Is made even more ambiguous by the fact that certain aspects aren't actually ambiguous.
The interesting thing about the Les Mis discussion is that nobody actually comes out and points out the most pertinent flaw in the analogy -- Valjean stole bread to feed his family while Eddington has resorted to mass murder. Over and above Sisko's obsession, Eddington is an extremely dangerous man, not only because he's convinced he's right but because he will gladly kill numerous civilians to achieve his goal. This is not some hypothetical game of who's morally superior or who betrayed whom or who has a legitimate grievance. This is a hunt for a psychopath.
The morality of Sisko's actions is very much up for debate, of course, and it's interesting to see this episode being written and aired at a time before the "War on Terror" and its excesses (though it followed the Cold War, where the same issues by state actors were just as pervasive and just as troubling.) Though it seems clear that the colonists were not in any immediate danger of dying before they could be evacuated -- if they were likely to die, this would be an entirely different discussion -- Sisko's actions have clearly taken the show into a much darker place than the usual Star Trek franchise, a place it has already begun to inhabit anyway. And yet I don't really share the concerns of other reviewers here. The time had come for the Star Trek universe to explore the unpleasant realities of war and terrorism in a fashion that wasn't restricted to the "other" -- the inhuman Borg, the violent conqueror Klingons, the treacherous Romulans, etc were all easily put into a category of clear and unambiguous threats to the "Federation way of life." But the idealistic visions that permeated TOS and TNG eventually had to crack under the weight of the universe-building that ST had been engaged in since the 1960s. At some point, portrayals of utopian fantasies run out of steam and Monsters of the Week start to become repetitive. So this episode was a crucial juncture in the expansion of the ST universe. Out in the far edges of the quadrant, things stop being resolved with a brilliant technobabble exploit and a few pithy words about how things are back to normal. When we are shocked by the actions of a character on a TV show, and Sisko's actions were shocking and difficult to consider acceptable, we can move on with the realization that our belief that we understood the nature of the world we've been presented might not be quite as solid and predictable as we thought.
The interesting thing about the Les Mis discussion is that nobody actually comes out and points out the most pertinent flaw in the analogy -- Valjean stole bread to feed his family while Eddington has resorted to mass murder. Over and above Sisko's obsession, Eddington is an extremely dangerous man, not only because he's convinced he's right but because he will gladly kill numerous civilians to achieve his goal. This is not some hypothetical game of who's morally superior or who betrayed whom or who has a legitimate grievance. This is a hunt for a psychopath.
The morality of Sisko's actions is very much up for debate, of course, and it's interesting to see this episode being written and aired at a time before the "War on Terror" and its excesses (though it followed the Cold War, where the same issues by state actors were just as pervasive and just as troubling.) Though it seems clear that the colonists were not in any immediate danger of dying before they could be evacuated -- if they were likely to die, this would be an entirely different discussion -- Sisko's actions have clearly taken the show into a much darker place than the usual Star Trek franchise, a place it has already begun to inhabit anyway. And yet I don't really share the concerns of other reviewers here. The time had come for the Star Trek universe to explore the unpleasant realities of war and terrorism in a fashion that wasn't restricted to the "other" -- the inhuman Borg, the violent conqueror Klingons, the treacherous Romulans, etc were all easily put into a category of clear and unambiguous threats to the "Federation way of life." But the idealistic visions that permeated TOS and TNG eventually had to crack under the weight of the universe-building that ST had been engaged in since the 1960s. At some point, portrayals of utopian fantasies run out of steam and Monsters of the Week start to become repetitive. So this episode was a crucial juncture in the expansion of the ST universe. Out in the far edges of the quadrant, things stop being resolved with a brilliant technobabble exploit and a few pithy words about how things are back to normal. When we are shocked by the actions of a character on a TV show, and Sisko's actions were shocking and difficult to consider acceptable, we can move on with the realization that our belief that we understood the nature of the world we've been presented might not be quite as solid and predictable as we thought.
