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!

Eventually, we get into a discussion of pure evil. Gul Dukat finds himself on a planet with Sisko, whom he has saved. Dukat is suffering a kind of nervous breakdown after the death of his daughter and the loss of DS9. What starts out with what appears a kind of compassionate, though reserved reconciliation, turns into Dukat's effort to use his advantage over Sisko (who has a severely damaged arm and other injuries from their crash). We realize quickly that they could be saved, but Dukat envisions a slow death for his adversary. As the story moves along, we see that Dukat has no compassion or empathy for the people he slaughtered--only disdain and fury. His daughter's death is really rather meaningless to him. I thought this was a pretty good episode.

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?".

I rarely rate individual episodes, and this one has been sorely underrated. Star Trek is a wonderfully diverse series; sci-fi action, comedy, and as this episode demonstrates, quite capable of top-shelf drama.