Picard requires his officers to resign their commission first, and reinstates them after they’re done.
The Federation operates on the “we were on a break” rules
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
Also don’t let yourself think you are doing what’s right when you are doing whats comfortable and easy for you as Sisko does several times.
It’s been awhile for me.
Can you think of an example to jog my memory?
Worf joined a terrorist group to mess with the weather on Risa, and saw absolutely zero consequences.
Returning Rugal to his father, half of his actions to do with the maquis and everything he does in a pale moonlight are the immediate ones that come to me.
“In the Pale Moonlight” was something Sisko was very much not comfortable with. He’s very clearly struggling with his morality the entire time and is enraged when he discovers Garak played him and murdered people. His, “I can live with it,” thing is him trying to convince himself, not a statement of how he feels.
Classic Asimov
I like Sisko because he makes the difficult choices other captains don’t. It’s not to say that he’s always right (poisoning a planet just to catch Eddington, the lamest Star Trek villain since the Pak’led, seemed a little extreme), but he’s willing to make decisions with lasting consequences, as opposed to Picard whose problems tend to get resolved by the end of an episode. Ah, if only EVERY issue could be fixed in 44 minutes!
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Picard didn’t have to deal with a war. Or at least, deal with the consequences of one.
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Just once or twice a season… Please?!! I haven’t committed treason in two years!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Sisko wasn’t a perfect Star Fleet commander but he was the perfect Star Fleet commander for a frontier outpost like DS9. Any regulations and by the Academy officer would’ve been eaten alive by DS9, the station needed someone with the power of The Federation behind them while able to turn their back on certain necessary evils.
Also get his hands dirty too. It needed a Star Fleet officer who wasn’t afraid to flip the switch during The Dominion Wars and utilize the military side of the peace force. It only cost him his humanity, but he sacrificed it to be the officer that would unleash human’s capacity for savagery upon The Dominion, knowing it was the only way to defeat them.
It reminds me a bit of Murtry from Cibola Burns of The Expanse series, “We fly out here to this new place, and because we’re civilized, we think civilization comes with us. It doesn’t. We build it. And while we build it, a whole lot of people die. You think the American West came with railroads and post offices and jails? Those things were built, and at the cost of thousands of lives. They were built on the corpses of everyone who was there before the Spanish came. You don’t get one without the other. And it’s people like me who do it. People like you come later. All of this? This is because you showed up too early. Come back after I’ve built a post office and we’ll talk.” Murtry was a murdering psychopath but he wasn’t entirely wrong either. The Federation is just another form of manifest destiny but at a grand scale. But instead of using muskets and murder, The Federation uses something much more insidious: politics. Sisko is charged with bringing The Federation’s values and system of governance to the final frontier, and like most changing of the guard, it will cost bodies. Sisko is like Star Fleet’s Murtry, someone like Picard is like Holden who comes later after we built a post office.
Ok … so do we need a Lawful-Chaotic + Good-Evil matrix for Trek?
I mean, so many of the main characters would be on the good side of things, it might get crowded
Still interesting to see the contrasts.
Garak - Chaotic Neutral? Dukat - Lawful Evil?
Worf - Lawful Neutral? Picard - Lawful Good?
Kira - Chaotic Good? Kai Winn - Lawful Evil?
Dukat is a prime example of a character that slides all over the scale you almost have to put him as neutral. He starts lawful evil, bound by his word amd antagonistic to anyone not in his faction.
Then he slides to being lawful neutral as relations thaw and elements of his past are exposed while he begins to see his federation counterparts less as adverseries and more like friendly rivals.
Once his half-breed daughter comes into play he eventually slides up to being lawful good, doing everything in his power to be a model father and role model for her and using every last ounce of his influence to care for her. While still operating in self interest, he is far more willing to use his resources to aid his former enemies even when inaction on his part would probably be a net positive given the problems they are solving.
But then the allure of former power and glory mixed with a reminder of who he once was leads to a betrayal of his new friends with some surprisingly honest comments about how he wishes they could have stayed friends but his people’s best hope hinges on him making a deal with the devil. He’s back to being lawful evil but he’s not out to kill his rivals, despite getting more than a few opportunities to do so. In his own words, he only wants them to realize they were wrong to oppose him, and he would only kill them if given no other choice.
This spiral does not stop there though, as when all his plans and schemes fall apart due Sisko’s hail Mary, followed immediately by the death of his daughter leads him into madness and finally being Chaotic Evil. All his former allies are viewed as betrayers who ruined his plans and deprived him of glory. And he almost immediately turns to a new, almost literal devil to be hos patron as he carries out much more personal and haphazard attempts at revenge, with all previous ties and virtues he once held discarded since they no longer serve him.
Wonderfully put! And I don’t think putting him Neutral-Neutral would make sense … he has an arc, as you outline so well, which would be worth plotting over the chart. Your post should rendered in that way to illustrate how awesome his arc is.
That being said, in my mind, achetypal Dukat is always original Lawful Evil with the chaotic Evil lurking within.
Garak is prime chaotic neutral. The perfect spy master.
Janeway: those are cadet numbers
Janeway: “If anyone on this ship is going to be a terrorist, it’s me! Now move aside and let me push the button!”
Archer: “Can you all please stop committing acts of terror for five minutes?!”
Pike: “Nobody will want to become a terrorist after they’ve tried my cooking.”
To be fair, most of the galaxy will do anything Pike asks you so you can stay in his quarters…
Then there’s Janeway with her 1st officer being a former member of a literal terrorist organization along with a substantial fraction of her crew.
How is that any different from Sisko? His first officer and lots of his crew were former members of the Bajoran Resistance.
There might be a difference between a resistance to an occupier and a rebellion against your non-occupational government.
IIRC, a lot of the Maquis were Federation colonists whose worlds got handed over to the Cardassians due to a treaty they didn’t get a say in. Is it really that different?
Yeah but the Marquis were just that, colonists. Bajor was the ancestral home to resistance fighters. I think that’s why they’re looked down upon a bit by the galaxy like yeah it sucks the planet you found outside of The Federation got traded off but you come from the largest galactic government, maybe choose a different rock?
I dont remember Sisko’s crew getting recruited after trying and failing to overthrow him.
What’s “pspsps” in Cardassian?
The uncorking a bottle of Kanar. That or the sound of a dying Bajoran priestess.
Im on season 3 of DS9 and I’ve been waiting the whole season to hear the backstory of Sisko’s goatee that he’s sporting on the FVD cover and then they spend a total of 5 seconds on it that amounts to “I wanted to try something different”
Good for him, let the man live.
Avery Brooks wanted the look he had playing Hawk in Spenser: For Hire back.
And can you blame him? It’s a fantastic look.
The Federation are the biggest terrorists out there.
So brave
