Waltz

Dukat and Sisko have a heart to heart.

This is a solid character episode with a memorable central performance.

There is not much about the plot to reveal other than Dukat features heavily and Alaimo puts his heart into the performance. It is quite reminiscent of the movie 'Misery' where we have a psycho looking after/holding captive an injured patient. On occasions the dialogue is bit obvious with exposition and it can sound marginally awkward, but most of it works very well, particularly as Alaimo delivers it so well.

Avery Brooks is also great and the interplay between the characters lays the foundations for later episodes.

For me it's a 7.5/10, but I round upwards.

The beginning of this episode finds Captain Sisko on a ship that is holding the prisoner, Gul Dukat. Soon, however, the ship is attacked and Sisko awakens to find himself in a cave with Dukat. It seems that they managed to somehow escape and are hiding on a very inhospitable planet. Sisko is injured and dependent on his 'host'. This is bad enough since Dukat is a mass-murderer and war criminal. However, it becomes clear that there's much more to it--Dukat has lost his mind and is seeing and hearing people that simply aren't there. It also eventually becomes clear that unless Sisko escapes that Dukat might kill him, as he's obviously impaired and really, really flaky.

The biggest problem with this one is that too much time is spend with this pair. They talk, talk, talk and after a while it really drags down the episode. While not a terrible episode, it's certainly one you'll wish was shorter!

I love this episode, we finally see the complete mental breakdown of Dukat. We always knew he was a bad man, but this showed his true intentions!

You know that term white witch, it's supposed to describe a person who practices magic just like an ordinary witch only a white witch is good. Oh right that's okay then, he/she being good, everything is hunky dory and we need not bother about plagues of toads and such only -- what exactly does good mean? Is this witch good all the time, some paragon of virtue, illuminating the world with their beneficence, because that would be quite unique seeing that most ordinary people don't even approach that level of consistent benevolence . We might be good some of the time, we might not but it's a practical certainty that aren't gonna be good all of the time, in fact it might be likely that we're bad quite a lot of the time.

In fairy tales we have the good fairy and evil step sister stereotypes, in reality though, it's a little different. Yeah we understand that Hitler was evil if he was evil wasn't the same true of Stalin, good ol' uncle Joe they used to call him when Russia was an ally in the war, it was convenient to label him a despot until Adolf had chomped on his cyanide pill. And what about Harry Truman, dropping the bomb, killing tens of thousands in an instant and condemning many more to a lingering death, what could possibly be more evil than that?

Real life just isn't like fairy tales, good vs evil isn't just a dichotomy trivially resolved for the convenience of the plot, it's something we confront every day. There's the casual deceit of politics and the media, the ever present hypocrisy of public life, and the petty conflicts and drama of our own personal lives, all can be viewed as conflicts between good and evil.

I could go on but you get the general idea, while the concepts of good and evil are intrinsic to a lot of drama they tend to get stylized and assigned to specific roles. It's a case of black hat/white hat or in the case of Deep Space 9 Cardassian/Bajoran. To be fair there was some attempt to explore the grey areas of morality with the Federation vs Marquis conflict portrayed in TNG, but they couldn't quite get it done right. The Marquis were optionally stereotyped as either idealistic dupes or irresponsible rebels for the convenience of a particular plot.

The stereotyping continued with DS9, the Bajorans had suffered a long occupation, ruthlessly imposed by the despicable Cardassians. The occupation was portrayed as something like the Belgian rule of the Congo crossed with German occupation of France in the second world war. Rapacious exploitation of resources and labour along with mindless repression and spontaneous acts of barbarism. A tale of woe and misery indeed but happily all this his behind them because now the Federation is here all is sweetness and light. Yeah because that happens all the time in the real world when a repressive regime is overturned don't it? All was proceeding as expected in DS9, with the writers and script editors working a rich vein in the stereotype mines and then along comes Mark Alaimo and his portrayal of the character Gul Dukat...

It's still difficult to try and understand what happened but somehow, no matter how hard the writers tried to write him as lame caricature, Alaimo managed to make the character of Dukat resonate. They'd make him pompous, arrogant, deluded, foolish, randy as a coot, licentious, vein, oafish, murderous and Alaimo would just stride through the role and make it work. So DS9 became the Mark Alaimo show whenever his character featured in an episode.

I imagine his was not a circumstance that was particularly well appreciated in Trek town as it's pretty evident that Watlz is an effort to hammer a nail through the heart of Dukat's fan appeal. Well they pretty much succeeded, turning him into a gibbering imbecile, ranting his malevolence in terms so literal he may as well be wearing a badge with the word 'evil' printed on it. Of course in doing so, they pretty much threw the show's credibility, which was pretty low already, into the deepest part or the ditch.

The beauty of Star Trek is its ability to transfer real world morality onto alien and fictional characters. The same quandaries we've struggled with for centuries can be isolated and examined without baises in 45 minutes.

The scene with Gul Dukat, his mind broken by the weight of his ill action, flailing around to find meaning in his evil deeds is a piece of art worthy of study. Marc Alaimo always made that role his own but here he has a Shakespearian moment brought into the 21st century.

We all still engage in whataboutary. Explaining away things we'd prefer not to admit and ignoring the obvious foibles of people we want to support. War crimes are war crimes and here, in a clear picture, DS9 showed how the tyranny of oppression is backed by twisted belief of manifest destiny. The next time you ask "but what about.." maybe you should just ask "why?".