In the fourth episode of the fifth season of Deep Space Nine, I’m gonna need this batch of episodes to give me a goddamn BREAK. Intrigued? The. It’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
Trigger Warning: For extensive talk of warfare, blood, gore, suicideÂ
Well, Deep Space Nine isn’t even remotely fucking around anymore. I’ve found that the writers for this series have been more willing to be explicitly political in their commentary, and this episode is a shining example of that. In a post-Gulf War world, it was easy for me to feel somewhat desensitized to the concept of war. I grew up as the first generation to watch a war unfold live and in great detail on the nightly news. Oh, the media has long played a part in warmongering or dissent in my country, but we never had quite the access we did – instantaneous access, I might add – as what happened in the early ’90s. My father had been in the Army and in Vietnam, and my mother was a staunch conservative and Republican. That meant the small TV we had sitting on the island in the kitchen and dining room was always turned to ABC or NBC as we ate dinner. I first learned about oil reserves and Saddam Hussein and warfare from those nights. (A strange side affect: I figured out why kids at school in Boise thought my brother and I were Arab or Middle Eastern. That was sadly one of the only times these kids ever saw anyone who “looked” like us.) I saw mangled bodies and blood and watched both sides cause destruction. I was horrified by it, plagued by nightmares of being bombed, until I wasn’t. Then, it just became an abstract thing. I couldn’t understand it, but I also couldn’t ignore it. It just happened.
And now, watching “…Nor the Battle to the Strong” in 2016, I’m reminded of how violence and warfare can be abstract things for an American citizen. Oh, I’ve seen plenty of violence myself, enacted by the state or the police or bullies or bigots, but like Jake Sisko, I was always detached from it. This episode pulls Jake into an unending horror while reminding us that no matter the cause, war is an ugly, horrific thing. It’s senseless. It is unnecessary and without meaning and destructive on a systemic level and a personal level.
Jake sees both sides of it. It’s important to note that the cold open deliberately misleads the audience. We are, much like Jake, expecting an adventure, anything to pull us out of the tedium of Julian’s scientific and self-centered rambling. We crave it as Jake craves it. So it’s just as significant that Jake is immediately pitched into chaos. He does not get an adjustment period; he does not get to ease himself into this nightmare. The bodies are everywhere: torn at the seams, strewn about the triage room, blood seeping out of wounds, staining the front of Jake’s shirt, marking him as one who is undeniably a part of this experience.
But he’s marked for another reason. This is not about being a witness to war. It’s about being inside of it. Jake meets a man who, bewilderingly, shot himself in the foot, just so a medic could take him off the front line, away from the battlefield. The act is incomprehensible to Jake, who has grown up amidst heroes and demigods and valiant Starfleet fighters, all who seemed to know what to do when things got tough, when the odds seemed impossible, when their lives were threatened. Yet hours later, when the Klingons destroy the base’s power source, Jake must come face-to-face with what war is actually like.
And it’s horrifying. Loud. Disorienting. Terrifying. In just two scenes, the show manages to convey a specific absurdity of war: how can you possibly contend with an enemy that can murder you from a distance? How can you be expected to ignore bombs and shells exploding next to you and someone you care about? Jake has an epiphany: he’s not his father, or Julian, or O’Brien, or Dax, or Odo, or Worf, or Kira. He is so afraid that he abandons Julian and runs away.
And he believes that marks him as a coward. His interaction with the dying Starfleet officer confirms it, too. That man faced death willingly, something Jake couldn’t possibly do. He ran from it! So when he stumbles back into the medical base, it’s all too real for him. He can’t joke about death and he can’t face it. It felt clear to me that Jake was shell-shocked, as his experience was so goddamn traumatic.
But then Deep Space Nine does something surprising. For a show (and a series, for that matter) that’s so heavily based in a military world, that valorizes and celebrates acts of bravery and courage in battle and in the support of the Federation, I expected that perhaps Jake would be put in a situation where he’d be able to prove itself. Yet during the siege of the base, he cowers. He hides. He watches people die swiftly and terribly. And when he gets ahold of a weapon, he fires it without abandon or purpose other than the sheer will to stay alive. He doesn’t cause the cave-in due to a precision tactic. It just happens.
Jake’s act of bravery is in admitting that he is a coward. In speaking honestly of his all-encompassing fear. In sharing the horrors of war as they are, not as how anyone would like them to be remembered. For me, that’s one of the most anti-war statements that Star Trek has ever made. War is hell, we should be terrified of it, and we should run as far away from it as we can.
The video for “…Nor the Battle to the Strong” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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