Well, I'm back. How's everybody been? I see from looking at my Trek blog that it's been just over a month since my last post. In case anyone's under the impression I've forgotten my Greatest Moments in Trek series, let me say it isn't so. I've been on vacation visiting my fiancé’s family in North Carolina and my friends and family in Tennessee. I also attended the Nashville star trek convention, and I intend to repost my blog about that from my main blog to this one here with some expansions and revisions for trek fans. Still, that comes after I finish the series.
When approaching Deep Space Nine, I found myself in a bit of a pickle. I already have a longish post devoted to DS9, so should I really write another one? Admittedly, I didn't know when I wrote that post that I'd be taking up this series, so there is a question of thoroughness and consistency to be considered. Finally, I decided to write a DS9 post for this series, but in doing so, I've decided to impose this rule on myself: I will not discuss any episodes that were mentioned in the long DS9 post found earlier in this blog. After all, why make you read something you've already read before, right? Otherwise, I'm following my by now customary formatting. That is, I’ll discuss two episodes of my choosing, providing a short summary for each followed by my discussion of what, to me, are its most hard-hitting points.
The interesting thing about DS9 is the ways in which it departs from star trek that came before it. Most notably, we see a new vision of the star trek universe emerging. As Richard Arnold once put it, Jean Roddenberry imagined that with time, we would change as a species and his trek universe imagines us as we could one day be. Michael Pillar and Ira Stephen Bear, on the other hand, suggest that the more things change, the more they stay the same and that humanity will be much as it is then as it is now. That's certainly a more historically consistent, if less idealized, portrait of the future, and it ticked off a number of fans. What resulted, in my opinion, is something of a compromise. Earth is still a great place to live in DS9, a paradise according to more than one person. Many of our social ills have indeed been vanquished and humanity is undoubtedly much better off in that time than this. In that sense, Pillar and Bear didn't tamper with Roddenberry’s design. Yet, it remains true that there will always be those who don't play by your rules of good conduct or espouse your values. Enter the Dominion. And there will always be those who see it as their sworn duty to uphold your way of life, even when it means sacrificing every principle you hold dear while doing so. Enter section 31. I find the result, Deep Space Nine, to be something that functions with greater character depth and richer levels of complexity than The Next Generation or the Original Series, each of which stands well on its own with many deep characters and profoundly complex moments.
While I had seen about a third of Deep Space Nine prior to the 2004 Los Vegas convention, I came home realizing that there was much I hadn't seen and more I needed to know about characters like Worf and O'Brian, characters who had become known to me throughout TNG. By the end of 2004, I had watched the series the whole way through, and have done so at least four times since then. This meant that by the time of the 2011 Nashville convention, I had gained a deep appreciation for the character development of non-Federation characters like Martok, Damar and Kei Winn. Likewise, I came to realize that only DS9 tackles these questions consistently over time and with such depth. It's not that TNG or Voyager or TOS fails to tackle tough questions, but DS9 demonstrates what a television series can do when those questions persist, recurring again and again. That being said, here we go.
"Tribunal"
Story by Bill Dial
Summary: All the summaries of this episode (and of all the Deep Space Nine episodes for that matter( are entirely too long and written by people who obviously have no idea how to summarize. So, I pen my own short, concise summary below:
Miles O'Brian and his wife Keiko are on their way to a much needed vacation when their runabout his stopped by a Cardassian warship. The Cardassian commander, Gull Evek, boards the runabout and upon discovering a consignment of photon torpedo warheads in the runabout's cargo bay, takes O'Brian into custody.
O'Brian is taken to Cardassia Prime, where he is slated to stand trial, a trial in which his verdict is already sealed. Back on DS9, Sisko and his crew examine the evidence, discovering in due course that a Cardassian, surgically altered to look like an old shipmate of O'Brian's, covertly recorded voice samples from the chief and used them to gain access to the warheads and to plant them on the chief's runabout. When the Cardassian court proves unwilling to entertain this new evidence, Sisko brings the Cardassian plant directly to the court room. The judge, seeing that this attempt to discredit the Federation has backfired, releases O'Brian.
This episode marks a couple of firsts. It's the first time we see the Cardassian home world, a bleak and spartan sort of place. It's also the first, last and only in-depth look we get into the Cardassian legal system. It was as though, in their attempt to fashion this Kafkaesque machine, Pillar and Bear went out of their way to create a legal apparatus that functions on the most diametrically opposed basis from the American one as possible. And they were successful.
Whatever its flaws, the American, and to a greater degree, the other judicial systems of the western world, function on the presumption of innocence; that is, you are thought to be and are treated as though innocent until the state proves that you're guilty, and it's up to the state to provide enough evidence to convince a judge or jury of your guilt. In a forum like the American judicial system, a trial is the proving ground where your defense matches wits with the state and attempts to convince a judge or jury that the state's case just isn't strong enough. Not so on Cardassia. On Cardassia, the state gathers the evidence against you, considers it and renders its verdict of guilt, always guilt, before you see a court room. There is still a trial and it is a public trial, but its purpose is to allow the state to publically explain its verdict of guilt and to allow the people, in a mentality somewhat akin to Orwell's two-minutes hate, to revel in the triumph of the state. You even get a lawyer, a conservator, as he's called, and you also get an advisor, a nestor. The conservator and the nestor are charged not with your defense, but with persuading you to concede to the state and to confess publically, thereby reaffirming the essential rightness of the state in its conviction of you. O'Brian's conservator, Kovat, explains the whole mentality, and I've reproduced Kovat's statement here, leaving out O'Brian's interjections:
Whatever you've done, whatever the charges against you--none of that really matters in the long run. This trial is to demonstrate the futility of behavior contrary to good order. Everyone will find it most uplifting. Once again, justice will prevail. Our lives will be reaffirmed safe and secure. Here on Cardassia, all crimes are solved. All criminals are punished. All endings are happy. Even the poorest of our citizens can walk the streets in the dead of night in perfect safety. You are only one man, but your conviction will be a salutary experience for millions.
As I was preparing to write about this episode, I read the blog of a public defender here in America. He said that to him, the most brutal and crushing aspect of his job wasn't the low pay or the overwhelming case load. It was the seeming presumption by just about everyone, media, John Q Public, even implicitly, potential jurors, that your client is guilty. That's a sentiment I've heard many times, that the presumption of innocence is a myth in this country. The common wisdom seems to be, "if they arrested you and put you on trial, you must be guilty." Nowhere in our judicial system does this seem more true than in a rape trial. Now, rape is a brutal and savage crime, and none of what I'm about to say should be seen as taking anything away from genuine victims or as vindicating or absolving actual rapists. However, sex crimes have this unique distinction: once accused, you're ruined. All it takes is a word, even a false accusation. And you, usually the male suspect, are forever tainted. You're seen as guilty, and it is very hard to defend yourself against the charge of rape, mostly because most defenses turn on trying to prove consent. Now, some say that growing skepticism and the advancement of DNA technology is reversing this trend in thought, but I doubt it. I doubt it very much. Want a concrete example?
I remember the recent arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, in May of this year. He was charged with sexually assaulting Nafissatou Diallo, a thirty-two-year-old maid at New York City's Sofitel Hotel. He was indicted, placed on a million dollars bale and placed under house arrest. Now as it happens, that case has pretty much collapsed, because the prosecution has come to believe that the alleged victim was full of shit, which, from what I can tell, she was. She lied repeatedly to investigators and to the grand jury. All in all, this is a woman who gives genuine rape victims a bad name. But let's consider Strauss-Kahn. He resigned his post at IMF on May 18, and I doubt he will ever be reinstated. The rest of his professional career will be overshadowed by these events. Yes, I am presuming his innocence, because in the aftermath of the arrest, what did I hear? Too often did I hear sentiments like, "and he thought he could get away with that; well, they wouldn't arrest a high profile fellow like that if he wasn't guilty; [and as the case wound down], I can't believe he got away with that." How do you defend yourself against this? Often times, you don't.
In truth, I sometimes feel that we in America come closer to Cardassian justice than we do to our own espoused ideals. The episode, "Tribunal," explores what our worst presumptions of guilt, like in the Strauss-Kahn affair, might look like if we acknowledged them and made them both institutional and state policy. It's a little scary, isn't it? But even if we don't put on puppet trials like those of the Cardassians, that's not to say that we couldn't. Right now the closest examples I can think of are the Moscow show trials during Stalin’s purges of the 30's, or McCarthy’s activities with the House on Un-American Activities Committee in the 50's. We have got to be careful to preserve the notion of guilty until proven innocent, to do more than pay lip service to the ideal. Better indeed that ten guilty men go free than to hear, "Mr. Blair, whatever you have done, whatever the charges against you--none of that really matters in the long run. This trial is to demonstrate the futility of behavior contrary to good order."
"Rocks and Shoals"
Story by Ronald D. Moore
Summary:
Sisko and his crew crash their stolen JemHadar ship on an alien world deep inside a nebula. Unknown to them, a unit of JemHadar has also crash landed on that planet. The Vorta is gravely injured and, upon learning of the Starfleet presence on the planet from a captured Nog and Garak, enlists the aid of Dr. Bashir. With Bashir and Sisko present, the Vorta, Kevan, reveals that he has the smallest amount of Ketrecil White remaining, not enough to maintain the discipline and sanity of the JemHadar soldiers he commands. He offers to send them into a Starfleet ambush, thereby killing the JemHadar before they can go berserk and saving the rest of their lives, including the Vorta's own. When Sisko fails to persuade the JemHadar commander to surrender, the JemHadar attack as ordered and are wiped out. The Vorta then surrenders his communications equipment and himself to Sisko's custody.
This episode is one of the most compelling of the early Dominion War. What no one I've read has yet mentioned is the tie between this episode's title and the notion of discipline and good order. "Rocks and Shoals," is the title of the old U.S. Navy regulations manual detailing offenses and punishment codes of the American Navy. I should add that, since World War II, it's been superseded by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but no naval officer would fail to recognize the title of this episode and suspect some of its themes.
Let me start by saying that I'm not ignoring the Terok Nor subplot in this episode because I think it unimportant. However, the burgeoning resistance to Dominion rule on Terok Nor is a multi-episode-spanning concept, and only a fraction of it is dealt with in "Rocks and Shoals." I've decided to forgo it in light of the main themes of the show.
Discipline and a soldier's right duty are the major themes of the episode, and they are depicted well. Watch it again and take note of Third Remata'Klan. As JemHadar go, he is portrayed as an intelligent soldier, with more dialogue than most JemHadar get in the series. He believes passionately in self-discipline and in his role as the only one who should discipline his own men. As he says to Kevan after his botched reconnaissance mission, "You can discipline me, but only I discipline the men. That is the order of things." I'm sure there are many soldiers who wished their platoon leaders would stick up for them like that, and many more who could see in this moment a section commander who did, in fact, stick up for them in a moment like that one. Of a man like Remata'Klan, we can say what Eisenhower is alleged to have said of the German General Rommel, "a good man who just happens to be fighting for the wrong side." Remata'Klan is not blind to his commander's betrayal. But to him, two wrongs don't make a right. That is why he doesn't feel he has the authority to surrender his men when the Vorta hasn't authorized it. I'm not saying what he did is right. I don't believe in blind obedience to orders. But part of me has to admire the dedication of a soldier who pursues his duty with the absolute certainty that it will be his death. Sisko points out the betrayal and asks the soldier if he is really willing to give up his life for the order of things. Remata'Klan's answer is reminiscent of the ultimate sense of duty and honor. It is an answer that frustrates and anguishes Sisko, but one that General Martok would have understood perfectly: "It's not my life to give up. And it never was."
The other notion of right and wrong here that I want to pick out and explore is the idea of rules in warfare. We often take it for granted that things like ambushes and attacks on civilians and so on are somehow against the rules these days, somehow less in keeping with honorable warfare. A bit of that mentality comes out when Sisko and his officers are preparing the ambush. O'Brian and Nog bring this out, with O'Brian pointing out that there are rules even in war. Garak represents the other side, pointing out that humans' notions of rules in war frequently make winning harder. Which one is right? Well, as Sisko points out, it's not a vote. This discussion among his men about the rightness of what they're about to do throws some ambiguity into what otherwise might be a situation we take for granted, attacking the enemy. Is it right that we behave as they do? Shouldn't we be better than that? Or is it about survival, survival at any cost and by any means necessary. The trouble is that I think both answers are correct. Sisko seems to think so too. His loathing of what he's done comes out in his attitude towards the Vorta. Note the loathing on Sisko's face and in his voice as he tells O'Brian to take the Vorta into custody. Finally, I like it that Sisko orders the JemHadar buried. It may be inconsequential to them and it may change nothing about what's happened, but it is a sign of respect here from one soldier to another. Indeed, Sisko in this episode definitely has much more in common with Remata'Klan than with the Vorta, Kevan.
This is not the first episode of star trek to deal with a soldier's duty and the notions of right and wrong in times of war. But it makes the Dominion War more personal and puts it on a face to face and man to man level. It's easy to kill an enemy who's on another ship or star base or planet. It's harder to do so when you've looked him in the eyes, talked to him and established some common ground. Just some more food for thought furnished by star trek. Now, on to Voyager.
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