In the second episode of the sixth season of Deep Space Nine, I wasn’t ready. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
Trigger Warning: For discussion of war and warfare, suicide.
what the hell
WHAT THE HELL
Kira
This script is BRUTAL, y’all, and it’s deeply serialized, and it’s super uncomfortable, and I did not expect things to be taken so far, and it’s all Ronald D. Moore’s fault. (Which, as a brief aside, I wanted to comment on. The more I watch this show and Voyager, the more I understand Battlestar Galactica deeply and truly. Like, I wonder if there’s a ton of shit from these shows that appears on BSG that I straight-up missed because I didn’t know any better.) But this isn’t grim just for the sake of it; it’s about the perils of war, the way it tears people it apart, how pointless it is, and how it can lead people to accept monstrous things.
Thus, I would not have put anyone else in the main role for this specific story than Kira. It has to be her. The first episode of the season established the unnerving and insidious occupation by the Dominion and the Cardassians. The whole point was that in many ways, the Cardassians were not relying on the same violence that they had the first time, which made resistance a million times harder to organize. Technically, Terok Nor belongs to the Cardassians anyway, and the Dominion has a non-aggression pact with the Bajorans. Is it the same as the original Cardassian occupation?
That’s the question posed by this episode and specifically by Vedek Yassim. We all know this is an occupation; none of us trust the Dominion; we all know it’s only inevitable that the Dominion and the Cardassians will claim Bajor for their own. So why the reluctance on Kira’s part? How could someone who was a major player in the Resistance hesitate to fight oppressors again? But the Kira in the opening of season six has become a season advisor to the Emissary and to Starfleet. She’s a completely different person, and I didn’t see her hesitation as something out-of-character. This is where she is now, and it’s who she is now. After all she accomplished, she didn’t want to tear it all down.
But at what cost? The peak of this conflict hits with a shocking, disturbing act: Vedek Yassim kickstarts the resistance against the Dominion by publicly hanging herself in the promenade. I AM STILL REELING FROM THIS, Y’ALL. I didn’t expect it, and Moore does a brilliant thing with Kira. He mimics the routine we saw before Yassim killed herself, yet everything feels off. Yassim’s act hit Kira so hard that she can’t even do her normal day-to-day tasks without thinking about it. Not only that, but there’s a bizarre element for the audience, too! There are numerous shots of Cardassians and Jem’Hadar soldiers working on the station we’ve come to love. One Cardassian gets Kira her coffee in the morning. It feels wrong.
And I, for one, cannot wait to see how Kira is going to make this all tumble down. USE JAKE USE JAKE USE JAKE HE IS SO GOOD AT BEING A REPORTER, Y’ALL.
Crash Landing
At the end of “Rocks and Shoals,” we only have a vague idea of how the crew is going to get home, and it’s one of many bold choices in Moore’s story. The commitment to serialization at this point is downright ridiculous when compared to the rest of Star Trek, and it’s BEAUTIFUL. After escaping from two Jem’Hadar ships into a dark nebula, the crew crashes, everything is a mess, and thus, a complicated and ethically frustrating conflict plays out between the Federation characters and a group of Jem’Hadar soldiers who also crashed on the same planet.
Like with Kira’s plot, the story here relies so heavily on Sisko’s leadership, and I can’t imagine it any other way. Yet it’s not just because Sisko tries to put a wedge between the Jem’Hadar and their Vorta, though that’s a huge part of this episode. In the end, Sisko and the rest of his crew are pawns of Keevan, the manipulative, cunning Vorta who assured his own survival at the expense of everyone else. And for a moment there, I genuinely believed that Sisko was going to pull off the impossible. He’d gotten Third Remata’Klan to talk with him in ways we don’t often see of the Jem’Hadar, and it was clear that Keevan was despicable. With the low supply of Ketracel White, I figured that the Jem’Hadar would turn against Keevan.
Yet the crushing brutality of what actually happens reminds us of the pointless nature of war. Will the Dominion ever benefit from their soldiers dying? What of the Starfleet officer who died? Are lives changed for the positive? Will anyone even remember these people in the end? Or will they just become numbers? I know I might not seem all that cynical in general, but this story is dire on purpose. The Dominion are not a caring people. They are not in this war for good or ethical reasons. And they have forced Sisko’s hand in a way to make him and the other crew members kill people who had little to no other option but to follow orders. How much worse is this war going to get?
I’m scared.
The video for “Rocks and Shoals” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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