“Valiant”
Written by Ronald D. Moore
Directed by Michael Vejar
Season 6, Episode 22
Production episode 40510-546
Original air date: May 6, 1998
Stardate: 51825.4
Station log: Quark’s is overwhelmed because the drinks replicator is down. Quark submitted an emergency report to O’Brien, who passed it on to Rom, who passed it on to Nog. However, it isn’t Nog who shows up to fix it, it’s Dax, who owes Nog a favor and so is covering for him while he takes a trip to Ferenginar by way of Starbase 257 on the runabout Shenandoah. Nog is delivering a diplomatic pouch from the Federation Council to the Grand Nagus. Jake is along for the ride—allegedly to see Ferenginar, but he soon reveals that he’s angling for an exclusive interview with Zek.
Their argument on the subject of Jake’s journalistic ethics is interrupted by a wing of Jem’Hadar fighters that attacks the starbase. Nog legs it, but one Jem’Hadar ship chases after them. When it catches up, they’re actually in Cardassian space, and Nog drops out of warp, since the runabout’s maneuverability is better, though not by much. Sure enough, the Shenandoah gets its ass kicked, but is rescued by a Defiant-class ship, the U.S.S. Valiant.
The ship is populated completely by cadets—specifically Red Squad, the elite unit. Nog has never heard of cadets being given full run of a starship before, but there’s Tim Watters, the leader of Red Squad, in the captain’s chair.
Turns out they were on a training mission—seven officers, 35 cadets, circumnavigating the entire Federation. The cadets ran the ship while the officers observed. When the war broke out, they were in a sector that was immediately taken by the Dominion, and suddenly they were behind enemy lines. The officers were all killed or badly wounded. Captain Ramirez gave Watters a battlefield commission to captain before eventually succumbing to his injuries, and Watters has gone on to provide similar commissions to many of the cadets.
They’ve been behind enemy lines for eight months, and they’re shorthanded. Nog’s familiarity with the Defiant makes him ideal to become chief engineer, as they’ve been having trouble with the engines all along, including being unable to get above warp 3.2.
They also have orders: to collect data on a new Dominion battle cruiser being constructed. However, those orders were for Ramirez. Being behind enemy lines, the Valiant has had to maintain radio silence, so Starfleet doesn’t know that they’ve put this mission in the hands of cadets.
Chief Petty Officer Dorian Collins treats Jake’s injuries and then brings him to the mess hall. She shares some stories of home, living on the moon, including a very poetic reminisce about a lunar sunrise.
Nog implements some changes that O’Brien has done on the Defiant to get the Valiant to warp 4. First Officer Karen Farris is skeptical—she’s been disdainful of Nog since his arrival—but it works, and the ship is now going faster than it has in months.
Watters goes to sickbay to snag some uppers, and Collins is there, a bit misty-eyed with nostalgia after talking to Jake. Watters then summons Jake to talk to him and Farris, upbraiding him for plunging a member of the crew into emotional turmoil. Farris plays bad cop while Watters plays good cop, saying that Jake is there to write the story of the Valiant and its crew—but he shouldn’t become a part of the story. Just step back and observe—and he is ordered to keep away from Collins. After Jake leaves, Farris—after saying she doesn’t trust Jake or Nog, though Watters isn’t worried about Nog because “he wears the uniform”—expresses concern over how little sleep Watters is getting, but he brushes her off. Once she leaves, Watters pops some more pills.
Jake is disturbed to learn that Nog has joined the crew, and is already drinking Watters’s Kool-Aid, but they don’t have time to dwell as the ship goes to red alert. They found the battleship they were supposed to gather intelligence on, and they’re pursuing it, keeping their distance, but launching a class-3 stealth probe to scan it. (Farris also takes a moment to snidely kick Jake off the bridge.)
After collecting data from the probe, Watters holds a meeting in the mess hall. They’ve completed their mission and they can go home—but the battleship is a threat to the Federation. What’s more, they’ve found what they believe to be a flaw in their antimatter storage system—its support system is vulnerable to delta radiation. Watters wants to take the Valiant and destroy the battleship before it can be deployed. They’ll rig a torpedo to emit delta radiation on impact.
Nog, however, splashes some cold water on the plan: in order to so rig the torpedo, they have to remove most of the guidance systems, which means targeting manually—and they’ll have to get within three hundred meters in order to fire effectively. (He probably meant three hundred kilometers, since the Defiant itself is a hundred and twenty meters.)
Watters gives the usual speech about how it’s risky, and no one will think ill of them if they go home and let some other ship finish their mission for them, but they’re Red Squad, they’re the best, and they can do anything. Jake’s attempt at a reality check fails pretty spectacularly and in fact only increases the cadets’ resolve to do it themselves because they’re so very awesome. They start chanting “Red Squad” over and over again, and Watters looks out over them with the satisfied look of a cult leader.
Jake knows he can’t talk the crew of the Valiant out of this suicide mission, so instead he works on Nog. Nog, however, is being a good officer; his only response to Jake’s revelation that Watters is taking uppers (which he learned from Collins) is to reprimand Jake for disobeying the orders to stay away from the chief. Nog insists that he’s part of something greater and that Jake doesn’t understand, that he’s only thinking of himself—and Jake says he damn well is thinking of himself, because he wants to actually live to see tomorrow.
When Jake says he doesn’t even know who Nog is anymore, Nog tartly replies that he’s the chief engineer of the U.S.S. Valiant. Jake says he’ll put that on Nog’s tombstone and leaves—walking right into the arms of Lieutenant Shepard, who was sent there by Watters, who eavesdropped via the comm systems on Jake and Nog’s argument. Shepard escorts Jake to the brig at phaserpoint.
The crew gets ready for battle, going through every drill like clockwork. They’re a well-oiled machine when it comes to battle preparation.
Watters gives what he probably thinks is an inspirational speech about how this moment in history will never come again, that they’re all amazing and wonderful and they should cherish this moment because they’re Starfleet, they’re Red Squad, and they’re the best. The cadets and Nog all nod encouragingly.
In the brig, Jake rolls his eyes.
They engage the Jem’Hadar battle ship—and totally get their asses handed to them. Nog’s modified torpedo doesn’t actually work, and the Dominion ship is five times their size and outguns them by, y’know, a lot. Within minutes, Watters is killed, then Farris, then pretty much the entire bridge crew. Nog and Collins are the only ones left alive on the bridge.
Collins asks Nog for orders, and seeing the corpses all around them, Nog signals abandon ship. He gets Jake out of the brig, and when Jake asks what happened, Nog only says, “We failed.”
Four escape pods leave the Valiant, but two are destroyed by the Jem’Hadar, and one other is wiped out by the backwash of the Valiant exploding. Only the pod with Jake, Nog, and Collins makes it out.
On the Defiant, Kira picks up a Starfleet distress call from inside Dominion space from a Valiant escape pod. Worf points out that the Valiant went missing eight months ago and it may be a trick, but Sisko doesn’t want to risk it, so he cloaks the ship and goes in, rescuing the one pod and not finding any others.
Bashir is able to heal Collins of her wounds. Jake goes to see if Nog is okay. Nog asks if Jake is going to write a story about the Valiant, and Jake allows as how he probably will. When Jake asks Nog what he thinks the story should say, Nog says that it was a good ship with a good crew that made a mistake in following Watters over a proverbial cliff. Collins disagrees, saying that Watters was a great man and if they failed it was because the crew failed him.
Nog walks over to Collins, giving her the Red Squad pin he was issued by Watters. “He may have been a hero, he might even have been a great man, but in the end, he was a bad captain.”
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Viterium is an extremely solid metallic compound—until you expose it to delta radiation, at which point it becomes unstable.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo is highly amused at Quark’s discomfort at Dax effecting repairs in the bar and gleefully declares that Quark is in love with Dax and it must piss him off that she’s married to Worf—also he notices that Quark prepared the wrong drink for a customer.
The slug in your belly: It’s never said what favor Nog did for Dax to earn him the right for her to take on his repair duties, but considering we’ve already seen him obtain real Saurian brandy at the front lines of a war, the possibilities are just endless.
Rules of Acquisition: Without a working drinks replicator results in Quark being very overwhelmed by customer orders that he has to prepare by hand.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Quark’s infatuation with Dax is such that he finds her too good for such menial tasks as replicator repair. As he watches her work at it, he’s simultaneously appalled and also totally checking out her ass, which is pretty much the most Quark thing ever.
Victory is life: The Dominion has unleashed a new battleship that’s way bigger than the usual Jem’Hadar battle cruisers, and which may or may not have a viterium storage unit for the antimatter.
Tough little ship: For reasons passing understanding, Starfleet assigned a Defiant-class ship—the most powerful battleship class in Starfleet by a damn sight—to a silly cadet cruise when war was in danger of breaking out. The levels on which this doesn’t make sense are legion.
Keep your ears open: “I want you to step back from your duty and look around—and I don’t mean look at the walls.”
Watters proving that in addition to being a crap captain, he also sucks at conversational humor.
Welcome aboard: Aron Eisenberg is back as Nog, while the Valiant crew is played by Paul Popovish (Watters), Courtney Peldon (Farris), Ashley Brianne McDonogh (Collins), Scott Hamm (Parton), and David Drew Gallagher (reprising the role of Shepard, last seen in “Paradise Lost”).
Trivial matters: Red Squad was first mentioned in “Homefront,” and first seen, in the person of Shepard, in “Paradise Lost.” They also appear in the videogame Star Trek: Invasion, the eBook novella The Oppressor’s Wrong by Phaedra M. Weldon (part of the Slings and Arrows miniseries), the novel The Best and the Brightest by Susan Wright, and the comic book series Starfleet Academy, written by Chris Cooper.
Collins’s story was followed up on in “Dorian’s Diary” by G. Wood in Strange New Worlds III.
Strictly speaking, Nog, as a commissioned officer, outranked all the cadets on board. However scripter Ronald D. Moore used an old naval tradition from the 19th century, that anyone left in command of a vessel can only be relieved by a flag officer, to get around that (since the plot wouldn’t work if Nog could just take over the ship).
Moore had originally wanted to name the ship assigned to DS9 in the third season Valiant (after the ship referenced in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”), but as Voyager was in development, they didn’t want two ships that started with the letter V, so he went with Defiant (after the ship in “The Tholian Web,” and later Enterprise’s “In a Mirror, Darkly”). He finally got his chance to use the Valiant here.
The new Dominion battleship will next be seen in “The Dogs of War.”
Walk with the Prophets: “Red Squad! Red Squad! Red Squad!” What I love about this episode is that the words that are put in the mouths of Watters and Farris and Collins and Nog and Shepard are all words we’ve heard come out of the mouths of our main characters any number of times. We’ve heard Kirk (“risk is our business”), Picard (“let us make sure that history never forgets the name Enterprise”), and Sisko (“I will not rest until I stand with you again”) give inspirational speeches like Watters gives before they go on their dumbshit mission. Scotty, McCoy, Riker, Worf, Dax, O’Brien, they’ve all said things similar to what the cadets on the Valiant (and Nog) say here, and whenever someone dissents the way Jake does, it’s usually an ambassador or an admiral or some other guest star whose job is to be in the episode as an irritant.
And of course the main characters are right and the guest stars are wrong, because that’s how television is constructed. Indeed, it all is constructed—Kirk, Picard, and Sisko (and Janeway and Archer and the rest) are all great leaders because writers write them that way and actors portray them that way.
What this episode reminds us of is that not everyone is a great captain, not everyone is a good first officer, not everyone is a brilliant chief engineer (though amusingly Nog actually does his job as chief engineer superbly). It’s all well and good to know how to talk the talk, but you have to be able to walk the walk as well. The captains we see every week are the product of years of experience. Sisko ran an engine room, was a first officer on two ships, and ran a shipyard, and we know that Picard and Kirk have lots of experience prior to the first time we saw them (hell, by the time of the TNG films, Picard was on his third command over the course of three decades). We know from “Obsession,” from “Tapestry,” from “Emissary” that Kirk, Picard, and Sisko have faced all kinds of horrible situations even before they took on their current posts. Those experiences made them into the great captains they are now.
Red Squad? They’re a bunch of completely inexperienced kids, and they have no clue what they’re doing. The worst part is that they think they know what they’re doing because they’ve survived this long, and assume it’s skill rather than luck, because they’re Red Squad and they’re elite. What they’ve forgotten is that elite is an adjective in this context, not a noun, and it modifies the word “cadet,” not the word “officer.”
This episode is brilliantly done because it uses all the tropes of a behind-the-lines adventure, of a plucky Starfleet crew triumphing against all odds, and flips it onto its ass. It also shows the difference experience makes, perhaps best illuminated in the brilliant pre-battle montage. For several minutes, we watch Red Squad prepare for battle, and they’re incredibly efficient and spit-and-polish and excellent—because this is the stuff you can teach, and they’ve learned it well. But then the fight starts, and they’re so incredibly out of their depth that it’s hard to even feel sorry for them when they fail so completely. The minute their plan doesn’t work, they’re lost, and they go from cocksure cadets to a bunch of kids who need some grownups to tell them what to do.
There are flaws here. For starters, putting the cadets on a top-of-the-line battleship never makes anything like sense. The Valiant is not a ship that would be wasted on a cadet cruise, not with war brewing (they started before the war did, but the entire back half of the fifth season was burbling toward war—Starfleet would’ve had all the Defiant-class ships close by for when war did break out, not sending them on school field trips). Of course, the out-of-the-box explanation is that it was cheaper to use existing sets and models, and by making the Valiant the same class as the Defiant, they didn’t have to build anything new.
In addition, Jake’s counterargument to Watters in the mess hall—that his father would never do this—is never even a little convincing, and was entirely the wrong argument to make. And there isn’t enough of Jake and Nog together—though their scene in the engine room is brilliantly done. This the first Jake-and-Nog story that’s truly about the pair of them as adults (“In the Cards” was too informed by both characters’ heavily subordinate relationship to Sisko), and it works. Nog has had a lot of responsibility dumped upon him in a very short time because of the war, and he makes the mistake of viewing this as being like any other post. But he earned his battlefield commission by hard work and field success. Red Squad didn’t earn anything, they got their commissions by basically not dying. Nog, though, just sees the ranks, not how they got them. (Hell, Watters imprisons a civilian reporter, having apparently forgotten what precisely he’s fighting for.)
Jake’s perspective is necessary here because he is an outsider. He hasn’t worn the uniform, and it makes him the only sane person on the ship, for all the good that it does him. And of course, he survives, because he’s a regular, as does Nog; having Collins survive leavens the absurdity of the regular-character pixie dust that miraculously lets the two characters we know live while the ones we don’t know die, but it’s still pretty absurd.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido is one of the three guests at HonorCon 2014 in Raleigh, North Carolina this weekend, along with fellow space-opera authors David Weber and Timothy Zahn. You can see his schedule here.
My husband hates this episode, although I didn’t really mind it. I found it tragic, really. Although I do think it is the kind of thing that Sisko may very well have done, and it would have worked, because the plot would have demanded it. Not being a military person, it was hard for me to put my finger on exactly what made the cadet crew less good than the Defiant crew (aside from the lack of experience and fact that their captain was totally on drugs) – in other words, what would having experience actually taught them and caused them to do differently?
It’s kind of too bad we didn’t get to Profit and Lace today, as that would have been a perfect Halloween episode. It’s certainly disturbing enough…
The point which bugged me the most was the whole “stuck behind enemy lines” bit. Stuck for seven or eight months? Sure, limited to warp speed of 3.2 or whatever it’s going to take them longer to get somewhere, but clearly they’re not actively engaging the Dominion that whole time. If they’re close enough to the front lines to rescue Jake and Nog, then why the heck haven’t they already brought the Valiant back to the Federation? Is Starfleet Academy so desperate for students that’s it’s accepting cadets dumb enough to think it’s a good idea to stay behind enemy lines in a ship that they don’t even know how to properly maintain? That right there brought this episode down to a 5 for me.
When you’ve been assigned to an intelligence mission and decide to go on an unnecessary dangerous raid before sending back the intelligence you were tasked with retrieving, that’s got to be dereliction of duty.
There’s a lot of handwaving necessary to get Jake and Nog into the places they need to be to make the episode’s point before getting them out again, but for once it was worth it.
Duty is about more than being brave. It’s about keeping your focus on what really matters. To paraphrase from a really bad TV show that had one really good episode:
They put the third duty not only ahead of the second, but also ahead of the first. They didn’t trust their superiors. One of the better episodes showing why freewheeling captains are usually a bad thing.
It would have been much, much, much better to use the Voyager sets. At least then it would have made some kind of sense to be using that class of vessel. Small ship, designed for limited missions would work as a cadet cruise vessel, planet hopping around the Federation, and it could also function as a fast scout, which would be ideal for intel gathering. Of course we’d also have the unfortunate similarity to Voyager, and say this for the Valiant crew, at least they didn’t strand themselves in the ass end of the galaxy for the better part of a decade, but then Janeway was a rookie captain too, if memory serves.
This is an unpopular episode, because the people who know how things like ships know how they should work and know how little sense this makes, and the other group of Trek fans, the young nerds who like to write fanfic with unbercompetent teenagers, get upset when its shown the young nerds high on their own sense of self-importance aren’t given the success but get blown up.
This review sums up everything I loathe about Star Trek ’09, which is pretty much the same setup, except the cadets succeed because … something something, Jim Kirk’s destiny.
This is why I love the Re-watch – a perspective that makes sense and get me to look at the episode ina different light.
When I watched and rewatched it, all I saw was a bunch of incompetents tooling around in a starship. The references and tropes flew right past me – I just saw a crew that, much like the humans in BSG and the Americans in Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, while ostensible heros left me rooting for the bad guys – be they Jem Hadar, Cylons or the Japanese.
A seven? Are you freaking kidding me?
In my book this is hands down THE single worst DS9 episode and also among the worst of any series including Enterprise. A bunch of snotty overgrown teens think they’re hot you-kn0w-what, and they’re off running a warship of their own trying to play hero. None of this makes any sense whatsoever. None of the cadets are likable in any way. Nothing they do is remotely realistic. Even the battle is unfathomly stupid; a huge Dominion warship appears to be destroyed thanks to some inane technobabble, and then it emerges in perfect operating condition without a scratch.
The one and only thing I like here (and therefore the only saving grace making it better than TOS’ The Way to Eden) is the escape pods being destroyed at the end. Nobody in the Trekverse ever has to deal with these idiots again. I love it.
I don’t even feel in the mood for a tirade against this episode right now. I’ll just say that what I really really hate about this episode is that there are Vulcans on this crew just going along with the stupidity and the inane chants of “Red Squad! Red Squad!” How is the crew’s behavior in any way logical? Oh yeah, because “someone else will finish the job we started! Wah wah!” Because that is completely logical and not tied up in human emotions AT ALL.
@2 Nick,
I don’t find it so unlikely that they could be in this position.
Tim Watters was given a battlefield commission by his dying commanding officer, and this would have had a powerful effect on him.
As they didn’t go to war (war unexpectedly came to them), they did the best they could, and as prospective Starfleet officers, tried to carry out their orders to the best of their ability. That they lasted as long in enemy space as they did is a tribute to their training.
They would have succeeded had they not decided to actually engage in a battle that none of them had experience for.
@5 – yes, yes, and yes. Excellent comparison. There are a few real world examples of young, inexperienced officers doing amazing things. The examples of real world junior officers screwing up royally due to hubris and incompetence are legion. The only saving grace to this episode is that it showed how miserably they failed instead of having them save the day and pull out a victory.
@9 – Even if it did take them months to get back to the front line, they’re close enough to it now to rescue Jake and Nog. That means they’re close enough to get the heck out of Dodge. If they had brought the ship back to Federation space successfully it would have be a major victory for them, because yes, as you say, their training has kept them alive in enemy space all this time. And then they go and ignore every bit of that training? I didn’t buy it that Watters was such an inspirational leader as to wipe all sanity from the entire crew.
I don’t buy for an instant that Ramirez gave Watters a battlefield commission (from cadet all the way up to captain, no less!) and told him to finish the mission. He was too busy dying. If he told Watters anything, it was to get back to Federation space pronto, because they’re still just cadets. Watters wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be the next Kirk. So he lied to his classmates, and because the defining characteristic of Red Squad is unquestioning obedience to authority, they believed him. Everything that happened in this episode happened because of Watters and his ego.
My wife finds this episode hard to watch. She’s a former US Navy officer, and she’s told me on multiple occasions that if a ship full of her Academy classmates were put in a situation like this episode, it would happen exactly the way it did here.
@7 – You’re not supposed to like the cadets. They’re a bunch of assholes with an overblown sense of their own abilities and importance. This is what happens when you take a bunch of kids who don’t know anything about anything, tell them that they’re the best and the brightest in the world, and send them out with expensive military hardware at their fingertips. Much like actual military cadets (or midshipmen), actually. They are monsters, but through no fault of their own. They were made that way.
@8
Yeah, I was going to say including Vulcans strains the episode’s premise even more, but the fact is it just doesn’t have a worthwhile premise to begin with, so…yeah.
It’s like the writers sat down and asked themselves, “Who’s the least-liked character from first-season TNG? Wesley? I’ve got it! Let’s fill an entire ship with boy-wonder Wesley Crushers! It’ll be great!” And somehow, nobody ever stood up and said, “Hey guys…this is really, really, really stupid. Maybe we shouldn’t do it.”
Thus, we got an episode so atrociously dumb that no word in the English language accurately describes it. People hate on The Reckoning, but good lord, that’s Shakespearean compared to this steaming mess. Valiant is an episode created by the Pah-Wraiths, and only divine intervention from the Prophets put a stop to it by deciding the ship’s mission fails instead of succeeds.
Lisamarie: For starters, more experienced officers would have considered the possibility that the Dominion wouldn’t be so spectacularly stupid as to store their antimatter in something that vulnerable. As, in fact, they weren’t. More experienced officers would have had a Plan B, as wellas maybe a C and a D. And more experienced officers wouldn’t have gone off-book on their mission like that because they believed in the power of their own awesomeness.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I can’t stand this epiosde. I agree that there’s some good stuff, mostly what Krad said, the trope inversion reminding us that it takes more than good talk, but I just can’t get past the premise. The whole thing is just so monumentally stupid that anything the episode tries to do just fails.
#5
Same here. Opposed to Star Trek ’09 and its sequel, this episode is brilliant in my opinion. It has a young, gung-ho captain who gets himself and his crew killed.
Realistic in that way. Such is the fate for lunkheads.
There is some good stuff, but I think the flaws drag the whole thing down. I have two big problems with it beyond what’s already been addressed. The first is that having only the escape pod with our two important characters and one guest to ram home the point is just too pat. They could have had a couple more pods survive to lend at least a little plausibility.
But really my biggest problem is the mere existence of Red Squad. These might not be the same cadets who were involved in “Homefront”/”Paradise Lost”, but did no one in Starfleet look at what happened there and think maybe the whole concept needed to be dumped? They just shouldn’t exist, and even if they do, the ought to carry a nasty taint.
Easiest fix for this episode is to leave one very junior officer alive and in command. A slightly more competent Reg Barkley or something and let him power trip and draw these kids into his fantasy.
@7 – Even leaving out “Profit and Lace” (we’ll save that torture-fest for Tuesday), you’re going to tell me this is worse than “Meridian”? C’mon now, you may not like the characters or what they do, but the episode holds up well enough. In fact, I’d say such a passionate response makes it far from the worst ever…any episode that makes you feel something can’t be that bad…
Uhm, guys? Y’all did get that the point of the episode was that the cadets were incompetent, yes? That’s not a bug, that’s a feature…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“Nog legs it,” – I see what you did there! (Shh! Spoilers!)
— Michael A. Burstein
I didn’t care for this episode, since by this point I was getting tired of all the episodes deconstructing Starfleet and showing its dark sides. This was kind of a prototype for Moore’s later work on Galactica, with shades of the Pegasus crew, a supposedly elite, hypercompetent crew that became cartoonishly evil because they were fanatically loyal to a megalomaniac commander. And that’s not what I watch Star Trek for. Okay, granted, ST has given us plenty of corrupt Starfleet officers before, from Ben Finney to Ronald Tracey to Ben Maxwell to Cal Hudson. But it was less interesting this time, perhaps because it was just a bunch of kids acting very stupidly.
Also, this episode is a prime example of an unfortunate tendency in Trek TV casting. Every single speaking character in the Red Squad crew is white with an English or Scottish surname. Watters, Collins, Farris, Shepherd, Parton. And just about all the extras were white too, although Memory Alpha and IMDb together reveal that one of the background cadets was played by a Latina actress. The lack of diversity is staggering and defies all credibility. Okay, there was a Captain Ramirez, but he’s dead and never seen. This is a pattern noted by Ex Astris Scientia years ago: That human guest character names in Trek tend to be disproportionately of British or Irish origin. There’s often a failure to cast or write diversely outside the core crew, and that couldn’t be clearer here.
That said, I really like it that Dorian was from the Moon, because another all-too-common mistake in Trek is to have all human characters be from Earth, all Vulcans from Vulcan, all Klingons from Qo’noS, etc. Which makes no sense given all the colonizing that Earth was shown to do in TOS, and given all the immigration that would undoubtedly take place among worlds in the Federation. It would’ve been nice to see a human character born on Tellar or a Bolian hailing from Brooklyn, say, but a human born on the Moon is a start.
@3: What show is that quote from? It sounds familiar. And what was the one good episode?
@19: Right, exactly right. They’re incompetent, and nobody would reasonably expect them to be otherwise, because they are, after all, cadets. Which is why the idea of cadets crewing a cutting edge warship within spitting distance of Cardassian territory was ridiculous. It’s like the US Navy having a ship run by midshipmen off the coast of Cuba during the missile crisis. The whole concept is just too absurd for me to accept.
@5 In Trek 09 the cadets survive because Pike made a personal sacrifice, nu!Spock had the sense to get out of dodge, Scotty arrived to fix everything, Real!Spock handed out the cheat codes, and finally nu!Spock then used the spaceship from the future. Jim Kirk and the ship full of cadets managed to not get killed while the real officers managed to fix things. Then got promoted for, I dunno, because Starfleet command got really drunk after Earth was saved is my guess. Well, my guess and the testimony from Grand High Admiral Whiskers (formerly fleet mascot whiskers, the maine coon kitten).
What makes this episode work as well as it did is definitely the ending. Much like TNG’s The First Duty, Ron Moore had the balls to have these characters suffer the consequences of their actions.
And it was superbly executed. Mike Vejar choreographed this to perfection, to the point that I was as drawn into the Red Squad’s sense of invincibility as Nog was (even though I completely supported Jake’s outsider stance), and then I was completely unprepared for the torpedo’s failure and the brutal mayhem that would follow. Emotionally speaking, this episode grabbed me by the balls.
I’m glad Star Trek reminded viewers every now and then that not every captain was Kirk or Picard. There were several rotten apples in starfleet. Benjamin Maxwell, for one. Admiral Pressman being another. And even though Voyager’s writers tried to paint her as a hero, I saw Janeway as a pretty fallible and flawed captain, making all kinds of questionable decisions.
One can’t help but notice the parallels to high school and college social structure. Red Squad always felt like starfleet academy’s version of a high school football jock, right down to the use of bright colored clothing to make their presence known. They talk the talk, but in the end they’re more green than season 1 Wesley Crusher.
I’ll throw out a fanfix theory that might make the episode more palatable:
The original Valiant training mission was arranged by a Founder infiltrator as a long-range tactic to get a major Federation warship out-of-place when the war started; the Founder further manipulated the crew assignment to maximize the incompetence and emotional instability of the ship’s personnel, so that even if they took action against the Dominion, they’d likely fail.
(Of course, nobody on DS9’s writing staff was clever enough to think of that…)
@19 – It’s kind of depressing to see 24th century Starfleet cadets acting like 20th century US Navy midshipmen, but that’s why I liked this episode. It felt real.
Yeah this was one of those episodes I kind of liked, but also found really annoying in the body of the cadet crew, but it also magnifies the issues I had with Nutrek 1 where they gloss over old Kirk’s experience (e.g. Farragut, according the Shatverse Trek, Republic, the fact that Kirk really played the political games hard to get Captaincy of Enterprise) and just field commission jump him to Captain of the newest and most advanced Starship in the fleet, whereas before Kirk, McCoy, Uhura were seen as cadets. They kind of acknowledged it in NuTrek 2 when Pike said kirk wasn’t ready (I think I may’ve said a loud ‘well duh’ in the movie theater. I do know I reacted to Cumberbatch being Khan loudly.)
In THIS episode though I felt like the only sane voice of reason was Jake Sisko, and that if htose kids didn’t get killed Sisko would have torn into them (that would’ve made the episode worth it.) Honestly it just felt like the whole of the episode didn’t need to be there. I don’t know, I guess logically what Mr. Red Squad Hero should’ve done was find a way to the nearest starbase (that’s probably what hte dying officer wanted him to do?) and report to command, not go chasing after a new battleship. They acted either highly arrogantly or were mindless followers (‘Ooh Captain Watters is great and awesome and he will fix this!’ With what? His school book knowledge? His uninspiring speeches?).
What I did like about this ep though was that it showed how blind arrogance and blindly following orders can be fatal.
Dumb episode though. Still not as bad as ‘Way to Eden’ though.
Formal Naval Officer here. Sadly, several of the other commentors are correct – US Navy midshipmen would have acted in the same stupid way. However, we don’t crew actual warships with a handful of officers and a bunch of midshipmen – the systems are just way too complex for such inexperienced staff to operate.
That was the toughest part of this to understand – the systems should have been way too complex for cadets to operate. Shouldn’t you need actual experts?
If Red Squad represents Starfleet’s finest, well than Starfleet is so hosed.
What they should have done was to got back to the grown-ups. Instead Mr. Ego decides he’s smart enough to be a big boy Captain and his moron crew goes along with it.
I can almost buy them being egotistical enough to fall for this crap, but what about Nog? He’s not under their sway, having never served with them, but drinks the Koolaid nonetheless. UGH.
He’s never been my favorite character and never more so in this ep.
Terrible episode. I was glad to see them die and was pissed at Collins who was STILL unable to see where they went wrong. I can only hope that she was later deprogrammed.
I’d give it a 1, not a 7, and that’s being generous.
@29: Red Squad doesn’t represent Starfleet’s finest. It represents a bunch of gullible cadets that a clique of power-hungry officers manipulated into their instruments by convincing them they were Starfleet’s finest and were thus above the rules. Remember, Red Squad didn’t exist until Admiral Leyton and his co-conspirators created it. They wanted a loyal, unquestioning cadre of followers with which to consolidate their power. Really, my biggest problem with this episode is the implication that Red Squad was not immediately dissolved after Leyton’s arrest. I don’t know why the Academy would’ve kept it.
@28 The complexity of the sytem is kinda believable within the context of the Star Trek wider verse. Its well established that their systems are massively intuitive in their use and capable of really holostic system managment. Several times we’ve seen people with zero training manage to sit down and just start operating. Their systems help files leave Clippy the paperclip in the dust, to the point where the computer is bending over backwards to help them press the right buttons. And has massive redundancy and failsafe capablities worked in. Even then, with all that, it was starting to break down as they needed Nog’s help to get things back on line.
@30 My theory as to why Red Squad still existed was that Starfleet didn’t want to write them off. Being the generous souls that they are, Starfleet probably thought that having been hoodwinked they could get a second chance and that is probably why they were given this cruise. It sort of explains it, taking all the hoodwinked cadets, isolating them from any other sources of conflict (apart from with the Dominion) by putting them on a ship making a tour of the Federation and having them under close observation 24/7 all the way. Presumably the intent was to then have a report saying which ones were salvageable and which had to be written off, or even just having them readjust to “normal” Federation practices. As a re-eduction plan, it sort of works.
Oh yeah, I get that they were massively arrogant and that the plan was pretty wacky -and I was also groaning at the TV screen when they had actually completed their recon mission and instead of going back with the info, they decide to stage an attack, thus jeopardizing the entire mission. I guess I’m just saying that there are ‘main character’ plots that also rely on the same kind of stupid assumptions, the enemy holding the Idiot ball (One Little Ship sticks out in my mind for that one) or wacky schemes – although that’s more a weakness of those episodes instead of this one. In fact, I kind of chuckled a bit at how meta it was – I knew these characters were all doomed.
I also noticed a few similarities to things that annoyed me in the newer Star Trek movies, so glad I’m not alone in that.
ETA: Several of the other comments on this thread are making me laugh out loud.
@28 & 31: And don’t forget that Starfleet computer systems never seem to be able to tell authorized users from unauthorized… Starfleet ships just scream “Come hijack me!”
And thank you, KRAD, for noting the designer’s intended size of the Defiant Class (120 meters) as opposed to the later production number printed in the Tech Manual of 170 meters (alongside diagrams of the ship’s decks that pretty conclusively showed it could only be 120 meters, no less).
@Christopher bennet – funny this next to the incredibly dark ending was some of my favorite parts of star trek. The entire brightness and light of Trek got old as it wasn’t at all realistic with human nature fast. These kind of episodes is exactly what I watched DS9 for. The fact B5 (which you really should do a rewatch of) and BSG went further in this direction is what made me love them
To original poster – I think you underestimate the naivete of the federation. Especially given the distance of the headquarters on earth from ds9. Yeah DS9 can see war is likely coming but headquarters back on earth yeah no – combine that with the naviety of the federation believing as always up to the last minute that they can negotiate with what amounts to pure evil and you get this.
@35: The problem with that kind of “realism” is that it isn’t aspirational. Stories aren’t just supposed to copy reality; they’re supposed to offer us alternatives to reality, to inspire us to pursue our ideals. Throughout history, humans have striven to build a better world rather than just settling for the one they had, and they were inspired to do that by the myths and stories that illustrated their ideals, that provided templates for the better world they wanted to work toward. The reality is that the world we live in today is largely better, more peaceful, more equal, and more ethical than the world our forebears lived in. The odds of any given person being a victim of violence have fallen over the past few generations. More and more forms of institutionalized discrimination have been torn down. Global poverty is on the decline. We still have a lot of problems, of course, but we’ve made real progress, and that’s because people were inspired to work for a better world. And they couldn’t do that without the ability to imagine what a better world would look like.
So if you ask me, the truly unrealistic people are the ones who reject idealistic fiction as irrelevant, who assume that a better world is pointless to contemplate. We already have built a better world than we had before, because the reality is that we do, in fact, have a lot of positive traits alongside our negative ones. “Human nature” includes everything from Hitler to Gandhi. It’s endlessly mutable. And that means we can choose to emphasize the better angels of our nature if we have the courage and will to overcome our darker urges. Star Trek is not unrealistic, because it’s never denied that those darker sides exist, in characters like Tristan Adams and Ron Tracey and Norah Satie and Admiral Leyton. It’s shown that a better world requires effort to create and vigilance to maintain, and that is entirely realistic.
For that matter, I think you exaggerate the difference in philosophy between Trek and Babylon 5. Straczynski was clearly very strongly influenced by TOS, and the philosophy in B5 is profoundly Roddenberrian: Humanity has the potential for great good and great evil, but we are capable of choosing the former, and our better nature can overcome the darker side if we are determined enough. (Remember, it was Roddenberry’s own script “The Omega Glory” that contained the line, “I’ve found that evil usually triumphs unless good is very, very careful.”) I’ve always seen B5 as simply showing an earlier stage of the process. Trek showed a humanity that had already succeeded at improving itself, while B5 was more about the hard work of reaching that point. But they were very similar in their basic ideals and optimism.
On Red Squad being given a Defiant:
It seems likely that the members of Red Squad are very politically connected. I can’t see any other explanation for how they avoided being court-martialed for their role in Leyton’s coup. If so its not that surprising they would be sent out in a well protected ship, since no one would want to have to explain to Federation Councilor Watters or Admiral Farris that their children were lost because Starfleet cheaped out and sent them off on a year round cruise in an Excelsior class ship.
I’m also not sure that Starfleet Command takes the Defiant class ships all that seriously anyway. After all once Sisko stepped down from commanding the Defiant they gave command to a LCDR who was not even a command officer. And we saw in the Voyager episode “Message in a Bottle” that Starfleet is stationing Defiant class ships on the Romuluan border in the middle of the Dominion War, so obviously they aren’t deploying them all to fight the Dominion. It wouldn’t surprise me if there isn’t a lot of institutional prejudice against Defiant class ships amongst the Starfleet admirality (most of which would have come up the through pre-Wolf 359 Starfleet), who probably don’t see dedicated warships as real Starfleet ships. Thus they would probably have no problem with using a Defiant class ship to babysit a bunch of politically connected cadets.
On Vulcans being in Red Squad:
Is that really that improbable? We’ve seen Vulcans join cults before (Sybok and the Vulcan lady in the episodes Gambit), and we’ve seen them be prone to petty egotism (Captain Solok). It’s also possible that the Vulcan members of Red Squad could have had non-Vulcan blood like Spock and Saavik.
One thing that I don’t think has been commented on, at least not directly. For all that we look at these cadets and say that they’re not using common sense, their actions are foolish and over-confident, etc., can we really say that a young Kirk, Picard, or Sisko would not do exactly the same thing?
Compare this episode with “Tapestry” from TNG. There we see Picard, as a recent academy graduate making a colossal mistaken that would have gotten him killed had he not been close to a starfleet medical facility. And he makes that mistake out of exactly the same kind of hubris and over-confidence that is exhibited by the cadets here.
In a way, the two episodes are different aspects of the same truth — that the same qualities that can make a leader excel — self-confidence, courage, willingness to take a risk against the odds — can also lead to tragedy. And in the moment of decision, it may be awfully hard to know when to take a risk and when to exercise prudence.
So if you ask me, the truly unrealistic people are the ones who reject idealistic fiction as irrelevant, who assume that a better world is pointless to contemplate. We already have built a better world than we had before, because the reality is that we do, in fact, have a lot of positive traits alongside our negative ones.
@36
Ever think about entering politics? We could have used you as speechwriter for the presidential elections. With this kind of eloquence and conviction, the last few weeks would have been a lot less divisive, and a lot more united (and we would have won by a larger margin instead of a narrow one).
@37: Technically, Saavik does not have non-Vulcan blood. Vulcans and Romulans are the same species; their differences in behavior are entirely cultural.
And of course, in general, Vulcans’ rationality and control has nothing to do with their “blood”; the entire reason they adopted the philosophy of emotional repression is because they are innately hyperemotional to a dangerous degree. So since Vulcan logic is a cultural practice rather than an innate attribute, it stands to reason that different Vulcans would pursue it to different degrees and define it in different ways, in the same way that humans define their religions in very different ways.
@40 Christopher was the backstory of Saavik’s mixed heritage really canon? I remember as a kid reading the McIntyre novelizations of “Wrath of Khan” and “Search For Spock” and it was stated that she was the result of a sexual encounter wherein a Vulcan was raped by a Romulan but that she didn’t know the identity of her parents. It was a major part of her character’s identity in those books but I don’t remember it ever being mentioned once onscreen in the films. In fact I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that the filmmakers considered her a Vulcan and that the half-breed storyline had been dropped in a early rewrite of the screenplay.
In the context of the novellizations, however, I distinctly recall that one of Kruge’s men scans from orbit to determine who is on the Genesis planet and that the scanners are confused by Saavik’s readings – that she’s not quite Vulcan or Romulan. And in “The Enemy” Dr. Crusher notes physiological differences for which her knowledge of Vulan medicine has not prepared her in treating her Romulan patient. I’m just wondering if they’re truly the same species at that point.
@40: True. And for all we know the Vulcans in Red Squad might have grown up on Earth or a predominantly human populated colony world and fully adopted human cultural norms. (And thus they would be just as likely to buy into the Red Squad hype as any human teenager.)
No. If it’s not onscreen, it’s not part of the canon, even if it was in the original script. The producers wisely dropped the “half-Romulan” bit for exactly the reason I mentioned: They realized that Vulcan logic is learned rather than innate and that Romulans are an offshoot of the Vulcans anyway, so the idea that being half-Romulan would make her more emotional is a non-starter. Vonda McIntyre kept her half-Romulan heritage in the novels, but explained her emotionalism as a result of her upbringing (raised on Hellguard and only introduced to Vulcans in early adolescence) rather than her biology. Just about every novel and comic treatment of Saavik has used the basics of McIntyre’s Saavik backstory, but it’s not canonical.
We know the Vulcan/Romulan split happened about 2000 years before TNG, and that’s not enough time for the two to have diverged into separate species, not without aggressive genetic engineering on one or both parts. At most, I’d interpret them as different “races” of the same species.
Why was a Defiant-class commanded by a LCDR? They are tiny ships with very small crews. This is why powerful nuclear attack submarines have CDRs as COs, while ships with arguably less combat power have O-6s running the show. And in a war, senior officers are probably harder to come by – the casualties inflicted on Starfleet are shown to be really bad. This is a replicator economy – they can build ships very quickly at little “cost” – but what they can’t produce quickly are highly qualified staff.
There have been numerous suggestions throughout Trek (especially DS9 but even TOS) that the majority of Starfleet do not serve on starships. I would think that enormous “shore establishment” on planets and stations would be pulled into the fleet as it expands.
Why would a Defiant class be used for a midshipman cruise? No reason – lazy writing, really. The traditional dedicated training ship is an OLDER ship – both in real life (see the Coast Guard’s Eagle) and in Trek (remember TWOK?).
And as far as people being evolved…Please. The entire idea of DS9 is lets take utopia and throw it at a war. Quark makes the point that humans have evolved their SYSTEM but that when removed from it, they are the same. The entire DS9 series is an in-universe refutation of Rodenberry’s late-in-life addiction fueled foolishness.
@44: I didn’t say anything about humans being “evolved.” My point was about our capacity to improve ourselves if we work very hard at it and don’t let ourselves backslide thanks to rationalizations about how “human nature” is intrinsically bad. That’s nothing more than a lazy excuse to avoid doing the work to improve. The universe is governed by entropy; the only way to avoid deterioration is to keep striving to do better. And my point was not about the reality of the fictional premise; it was about our need in real life for stories that give us ideals to aspire toward. If we’re to be motivated to do that hard work to better ourselves, we need to be able to visualize what a better world would look like. The fact that the story is more idealized than reality is the exact reason why it’s valuable.
Anyway, evolution is not an upward progression, it’s simply a process of adaptation to the demands of one’s environment. Now, it is possible we could gradually evolve into a less aggressive behavior if there is a steady selection pressure against it — i.e. if more aggressive people are less likely to find mates and reproduce, which might be due to getting killed off quicker or due to a society in which more aggressive people are considered less desirable mates. But that would take thousands of years to take effect. Trek’s humanity is not more evolved, just more dedicated to self-improvement. Yes, DS9 quite plausibly showed how easy it would be to backslide from that, but by this point it had shown that quite clearly already and it was getting tiresome to see them keep hammering it home week after week, especially via such mediocre stories.
@43: What about the fact that Vulcans have telepathic abilities while Romulans don’t? Doesn’t that suggest that Vulcans and Romulans have diverged into seperate species? It doesn’t seem likely that the Vulcan telepathy is merely a learned mental discipline that Romulans are equally capable of learning because if so then wouldn’t we have seen Romulan telepaths by now? (If nothing else you would expect the Tal Shiar to master the technique, so they could have trained telepaths instead of having to rely upon the (apparently easily thwarted) mind probes.
@44: And yet even with that manpower shortage Riker stayed as the XO of the Enterprise for the whole Dominion War rather than being placed in command of any of the newly built ships. That suggests Starfleet Command thought it was more important to have a qualified first officer on a Sovereign class ship than an experienced captain on a Defiant class. Which makes sense if Starfleet Command doesn’t consider the Defiant class ships to be that important. And if they’ll let the JV squad captain the Defiants is it really that surprising they would waste one as a training ship?
It may depend on how they intend using Defiant class ships in general. Okay Ben Ssko’s personal Defiant has the whole Conservation of Ninjitsu going for it and for most of the show it benefits from the Main Character Shields of its crew, but do all Defiant class vessels have that? As pointed out upthread, replicator tech means Starfleet can effectively spam-ships, and the smaller the easier it is to spam.
I’m thinking the tactic for Defiant class ships in general are more like a zerg-rush as the first wave of any assualt. Then they pick up the survivors, respawn another batch of Defiant-class, staff them and zerg rush again. You wouldn’t want to put an experienced officer on one of those things and waste a lot of training, you’d need those for the commands of the 2nd wave and the occupation forces, ships that are intended to last. You’d find a crew of screw-ups or surplus to current requirement science officers to crew the Defiants. Basically the Defiants are more likely to be treated like next-gen Miranda class
targetsships.@46: Clearly there’s been some divergence, but that doesn’t prove that it’s the result of speciation as opposed to some other factor. As I said, speciation would take far longer, unless it were done via genetic engineering. It’s not unheard of for different populations of the same species to have different abilities; for instance, some humans can digest lactose and others cannot. And many humans have mental abilities others lack; some people have perfect pitch while others are tone-deaf, some people are colorblind while others can detect more subtle variations of color than most people, and then there’s the still little-understood distinction between the autistic spectrum and the rest of the population. As long as two organisms can still interbreed, they’re the same species even if they have different abilities or attributes. (Although by that logic, most Trek humanoids are the same species. But that’s another discussion.)
It could be that the Romulans have bred telepaths out of their population, perhaps by killing or sterilizing everyone who showed telepathic potential, or by genetic engineering. Which could be the beginning of a gradual process of divergence into separate species, but only the beginning.
Didn’t the Romulans exile their telepath’s to Remus, which is why the Remans had telepathic powers in Insurrection?
@49: I’ve never bought the idea that the Remans are altered Vulcan/Romulans. That would take an extreme degree of genetic engineering, and it’s hard to understand why they’d choose to change themselves into that form. I think it’s more likely that the Remans are indigenous to Remus.
I could get behind the idea that the Remans were Romulans that had genetic surgery practiced on them against their will for crimes, politcal or genuine both, its a dickish thing to do but it is the sort of thing that might occur to a certain sort of person. Maiming as punishment is hardly unknown, and it does come with its own unique level of terror. Would you oppose a government if you, your friends, your family, anyone with a random connection to you, would be picked up, genetically modified into an abomination, and shipped off, one and all, to a Space-Gitmo? I could see the Romulans doing that. Its a cold, calculating type of terror that is completely in-keeping with what we’ve seen of their political structure.
@51: I prefer the idea that the Remans are a separate subject species, if for no other reason that it makes the Romulan Star Empire an actual empire! I’m so tired of Trek’s so-called “empires” that consist of only one species. An empire, by definition, is a political entity in which one central state rules over multiple other states and draws upon their wealth, goods, and populace to serve the needs of the metropolis (the central state). So an interstellar empire shouldn’t be one race, it should be multiple races under one race’s rule. The only alien civilization we’ve seen in Trek that really looks like an empire is the Dominion, because its rulers man their ships with members of the more expendable subordinate races — much as historical empires such as the Roman and British Empires made extensive use of subject populations as cannon fodder in their armies. One of the things I like about Nemesis is that it actually depicts the Romulans functioning as an empire, ruling over a subject people (the Remans) and using them as expendable frontline troops in their wars. It was so immensely refreshing after decades of seeing the Romulans portrayed as a single-species state (not to mention the Klingons, Cardassians, and pretty much all the other so-called “empires” in Trek). Having the Remans just be some kind of mutant Romulans takes that away.
The only alien civilization we’ve seen in Trek that really looks like an empire is the Dominion, because its rulers man their ships with members of the more expendable subordinate races — much as historical empires such as the Roman and British Empires made extensive use of subject populations as cannon fodder in their armies. One of the things I like about Nemesis is that it actually depicts the Romulans functioning as an empire, ruling over a subject people (the Remans) and using them as expendable frontline troops in their wars.
@52
The So’na sort of did the same on a lesser scale, back in Insurrection. Though not really an empire, they operated on the same principles through the use of subordinate labor class species.
@48 – The question of “when has speciation truly occurred?” is an interesting one. The ability to produce offspring is a good rule of thumb but it’s not set in stone. The ability to produce fertile offspring is a little closer, but even that’s not a given. It’s possible, albeit unlikely, for a mule to be fertile, but it does happen – and horses and donkeys diverged from their last common ancestor about 4 million years ago.
But in the case of Vulcans and Romulans, the question is moot. 2000 years is nothing on the evolutionary time scale.
I figured the cadets were given the Valiant and sent away to keep it (and them) out of the way in case Admiral Leyton’s remaining supporters needed a little firepower in control of friendly forces.
@21
Young Indiana Jones
I don’t know the title of the one episode, but he and a friend somehow capture a WWI German officer and are trying to get him back to friendly lines by themselves. Meanwhile the entire time the German is lecturing him on how he’s doing everything wrong. The show in general is forgettable, but that one stuck with me.
CLB, I just want to give you a big slow clap. I am always impressed by how organized and eloquent your responses are. Your optimistic (and I mean that in a more substantial way than just a ‘everything will be okay’ superficial way that people seem to stereotype optimism) approach to humanity is refreshing.
“It’s shown that a better world requires effort to create and vigilance to maintain, and that is entirely realistic.” – yes, this.
I find I have to argue about this a lot. I should probably no better than to get into arguments on Facebook, but it happens. Recently one of the things I’ve been attempting to discuss is the viral ‘catcalling’ video and if that constitutes harrassment, what we should do about it, etc. I am not here so much to debate what was harrassment and what wasn’t, but it was very frustrating for people (especially fellow women) to shut down discussion with things like, “it’s a fact that people are going to judge your body so if she doesn’t like it she should speak up”, “she’ll miss those comments when she gets old”, etc. Or, similarly, “Bullies are going to bully, so you need to teach your kids to respect themselves”, etc. Yes, there probably will always be some people who do stuff like that, but this idea that we can’t even conceive of teaching people to have a different worldview or attitudes about these kinds of things? It’s exhausting and dispiriting to me. Especially when people say things like ‘it’s a fact’ as if whatever biological imperatives we hare are just the end all be all and culture/education counts for nothing, or then start to put down/shame others who are bringing it to attention because they’re ‘wasting their time’ when there are ‘more important’ issues to worry about (apparently we can only worry about one issue at a time). It’s one of those areas that we try to be very conscious about how we raise our sons (and any future daughters if we get any).
I get that the cadets were supposed to be arrogant and elitist and thus unlikeable but that’s didn’t make me enjoy the episode any better. In fact I found it troubling and depressing in a Star Trek context because Starfleet and humans in the 24th century are supposed to be better than this. The only thing I liked were the battle scenes.
Okay, I’m a little late to the game here but here’s my $0.02
I agree with everyone else that this is exactly how cadets would/should operate. Having gone through AFROTC (before Air Force Medical and I had our falling out) I knew way to many cadets like Watters. They never learn that discretion is the better part of valor. The difference between an experienced officer like Sisko and an inexperienced one like Watters is knowing when to keep fighting. Watters ship was damaged, unsupported and outgunned. The smart thing to do would have been to head for Federation space ASAP (they are probably only a day or two at warp from being there anyways). The problem is that Watters, like many cadets, are too caught up in the oorah of cadethood and haven’t learned the hard lessons of making smart tactical decisions.
One thing I disagree with though is Nog’s excitement at being part of this “elite” group of officers. He’s served in combat numerous times with heroic officers like Sisko, Worf and Dax. It makes zero sense for him to idolize this 22 year old hot shot. It would have been far more interesting to place him as the voice of doubt against Watters, where some of the crew see what he’s saying (especially the younger ones) since they’re probably scared, but hiding it with bravado, while Watters is gung ho on “This is my ship and my mission.” Having Jake as the voice of reason doesn’t help since he’s too easy to dismiss as a civilian. (Think about all of the vitriol that has been focused on people who have been anti-war the last decade or so. There’s been a lot that boils down to “You’ve never served so you have no opinion”) Having Nog saying “A good captain would look after his men first” while Watters says “A good captain completes his mission” would be a much more interesting argument.
As far as the roles of the Defiant, they are extremely powerful escorts, however I have to imagine that they CANNOT stand toe to toe with a battleship size vessel (like a Sovereign class). They pack a powerful punch and are maneuverable, but that has to be at the expense of something- most likely shielding. If you notice in the battle scenes, they seem to survive because they are faster and more maneuverable, which makes them harder to hit- especially when manned by an experienced captain and crew like Sisko et al. However, it probably is true that most Defiant classes are commanded by Lt. Cdr’s (Destroyer and Destroyer Escorts were frequently commanded by Lt. Cdr’s in WW2 and smaller ships commanded by LT’s) with much more average crews. Sisko gets a Defiant because a) he’s the guy who built it and is the expert and b) also commands a really, really big starbase to which the Defiant is (literally) attached.
This episode seems like a good premise (what if we have a bunch of really junior people stuck behind enemy lines) that just doesn’t get fleshed out all the way.
@58 – See, that’s why I like it. It illustrates in a powerful way that 24th century humans aren’t inherently different from 21st century humans. If 24th century humans are better, it’s because they’ve chosen to be better. That might not be enough for you – I still loathed Catcher in the Rye even knowing that the protagonist was supposed to be unlikable because the author did entirely too good a job of writing an unlikable character.
@59 – That’s a good point about Nog. I actually didn’t think of that when I watched this episode, it worked for me because Nog was so enamored of Red Squad back when he was at the Academy that I’d figured it would be easy for him to get caught up in the moment. But you’re right – there’s no good reason why someone who serves with Sisko, Dax and Worf should be enamored with someone like Watters.
Re:Nog being impressed by Red Squad, Nog has self-esteem problems. We’ve seen it a lot. He gets little validation from his dad (even Nog knows Rom is an idiot), his mother is absent, Quark is…Quark. Sisko, Worf, and O’Brian are not exactly the expressive type. In Red Squad he finds people that are willing to be positively overflowing with compliments for his skill. They sucker him in like the church of happyology sucker in an aspiring actor. Its a very cult-like thing. Simplified for one episode of tv of course.
@61: I loathed Catcher in the Rye too! I was required to read it in high school, and it just seemed totally pointless to me. It doesn’t have much of a plot, because it’s just a character study — I get that. But it’s a character study of a thoroughly unpleasant and rather pathetic character.
@63 – Small world! Well, a lot of thoughtful and perceptive people (not to talk myself up or anything) hated Catcher in the Rye. Somehow I managed to dodge the bullet of being required to read it in high school. I actually read the damn thing voluntarily when I was in high school after reading an article in the paper about how it was banned a lot for “controversial themes” and how the protagonist was an everyman who every teenager could identify with. I was incredibly insulted at the suggestion that I would identify with such a character. I reread the book later after finding out that the protagonist was intended to be unpleasant, but it didn’t make the experience any more enjoyable even though I understood it better.
@63/64
Add me to list. Over the years, I’ve given it some thought and decided that the biggest problem was that when I was a teenager in the late 70s, Holden Caulfield’s problems were simply not relevant to me. Not to mention the fact that he rebelled by using swear words I learned in the 4th or 5th grade. Made him look childish, not tough. But really, the big thing was that society had largely moved on and those were not the crises of the teens of my day. I’ve also wondered just how much they were really the crises of 50s era teens in general. More likely only those of New England upper-middle and middle classes and those that emulated them. On the west coast in the 70s? Meh.
Hah, I remember loving Catcher in the Rye (I read it in 9th grade) although I didn’t like Holden himself. But in 9th grade I was kind of obnoxious and felt everybody around me was ‘phony’ and ‘mainstream’ (the horror!) too so…. :)
I too find J.D. Salinger in general and The Catcher in the Rye in particular to be overrated and awful and populated by characters about whom I can’t gather up the interest to give a single damn about.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
That’s actually how I remember feeing about the Great Gatsby, which we read in that same class. I also remember our class was roughly divided into two groups – people that liked Catcher in the Rye, and people that liked The Great Gatsby (very few enjoyed both).
Granted, there probably is more to that book that I didn’t catch on first reading, but I hated it at the time.
I don’t think Red Squad was created by Admiral Leyton to help him take over the planet. I think they were similar to (or a replacement for) Nova Squadron and were supposed to be an elite group of cadets, like college students elected to Phi Beta Kappa, or the precison squadrons in the Navy and Air Force today. As for the episode, I found the “horah!” of “We’re Red Squad! And we can do anything!” to be annoying as hell, like most people. I thought it was PERFECT that Nog had the experience he did. Yes he was an ensign by rank, but he never finished the Academy; he was assigned to DS9 in his second year for field training and never was able to return to the Academy b/c the War broke out. There’s an envy even for someone who was a field officer, being trained and mentored by people like Sisko, Dax and O’Brien, to have a “normal” time, which would have had Nog graduate in 2375 or 2376. I have a college degree already but if I could go back to college and join the Honors Institute, even today, I would. It’s aspirational. These people were supposed to be “the best” officer corps Starfleet produced; in “Homefront”, Nog asked Sisko for a recommendation for it. I think Nog’s experience having these people who represented excellence and let Nog get swept up in it was the exact right thing to do for his storyline. I loved at the end of the episode, when his senior officers are dead and he’s staring at the viewscreen as that gigantic Dominion warship pummeled the Valiant with torpedoes, he realizes “Oh crap I never should have gone along with this, these people aren’t the best and brightest. They’re just a bunch of dead kids.” And absolutely no question in the world that Watters had to be intentionally hiding the Vailant‘s true location from Starfleet; they were only minutes away from Starbase 257 at warp speed, unless the base was deep behind enemy lines somehow (I doubt it). Why? Who knows, that kid was on cordafin injections for two months, a 19-year-old in command of one of Starfleet’s strongest warships, claiming to be behind enemy lines. If I had temporary command of a Federation starship, I wouldn’t be giving it back any time soon; I’d be finding a coherent tetryon beam in the Badlands to get me to the Delta or Gamma Quadrants so I’m cut off from higher command for a few years and can essentially play God depending on my mood swings… oh sorry, wrong series!
As I’ve been going through these episodes at my own pace (and I hope my occasional comments months after the fact are not an unforgivable breach of etiquette), I have noticed that among the episdoes I detest the most (such as “The Muse”), the majority of them seem to telegraph their awful trajectory in the second or third act and then never waver.
It’s as if the writers are saying “Hey, we’ve got this terrible premise, see? Now, we’re gonna see it through to the bitter end, and put you through it too. Enjoy!” (I think Keith would put “Change of Heart” in that category, haha.)
Quite simply, “Valiant” made me feel sick. Twenty minutes into it, probably about the time “Captain” Watters took those cordafin tablets (whatever those are), the message could not have been more blatant, not to mention head-scratchingly dumb. “Drug-addicted novice Captain! Red Alert! This will end badly!”
From there, it was just one eye-roll after another. I get that the young crew was obliged to harden up quickly due to their dire circumstances. I can even see how that might lead them to become these oddly inhuman, militant, and rather detestable proto-fascists.
But to suddenly believe that a ship that was obviously not at its best (having been damaged enough to kill all its officers, and then going another 8 months without proper repair/resupply) could take on a new ship twice its size with no support was simply not believable.
No Starfleet officer would contemplate such an absurd mission, especially when—and this is the real kicker—the intelligence they had gathered would not have made it to the Federation at all had it not been for the little Moore-ian handwave of allowing just the right escape pod—the one with our beloved main characters and their doughy, stereotyped “everywoman”—to get back to Federation space. Bleh.
So not only is the story a total flub, the whole production becomes actively distatesful and manipulative. Try as I might to find something to enjoy here, the most satisfying moment was when the whole thing blow up in their faces. And even then, I couldn’t really get behind it because I felt manipulated into actually rooting for the death of this crew of young, smart Federation personnel. Loathesome.
The Jake and Nog that I (and we) know have been friends for so long that they could have simply exchanged a glance (“ehhh, this Watters kid, he’s off his rocker, ain’t he…?) and known that a disaster was imminent. Instead, we had to watch Nog go through the motions, uncharacteristically buying into an entire crew’s cult of combat instead of actively subverting it from the beginning, as would have been more fitting of his experience by that point. That would have made a more interesting story rather than this Lord of the Flies-like nonsense.
(But hey: at least there is the power of words to vent such frustrations, eh?)
I also wanted to say how glad I am that CLB and a couple others have noted the unforgivable and relativly consistent “default” to white speaking parts. It is probably not some kind of deliberate neglect, but just another mundane example of how white/Anglo/pinkskins are presented as the “default” humans. (And even with the Bajorans, among whom there are often a good number of dark-skinned extras, we never get to actually meet one of them. How do black Bajorans feel about their Emissary, eh?) This is as good an example as any of the subtle ways in which those who are not white are more or less excluded from the story.
This kind of subliminal marginalization is a little too similar to the way alien cultures are also presented in a monolithic way (where even variations in skin color are never really addressed—like, did Tuvok ever talk about ways in which dark-skinned Vulcans might or might not have been different from the rest?).
It’s not that there haven’t been plenty of exceptions (as we’ve seen a fair number of black captains and admirals in Starfleet, as well as interesting skin color variations among Klingons and Bajorans), or that there need be some kind of “quota” of non-white (or non-male) parts. A United Colors of Benneton tokenism is arguably just as offensive as a lily-white cast.
But in the future Trek describes, it’s inconceivable that there would not be all kinds of cultural hybrids showing up. For example, I always thought of Jean-Luc Picard as a French-English hybrid, because by that time in history, those cultures would have been so closely tied (much as they were during the Norman period), that strict distinctions between them would become far less hegemonic.
Anyway, it’s not a central point to the episode, but certainly worth noting. I would have loved to see more characters on Trek who were not only “of color” (hate that term) but also a little disorientingly non-token (like say, if our favorite fire-spinning Lieutenant Atoa had been described as part Hawaiian, part Martian or something…).
hrumph. so. this episode.
With all his yammering on about duty, Nog was pretty quick to forget about his screamingly important mission to bring the Ferengi into the Federation. But, no, instead he decides to go play Peter Pan with the biggest bunch of incompetent (and may I add, for the most part, poorly acted) raging egoists this side of Andoria. Only on this ship, Peter Pan doesn’t know how to fly and you end up face first on the sidewalk in a pool of your own blood.
The direction of this episode was terrible. It reminded me of Starship Troopers – which I actually liked, it just didn’t work here. The captain spinning in his chair and the montage of the crew getting ready for battle reminded me of an episode of the A-team.
I found no redeeming qualities whatsoever in this episode.
That moment when they fired their torpedo at the braces was a major mistake on their part, too.
Regardless of whether their delta radiation trick worked on the battleship’s braces or not, instead of stopping and standing to watch like a audience at a sports game when they fired ONE torpedo, they should have continued to fire a rapid barrage of phasers and other torpedoes at the warship. Battle isn’t a spectator event where you fire one torpedo, then stop to watch what happens.
#RedSquadSoWhite
Not only doesn’t it make any sense to put so many cadets on one ship to sent it away on a stealth mission behind enemy lines, it also doesn’t make sense to “keep radio silence” for the whole time. The Valiant is reported missing (by whom?) and Starfleet doesn’t even try to contact them? Or was that part of the plan? Then it would even make less sense than “no sense”.
Didn’t we see two Vulcans (and even one Trill? Speak about “experience of a few life times”) in the crew? The only logical thing to do would’ve been to return home, not to continue the mission with a bunch of kids. And attacking a frickin’ battle ship with a small vessle as the Valiant is not only illogical, it’s just madness, plain and simple.
But that is not all: Sending off Nog all alone to deliver “an important message to the Grand Nagus”. What the hell is that all about? Couldn’t they just like e-mail it to him?
Last but not least, OF COURSE everyone except for the main cast dies (oh, and the person who didn’t act like a total douche survived as well). This trope is so predictable, it’s not even funny anymore.
Interesting how the comments show different perceptions of the same episode. While i found the whole base story to be totally stupid, it has at least three good lessons from my perspective:
1) creating an “elite” group within an organization is a very-very dangerous game, especially when we’re talking about kids
2) hero cult is stupid – see the problem with the whole group and the worship of their totally incompetent and stupid captain
3) Dunning-Kruger at its best. when a bunch of incompetent fools think they know everything.
I was surprised that Nog would fall for all this…:(
But all in all, a nice episode…
69: ”And absolutely no question in the world that Watters had to be intentionally hiding the Vailant‘s true location from Starfleet; they were only minutes away from Starbase 257 at warp speed, unless the base was deep behind enemy lines somehow (I doubt it).”
Just reading this series alongside my own rewatch, and throughout rewatching this episode I was awaiting the revelation that I thought I half-remembered that Watters had intentionally disobeyed instructions or protocol which required him to take the ship back to Federation space in favour of playing commando behind enemy lines with his merry crew of rookies. Clearly my memory was wrong but still that’s definitely what he did!
Why would Starfleet allow a Defiant-class starship to be used as training ground for a bunch of cadets, when the Federation was on the verge of war against the Dominion? I think “The Valiant” would have worked if the cadets had been junior officers commanding the surviving crew. But a Starfleet commissioned officer giving a cadet a battlefield commission, when the smartest move would have been to order the cadets back to the nearest Starfleet base? And what was up with Nog? He had enthusiastically agreed with everything Watters did . . . yet, in the end, judge the latter as a “poor captain”?
This episode was dumb. This is an example of Ronald Moore trying to be “meaningful” and failing due to details.
@63/Christopher: I never read Catcher in the Rye in high school, but I did have to read another popular mid-20th-century book that I loathed: On The Road by Jack Kerouac. I thought it was awful and still do today 20 years later.
I do not care for the writing style — it is much too wordy and repetitive. I like to compare Kerouac to Hemingway because they wrote during the same period, and I find Hemingway much more skillful and concise as a writer.
Ostensibly a journey of self-discovery, I felt extremely let down by the plot. I kept reading and reading all of these repetitive drug-fueled exploits, and the book makes you think that it is building towards some new revolutionary life discovery. At the end, there is no profound revelation you get from the book. “Don’t follow druggies around aimlessly,” is probably the big lesson from the book. But I could have told you not to do that as a 14-year-old.
A lot Baby Boomers who grew up in a culture of glorifying drugs act like the book is much more profound and revelatory than it really is.
If you want to read or watch a good story about self-discovery, I recommend the 2016 movie Moonlight. It’s very well-written and the lessons are profound.
Anyway, I actually really liked this episode. Star Trek is chock-full of episodes that build up to a hopeless situation only for the characters to miraculously pull through and succeed with their goals at the last possible second. I really thought these characters would miraculously pull through and I was shocked when Watters died. It really does subvert expectations.
It’s not all that unusual for young people who are fresh out of school to be full of themselves and try to impress people when they are given authority. It spoke to me because I witnessed it first-hand in a previous occupational life.
For 7 years, I worked for a company that only hired mid-level managers right out of university. They were entrusted with supervising several businesses that included 40-50 employees within 6 months after graduating. Most of them had no prior management experience — the company only cared about the degree. The company did not promote into middle management from within. So many of these young 22-year-old managers had an air of arrogance and invincibility. I was only about 7-8 years older than most of them.
I’ll never forget the time one of them told me I needed to prove myself to stay with the company… I had nothing to “prove” to them as I had been working in that particular industry since most of them were in middle school.
Having recently re-watched this episode for the first time, I find it hard to understand why the crew of Valiant attracts so much hate and so little pity – if nothing else descriptions of them as uniformly incompetent, as opposed to painfully young and overconfident, hold very little water given they were able to survive behind the lines for over half a year and only one Good decision away from coming back to the Federation mostly intact, with some extremely useful actionable intelligence and one H— of a story to tell.
Their decision to stay behind the lines in the first place was undoubtedly questionable at the very best, but having made that poor decision they managed to make it work for eight months – which implies not only luck but a pretty considerable level of basic competence: unfortunately the shared hardships and danger (not to mention the already-strong unit identity) seem to have created an atmosphere of unquestioning acceptance: people talk about Vulcan Logic being a fireproof shield against poor decisions, but given how often even very experienced Vulcan officers have been shown to go along into some horrible with their captains & their crews out of simple loyalty (no matter how much they may agree or disagree with the decisions that led them to that course of action) it’s not difficult to understand how mere cadets could be carried along for a ride into the Valley of Death …
In all honesty I really like this episode for being a powerful deconstruction of the “Death or Glory” mindset too common in fiction focussing on military or paramilitary units in exceptional circumstances: the thrill of horror one experiences on hearing acting-Captain Watters speech sound the bugle for a charge up the Little Bighorn is practically worth the price of admission in its own right (and the episode also has Ensign Nog’s painfully humble riposte to the last of Red Squadron to recommend it, at the very least), so it’s very hard for me to accept the idea that it is one of the worst episodes of STAR TREK.
…
Though I do agree that USS Valiant should probably have been an Intrepid-class vessel; it’s in the name! (Hopefully the NCC-75418 mentioned in NEMESIS will have a captain with better judgement than NCC-74210). I do wonder if the training cruise of the Defiant-class Valiant was as much about seeing if the noteworthy bugs in the design had been worked out* making this a test as much of the ship as her cadet crew.
*I wonder if the Defiant-class (over-gunned and over-powered as it was) would be phased out of service as the Prometheus-class was built up? It’s hard not to see the latter as a replacement for the former, given time and a successful trials.
Still don’t care for this one. The acting from pretty much everyone on the Valiant except Aron Eisenberg is… not great. The original idea to have a grizzled and dejected crew is put to good use in The Siege of AR-558, but revisiting Red Squad really should not have been high on anyone’s list of priorities. It served for a bit of growth for Nog and had some fancy CGI, but definitely a throwaway story.
@81
A story about a group of proud, patriotic people following an arrogant leader to their doom is not what I’d call throwaway. Ahem.
I really enjoyed this episode, and agree with all of KRAD’s points about it. Experience is so important, and believing you’re infallible just because you haven’t been unfortunate to suffer a defeat is a recipe for disaster, as was shown.
Honestly, I like stories that show the downfalls of cult-like followings. Given recent events, stories like that seem very relevant, and using the futuristic setting to shine a light on current problems is a very Trek thing to do. And while some may say, “surely we will have learned better by the 24th century,” I think we need to remember that these were cadets, practically kids. Their captain was killed, and would’ve latched onto an amoeba if it seemed sure enough of itself. Even in the 24th century, people in dire straits will get thirsty for leadership when faced with a desperate situation, and get high on their own supply of dumb luck.
But the points about the plausibility of the setup of this situation are entirely valid. One WOULD hope Starfleet would’ve realized the pitfalls involved in having an “elite” cadre of cadets, so Red Squad’s continued existence does feel contrived. And yeah, seeing all those escape pods get destroyed except for ONE – gee, I wonder who’s in that one?! – was silly.
But to me, the episode was good enough to make up for those flaws.
The first officer cadet sure was abrasive…oh, her name was Karen. That explains it.
Lockdown Rewatch.
I had almost no memory of this one apart from a brief memory of Nog and Jake on a Defiant clone but I could remember very little of the context It’s not a bad episode the cadets are played well if a little bit of throw back to The First Duty in having the senior cadet be a bit a Jackass. Aaron Eisenberg is as almost always excellent and this is also one of Cirroc Lofton’s best episodes as well.
What a position for Jake and Nog to be in for the beam out! 35: Yeah, I definitely want a B5 rewatch too. 70: I didn’t mind the near total annihilation of ship and crew. It meant their mistake carried real consequences, even though it also meant regulars Jake and Nog had to survive it. 80: Vulcan logic doesn’t always lead them to the right conclusion but because they never question it, they think it does. 84: With that hairdo and harsh demeanour, Karen could be a younger Seven of Nine.
I just watched this episode for the first time and it stuck with me as a really interesting rebuttal to a lot of typical science fiction cliches. The group of academy cadets and plucky young heroes stuck with a super-advanced warship before deciding to take it behind enemy lines to save the day. It makes absolutely no sense in a real life military and not much more in Star Trek but it’s a perfect Mobile Suit Gundam or anime sort of storyline.
And it ends with them all horribly killed.
Its not the first time either as we saw this as the premise for Wrath of Khan too except it was Kirk’s overconfidence there. Now we’re going to see PRODIGY take the same premise except, of course, it’s not a wartime situation.
I will say that I think, even in universe, Waters is engaged in a bunch of complete tribble****ing to “his” crew and making wildly questionable decisions based on the most loosest possible interpretations of “orders.” He’s living out his Captain Kirk fantasy and looking for a way to be a big hero so if he ever returned to Starfleet, he wouldn’t be thrown in the brig or sent to Australia’s penal colony.
After all, the Valiant as an additional Defiant-class vessel during the Dominion War might have made a BIG difference in a lot of battles.
It was fine. It’s still DS9, which means that it’s going to entertain me.
I generally don’t like kids. So, it was never going to be a great episode for me, but it was certainly better than most of the “kid episodes” on TNG. The one with the imaginary friend has got to be a top 3 worst in all of Trek. The Little Rascals one? Yep. Valiant is looking alright for a kid episode.
I also detested Catcher in the Rye and had to read it in high school. Like another commenter, I was insulted that I was supposed to identify with this useless boy somehow. I also disliked Gatsby, but have reread it as an adult and have a better appreciation for it. But still, the characters aren’t that likeable so no matter how deft the writing, I’m unlikely to read it ever again.
I liked this episode, but agree with some that there’s been too much emphasis on being “dark Trek”. CLB’s inspirational comments (#36) made me think of my own arguments in favor of Disney movies, especially those based on fairy tales. Plenty of parents I know don’t want their kids to see Disney movies- they either think they’re too scary or too happy shiny and unrealistic. My thinking is that these traditional children’s stories are teaching stories: there’s real danger out there, kids, you need to know and have a healthy fear. Disney often shoehorns a happy ending in, and I even like that. To me it teaches that hard times are inevitable but it does get better eventually.
This is why, as much as I have enjoyed DS9, I prefer TOS and TNG. Overall a more hopeful vision for the future.
I was rewatching this episode a couple of days ago, and for the first time I noticed that Watters was doing the “Kirk slouch” in the big chair.
It also occurred to me that that shot highlights how there may be something seriously wrong with the culture of Starfleet Academy.
Going back to TNG episode “The First Duty,” there seems to be a remarkable tolerance for “elite” cadets being able to think they can “break the rules” if they think they can still pull off some spectacular results (could also go back to Kirk’s rewriting of the Kobayshi Maru scenario and not being disciplined for it). And, earlier in DS9’s “Paradise Lost,” we find out about Red Squad and their special status that seems to set them apart from normal requirements. Even when they’re duped into following orders from the Changeling officer, they seem to have had no qualms about how unusual or possibly illegitimate those orders may have been, and are only concerned about showing how well they can execute them.
So, that would make it less of a surprise that the Valiant crew could convince themselves they could accomplish anything seasoned veterans could do, and how that would end in disaster. One could only hope that Jake’s and Nog’s reports on this incident may result in a review of how the Academy trains its best and brightest.
As I mentioned in my original comments, though, “Paradise Lost” established that Red Squad was a recent creation of Admiral Layton, a symptom and tool of his creeping fascism, rather than a normal Academy practice. The anomaly was that “Valiant” established its continued existence after Layton was arrested.