Twenty-six years in the past right now, Deep Space Nine delivered the knife beneath its cloaked examination of Star Trek’s morals in wartime with all the fragile precision of a stitching needle: the unimaginable “Within the Pale Moonlight,” not simply one in every of DS9 or Star Trek’s finest hours, however one of many all time biggest episodes of TV ever made. However the most interesting second in an already immaculate piece of tv is all concerning the methods to enact violence with out lifting a single finger.
“Within the Pale Moonlight,” framed round a maudlin Captain Sisko recounting current occasions in his private log after a protracted, lengthy day, is concerning the rising ethical compromises he’s keen to make as one in every of Starfleet’s vanguards within the increasingly dire war towards the Dominion. Seeing a chance to carry one of many Federation’s coldest enemies, the secretive Romulans, right into a warfare they’ve stayed impartial in, Sisko finds himself drawn into the charismatic orbit of the easy tailor and infrequently grasp of all kinds of spycraft, Garak the Cardassian clothier, as the 2 plot to artificially assemble proof of a Dominion plot to invade the Romulan Star Empire, and cross it alongside to a Romulan senator.
The episode layers on its stress by way of every circle of hell Sisko is keen to place his soul by way of. Even step one of merely working with Garak on such a plan is already heinous sufficient for the excessive and mighty values of Starfleet’s officer class, however little by little, Sisko begins to see the proverbial river of blood he should wade into to come back out of the opposite facet with even a likelihood of Romulus getting into the Dominion Conflict. Utilizing criminals to faux proof, crafting the right deception, planting it in Senator Vreenak’s palms, all this is able to be tantamount to the gravest of ethical prices our hero might pay… after which all of it blows up in his face when Vreenak calls Sisko out on his bluff, realizing the info rod he’s been handed showcasing the Dominion’s supposed plans is counterfeit.
It’d be right here that some other Star Trek present would plant its flag because the lowest second one in every of its heroes might sink to: they performed soiled, and now should face the results of taking the low highway. However Deep House 9 is not any other Star Trek show, and so it prepares to thrust its knife. The subsequent day, as senior employees monitor casualty lists and Sisko braces for his fall, a Starfleet Intelligence report comes by way of confirming the dying of a Romulan Senator in a shuttlecraft explosion the Star Empire is laying by the hands of Dominion subterfuge. It’s Vreenak: he’s lifeless, the key of Sisko’s ethical price with him, and Sisko is aware of precisely who’s in charge for the explosion.
As Sisko storms all the way down to Garak’s store, we get it: the best second in all of Deep Space Nine. Time and time once more within the present, in methods small and huge, we’ve seen up up to now that Benjamin Sisko is just not a person who pulls punches, metaphorically or in any other case. From laying out Q the second he tries to solid the then-Commander as one other Picard, to his dogged willpower to root out the anti-Cardassian guerrillas of the Maquis, Sisko has at all times acted as he does right here: to come back in swinging. He decks Garak, sending him clear throughout the room. He yells his accusations at Garak—he killed Vreenak, he killed the prison they used to forge that knowledge rod; all alongside, he’s knowingly introduced the Romulans into the deadliest warfare the Alpha Quadrant has seen in generations on a falsehood. Even with out the punch, this isn’t Sisko passionate or dogged or decided. He’s livid, one thing we’ve got seen simmering in him earlier than, however now absolutely unleashed.
However Garak by no means fights again. He takes Sisko’s punch, and all the craze, goes to dam the second swing, however he doesn’t match Sisko’s braggadocio. He waits. After which in chilly, calculating kind, he turns Sisko on himself—laying out all of the proof that the Romulans will now have, from a lifeless senator to an imperfect, broken rod containing even the faintest traces of proof of a Dominion plot, and guides Sisko alongside the way in which to a conclusion that was there from the start of the episode. Sisko would see what Garak predicts the Romulans will see, and would enter the war against the Dominion, simply as they may. Garak doesn’t even should say it, he simply lets Sisko work by way of it out loud himself, not even having to push him… as a result of for all his posture, for all of the fists swinging, they suppose precisely the identical. And if something, Sisko is even dirtier than that, as a result of he already knew that in going to Garak he would get somebody who keen to soiled their very own palms on his behalf, and go away him with the victory he needed—at any price, it doesn’t matter what he’d declare in any other case.
And so, with Sisko on the lowest depths of hell ultimately, he and Garak are locked as kindred spirits on this recreation of spycraft and ethical theater. It’s a exceptional second, one which has rightly caught with Star Trek for the 2 and a half many years because it first broadcast, due to the way in which it skewers the franchise’s legacy of purported enlightenment in such an elegantly compelling way. For years earlier than this, Starfleet and its officers have been depicted as above this sort of underhanded manipulation—that our heroes speak their methods out of fights, that they keep the ethical excessive floor, and that even once they falter, once they play a bit soiled, it’s with a roguish attraction, and within the method of a hero, the small, harmless costs paid, for a higher good that’s at all times price it. It’s by no means meant to stain their soul, as a result of ultimately, it at all times works out within the hero’s favor—and their righteous view of the universe.
Sisko’s higher good is a whole lot of 1000’s, if not tens of millions, of beings slaughtered to stop the entire destruction of the Alpha Quadrant powers as we all know them, predicated on a lie. Ultimately, he received it, not within the noblest of manners because the heroes earlier than him might need, however by way of cloak and dagger deception and knives at the hours of darkness. As a result of, again towards the wall, he was at all times keen to throw that punch—and since Garak knew it too, he himself by no means needed to.
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