Time to recap another fave of the hivemind! Let’s see what you guys picked for me this time…

[returns] Well gosh dang do you all ever love Benjamin Sisko In A Crisis Of Morality! DRAMA. ETHICS. And, new: INTRIGUE, which also goes by the name GARAK, thank u.

Season 6, Episode 19: ‘In the Pale Moonlight’

Curtain opens on Ben Sisko in his quarters, starting a personal log. I was about to take a sidebar about how amused I am by the whole concept of officers keeping personal logs, because every time one happens I think about how in the earliest days of TOS the writers clearly said to themselves hey, y’know what would be a convenient way to get our characters to monologue about their inner thoughts and feelings? A Starfleet culture of keeping audio diaries. Anyhow that device turns out to be THE ENTIRE FRAMEWORK OF THIS EPISODE, a-lol.

“I need to talk about this,” Ben says, out loud. “I have to justify what’s happened, what I’ve done. At least to myself.” Like, yes you first-person narrator of a Victorian horror story, take us back, make us understand how you will forever be A Changed Man after this Experience. What a classic opening.

[chuckling appreciably]

No one is chuckling in this first flashback scene though. It’s the grim weekly ritual of his crew filing in to check the list of Starfleet officers missing or confirmed dead that Sisko posts on the wall of the wardroom. Ben hates Fridays now.

Evidently the Federation is losing a lot of ships to Jem’Hadar sneak attacks from around the Romulan border. The Romulans had signed that nonaggression treaty with the Dominion a while back, and are apparently planning on turning a blind eye, not getting involved, and generally just sitting back and letting all their enemies destroy each other in their drawn-out war. If the Romulans were to join forces with the Klingons and the Federation, then maybe our guys would stand a chance against the Dominion, but as stands, they’re likely to continue taking these losses, possibly until they lose the whole thing.

Sisko has had it.

Personal Log VO: “That was the moment I made the decision. It was like I had stepped through a door, and locked it behind me. I was going to bring the Romulans into the war.”

MELODRAMA A-FUCKIN-HOY, FRIENDS

Keep reading