn’t. He’s always seemed like the type to have a back up plan.
Perhaps the bomb was even designed to look like it was planted by the Dominion, so that if it didn’t have to be used and was discovered by the Romulans, it would further support the idea that they couldn’t be trusted.
Your review hit the nail on the head about why this episode is on every single list of the best of Trek: because it exemplifies what makes Star Trek tick.
Star Trek isn’t about rubber-forehead aliens of the week. It’s not about technobabble and overcoming the latest holodeck malfunction. It’s about characters exploring what it means to be human, exploring the choices we have to face both as individuals and a race, and what the consequences of those choices are.
“In The Pale Moonlight” works because our two major players here, Sisko and Garak, have to deal with what every single leader in every war have always had to deal with: can I live with the blood on my hands if it means victory and saving more lives than were lost? We’re quick to reduce war to a numbers game, but it has a very, very personal cost, and watching Sisko tell himself that, or maybe he was asking himself if, he “can live with it” helps remind us of that fact.
I’ve been waiting for you to get to this one, Keith. Great review.
@12: If I can pick apart your comment, CLB – the revolutionary nature of the bombs is precisely why they were dropped. A bit of early “shock and awe,” if you will.
The firebombing of Tokyo and nearly every other major Japanese city had been going on for quite some time, and caused a very specific type of damage. Over the course of several days, entire districts would be set aflame, and people perished by burning, through building collapse, and in similar “well-known” ways. The Japanese knew what a long firebombing campaign entailed, and although it was slowly wearing them down, they wouldn’t surrender to it.
But if you instantaneously evaporate people and buildings, that catches the eye. The surrender happened long before the after-effects set in (Hersey’s Hiroshima is an excellent, accessible read on this period), so it had to have been in reaction to the utter, total devastation twice inflicted by the new technology.
Which is why I think Truman did know what the result would be. He certainly didn’t predict the medical, environmental, military, or political after-effects – but I think dropping the bomb was intended to be a slap in the face, demonstrating American military might and cowing the Japanese, thereby avoiding an invasion that would have been costly both economically and in human life. And it was quite effective, achieving the result Truman had desired – Japanese surrender.
But perhaps, as you note, since Truman didn’t know about the after-effects, he didn’t lose sleep over it as Sisko did. He knew the death toll would have been the same, and it was just a faster way of achieving it, but he was still going to kill all those people anyway. But remember, too, the potential loss of American life from a land invasion. Might he have felt that by dropping the bombs, so only “the Japs” would die, he was avoiding anything to lose sleep over?
Your comment has brought me around to a new way of thinking: perhaps, then, Truman is the opposite of Sisko here, and slept like a baby…
While the decision to use the conquering of Betazed to bring home the reality of the war was good, I think an even better idea would hve been for the Dominion to invade Trill.
Betazed is the homeworld of a main-credits character, but Trill is the homeworld of a main-credits character on this show. Of all the cultures of the main characters, Dax/Trill was the least explored, especially as the show went on and moved deeper into the war narrative. (Trill doesn’t get any real focus in the show until “season 8”.)
All the characters had their own continuing storyline they were attached to – except Dax. Sisko, Odo, Kira, Worf, Quark, all have their own plot that they’re central to. Bashir gets Section 31, O’Brien gets the Orion Syndicate. But Dax has nothing. Bringing Trill into the war in this very visceral way would have solved that lack quite nicely.
It could have provided an excellent arc to end the sixth season – the mission to retake Trill from the Dominion. Dax would surely have had to have been central to that story. It could even have provided a great heroic way for Jadzia to go out and be replaced with Ezri. That’s if she even still wanted to leave after that – maybe the greater focus on her character would have convinced Terry Farrell to stay.
Anyway, just an interesting what-if scenario.
“He knows he’s done a horrible thing, and it’s so horrible that the only person he can talk to about it is himself—and a computer that will gladly erase all trace of what he said.”
As an aside, I have this un-written legal history of the Federation in my head which includes an extraordinary set of privacy protections. I always think about it when things like this happen — when people are talking about things where the computer can hear them that they REALLY shouldn’t be talking out loud about. It’s most visible when we’re watching the villains scheme together in some guest quarters somewhere, and no trace of that scheme getting back to, say, the Captains of the ships.
So many plots would be hijacked completely if the computer just said, “Oh, you know, I heard that and now I’m reporting it. Have a nice day.”
But it never does! It doesn’t even actively track crew members, and only tracks even them passively via their communicators!
What this implies to me is an incredible amount of privacy protection. That Sisko can feel free to speak out loud on the station about these things, and then feel secure in the fact that whatever he did happen to record actually did get erased… hot damn!
Its a great episode to show why making decisions based out of desperation is a bad thing. Sisko lets himself be overcome with desperation. He falls into the classic trap of “We must do something. This is something. Ergo, I must do this”. At every stage it is shown how it is falling apart, but he then he falls to the “sunk cost fallacy”, he’s done so much that he feels he can’t quit. By writer fiat it comes together, but really what should have happened was Romulus ending joining the Dominion against the Federation. I do wonder, had JJ not blown Romulus up with quantum lens flare, how it would have played out in the future after the Dominion war when this came out (as all dirty secrets tend to), especially with Garak so key in rebuilding Cardassia; he’d have no qualms about leaking the information if he had to. Garak is a Cardassian patriot after all. Garak is Space-Charles DeGaulle.
I do share, however, your admiration that for once it feels like someone who is “making the hard choices” actually makes it feel like a hard choice. Full marks to Brooks, and the production team for that. It was something he should feel anguish over. Whatever Garak says about saving the Federation, Sisko betrayed everything it stood for in order to do it.
@11+13
Yes it is like Garak (or any good chessmaster) to set up backup plans for the potential failure of the first plan but when I first saw this I took it to be that Garak knew the recording would not be up to snuff and that the murder by explosion was the true plan all along. He lied to Sisko about his plan and used the surface appearance to misdirect him while he carried out the real plan. He hired Tolar not because he believed he could make a good enough fake but because he knew that his fake would be close enough to work after the explosion
I admired Garak’s cleverness not in having two possible scenarios that could work in his favour but how he used a false scenario to throw off Sisko while still using the elements of it for a real yet even more morally questionable plan.
That was always my understanding of what he did, does anyone else see it this way?
Oh, and totally forgot to mention. My big bugbear from this episode. If they really wanted to have Sisko’s angst be a big thing to the audience, they have done what JJ also failed to do in the ’09 movie. Instead of throwing Betazed into the fridge (or as JJ did, Vulcan) they should have had Earth itself fall. Then it would have meant something to the audience. Betazed, for all it means a bit more than Random Planetia Du Jour, still wouldn’t have felt as real as actual Earth.
@21: The way the Federation is set up, by my understanding: If Earth fell, then the war would actually just be over.
@22 It has certainly seemed that way at times, but it was never supposed to be. Earth was supposed to be one planet among many, perhaps the Capitol, but not the entirety. This would have been a golden opportunity to explore that. To draw from WW2, if England had fallen after Dunkirk and London invaded by German tanks, that would not have been the end of the British War, they would have drawn on its dispersed assets like its colonies and Canada to continue the fight. Certainly when France fell, the Free-French fought on (despite what talk radio would have you believe) and the other allies fought on. There is no reason for Earth falling to be the end, a massive defeat (on par with what Japan did to the Brits in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Burma), but not the end.
It would have been such a marvellous opportunity to show the Federation was than just Earth. Especially with so many non-Human characters as cast members to explore other viewpoints on it.
You know, I’ve watched this episode many times, and I rewatched the end in light of this review . . .
And I don’t agree with you guys. I don’t think Sisko failed to convince himself he could live with it at all. I think when he said he could, he meant it — perhaps for the first time.
I think he might not be happy with it. I think he may be unsure what to think of himself realizing that he CAN live with it. But I think he knows he can.
I don’t think the man who he’d be if he couldn’t live with it would be the same man who would insist on finishing the job at Cardassia Prime when the others suggested that the Dominion was beaten and it would be necessary. But I do think it suggests the same man who had no taste for drinking to the final victory with Martok.
Er, that’s “suggested that the Dominion was beaten and it WOULDN’T be necessary.”
And this is another reason while I like watching Sisko, I think he is horrible. He hated on S31 last week but is this very week employing tactics that are right out of their playbook.
I don’t mind S31 (couldn’t leave comments last week) in the show because it is tolerated or supported by the Starfleet brass, so is at least showing a darkside of some of the admirals.
#21
I’m no great fan of the 2009 movie, but I do think Vulcan’s destruction meant something, far more than Betazed falling under the control of the Dominion. It’s directly tied to one of the main characters of the movie. And Betazed could be taken back. Vulcan couldn’t.
Anyway, I agree that Betazed is a bit too light a defeat. The fall of Vulcan or Earth or even Trill would’ve meant far more to the audience.
I’m a big fan of this episode. Great acting job by Avery Brooks, especially at the very end.
He could have probably talked to Kira, afterwards if he wasn’t emissary, I think he knows how she sees him and just pretends it isn’t the case as she covers it normally.
Cannot say enough about this one. Truly one of the finest hours of television I have ever seen. Just amazing.
@16: Actually I’ve seen it compellingly argued that the Japanese surrender had nothing to do with the atomic bombings. The government didn’t meet to discuss surrender after Hiroshima was bombed, and their meeting to discuss surrender on August 9 happened before Nagasaki was bombed — but after Stalin declared war on Japan, depriving them of any options for forcing or negotiating favorable terms for their surrender. This article lays out the case in detail, including a discussion of the reasons why both sides found it preferable to attribute Japan’s defeat to the atom bombs:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii
@18: It wasn’t that long ago that being able to trust that our electronic devices were not spying on us would’ve been seen as a bare minimum standard for personal privacy rather than an “incredible” degree thereof.
@23: Actually I think that having Earth be the world that fell would be the last thing that would call attention to the rest of the Federation, because then the whole war would be about Earth. Earth’s been endangered too many times in the movies as it is; spreading the danger out to other major Federation worlds helps it feel more like there are other worlds that matter.
Also, doesn’t it follow that if they took Earth, they would’ve had to capture other, more outlying worlds first? So worlds like Betazed would’ve had to fall somewhere along the line before that, and that hadn’t happened yet. We’d seen the war being fought along the border, but we hadn’t previously gotten any indication that the Federation was losing territory. The fall of Betazed is the beginning of that process, and that’s a major event.
@26: Like I said, I see it as Garak employing the tactics and convincing Sisko to go along with it. Sisko never would’ve taken these steps if Garak hadn’t been goading him into them.
@31: Well, yes, but that was before things like the Kinect, which is not so far really from what a ship like the Enterprise-D is a big, armed, inhabitable, warp-powered version of.
And of course, these series were written before things like the Kinect as well, but even when I was watching real-time it always somehow seemed tough to swallow that a ship like Enterprise-D wouldn’t be somehow equipped to, say for example, give the commanding crew some immediate evidence as to who killed K’Ehleyr.
But with some plausible legislation in place, suddenly it becomes credible to me again.
@31 Building on what you said, Earth would certainly have fallen after other notable worlds. It also occurs to me that we already saw some Earth-under-Dominion-attack play out in the Homefront/Paradise Lost two-parter where some Founders had infiltrated Starfleet. Seeing Earth under a fuller scale attack would have been bigger, but Earth had already been threatened, so I don’t think the viewers would need Earth to fall to make a proper impact. Earth was already at risk, as was the whole of the quadrant. Most of season 6 makes that more than clear.
Good recap to an amazing episode. A plot that I’m not going to offer judgments about, partly because I keep changing my views about it over time, which I think is part of its genius.
I like the analysis of Picard vs. Sisko. I’ve also gone back and forth about which of them I like better, and it’s a tough decision because they’re awesome in such different ways.
I do think Worf’s silence about Romulans made PERFECT sense. You could see his loathing for them whirling around in his head, but he knows that as much as he hates them, both of his nations need them as allies right now, so there’s nothing he can really say that will be productive. Very believable.
@31 Most recent historians credit the Japanese surrender to the advance of the Soviet Union, and many suggest that the US dropped the bombs in advance of that to get Japan to surrender before the Soviets invaded and stop the Soviet advance in yet another territory. So, yes, I agree.
@@.-@ Of course, Garak never meant for Vreenak to live. It was a failsafe and not something to be left to any chance. Even if Vreenak accepted the data rod as authentic, its provenience would be even more authenticated if the “Dominion” destroyed his ship to keep it from getting back to Romulus.
I adore this episode. It is well scripted and stunningly well acted. I have been looking forward to this review for a couple of weeks, and the review is as good as the episode, so thanks KRAD.
It is bleak, and it is the episode that Inquisition could have been if done a little better. It is the heart of the questions of DS9 and of a Trek that has finally run into a situation that requires the removal of any illusions.
@31 & 35 – I have seen the argument regarding Stalin several times, including the excellent FP article CLB linked to. My solely personal view, based on research into the bombings as well as travels in Japan, is that the Soviet Union could have played no more than an equal part to the surrender, and not the greater part – but history is all about interpretation, anyway. There is no single right answer to “why did Japan surrender.”
This is all tremendously off the point of Sisko’s feelings in this episode, though. While I greatly enjoy the historical discussion (and would be happy to continue it elsewhere), I feel like I’ve smeared too much real-world history all over this particular rewatch and should leave well enough alone. :)
@35: I don’t like the implication that optimism is an illusion and darkness and moral compromise are the only reality. I think it’s the other way around: the assumption that moral compromise is necessary is just an excuse people use for engaging in moral compromise. Yes, there’s a lot of bad stuff in the world, but that’s because the universe is governed by entropy. Things fall into decay if left untended. But that’s why it’s so imperative to fight that tendency to decay, to work to make things better, rather than just becoming complicit in the deterioration. Star Trek has never, ever been about any illusion that the world is perfect. It’s been about the recognition that we have to work to make things better. An ideal is not an illusion, it’s a goal to strive toward. And if you ever stop striving toward it, that’s when entropy drags you backward. The more excuses you make for compromising your ideals, the more inexorable the backward pull becomes. That’s what Sisko learned here. He thought he could make a small moral compromise but he got dragged into a much bigger one. If he’d held his ground, if he’d refused to let Garak lead him astray, maybe he could’ve found a better way to win over Romulus. Maybe Odo could’ve used his in with the Founders to infiltrate them and find the proof of their plans to invade Romulus. Maybe Sisko could’ve sought help from Picard or Spock and they could’ve reasoned the Romulans into cooperating. We can’t know those wouldn’t have worked, because Sisko didn’t try them.
@@@@@ 24
I agree with you — I’ve always thought Sisko’s last “I can live with it” is said with enough conviction to suggest that he has just convinced himself that he can, in fact, live with it.
I think it is a compliment to the writing, acting, and directing on DS9 that an episode like this has enough nuance and events that are left ambiguous that we can have these different ideas and any of them could be correct.
While I do place this episode very high on my list of great Star Trek, does anyone else find it very convenient Vreenak was written as a snide ass? Certainly we know by this point not all Romulans are like this. Some are good natured, even honorable. And Vreenak’s extreme jerk-tastic attitude does soften the blow somewhat. Yes, he was murdered by “the good guys,” but he was such a meanie to Sisko.
Maybe a great episode could’ve been made greater had Vreenak been more even-tempered and diplomatic, like a Romulan version of Picard.
One of my single favorite episodes of any TV show ever. It peeled back the shiny veneer of the Federation. (I’m not a huge Star Trek guy.) And I love stories where “good” people have to make “bad” decisions.
Count me as another one who thinks the assassination was the plan all along. Even if the rod passed Vreenak’s initial inspection, there’s no guarantee it would hold up to whatever scrutiny it was subjected to on Romulus (and you can assume it would examined very closely indeed); and even if the Romulans were convinced that it was real, there’s no guarantee that the decision would be for war – the Senate might try another round of appeasement instead. But a corpsified Senator is just the thing to get people – even Romulans – thinking with their hearts rather than their brains.
And while Sisko is a tender soul, it’s not like the prospect of corpsifying a Romulan – or any number of Romulans – would matter to Garak. He’s very results-oriented that way, you know.
This episode was one of the best the Star Trek writers have ever turned out. Avery Brooks and Andrew Robinson played that to the nines! I seriously watched this episode on the edge of my seat the whole time.
This is one of the episodes people have talked up from basically the moment I started watching the series – before, even. I always had this held up to me as a shining example of DS9. I even had the end spoiled for me; I knew coming in that ‘Sisko fakes evidence that gets the Romulans to join the war’. When I was watching it, by the time I got near the end, I was thinking, “Well, this is good, but it hasn’t been the spectacular episode everyone made it out to be.” Then Vreenak held up the recording and declared it to be a
fakefaaaaaaaaake. I went “…bwah? Wait, then… okay, huh. I wonder what’s going to happen to change things.”Then Vreenak’s ship got blown up.
I realized what had happend about the time Sisko went marching down the Promenade. And it was pretty much a punch to the gut for me. It was the last few minutes of the episode that tied the whole thing together, that made you realize just what had been going on the entire time. A sudden twist at the end of an episode can come across as a poorly-done deus ex machina if done wrong. But if done right? It twists the knife just a little bit harder, and takes an episode from ‘a hit’ to ‘out of the park’. This episode, in the final few minutes, knocked it out of the park.
@39: I’m not sure I find it convenient, no. This guy was explicitly the Romulan senator that had been the most hardline member of the ‘we’re not getting involved in the war’ camp. I can think of quite a few reasons he might have for that which would also lend to a snide personality, at least towards Sisko; he might be an opportunist waiting for the war’s dust to settle, he might have a blatant dislike for the Federation in general, he might just be annoyed at ‘some Federation celebrity trying to wine and dine him to switch a stance he’s already made up his mind on’. I can see him being snide about the DS9 trip quite easily.
This is DS9’s best dramatic episode.
“I always wondered whether Garak had thought that the Faaaake recording would ever work or if the murders were always the whole point of the plan.”
I believe that it WAS the plan because Garak knew that a) the rod couldn’t be faked and b) he knew Sisko wouldn’t approve the murder of the Romulans. He knew Sisko would go along with throwing the Dominion to the wolves via the faked rod, but also knew that Sisko would not be able to cross that line into assassination.
I love how he made Sisko face what he had done. And Sisko CAN live with it; he will just feel guilty forever about it.
It was a splendid ep that showed the hard choices that are made during wartime, and that even good people are obliged to sometimes do bad things in war.
I watched this episode in rapt attention as a snot-nosed 17-year-old kid back in ’98, and watched it again in rapt attention last week. This is one of my favourite episodes of Star Trek, period. This episode showed that Starfleet captains are not these large-than-life figures, but real people who made life or death decisions affecting countless lives, especially in wartime. Until the end, I always felt Sisko was talking to us, the audience, outlining to us the hard choices leaders have to make in wartime and displaying to us the personal cost. Only at the very end when Sisko tells the computer to erase the log is that broken and the fourth wall comes back; A great way to draw us into Sisko’s moral crisis.
Magnificent hour, kudos to Avery Brooks and Andrew J. Robinson.
“But the most damning thing of all is… I think I can live with it” This line uttered by Sisko, when he is summarizing his misdeeds in the last monologue, highlights, why the show would end with a final confrontation between him and Gul Dukat. Both men are more similar than either of them would ever admit. Both characters believe in doing what has to be done and that the ends justify the means. However, where Gul Dukat would rationalize away any guilt with his massive ego and self-deception, Sisko is a too honest and humble man to do so. Sisko knows the truth, that Gul Dukat never learned (or refused to): That a necessary act of evil is still an act of evil, no matter how justified or necessary it was. For this reason, Sisko remains in the role of the hero, and Gul Dukat in the role of the villain.
The only problem I have with this episode is it always feels like its about 25 minutes long, not 45, when I watch it – I just loose track of time because of all the awesome going on… I wish this story was novelized! It would be fantastic to see the days around all the key highlights the episode shows fleshed out a bit more and also look at events from some other characters perspectives.
One thing that is missed while we’re examing this. What arrogance Sisko has, that HE hath decided the Dominion must be brought into the war and only He hath the ability and drive to do so. At the end of the day he is still only a captain, oh a senior captain perhaps, but just a captain on a station far away from Starfleet command. It isn’t as if there are buildings full of Starfleet officers analyzing the big picture, seeing more than that board of names, it isn’t like there is the whole panoply of the Federation diplomatic corp doing their damndest to win over allies by fair means instead of foul, no it is Sisko and only Sisko that can save this. Arrogance!
When Vreenak pointed out that it was Sisko who started the war with Dominion (although not entirely accurate) he put his Romulan finger squarely on it. Sisko has a lot of guilt tied up in those casualty lists, and he really shouldn’t have been the person making the decisions he did. He was desperate and driven by guilt, this wasn’t a man making the Hard Choices [tm] of Command, this was a man desperate to assuage his own guilt.
@43, The roots of Vreenak’s anti-Federation outlook were detailed in DRG’S Serpent Among the Ruins.
Vreenak was a ambasasadoriale aide and very pro-Romulan during the time of the Tomed Incident. He was an ardent supporter of the Romulan admiral who suppousedly carried out the attack and believed the UFP framed him.
Obviously, it got worse in the intervening years.
@48, One thing I wish the series had dealt with more during the last two season was the Federation civilians or dissidents blaming Sisko for the War. In a sense, he is responsible; discovering the Wormhole set this all in motion.
Mr. Magic: ack! Thank you for reminding me about Serpents Among the Ruins. I totally forgot about Vreenak’s presence in that book…..
(In my defense, I read Serpents in manuscript form when I was attending my great-grandmother’s funeral, and it was hard to focus, and I was spending most of my focus on making sure that the Klingon stuff was consistent with what I was doing in The Art of the Impossible. So a lot of details have fled my brain.)
(That is, BTW, the same great-grandmother on whom I based President Nan Bacco.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
#43
Yeah, I know we can easily explain a Romulan hard-liner’s dislike for the Federation and humans. What I’m saying is it didn’t have to be written that way. He could’ve been against joining the war but still not have been portrayed as such a snide ass.
Maybe the murder could’ve had more impact had Sisko and Vreenak found a way to melt the ice a little before Vreenak discovers the faaaaake. Sisko betrays the bit of trust (maybe even the start of a friendship) they’ve established. And what better way to show how different DS9 is from TNG than showing Sisko playing a part, albeit unwittingly, in the murder of a Romulan version of Picard?!
@34,
@48
@49
Ah the Romulans. The ones who actually could see the whole storm coming as far back as “Visionary”
And who tried twice to do something about it (“Visionary” and “The Die is Cast”). Think of all those (non-Ds9 as that would have been blown up) innocents who would have been saved if the wormhole had just been closed back in Visionary. “Visionary”‘s Romulan solution is effectively the same as what Garak does here, just with a better payoff as regards overall total lifes saved. Klingon-Cardassian war, Klingon Federation war and Dominion war. All averted. And yet they get painted as being dishonerable because they signed a non-aggression pact.
And now the Federation comes crawling to them looking for a military bailout. Vreenaks attitude could easily have been characterised as “You made your bed with the naivity of a gaping open wormhole in order to perform exploration and not closing the wormhole after 2+ years of Dominion neferaious activity. Now lie in it”
Many innocent Romulans will die to help out the Klingons and Federation. After all, Romulan space will be invaded as well in the war.
@24
I really dont get the sense that Sisko cannot life with what he did. Its down to Brooks’s acting during the last scene. The way he raises the pitch of his voice for the second “I can live with it” and the raising of one leg over another, suggest to me that he cannot.
Fantastic episode and one that deserved a followup. I read “Hollow Man” and while good, it wasn’t the sort of sequal I wanted. I would have prefered a more G’Kar/Londo sense of betryal as regards the other Ds9 main characters’s feelings towards Sisko. He deserved to be in the doghouse after this, for a while at least.
“Six lives versus millions” is bad math; it leaves out all of the Romulans who are going to die in the war now. Probably closer to hundreds of thousands versus millions, here.
While the Federation is a lot more than earth, Starfleet is way, way disproportionately human. Which probably says unfortunate things about the Federations pretentions to republicanism, and definately says a lot about resistance after Earth falls. (It would probably be almost entirely Andorian, with a handful of under-armed and/or vintage Vulcan ships.)
@37 It’s the jew-in-the-attic problem.Do you honestly tell the SS about the Jews hiding in your attic, or do you cross your heart and let them die?
Or on a smaller scale, if it is wrong to lie, and wrong to hurt someones feelings, what should you do when the truth will hurt someone?
Anyone who has more than one moral principle is bound to occasionally come across incidents where they have to pick one over the other. Only a monomaniac can avoid moral compromise.
But that’s not the Fundamental Black Evil Truth at the heart of the Universe: it’s just a fact of life that you can’t always have everything you want.
Just because you can’t have utopia doesn’t mean you can’t make anything better.
@54: That’s exactly my point. It’s a lie to say that optimism is the delusional belief that nothing bad ever happens. Optimism is not a naive illusion; it is the committed belief that bad things can be overcome, that the imperfections of the world are a problem to be solved rather than an excuse to give up and wallow in immorality yourself.
Utopia is not a destination; it’s a direction. If you point yourself toward an ideal world and keep striving in its direction, then you will never reach it, but you can and will get closer to it. And you and the people around you will be better off than those who scoff at you for dreaming while letting entropy and despair drag them downward.
I’ve been looking forward to this review. It’s very rare for an hour of television to be as emotionally exhausting as this episode. I know it’s the go-to episode when people are asked what the best episode of DS9 is, but that’s not without reason. And I’m not ordinarily fond of Dark ‘N’ Edgy, “I did what I had to do,” optimism-is-for-losers stories, but ultimately I don’t think this is one; it’s about what Sisko chose to do, not necessarily what he had to do, and it’s a much deeper exploration of the ends justifying the means than, say, every season of 24 put together. Also, Garak’s always been my favorite character in this series, and he was amazing in this episode.
For those of you wondering how Truman felt about dropping the bomb, we don’t have to speculate: he’s on the record as saying that he didn’t lose a single night’s sleep over it.
This is one of my favorite episodes. Not just of DS9, not just of Trek, but of all the TV I’ve seen. It’s something I never thought I’d see in Star Trek and it handles everything wonderfully. I didn’t see the end coming at all, but it felt completely believable.
One detail I’ve always loved is the bickering Garak wrote for the holographic Weyoun and Damar.
I love that even in a holographic forgery meant to bring the Romulans into the war, Garak can’t resist taking potshots at Dukat.
@50, What I loved about Vreenak’s inclusion there is that it made his death on DS9 an ironic demise from a dramatic POV.
In DRG’s novel, he believes his hero Vokar was framed for an attack which prevented a Federation-Romulan War.
60 years later, he himself is killed and the Dominion is framed as part of a plan to bring Romulus into a Federation war.
@57: That doesn’t surprise me about Truman, because the atom bombs were the culmination of the tactics of mass destruction that characterized the entire war. In retrospect, when we think of the horrors of WWII, we think of the Holocaust and the atomic bombings, but to people at the time and after, they saw war itself as a horror that had escalated out of control. In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was a lot of sentiment that we had to find a way to end war forever because we couldn’t survive another. That’s why the United Nations was founded.
You know, in Star Trek and some other SF, there’s often been a belief that we’d need to go through a cataclysmic, nearly world-destroying war, like Trek’s World War III, before we outgrew our aggressions and built a better future. But I think that WWII already was that cataclysmic war that scared us straight. For all that we built up a massive nuclear arsenal in the decades since, our experience with mass destruction in WWII made us unwilling to cross that line again. So there was some lag time, a more gradual transition that’s been going on for the past seven decades, but the trend of progressively escalating wars ended with WWII, the wars since have been smaller, and the world has gotten more peaceful and stable overall since WWII ended.
@48: Sisko wasn’t acting unilaterally though. He had permission from Starfleet Command to carry out the operation.
This is the episode that ties together everything I love about DS9. It’s not just the “best” episode, but the one which really captures the soul of the series. In the Pale Moonlight manages to highlight everything I love about DS9 – the moral ambiguity, the superb interplay between actors, the honest characterization, and the willingness to take chances dramatically.
So what’s the definitive episode of each series? I’d vote for City on the Edge of Forever for TOS, and All Good Things for TNG, for similar reasons. They were both intellectually ambitious works that tried to push beyond the familiar tropes associated with sci-fi on television (which, admittedly, TOS largely originated).
I just didn’t like either Voyager or Enterprise enough to think about either in this respect.
Excellent review of an excellent episode. A very well deserved 10. Amazing to think that Garak was only supposed to be in one or two episodes and that Andrew Robinson only took the role on “to pay a few bills”. He even gets to say one of my favourite lines of the series in a later episode: “Now get out of here before I say something unkind…”
This, for me, is one of the best episodes of Trek ever, and I say that as someone who prefers TNG and Voyager to DS:9. But this episode ticked all the boxes, carried by an outstanding script and stellar performances. I’d actually stopped watching DS:9 when this episode became available in the UK and was persuaded by a friend that I had to watch this even if I never watched another ep. She was right and I got back into the show from this point. Terrific episode, worthy of a 10.
@55 that may have been the point you intended to make, but it looked to me as though the point you intended to make was that he should have found some way to get what he wanted without any moral compromise.
Which strikes me as a rather ambitious demand to make of a man fighting a war.
@65: No, my point is that I reject the cynical assumption that optimism is nothing but an illusion. That’s misunderstanding what it is.
I have a small gripe with this episode. How did Vreenak know it was a faaaaaake? Because he’s f’n Romulan, right? NO. It’s because Garak got f’n careless. He put the Legate Badge on RUSOT, not Damar. It could be argued that Tolar wasn’t well versed in Cardassian rank structure, or didn’t give a shit, or both. HOWEVER Garak was there the entire time and should have known better. He has proven that he is capable of paying extreme attention to detail in the past (like when he blew up the tailor shop). So why would he miss something so trivial and obvious? The only answers I could come up with are either that there has to be some apparent on-screen why of justifying Tolar seeing through it, or that Garak didn’t like Damar enough to respect his rank. One has to assume Garak despised Damar for the simple fact that he (almost literally) worshipped Dukat. And we all know how Dukat and Garak feel about one another. Either way, given how shady and paranoid Romulan authorities are known to be, I think being a member of the Romulan government is reason enough for Tolar to figure it out. Garak didn’t have to conveniently forget that Damar is now the leader of Cardassia. I’d give this episode a 9 for forgetting that Garak was a certified super spy.
On the subject or moral compromises and WWII, I think we’ve all overlooked the single biggest moral compromise of the entire enterprise: allying with the Soviet Union. To paraphrase Churchill, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at the least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”. And make no mistake – Stalin was indeed a figurative devil.
It was absolutely necessary (D-Day was only successful – barely – because 2/3 of their forces were dedicated to the Eastern front, and largely getting crushed), but there is a tendency to overlook the Soviet side because of the way they transitioned from wartime ally to cold-war adversary.
If you squint, you can actually draw a sort of parallel here with the episode – the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact taking the place of the non-aggression pact with the Dominion. The big difference here being (a) that the Dominion was smart enough to wait until after the one war was won before betraying their allies and starting a second front, and (b) the intelligence passed to the Romulans indicating the imminent betrayal was faked rather than genuine. (There’s a reason I hate making historical analogies to works of fiction).
Little note: Sisko stumbles over the date at the beginning of the log. It serves a dramatic purpose, but I think it shouldn’t be that way. Logs seem to always (?) begin with the stardate (except with “x’s log, supplemental”, when the date was given in the previous log). Now, I can interpret this in either of two ways.
One is that the human always knows the stardate (which seems to be the day plus the time of day in tenths of a day) when making the log–either because they make a point of always knowing what time it is (which seems unnatural, plus I don’t think I’ve ever seen something that looked like it was displaying the time in Star Trek), or because the computer displays the time when making a log and the human reads it off. Even in the latter case, it seems a bit odd that they’d always say it in such a regular way–unless it was a Starfleet regulation, but even then, would they always keep it up in their personal logs or when under great stress?
The other is that the human just begins the log and starts speaking, and the computer stores a timestamp with the log. The fact that we hear the human’s voice giving the date can be interpreted as either the computer simulating their voice (which we know can be done, though it seems a little odd to make routine), or the producers saying, “Well, we want the date read aloud, and why not have it be the voice of the human making the log? It’d be more pleasant and make no plot difference whatsoever.” Which I can accept.
Anyway, to me, the most plausible interpretation is that the stardate is inserted by the computer, and the second most plausible is that the human reads it off the display when making the log, and neither of those is consistent with Sisko stumbling over it and then asking the computer to tell him the date. Oh well.
@67: I didn’t notice the badge thing, but now that you bring it up, I can answer you with an interpretation that might make the episode even better. Garak says he planned blowing-up-the-shuttle as a backup option. In fact, we might figure that blowing up the shuttle was his preferred outcome. First, a data rod and an assassinated senator is probably more compelling than a data rod by itself. Second, what happens if the senator is convinced, but brings it home to the Tal Shiar experts at home and they determine it’s a fake? Then it’s too late to assassinate him and you’re screwed. So Garak might have deliberately ensured there was an error large enough for the senator and whoever’s with him to find.
… I suppose there is the problem, though, that “The wrong Cardassian is wearing a legate badge” might not be an error that could plausibly have been created by bomb damage. Maybe. Maybe the whole picture would be smoky and distorted and the Romulans wouldn’t be able to tell (esp. if they’re not looking for it). –Also, if Garak planned to blow up the shuttle regardless, would it matter whether the senator believed it? Maybe Sisko would have murdered Garak if he blew up a believing senator, whereas now he’s grateful to him. I dunno.
I think Garak always intended to kill the senator. He’s not only a super spy but a super assassin, if need be.
@70 I think it was more likely an oversight by the prop department. Though I have to wonder why Casey didn’t fix it. He would know his uniform better than anyone.
I could also place blame on Sisko since he had to approve before the rod was recorded. But given the stress and racing thoughts and millions of whatifs going through his mind…well, I’m inclined to give him a pass.
I guess it makes sense that the senator had to die…that is assuming the recording was made correctly. You have it right with the wrong guy wearing the rank thing. That isn’t something that ship explosions would likely cause. It’s just too specific.
I dunno…I feel like a Romulan senator HAS to have enemies. Why would Romulus declare war on The Dominion knowing how most of their politicians have proverbial bounties on their heads? And if they can find the data rod among a pile of debris one has to assume they’ll find the explosive device remnants, too. I don’t think Garak would use a Cardassian bomb, and it’s unlikely he has access to Dominion munitions (given the effectiveness of Dominion security). So why would the Romulans immediately blame the Dominion?
I can see Garak justifying an assassination by making sure Vreenak knew it was faaaake. That’s part of his job. But this time I think he missed something. Unheard of for Garak.
Unsurprisingly, this episode was bound to get more comments than any other. In the Pale Moonlight may very well be DS9’s finest hour, if not all of Star Trek’s, for that matter. After this one aired, there were very few posterior episodes on this level. Maybe another DS9 installment, plus a couple of ENT episodes, and that was pretty much it. This was the peak.
This episode also had the unintended side effect of the It’s a Fake internet meme. Coupled with Far Beyond the Stars, you get this…
For all that The Wrath of Khan tried to invert it, Spock was basically right: more often than not, the needs of the many really dooutweigh the needs of the few.
@krad
Except that it was really Search for Spock that tried to invert it. Wrath of Khan defended the needs of the many viewpoint (and so did Voyage Home).
When it comes to the message “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one”, Star Trek’s stance (and it is an admirable one) is that it is only true if you are a member of the few (or are the one) who will be giving up your rights and your life for the many by your own choice. That is what Sisko is thinking he’s doing here, he’s just getting himself dirty in the greater good, but he learns by the end that what he has actually done is sacrifice others, people he had no right to choose for, in the name of some nebulous and undefinable good. Garak offers the sop that they were just criminals and objectionables, but that doesn’t really wash.
@74
Yap, it reminds me of the ending of the first Xmen film where Wolverine quite rightly lays it on Magneto for him not being in the machine instead of Rogue. Sisko isnt sacrificing himself to save others cleanly like Spock did, he picked the Romulans to do it instead.
And will he give himself up to Romulan justice after the war is over? Of course not. They are the “Other”, the bad guys. Just cannon-fodder to be used to keep the better people in the Federation safe. And of course Sisko knows better then the Romulans in doing whats best for them, the non-agression treaty is foolish for the Romulan interests as Sisko thinks Never mind that the Romulans knew better then the Federation in closing the wormhole in the first place when the Dominion first appeared.
I’m not going to saw that the blood of every Romulan who dies in the Dominion war is on Sisko’s hands, but damn it, he should show some recompense to the Romulans for what he did. Maybe not “on the record” as that would spoil the whole scheme, but something actually has to be given to them. They were right about the Dominion and now have been tricked into sacrificing their blood to clean up the Federation’s mess.
Let me start off by saying I agree that this is a fantastic episode. The acting is just outstanding. But I don’t think they went far enough in creating a situation that compromises Sisko’s honor. Let’s look at what he had to do.
First, he had to accept responsibility for the deaths of the agents that Garak contacts. Any commander is going to have to deal with issues like that. War sucks.
He has to lie to the Romulans. Since he’s sure that the Dominion will eventually attack Romulus, I don’t see why this should bother him significantly. He’s being dishonest in the details but the general premise is still true.
Next, he has to bribe Quark. Distasteful, to be sure, but not exactly the type of thing that earns the evil overlord merit badge.
Next, the biomemitic gel. I guess this could be considered morally reprehensible, but we don’t really know enough about it to know WHY it’s so bad. All we know is that Bashir is opposed, but not what the real consequences are to having this gel on the black market.
Finally we have the death of the Romulans. Again, this is war, and it’s not a stretch to argue that the Senator was an active enemy of the Federation. I don’t see Sisko being so tortured over his death.
For this to really hit the mark, we need to see something that would make Sisko really forced to deal with something completely at odds with his morality. The sale of children into sex slavery. Allowing an attack that would kill thousands or millions. Treason. Personal betrayal. Of course anything that would really stain his soul would also stain him in the eyes of the viewers. They can’t let it be so evil that it can’t be justified by the outcome.
@74 – So that’s why the senior officers always beam down to the hostile planet’s surface for away missions instead of having a dedicated recon team! It’s like the Air Force – the only service smart enough to send the officers out to get killed while the enlisted remain on base drinking beer. (Before anyone gets offended, I learned that joke from a retired wrench monkey I used to work with).
Snark aside, I think that while the idea is noble, it’s completely unworkable in practice. Somebody is always going to have to give orders that puts someone else down the chain of command at risk, and there will always be people too valuable to risk anywhere but the rear echelons. That was, in fact, the poinit of several episodes across all of the series (I distinctly remember an episode where Troi passed a simulation where the right answer was to order the engineer into a suicide mission in order to save the ship).
@75 – I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that Sisko just decided that he knew better than the Romulan government and wanted to use their troops as cannon fodder to protect the Federation. If one of Garak’s contacts had managed to smuggle legitimate information out to him, that would have at least pushed the Romulans in the direction of joining the war.
You do make a good point about how the Romulans knew from the beginning that closing the wormhole was the right idea. But I think that’s bigger than what happened in this episode. Leaving the wormhole open was, unlike this, not a decision that was made unilaterally.
@76 – Perhaps that’s why, at the end, he can live with it. Despite what Eddington wanted to believe when they clashed, Sisko is not Inspector Javert. He’ll lose sleep over what he did, but ultimately he can live with it.
@37,
I take issue with your assertion that this could have played out any other way, with Odo or someone else finding the Dominion plans to conquer the Romulans. Why? Because those plans did not exist.
The Dominion had enough on its plate with the war against the Federation and Klingon Empire, and they had no reason to attack the Romulans.
Yes, they have a distrust for solids, but they tend to keep their word, for good and for ill.
They never turn on an ally, unless that ally proves treacherous (granted, they also think that there is no such thing as independent action, and believe that an attack by one is the same as an attack by all, but nonetheless…).
At this point in the story, no Romulan or agent of the Romulans had shown a desire to attack the Dominion, nor had they trespassed on Dominion territory nor had they attempted to ally with the enemies of the Dominion. The Dominion was content to have a a strict mutual nonaggression pact with the Romulans, and it would be out of character for them to repudiate it.
@79: I don’t understand why you’d believe the Dominion would keep its word or have no intention of conquering Romulus. That goes against everything we know about them. They see all “solids” as threats that must be contained. Any alliance they make with a given state is just a deception to control them and soften them up for eventual subjugation, as we saw in “The Search, Part 2” and then in their treatment of Cardassia. And their entire modus operandi was built around deceit and manipulation. If anything, it would be out of character for them to honor a deal with “solids,” because they hate and fear solids and would never tolerate leaving them uncontrolled, nor consider them worthy of treating with fairness or respect.
So of course the Dominion would’ve turned on Romulus. The Romulans are an aggressive, treacherous power, a far greater potential threat than the Federation or the Cardassians. There is no conceivable way the Dominion would’ve suffered them to exist for long. The non-aggression pact was just a way of keeping them in check while the Dominion dealt with the Federation, Klingons, and Cardassians. Once the Dominion had secured those powers, they would’ve surely turned on Romulus, or subverted its power structure as they did Cardassia’s.
KRAD,
Probably your best review ever. That’s some damn fine writing.
@75: The Romulans aren’t exactly innocent victims in all of this. They were letting Dominion ships cross their territory to attack the Federation. (Neutral nations have an obligation to keep their territory from being used by warring nations, so the Romulans were violating their supposed neutrality every time they let a Jem Hedar ship cross their territory without interference.) And based on Voyager, we know the Romulans also carried out at least one overt act of piracy in trying to seize a Federation starship during this period (a blatant act of war.) Thus given the Romulans own actions in both directly attacking the Federation and in helping the Dominion do so, Sisko doesn’t owe them anything. His actions were a justified response to ongoing Romulan belligerence.
AndrewV: Thank you very much!
Jonellin: I’m with Christopher and bguy here — nothing in the Dominion’s history or actions give any indications that they’re just going to stop with the Federation and Klingons. The only other option is for the Romulans to do what the Cardassians and later the Breen did: join the Dominion — but there’s nothing in the Romulans’ character as a government or as a people that suggests they would put up with such a notion, and they don’t have the Cardassians’ desperation to leaven it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@79: I agree with everything @80 wrote. That said, I wouldn’t expect the Dominion to make explicit, near-future plans to invade the Romulans at this stage; making another enemy before they’ve squashed the Klingons and the Federation would be stupid, unless they believed they could defeat all three enemies and were too impatient to take them in sequence. Which seems like a hard sell, hence the need for the supposedly incontrovertible proof of the data rod. (If the Dominion had a more humanoid structure, I could believe they’d want to minimize casualties by striking the Romulans when they’re unprepared.)
More likely the Dominion would make some low-cost, long-term preparations for the war with the Romulans. Things I might expect them to get caught doing: sending some agents (changelings) to infiltrate the Romulans, stealing Romulan ship blueprints and looking for weaknesses, designing a virus to kill Romulans, designing weapons that worked specifically against Romulan ships, preparing a large-scale sabotage of Romulan shipbuilding…
The thing I find most surprising is the Romulans making the agreement in the first place. The fact that the Dominion can breed Jem’Hadar soldiers to adulthood in a matter of weeks… well, I’m not sure if the limiting factor in these space wars is shipbuilding or manpower. But it seems the Dominion is rather good at both, and if they conquered the Federation and the Klingon empire, very quickly they’d produce an overwhelming force and would have no reason not to crush everyone else in the vicinity. Could the Romulan leaders who made these decisions have been blinded by hate and spite towards the Federation? Perhaps they’d hope to let the parties fight a while, then negotiate with the Dominion to let them conquer half of the Federation and Klingon territories themselves (where they’d face little resistance). I guess that’s plausible.
@82
I know the Romulans are not exactly innocent, with regards to their attempted theft of the “multi-vector assualt mode ship” and the letting of Dominion ships across their space but lets look at what they attempted to do in the past for AQ safety from the Dominion. (through immoral means for some)
1: Give a cloak to the Federation, which the Federation went ahead and broke the rules of its usuage as regards AQ use.
2: Attempted to close the wormhole in “Visionary”
3: Attempted geneocide on the Founders in the “The Die is Cast”
4: Sent a force of ships to the station in “By Inferno’s Light”
So the Romulans have not exactly been doing nothing as regards the Dominion problem. So post “Inferno’s Light”, even after that, the Romulans see that the Federation is still stupid enough to let multiple convoys of ships through into the AQ, instead of mining the wormhole straight away (and even after the Dominion attempted to blow up Bajor’s sun, which would kill everyone on Bajor). Id say, that the Romulans might have figured that the Dominion is the better long term plan, seeing that the Federation seem so incompetant at forecasting future problems and attempting to stop them. A potential plan for the Romulans may have been to declare war on the Dominion straight away after they had conquered the Federation and the Klingons when they were somewhat exhausted. Maybe.
@76: I disagree; I think the genius of the episode largely lies in how easy it is for Sisko to rationalize everything he did, precisely in the ways you just rationalized it.
If he’d had to sell children into sex slavery, it would make the episode more interesting in some ways, but less interesting in others. It would be more about ends vs. means, but less profoundly about rationalization. Which is where a lot of our real-life struggles about ends vs. means actually occur. (Plus, you know, it also would have been darker to the point of ruining the viewers’ rapport with Sisko for the rest of the show.)
@86: I don’t think it was as easy as you say. The whole log entry was Sisko’s attempt to rationalize it to himself, but he couldn’t really do so, couldn’t convince himself that it wasn’t wrong. He accepted that it was necessary to keep it secret, but he was by no means convinced that it had been right or that he had nothing to feel guilty about.
@87: Oh, I agree! But the process of *trying* to rationalize it was much more interesting than it would have been with seriously-darker deeds.
There isn’t much for me to add at this juncture (I have really enjoyed reading CLB’s comments on optimism though) but I just want to say I’m glad to have some validaton about the title. I asked my husband if he thought the title had some connection to the Batman line and was meant to be a subtle reference to dancing with the Devil and he wasn’t sure – although I was thinking that they both stemmed from some other source. Did the line in Batman come from anything, or was it just made up for the movie (or did it ever show up in the comic)?
There’s an old song by The Band from 1976 or so that starts with the lines, “She stands on the bank of the mighty Mississippi / Alone in the pale moonlight / Waitin’ for a man, a riverboat gambler / Said that he’d return tonight.” It’s what I always think of when I think of the title of this episode or hear the line from the 1989 Batman. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@@@@ 21 Remember the episode (can’t remember the title offhand) where the Breen pulled a Pearl Harbor-esque attack on Earth? I remember seeing SF HQ in flames and the Golden Gate Bridge in ruins in the teaser…THAT was a powerful moment. I think you’re right about how it would have played if they’d conquered Earth instead of Betazed, although Betazed falling was powerful!
Picking up on Redlander #39’s point, I strongly disagree with the love for this episode. It spoons out such an unoriginal, cowardly, and immoral trope: the cool, strong protagonist has to do bad things because of WHATEVER and he’s probably damned, but he’s still kind of a good guy and we get the satisfaction of seeing him wrestle with his conscience. Of course, what makes this so entertaining to watch is that the fictional work shields us from the enormity of the protagonist’s crimes. So we don’t really get to know or identify with Vreenak or Tolar, and their murders occur off-screen. So the crimes of Garak and Sisko are pretty much abstract, since their victims are basically nobodies.
If you are producing a work of fiction, and you want to go serious and raise moral dilemmas, go the full way and be serious. Don’t half-ass it.
I will give the writers credit for not going 100% cowardly and giving us some ad hoc reason for feeling better about Garak’s murders (oh, it turns out Vreenak and Tolar were child molesters!).
Sorry, I retract my last paragraph. I just realized the Tolar-stabbing-Quark thing was exactly the writers going 100% cowardly and making us feel better about Garak killing him off. Nevermind.
Sisko staring me straight in the face when he was speaking was a bold directorial move. It was unnerving. When I first started to post this, I was going to complain about how I hate the breaking of the 4th wall. It bothered me that much. Then I realized, that was what the director wanted and bravo to that.
@94/doompaul: Well, he wasn’t talking to us, he was talking to the camera on the log recorder. Basically talking into his webcam to record his video diary. I don’t see that as breaking the fourth wall, because it’s entirely diegetic — the camera and the “audience” that the character is addressing are actually there in-universe. The fourth wall is the “barrier” between the fictional universe and the real audience. If a character looks at the camera and addresses the audience when there isn’t supposed to be any camera present in the room, then that’s breaking the fourth wall and admitting that what you’re seeing is a filmed play. But if a character is actually talking into a camera in-story and we just happen to see them through that camera’s lens, as in a found-footage movie or something like Felicia Day’s The Guild, then the fourth wall is as solid as ever.
Garak says that his plan was to plant the bomb all along in the episode; I don’t know why you are all speculating about it here.
17: there is no Season 8. 48: Sisko is trying to get the Romulans to join the war against the Dominion. 51: how is Vreenak a Romulan version of Picard? 76: Bashir gives us plenty of reasons why Starfleet keeps biomimetic gel on a short leash in Sisko’s office. 91: It was The Changing Face of Evil. 94 & 95: A better example of breaking the fourth wall was in Rules of Engagement when the crew were giving Ch’pok they’re versions of what happened, but that felt more like a gimmick. It never allowed us to get inside Worf’s head like Sisko in this vastly superior episode. Vreenak’s “It’s a faaake!” is right up there with Kirk yelling “KHAN!” into a communicator.
David Sim: the “season 8” that lvsxy808 refers to in comment #17 is the post-finale DS9 fiction that Simon & Schuster has published since 2001 (to which I’ve contributed).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
^Although Marco Palmieri, who shepherded the DS9 post-finale books for their first 8 years or so, never liked the “season 8” label. He wasn’t trying to emulate the format of a TV season, but to embrace the novel format and the new storytelling possibilities it allowed.
@97: Obligatory SF Debris quote: “Okay, everybody got that out of their system now? No need to fall back on any hackneyed internet memes, right? Especially once we realize that every time you masturbate, God does indeed kill a kitten, and I for one welcome our domo-kun overlords, and remind my fellow Earthlings that all your base are belong to us because it’s a trap!”
This is easily one of the strongest DS9 episodes of all time. It raises so many questions, and even though Sisko does a teriffic job of trying to convince himself that he did the right thing and that he can in fact live with it. But somehow I have the feeling that Sisko will still lose a few nights of sleep over what has happened.
I don’t think I’ll ever pass up an opportunity to re-watch this episode. This and “Duet” are the two best episodes of the series, in my opinion.
The writing and the direction here are masterful, as are the performances. I liked the quick transitions between some of the scenes such as when the episode cuts to Sisko’s first conversation with Tolar. It gives a sense of how fast Sisko is being led down a disastrous path. Also when Garak first suggests manufacturing the evidence and the scene immediately cuts back to Sisko lamenting that he didn’t quit the enterprise right then. It was the equivalent of one of Sisko’s high-octave “WHAT??” reactions and also a kind of foreshadowing that this was the point of no return where everything was going to go downhill fast.
I also liked how they repeated the phrase “Whatever it takes …” at key moments like the famous last words that would come back to haunt Sisko or a tragic punchline to this slow-moving trainwreck of a situation.
The final confrontation between Sisko and Garak is something I’ve watched on YouTube again and again.
As a trivial note, Andrew J. Robinson’s book “A Stitch in Time” has Garak reminiscing about these events and indicating that Sisko had a bit of a nervous breakdown afterward. Garak had to bring in Bashir for help.
This was a superb episode. It’s a pity that the series never really addeed a follow-up to it or any consequences to the manner in which the Romulans were dragged into the war. But that always seemed to be a problem with Trek. Whenever the Federation or Starfleet commit a truly terrible deed, no consequences are ever faced.
@90 This is from Gene Scheer’s song cycle, “Voices from World War II,” which premiered in early 1998. It seems particularly fitting, and makes me wonder if it’s the actual inspiration for the episode title.
BeeGee: given that “Voices from World War II” was released in 1998, it’s unlikely that this episode, written in early 1998, was even known to the producers in time for it to influence the title.
Also, Ron Moore specifically said in an AOL chat in 1998 that the title was inspired by the line from the 1989 Batman.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Lockdown Rewatch.
Straight into it, in my opinion this is the best episode of Trek ever committed to television it shades for me The City of the edge of Forever, Far Beyond the Stars and The Best of Both Worlds part 1. If people ever say to you “how can you still rate Star Trek in the age of television when we have had things like The Wire and Breaking Bad?” a good way to answer that is to point them in the direction of this episode.
Garak has now moved beyond his undisputed position of best recurring character in the history of Trek to become one of the best characters period. Andrew J Robinson is always excellent but never better than he is here. Avery Brooks too is sensational. A powerhouse of an episode.. is it possible to go all Spinal Tap and give it 11 out of 10 ? I am going to anyway. Superb.
However horrible Sisko’s actions were, there is that underlying threat that the Dominion would eventually break their non-aggression pact and attack Romulus, so dragging the Romulans into the war is in everyone’s best interest. There would have been sooooooooo much more controversy if we, the audience, were convinced that the Dominion would leave the Romulans alone for the next few hundred years and yet Sisko brought them into the war anyways. I, for one, would have found his actions more unforgivable if that were the case.
There’s always been a major flaw in this expisode, and it just about ruins the whole thing. Sisko’s line about “Starfleet Command has given their blessing, so I’m off hte hook.” — because he is. This isn’t the story of a man compromising his morals to acheive a greater good, this is about a Starfleet Intelligence operation, same as Honor Among Thieves was with O’Brien. Now, remove that line and you get a much much better episode — the very one most people here are discussing in fact. But that’s not what was presented on the screen.
Ironically, the other time Sisko comitted a war crime (when he deployed chemical weapons against a civillian target), it was specifically mentioned that Starfleet did not approve of his actions. Then he and Dax laughed about it. Because war crimes are funny.
Having read KRAD’s review, and the comments here, I’m seeing another flaw. Sisko doesn’t fail to convince himself that he can live with it, because he does. He lives with it just fine. He’s off buying a house on Bajor, snogging his girl, playing a casino heist in the holodeck-’60s, facing his Vulcan rival in a baseball game, with no indication that he’s haunted or troubled or having any moral difficulty whatsoever. He stands in multiple meetings with Ross, Martok, and the Romulan admiral planning battles and invasions — he looks that Romulan in the eye and convinces him to attack Cardassia knowing that it will be a hard battle with heavy allied losses and he doesn’t blink. No remorse, no regret, nothing. He did live with it.
@108– these are great points. I never much cared for the Sisko character anyway, but this was the episode that cemented my antipathy for good. I’m rewatching Enterprise right now and for all the flaws in that series, they did a good job of portraying Archer’s ambivalence and guilt when he crossed moral and ethical lines late in the xindi arc season. And even more to the writers credit, Archer’s harder, cynical edge was maintained throughout season 4. Sisko just gnashes his teeth about it for a little while and then, as you say, he lives with himself just fine even though he is essentially a felony murderer in my eyes.
To me, this episode established that Sisko and Garak are dangerous men, and a potent combination: one who will do nearly anything to preserve what he believes in, and the other who will believe in nearly anything to preserve what he does. That’s exactly the kind of pairing that could lead to events such as the ones that occur here. Sisko needs to preserve the Federation and its lofty ideals, but doesn’t know how to do what’s necessary. Garak knows little else but how to do what’s necessary, but he rarely has a reason to do it. Only together can they both get what they want, Sisko halfheartedly going along with Garak’s schemes and Garak putting on a good show of caring about Sisko’s ideals.
It was good. I liked it. I’m not sure it’s my fave but I appreciated it.
I appreciate the Batman reference as Sisko and Garak basically do a dark vengeful hero thing from the shadows here. They even use a special gizmo from the Batc– holosuite.
My one quibble: How did they know the Romulan isn’t going to immediately report back to Romulus before he even takes off, or leave a captain’s log in a black box, saying what he learned? That was a bit of a gamble. If he had told the story (via radio or whatever) before the bomb went off, Romulus might have been angry enough to join the Dominion side after all, officially or just helpfully from the sidelines.