DS9 Flashback: For the Uniform

Near the end of season four of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (in "For the Cause"), recurring characters Kasidy Yates and Michael Eddington were revealed to be working for the Maquis. Half a season later, Kasidy Yates had been brought back into the fold. But Eddington was still out there, a dangling plot thread that was picked up in "For the Uniform."

Starfleet traitor Michael Eddington is stirring up trouble with the Maquis, and Captain Sisko is determined to capture him. Sisko's fixation leads to the crippling of the Defiant, orders to stay out of the action (which he soon ignores), and ultimately to an embrace of the villainous role Eddington assigns him. Like Valjean in Les Misérables, Eddington sees himself a hero who has committed at worst a trivial crime... and he sees Sisko as the monstrous Javert, who won't just let it go.

Every time a Maquis story comes around, I remember that the entire concept of the Maquis was thrust upon them by the creation of Star Trek: Voyager. They might have just as easily chose to ignore it. But I'm glad they chose to follow up on the story of Eddington -- even if it takes a familiar, Wrath of Khan-like structure of vendetta via space battle, with a literature-quoting nemesis out-thinking our hero until he's inspired to think outside the box.

Eddington does come off marvelously deluded in this episode. Though he casts himself as the hero, he maroons Sisko's contact on a planet where he'll surely die a slow death, justifies mass slaughter because he's targeting a different race, and takes clear joy in taunting Sisko despite his protests that it "isn't personal." Of course, more interesting villains never see themselves as the villain, but Eddington is so far from the Valjean he imagines himself to be that it's actually rather hard to empathize with his point of view.

It actually undermines Sisko's "heel turn" in this episode a bit that Eddington is also so dark. I love Avery Brooks' intensity throughout; he's legitimately frightening in the scene where he unloads emotionally to Dax (and physically, on a heavy bag she holds), and he's cold as ice in the moment where he too elects to use weapons of mass destruction. But there's tonal dissonance to the way it's all sort of whomp-whomped at the end. He and Dax laugh that the plan was never run by Starfleet; roll credits. But wait a minute! Sisko destroyed a planet! That probably won't sit well with Starfleet, at least not until there's a long examination of whether the ends justified the means here. (But at least this episode did open the door to this sort of brash, Kirk-like action. That paved the way for a much stronger examination of these themes in season six's "In the Pale Moonlight.")

Another echo of the Wrath of Khan vibe is the way this episode feels more militaristic than most Star Trek. The damaging of the Defiant, and subsequently taking it out anyway in more analog fashion, creates a real submarine-type environment. There's more background dialogue than normal, orders are being repeated and relayed through Nog, and there's the sense that any action will take time to carry out. It's fun and effective for this story.

Also supporting this story is some strong visual effects work. After not liking the CG look of the Badlands in previous episodes, supervisor Gary Hutzel decided here to recreate them by pouring liquid nitrogen ("which boils furiously at room temperature") onto black velvet and filming it in slow motion. It looks much more dangerous; similarly impressive are the collapse of a planet's atmosphere after Sisko bombs it, and the sluggish movements of the damaged Defiant.

A visual effect of decidedly more mixed results, however, was the "holo-communicator" introduced here. You might imagine the concept was here to save money on viewscreen shots, or bridge sets for other starships. Or maybe you'd expect it for narrative reasons, to avoid the Wrath of Khan "problem" of the rivals never being in the same space during the story, using holograms to portray them in one room. But nope; the holo-communicator is here mainly because it had been bothering staff writer Ronald D. Moore: "it's so absurd that in the twenty-fourth century they have holodeck technology that allows them to recreate Ancient Rome, but everybody talks to each other on television monitors."

After trying and failing to get this technology added to the Enterprise-E in First Contact, Moore convinced DS9 show runner Ira Steven Behr to go for it here. But the effects department hated the idea. How were they to show this "amazing 3-D image" in the 2-D medium of television? How do you distinguish that it's a hologram and not someone beaming in? Are you supposed to move the camera constantly? That can be time-consuming and expensive. Is it a lighting effect, or is that just confusing? Is there some sort of visual element that winds up being far more expensive than a viewscreen shot would have been? No one really liked the results here, so the holo-communicator would appear in only one more Deep Space Nine. (Decades later, Star Trek: Discovery would have the time and budget -- and the benefit of advancing real-world technology -- to make holographic communications in Star Trek a regular thing.)

Other observation:

• I love the opportunity Odo takes to get in a dig: that Starfleet should be reminded that Eddington was only on the station in the first place because they didn't trust the shapeshifter.

"For the Uniform" has its rough patches, but it still looks good overall. I give it a B.