Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

“The Ship”

2.5 stars.

Air date: 10/7/1996
Teleplay by Hans Beimler
Story by Pam Wigginton & Rick Cason
Directed by Kim Friedman

"Now I know it's hot, we're filthy, tired, and we've got ten isotons of explosives going off outside; but we will never get out of this if we don't pull it together and start to act like professionals!" — Sisko in the face of dissension

Review Text

Nutshell: An interesting setup premise, but the ending, despite having some depth, is underwhelming and quite overwrought.

While Sisko and his crew scout the surface of a Gamma Quadrant planet for resources, a Jem'Hadar warship unexpectedly falls into orbit and crashes. Sisko decides to investigate. Upon entering the ship and finding the entire Jem'Hadar crew dead, Sisko claims the ship for Starfleet and sends for the Defiant to assist in the excavation of a great strategic find.

Before the Defiant can arrive, however, another Jem'Hadar crew arrives, led by a Vorta official named Kilana (Kaitlin Hopkins). They promptly blow the orbiting Runabout out of the sky, killing four of Sisko's officers, and then they demand Sisko return their ship. Sisko has no intention of simply giving it back to them. He and his crew hole up inside the downed vessel and prepare for an attack. The Jem'Hadar do not attack, however; for some reason, they cannot risk destroying what is on board the ship.

"The Ship" is a mixed bag if I've ever seen one. It has an intriguing premise and it features our heroes in a tough position where they are going to get dirty before it's all over. It even goes so far as to have dissension among Sisko's officers—something rarely seen on Star Trek. But countering the freshness of the gritty elements is a host of standard plot machinations and an overwrought ending with only marginal effectiveness.

The nature of "The Ship's" plot is conducive for repetitive scenes. For example, early in the episode, Ensign Muniz (F.J. Rio) is injured by a Jem'Hadar weapon blast. As the show progresses, there are a number of scenes between Chief O'Brien (who has sort of taken the kid under his wing) and young Muniz. There's a lot of sarcastic camaraderie here—and most of it works. But there are so many derivations of the same sequence that it begins to feel like the show runs out of things to say about its situation.

Still, another way of looking at the repetitive nature of the story is that it allows us to feel what these characters are feeling; after being trapped in this ship for so long with Jem'Hadar explosions going off outside, it's easy to see how and why tensions continuously rise. The rise in tensions parallels right alongside Muniz's deterioration, as his condition descends from fair to bad to worse (his hallucinations and sudden breaking into speaking Spanish prove to be an effective and foreboding way of conveying his condition).

One thing I really like about this episode is how the mounting tensions begin to get the best of the crew. "The Ship" is definitely not catching the DS9 crew at their best. At one point in the fourth act, emotions build up until there's irritable dissension unlike anything seen on the series. There's enough attitude in the room to cut with a phaser. Worf's hardly-helpful comments about Muniz's condition ("He will not see tomorrow") anger O'Brien to the point of throwing punches. Meanwhile, Dax's sardonic sarcasm begins to annoy everyone (Sisko: "Maybe you didn't notice Dax, but no one's laughing"). I particularly liked Sisko's response to the situation to get his officers back in line; Avery Brooks shows his usual energetic authority. A good commander knows what he has to say and when.

Another aspect that is very commendable is the production. At no point during this episode did I get the feeling that I was anywhere but trapped inside this close-quartered ship. The sets are outstanding, and Kim Friedman's lighting and photography techniques are very nicely executed.

One thing that does not work in "The Ship," however, is the Kilana character. Kaitlin Hopkins appears very uncertain in the role—seemingly miscast—and most of her negotiation scenes with Sisko (many of which do not have much of a point to begin with) are further sabotaged by her lackluster performance. She delivers far too many mid-line pauses in her dialog to be convincing, and something about her entire demeanor just...annoyed me.

Also holding back the episode are the plot workings. Given the premise, the way the plot resolves itself is hardly impressive. Once Sisko realizes it's the cargo that the Jem'Hadar really want, Kilana agrees to let him keep the ship if he allows her to remove the item. Sisko doesn't trust her, and I don't blame him. He instead begins searching the ship for this mysterious cargo, but with no success. I was hoping the item would be something new, compelling, fascinating, or the like. Nope. Turns out that the item is a Changeling hiding on the ship, disguised as part of the floor. It dies (for reasons I'm still not certain of), and turns into a pile of ashes.

Once the Founder dies, the Jem'Hadar kill themselves for allowing one of their gods to die. With the damage done, Kilana beams on board and reveals everything to Sisko.

This is where the episode's Big Sweeping Message is revealed, and in a way that leaves much to be desired. While I appreciated the fact that the writers tried to make this adventure outing add up to something dramatically relevant at the end, I did not appreciate the bluntness of the lesson or the logic behind it. Sisko's statement, "The Runabout crew, your soldiers, Muniz... They'd all be alive if we had just trusted each other!" falls completely flat, and feels so spoon-fed that it borders on the pretentious. This line literally had me groaning, it's so overwrought. While the idea of a tragedy based on a lack of trust is certainly relevant material, "The Ship" does not have the depth or emotion it needs to pull it off successfully.

One glaring inconsistency in the plot is how Sisko refers to the loss of his Runabout crew as a direct result of not trusting the Jem'Hadar when the Runabout was in fact destroyed from orbit before the Jem'Hadar even beamed down to confront Sisko. It's not as if Sisko traded these officers for the strategic value of the crashed ship (as he terms it in a closing scene)—they were dead before he even saw one Jem'Hadar soldier, and there wasn't a single thing he could've done to prevent it. For that matter, even Muniz was shot in the Jem'Hadar's initial assault, long before negotiations had started. I suppose there's the possibility that he could've survived had the crew hammered out a compromise with the Jem'Hadar in enough time to get him real medical treatment, but even that is a bit of a stretch under the story's circumstances.

The big picture "The Ship" tries to get across, and not so subtly, is the analysis of death in the line of duty. This is not the first time Sisko has lost someone under him; nor will it be the last. It seems odd, then, based on the episode's events, that he would blame himself on this particular mission, especially given the extreme circumstances. A lot of Sisko's argument with Dax in the final scene seems somewhat unfounded when one considers the way the episode unfolded. This is not the first time we've seen this theme, nor was it particularly effective this time around. If the show really wanted to be about Sisko feeling guilt for losing officers under him, it might have been better if they had actually died as a result of his decisions or orders.

With a reworked ending and a more surprising "mysterious item," "The Ship" could've been much more effective. This is one time I wish the creators had pushed for a straight action show over a story with a message, because as it is the drama here is both not enough and too much.

Previous episode: Apocalypse Rising
Next episode: Looking for Par'mach in All the Wrong Places

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Comment Section

146 comments on this post

    Oo... it occurs to me that something "new and compelling" that they could've found on the ship, that would've added to the depth of the episode, would've been a changeling *defector.* Some changeling that wanted to leave the Dominion for reasons of its own, but didn't trust "the Solids". (I suppose it shouldn't be a defector, which would raise questions of why it wanted to join the Solids. Perhaps just a changeling that wanted to leave the Founders but didn't like either side.)

    Negotiations could be coming to a head, it would confound both the Feds and the Dominion, and then the changeling died... still a tragedy to the J'em Hadar, a tragedy for the changeling, and probably a tragedy to Sisko who no doubt would've spent time trying to convince the changeling of the advantages of joining the all-beneficient Federation.

    I can't believe how out of character everyone is in this episode, especially Worf. I'm not saying Starfleet officers should never lose their temper, but in this scene it just felt totally uncalled for (not to mention Avery Brooks' overacting). Perhaps there just wasn't enough tension leading up to it.

    I agree that the five deaths could have happened differently and made more sense (in terms of Sisko's guilt). And that's too bad because I really like the second-to-last scene between Sisko and Dax. I think this is the first time the issue of real people dying under your command was brought up, and it was about time. Too often do they just mention '11 dead' and move on, which is dramatically pointless.

    Just watched this one last night. Sorry to disagree, but I did indeed love it. I found Hopkins' performance decent if not stellar; it seemed to fit the character that she was so uncertain.

    Thanks for confirming for me that there was a glaring inconsistency regarding the runabout, though. That was driving me nuts.

    I'm sure it was meant to be amusing in a funny-ha-ha kind of way, but the scene with Julian getting in legal trouble over Quark was stupid. Like there was any chance that Bashir was involved in Quark's criminal enterprise. The notion that it was such that Kira actually left their doctor behind over the matter on a mission to retrieve a downed crew was simply jaw-dropping.

    I always liked this one because it put the characters through hell. I remember seeing this at my first ever convention as a kid with my dad. jadzia had that snarky bit about men or testosterone or something and sisko says that no ones laughing. sorry sisko, but the convention loved it. all the tension in the air and the character conflicts made this one really enjoyable.

    I just watched this episode and I have to agree with Jammer's review of this episode.

    Everyone seemed out of character like what Nic said. What was up with Worf acting belligerent out of nowhere? I agree in that tensions were not built up sufficiently so that everyone seemed to be acting out of character. Worf and O'Brien had been in similar if not worse situations on both DS9 and TNG!

    Also, regarding Jay's comment with Kira leaving Bashir on the station with "legal problems" was a horrendous scene that made it one of the worst scenes ever. An away team found a Jem'Hadar warship and they are not taking their chief medical officer? They didn't know there was wounded but there could easily have been. It just was an absolutely horrendous scene.

    Like what Jammer said with a mysterious find this episode could have been really stellar.

    I must say that Terry Farrel's performance was quite fun to watch and her character is still my favorite on DS9. I wish her character was utilized more.

    I'm surprised the word "cleavage" hasn't been mentioned once in this review or in the comments. I was hardly able to pay attention to what was going on whenever Hopkins got on-screen.

    ;-)

    Jammer's right - the Vorta's performance was annoying. In fact, the only decent actor playing a Vorta in the entirety of DS9 is Jeffrey Combs as Weyoun. It also says a lot that the second best performance turned in by a Vorta was Iggy Pop.

    I thought the final scenes with Sisko/Dax and O'Brien/Worf were well done. It just occurred to me that the character of Muniz was seen in quite a few episodes leading up to this - since about the middle of the 4th season. Maybe it was a conscious decision by the writers to introduce a semi-regular starfleet crewman that would eventually be killed in the line of duty so his death could have more meaning to the audience.

    Another great episode of DS9, I loved the interaction between the characters and Dax's sence of humor. The scene with Worf and O' Brien in the end was very touching.

    Pretty much standard fare, the scenery and battle scenes were okay for Trek standards but hardly a cutting edge dramatization. The close relationship between O'Brien and Muniz came out of nowhere and cheapens his demise. The Vorta performance did not bother me.
    2 Stars from me

    Very good episode, the characters were the highlight of it.

    Didn't like worf's out of nowhere "klingon tradition" of watching over a dead body.

    trek has told us again and again that a dead klingon body is an empty shell and it is treated as such.

    It was a forced resolution to a forced out of character conflict between obrien and worf.

    not a great episode

    @ Justin

    I'd put Iggy Pop's Vorta at third best. Second best was Keevan.

    In the first scene between Sisko and the Vorta, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Sisko talking about an old tradition: it's called salvage, we were here first, therefore the ship is mine (or something like that). That is very un-Federation-like, that's more Ferengi-like !

    I thought Sisko would ask for a medical kit as a show of good faith; at least, it wouldn't have hurt to ask. At least, I would have seen the captain with more respect. Instead, he refuses a reasonable offer with twisted arguments.

    Here's an episode that could have been good. However, I'm glad that for once, we see the crew care for the lost people in the line of duty. A shame it wasn't for the good reasons (and I completely agree with Empty Shell).

    Maybe it is because i was about 15 when i first watched this episode. But still - another 15 years later - it remains one of my all time favourites of the entire series.
    Brilliant direction, a good score, a great villain, superb character moments and one of the best endings of an episode of Trek. I love the changeling twist and this episode will always be remembered as the only TREK outing where the death of Red shirts is properly dealt with.
    This is big drama ( especially the scenes between Colm Meaney and F.J.Rio) and i don't care whether it is out of character sometimes because i can't imagine what effect a tense situation like this would probably have on people.
    4 STARS

    Greetings Jammer. I would give this episode at least 3 stars instead of 2 1/2 stars. While I agree that it is not perfect (I agree with you about Sisko worrying about things that was not within his control to begin with like the destruction of the runabout which resulted in the death of the 4 crewmembers aboard that runabout for example. I also agree that Kaitlin Hopkins character as the vorta Kilana needs work). However, I disagree with you on everything else .

    Has anyone noticed that when the crew first board the upside down; they enter through the bottom and then climb up instead of down. Somebody goofed.

    The problem with this one is that, apart from the last five minutes, it isn't a DS9 episode. It's an ENT or VOY episode or a bad TNG episode. Or even a TOS episode. We have a bunch of redshirts that we know are obviously going to get killed for dramatic effect. Especially the redshirt we focus on for the whole episode who kind of came out of nowhere and we're supposed to care about.

    And we sent our main characters on a runabout to see if this planet is suitable for mining. Dax I can understand, being the science officer. But Sisko, Worf, and O'Brien? Not a chance. They're far too important to just send off willy nilly into the Gamma Quadrant whenever a science officer gets curious. Especially Sisko, being Starfleet's main hope for maintaining relations with Bajor and, more importantly, maintaining a presence at the wormhole. If the Bajorans tell Starfleet to leave, Sisko is pretty much the only one who can convince them otherwise, being the Emissary. So he's far too important to risk on a runabout in the Gamma Quandrant on an expedition to see if a planet is suitable for mining.

    These are mistakes the other Trek show would make, but not DS9. DS9 is smarter than that.

    The problem really was the "if we'd just TRUSTED one another. we are both EQUALLY at fault. we're both in the wrong EQUALLY" was completely unconvincing. kilana was the most manipulative, flattering, deceitful vorta i'd ever seen, and reminded me of how manipulative and vaguely-cunning the entire species can be. the idea of being able to trust kilana to save the others lives is a real stretch, especially when she sent the jem-hadar onto the ship, and her jem-hadar killed the runabout crew. quite frankly, it's pretty obvious who was in the wrong here, and was responsible for the founder's death, and had the real unreasonable trust deficit.

    Not a bad episode. It's fun to see characters interact under pressure.

    6/10

    I guess I'm part of the crowd that loved this one. The characters interactions within the tense situation were very well-realized throughout the entire episode. The O'brien/Munez thread was nicely handled. No I don't know the character as he's only been a bit part in a few other eps. But that doesn't mean O'brien in the show is only allowed to be close friends with the regulars. Within the context of this episode it wasn't meant as let's force us to care about someone unknown. It was just part of the overall drama playing out. Maybe they could've had a different element to add to the drama in place of Munez? Sure, but what was here doesn't detract for me in the least.

    The discussion between Dax and Sisko near the end was a tad much. However it was nice to see at least SOME sort of dialogue concerning the random death of "redshirts" as it were. The line involving how these people died for the crashed ship was just an oversimplification of saying how the events leading up to the shows end ultimately resulted in the deaths; and that being in command, Sisko, is ultimately accountable. A small rewrite there wouldn't have hurt.

    The ending scene was about as poignant as it could get.

    Overall, I saw a winner here. It was a step up from the solid premiere. The pacing was adeptly handled, the plot was good, characterizations were spot-on. Methinks I liked this more than Jammer. :p

    3.5 stars.

    Ah, the "Vorta w/boobs" episode. :-)

    The first time I saw this I knew that a founder was in the ship as soon as they started talking about the construction of the thing. Is there ANY other reason the Jem'Hadar don't storm the ship?

    Come on, this really makes our heroes look pretty naive.

    Muniz - at least we have somewhat of a meaningful death. This wasn't just some "red-shirt". (they were all on the run-a-bout) We've known him for at least one prior episode. (maybe 2) I enjoyed Muniz. Sorry to see the character die.

    Avery's acting here is just horrible.

    "Muniz, the runabout crew, your soldiers, they'd all still be alive if we had trusted each other."

    Not much better when he's talking to Jadzia about lost shipmates but the content of the conversation was good and needed IMO.

    2.5 stars.

    I enjoyed the tension of the characters being trapped and surrounded and it never seemed forced to me. While it was nice idea to explore losing people under your command in a personal way beyond random red shirts getting shot or killed by exploding consoles, the Muniz scenes got a bit melodramatic and repetitive. All of the characters were constantly stopping to reflect on his condition and I felt like the script was grabbing me and saying "THIS IS SAD!"

    I'm with Jay, Jeffrey Combs' Wayoun is definitely the best Vorta ever, but Chris Shea's Keevan from "Rocks And Shoals" and "The Magnificent Ferengi" is definitely runner up.

    Muniz - "I can't feel my legs"

    Dax - "Don't worry. They're there"

    Lol. That is the one line from Dax that made me laugh and it wasn't even meant to be funny.

    This episode is just hard to watch. I cringe every time is hear O'brien say "Easy, Quique" and Muniz replies "ok papa"

    I like this episode, though its brand of pinned-down panic is done better in BSG's second season with part of the crew trapped on Kobol. Of course, it's unfair to judge "The Ship" by the standards of an episode of another series that aired eight years later. But there IS something to be said for letting a situation stew. Maybe a two-parter is too much time for an episode like this, but the 20 minutes it takes for the crew to start cracking is a bit of a short cut. I realize more time has passed in-episode, but what matters is how it's presented.

    Anyway - I DO like how the situation was very badly mishandled by the Vorta. Not only did she lose the Changeling, but she lost the ship and her platoon as well. Her tactics started out as a full-on attack (bad decision, considering the 100% likelihood of their targets holing up in the ship and finding the Changeling), a poor attempt at diplomacy, and espionage. Sisko reacted exactly as she SHOULD HAVE expected, and she was unable to think outside the box to get the job done. Though, that snack she offers Sisko may have her attempt to garner some trust, she should have realized beforehand how suspicious she'd be coming off (it's not clear if the snack is poisoned, but Sisko's reaction immediately makes the whole attempt a failure in either case).

    I liked Sisko's line about trust - delivered well, I think. The Vorta should have known how to handle this situation. She should have known that telling Sisko about the Changeling would have given her team a higher chance of recovering it. She presumably knows all about Sisko - she does ask him about Jake - so should have used that to her advantage that he's a bit of a humanitarian. More trust would have been required on Sisko's part, who isn't privvy to any psych reports on Kilana. Even a trade would have worked: working Dominion technology for the Changeling, straight up. She should have known that.

    One more thing to add:

    Her outfit, which I hesitate to comment on - but was it part of her failed negotiation? No other Vorta so far has dressed like her, so her revealing top may have been another misguided attempt to soften Sisko's stance. Given the outcome of the episode, Kilana's actions look more and more desperate. It might have been neat to hear a Jem'Hadar perspective on the situation, too, though I think the writers wanted to avoid making Jem'Hadar-Vorta episodes boil down to dissent every time.

    Anyway, a clean 3-star episode for me. Well written, pretty well performed, and adds some nice texture to the series without trying to be a game-changer. Worth watching.

    One last comment, I SWEAR:

    For anyone who likes Muniz, he also had a pretty substantial role in Seasons 6 and 7 of the police drama The Shield.

    As an aside, The Shield is an excellent, excellent show that I don't hear talked about in hindsight such as The Wire, The Sopranos, and, very likely in the coming years, Breaking Bad. I know four other people who have watched it, and all were introduced to it by me - though it doesn't help that in Toronto it was very difficult to catch first-run episodes on their release without using... other methods.

    Enjoyable episode (loved the Vorta). Don't usually see the crew in contentious discussions which I found both refreshing and out of character (been in much worst before for longer periods).

    The whole tension falls flat for me however. I couldn't accept the stand off and felt the Jem Hadar were being portrayed as weaker than previously, once again like star trek does with other great villians such as the borg and klingons.

    After the Vorta negotiation they know they are dealing with a small band of surveyors and a few warriors who are in an unfamiliar ship with a secret assett they can't find. The Jem Hadar are warriors born, can cloak, can beam into the ship anythime and they don't try it?!? Why? How about the Jem Hadar who entered the ship undetected and planted a device? He could have beamed in invisible, planted a sleeping gas device and waited till all the crew fell asleep. Then Jem Hadar storm the ship and do as they please.

    I welcome any comments on flaws in my logic as not seen this show to the end yet, but overall enjoying the experience.

    To the fool who said Avery was overacting. He played those scenes superbly. These were emotion driven scenes and he did not overact. Maybe some people think everyone should be bland and passive and if they laughed out loud it is an overreaction. I am glad none of you are paid film critics.

    I discovered DS9 only a few weeks ago, and have been binge-watching it. I'm up to "The Ship," obviously. Meanwhile, I discovered Jammersreviews.com only a few days ago, and have been binge-reading that. But I'm only on Season 1 right now, though for this episode I made an exception. One thing I've noticed about how "cool" this site is is that comment threads can continue for eight years and still seem coherent!

    Anyway, to cut to the chase: unlike the worthy Jammer, I thought "The Ship" was a phenomenally good episode. I'd give it five stars out of four, and nothing less! Somehow, the rising tension, the riveting plot, the low-lighting, and the great character work of the actors and scriptwriters combined to make "The Ship" feel not like a TV episode, but like an epic movie.

    "The Ship" puts our heroes in a desperate, desperate situation, and it gives them their humanity (or Klinon-ness, in the case of Worf) in that situation. That's character work at its best, and DS9 is the best Star Trek franchise at character work. Contra some, Sisko is not overwrought, either with the Vorta at the climax, or later with Dax. He's grieving, and he feels responsible for the deaths of his people.

    And well he should. Sisko's claim to Dominion property on the sole (and incredibly childish) basis of "I found it first" is obviously morally wrong and intellectually laughable. His logic is as flimsy as cardboard.

    Of course, Sisko is doing as the Federation would like, but this is a vastly overconfident Federation that continues to antagonize the Dominion by expanding into the Gamma Quadrant like old Rome expanding into its neighbours' space. The Federation has been clearly told to stay out of the Gamma Quadrant, and yet it keeps going back in--to colonize, to mine, to claim. And now, to steal.

    Think about how Americans felt when the Serbs made American stealth fighter technology from a Yugoslavian crash site available to the Chinese. Now, imagine that US troops had showed up to secure the crash site within minutes only to find the Chinese were saying "finders keepers, losers weepers." Now imagine that the crash site was not in Yugoslavia, but in Mexico, close to the US border. Not an American alive would say the Chinese had the better claim simply because they happened to have local agents on the ground who found it first.

    The Federation in this episode and the ones leading up to it is behaving as an amoral expansionist power increasingly prepared to sacrifice its principles for power....not unlike, in many ways, the modern US of A, which has bases in countries around the world in defense not of world peace but of its own "strategic interests"; a country that sacrifices rights and freedoms on the altar of domestic security. (DS9 touched on that, too.)

    That's what makes "The Ship" so prescient and poignant. Those deaths that Sisko grieves were completely avoidable, and they were the result of salivating greed at the highest levels of the Federation at the mere prospect of rummaging through a salvaged Jem'Hadar ship. This is not your father's Federation. Picard would have been absolutely appalled.

    The DS9 Starfleet officers on our mission give their lives to the service of Starfleet and the Federation, just as the Jem'Hadar give their lives to the service of the Founders. And just for once, the Jem'Hadar come off looking much the more honourable.

    Now of course, it would be quite correct to point out that this interest in the Jem'Hadar ship does not occur in a vacuum. Starfleet has already seen significant losses due to Dominion actions, from the destruction of an Enterprise look-alike to the gutting of its traditional alliance with the Klingon Empire. Whatever else can be said, there is much to support the thesis that the Dominion is far more expansionist and dangerous to the Federation than the Federation is to the Dominion.

    And that's what this episode is all about. It's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Federation in the 24th century is not in paradise. It's got to navigate a universe in which there are very real threats to its existence. Sometimes, it will put its personnel in harm's way and sacrifice their very lives to achieve its larger objectives. Sometimes, the way it does this will seem, or even be, very wrong and unethical, but what are the alternatives? Too often, the issues and the possibilities are unclear. Could the whole war with the Dominion have been prevented if the Federation had not squandered the little goodwill that existed between the two quadrants? It's a valid question, and one with no easy answer. In a world of cold wars, military and economic expansionism, DS9 reminds us to ask the hard questions and attempt the harder answers.

    @ Empty Shell,

    You're probably right about the contradictory nature of Klingon tradition, but there are ways of harmonizing things. The first (and weaker possibility) would be to say that we simply haven't come across this tradition before.

    But we could say that the tradition is an older Klingon tradition, even as, say, the Tridentine Mass predated the modern Mass in the vernacular. Rites change, perhaps even in the Klingon Empire. It would make sense for Worf to follow an older and no-longer-used Klingon tradition in this instance.

    For my part, I found that scene very touching, and an appropriate end to an episode that had earlier seen Worf and O'Brien at hammer and tongs over Muniz's untimely passing.

    @Nathan - I think you're largely right, but I think you overplay the Dominion's moral high ground a little.

    Space is big and the Dominion's claim to the entire Gamma Quadrant is a little specious. We were exploring the Gamma Quadrant for 2 years before we saw our first Jem Hadar.

    And as of the previous episode they were shown to have planned an assassination of the Klingon Chancellor and set up pieces to take his place. It's not like they don't ever come into our space and stir up major crap.

    That said, our incursions into their space are done in a cavalier way that we would never dream of pulling with the Romulans. But I personally felt that the agenda in securing a Jem'Hadar ship was to prepare in case of invasion, not prepare in case we decide to invade them.

    I felt the move in this episode was defensive. Sisko may have though that in the likely coming war with the Dominion the needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few and having a Jem'Hadar ship might save lives.

    Picard may still have been appalled, but your case against expansionism ends at the survey they came into the Gamma Quadrant to perform, not swiping the ship. When a foreign power attempts to take over the Klingon Empire unprovoked (to our knowledge) you have to get ready for a fight.

    Hi Robert!

    I very much agree with you that the motivation for securing the Jem'Hadar ship is actually defensive in nature, but for me the point is that it wouldn't look that way to the Dominion's leadership, which is extremely xenophobic, in the sense that they distrust those outside their control. The changelings have endured probably millennia of unwarranted aggression against them, and then they have been attacked, unprovoked, extremely recently by Cardassians and Romulans who actually sought to exterminate them. They would be aware that the Federation and Klingon Empire have peace or armistice treaties with these powers, and it might be very easy for them to generalize in saying "the Alpha Quadrant is at war with us." It would fit their narrative.

    The whole tit-for-tat and who-started-it-first is actually one of the things I like about DS9 so far. Many of the belligerent steps that each side take (and especially those that the Federation take) seem to be good at the time. It is possible to see how they are justified. But those same acts ratchet up the tension between the powers.

    For me, the taking of Odo back to his homeworld for treatment is almost an overture of peace by the Federation to the Dominion ("Broken Link"). There's also the fact that the Dominion have allowed or aided DS9's crew on several occasions when it was within their power to have killed them all. The Dominion has also made overtures of peace to the Federation. Unfortunately, in this instance, the Federation squandered that goodwill, just as on other occasions the Dominion has squandered the Federation's goodwill.

    I would agree with you that the Federation has, in general, significantly more moral high ground than the Dominion does, but in this particular instance, I think it's the opposite. And certainly, if the Federation is so enlightened and understanding of other cultures, the brazen and foolish way they colonize and claim parts of the Gamma Quadrant beggars belief--and here I would very much agree with your comment contrasting the "cavalier" way the Federation is behaving with the extremely cautious and prudent way they treat the Romulan Empire.

    By the way, you're a favourite commenter so far in the other threads I'm reading!

    In regards to Sisko's "salvage" claim:


    Maybe it's just me, but I always took that line as Sisko kinda messing with the Vorta. It's not like Sisko is above being a little bit of a smart ass once in a while.

    @Nathan - Nice of you to say! And I do agree with you, I often wonder if things had gone down a different way if they could have found a bit more common ground. I don't know how many other episodes I should mention though, as I've since realized you're not quite this far in the series yet :)

    @Robert, thanks! I just finished "Let He Who Is Without Sin," but I part ways with most of the people on this site over it. I thought it was a great episode.

    I'm still far behind in my reading of Jammer's reviews (and the comments!), though I am catching up. I'm now reading in parallel season 2 and season 5. It's really fun to watch the episodes and then read what people say about them!

    @Nathan - From a nitpicking perspective I find it hard to believe that the events in "Without Sin" could happen.

    I personally liked a lot of pieces of the episode (and I like Leeta/Rom), but the fact that Worf didn't lose a pip over this bothered me. It was terrorism.

    I liked the Worf/Dax stuff, the backstory as to why Worf isn't a "typical" unreserved Klingon, etc. I have a hard time with this episode because it's not outright awful like "Prophet and Lace", but having Worf sabotaging a planet's weather grid was just cringe worthy. I have to believe they could have found another way to tell this exact same story.

    Hi Robert!

    I would not go so far as to call what Worf did "terrorism," although it was certainly criminal and political. Unless I missed something (and I might have!--I would welcome corrections), no sentient individuals were killed or harmed through his actions, and no infrastructure was permanently damaged. A room or two was turned upside down, and people got wet. Vacations were ruined, but there was no major lasting damage to any significant amount of property.

    That said, I very much agree with you that Worf should have at the very minimum lost a pip over what happened; in fact, he should have been expelled or at least suspended from Starfleet. But the fact that he doesn't seem to face any repercussions at all is of a piece with the rest of Star Trek, which too often allows our favourite main characters to get away with things that they never could in the real world today.

    Worf has, for instance, killed Duras in mortal combat while wearing his Starfleet uniform. For that, he gets only a reprimand! Quark endangers the DS9 station more times than I can keep track of under very nefarious circumstances, but he's never kicked off or imprisoned (one or two nights in the brig don't count).

    Worf regularly punches, hits, or throws people whose only fault is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or who otherwise excite his passions.

    In fact, Worf is incredibly passionate. He'll ask to quit his career without even the most minimum of notice in one episode, go off and murder Duras in another. He refuses to donate his blood to a dying Romulan when that offer could have helped the Federation's relationship with the powerful Romulan Empire. He tries to commit suicide. He tries to help others commit suicide. In "Rightful Heir" he doesn't even show up for his shift for the simple reason that he has a crisis of faith that sends him on a wild goose chase to find the Klingon Messiah. And he always comes back to his rank and his honour (within the Federation). Given all that, I don't really see how "Without Sin" can be considered anything other than typical Trek fare insofar as Worf doesn't face any consequences for his actions. (Then, too, after the disaster at Wolfram Alpha, the Federation war with the Cardassians, and the announced presence of the Dominion, perhaps the Federation is simply reluctant to punish talented Starfleet officers for their crimes. But that would put Gene Roddenberry's vision in a whole new light, though, and might mean that working in Starfleet could be very demoralizing!)

    By the way, I think watching Worf face his "crisis of the week" is one of the things that makes him so endearing! He's definitely a favourite character of mine, and it's always interesting to see him see his way through whatever is bothering him.

    @Nathan - I do see (and agree with) what you're saying, but I felt consequences in most of those situations. And I feel in most of those situations the Federation is hypocritical and self serving.... BUT at least I understand that.

    Sisko/Odo put up with Quark because they need him. He's a pillar of the community, remember? But seriously, anytime he REALLY crosses the line he usually helps them find a way out of it.

    Picard gives Worf a dressing down over the Duras thing (and Sisko over nearly killing Kurn)... but the fact is that in the civil war and with killing Duras I can see Picard convincing the Federation to turn a blind eye because Worf's actions benefit them.

    Yes, Worf can be a bit of a firecracker, but I usually at least feel like there are consequences. He hacked the weather net (something capable of destroying the planet) and handed the device over to an Eco-terrorist. He's lucky nobody died in one of those earthquakes because that'd be reckless manslaughter!

    Obviously we don't get to see Sisko rip into him after the episode was over, but I just felt like Worf crossed a line here that I would have personally preferred for him not to cross. At least the suicide/murder stuff was culture clash stuff. I doubt Klingons would find sabotaging a weather grid to be an honorable action on par with avenging your mate!

    Hi Robert,

    Just for the record, I was definitely rooting for Worf to kill Duras. ;-)

    Anyway, there are other instances of a lack of consequences in DS9. Garak didn't face any for killing a Gul and helping Natima and her students to escape. O'Brien didn't face any for endangering the station and/or the Wormhole when a Pah-wraith was in possession of Keiko's body. I guess compared to Worf's situation, these situations were much more serious, with mitigating circumstances, but no Starfleet officer should allow himself to be blackmailed into hacking the station's computer system in order to save a family member.

    In other words, while I do very much agree with you that Worf should have faced some kind of consequence for his action, I still think that the fact that he doesn't really is of a piece with much of the rest of Trek.

    Having said that, I don't think that hacking the weather net could have caused the destruction of the planet. Presumably the people on Risa attained warp technology under the old pre-controlled climate. As I see control of the weather grid, it's more a matter of convenience and safety rather than avoiding apocalyptic scenarios. To be sure, it could be a matter of the potential for fatalities in some cases, but nothing on a grand scale. Also, Fullarton was never after fatalities, and in one case he stopped his followers from further excesses after they had "made their point." In other words, I basically think that any use of the T-word to describe Fullarton and Worf is overstating things. All that said, I agree with you that Worf should have faced some sort of consequence for his actions in this episode.

    FULLERTON: You should see them all run. I think they've finally realised that the party's over. Increase the feedback in the tectonic stress regulators.
    BOLIAN: If I do, there won't be a building left standing on this part of Risa.
    (Rumble)
    BOLIAN: It might be a good idea to head to the spaceport. Or at least get out of this room.
    FULLERTON: Very well. I think our work is done here.
    (Worf and Dax enter)
    WORF: The uplink. Give it to me.
    FULLERTON: Mister Worf, I suggest you all get off this planet as soon as possible. I have no wish to see you or your friends harmed.

    That sounds pretty serious to me. Not a building left standing? I mean sure... maybe they are exaggerating or I'm remembering the severity wrong, but as far as I'm concerned Worf handed a pretty serious weapon to somebody he couldn't trust.

    That said you are spot on about O'Brien, though the Garak thing is perhaps murkier (as are all things involving Garak). Again, allowing her movement to succeed benefits the Federation so ::shrug:: we don't know who killed the Gul. Somebody had disabled station security in the docking bay. Our bad...

    That relationship to Garak doing the dirty work for our heroes blows up in S6 (among other points), but it's certainly a running thread. But yes, O'Brien putting Keiko ahead of station security is as bad (or worse) as Worf not leaving Dax in the field to rescue the spy (which there were consequences for). I can't argue that one.

    Meh episode. Two stars at best.

    When O'Brien and Munez were talking all the time at the beginning, it was clear he was going to die.

    Worf has been living his whole life with humans, and this is the moment he decides to unlearn everything and go all Klingon on O'Brien. Don't buy it.

    When the Vorta told Sisko that there was something very special on that ship they needed to retrieve, it was obvious it was a Changeling. What else could it have been? If it was merely something that couldn't fall into Federation hands , they could have just nuked the ship from orbit.

    If the Defiant needs two-and-a-half days from the wormhole to the planet, how could it be WEEKS off Dominion space? The wormhole is - depending on the episode - a couple of hours or a few days from the wormhole.

    The Sisko-Dax scene in the messhall was horrible. A bunch of unsophisticated, uninspired dialog.

    "killing four of Sisko's officers"
    Three, actually. There were five casualties altogether - Muniz and the blue guy T'Lor on the ground, so that leaves three on the shuttle.

    @Impulse
    Your logic is right. Actually, they could simply have beamed everyone on board out.

    You have to look past the usual set-up problems (all those people on one runabout into the wormhole), plus (as others have pointed out) pretend the transporters don't really work in the crashed ship. That last one, admittedly, is a pretty strong problem, since they showed a Jem'Hadar beaming in.

    If you can get past that, I find it a pretty strong episode. The writing was perhaps a bit overwrought at times, but, Vorta aside, the acting was strong.

    I felt the Changeling reveal was good...I hadn't guessed that the first time I watched the episode, and it does explain the actions of the Vorta & Jem'Hadar.

    Jammer said in his initial review he wasn't sure why the Changeling died at the end. Well, he's probably figured it out now, but the failure of the inertial dampeners killed all of the "solids" whenever they changed direction at high speeds. It seems likely the liquid structure of the Changelings allowed it to survive the collisions (as well as the crash), but gave it injuries that eventually killed it.

    The episode's two biggest themes and draws are: the sense of claustrophobia on the Jem'Hadar ship, and the sense of futility at the sacrifices they have to make for a ship which they may not even want. I go back and forth on how successful the episode is overall. Jammer was correct in his review that it's silly for Sisko to talk about the loss of his men on the Runabout, shot down by the Jem'Hadar before they had any chance to respond at all, as if this was a consequence of the breakdown of trust and communication with the Jem'Hadar. However, what strikes me is that Sisko et al. did have an option they could have used to avoid the confrontation: leave when they found the Jem'Hadar ship. The decision to claim the Jem'Hadar ship for their own by "salvage rights" is the decision from which the rest of the episode follows. What really strikes me about these episodes -- basically most of s3-early 5 -- is how badly the Alpha Quadrant peoples mishandle contact with the Dominion. It is true that the Dominion is run by totalitarian conquerors who regularly cut off communication rather than attempt to open it, but the response of people in the AQ is consistently either to attack each other in paranoia, to launch doomed preemptive genocidal strikes on the Dominion, or to ignore the Dominion threat entirely and continue exploring the GQ like nothing has happened. It may be that there is no "good" way to deal with the Dominion, and that conflict is inevitable, but the Federation as a whole seems to have given up trying to prevent a conflict, but also is halfhearted in its efforts to prevent one, and Sisko taking a series of risks to protect their dubious claim on a crashed Jem'Hadar ship found while doing unrelated matters seems to fall into this general category.

    And so this episode, in some big ways, plays out in miniature the whole problem of the Dominion war. Sisko et al. are not malignant, but disrespect what the Dominion boundaries are and are inconsistent in what they are prepared to risk -- they are willing to risk much for military advantage, and willing to risk very little to talk. As it turns out when the episode ends, the Vorta and the Jem'Hadar had no real interest in the ship, but only in the Founder they were (let's remember) programmed to protect at all costs, and naturally the Founder itself dies. Sisko bemoans that they could have avoided this if they could have only trusted each other, which is true...but a wider view reveals that the reason they couldn't trust each other is because of larger patterns that have already been established at the time of this episode. The Dominion's mistrust of solids is already based in part on the way the AQ solids have behaved before -- let's remember that the Founders' homeworld was nearly exterminated *twice* (the Obsidian Order/Tal Shiar, and Garak, though maybe no one knows about the latter one).

    But moreover, there is no reason for Sisko to trust the Dominion at this point, either, particularly as they blew the Runabout up before there was any time to negotiate. While I think that there are ways Sisko could have handled the situation *before the Dominion arrived*, I cannot really fault him for not trusting the Vorta et al. after their arrival. If Sisko had given up the Founder, the Jem'Hadar would probably have just blown up their ship anyway; in fact, I have a hard time believing that these foot soldiers would have allowed Dominion property to fall into enemy hands under normal circumstances. And so on some level, Sisko could not really have just given up the Founder and hoped to keep the ship, without ensuring all their deaths, based on the precedent that the Dominion has set all this time. Conversely, the ability of the Defiant crew and the Dominion to trust each other to some degree in To the Death and Broken Link suggests that there is maybe some possibility that they could work together...but those incidents are ones that no effort has been made to build on, alas.

    So, okay: was it the right decision to try to salvage the ship? The irony, as it turns out, is that the *only* reason they manage to keep the salvaged ship is that it had a Founder on board, and that the Jem'Hadar are so conditioned to worship the Founders that they committed mass suicide at its death. "Five days away" or not, Dominion patrols would obviously be closer than the Defiant, and once it was clear that they could not take the ship away with the Runabout they probably should have gotten the hell out of there, and *possibly* returned with the Defiant hoping the ship was still there. They could not reasonably have hoped to maintain control of the ship against any Dominion salvage mission with a Runabout. At best, they could have stripped the ship for materials with the Runabout, and prepared to run at the first sign of Dominion attack. Moreover, the question of whether taking the ship for salvage rather than warping away and possibly even leaving a message for the Dominion that they found a crashed ship as a peaceful overture was a good idea should have probably been discussed. I will grant that the Dominion are unlikely to respond to positive overtures, but it seems pretty certain that they will respond negatively to attempts to take their property. Part of what is interesting, too, is that the crew's increasing belief that there is something VERY, VERY IMPORTANT about the ship makes Sisko want to defend it even more, and creates the sense of hope that everything will be worth it...and in the end, it is nothing, really, aside from the ship itself.

    All of which is to say that the only way to avoid what happened in the episode was actually to avoid attempting to salvage the Jem'Hadar ship entirely. The implicit exchange -- a Founder's life for the ship -- is something that could have happened if there was a fundamentally different relationship between the Federation and the Dominion, but there isn't. Sisko misinterprets the problem, and in some senses I think his failure to pinpoint that it's larger issues of trust that locked both sides down here. So the question is whether the benefits from the ship outweigh the disadvantages.

    The episode's claustrophobia and crew conflicts, I think, work okay, with the conflicts sort of/mostly following from the characters. One problem with episodes like this, in which the main cast start to turn on each other in a tough situation, is that it is sometimes hard to establish why this situation is so much harder than others the characters have been in in which they did not start clawing at each other. I think that Muniz' slow, agonizing death, along with the implicit recognition that it may be for nothing, generally works well on this front. I do think that Worf and O'Brien's conflict is mostly well-handled, and toward the core of the episode; most of the time when a crew member is dying, there really is a medical personnel present to give a more definite diagnosis, and there is more possibility for action. This is a scenario in which there was fairly little to do but wait for Muniz' death, with some mild chance at survival, which puts Worf's inclinations to protect Muniz and O'Brien's inclination to hold onto hope into conflict. I also think that Dax's hostility ramping up was dealt with pretty well -- her sarcasm has annoyed me in previous episodes, and I like the idea that her blase, slightly superior attitude that the sarcasm demonstrates gradually became more and more manifest, until Sisko shut her down ("no one is laughing"). I think that the conflict among the crew ultimately stems from a feeling of unease based on Sisko's initial decision to claim the Jem'Hadar ship in salvage rights; they are waiting to be killed for *unknown reasons*, without a strong moral imperative for staying, and with fairly little to do. On Memory Alpha, many of the writers/producers suggest that they wanted the episode to feel much more claustrophobic than it ended up being, and wanted the O'Brien/Muniz connection to feel more real. That the episode really "should have" depicted a siege lasting much longer in-universe than it was, to show the gradual fraying of nerves, would have done much to make the character conflicts feel even more organic.

    Overall, I think the episode is interesting and fairly successful, though in the end I think that the episode slightly trips over its real points at a few moments, and aspects of the crew's conflict do feel a little forced. I think Jammer was largely right on this one. 2.5 stars.

    Oh, I should add: one of the things I like here is that, as a microcosm of the whole Dominion/AQ conflict, it demonstrates the big problem of Dominion policy as well as to some degree Alpha Quadrant policy. The primary, indeed, SOLE purpose of the Dominion is to provide the Founders with security -- but the Founders' paranoia, which drops down through every level of their organization down to the foot soldiers, makes protecting their own wounded basically impossible. At some point in the past, the greatest threat to changelings was solids, and I see no reason to doubt that they once were persecuted (if nothing else, because we see Odo persecuted), but that time is long past and it is their own actions and policies in the Dominion that threaten the Founders most of all.

    Would have been a fine concept piece about duty and death, had not this same scenario been played out a million times in other sources already. By taking the main beats from the Big Book of War Cliches - wounded soldier/sneak attack - we're not really seeing anything new. We also have a very pat conclusion - the Jem'Hadar fail so they top themselves and we get a Sesame Street lesson on how things would have been different if we'd just trusted each other. The scene with Quark and Bashir also seems to belong to a different episode.

    But despite all that there is a tense, claustrophobic feel to the episode and the internal strife is well handled. When Sisko chews out Worf and O'Brien - and then goes on to chew out Dax as well - it's a real shock to the system. 2.5 stars.

    I was thinking about this episode some more. I want to like it more than I do, and almost quite like it. I reread Nathan B.'s comment above, which I think makes an excellent case for the episode. Some what I wanted to get at in my comment (which I don't think was clear) is that this episode does show some of the way in which the Federation and the Dominion both badly bungle diplomatic relations, going to war when war is actually not what either side truly wants. The Dominion's belligerence actually endangers the Founders much more than it protects them, as we see in this episode. And Sisko's expansion near Dominion territory decision to salvage the Jem'Hadar ship sets the events in this episode into motion, in a way that reflects the way general incursions into the GQ antagonize the Dominion without very much effort actually being made to make assurances to the Dominion that they are *not* attempting to do what, say, the Tal Shiar/Obsidian Order did (given that they basically stop trying to communicate with the Dominion post-"The Search").

    Still, as an episode itself, I think that a close analysis lets Sisko off the hook more than I'd like given the episode's downbeat ending. Maybe it was a bad idea to try to salvage the Jem'Hadar ship, but after that *initial decision* to be on the planet at all, all five deaths were the result of the initial Jem'Hadar attack of Kilana's, and four of those deaths were *immediate*. So basically none of the decisions Sisko made in talking to Kilana had any impact on his own crew's dying, except insofar as it could have been worse. This means that the majority of the running time, in which Sisko has to wonder whether or not he should trust Kilana or not, is in some senses irrelevant. And I think this feels wrong as a story choice, because to me this episode is not tragic in the inevitability of the ending (ala the Jem'Hadar plot in "Rocks and Shoals" or the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't downbeat ending to "The Masterpiece Society") but tragic in the, ahem, *evitability* of the ending, which Sisko claims could have been avoided if only they had trusted each other. It is true that the Founder (and the Jem'Hadar) dies, and that is tragic -- Sisko is not as bloodthirsty as to want them dead -- but none of Sisko's crew's deaths could have been avoided by any actions after the initial decision to salvage, which means that I am left cold by Sisko's ending "we should have just trusted each other." On the other hand, his exchange with Dax about whether those deaths are worth the Jem'Hadar ship does apply, since Sisko should have recognized that he was risking Dominion response in salvaging (stealing) the ship. Dramatically, I guess I wish this were more like something like "The Galileo Seven," where Spock continues making command decisions and each one has consequences in-episode, so that there is a lot of room to evaluate his mistakes (and successes). Sisko's decisions basically have very little impact on the plot, but the dialogue still revolves around Sisko pondering what he could have done differently rather than the sense of tragedy that he could do nothing to prevent it.

    On the other hand, O'Brien does say that Muniz will die if they can't get him to a medical bay, and Kilana said that their wounded would be cared for. And so while the other four deaths were basically unpreventable by any actions after the initial decision to salvage the ship, it may be that Muniz could have been saved. So Muniz' slow, agonizing death is the reminder that every moment Sisko continues *not* to make the choice to trust Kilana, he is continuously *not* saving his crew member. That Kilana bungles the situation very badly is on her; and unlike many others here, I actually enjoyed the actress' performance and did find Kilana's tacit admission of failure (pretty much throughout the episode) pretty effective -- as if Kilana is so intensely afraid for the Founder that she keeps making rash, dangerous decisions but then tries to (ahem) salvage the situation with fake confidence and flattery when they fail. But that Sisko is unable to figure out that she is trying to protect a changeling, and his failure to ask for a medkit as a show of trust (as a commenter indicates above), is on Sisko and gives weight to Sisko's "trust" line, even if it does not seem to me that it means anything for those other four crewmembers.

    Jammer is absolutely right that "the message" of "The Ship" is rather forced. Look, I get it - losing people under your command sucks. Still, I do think it was effectively conveyed through Muniz's deterioration. He's also right that the message is pretty substantively undermined by Sisko's decisions not being the direct cause of any the five Starfleet deaths. You could argue that his and the Vorta's decisions to not trust one another lead directly to the deaths of all the Jem'Hadar and Founder, but that clearly isn't the focus in the final scene with Dax. It's painfully obvious that Sisko doesn't give a damn about those deaths, only about the deaths among his crew. In that, the episode definitely suffers.

    However, "The Ship" is a superb episode in every other way. The lighting, the atmosphere, the close-quarters and especially the dissension among the heroes make this a very enjoyable outing. Having O'Brien and Worf so at odds with each other is indeed something that is almost never seen in Trek, so that was a very welcome change. And they even had Sisko call Dax on the carpet on her often overbearing attitude and personality, another plus (at least for me). Having Muniz be the one who dies in the attempt to ram home "the message" was also a nice touch. Since he has been a somewhat recurring character before now (not on the level as most of the recurring cast, but he has appeared before - most notably in "Hard Time"), having him die was more impactful for the audience. They could have just had a random nobody character die like most Trek episodes would, but they instead went with a somewhat established character. I applaud them for that. Finally, it was nice so see a little variety in the make-up of the crew this time around, with two very distinctive non-Human aliens among them.

    As for the role of Kilana, the Vorta character, I have to strongly disagree with Jammer. I didn't find things like her mid-sentence pauses and stumbling demeanor off-putting at all. It seemed very much in character. That's because I think it's clear that she's using a very specific technique in her "negotiations" with Sisko - she's trying to flirt with him. She adopts a very demure attitude and mannerisms and lays on the flirtatious affectations in order to lower Sisko's defenses. She even goes so far as to show a rather generous amount of cleavage as a part of ruse. She's trying to use her feminine wiles as a negotiation tactic. On a lot of people, that probably would have worked, as she is a pretty attractive woman. It just doesn't work on Sisko. Given that all of these mannerisms completely disappear in her final confrontation with Sisko and Dax after the Founder's death - gone are the mid-sentence pauses and flirty attitude, she becomes a fairly no-nonsense straight-to-business type person - it only solidifies my belief that she was putting on an act for Sisko for most of the episode. Given that we also never see another female Vorta act this way, it only further bolstered that belief. In other words, the character really worked for me.

    8/10

    Boring in the beginning, overwrought in the middle, clichéd at the end. Terrible acting throughout.

    It defies credibility that the Klingons would think it is honorable to die in battle but not honorable to be wounded in battle and die of that wound two days later.

    Why was O'Brien allowed to spend so much of his time playing nurse when he should have been working on the ship's systems from the moment they boarded?

    How come they never needed any more bandages? By the end of the episode everyone should have been sleeveless.

    The first scene where O'Brien and Worf argue about whether to kill the red shirt guy was so overacted that I thought that they were doing it on purpose to fool the Vorta who was eavesdropping, or something. Then I figured that like the sword that Worf and Jadzia found last season there was something on that ship that made people act out of character. But, nope, it was just hot in there. It would have been a more interesting episode (maybe) if they had played up the paranoia aspect of being trapped on a ship with lots of nooks and crannies knowing that the Jem Hadar can beam in at any time.

    I thought the Dominion claimed all of the gamma quadrant as its territory?

    In the military we have a term: OPSEC. Operational Security. It means not openly discussing tactical or strategic plans. For example, Kira NOT telling Odo, Quark, and Bashir she doesn't have time for their petty problem because she has to go help Sisko retrieve a captured Jem'Hadar vessel, the "greatest intelligence find in the last ten years," according to the captain. Odo, maybe. Bashir, he's not need-to-know. Quark who is still smuggling illegal merchandise?! Now, we can trust Quark won't willingly damage the prospects of the Alpha Quadrant, depending on the price. But considering his wide range of contacts, he only needs to mention the downed ship to someone, and then a Dominion spy overhears and sends in the Jem'Hadar. Which is exactly what happened. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

    I like Muñiz's line, "Don't worry, jefe. I'll get you through this one."

    So Dax, a Trill, can't even speak Trill with trilled 'r's, nor can she trill the 'r's in Klingon — but she goes out of her way to trill the 'r' in "Enrique"?? Pandering much?

    @Luke

    I want to thank you, because you really helped me to hate Dax. She's awful! I never realized it before I read your reviews. In addition to your pointed criticism, my biggest pet peeve is that she always calls the captain by his first name. It's so unprofessional. I don't care if they are friends. Time and a place! When she is set straight by Sisko, she calls him "Captain" with such condescension.

    Tactical mistake: not taking Kilana hostage!

    Why is Worf obsessed with Enrique dying? It's not like he has been with humans for a few days. He grew up on Earth! He knows how humans feel about friends dying. His Klingon moralism is utterly contrived, only so that we have a completely artificial discord of these characters:

    Worf says to Miles (his friend of 10 years!!) "You are just another weak human afraid to face death."
    Even if he weren't a decennial friend, didn't these assholes just enjoy some serious team building on Kronos?! WTF!

    This is completely unbelievable. Dax being a snarky bitch, that is common place. I wish Sisko had smacked her broad across the face like a Klingon captain would. She was completely out of line. Miles was just trying to fix the ship and help his friend (who is not an ensign by the way, Jammer, but a crewman, probably an E-3). Worf and Dax are beyond the pale. They deserve each other.

    Some barrage! It sounds like distant thunder. This is what breaks their cohesion?! Improbable.

    I don't like whatever lesson was supposed to come from this. "...if we had trusted each other!" says Sisko. What?! Dude, Benny, your people died, and the Jem'Hadar died, because of the freaking *Jem'Hadar*! They blew up the Runabout and attacked because they are Dominion.

    @Luke, do you think this idiotic message is comparable to left-wingers blaming the United States' for being attacked by Al-Qaeda?

    I also think Jammer is dead wrong about Kilana. The unsure-of-herself routine (along with the low cut dress) were meant to lull Sisko into a false sense of security, as was the "it's my first mission" lie. "I'm just a helpless attractive woman in need of a big, strong captain to help me through this diplomacy stuff." Sisko to his credit does not bite. And she looks pissed. All Vorta have this cloying aspect to their character, and Kilana oozing the diplomatic schmooze plus the weak-woman honeypot ploy is perfectly in character for her and the Dominion. I really like her character.

    Or maybe it was just the dress...

    Didn't they say this Jem'Hadar ship was indeed special in its construction? I guess it wasn't after all. It just had a Founder on it. Oh...

    In the final analysis, even I used to really enjoy this episode, it has two untenable problems. Worf is bizarrely out of character, and Sisko blames himself in an unfathomable attempt by the writers to equivocate both sides in a conflict as being equally wrong.

    @Luke, I am seldom harder on episodes than you are, but on the Luke Scale I would give this a 5/10 at best.

    Sorry if this repeats something another commenter has said (haven't had time to read them all) but I respectfully disagree on your approval of the "tension boiling over scene".

    I absolutely did not get enough stress and craziness in this episode for Worf, and Dax to just go SO out of character. O'Brien is losing a colleague/subordinate/friend. It's sensible that he would be angry with jokes or Worf's attitude...

    But Worf ripping a console out of the wall? Dax chiding him for it?

    Then this exchange:

    WORF: That is no way for anyone to die.
    O'BRIEN: I told you, he is not going to die.
    WORF: It is only a matter of time.
    O'BRIEN: So we might as well kill him, right?
    WORF: If you truly are his friend, you would consider that option. It would be a more honourable death than the one he's enduring.
    O'BRIEN: I'm not some bloodthirsty Klingon looking for an excuse to murder my friend.

    This one is not completely out of character but the line that follows comes out of the middle of nowhere in my opinion:

    WORF: No. You're just another weak human afraid to face death.

    Worf and O'Brien have been colleagues and I suppose friends for years. Since when does Worf have this much disdain for humans, let alone O'Brien.

    O'Brien then takes a swing at Worf, to which Dax makes a joke. Not like a "nervous, under her breath" joke... a flat out "everyone will thing this is funny" kind of joke... in that situation... it's just so out of character for someone with that many lifetimes of experience.

    Honestly, they know the Jem Haddar won't bomb the ship, so while they've had hours of loud bombardment noise... I'm really not understanding what the actual stress building is any more than other situations this crew has faced where they haven't buckled.

    Just two episodes later, in "Nor the Battle to the Strong", we see a far more convincing implementation of a stressful uncertain situation; perhaps because we have a novice like Jake and rookies and doctors facing a real threat, and not these seasoned officers facing seemingly no imminent threat. "The Siege of AR-558" 2 seasons later would do another good job on the same theme. Neither episode features the senior staff (Bashir in the former, and lots of others in the latter) breaking down and going off-character due to nerves.

    Finally (on that topic), I felt that Sisko's over-enunciated yelling at the crew came off a bit theatrical and over the top scripted, and not so much natural.

    I agree that Kilana was not played well. Apparently (for the second failed time), the Vorta was intended to be Eris, (the Vorta from "The Jem'Hadar" in s2), but the actress was again unavailable. I also agree that potentially the stakes could have been better if more had died as result of Kilana and Sisko's actual decisions. That would also have added to the basis for the crew to get increasingly nervous since their decisions would have led to more and more of them getting killed as time went on.


    Apparently the producers also felt this one was a bit of a failure. Ira Behr didn't think the tension built like they wanted, and the writer felt when Sisko etc. go outside and meet with the enemy, it kills the tension, and felt it would have worked better if they had remained bottled up in the ship the whole time and only had the Vorta taunting them verbally by transmission. I might agree with that point. Behr also felt that the attempted relationship between O'Brien and Muniz (who had been in several other episodes) didn't work. I don't know if I agree. Perhaps they wanted to really get a bond established more than they did here, but I nevertheless did get the feeling like there was some existing bond and that O'Brien was taking it harder than just "some crewman". It did come off a bit as O'Brien feeling responsible for a kid under his command more than as actual friends as equals, so maybe they could have improved there.

    I had a lot of the same problems with this episode as others mention in comments above. But what really bothered me was the jem Hadar killing themselves. Really? They can't continue living to protect another founder at some point in the future? And then the vorta says "well there's nothing I can do to stop you from taking the ship" but she clearly had a ship in orbit because she was able to beam out, and she should have been able to blast the ship from space, destroying it and killing all her enemies inside. Our heroes got out of this way too easily.

    All Muniz needed was an IV. Find some water and a tube, sterilize them, and wait for the Defiant.

    Can we agree that Worf is the worst? Screw him and his Klingon crap. You find humans and Federation values stupid? Go the eff back to your violent dicks of a people and take Dax with you.

    At least no Keiko in this episode.

    "Now that all the minor characters are dead, let's head for home."

    2 stars. Overrated doesn't even begin to describe this. The death of the bit player we never saw before did nothing emotionally. The build up of the mystery as to what is on the ship fizzled. I suppose if you are someone who thinks characters bickering at each other is great drama then This episode rocked but I however am not such a person. Ultimately like I've said before this episode only is worthwhile for the salvaging of the Jem'Hadar ship that is put to great effect down the line

    "The Ship" had the makings for a very interesting episode and it did a lot things right (the premise, Brooks' acting, reacting to dying crewman) but there plenty of annoying things about it too. I think Jammer's review is on point and nails my sentiments pretty well.

    I guess I would question Sisko's assertion that because he found the ship, it's his when the Vorta female claims it as theirs. I believe she's right here. I guess the Federation claims the planet but it's the Jem'Hadar's ship.

    The negotiations between the Vorta female and Sisko really irritated me. She and the Jem'Hadar destroyed the roundabout and now they want to talk with Sisko -- why don't they just beam soldiers into the ship and kill Sisko and his crew if they just want to get/save the dying Founder? And what was the point of all the ongoing explosions?

    Instead the Vorta female proves to be incredibly annoying as a character -- just the wrong actress for this role. She was terrible. Hard to believe this bimbo-like character is commanding the Jem'Hadar on this particular mission.

    This was actually one episode where I think Brooks' acting was on point 1) during the negotiations with the Vorta and 2) setting his crew straight when at each other's throats. Good to see him lean into Dax for her dumb comment.

    I also thought Worf was out of character in telling O'Brien that his trainee would die. Worf's been around humans long enough to know that he shouldn't be saying those things.

    A lot of the episode really does revolve around the attitude toward the dying officer and Sisko takes it personally -- it is good to see it but it does seem misplaced as he was not directly at fault. So that part at the end was a bit overblown as was when Worf comes to see O'Brien at the end near the torpedo. I would find it hard to believe that these 2 are so quickly on speaking terms.

    2.5 stars is the right rating here -- a case of dropping the ball for an episode that had good potential and some poor / out-of-character acting. Really could not stand the Vorta female. Ultimately, the examination of the crew after the trainee's death didn't resonate with me.

    I think this episode could have used another rewrite. But most of the tension was really well done, and you can't help but love Sisko when he's asserting his authority. O'Brien is one of my favorite characters, but he just didn't seem very convincing to me here. At first he was taking shit from the from Munoz, and then doing all these worried Grandma faces. I think they make the chief look like a schmuck too much of the time. His rank is also unrealistic considering the breadth of both his duties and accomplishments. My biggest problem with the episode is how it started: it's obvious by now that exploring the gamma quadrant in a runabout is just stupid. Any sane commander would consider the defiant or another warship to be the only reasonable choice.

    There's a lot to like about "The Ship", and quite a bit to dislike. On the negative side, the O'Brien/Muniz scenes are a cheap way of trying to elicit more emotion when Muniz dies later. It's also never as harrowing or intense an episode as it clearly wants to be, and really should be. On the positive side, the ending scene is excellent, the O'Brien/Worf feud was very well resolved, and there are some really effective moments sprinkled throughout. Pretty much the definition of a mixed bag.
    There's a terrific episode buried somewhere in here, but it's unfortunately marred by poor execution.

    2.5 stars.

    Recently re-watched this episode.

    Overall, I liked it, but I think I agree with Jammer's evaluation.

    One of the things that struck me as problematic is the O'Brien/Muniz angle. We'd only seem Muniz what? Two before this episode? And in those, he was just kind of on-screen not doing a whole lot of anything memorable (except getting a bollocking from Worf in 'Starship Down') or anything to get the viewer emotionally invested in him.

    In 'The Ship', however, he's shown to have what seems to be a very close relationship with O'Brien, and I was kind of left wondering, 'Where the hell did this come from?' So, in this sense, the impact of his dying, and ultimate death fell a bit flat.

    Except, in another way it didn't.

    I found the on-screen chemistry between Rio and Meaney actually great to watch, and the script and direction really helped them. So, in that sense, I was also left with, 'Aw, come on! These two work great on-screen together, and you want to kill Muniz off?!' So, in this sense, Muniz's death kind of hit.

    In any case, enjoyable episode, overall, but certainly not without its share of issues.

    I'd also say 2.5 stars.

    @MadManMUC-

    Yeah, exactly. The Muniz stuff almost works, but he just has one too few appearances.

    Not bad, some good stuff.

    The presence of an ailing Founder is a fairly decent explanation for the extraordinarily soft kid gloves.

    Sisko isn't wrong with his overwrought speech about TRUST, in that even the runabout crew would be alive if Kilana had taken that relatively small chance on trusting them - though that is no way Sisko's fault.

    Muniz, yep, that's surely his fault. He didn't even bother to try to negotiate for some medical assistance. I'm thinking that's a deliberate oversight - the idea being that all along, Sisko was willing to sacrifice Muniz for that ship. He took the chance deliberately and consciously, knowing Muniz's chances were nearly zero - which is why his guilt is heavy on him at the end.

    The ep seems to be about priorities and choices and values.

    Kilana's make up and outfit was distracting and a minus for me, but I guess Trek's gotta do what Trek's gotta do.

    Kept my attention. Awkwardly done in many way. Solid Trekkian fare overall.

    I am unsure whether the writers on DS9 are unable to think anything through, or just don't care.

    Why no medical officer?

    Why did Sisko negotiate in such an aggressive manner?

    Why didn't he ask for medical aid?

    Why didn't they just beam them out of the ship?

    This episode would have been so much better if the Jem Hadar captured the crew on the roundabout and the Vorta tried to use them as a bargaining chip. Sisko doesn't trust them but at least the pretense of the negotiations could exist. Then the founder dies and Jem Hadar blows up their ship or something with the roundabout crew still aboard. Because as the episode stands Sisko did literally nothing wrong. Why would he trust the word of person who ordered the destruction of his ship and crew and then tried to gun him down? Why would he feel responsible for their deaths if his decisions didn't impact events in any way? I understand you can't help feel responsible for deaths under you command but that ending part with Dax was so hamfisted considering.

    The thing with Worf, they should have went with "put him out of his misery" angle or something. Because that was so stupid. Why does Worf care about a human's honor? It's not like he doesn't understand humans by this point. Was the point that things where so intense that Worf couldn't keep his cool? Isn't Worf supposed to be a badass? Why can't Worf keep his cool and show some character development as an CO? It would be nice change of pace if he was the one who kept the rest of crew on point for once. But no, he's Worf, destined to fuck up every other episode.

    So if I ship some exotic pets via FedEx and they fail to tell me I need an import licence, then they also decide to ship 3 tons of heroin in the same shipping container as my pets, I can be prosecuted for the pets AND the heroin? Or did they just make this pants-on-head daft law in the 24th century?

    That was the scene that started the irritation with this episode. Then, with the most elite fighting force in the gamma quadrant bearing down on everyone, they all stand in the open having a bit of a chat about what to do and not looking at the enemy, but the Jem Hadar seem inacapable of capitalising on their inattention, unless its a redshirt wot has top bants with the chief?

    Then everyone being a jerk for the sake of it, with O'Brien and Worf kicking off before the understandably nerve shattering bombardment began (this was after all a PTSD inducing WW1 tactic). I don't really get why Worf is being written as such a massive pen15 so far, perhaps they need to get daddy Jean Luc to come have a word?

    The Jem Hadar not only offed themselves due to the dead founder, but let the Federation take their ship to reverse engineer, even though by that stage there was nothing to protect. Its like the Secret Service letting the president get shot then just handing over the plans to the F35 as well because they failed.

    One thing I did like is the continuing representation of the manipulativeness and guile of the Vorta and Founders, and their intelligence gathering capabilities. I quite liked the representation of the female Vorta, who was effective enough to make me feel Sisko was being unreasonable with his mistrust.

    The crew member holding the medkit gets killed when the Jem H'dar first attack. So presumably the medkit is laying around somewhere near the ship. So why doesn't Sisko get it for Muniz when he goes outside to speak with the Vorta?

    Teaser : **, 5%

    In the reviews of “Deadlock,” I recall a lot of complaints that the fact that the Voyager was severely damaged at that episode's end but would be fully-repaired by the next week ruined the story, was evidence of lazy writing, made the show feel shallow, etc. Many are/were unwilling to extend an ounce of creativity or speculation to make it work because Voyager sucks, ergo everything Voyager does sucks unless someone's YouTube review says it doesn't...or something. I mean, to each his own, but the first thing Sisko's log reveals in this episode, after just having blown open a very serious Dominion plot at the end of last week's episode, is that most of the DS9 senior staff has decided to complete a routine survey mission of a planet in the Gamma Quadrant. In a RUNABOUT no less. Can we contrive reasons for this? Sure. But I don't appreciate the double standard. This is the fifth season of the show and the set-up for this story, however it turns out, is silly even without the context of continuity. Considering, as William B noted, the general state of affairs of the series at this point, and the context of the very last episode in particular, it's completely absurd. But we shall suspend our disbelief and move on.

    As I said, Sisko and...a lot of people for some reason are on this survey. Like a dozen of them--yeah. We catch up with O'Brien and Muñiz (who in any other episode would be on this survey by themselves) pausing to banter about how old O'Brien is, and to establish their rapport. O'Brien doesn't like being called “sir,” because he's not an officer. It's all very heartwarming, so saith the script.

    They catch up with Sisko, Worf and Dax. Dax is there to talk about the ore they're totally going to start mining. Yes, why not set up a mining operation in the heart of enemy territory sixty thousand lightyears away from Federation space? And Worf is on hand to assess the strategic viability of such an operation. For a planet. On which he is standing. Let me ask you, what's the strategic viability of supplying Mars with wheat grass and iPhones? I'm asking you because, as someone on Earth, you have a strategic vantage point in making this assessment. And Sisko is on hand to command these people. How would they possibly do this job if he, the captain of a vessel and commander of a space station, weren't standing right there ordering them to do their jobs?

    Anyway, the other half of the crew that was apparently sardined into the runabout makes contact with the away team to warn them that a ship has dropped out of warp nearby. It crash-lands just out of sight of Sisko's away team because of course it does. They're beamed over and discover that it's a Jem'Hadar warship. What in the GQ? Get out of town...

    Act 1 : **.5, 17%

    They manage to break into the ship, which isn't nearly as damaged as you'd think it would be, but IS upside-down. That's a bummer. The production design is definitely commendable as the flickering lights, smoke and horror movie score create a real sense of dread, especially after the sunny scenes we just left on the planet surface. They eventually run into some Jem'Hadar corpses, which is a little obvious, but okay. According to Dax, they died well before the crash, from inertial dampener failure. O'Brien and she begin to learn about Dominion ship design—surprised at a lack of viewscreens and other ubiquitous Star Trek staples. Sisko wants to haul the ship back to the AQ, naturally, but the runabout isn't going to cut it. See, that's a contrivance that plugs two plot holes on its own!

    So, we cut to DS9 where we finally get an appearance by Quark. He and Bashir are being dragged by Odo into Sisko's office over some conflict. He ordered some spiders for Kira (don't ask), and Quark neglected to mention he needed a permit to import them. Kira tells them to work it out while she takes the Defiant to the GQ to perform salvage. Yawwwwn...

    At the site of the crash, O'Brien is mumbling something about fixing the ship's engines to make towing easier and Worf reports that they finished burying the dead Jem'Hadar. But then, the runabout is shot out of the sky by another Dominion vessel and Sisko watches his crew vaporise in the atmosphere.

    Act 2 : **.5, 17%

    The Jem'Hadar appear, kill a blue shirt and wound Muñiz before the crew take cover inside the crashed ship. Dax mentions that the Jem'Hadar's magic transporting abilities make it likely they'll materialise in the ship...but they don't. Sisko and co. head back to the command centre and O'Brien chides Muñiz for putting on a brave face while he bleeds out from his wound. With the med kit lost and the Defiant 2.5 days away...yeah Muñiz is carne muerta.

    O'Brien manages to get the ship powered up and they continue making small discoveries about Dominion tech, including these little eye-pieces that allow visual contact for the Vorta and the First. While Muñiz continues his 2 days from retirement thing, a Vorta called Kilana hails them over the comm.

    DAX: They know your name.
    SISKO: They always seem to be one step ahead of us.

    She requests a face-to-face meeting and Sisko agrees. The pair and their escorts meet outside and she “cuts to the chase,” telling Sisko that they want their ship back. This is a minor complaint, but Kilana is adorned with jewellery, [[being a girl]], which strikes me as silly. Even without the retro-continuity about the Vorta lacking a sense of aesthetics, she's a military leader, right? In a society of clones run by shape-shifters? Was Weyoun wearing cologne on that trip to Iconia? Anyway, Sisko claims “salvage rights” over the warship, which, erm, fine. We see that while they chat, a single Jem'Hadar beams aboard the ship.

    Act 3 : **, 17%

    Kilana and Sisko continue with her offering him a snack and him retorting that he only likes white chicks if they're the re-incarnated souls of his former mentors in parallel realities. At least that's what would have gone down if I had written the script. She tries playing good cop and bad cop at the same time, in a way. She gets personal with Ben, playfully chiding him about teaching Jake to be trusting of others and she makes a “generous” offer to bring Sisko and crew back to DS9, “including your wounded.” But, her remarks about Jake have a sinister overtone, implying that the Dominion can reach him whenever they like, and Sisko sees right through her offer as a gussied-up call for surrender.

    In The Ship™, Dax and O'Brien chase phantom noises to a sensor device and get ambushed by the Jem'Hadar. Notably, the soldier takes them down in hand-to-hand. For...reasons, the pair of allegedly seasoned combat veterans are easily thwarted, but Muñiz shows up just in time, straight out of an action movie, to shoot the Jem'Hadar with his phaser.

    Kilana and co. vanish and the DS9 crew ponder the purpose of the sensor device while Muñiz writhes in agony. They put the pieces together and realise that the ship is valuable in some way that makes the Dominion guarded in how they might try and retake it. They won't send in more than one soldier or risk using energy weapons. They determine to make blue prints and try and track down the “special.”

    O'BRIEN: It's not that bad.
    MUÑIZ: You're lying.
    O'BRIEN: What makes you say that?
    MUÑIZ: I called you sir and you didn't even flinch. I must be dying.
    O'BRIEN: Now you listen to me, Quique. You're not dying unless I say you're dying. And I say you're going to make it.

    I'll get into this more at the end. Suffice it to say for now that Meaney and Rio do a fine job with this material, but it really tries my patience. And that's because this is what one might call the evolved form of the DS9 Banality Syndrome making its unwelcome return to the series. In early seasons, it was about houseplants and baseball and other bullshit—DS9 characters talking about “character” issues that are so obvious, clichéd and grafted onto the franchise from other genres that, beside the far more original and interesting Trek material, felt exceedingly tedious and, well, banal. Now it's a war story, with the brave but tragic young soldier and his mentor going through denial. This stuff is fine, I guess, it's just fucking boring and obvious. Star Trek isn't MASH. Like I said, I'll elaborate further at the end.

    So, then we get a scene where O'Brien, Worf and Dax argue about said banal plot thread. The three of them are certainly *in character*--I don't want to mis-represent my complaint here. It's just that the way the conflict arises is extremely forced and without nuance or effort.

    DAX: Muñiz is strong. He'll make it.
    WORF (screaming): No, he will not. He will not see tomorrow.
    O'BRIEN: You keep that to yourself. I don't want him to hear that kind of talk.
    WORF: It does no good to shield him from the truth.

    Dax is written inconsistently over the series. Sometimes she's borderline socially-retarded, saying things that seem to show zero sensitivity to the people she's addressing (like her off-handed remarks to Kira); other times she's seems to have this wisdom that better fits her character (like her insight into Bashir's struggle in “The Quickening”); but this is just...flat. It's a functional line that sets the conflict in motion, but doesn't seem to have anything to do with Dax or her relationship to O'Brien. Worf is then set off by her remark into his usual Klingon-ness. But why is he so pissed off about it? Think back to “The Enemy” and Worf's cold “then he will die” when informing Dr Crusher that he was refusing to help save the dying Romulan. Worf had a lot of cause to be emotional—the reminder of his tragic backstory, the immediate pressure from his job, his commanding officers and his Federation ethics to do something he felt he couldn't, the conflict in trying to live up to a cultural ideal that he only understood in the abstract—but he was calm, clear and direct, not incendiary. If we are generous, we can perhaps say that Worf is under a lot of pressure here, too (although the episode has not actually shown this to be true at this point). But why is this relatively simple and impersonal pressure (being surrounded by the enemy) getting under his skin now? It's conflict and that's “dramatic.” I get it. But it's not natural. It feels like DS9 trying to take its uniquely Star Trek-shaped puzzle piece and jam it into a generic space war story puzzle it doesn't fit.

    While Sisko attends Muñiz who is now going into shock from his blood-loss, Kilana calls and offers to meet him again, sounding more desperate. She offers to come unescorted and unarmed. Her new proposal is to let the Jem'Hadar retrieve the Special and leave them alone *with* the ship. Sisko says that he'll get it for her if she tells him what it is, which of course, she won't do. This moment is actually, in my opinion, the crux of the episode. But again, I'll circle back. For now, this impasse triggers an aerial bombardment from the Jem'Hadar.

    Act 4 : **.5, 17%

    The crew realise that the bombs aren't meant to actually hit them, but merely “rattle” them as they won't risk harming the Special.

    O'BRIEN: Any idea what?
    SISKO: Could be anything. Encoding device, guidance system.
    DAX: Maybe she lost an earring.

    Huh. I didn't expect the episode to point out its own weird conceit. Bonus point. Sisko orders all hands to search the ship for...whatever while O'Brien repairs its weapons.

    Finally, Muñiz starts hallucinating and drifting into Spanish. With the Siskos' colour-coded love interest stuff, I try to tread lightly as I am not black and can only make observations, but my father is Spanish, I'm bilingual, and this shit is offensive. I'm not going to dock the episode for this, because there is precedent in TNG for Picard sending occasional messages in French—even though he should always be speaking French and just have his words translated—but this has the same tokenism-scented inauthenticity that makes Chakotay's character so cringey sometimes. Torres is latina on her human side, but we never see her going Spanglish to try and assuage the audience's white guilt. Rio is trying his best here, but the moment is sterilised for me by the writers trying way too hard.

    Meanwhile, Dax is starting to get flustered as she raids the Ship for whatever the fuck they're looking for. Worf, likewise, is champing at the bit for an opportunity to murder somebody, per his idiom. He mutters to O'Brien:

    WORF: That is no way for anyone to die.
    O'BRIEN: I told you, he is not going to die.
    WORF: It is only a matter of time.
    O'BRIEN: So we should just kill him, right?
    WORF: If you truly are his friend, you would consider that option. It would be a more honourable death than the one he's enduring.

    All of that is fine, but then we get:

    WORF: You're just another weak human afraid to face death.

    What the actual fuck, Worf? When did he turn into this racist piece of shit, exactly? The only time Worf has ever talked about human weakness is when he was teasing Wesley about the physical fragility of human females back in “The Dauphin.” Remember “The Bonding,” when he adopted a human child into his family so they could face death together? Or how about “Chain of Command,” when he scoffed at Jellico's writing-off Picard being lost in the line of duty? Or how about “Ethics,” when he asked Riker to kill him so that his Klingon son wouldn't have to? But no, in this story, Worf thinks humans are weaklings because the script says we need this artificial conflict. Bravo.

    Sisko breaks up their fight and chides Dax for her unhelpful snarkiness (thank you) before giving his version of a pep talk, which of course means screaming at the top of his lungs like a lunatic for his people to “act like professionals.” Hilarious. He sends the trio off on tasks and orders Muñiz not to die. Obviously, this is for Sisko's own psychological benefit as Quique is watching fireworks with his father.

    Later Sisko makes a captain's log that updates us on the crew's progress. They think they might be able to fly the ship off the surface and make the attempt. There's some shaking and sparking and...they fail completely. Oh, and Muñiz is dead. Oops.

    Sisko privately tells Dax that he is more determined than ever to recover the Ship, as he needs to have a tangible reason to justify the deaths of the five casualties on this mission. Again, I'll come back to that. As luck would have it, their conversation is interrupted by the revelation that a bulkhead is actually a Changeling that starts to ooze off the ceiling.

    Act 5 : *.5, 17%

    It lashes out at them, but it seems to be dying. They realise that the Founder here is the Special and reason that when it dies, the Jem'Hadar will no longer hold back on their assault. Apparently, one of the Changelings' abilities is a Vulcan Scream or something as its cries of agony reach the ears of Kilana and her horde outside. It dies and Kilana beams in to offer her surrender.

    SISKO: Where are your soldiers?
    KILANA: They're dead. They killed themselves.
    DAX: Why?
    SISKO: Because they allowed a Founder to die.
    KILANA: You should've trusted me.

    SISKO: Muñiz, the runabout crew, your soldiers, they'd all still be alive if we had trusted each other.

    Lol what? So much of this makes no sense.

    First of all, why was the Founder dying? Because of the crash? Does goo suffer bone fractures? I don't think so. The Founder must have already been dying for some reason before the crash. So how were Kilana and these Jem'Hadar, far from Dominion space, supposed to save the Changeling even if Sisko and co. hadn't been around?

    Second of all, why was Kilana afraid Sisko would take the Founder as a hostage? In exchange for something? Like herself or the Ship? WHICH SHE WAS ALWAYS WILLING TO GIVE HIM? It's true that Sisko has been indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least two Changelings, but Kilana has shown that she's deeply informed about him and Federation procedures. She doesn't have to trust Sisko at all to know that he would only kill the Founder if he had to, and that it would make much more sense for him to exchange it for this Ship and getting his own remaining crew home alive.

    Third, Sisko already pointed out that he had absolutely no reason to trust Kilana. There was never any sign that he was making a difficult choice between trusting his instinct over his mind or something. Kilana never gave him a reason to trust her. This is SO contrived and stupid.

    Oh, and just to put a little capstone on this buffoonery, we get a little exchange about belief that comes out of nowhere. Fuck this.

    Wait a minute, wait a minute...so Kilana beams away with some of the Founder's remains to...somewhere. I mean, all of her men are dead, so she's gone to some ship or outpost right? Why, at this point, would the Dominion allow Sisko and co. to hold on the Ship and all its intelligence? Blow them up, idiots!

    There's a coda where Sisko informs Dax that they're all getting medals for their “prize.” [eye roll]

    DAX: They chose a life in Starfleet. They knew the risks and they died fighting for something that they believed in.

    They did? I thought they died because of a really random set of coincidences exacerbated by incredibly poor planning. But yeah, war movie clichés ahead full...Worf and Miles keep watch over Muñiz' body because of some Klingon bullshit that allows these two to reconcile without actually talking about what they said or how they feel because they're tough guys or some other fucking tired bullshit. The end.

    Episode as Functionary : *.5, 10%

    The intended sentiment of this story prefigures “The Siege of Ar-588,” but fails because the writers don't know what their setting is. Is this a war? Well kind of. But the premise of this story is that Sisko and a dozen other people could risk going to the GQ to survey a planet for some ore in a Runabout. Sisko laments to Dax that his officers' deaths have to mean something, that he needs to justify their sacrifice to their families and to himself. Sure. But, when Q flung the Enterprise into Borg space and 18 of Picard's officers died and/or were assimilated, he didn't wring his hands over the pointlessness of their mission, because their mission was to seek out new life. And in that process, they got killed. Sisko's mission wasn't to recover a Dominion ship, it was to survey a planet. Like in so many Bajoran religious stories or anti-humanist Starfleet stories on this show, there's a bait and switch that really, really aggravates me. At the start of the episode, the crew find themselves unexpectedly ambushed and besieged by the enemy, forced into a combat situation that none had asked for. By the end, Dax is telling Sisko that these people died in the line of duty, doing what they signed on for. Bait and switch. Either of these premises (unfair, surprise combat situation OR unfortunate cost-of-war analysis) could work out fine, but the philosophical and ethical implications of these are not the same at all. And substituting one for the other is, well, exactly the kind of douchbaggery I always hate to see on this show.

    If this were Season 1 or 2, the situation would be different—5 officers lost their lives in the line of duty due to unforeseeable complications with a mysterious enemy, like in “Q Who?”, but now, off the heels of an anti-Dominion mission in “Apocalypse Rising,” this feels kind of ridiculous. How would it look if Picard had sent people on a survey mission to the Delta Quadrant? But if the writers made the state of war between the Dominion and the Federation explicit at this point (precluding the possibility of silly survey missions to the GQ), then Sisko would have no cause to wring his hands. Yes, there would still be tragedy, but it wouldn't have this air of pointlessness; his people would be volunteering to risk their lives to fight the Dominion. Of course, this episode's followup in S6 will do just that and to much better effect.

    The point is that this episode's stakes are too contrived to overlook. Every time something bad happens, no matter how well acted or scripted, there's a nagging voice in the back of my head saying, “Why the fuck are you even here, morons?”

    Filling out most of the rest of the episode is a series of clichés and tropes that have no place in a Star Trek story to begin with, but are also just as contrived as the premise itself. Worf in particular is all over the place with his characterisation, and all the main cast find themselves saying and doing things that ratchet up the conflict seemingly for its own sake. This didn't have nearly the same weight as a relatively silly episode like “Night Terrors” had in believably wearing the characters down to the point where they make mistakes and say things they shouldn't to each other. The claustrophobia elements are pretty much confined to acts 3 and 4, which is simply not enough time.

    The one potentially interesting element I found here was in the comparison between Sisko and Kilana. Both are gambling with a life; Kilana's is her god, Sisko's is his officer. For Kilana, giving up vital Dominion secrets and sacrificing herself and all her soldiers is a completely justified price to pay for one life, because her programmed religion conviction deems it so. The episode toyed with the idea that Sisko would on the other hand be willing to sacrifice one life, Muñiz', in order to acquire those secrets. But the way the episode is structured, Sisko didn't actually have a choice. We were never made to believe that he could have reasonably given Kilana the Ship and she would have cured Muñiz and delivered them all home. That's absurd. So the comparison doesn't work. Without that philosophical element, this story is incredible tired and trite.

    Final Score : **

    @Elliott,

    I'm largely in agreement. Especially, I get the nagging sense from this episode that the deaths should have been much more strongly a result of considered choices that Sisko (et al.) made. So either the question should be about whether it was worth it to do a survey mission in the GQ, OR there should have been more indication that the deaths were the result, even partly, of Sisko making strategic calls based on wanting the Ship/"not trusting each other"/etc. and it's maybe marginally true in Muniz' case that he could have gotten Muniz medical care earlier, but even then it's not brought out that strongly what he could have plausibly done.

    The Worf material plays very weird IMO. The main way I could see it working is: last year Worf realized he couldn't murder his brother begging him to do so, and his disgust with himself gets spewed outward and projected onto "weak human[s]." I don't buy that explanation though.

    I do think Kilana's earrings etc. were meant to be part of the pathetic seduction schtick she attempts, which is meant (in-story) to be a failure and misjudgment. I'm not positive how well it comes across, but I think it's an interesting idea to have the nonsexual Vorta clumsily attempt to use sexual come-ons for these sexually reproducing animals she marginally understands. I feel a little like this element gets lost in the shuffle of the episode, and I'm not sure how well it really fits in with the other themes, but I give it points for the attempt. I think this might be another way to look at Kilana's failure to see that Sisko would let the sick changeling go: she maybe sees the AQ, non-engineered humanoids as brain-stem-dominant marginally sapient animals who evolved to fuck and kill, and lets that prejudice (possibly fueled by disgust) overwhelm what she knows to be true of their values. Maybe. The series does a better job with Weyoun viewing other humanoids through a bemused-zookeeper lens (SPOILER) (culminating in his inability to recognize the signs of Damar's turn).

    I'm not sure where I stand on the "genre" issue. I think the DS9 staff can do war episodes if they want, but it should be done well. I agree that it plays as banal in this episode.

    (I forget, has it been established by this point in the series that the Vorta are cloned?)

    William B....

    No. That isn’t established until Weyoun returns in “Ties of Blood and Water”.

    @Luke, thanks! That makes sense that it would only be a backstory invented once they wanted to bring back the dead Weyoun.

    I like the idea that Kilana was wearing earrings and a low-cut shirt in order to emphasize her feminine features to a male commander. Her offer to take them in and treat them well in exchange for the ship somehow comes across more believable if she’s projecting a sort of female-motherly image.

    I, too, basically agree that The Ship is a sampling of 3-4 'could have been' decent ideas and sort of mushes them together into a 'not quite' result. I still enjoy watching it because I think Brooks' performance captures a lot of what the scripting slightly missed on, in terms of atmosphere and stakes. Although it's true the stakes are muddy at the beginning, I always bought it because they played it as very important onscreen.

    SPOILERS

    The one good thing about the episode, and where I think it does actually work as intended, is it gives us the plot twist that the stakes were not at all what the Federation crew thought they were. True, there was a ship with tech in it at stake; but all of the Dominion's actions couldn't be understood based on that alone. It turns out that the uber-valuing of Changeling life was the real explanation, and this, too, would end up being the deciding factor later in ther series. Sisko and the others in S7 are so concerned about the war itself, while meanwhile the Great Link is what the Founders are afraid of losing. So the idea here of a single Changeling being worth more than a ship, does pave the way for a premise that would be game-changing later in the series.

    @Peter,

    (spoilers)

    I agree.

    One thing I was thinking of adding is that while I agree with Elliott that Kilana's choice to hide the Founder's death from Sisko doesn't necessarily make sense in and of itself, it is consistent with the Founders' default assumption of solids' untrustworthiness. In fact, while I don't know if this was intended, I would believe that the Founders (and their Vorta as a result) would want to not only recover their dying Founder, but ideally even avoid revealing that one was dying in the first place. If we assume that the Founders were afraid of showing any vulnerability and were betting everything on recovering the Founder without the solids even finding out it was sick, out of fear that this sickness would be used against them (possibly down the line) then their actions also make sense. The Founders appear to continuously hide evidence of their vulnerabilities, even when hiding them appears to hurt them more than if they came forward with them.

    I was thinking a bit about one moment Elliott brought up, which is when Worf says that he's not some weak human afraid to face death. One thing to consider is that in context:

    O'BRIEN: I'm not some bloodthirsty Klingon looking for an excuse to murder my friend.
    SISKO: That's enough.
    WORF: No. You're just another weak human afraid to face death.

    One thing that's interesting is that while I don't think it's in character for Worf to start on this anti-human stuff, it *is* in character for Miles to reach for this kind of racism (or species essentialism, if you prefer), particularly in stress. Miles likes Worf and considers him a friend, and I can't really remember him having bad things to say about Klingons generally, but of course he's struggled with Cardassians in the past, and we know in, e.g., Hippocratic Oath he was far less optimistic about the possibility of the Jem'Hadar getting freed of the White (and thus the Dominion) than Julian. And of course the Federation is "at war" with the Klingons (or whatever). I think it's a knee-jerk reaction consistent with the way Miles locks down and tries to simplify things to cope.

    So on that note, I think we can read Worf's reply less as being about Worf being racist against humans and more as his being retaliatory: he matches Miles' species criticism in kind, repaying Miles' insult. This *kind of* works, but I still don't quite buy it. I think Worf refusing to just sit by and take Miles' insult is in character. I think him snapping back at him is in character. But I guess I don't think that Worf, raised by humans, would go for the human insult in this way. If it were on some issue like humans' approach to sex and commitment, or something, then, sure -- it's not like there aren't significant worldview differences. But Worf was rescued and raised by brave humans; he knew Yar who survived hell and then died in the line of duty; he watched Picard and Riker step into the Klingon world with gusto; he fought against the Borg invasion with the Enterprise crew; he grappled with Marla Astor's death under his command; he commanded the Defiant in battle. Worf lives and rlies on humans in a ay Miles doesn't live and rely on Klingons.

    Elliott's going in chronological order, so I'm jumping ahead a bit, but in Star Trek: First Contact, Worf's famously dramatic riposte to Picard's stress-induced lashing out at him was "If you were any other man I would KILL YOU WHERE YOU STAND." It's absurd and melodramatic, but what works about it is that it doesn't generalize away from Picard's insult to his entire species; Worf both acknowledges what Picard means to him and how inappropriate Picard's statement is. I think Worf snapping back at Miles would be perfectly in character; I think though that it would work better if Worf still made it more about Miles' insult to him (and his species) rather than playing Miles' species-comparison game. I think if Worf had personalized it and said "The difference between us is that I am not too weak and afraid to face death," it'd be perfectly fine. The species-essentialism of it is what seems smaller and pettier than Worf at least should be.

    No one has mentioned the hilarious reference to "The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill..." :)
    "I was climbing mountains in Ireland before you were born"
    "You mean 'hills', don't you?"

    Yes, no doubt due to the fact that Colm Meaney was in that film (which, for the record, is about Wales). Ireland does actually have plenty of legit mountains, mostly in Munster.

    Another episode which makes me wonder how DS9 mamaged to get itself renewed.

    Once again, a large chunk of the command crew from the space station - at a time of active war with two separate enemies - decide to spend several weeks on a remote planet doing some pointless mineral survey. It's almost as if this was a TNG episode rather than DS9. Again.

    (They've also managed to pack somewhere around a dozen people onto a single runabout, which is a lot more than we usually see. And as mentioned before, THE FEDERATION IS AT WAR WITH TWO POWERS OF EQUAL OR GREATER MILITARY STRENGTH: why the hell are senior military staff for the main defence hub of the sector buzzing around in weak little ships?)

    And look. As if by a hugely convenient plot device, there's a Jem Hadar ship in trouble! And it happens to crash land within visible range of where the misplaced bridge crew happen to be standing.

    Handy that. Even handier, the entire crew of the ship is dead and the ship is empty, though there's a few foreboding camera shots to let us know that Something Is Still In There.

    (And I have to ask: where are all these Jem Hadar ships coming from? The
    episode mentions that there's a dominion outpost 3 weeks away: where have they come from? Assuming my warp maths is correct, it'd take at least ten years at warp 9.9 for ships to travel to the wormhole exit point in the gamma sector and the Dominion doesn't use cloaking technology on it's ships, so can't just nip through the wormhole - which if the federation has any sense, has a very large number of weapons pointed at it...)

    So, Sisko sees an opportunity for salvage - which is perfectly logical. But he also somehow fails to take into account the fact that maybe, just maybe, the ship could have gotten a distress call off or that the Dominion might come looking for it.

    Instead, the ground-based crew is set the task of digging graves for the Jem Hadar (instead of collecting samples for analysis for the war effort) and there's a blase conversation with the remaining bridge crew back at DS9, who then happily blab in public about the discovery of a crashed Jem Hadar ship. On a station where literally anyone could be a shape shifting spy.

    It therefore comes as a great surprise to everyone when a Jem Hadar ship turns up and blows up the runabout. Fortunately, the federation seems to have an inexhaustible supply of runabouts, and the red-shirt crew required to pilot them.

    Even better, the Jem Hadar then beam down to the planet and start attacking the people on the ground. And once more, a bunch of people trained to Civil Defence level are able to hold their own against a platoon of skilled super soldiers who are stronger, faster, better shots and can turn invisible.

    But wait! For some reason, the Jem Hadar won't follow them onto the crashed ship. For Reasons. Oh, and one of the crew members - a nobody who's been having suspiciously large amounts of banter with O'Brien - has managed to get himself shot by the Jem Hadar's hugely overpowered weapons, but didn't die!

    We gots the making of a siege! With a bonus helping of a cliche dying-companion sub-plot.

    And so on the episode creaks and rumbles on, with yet more cliches a plenty, including one of the more pointless monologues yet seen in DS9 (as outlined by several other reviews above).

    Eventually, things come to a head, with the revelation that a dying changling was aboard the ship! Looks like those foreboding camera shots were there for a reason. And the Jem Hadar all decide to top themselves at the exact same time as the changling dies, despite the fact that THE ENTIRE REASON THEY DIDN'T INVADE THE SHIP WAS BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHERE IT WAS AND HAD NO WAY TO COMMUNICATE WITH IT.

    And then we get a monologue. Blah blah trust blah blah pointless blah blah. It's a speech which makes very little sense in the context of what actually happened during this episode. Especially since the main cause of all the deaths is the complete incompetence displayed by Sisco.

    After all, if he'd done the sensible thing and hauled the runabout to a safe spot where they could monitor the crashsite while waiting for the Defiant to turn up, no one would have died...

    I think the drama mostly works in this one (Sisko telling off Dax is a thing of beauty), but I agree that it's deeply contrived. One thing you don't mention is: why would the Federation consider mining a planet in the Gamma Quadrant, even one they wrongly think is a comfortable distance from Dominion patrols? It would require some sort of shipping schedule to be set up and are they really satisfied that it would be safe, given that this isn't an area heavily patrolled by Starfleet? Is this mineral so rare that they literally can't find it on their side of the galaxy?

    Yeah - I've just realised that this episode was set in the gamma quadrant. Which makes even less sense; trying to set up a supply line when you've got a single, easily disrupted route during an active war is an absolute recipe for disaster, as England found to it's cost during the two world wars, when German U-boats wreaked havoc across the Atlantic.

    Given how little priority Starfleet seems to give to reinforcing DS9 and the wormhole (as highlighted just a few episodes later on), it's doubly ridiculous...

    Admittedly it's not yet an active war, but the Dominion have made it clear that they need little excuse to attack Starfleet ships. So yeah.

    Well, the Dominion only attacks Federation ships. The could get contractors like the Ferengi to transport the stuff.
    And about the defenses. Isn't the station at this point not already the most fortified station in the Alpha Quadrant?! This all happened after the Klingon attack and we later see that they destroy more than 50? Dominion ships when the station is finally attacked. We also learn in Purgatory's shadow that the Federation had a plan to seal the wormhole in case of invasion.
    About the Jem Hadar killing themselves. it is shown that they can hear the founder die outside of the ship. They have really good hearing...

    "After all, if he'd done the sensible thing and hauled the runabout to a safe spot where they could monitor the crashsite while waiting for the Defiant to turn up, no one would have died... "
    That is not true. First where should they sent the runabaout to monitor the situation without being detected by the superior Dominion sensors and second the ground team would have still been attacked or do you mean hiding for a week somewhere and then getting the ship. Well then only the founder would have survived but the Dominion certainly would have destroyed the ship. The option Sisko choose is obviously superior. In the scenario you are proposing the Federation would have gained nothing and the Dominion would have gotten a founder back. In Sisko's option the Federation has lost a shuttle, two officers but gained invaluable insights into Dominion tech and a fully functional ship while the Dominion lost a squad of Jem Hadar and a founder. I'd call this a win for the feds.

    If you want to nitpick then at least get your facts straight, sir! :)

    Welp...

    I think I've got my facts pretty straight.

    This mysterious planet was over a week away from DS9 **on the other side of the wormhole**. It doesn't matter how well armed/armoured DS9 is when any armed response will take at least seven days to arrive! As was indeed demonstrated in this very episode.

    Equally, the question isn’t just about defending against incursion, but also about the ships travelling to and from it. Because DS9 is on the wrong side of the wormhole.

    Again, to use the WW2 example, this is akin to the situation in the Atlantic, where ships sailed from the USA to the UK carrying vital supplies, and were harried every step of the way by German U-boats. Which in turn meant that a lot of naval resources (ships, planes, etc) had to be allocated to protecting the convoys.

    To make matters worse in this context, there would be little or no defences of the mining facility - as Worf explicitly states at the beginning of the episode, the planet would be very difficult to defend due to its remote location. Because DS9 is on the wrong side of the wormhole.

    As such, the only way to sustain a mining operation would be to establish a permanent base in space (DS10?) and to have heavily armed escorts for every shipment travelling to and from the planet. That’s a huge amount of manpower and resources to tie up, especially when you consider that all the Federation could be bothered to give DS9 for defence was a single prototype warship which was initially more likely to blow itself up than the enemy.

    (and indeed, a few episodes later, it’s revealed that Star Fleet is stretched thin and has virtually no resources to assign to DS9 when the incursion finally happens.)

    Then too, it’s been made clear at this point that the Founders have hundreds of Jem Hadar ships, and are more than willing to sacrifice them to defeat an enemy. After all, they’re just a slave race and easily/quickly replacable.

    And at this point, the Founders have stated that they’re killing anyone they capture (e.g. as per the Cardassian/Romulan fleet. The fact that this may not be true isn’t revealed until several episodes later...

    I’d also note that the Dominion has been picking off all ships travelling to the gamma quadrant, as per the earlier mentions of how Bajoran colonies had been destroyed.

    And while DS9 theoretically could close the wormhole, that would trap anyone left on the other side, leaving them to the tender mercies of the aforementioned hundreds of Jem Hadar warships. Because DS9 is on the wrong side of the wormhole. As I may have mentioned a few times ;)

    Regarding the runabout: Star Trek has always had plenty of options for hiding - the magnetic pole of a planet is the one most favoured by Trek writers. They could also just retreat to maximum sensor distance and switch ship emissions to minimum, so they just look like a random asteroid. Or park in a cave on the planet. Or some other technobabble solution, of which Star Trek usually has plenty :)

    As regards the value of the ship: I’ll agree that was significant. On the other hand, Sisco’s resources for securing it consisted of a Runabout and around half a dozen officers armed with light weapons - and of his team, only Worf (and maybe O’Brien) had any significant military experience.

    Against that is the risk of one or more Jem Hadar ships turning up, each filled with the equivalent of a platoon of heavily armed special forces with superior combat technology and the ability to cloak. And at the point Sisco made his judgement call, he was not aware of the presence of the founder, so couldn’t consider the crashed ship to be a potentially defensible position - after all, the Jem Hadar could have just teleported into the ship, or even just beamed a load of gas or explosive devices into it.

    If it hadn’t been for the Founder’s presence, then the entire team would have been killed when the Jem Hadar arrived and Star Trek would have gained nothing, as the crashed ship would have been either destroyed or recovered. As it was, they lost a runabout and ten or so crew members, which in turn triggered the clumsy monologues about trust and “what they signed up for” yadda yadda.

    You can argue in the post-analysis that seizing the ship was a valid trade off. But that’s after the fact, and after the Founder “fluke” intervened to both save the few survivors and allow them to seize the ship.

    To be fair, I can believe that the Klingons or Romulans would be willing to take that kind of risk - after all, their cultures are far more military in nature and they’re much more comfortable with sacrificing the few for the many.

    But the Federation has never had that kind of mindset; instead they’ve always adopted the “bring everyone home” ethos as per the US army.

    (Personally, I would have stuffed a couple of Jem Hadar bodies into cold storage on the runabout and stripped a few computer banks from the ship before retiring to a safe distance and monitoring for any new arrivals, with strict instructions to jump into warp at the first sign of any ships. But hey: I’m not a Star Trek writer who wants to write a siege story…)

    You are backl Do you think your feeble arguments defeated me?!
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYPsoxpt0BU

    About your first four paragraphs
    As I pointed out the Federation is using contractors to trade with the Gamma Quadrant. They even traded with Dominion members like the Karemma.
    Why not get the Flubilunian Empire or whatever to mine and the Ferengi to transport it. Easy.
    Plus as somebody else mentioned they are not at war and the Dominion stated that they only attack ships that have entered their territory. It's is not at all like merry old England during WW2 for numerous reasons. (I hope I don't have to name them. It seems very obvious to me but I can if you want)

    "(and indeed, a few episodes later, it’s revealed that Star Fleet is stretched thin and has virtually no resources to assign to DS9 when the incursion finally happens.)"
    The Federation knew that it couldn't stop the Dominion, especially without the Romulans. "Giving up" the station while also mining the wormhole was a fairly smart choice. Plus they used the ships for destroying a big shipyard.
    To quote Clausewitz:"The defensive form of war is not a simple shield, but a shield made up of well-directed blows."

    "I’d also note that the Dominion has been picking off all ships travelling to the gamma quadrant, as per the earlier mentions of how Bajoran colonies had been destroyed."
    I think they specifically tell the bridge crew that they destroyed only stuff in their territory (like the Bajoran colonies).

    "Regarding the runabout: Star Trek has always had plenty of options for hiding." As I mentioned the Dominion has superior sensors so only hiding would have been risky but maybe possible but certainly not monitoring. The better option then would have been to just fly back.

    "only Worf (and maybe O’Brien) had any significant military experience."
    That is not true. Sisko and at least Dax have fought through numerous engagements. Dax probably more than anybody. We also don't know the capabilities of the other officers. I say bad reasoning and speculation, good sir. Speculation! *mustachioed British officer from the 19th century smiley"

    " And at the point Sisco made his judgement call, he was not aware of the presence of the founder, so couldn’t consider the crashed ship to be a potentially defensible position"
    And you did so well... (Picture me as the genius villain who gives his big speech). You argument is more shaky as you may realize, Mr. Mann. Yes Sisko didn't know that there was a founder on the ship BUT he did know that they were three weeks outside of Dominion space and if it was just one of the endless amounts of ships it would probably take quite a while maybe weeks until the Dominion notices and then sends a rescue ship. Sisko's decision makes perfect sense. Only because of the founder did the Dominion arrive so fast. Without it the Defiant would have arrived a week later, pulled the ship out and they all would have collected a ton of medals.

    "sacrificing the few for the many.But the Federation has never had that kind of mindset"
    Oh come on! :D
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa6c3OTr6yA

    "instead they’ve always adopted the “bring everyone home” ethos as per the US army." Did they ever state that??

    I think I have sufficiently deconstructed your argument. ;)



    PS: Here is also a video about how Mann treats his colleagues.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv8fPISqh_k

    Can we trust a men like this? I SAY NO!!! :(

    > Plus as somebody else mentioned they are not at war and the Dominion stated that they only attack ships that have entered their territory. It's is not at all like merry old England during WW2 for numerous reasons. (I hope I don't have to name them. It seems very obvious to me but I can if you want)

    Oh dear. I wasn't comparing the situation to WW2, but was instead using the "liberty ships vs u-boats" example to demonstrate the difficulties of having an extended supply chain across long distances across potential/actual hostile territory.

    It seemed very obvious to me, but I can explain further if you want ;)

    Beyond that: the Dominion and Federation aren't at war? This'll be the Dominion that has established a spy presence on Terra? The one that's been actively using subterfuge to try and get the Klingons and Federation to attack each other? And the ones, who (just a few episodes later) had prepared an attack on Bajor's sun which would destroy their entire civilisation? The Dominion which force breeds genetically altered shock-troopers addicted to a drug? The Dominion which had wiped out and destroyed all ships which they found on the other side of the wormhole without asking questions or attempting any form of negotiation? Including a Bajor colony!

    And let's not forget Bashir's harrowing experience on a planet the Dominion first nuked back to the stone age and then infected with a 100% infectious and 100% fatal disease.

    It was pretty clear at this point in the story that the Dominion was not looking for co-existence, was not interested in any form of negotiation and was actively looking to destroy the Federation and Klingon empires. And meanwhile on the Federation side, they'd already significantly upgraded DS9's offensive and defensive capabilities in preparation for a Dominion invasion.

    There may not have been much active fighting, but it was definitely a full blown cold war, complete with a lot of black operations, many of which would have resulted in the deaths of billions if successful.

    Though as we find out later, the Federation had a few dirty tricks of it's own tucked into the uniform...

    > The Federation knew that it couldn't stop the Dominion, especially without the Romulans. "Giving up" the station while also mining the wormhole was a fairly smart choice. Plus they used the ships for destroying a big shipyard.
    Laying a minefield? Sounds like something you'd do in a time of war!

    (Plus, all that happened several episodes /and/ one Cardassian betrayal later. Again, Sisco couldn't use this kind of future knowledge, even if he was the Emissary ;) )

    > To quote Clausewitz:"The defensive form of war is not a simple shield, but a shield made up of well-directed blows."

    Ooo, classical quotes time! Here's one from good ol' Sun Tzu:

    "On open ground, I would keep a vigilant eye on my defenses. On ground of intersecting highways, I would consolidate my alliances"

    I'm pretty sure being a week away from any support would class as open ground, and hence require a very vigilant eye on your defences. Such as, you know, setting up a convoy system for any ships travelling to the planet and back.

    And I'm equally sure that the wormhole would count as an "intersecting highway", so Sisco should have been concentrating on his alliances with Bajor, the Cardassians and even the Klingons and Romulans, rather than spending several weeks poking at rocks on a remote planet which the Federation could never hope to support in the event of a full scale war breaking out.

    Gotta quote 'em all, baby!

    > I mentioned the Dominion has superior sensors so only hiding would have been risky but maybe possible but certainly not monitoring. The better option then would have been to just fly back

    For better or worse, Star Trek has always preferred dramatic set-pieces over technical consistency: one week's technobabble is generally (and conveniently) forgotten by the very next episode. For instance, no-one seems to remember the Ferengi metaphasic shield from TNG, despite the fact that this could handle a far heavier energy load than a normal shield.

    Certainly, it would have been sensible to prepare for the potential arrival of the Jem Hadar as best as possible - and to put as much resource as possible into studying the ship - rather than sending most of the crew off to dig graves.

    > That is not true. Sisko and at least Dax have fought through numerous engagements. Dax probably more than anybody. We also don't know the capabilities of the other officers. I say bad reasoning and speculation, good sir.

    I'll grant Dax to a degree. But whichever way you cut it, a small group of lightly armed non-soldiers is never going to fare well against a much larger group of heavily armed, better armoured shock troopers, especially when the latter also happen to be faster, stronger, significantly more motivated and willing to die for their cause. And that's before you throw in things like teleportation and personal cloaking devices.

    > Yes Sisko didn't know that there was a founder on the ship BUT he did know that they were three weeks outside of Dominion space and if it was just one of the endless amounts of ships it would probably take quite a while maybe weeks until the Dominion notices and then sends a rescue ship.

    You were kinda doing well there.

    First, it's mentioned fairly early on that this isn't a standard Jem Hadar ship, which in turn would imply that it could be more important than usual.

    Then too, if the nearest *known* Dominion outpost is three weeks away, then why was this ship nearby? This suggests that there may be a Dominion base or other assets nearby, or that it could even be some sort of transit route between points of the Dominion. As such, what are the odds that there are other Dominion ships which are less than three weeks travel away?

    Also, just what does "three weeks" mean? Is that three weeks at standard cruising speed? Does the Dominion use the same cruising speed? Given that warp speeds are exponential and the Dominion has superior technology (and less regard for the safety of the crew - i.e. they're prepared to run their systems hotter and have fewer safety/backup systems, so have ships which are both lighter and more power efficient), how quickly could they really travel to this planet if this ship is important to them for some reason?

    All things considered, there were four main scenarios:

    1) They'd be able to use the runabout and/or the ship's own engines to escape the gravity well and head back to the wormhole. Elapsed time: minimum one week (depending on what speed they can maintain while towing/nursing a damaged ship's engines)
    2) They'd have to wait for the Defiant to arrive, and then to tow the ship back to the wormhole. Elapsed time: minimum two weeks (again, depending on what speed they can maintain while towing)
    3) A Dominion ship could turn up at any time and simply destroy the ship to protect it's secrets *at any time*
    4) A Dominion ship could turn up at any time and drop a platoon of the aforementioned heavily armed shock troopers *at any time*

    Scenarios 3) and 4) would mean the death of everyone on the planet. Scenarios 1) and 2) rely on the hope that there are no nearby Jem Hadar ships.

    So yeah, the best bet would have been the option I suggested: get as much material onboard the runabout as quickly as possible, and hightail it out of there, while the Defiant trundles over to the planet. If the ship is still intact and there's no Jem Hadar around when it arrives, then it's cocktails all around. If not, then at least you've gotten something useful out of it and there's little risk of the entire team being wiped out.

    (And to be honest, I'd question the validity of options 1) and 2), given that even if there weren't any changling spies on DS9, the Dominion would certainly notice the Defiant heading into the gamma quadrant, and would be more than willing to ambush and destroy it. And for all (to quote the Rikers) it's a tough little ship, it didn't exactly fare that well when set upon by hordes of Jem Hadar ships at the start of Season 3, and I doubt it's been upgraded enough to do significantly better.

    Then too, it presumably wouldn't be able to cloak if towing the other ship. And even if the other ship could move under it's own power, it wouldn't be able to cloak and would be a sitting duck for any Jem Hadar warships. So the Defiant would have to decloak to defend it in the event of an attack.

    So whichever way you cut it, Sisco and co would have to spend at least a week sailing through territory monitored by the Dominion, in an uncloaked ship.

    Thankfully for Sisco, the writers handwaved that little issue away...)

    > sacrificing the few for the many.But the Federation has never had that kind of mindset
    > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa6c3OTr6yA
    Conflating the choice of an individual with the ethos of an organisation is pretty weak sauce, old chap.

    To be fair, the Federation does occasionally ask individuals to risk their lives. Such as when Picard asked a Bajorian midshipman to act as a prisoner for a Cardassian agent (even if this was arguably highly out of character), or when Troi realised that the only way to "win" her command simulation was to order Geordi to his death. But these are at least nominally extreme situations; in general, Star Fleet doesn't send it's members into high risk situations - and spends lots of time agonising over their deaths when something happens, as demonstrated in this episode.

    You can perhaps argue that the crew had already volunteered for a high risk mission, given that they were in the Gamma quadrant in an essentially unprotected ship, but then we get back to just how ridiculous this entire scenario is...

    > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv8fPISqh_k
    What can I say? Except...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-WN_AxH3Ik

    You know I thought that you would run for the hills and lick your very significant wounds but apparently this will be another page of 50 shades of grey. LET THE SPANKING BEGIN!

    "but was instead using the "liberty ships vs u-boats" example to demonstrate the difficulties of having an extended supply chain across long distances across potential/actual hostile territory."
    Still the example is at best an apples and oranges scenario considering that England (and the rest) would have just starved to death because the Islands were the center of the British Empire. Here we are talking about one resource and the Dominion doesn't have cloaks so the u-boat comparison is also off. But I get your general point. Convoys in potentially hostile territory are dangerous.

    "This'll be the Dominion that has established a spy presence on Terra? The one that's been actively using subterfuge to try and get the Klingons and Federation to attack each other?"
    You do realize that the USA does all that towards their allies, the Europeans. It is kind of a joke in Europe. For example the US embassy in Berlin has huge spy stuff on it's roof. It is less than 500m away from the chancellery and the parliament. The US also tries for more than 20 years now to pit the eastern European countries against the western European ones with the aim of dividing an potential global rival. So doing this kind of stuff is certainly not a sign of an war even a cold one but actually nothing unusual even towards allies. Sure the US doesn't want a war between Germany and Poland... I hope. :D

    "And the ones, who (just a few episodes later) had prepared an attack on Bajor's sun which would destroy their entire civilisation? The Dominion which force breeds genetically altered shock-troopers addicted to a drug?"
    Oh I don't even want to speculate what horrible potential plans China and the USA have in case war.
    And about the drug thing. You do realize that you basically cannot be an US air force pilot on an aircraft carrier if you refuse to take drugs. *cough* Dexedrine *cough* So using drugs for military benefit is nothing unusual, in many militaries today it is the norm. Sure the US isn't breeding soldiers or so they say... :)

    " The Dominion which had wiped out and destroyed all ships which they found on the other side of the wormhole without asking questions or attempting any form of negotiation? "
    To quote the US President: What do you think? Our country is so innocent? :D
    Man, this guy has given the world quotes for eternity.

    "Though as we find out later, the Federation had a few dirty tricks of it's own tucked into the uniform..."
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87ejOe6MJnQ

    "Laying a minefield? Sounds like something you'd do in a time of war!"
    You can mine your own territory as much as you want. There are numerous states who use minefields who are not planing to go to war or are at war.

    "Gotta quote 'em all, baby!"
    NO! You still ignored my contractor argument. Again if I might add...

    "For better or worse, Star Trek has always preferred dramatic set-pieces over technical consistency: one week's technobabble is generally (and conveniently) forgotten by the very next episode"
    Ok, that is a forbidden argument because if we accept that then reality in this forum breaks down. And if reality this reality breaks down then I would have to accept the fact that I already wasted 40 minutes answering questions about something that has no meaning which would not reflect well on the fact that all our lives will end at some point.

    "I'll grant Dax to a degree"
    You can grant Day full stop. :D

    "Certainly, it would have been sensible to prepare for the potential arrival of the Jem Hadar as best as possible - and to put as much resource as possible into studying the ship"
    That is what they did until the other ship arrived.

    "First, it's mentioned fairly early on that this isn't a standard Jem Hadar ship, which in turn would imply that it could be more important than usual."
    would imply that it could... be many things. What it means is that it is not a standard attack ship.

    " This suggests that there may be a Dominion base or other assets nearby, or that it could even be some sort of transit route between points of the Dominion. As such, what are the odds that there are other Dominion ships which are less than three weeks travel away?"
    No it doesn't. It could be an exploration vessel, a diplomatic vessel. A million things but vessel weeks away from the next outpost doesn't mean outpost nearby. The next Federation outpost was a week away. How long did Sisko have to wait for a pick up again? They only know that they are 3 weeks away from the nearest Dominion outpost. So hoping that the Dominion will need quite a bit of time is not unreasonable and considering the gains the logical choice.

    "the Dominion has superior technology"
    The Dominion ships can still not fly faster than warp 9.9. and logic dictates that three weeks away means at maximum speed because if it doesn't than why use a measurement of time not distance. In universe the writers wanted to indicate: "A ship would need three weeks from the nearest Dominion outpost."

    "how quickly could they really travel to this planet if this ship is important to them for some reason?"
    Again, they only appear so quickly because it is important but it could have just been some random troop transporter.

    " If not, then at least you've gotten something useful out of it and there's little risk of the entire team being wiped out."
    I thought that the shuttle gets destroyed shortly after they arrive at the ship.

    "the Dominion would certainly notice the Defiant heading into the gamma quadrant, and would be more than willing to ambush and destroy it."
    Yes but the Defiant is a week away. Dominion three weeks. Plus they only know that the Defiant is heading for the Gamma Quadrant not where they are going. Plus the Defiant has cloak.

    "So whichever way you cut it, Sisco and co would have to spend at least a week sailing through territory monitored by the Dominion, in an uncloaked ship."
    It is save to assume that only a very small part is monitored. I think they also mention that the Dominion didn't get near the wormhole for quite some time.

    "Conflating the choice of an individual with the ethos of an organisation is pretty weak sauce, old chap."
    Utilitarianism is often used in Star Trek. The needs of the many and so on.

    "Star Fleet doesn't send it's members into high risk situations"
    Are you sure?? :D
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbOcmKCE2J8

    "You can perhaps argue that the crew had already volunteered for a high risk mission, given that they were in the Gamma quadrant in an essentially unprotected ship, but then we get back to just how ridiculous this entire scenario is..."
    There are many mission in Star Trek that turn out high risk even though at first they seemed fairly low risk.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-WN_AxH3Ik
    good one. :D

    OMG an hour. I actually have stuff to do.
    This has been fun. :)

    > NO! You still ignored my contractor argument. Again if I might add...
    Contractors? I saw your comment but figured I'd typed enough for one night…

    It's certainly a possible solution, though Worf's comments strongly suggested that this would be a purely Federation endeavour.

    Anyhow, let's go wibbly wobbly timey wimey back to the cold war, and look at trade between the USA and USSR. There was always some degree of trade between the two, both legitimate (Vodka, oil) and black market (Levi jeans, cigarettes, etc). But anything with military applications (e.g. technology, uranium) was strictly verboten and both sides came down hard on anyone they caught.

    It's fairly safe to assume that whatever unobtanium Star Fleet was looking for was for military use. And this is the Dominion we're talking about: if you're caught doing something they don't like, the default response is to kill you, find and kill your family and then track down your home planet to drop a dinosaur killer on it and release a tailored virus to torture the survivors for generations to come. As a warning to others, because they're nice like that.

    Is there really going to be anyone willing to challenge the Dominion that way? It's unlikely that anyone from the Gamma quadrant would take the risk, and anyone from the Alpha quadrant would have to weigh up the risks of being destroyed or (at best) trapped in the Gamma quadrant if the war kicks off and/or the wormhole is destroyed.

    > You do realize that the USA does all that towards their allies, the Europeans. It is kind of a joke in Europe. For example the US embassy in Berlin has huge spy stuff on it's roof

    It’s all part of the Great Game (which nearly destroyed Europe when it helped to trigger WW1, but I digress). And I had much fun wandering around Teufelsberg last year, and hearing the reason why Berlin had a ferris wheel for so long ;)

    But this is where Star Trek takes the “political dominance” struggle of the Cold War and amps it up. The Dominion isn’t interested in any form of co-existence: you toe their party line or they destroy you. As highlighted a few episodes earlier on with the plot to have the Klingons and Federation destroy each other, and as again highlighted just a few episodes later with the attempted sun-buster trick.

    The closest analogy is perhaps the very loosely proxied Korean and Vietnam wars, but with one side actively prepared to use nukes. Which thankfully, the USA and USSR always pulled back from.

    > You can mine your own territory as much as you want. There are numerous states who use minefields who are not planing to go to war or are at war.

    I’m struggling to think of any scenarios where you’d use a landmine without wanting to go to war or prevent an invasion (which arguably is also a war, albeit more one-sided). After all, a mine has one single purpose: it kills. And before you bring up the DMZ between North and South Korea, that definitely falls into the latter category: they’re still technically at war and NK often fires shells over the border and has attempted invasion several times. I’ve wandered through the tunnels they were going to use to bring their troops and tanks through!

    (there’s also the horror of the mines left over in places like DRC and Vietnam; it’s more than a bit of a shame that the Korean DMZ is the main reason the USA refuses to condemn and ban them…)

    > And about the drug thing. You do realize that you basically cannot be an US air force pilot on an aircraft carrier if you refuse to take drugs. *cough* Dexedrine *cough*

    There’s a bit of a difference between soldiers taking amphetamines, and force-bred, pre-programmed shock troopers who die if their magic chems are withdrawn. Hopefully, we’ll never go any further towards the latter in the real world!

    > They only know that they are 3 weeks away from the nearest Dominion outpost

    No, they know that they’re 3 weeks away from the nearest *known* Dominion outpost. And TBH, the more I think about that, the less sense it makes. How can they be a week away from the wormhole /and/ three weeks away from the Dominion? I don’t think we ever get a clear statement as to how far the Dominion is away from the wormhole, but this suggests two main possibilities:
    1) The planet is in the opposite direction to the Dominion (i.e. the Dominion is two weeks away from the wormhole)
    2) The planet is en route to the Dominion (i.e the Dominion is four weeks away from the wormhole)

    1) seems more likely, but that’d mean it’d be even easier for the Dominion to intercept any traffic, as they could just amble over whenever they receive notification that the wormhole has opened, and arrive at the wormhole just in time for the Federation ships to return from their two-week round trip, all slow, laden with heavy ores and easy targets.

    > "Certainly, it would have been sensible to prepare for the potential arrival of the Jem Hadar as best as possible - and to put as much resource as possible into studying the ship"
    > That is what they did until the other ship arrived.

    No, they faffed around burying the bodies - something which is not part of Jem Hadar culture and (from a military point of view) a huge waste of potential research material. I’d hope they at least stored some samples on the runabo… oh wait, it was destroyed ;)

    > would imply that it could... be many things. What it means is that it is not a standard attack ship.
    Suffice to say that if something is different, then it’s potentially more valuable to it’s owners. Or it could just be a garbage scow. Either way, the sensible risk assessment would be to assume that it’s more valuable, and that the owners are more likely to want it back.

    (Fundamentally, the whole idea of the dominion letting the Federation take the ship is a bit ridiculous - from the Enigma machine to the A-bomb and the space race, in an era of industrial (cold) war, having a technological edge and/or limiting enemy knowledge of your capabilities is absolutely key)

    > The Dominion ships can still not fly faster than warp 9.9. and logic dictates that three weeks away means at maximum speed because if it doesn't than why use a measurement of time not distance. In universe the writers wanted to indicate: "A ship would need three weeks from the nearest Dominion outpost."

    Like I said above, the more I think about the “three weeks” thing, the less sense it makes - and not just geographically. Over on Memory Alpha, it suggests that standard Jem Hadar ships cruise at warp 7 - or approx. 656c, according to the Oukda warp scale. Runabouts travel at warp 5, or 213c. And the Enterprise and Discovery top out at warp 9.975, or approx. 2100c.

    (Then too, it’s pretty canon that ships can’t travel at maximum warp for extended periods, due to the stress it places on the ship’s systems…)

    So, which are we talking about?

    Warp 5? That 3 week journey would only take a Jem Hadar ship 1 week, or just over half a day for the Enterprise
    Warp 7? That 3 week journey would only take the Enterprise 1 week, or about ten weeks for the runabout
    Warp 9.975? That 3 week journey would take a Jem Hadar ship about ten weeks - or /thirty/ weeks for a runabout


    The most likely - and sensible - explanation that it was based on warp 7. But that then means a high-warp capable ship would be able to arrive in a matter of hours.

    Worse, the week it’d take for the runabout to return to the wormhole at warp 5 can be done in about 2 days at warp 7, or just a few hours at warp 9.975. And why would the Defiant also take a week to get to the planet? Surely they won’t just amble over at warp 5?

    To be fair, in the end it’s just a stupid throwaway line which is meant to help justify Sisco’s decision. It’s just /incredibly/ stupid, given the exponential nature of warp speed.

    > Again, they only appear so quickly because it is important but it could have just been some random troop transporter.
    A cursory inspection of the ship would indicate this, and if it was just a troop transporter, the benefits of salvaging it would be reduced. And this should also be factored in the risk assessment.

    > " If not, then at least you've gotten something useful out of it and there's little risk of the entire team being wiped out."
    > I thought that the shuttle gets destroyed shortly after they arrive at the ship.
    No, it gets destroyed after the team had time to inform DS9 of what was going on and request the Defiant after their attempts to tow the ship with the runabout’s tractor beam failed. They also had time to recover and bury all the bodies they’d found. Faff, faff, faff...

    > Yes but the Defiant is a week away. Dominion three weeks. Plus they only know that the Defiant is heading for the Gamma Quadrant not where they are going. Plus the Defiant has cloak.

    As per above, the timings are all whacky, unless all ships travel at the same speed all the time. And the Defiant may be able to cloak on the way there, but I’m fairly sure there’s no technobabble to allow them to cloak while towing a ship. And if the ship was able to move under its own power, it would be uncloaked/detectable, and the Defiant would have to decloak to defend it.

    > It is save to assume that only a very small part is monitored. I think they also mention that the Dominion didn't get near the wormhole for quite some time.

    It’s equally safe to assume that in a “cold war” scenario, the Dominion would be very closely monitoring all traffic around the wormhole - especially if (as you suggested) they have superior sensor technology which lets them monitor from beyond the range of Federation sensors.

    Equally, given that individual Jem Hadar soldiers can cloak, it’s pretty safe to assume that the Dominion have the ability to cloak ships and satellites - they just choose not to, though it’s debatable whether this is because Jem Hadar ships are mass produced on the cheap, or if it’s a deliberate statement of strength. Certainly, they’d already developed cloaking countermeasures before the Defiant first poked its nose into the wormhole.

    And as we find out just a few episodes later, the Dominion has a POW camp close to the wormhole, and has a large fleet of Jem Hadar ships hiding in a plasma cloud, also very close to the wormhole.

    But it’s fine - after all, everyone knows the nearest outpost is three weeks away from the planet in this episode, which itself is just a week away from the wormhole!

    What’s that? Is it the sound of dramatic convenience whooshing past? ;)

    > "You can perhaps argue that the crew had already volunteered for a high risk mission, given that they were in the Gamma quadrant in an essentially unprotected ship, but then we get back to just how ridiculous this entire scenario is..."
    There are many mission in Star Trek that turn out high risk even though at first they seemed fairly low risk.

    To be honest, it’s amazing how many things go wrong in Star Trek - from teleporters to warp engines, holosuites and beyond. It’s almost as everything happens for dramatic purposes… ;)

    Any which way, sending a lightly armed ship only capable of warp 5 into a region where it may encounter heavily armed ships capable of warp 7 seems a tad… stupid. Putting half the command crew of DS9 onto said ship is doubly stupid!

    Almost as if there wasn't any attempt at a risk assessment...

    > OMG an hour. I actually have stuff to do.
    This has been fun. :)

    It is mildly worrying, how easy it is to get sucked into writing about this stuff ;)

    Yikes, I sort of helped trigger this exchange and now I can't bring myself to do more than skim it. It sure would have helped if the writers had supplied a better reason for Sisko to be on a runabout deep in the Gamma Quadrant than that he's leading a quantity surveying mission, right?

    To be fair, I was fairly bored, too ;)

    Still, tis probably time to draw a line under this overly obsessive analysis!

    Yeah, I have a few rough days (actually weeks) behind me and still a few in front of me so this was a welcome diversion.

    Live long and prosper!

    @Jamie Mann
    "It is mildly worrying, how easy it is to get sucked into writing about this stuff ;) "

    Neah, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

    The problem begins when the person cares more about alleviating his boredom then about making sense or having an honest discussion. When things reach *that* level, I begin to worry.

    @OmicronThetaDeltaPhi

    That's fair - I hope I'm managing a balance between being a Grumpy Old Git and providing reasoned explanations for my opinions!

    I did not buy the Muinz subplot. Colm Meany is an outstanding actor but even he can't make lame "shop talk" convincing or that entertaining. When Muinz finally succumbs to his extremely physically and psychologically agonizing wounds, I thought Meany did a fine hit of acting. However, Dax immediately bursting into tears, mascera running wild seemed like way too strong a reaction for a basically redshirt character. Overall, this episode gets 3.5/5 from me.

    I don't understand why the founder didn't attack them from the start? One founder is more than enough to take them out, as they've shown every time we see them infiltrate a federation location and pose as someone- and they didn't know the founder was there so he could have posed as any of them when they went off to search the ship. Weird episode, but good acting and character interactions. Worf also seemed a bit out of character.

    I've got to assume the changeling is injured or somehow incapacitated. It had ample opportunities to leave on its own if it wanted to.

    I didn't think Dax could get more worthless, but I was wrong. Making sexist jokes over a dying man in a battle situation just shows what a shallow and meaningless character she is. I kept thinking, gee I bet O'Brien wishes there was a science officer to help him save the day. And there was - Dax - sadly getting by on her conventional, pedestrian physical attractiveness, as usual. Really a waste of a uniform. And Farrell has very limited range as an actress. I can appreciate Brooks' portrayal of Sisko, because I know military men who act and speak just like him. I think he lends realism to the show. He's not Picard and he's not trying to be. Farrell, on the other hand, doesn't seem to act as much as pose and flirt, like a dopey teenager. Only Tom Paris could ruin a show more than Jadzia.

    I thought the script was a poor effort, but contrary to popular opinion, I thought the Vorta was meant to be super annoying and she accomplished that.

    It seemed outright stupid not to take the Defiant in the first place. And as for Bashir... uh, whatever. An away mission with heavy casualties is enough for him to override any order and go with the rescue team. (I guess they are still pretending Kira joined Starfleet.)

    Ira Behr did the introduction to a DS9 Technical Manual book in the 1990s, and in it gave his one line summary of the show: "technology changes, but humans won't". I always considered this a glib, dishonest and reactionary answer. And it's an answer DS9 can only sell by withholding information, rigging its little dramatic dilemmas, and turning a blind eye to very specific things.

    And so in this episode, you have Sisko and a Founder fighting over a crashed Dominion ship. They fight, people die, and we get a sentimental coda which espouses a message typical of war films: war is bad, sad, but ultimately unavoidable because of human predilections, whilst footsoldiers themselves must sadly die for commanders, who take on the White Man's Buden to make tough choices so others don't have it. War? *sigh* Whatcha going to do?

    To justify this kind of philosophical shrug, you have to basically renounce science, rationalism, and any kind of forensic look at the Dominion/Federation war. You have to ignore the Federation working with the Cardassians and Romulans to genocide the Founder homeworld. You have to ignore Sisko constantly sending cloaked warships and runabouts into or near Dominion space. You have to ignore, in this episode, him appealing to 17th century human salvage rights to justify stealing another Empire's crashed ship.

    The Dominion are brutal tyrants. In this episode they fire at and destroy a runabout without provocation. Sisko is right not to lay down arms and trust them in this episode. But the Dominion are also "right" in their madness; the Federation and its "allies" have tried to wipe them out. Have been encroaching on their space. Given this, and given their past history with solids, declaring Federation travel through the wormhole off limits, and sending Changeling spies to spy on and meddle with the Federation, and then escalating into outright war, makes some kind of sense.

    What makes no sense is the Federation, a body with centuries of experience, and countless military, ambassadorial, scientific, psychological and sociological experts, nonchalantly dancing about the Dominion like 20th century Imperial strongmen.

    In its drive to make war seem inevitable, discussion naive, diplomacy a dead end and compromise and coexistance a pipe-dream, DS9 has to make the Federation look stupid, incompetent and callous. And because the Federation represents us in contemporary times, this necessarily means we the viewers are also stupid. It makes our political/philosophical approach to war stupid. But DS9 is not critqing human stupidity. It is not wagging a finger at us or contemporary society. No, DS9 is praising this stupidity and couching it in "tough choices" and "pragmatism".

    And because DS9 never properly critiques the Federation, never accuses it of failing to explore other options or tactics, never even shows these options being explored, and instead tricks you into accepting conflict as an inevitable consequence of choices the Federation and Dominion had no choice but to make, it makes its audience complicit in the stupidity.

    From season 4 onwards, it becomes increasingly harder to watch the Dominion/Federation arc. It's like watching two dopey cultures interact. Not once is the Federation meaningfully critiqued. Not once are Sisko's dubious choices countered, challenged or seen to have ramifications. In its headlong rush to have big CGI armadas trading blows, everyone has to act as stupidly as possible.

    Ira Behr is not wrong in wanting a pessimistic show. But that pessimism is rarely earned and is often got to by cheating and cutting corners. Behr is also not wrong to deem relations with the Dominion to be futile. But try anyway, show why it's futile. Just one or two episodes. And at the very least, if you're hellbent on portraying things as inherently futile, then make the logical leap to the next step: meaningfully prepare for war early. Secure the wormhole, rig it sooner with mines, park a Fed fleet over Bajor and maybe even send lots of covert Fed teams to try and emancipate conquered Dominion races. Why does a Federation that has access to Genesis devices, and that repeatedly thwarted the Borg, struggle to lock down a single wormhole?

    Anyway, this episode contains two good scenes, both which involve Sisko angry, sweaty and barking orders. The episode's core idea - the Alamo in miniature - is good, but the script is slack, lacks tension or conflict, and the relationship between the Vorta and Sisko rather dull. Worf and Dax also act woefully out of character in this episode, and I don't buy them falling apart so easily. Worf's hounding of OBrian is particularly ridiculous.

    @ Trent,

    Since you already granting that diplomacy with the Dominion is futile, the only other side that remains that you mentioned is to show the Federation trying it anyhow. I guess I wouldn't have minded that, but personally showing airtime of futile negotiations with essentially Hitler would cast the Federation perpetually in the role of Chamberlain, which is not flattering. And I do disagree with this statement:

    "You have to ignore the Federation working with the Cardassians and Romulans to genocide the Founder homeworld. You have to ignore Sisko constantly sending cloaked warships and runabouts into or near Dominion space. You have to ignore, in this episode, him appealing to 17th century human salvage rights to justify stealing another Empire's crashed ship."

    I don't think any of these things require ignoring. I blatantly disagree with those who call the Federation complicit in Tain's attack on the Founders. The Federation is not a Dominion ally and has *no* right or reason to intercede on their behalf when being attacked by a foreign power. It is not even a moral imperative to do something, let alone a legally mandated action. Now maybe the issue of genocide itself opens up issues, but I'm not even sure Sisko had any idea the fleet was going in to do anything other than attack. The only time I think we hear it's about wiping out the Founders was Tain saying it to Garak. I guess I could be remembering that wrong.

    Other than that, all of these "incursions" into Dominion space by Sisko, the Federation, Vulcans, Bajorans, etc, were labeled *by the Dominion* as aggressions, but the show is very clear that they are nothing of the sort. The Dominion essentially claimed to have annexed the entire Gamma Quadrant, which if you realize the scale of that is utterly preposterous. And they clearly only did so because of the wormhole, making their claim mealy mouthed and dishonest. Basically their view really is that they own anything they say they own. But that's not how territory rights and borders work, which in real life must be negotiated (or won at the point of a gun). You only 'own everything' if no one can stop you, which is what the Dominion assumes by default. But their idiotic claim doesn't make the desire to explore vast space an "incursion" that by any reasonable definition shows the Federation as aggressive. The only outright aggressive action the Federation really took until later seasons was sending the Odyssey, and even they it was only for a rescue mission (to save a Starfleet Commander) and not to attack.

    From that standpoint the series in no way IMO shows reciprocal provocation from both sides. There is essentially no provocation from the side of the Federation, which I think almost goes far enough by itself to count as their diplomatic effort. I might have also liked the odd episode of attempted peace-making, but we do get one conversation pre-minefield between Sisko and Weyoun that sums up nicely what all other diplomacy would have been like. This is not a Versailles/Germany situation where one side goes on the warpath but where you pushed them there. This is the real Federation as we know it, confronted with a bully. Probably not much different than early dealings with the Klingons.

    Peter said: "I guess I wouldn't have minded that, but personally showing airtime of futile negotiations with essentially Hitler would cast the Federation perpetually in the role of Chamberlain, which is not flattering."

    But the lesson of WW2 is not "Be more like Churchill and less like Chamberlain". It's that Churchillian thinking throughout the 1800s led to two World Wars. To solve the problems caused by Churchillian thinking, everyone then doubled down on Churchillian thinking, leading to an even worse quagmire and even more deaths. Similar logic would stretch the wars in Indochina and on terrorism.

    If DS9's Dominion serves as a stand in for 20th century Axis powers (Japan/Italy/Germany etc), what exactly is the lesson to be had here? That they can only be stopped with equal and opposite military might? But how did the Allies acquire this military might? By the very same exploitation and Imperialism that fomented the hyper-Imperialism of their enemies.

    DS9 had three options when transposing a WW2 allegory to space. One that whitewashes the historical realities and complexities of the period to give a consoling cartoon (Good Allies vs Bad Axis, which DS9 does), one that critiques the Federation - and by extension contemporary audiences - by showing the Federation making mistakes which trigger or make the war worse, or one which goes to lengths to show Why and How the Federation is not like Us, even when forced into a war.

    For the latter two, all the show needed was a few episodes which took the time to show the Federation making smart attempts to avoid war, negotiate, and learn about the Dominion, or a few episodes that make it clear that Federation actions are stoking Dominion hate and paranoia, before relationships break down.

    Peter said: "I blatantly disagree with those who call the Federation complicit in Tain's attack on the Founders."

    The Federation proved the Dominion right. They provide intel to Romulans, who they have a treaty with, who then use this intel to attack the Founder homeworld, whilst the Federation admiral, who hopes the attack succeeds, orders Sisko to not pursue the Romulan fleet.

    Imagine the same situation in TNG. The Federation discover the Klingons, a hyper militaristic race. The Galaxy class ship the Federation send into Klingon space gets shot down. The Klingons say don't go there again. The Federation go there again repeatedly. The Federation give their intel on the Klingon homeworld to the Romulans and the Cardassians. Picard learns that the Romulans and Cardassians are gonna attack the planet. Picard, realizing that this is wrong, informs the Klingons, or urges the attackers not to do it, or tells Starfleet about it. At the very least, Picard doesn't act surprised when the Klingons then decide the Federation are an enemy.

    Peter said: "The Federation is not a Dominion ally and has *no* right or reason to intercede on their behalf when being attacked by a foreign power."

    Imagine the CIA learning that rogue intelligence committees in France and Germany, using CIA data, are planning to detonate an atomic bomb in Moscow with enough power to wipe out the entire nation. America isn't at war with Moscow, and Russia has not attacked France or Germany and has not declared war on them. What's the moral thing to do? According to DS9, it's sit back and hope Moscow burns.

    The Federation have hundreds of years worth of data on wars, fascists and militarism. They know the Founders are racist, paranoid a-holes. They should be aggressively doing four things from season 3 onwards: teching up at the wormhole, arming themselves to the teeth, avoiding the gamma quadrant like a plague, bending over backwards to be friendly with the Founders, making all kinds of concessions, and working double-time on a defense alliance with the Cardassians. The Federation should be pursuing Cold War tactics (contain, out-spend, out-build, and dont engage), not their wackily cavalier attitude.

    Peter said: "Other than that, all of these "incursions" into Dominion space by Sisko, the Federation, Vulcans, Bajorans, etc, were labeled *by the Dominion* as aggressions, but the show is very clear that they are nothing of the sort. The Dominion essentially claimed to have annexed the entire Gamma Quadrant, which if you realize the scale of that is utterly preposterous."

    The Federation honors similar claims by the Klingons and Romulans, and the Dominion is roughly the same size as the Romulan Empire, which the Federation gives a similar wide berth. The Federation has plenty of other space to go exploring. When a giant Space Empire tells you to stay away, you stay away until you're fleet, intel and defenses are ready to back up your incursions.

    Ignoring all these details, turns the show into what exactly? A condemnation of Baddies who go out looking for Space Lebensraum? DS9 want's its contemporary western audience to denounce land grabs? But a western audience brought up on Manifest Destiny and Good War mythology watches DS9 and doesn't get a lesson in the dangers of colonialism, it gets a lesson in the evils of colonialists who don't look like us. It's wrong when the Other does it. Not us.


    Peter said: "But that's not how territory rights and borders work, which in real life must be negotiated (or won at the point of a gun). You only 'own everything' if no one can stop you."

    In a way, this goes to show how twisted DS9 can be. Star Trek, a utopian show about a Federation that evolved beyond contemporary property rights and norms (you'd think they'd be all about sharing and relinquishing material and territorial possessions), devolves into a pissing match between an alien's property claims and the Federation's desire to have more stuff?

    Yes, property rights are arbitrary and largely enforced by force. Knowing this, the Federation should back off until armed to the teeth. They are only at the wormhole to protect Bajor. By stoking the Dominion, they're risking the Dominion retaliating, traveling through the wormhole and attacking the first Federation protectorate they can find. The Federation are jeopardizing their chief reason for being by the wormhole.

    Peter said: "From that standpoint the series in no way IMO shows reciprocal provocation from both sides."

    You don't get to define what constitutes provocation, though. This is an alien race, with alien baggage, alien laws, alien mores, alien feelings, alien history, and an alien fear of being eradicated by alien solids. Your Federation laws, mores and opinions are irrelevant. If they tell you you're being provocative, you're being provocative. You're then faced with a choice: is exploring the Gamma Quadrant worth triggering a war, either earlier than would have been triggered, or at all.

    Peter said: "This is the real Federation as we know it, confronted with a bully."

    The Federation should be expert at dealing with bullies by now. They've seen how this kind of stuff played out with the Romulans and Klingons. They should have whole rooms full of supercomputers dishing out gigabytes worth of smarter tactics. There should be hundreds of undercover anthropologists dressed up as Vorta, JemHadar and Changelings all over the Dominion finding stuff out. Starfleet should have that wormhole decked out like a Christmas tree full of quantum torpedoes. Empok Nor should have been dragged to the wormhole and armed to the teeth. There should be a team of Betazed empath ninjas forcing Changelings to experience the suffering of their subjects.

    @Trent I think you make some good points. I have to admit that "Churchillian" thinking is more of the same and if Trek is to be utopian it can't really be the same.

    But on the other hand, if the alternative were easy, someone would have done it successfully presumably. It's hard to see how your ideas aren't just appeasement dressed up and repackaged. I mean in the case of the Dominion, they claimed the entire *gamma quadrant* for themselves. If Imperial Japan declared the entire Pacific Ocean their domain, should the USA as an enlightened power accede to this demand to avoid provoking them? More importantly, does this avoid war or make it even more likely to occur?

    I don't pretend to know the answer to this conundrum. But I will again agree with you that if the answer is just matching power with more power, then where is the utopia? It's like Kirk and Lincoln just beating up the evil team in a fist fight and claiming "good" triumphed. Ummm ok but what happens if evil knows king fu? :)

    @Jason
    "If Imperial Japan declared the entire Pacific Ocean their domain, should the USA as an enlightened power accede to this demand to avoid provoking them? More importantly, does this avoid war or make it even more likely to occur?"
    That is not really comparable. More like Japan declaring the Chinese sea/East Asia their domain. The whole Allies vs Axis thing doesn't work anyway because the Axis even at the height of their power never came close to the endless amounts of production and resources the Allies had at their disposal.

    Here a few numbers to highlight that: Production 1939-1945 Allies vs Axis
    - Tanks, self-propelled artillery, vehicles 4,358,649 670,288
    - Artillery, mortars, guns 6,792,696 1,363,491
    - Aircraft 637,248 229,331
    - Ships 54,932 1,670
    - military personal 80,000,000 30,000,000
    - Crude oil 1,043,000,000 66,000,000
    - GDP 97,707,908,723.20 10,268,201,776.37

    As you see the Allies were vastly superior which is a reversal of the Dominion Federation/Alpha Quadrant situation.
    As Trent said. They Federation should have armed itself, strengthened any alliance and avoided any action that could have lead to a sooner war.
    Trent is also right in saying that if the Federation doesn't have the power to enforce anything in the Gamma Quadrant then it really doesn't matter what the Federation thinks.
    It is also true that the Federation made the attempt of the Romulans and Cardassians to commit genocide possible. What did the Federation think the Romulans would do with the info of the founders homeworld.

    If you know that somebody wants to commit genocide, not at some point but now, with the info you provided, and then you don't warn the threatened people. How guilty are you?

    The Federation started it's slow descent into the dirty upside down Federation of NuTrek. These people disliked the positive vision of Star Trek or maybe they did but thought that you couldn't market it to a big enough audience.
    Especially the US likes to think of itself as the underdog who still somehow wins, even though it is normally vastly superior, like during the cold war were they battled a Soviet Union that was devastated after WW2 and the US is still proud of beating them. It's like being proud about winning in a fight against a guy who coughed blood and had broken arms and legs while you are a heavy weight champion.

    So they turned it into a good vs evil plot where good is much weaker. It very simplistically appeals to the emotional desires of much more people.

    "That is not really comparable. More like Japan declaring the Chinese sea/East Asia their domain."

    The Pacific Ocean comprises 30 percent of the Earth's surface. The Gamma Quadrant is 25 percent of the galaxy. Close enough.

    The Dominion flat out told the Federation that *any* incursion into the gamma quadrant was a violation of their territory.

    As for the Axis being the underdogs in WW2 that is a little hard to swallow but I suppose it depends on the time frame. After the fall of France and Dunkirk? Very hard to swallow.

    "The Pacific Ocean comprises 30 percent of the Earth's surface. The Gamma Quadrant is 25 percent of the galaxy. Close enough."
    I meant it in the sense that even if the Dominion would control all of the gamma quadrant it wouldn't border the Federation while the USA border the Pacific.

    "The Dominion flat out told the Federation that *any* incursion into the gamma quadrant was a violation of their territory."
    When did they do that?

    "As for the Axis being the underdogs in WW2 that is a little hard to swallow but I suppose it depends on the time frame. After the fall of France and Dunkirk? Very hard to swallow."
    They were from start to finish. Maybe the short phase between the defeat of France and the attack on Russia.
    The French army was bigger and better equipped than the German army (apart from the air force) and there the was the BEF as well. Not to forget the Maginot line.
    The French were just lead very badly and made some grave strategic and tactical mistakes. Same is true for the Red Army in 41, less so in 42 and after.
    When the USA joined, the production of the Allies vs the Axis was around 10 to 1.

    "The Dominion flat out told the Federation that *any* incursion into the gamma quadrant was a violation of their territory."
    When did they do that?"

    I believe it was in the episode The Jem'Hadar when the Jem'Hadar beams into ops with the Bajoran datapad and informs them that the Dominion considers any incursion into the wormhole as a violation of their territory. Then Dax responds that they won't be dissuaded from exploring the Gamma Quadrant.

    "They were from start to finish. Maybe the short phase between the defeat of France and the attack on Russia.
    The French army was bigger and better equipped than the German army (apart from the air force) and there the was the BEF as well. Not to forget the Maginot line.

    The French were just lead very badly and made some grave strategic and tactical mistakes. Same is true for the Red Army in 41, less so in 42 and after.
    When the USA joined, the production of the Allies vs the Axis was around 10 to 1."

    I'll concede that the Allies were the incumbent powers after World War I and may have had some paper advantages. But the incumbent always has a paper advantage at the start.

    But the Germans innovated heavily on the technological front and of course invested in the Luftwaffe to become a dominant air power. Their defeat of France was not just due to French incompetence but innovative German strategy coupled with game-changing technology such as the Panzer tank which just circumvented the Maginot Line via Belgium completely surprising the French who were apparently still fighting WW1.

    You could point out that the British navy outnumbered and outclassed the German one but who cares? By the time of the Battle of Britain the Luftwaffe dwarfed the RAF and air power was what mattered in that theater just as sea power (specifically carriers) was what mattered in the Pacific theater.

    I could point out fairly plausibly that had someone other than Churchill been in power after Dunkirk it's likely Britain would have sued for peace with Germany. Even assuming the US still enters the war do you see D-day without Britain? Nope.

    And on the Pacific side, awfully lucky that America's carriers were on exercises during Pearl Harbor and weren't sent to the bottom of the ocean. No carriers = no chance of victory against Japan.

    So yes, I am taking serious issue with this revisionist history casting Axis powers as the underdogs in this. I concur that the Dominion is probably not a perfect analogy for the Axis (the Axis never had the kind of overwhelming advantage in numbers and resources of the Dominion) but then again, I never saw the Dominion War as a proxy for WW2. The comparison with Nazis was more in political philosophy I think vis a vis the Founders.

    From "The Jem'hadar":

    TALAK'TALAN: Indefinitely. Commander Sisko will serve as an example of what happens to anyone who interferes with the Dominion.
    KIRA: What kind of interference are you talking about?
    TALAK'TALAN: Coming through the anomaly is interference enough. Unless you wish to continue to offend the Dominion, I suggest you stay on your side of the galaxy.
    DAX: You're making a mistake if you think that detaining Commander Sisko will stop us from exploring the Gamma Quadrant.

    It's odd that everyone, including the Dominion themes, seem to forget about this claim.

    I'll grant that it's probably rhetorical excess on the Dominion's side, and let's not forget that they could probably collapse the wormhole (or mine it on their side) if they really and truly wanted to keep the AQ powers at bay.

    Yes that was the exchange I was thinking of. I will add that with the wormhole, the Gamma Quadrant was effectively directly adjacent to Bajor which was basically Federation space by that point.

    @Jason
    You are not debating me but reality. I posted the numbers above.
    It is not revisionist history.
    The French had more and better tanks but these tanks often had no radio and were supposed to be coordinated by flag commands which obviously is not a good solution. They were also used as infantry support and not as separate units like the German army used them. The Maginot line wasn't build up to the channel because of Belgian protests and the French military deemed the Ardennes impassable for a larger force which made the Sickle Cut possible.

    Yes, the Germans had better/very risky strategies !because! they were inferior. They left very little troops in Poland on the Soviet border, while the French had their troops everywhere. For gods sake, in 1935 Germany basically didn't have an army and no air force. What do they teach you in Canada?

    "So yes, I am taking serious issue with this revisionist history casting Axis powers as the underdogs in this"
    Can you take it down a notch. Don't worry the Nazis still lost the war. If you want to believe that Nazi Germany was this gigantic empire and those plucky soldiers of the tiny British Empire stood against it, fine.

    "And on the Pacific side, awfully lucky that America's carriers were on exercises during Pearl Harbor and weren't sent to the bottom of the ocean. No carriers = no chance of victory against Japan."
    What?! Can you research this stuff before you post it. At the end of the war the USA had 28 heavy carriers and 71 Escort carriers. In 1943 with or without the original carriers the US would have had superiority in this area.
    This is not about heroism or anything this is about industrial capacities.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_World_War_II#/media/File:Carriers_ww2_by_country.png

    @Top Hat
    Thanks.

    @Booming I am not trying to be difficult here but the French lost. The Nazis marched through Paris. However you want to slice it the Nazis were superior where it counted. This wasn't a plucky underdog defeating a superior foe - the French were wiped out and the British nearly got annihilated at Dunkirk. No one after Dunkirk thought Germany was an underdog.

    I mean the Iraqis might have had more ground troops than the USA in the Gulf War but who cares? The Arabs also had a ton more men and tanks than the Israelis during the s?Six-day-war - big deal.

    As for the Pacific theater, I may have overstated my point when I said the Americans couldn't win if the carriers had been sunk at Pearl Harbor but it is a fact that destroying the US carriers was the primary objective of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and had they succeeded it's arguable that the Battle of Midway in particular would not have been the decisive victory (or any victory) and the turning point of the war.

    I am hardly the first person to suggest that the failure of the Japanese to sink the American carriers at Pearl Harbor doomed them. And I note that the Americans had just 3 carriers in 1941 at the time of Pearl Harbor, the same number they fielded at Midway. They were hardly churning the things out like gumballs!

    Finally why are we talking about "heroism"? I didn't say the Allies were heroic for the record (although they certainly were). I am just disputing this suggestion that the Axis powers were underdogs in WW2.

    @Jason
    "I am not trying to be difficult here but the French lost."
    Sure, doesn't mean that France didn't have a better army. The Sickle Cut was just batshit crazy. It was an incredibly risky gamble.

    "I mean the Iraqis might have had more ground troops than the USA in the Gulf War but who cares? The Arabs also had a ton more men and tanks than the Israelis during the s?Six-day-war - big deal."
    The first example is obviously off and in the second the Israelis were definitely the underdogs.

    I'm not sure if we are actually debating the word underdog. What I want to say is that Germany and Japan could have never won that war. If the BEF would have been annihilated maybe GB would have sued for peace, maybe but probably not. It's like with the Confederacy. They beat the USA in what 10 battles in a row. Didn't matter. Lee remarked after Fredericksburg that this victory meant nothing because the USA could easily replace the losses.

    The moment Japan attacked the USA and Germany declared war on the USA as well (even though the Japanese never declared war on the Soviet Union) both Japan and Germany were doomed. The GDP of the USA was bigger than that of all Axis powers combined. Russia alone had more soldiers than all the Axis powers combined. From then on it was just a matter of time. The only thing that could have saved them... Prophets. :)

    "They were hardly churning the things out like gumballs!"
    They kind of did but it took a while. The span between Pearl Harbor and Midway was what, seven month? Takes a little longer than that to build Carriers.

    Wouldn't it have been cooler if the Dominion had been as strong or maybe even somewhat weaker but still won at first? Or Proxy wars...
    But they went with the most simplistic option. Big unstoppable empire has to be stopped. I found the Klingon war far more interesting. It made no sense because the Klingons don't border the Cardassians but hey the Federation supported a former enemy for zero political gain because it was the right thing to do.

    Well Booming I don't doubt that once the USA enters the war that is a game changer - but so much could or would have gone terribly wrong before that which could have effectively ended the war before then. Maybe Churchill's books on the series are biased but I certainly didn't get the impression from them that Germany was an easy opponent. No documentaries I have seen about the Battle of Britain suggest that it was some cakewalk - indeed but for Hitler letting himself be goaded into the blitz (rather than continuing to hammer the RAF airfields) it seems the RAF would have been vanquished and Operation Sea Lion was potentially in play. As I see it if GB falls either militarily or by suing for peace, there is no chance of victory against Germany USA or no USA - D Day is gone.

    As for the Japanese, my impression is that they were much more of an upstart against the USA but then again they had some amazing tech with the Zero fighter that far outclassed the Americans and had they wiped out the USA carriers at Pearl Harbor who knows?

    Maybe we are again running into another translation issue with the "underdog" expression. Frankly I am a little surprised at you agreeing with Trent's borderline equivalence between Nazis and allies - you always seem more hardcover anti fascist in these situations.

    "but so much could or would have gone terribly wrong before that which could have effectively ended the war before then"
    As they say in the states woulda coulda shoulda. :)

    " Maybe Churchill's books on the series are biased"
    Maybe... As one historian wrote: In Callahan's view, Churchill was guilty of "carefully reconstructing the story" to suit his postwar political goals.

    "No documentaries I have seen about the Battle of Britain suggest that it was some cakewalk -"
    As I said between the defeat of France and the invasion of Russia there was a short time were the Axis was superior in some areas. In 1943 on the other hand most major German and Japanese cities were already what the historian calls "completely destroyed". Germany and Japan as the upstarts could get some wins in during the first two years of major warfare (mid 1940- mid 1942) but after that the complete superiority in every area became more and more overwhelming. It was the time span GB and the USA needed to convert their much larger economies from peacetime to wartime and mobilize their populations.

    "Frankly I am a little surprised at you agreeing with Trent's borderline equivalence between Nazis and allies - you always seem more hardcover anti fascist in these situations."
    In these debates I'm always reminded of what Michael Shermer said about scientific training. It makes it really hard to not see objective reality, if it is pleasing or not doesn't matter.
    I wouldn't say that there were "good" countries on either side but the allies definitely included the better countries. It is true though the Nazis copied the race laws of the southern states in the USA. GB let millions starve to death in India in 1943. The Soviet Union under Stalin did (insert horrible crime here). The Allies weren't knights in shinning armor but compared to the Nazis and imperial Japan they were the better side. A somewhat free press and an equally somewhat fair legal system (for some), a certain hesitancy to actively murder millions. It was good that they won. :)

    Jason said: "Frankly I am a little surprised at you agreeing with Trent's borderline equivalence between Nazis and allies - you always seem more hardcover anti fascist in these situations."

    German Imperialism of the early 20th century - barred by the other Empires from pillaging Africa, and expanding at home - was but the Imperialism of the Allies squeezed into a shorter, more violent time-frame.

    And so while there are obvious differences between Naziism and the Allies, their capacity for evil was the same. The British Empire killed over a billion in India during the Raj. The French and Brits were raping Africa and the West Indies (and even after WW2, these Empires fought long and bloody campaigns to avoid relinquishing these colonial holdings to subjects they once treated as Hitler treated the Jews). Everyone was raping Indonesia. The Americans were wreaking havoc in Latin America and China (later they'd drop more bombs on Vietnam than Hitler ever constructed), the latter carved up along with the French and Brits. The Japanese wouldn't have become techno-fascists if not for the forced market reforms of the Americans. The Aussies were raping the Aborigines, the Kiwi the Maoris, and the Allies of course had marriages of convenience with psychos like Stalin, and various Middle Eastern puppet monarchs, the latter of which would lead to a further century of inconvenient problems. And as late as the dawn of the 20th century, places like Canada were still massacring native Indians.

    There are countless other examples (and counter-examples: the Imperialism of the Axis and Allies in some places "positively" introduced practices with overthrew barbaric customs of indigenous peoples, either directly - the white man banning the practice of sati [widow burning] in India or the caste system in Nigeria, or indirectly, like Hitler's Naziism "leading" to emancipation movements which toppled British/French colonies).

    Anyway, my point was simply that the idea that Imperialistic Fascism is beat with the arms, resources and power won through violence, murder, plunder and exploitation, is the wrong lesson to draw from WW2. If Imperialism is largely caused by economic factors, and how these factors intersect with ethnocentric, political and religious factors, then you stop it by more, not less, "Federation values". More sharing, more caring and more understanding. And you keep an a-bomb in your back pocket just in case as a last resort ("But if you have an a-bomb? Why share and care? Why not Take!").

    I always thought a more interesting DS9 would have contrasted how citizens under the Federation live to that of the Dominion. Imagine a Changeling envoy being granted asses to Federation worlds ("See, we don't hate or persecute! We even have many non solid members: here, meet Ambassador H20 of Aquawet IV!). That would be pretty cool.

    You can still have your traditional war story afterwards. But take the time to first show how the Feds differ from historical Empires. Otherwise, what's the lesson?

    "German Imperialism of the early 20th century - barred by the other Empires from pillaging Africa, and expanding at home - was but the Imperialism of the Allies squeezed into a shorter, more violent time-frame."

    I think I will take the British Empire over the Nazis particularly speaking as a Jew but we will have to agree to disagree buddy.

    Yeah I'm somewhat with Jason here. The Nazi totalitarianism was way worse than GB or the USA. Sure empires were killing millions left and right but Nazi Germany was doing things on a whole different level.

    The comparison between GB/USA and Nazi Germany is so odious that a simple reductio ad absurdum is in order: what the Nazis did was so unbelievable to the allies that they literally did not imagine it was going on. And as Han Solo put it, they could imagine a lot. The very fact that they couldn't conceive the the barbarity and conditions the Nazis created is proof enough that they did not ever use methods like this. That should be enough for that argument.

    If you are trying to create an equivalence in damage done over time, etc etc, this requires a broader view of history, a definition of what "damage" is, and a view of accepted values as they shifted between the early 1800's and the mid 1900's. Citing old British Imperialism in comparison to acts committed after the advent of TV is just crazy.

    I'll address one particular in the flurry of statements. Trent said:

    " The Japanese wouldn't have become techno-fascists if not for the forced market reforms of the Americans."

    Don't know if you know much about Japanese society now, or how it was in the 1800's, and I am by no means highly knowledgeable in it myself, but NO ONE could have made them what they were other than themselves. They were utterly isolated and unique leading up to the opening of the technological and cultural floodgates, and what happened after that was not forced on them. No one 'caused them' to become, during WWII, a military culture that made the Nazis look gentle in comparison. That they did all on their own.

    Jason R said: "I think I will take the British Empire over the Nazis particularly speaking as a Jew but we will have to agree to disagree buddy."

    That's like saying you'd take the French killing 15 million in the Congo, or the Brits killing hundreds of millions elsewhere, over 6 million slaughtered Jews.

    Regardless, my point was that you can't make that choice. The Empire's were inextricably bound, and the entrenchment of the successful Empires over long periods of time (the British Empire controlled a quarter of all land on Earth at this point) influenced the logic and brutality of Imperial Germany in a condensed period of time. Each influenced the behaviors of the other. Protracted violence breeds explosive counter violence. In this regard the historian Adam Tooze once described Imperial Germany as a balloon trying to expand into Africa. It gets barred from expanding, gets squeezed back upwards and explodes against its neighbors.

    Peter said: "what the Nazis did was so unbelievable to the allies that they literally did not imagine it was going on"

    Why would you expect the Allies, who couldn't imagine the crimes committed in their own colonies, in their own names, whose citizens had no idea of the blood spilled to produce their sugar, coffee and silk, to conceive of Hitler's crimes?

    History teaches us a big lesson about human psychology. Cycles of violence don't happen because people fail to learn from history, rather, people repress history because they perpetuate cycles of violence. Behavior tends to precede belief, belief tends to be a post hoc rationalization of what you already do, and both limit what you allow yourself to know.

    Peter said: "and a view of accepted values as they shifted between the early 1800's and the mid 1900's."

    You seem to be arguing that "Germany's Imperialism is worse" because it "occurred at a time when everyone knew Imperialism was bad". I was arguing, however, that it is hypocritical to condemn Germany's Imperialism and not the Imperialism which preceded it, and which it was reacting against, and it is dangerous to offer "more Imperialism" as the solution to the Imperialists we don't like.

    Regardless, the Allies did not really "shift their values". In the mid 1950s in Kenya, for example, well after Hitler's camps were exposed, the Brits put the entire civilian population in "work camps"; one and a half million people locked up and surrounded by troops. Meanwhile, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the French were massacring one and a half million in Algeria, and displacing about 2 million. And of course then there's America's record.

    So the idea that the Allies were "bad in the 1800s", but "changed their ways", "became forces of good", "defeated the nasty Hitler" and "continued being good" is silly. They seemed good 'cos they had nothing more to conquer. They reverted to type when those they conquered tried to break free.

    Peter said: "but NO ONE could have made them what they were other than themselves."

    IMO like James you're ascribing a kind of autonomy and free-will to people and nations that doesn't exist in the real world.

    Japan was highly cloistered and isolationist from about the 1600s to the 1850s. They minded their own business. The Americans rolled up with gunboats and soldiers and forcibly opened it up for trade. They installed a central bank, debt based currencies, a bureaucratic class, signed trade treaties, opened up ports and kick-started severe reforms. Only then did Japan have its industrial revolution, and in the space of a generation become super Westernized. Feudal workers turned into wage laborers.

    The rapid social and cultural changes caused by this - a rapid transition from feudalism to capitalism, subsistence crops to export goods, traditional roles and customs obliterated by a new economy - caused a big backlash. This directly led to the "Showa Restoration" of the 1890s, a kind of hyper-conservative, hyper-nationalist movement which stressed Tradition (Trump in a kimono). All social ills were blamed on the West. Americans were deemed a corrupting parasite. Then a major Great Depression hit, Japan's debts piled up (mass banking collapses in the 20s), and it had no markets to expand into (the big Empires placed trade strictures, barred it from trade deals with China etc). Because its market had been transformed - once self sufficient, now reliant on imports of raw materials that now never came - it started to suffer. Then in the mid 1920s the US made it sign treaties limiting its military power - which the Japanese viewed as an insult and attack, like the Germans and Versailles - and American expansion began to ramp up in the Asia-Pacific, coinciding with increasingly stricter sanctions.

    So like Germany you had a country feeling surrounded, feeling dictated to, feeling torn from its past, impoverished, locked into a grow-or-die economy that struggled to access even its nearest markets, and turning to a hyper-nationalistic leader or ideology. The Japanese didn't choose these conditions.

    Now you can say Germany and Japan "choose militarism" instead of shrinking back down and kowtowing to the bigger fish. Sure. But the point of this discussion is that nobody ever asks the bigger fish to do the same; to act more like the Federation. And in DS9, even the Federation doesn't first act like the Federation.

    @ Trent,

    I think you're misconstruing the general tenor of my argument. The point of your recent post is something along the lines of the momentum and ecology of large forces shape adaptations and behavior on a large scale, and can't be ascribed to individual will. I will in fact be a top proponent of this theory of history. I never said that you were wrong about how major powers caused aggressive changes in the Axis powers. I certainly believe that about Germany. What I think Jason R is saying, and what I am definitely saying, is that nothing the allies ever did caused them to resort to such monstrosity that it would take a skilled horror writer to come up with it. Did Versailles make the people angry and want (in so many words) to see the scapegoats hauled down the streets? Maybe so. Did it mentally arm them for a war machine that would leave the enemy dead at their feet? That is easy to accept. It's not easy to accept that the economic vise they were in, coupled with the humiliation of going from winning the Franco-Prussian war to being reduced to a vassal, should then translate into acts that Dracula would shy away from. The popped balloon of Africa may translate into a military explosion, but does not explain the wholesale attempt at a genocide of a people currently irrelevant to the war effort. Now we may say that there are other genocides on record; true enough. What seems to separate the Nazi one is the brutal efficiency - industrially planned - of the genocide, the coldness of it. And what also separates it is the experiments. Which leads us back to the Japanese, who even exceeded the excesses of the Nazis, to the point where Nazi reports back about certain Japanese activities had them saying that, uh, I know we're badass but this is really crazy. You can say all you want about how Japanese militarism was basically inevitable; but there was nothing inevitable (on the side of allied actions) about their atrocities. It's not just about deaths, it's about thinking of the victims as literally not the same species. And unlike the British and French, which may be guilty of plenty (and I am not about to defend the American war efforts of the 20th century), here we're dealing with - in both cases - Master Race mentalities that go further back than the allied interference you mention. Already by the mid-1800's the proto-Nazi movement was afoot, capped up in their victory against France (which they deemed a cultural victory), and even prior to America's actions with Japan there was the idea that all other peoples were inferior. No one made the Germans and Japanese that way, unless you want to trace all things back to, I dunno, the first molecules of the formation of the Earth. But if you're looking for proximate causes, the Americans and British did not cause those mentalities in the Japanese and Germans, and these are the requisite factors in what I'm describing. Not the militarism, which I agree is easy to explain and predictable, but in the other stuff and the excesses. I think if you read detailed accounts you'll see that this was like nothing the British or later Americans were doing.

    I guess I should at least quickly bring this back to DS9, because what we're shown isn't merely a clash of cultures like Klingons loving conquest up against egalitarian humans, or even Cardassians thinking they're better than everyone in the degree of their achievements and advances. With the Founders we're dealing with a point of view about life that cannot be explained merely as a result of aggression by their neighbors, whatever they occasionally claim about having been hunted. The Dominion doesn't merely want to bring others to their knees in order to create "breathing room" or to ensure their own protection. Like Walt in Breaking Bad (SPOILERS) they do it because at bottom they just want to. It's not that the Federation is a threat to them, it's that humanoids are like bugs to them, insects to step on. Inasmuch as early Cardassians are portrayed as Nazi-esque and Orwellian, they are actually not quite the real deal in terms of that cultural superiority mentality. Oh, they're in the running, but they do know that Humans are crafty, Klingons good fighters, and all that. But the Founders really believe everyone else is just nothing, to be stamped on, and there is really no way to reason with that. Whatever may have originally caused the Dominion to become expansionist, nothing ever made them develop this idea that the life of one Founder is worth more than the entire Alpha Quadrant. That is entirely on them and (IMO) their lack of awareness. Want to blame a tense atmosphere partly on the Federation? I guess I can buy that. But blaming the Federation for the actual events that take place, which in their pre-history include planets such as we see in The Quickening, no; no one except the Founders is responsible for that.

    "That's like saying you'd take the French killing 15 million in the Congo, or the Brits killing hundreds of millions elsewhere, over 6 million slaughtered Jews."

    If you can prove Great Britain murdered 100,000,000 people anywhere in its entire history then I will happily concede that they have Japan and Germany beat.

    I always assumed Worf made up the Klingon ritual at the end.

    Stop comparing the Dominion to the Third Reich. The Dominion is Israel (Founders) + America (Jem'Hadar and Vorta).

    It's funny how Trent likes to go on his anti-white spiel when the Federation he likes was the Federation written by Roddenberry, a white man, while the Federation he hates was written by Berman, Behr, etc., who are basically all Jewish lmao.

    So far Worf hasn't added much to DS9. I really haven't liked how he was written here or in "Sons of Mogh" "Let He Who is Without Sin" and "The Sword of Kahless."


    I don't really get what the writers were aiming for with his character.

    Lots of interesting things written above. Zounds, the exchange in September 25-26, 2020 was positively epic! Honor is due!

    Now, a couple of things about The Ship:

    (1) more than vague resemblance to the film Sahara (Humphrey Bogart WWII flick) a stand-off in a desert with occasional negotiations with snarky Afrika Korps dude sometimes acting in bad faith...and of course the immortal "water for guns...." and early instance of dying soldier who cannot be saved. Has it all.

    (2) Kilana was just fine as played; Vorta are meant to be annoying, I think. The "Nothing is smarter than a Vorta" idea comes through in every other word they speak. They have the Jem'hadar to back them up so they have the luxury of condescension. I can easily imagine a line like "Oh you Federation people are so cute" being spoken by Kilana, or even by Weyoun. So Kilana saying to Sisko "Would you like a bon-bon, sweetie?" actually kinda works. Although, with a founder at stake, it was probably not the most efficient approach for her to adopt. "These bon-bons sometimes get stuck in my upper right 2nd molar....pesky things". :-)

    (3) Worf's complete lack of restraint in DS9 is hard to accept after 7 years on the Enterprise. He has morphed into a true knucklehead.

    (4) If you're about to see a dying founder, I just wish the writers had had Dax or somebody say a bit earlier "you know (Benjamin) I think this ship was some sort of ambulance". Sisko could then say "where's its patient?" Then drip, drip, drip.

    It was a pretty good episode...just shy of a 3.0

    Since I first saw this episode back in the series' first run, I have been irritated by the apparent changed premise with which the episode ends. During TNG, it was well-established that Klingons consider dead bodies a "shell," basically trash to be disposed of. The person is gone, hopefully off to Sto-vo-kor. They have no death ritual of protecting the body from being eaten by the Klingon equivalent of hyenas or buzzards. Within seconds of death, they stare into the corpse's eyes, then scream to the heavens to warn the dead that another warrior is headed their way.

    I suppose the writers could have been saying that Worf was lying about the ritual in order to offer comfort to O'Brien (whose Irish heritage does have the custom of a wake), but is that kind of subterfuge consistent with Worf's bluntness earlier in the episode?

    All in all, it looks to me as if writers set out to make Worf a completely different character (or several completely different characters) in DS9 from in TNG.

    @Trish, I agree, I think Worf is essentially a completely different character here than in TNG.

    I don't like this Worf *at all*. He's a whiny little bad word ALL THE TIME.

    My only goodwill towards the character is from TNG. My thinking he's being nice to O'Brien is from that point of view. But frankly, there's very little offered to support that.


    Munez is annoying because his cute comments made him an obvious new version of a redshirt from the getgo. Just maybe could he could be in pain and angry and lash out? Because, maybe he's a person and not a plot device?


    I did like Sisko handing Dax her ass. That was a believable moment.

    "We're in the gamma quadrant with one puny shuttle and a Jem'hadar warship just crashed here, so let's hang around and try to salvage it knowing that more warships are going to show up very soon and kill us all". Great plan. I'm curious about them being there to mine the planet also, why do they need to mine anything when they have replicators?

    @ Trent,

    Ok I gotta say I'm confused at this point about who is who. Are you the anarcho syndicalist, or is that "The Real Trent"? i.e. which of you is the one with whom I've been involved in many discussions?

    Ah I'm fairly new here so I'm sure I'm not "The Real Trent"; I mean I thought I was the real one but I guess from your point of view I'm the mirror universe version. I'll think of a different name to post under in the future to avoid confusion.

    @ Trent # 2,

    Ok, but are you the one who was temporarily using the handle "The Real Trent"?

    @ Peter G.

    Oh no, I've never used that name. I thought you were joking :D

    Doing a rewatch of DS9 Dominion War. This was just a bad episode. Too many flaws in the structure of the episode. I remember watching this originally thinking that there must have been some reason they couldn't beam into the ship, until low and behold they beam right into the ship. Retarded. Nothing much to say about an episode when the entire episode is invalid and makes no sense.

    I did kind of like the Vorta, though. Don't recall ever seeing her again.

    It is interesting, however, the things you recall upon rewatching an episode. I'd forgotten DS9 altered the death ritual long before Discovery ever did.

    Then I remembered something else. It was TNG who altered Klingon funeral practices in the first place. The Klingons originally mummified their dead as indicated by Spock in The Voyage Home when he identified a Klingon mummy glyph in that test they gave him. This is a full 180° from TNG's rendition.

    In the end, we must realize that anyone indicting Discovery for simply bringing Klingon funeral rites back to the way they were supposed to be in 1986 before TNG ever aired are simply full of it, as usual.

    Or we could just assume that Klingon's have multiple religious doctrines across time just like humans do and cease with the foolishness.

    @Quincy
    "Klingon mummification glyph" notuced that one for years.... : (
    Implies the existence of an ancient culture ancestral to the later Klingons who had a different notion of the afterlife, one requiring preservation of the otherwise corruptible body. Is it a slip-up? Perhaps. All the writers need to do is name that earlier culture and explain the change by later folk. So easy. But as we have seen, missed opportunities abound in the Trekverse.

    Not a great episode, but without it we probably wouldn't have gotten "A Time To Stand" and "In the Pale Moonlight", so it's worth it as a workshop to two of the best episodes in Trek. I think it's a bit dumb that the crew, with a long time to just sit around and search the ship, never thought there might be a Changeling----even aside from the fact that last week the whole story revolved around uncovering a Changeling, it just suits the facts. The Dominion has never shown such a concern over their technological equipment that they wouldn't just launch an immediate ground assault. Even if it was some extra-special new prototype, they could blow it up if need be and build another one from the blueprints. Whereas the Dominion has always clearly priortized Changelings' safety, so it seems like something that should have occurred to Sisko and others as a possibility.

    Two points of strong world-building detail in this episode though, which I quite liked: 1) the idea that only the Vorta and First get to see what's happening outside the ship. It's not something that has been established before but it makes sense given the super hierarchical nature of the Dominion, and shows up as an aesthetic detail (and occasional plot point) later in the series. 2) the Vorta hear mentioning reading Weyoun's report, despite him being disintegrated in S4. Casually sets up him up to be a re-occurring character. Which, given that Jeffrey Combs' performance is one of the very best of any secondary character in DS9 (and I think the best non-Cardasssian one) it's definitely worth inventing a whole new cloning attribute to the Vorta to justify it. But it's good to foreshadow it, and after all if Weyoun wasn't permanently dead after S4 he would have read a report that other Vorta would be expected to read and cite.

    My problem with the ending of this episode is that the "moral lesson" was never earned by the plot.

    The ending is an example of "false balance", a bias where two sides are presented as having equal evidence/support even though that is not true.

    Sisko and Kilana were not equally good-faith partners in this exchange. Kilana opened the encounter by murdering the runabout crew. She then further engaged by murdering the "non-main cast" characters on the surface. She then was deceptive during her negotiations, which she used as a ploy to send in an infiltrator with a spying device. Once these fruitless negotiations fell apart she started SHELLING them.

    What did Sisko do? He occupied a crashed ship and used it as refuge against a lethal enemy that had already killed half the people he'd come to the planet with.

    Acting like these two sides are somehow equal, and that its a moral tragedy worthy of condemnation that they didn't trust each other is, in a word: farcical.

    Maybe Sisko felt like he needed to blame himself because he's a human being, but the audience is left with the idea that the writers actually believe it too, and that's really despicable. Good people are not to blame when they stand up to evil people doing evil things, even if the outcome is bad/deadly.

    @Sean this was a great episode, And DS9 makes far bigger mistakes. You really think Sisko doesn't go on trips without a great cause? He does go on some really dumb trips like the light ship.

    All of you complaining about characters acting out of character must remember that this is DS9, where it happens often. Most DS9 fans just ignore that fact when assessing the show. It's a pity.

    This is way better than the 2-1/2 stars Jammer gave it.

    The story was interesting and the plot well executed. What kvetches there are are minor. I agree with splatomat about the silly moral equivalency.

    The Jemmy commander wasn't half bad to look at--the cleavage, especially, was impressive--though the five-inch heels were a bit much. Just a tad!

    The Latino guy's death was totally foreseeable, yet, it still impacted on me. The actor very successfully portrayed him as a nice "kid" you do end up feeling genuinely sorry for. Que desgracia...pobrecito.

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