This episode is one of my favorites. It depicts Captain Sisko making a log entry of his efforts to drive a wedge between the Dominion and the Romulans, who have a non-agression pact. The war is going badly for the Federation, and Sisko enlists the help of Garak to manufacture evidence that the Dominion plans to invade Romulus.
The action, interspersed with Sisko’s monologues as he makes his log entry, make this a very powerful episode. And the ending, when Sisko learns, despite everything he did, it was worth it, is not something you’re going to see on the sanitized TNG.
Avery Brooks is a highly underrated actor. He should be doing Shakespeare on Broadway.
I always enjoyed the matter of fact humor between those two characters that could be mistaken for haughty snarking but was really two extremely strong willed (to the point of ruthlessness) characters who understood each other perfectly. That seemed to be taken up a whole other level with that ep.
While much of the ultra long arc bored me, and I hated any and all BBEs and Klingon crap fests…, that ep is one of the stellar moments of Trek TV.
Garak could teach Machiavelli a thing or two. The first time I saw the twist, where Garak planted a bomb on the Romulan Senator’s shuttle to blame the Dominion I got chills. He never does anything without hedging his bet, does he?
And Sisko’s slow but sure descent into “hell” by good intentions, first agreeing to forge the evidence, then bribing Quark to let Graython Toler go so he could create the holo-program, to the “tweaking” of the final product, and letting Garak on the shuttle when he knows he shouldn’t is so well done.
And then, when he realizes the ends does justify the means, you start to see Sisko in a whole new light. He doesn’t live in Paradise, does he? So he cannot be a saint.
This is one of the episodes that I hold up as a prime example of why Deep Space Nine is the best of the five series. You would never see Kirk, Picard, Janeway, or Archer making this sort of decision, let alone embracing it with gusto at the end. Sisko (and everyone else on this show) is a full fledged character with flaws and foibles, not some ill-defined part of the psyche as played by Kirk in relation to Spock and McCoy, nor some dry academian like Picard.
I won’t even say anything about Janeway or Archer… I think they speak for themselves.
Garak, of course, is unquestionably the best written Star Trek character ever. Yes. I said ever… there is no disputing it.
I am currently catching up with DS9 via Spike’s reruns. I have TiVo set to pick them up so I can watch the eps I missed when I gave up on the show during its initial run. (Similar to what NCB mentions above, the Dominion thing didn’t look like it was going anywhere at the time, so I bailed. Based on the eps I’ve caught up with since then, the ones that follow the point where I jumped ship, I stopped at exactly the wrong moment. Grrr.)
Anyway, the point is, I just watched “Waltz,” the one where Sisko and a progressively more deranged Dukat are stranded together on a barren rock. And I was struck that everything Dukat said to justify the Cardassian occupation of Bajor could easily be said by an American leader to justify our occupation of Iraq. “If they’d only cooperated, we would have made their world a paradise! They brought our repression upon themselves! It’s their own fault!”
By the way, for anyone that might be interested, I highly suggest locating and buying the Deep Space Nine Companion, an episode by episode guide to the series with tons of behind the scenes information on the thought processes behind the creation of the series, its characters, and its storylines. I’ve been leafing through it for the past month or so and it’s an absolutely marvelous book and must-have for any fan of the series.
I’m about ten entries away from “In the Pale Moonlight” right now.
Archer might have made such a decision – after all, he tossed a guy into the airlock and threatened to blow him into space if he didn’t talk, and later he victimized an innocent ship for needed parts – but I agree that he wouldn’t have embraced it with gusto.
Threatening to do it and actually following through are two different things. Sisko has shown on numerous occasions that if he feels the cause is just, he will do whatever it takes to get the job done. To him, the end really does justify the means and I really appreciate that as a part of his characterization.
Of course, if he were a real person, I’d be much less enthused with that personality trait but as he is ficitional, I find myself drawn to him very strongly, much like I do the other tortured spirits of DS9 – Dukat, Damar, Garak, and Kira.
Well, Archer, I think, earns a comfortable No. 2 on the “Not a goody-goody” spectrum of Enterprise captains behind Sisko. In any case, I’m certainly not arguing that “Enterprise” is of the same quality as “DS9.”
I’m not trying to argue with you or anything… it’s just that when Deep Space Nine threads come around, I’m reminded of just how much I love the series and get inordinately passionate about the topic. My ranting and raving is just enthusiasm for the show… nothing more.
And for what it’s worth, I’d rank the captains thusly:
Most human: Sisko, Archer, Kirk, Picard, Janeway
Most interesting overall: Sisko, Picard, Archer, Kirk, Janeway
