5x26 Call to Arms

[9.0/10] The world is turned upside down. For five years, Deep Space Nine has been teasing a conflict with the Cardassians, a conflict with the Dominion, an existential battle for this all important sector, and now it’s finally here. The fight the series has been saving for a rainy day is finally brought into the light, and reader, it was worth the wait.

“Call to Arms” is the biggest Star Trek has ever felt. From The Wrath of Khan and “The Best of Both Worlds” on, blockbuster films and season finales have felt the need to up the ante to ridiculous degree. The running joke about the Alex Kurtzman era of Star Trek is that every season of every show is some galaxy-threatening existential threat. But such calamities pop out of the woodwork out of nowhere and fade away just as easily.

“Call to Arms” is the early crescendo, if not necessarily the culmination, of tensions that have been with the show from the beginning, and friction that has only escalated since Sisko and company first met their new foes in the Gamma quadrant. The fate of the station, the fate of Bajor, the fate of Cardassia, the fate of the Alpha Quadrant as a whole, suddenly rests on the actions of our heroes. And the seismic changes that come feel absolutely earned on the back of five seasons’ worth of steady, engrossing development.

So the big shit goes down. The station’s faithful brace for war. Bajor signs a nonaggression pact with The Dominion. So do the Romulans. The Bajoran residents evacuate. The Dominion-Cardassian alliance attacks. Sisko and company defend just long enough to lace the wormhole exit with mines to stop further Dominion convoys. After one long season of waiting, the big confrontation is here.

And that is exciting as all hell, the earned payoff of a committed and continuous build. But what elevates “Call to Arms:”, and Deep Space Nine as a whole, is that this momentous installment is as much about the human moments that persist despite war as it is about the plot-heavy mechanics of this clash of civilizations.

Yes, the world is about to be turned upside down. But Leeta and Rom are still planning to get married. Captain Sisko and his son still have to hash out the awkwardness of Jake becoming a Starfleet reporter. Kira and Odo still have to dance around the recent revelation of Odo’s feelings. And, sigh, even Garak and Ziyal must still contend with their ill-considered flirtation.

The writers could have entirely leaned into the plot developments and still satisfied the audience. (That’s basically what they did with “In Purgatory’s Shadow”, to great acclaim.) Instead, there is as much about how these mixed up people relate to one another, despite and because of the desperateness of their circumstances, as there is about diplomacy and strategy. It’s a bold choice, and one that retains the human core that always drew me into DS9 and Star Trek.

What I appreciate the most is that it’s not a trite or facile “There is still the light in the darkness” sort of message about war. IT is, instead, about how human relationships persist, but are also disrupted by these epochal conflicts. There is a human cost, beyond the casualties that pile up, in the frayed connections forced upon people in times of conflict.

Odo and Kira put their feelings on hold during the pendency of this crisis, and in an amusing turn, both seem downright relieved by it. (It’s also a convenient out for the writers.) And Chief O’Brien sends his wife and kids to Earth. (Another move that makes sense under the circumstances, but is convenient for characters the writers don’t seem to care to write for.) And right after their awkward first kiss, Ziyal must leave for Bajor, while Garak must find another refuge from the Bajorans and Gul Dukat. And Dr. Bashir preps the infirmary while Jake stands ready to assist as he did in “Nor the Battle to the Strong”. And Jadzia accepts Worf’s marriage proposal, right when they’re about to be separated by war and at mutual mortal peril.

And then there’s Rom, the unsung hero of Deep Space Nine. Despite big things in his future, “Call to Arms” may be his greatest triumph. It’s Rom who comes up with the self-replicating mines idea that provides a suitable Federation bulwark in front of the wormhole. After fears of being unlucky in love, he marries his dream girl in a sweet little ceremony on the brink of war. And the tragedy is that he has to say goodbye to her right after because of the evacuation. (Though candidly, I’m not over the moon about the fact that he imposes this decision on Leeta without so much as discussing it with her. We gotta take the good with the bad.) He even becomes a Starfleet spy.

This is the high water mark for a character everyone, including his own son, had written off, showing that he is worthy of respect, love, and even admiration, when put in the right environment to come into his own.

He’s even noble toward the brother who doesn’t deserve his affections. Quark tells Rom to evacuate with his wife, but Rom refuses. He’s working to reinforce the station’s infrastructure and defenses, despite the fact that there’s plenty of “hyoo-man” engineers to do it, because come hell or high water, he wants to protect his big brother. There is something so piercing and perfect about Quark calling him an idiot, and kissing him on the back of the head. It’s an emotional highpoint from the least sentimental character on a series that includes Odo, and I don’t mind telling you that it made me tear up for a moment. If ever there were a benediction for Rom, this was it.

Those smaller, human moments make the big moments feel that much more momentous. Weyoung offering a plausible feint and plea for peace, only for Sisko to recognize it as a smokescreen for an attack shows the savvy of the station’s commander. The folks fleeing the DS9 while our heroes batten down the hatches comes with a charged energy. Kira “formally protesting” the Federation hanging onto the station before reporting for duty is a fistpump moment.

And then the battle happens. Dukat and Weyoun lead the charge, the two slimiest villains this side of Kai Winn, both with their teeth finally bared. The episode lives up to the billing. The cavalcade of Dominion and Cardassian ships circling DS9 while the station’s defenses fend off their foes leads to a magnetic space battle. The simple task of trying to hold the line long enough for Dax and the Defiant to lay down the mines creates an accessible goal for the audience to understand, and adds specific urgency to our heroes’ mission beyond “just stay alive.”

The joint attack even gives General Martok one hell of a “Big Damn Heroes” moment that vindicates the collaboration and trust the Klingon commander has developed with Starfleet over the course of the half-season. And it’s a nice counterweight to the season premiere, when the phony General Martok was exposed as a changeling.

In short, the battle is everything we’d hoped for -- epic in scope and scale given the long-simmering enmity involved, visually impressive with the flurry of ships entering and exiting the stage at the right times for dramatic excellence, and full of great storytelling moments that make this battle part of a larger narrative, not just a dose of spectacle to sate our nerdy expectations.

The biggest shock is yet to come. After protecting their home long enough for the mines to be set, our heroes (mostly) evacuate the station, and the bad guys move in. Captain SIsko is no longer installed in the posting he accepted back in “Emissary”, and Gul Dukat is back in the office he coveted on the newly redubbed “Terok Nor” in the same episode.

It is a hell of a bold move from Deep Space Nine. I won’t belabor how long the change lasts, but even if it were just for this episode and we flashed forward to everything being hunky dory immediately afterwards, it’s startling to see all that viewers have come to know and love over the past five years dismantled and replaced by the villains in the span of forty-five minutes.

To compare it to other star-bound franchises, this is Deep Space Nine’s Empire Strikes Back moment. The good guys have been expelled from their home. Dukat strolls the promenade as its overseer once more, with even Kira forced to kowtow to him.

With that change in status comes intriguing possibilities for what’s to come. WIth Bajor capitulating to The Dominion, how will Kira react to being under the Cardassians’ thumb again, let alone Dukat’s dirty digits. How will the self-serving Quark readjust to life aboard a Cardassian station after having reluctantly internalized some of those insidious Federation values? How will Odo handle remaining as station security chief when the power behind the power worship him as a god? How will Rom fare at pretending to be his brother’s put-upon employee again when he’s actually there to funnel information to the Federation? How will Jake get by when trying to stick around the station to report the story? Can the Dominion and the Cardassians coexist, let alone Dukat and Weyoun, when their interests already seem to be in tension? The teases here for next season are all completely thrilling.

(Okay, that last one is pretty cheap. I’m sure it’s a cool hook for the writers to leave, but I don’t believe for a second that Captain Sisko would leave the station without knowing his son is safe. The fig leaf they try to put on it with Benjamin’s “He’s a man; he can make his own decisions” is something, I suppose, but not terribly convincing given the father-son bond we’ve seen to date.)

Nonetheless, despite the loss, this is a hell of a moment for the Federation. You can almost feel Deep Space Nine reassuring its fans. The Starfleet-Klingon force is coming! They effectively damned up the wormhole! While the DS9 faithful kept the Dominion forces busy, a Starfleet detachment wrecked their Alpha Quadrant shipyards! The good guys may have lost this battle, but they still have a shot in the war. Balancing those two, the sense that our heroes have been bruised in a meaningful way, but that they’re still in the fight, is not easy. “Call to Arms” does it to perfection.

And this is also a hell of a moment for Captain Sisko. You may see no more politically noble move in the franchise than Sisko telling Bajor to sign up with the Dominion, because he cares more about preserving what they’ve built over the last five years than he does about any loyalty to the Federation. His speech to those who will remain and those who must leave the station after Starfleet’s last stand there is stirring, an affirmation of the roots and connections he and so many others have forged here. He and Kira’s final sabotage of the station is a nose-thumbing final gambit. And that damn baseball, still sitting on the desk in the commander’s office, is a hell of a taunt to his successor that he plans to be back.

It’s those kinds of touches that elevate this episode, and this series, to something incredible. With five years’ worth of subtly laying the groundwork, the powers that be have finally pulled the trigger on a full blown confrontation between the Federation and the Dominion. What results is one of the series’ high points, a dramatic earthquake of meaningful changes to the show we know and love in ways that are concerning but organic to the situation.

But this is also a story not just of nations, but of people, who found their place upon that old bicycle wheel, find their lives thrown into chaos with the advent of war, and still hold onto the pieces of one another they can cling to amid the phaser-singed wreckage. There is, of course, more to come. But as an opening salvo into another era of the show, Deep Space Nine pays off so much of the monumental, and of the personal.