[8.5/10] “The Siege of AR-558” is a grim, dispiriting episode, but in a weird way I’m glad for it. We haven't had a committed “war is hell” episode in a while-- certainly not one this stark since Jake Sisko saw the front lines in “Nor the Battle to the Strong” back in season 5. They’re important. I think of them as the necessary cost of doing rousing episodes where our heroes retake the station in glorious battle and for the fun larks when they play baseball on the holodeck in wartime.
War isn’t fun. You wouldn’t necessarily want to rub the audience’s nose in that every week. Forcing viewers to face bleak horror on a weekly basis might be a recipe for disaster. (Or maybe not. Hello Walking Dead fans!) But episodes like “The Siege of AR-558” are crucial reminders, that behind the four-color excitement and political intrigue and comic relief that are the necessary stock and trade of a network television show, real mortal conflicts are not so pristine or so bloodless. Doing an arc like The Dominion War wouldn’t feel right without them.
The truth is that Deep Space Nine won’t, and probably can't, make any of its major characters a casualty of war. (Hell, even Jadzia was killed by magic demonic lightning rather than as a realistic death in the throes of battle.) Soi savvy viewers know that, outside of a key finale or special event, the chances of anything serious happening to our heroes is slim. “The Siege of AR-558” gets around that in a few interesting ways.
The first is introducing a crew on the front lines and integrating them with our own. Introducing a raft of new characters, who’ve been on some godforsaken rock fending off Jem’hadar attacks for five months, is a dicey proposition. There isn’t time to develop all of them in depth, or establish deep relationships with the main cast. Instead, you have to rely on the strength of performance and a certain degree of recognizable archetypes to carry the day.
Thankfully, the episode and the guest stars pull that off pretty darn well! The actor who plays Vargas, the young shell-shocked soldier, overdoes it in many places and seems overmatched. But he’s also clearly giving it his all and making some big choices, which I appreciate. Lt. Larkin is a bit generic in her conception, but you get the clear sense of an underranked officer stepping into the leadership vacuum and trying to hold everyone together in an impossible situation.
Deep Space Nine isn’t going to spend months in a foxhole, but it can give us characters who have. Through Vargas and Larkin, you get that sense of exhaustion, that sense of constant terror, the sense of being alone in the struggle, and most of all the sense of abundant and looming death, in front of and behind you. The likes of Sisko and Bashir slip into that mode pretty easily, and they’ve both seen some action, but their part is more to recognize and appreciate the hell that their comrades are going through, and show their acknowledgement by stepping into the fray alongside them.
The closest friendship we see is the one between Ezri and Kellin, the spritely-if-tired engineer tasked with decoding the Dominion comms station. He and Ezri working together to reprogram the Jem’Hadar’s “houdini” mines gives them a chance to bond. The episode doesn’t belabor it, or pretend that they’re instantly the best of friends. But we see them relating to one another through working on the same problem, commiserating over what it’s like to be in harm’s way, whether you’ve had nine lives or one. There’s a shared humanity between the two of them. So even if it’s not as deep a relationship as the one between Dax and Sisko, you feel it when Kellin goes to save Ezri in the final fray and dies in the process. The stasis of 1990s television means DS9 can't kill off the people with care about, but it can give us the untimely ends of people they care about.
It can wound our heroes, though, and if there’s a piece of “The Siege of AR-558” that truly rends the heart, it’s Nog’s piece of the battle and the loss that comes with it. The young Ferengi is relatable, admiring the Jem’Hadar-slaying, knife-sharpening commando who represents a kind of badassery Nog aspires to. He is enthusiastic, devoted to his duty, ready and willing to put himself in harm’s way for the good of the mission and his brothers- and sisters-in-arms. Which makes it all the more tragic when he loses his leg in a skirmish after scouting the enemy.
Nog is a child. He’s noble but naive. He’s grown since we first met him, but is still not far removed from being a green cadet. That means he’s extra motivated to prove himself, to show his courage. The same goes for his Ferengi heritage, which he seems low-key resentful of. He has a chip on his shoulder and devotion to duty that is admirable,but also worrying for someone we’ve watched grow up. So when he loses a limb in this fighting, when his ability to walk is put in doubt by how quickly they can get him to a hospital, when his friends and allies have to look at him lying immobilized on a table as he tries to keep a brave face, it breaks your damn heart.
So does his uncle looking after him. Quark’s inclusion here is a bit strained, with a fig leaf that Zek wants him on a fact-finding mission for some reason. But it’s worth the contrivance to get his perspective in all of this. Once again, he offers an outsider’s perspective on war and the Federation, resisting the values fans like me take for granted and making legitimate counterpoints. He is a nice foil for Sisko in that.
More than anything, as venal and self-serving as Quark can be at times, he represents the idea that war is senseless, and the loss of life and health that goes with it is gallign. Sisko cuts the figure of someone who understands the necessity of this grisly business, but who feels every name on those casualty reports anew. They work as counterpoints to one another, essentially focused on the same problem -- the misery and loss of life involved in war -- only differing on whether it’s worth it or not.
He’s also an oddly appropriate mouthpiece for how dehumanizing and dangerous all of this can be. His speech about how people can become animals when you put them in impossible situations has become rightly iconic. We see that devolution, in Vargas, in Reese, in the soldiers who are at their wits end having been stranded on some far flung planet of some strategic importance and under constant attack. Quark gives name and verse to the crumbling of the soul they might not have the words for. He’s an unexpected spokesman, but an eloquent one as always.
But he’s also an uncle, and that's the other role he plays in all of this. He represents the civilians at home, worrying about their loved ones, wanting them kept out of harm’s way. It’s unfair when he accuses Sisko of not caring after he sends Nog on an operation. But he’s also understandable in not wanting his loved one to be thrust into danger, in not understanding why it can't be somebody else, in being angry and resentful when harm comes to a young man he cares about.
Quark has had some laudable moments to go with his shameful ones over the course of the series. But there may be none more touching than him hovering over his sleeping nephew, tending to his fevered brow, and using his acute Ferengi ears to detect an incoming Jem’Hadar soldier and blast him before he can dare hurt Nog even more. In a script co-written by the series’ showrunner, Quark has his faults and his selfishness and his dim view of humanity, but he is also a loving family member, who protects a barely-grown young man from the worst of a war he abhors.
He has reason to abhor it. Much of what carries the spirit of “The Siege of AR-558” is not just the crisp dialogue or the withering performances, but the haunting atmosphere of the piece. The Federation base has the vibe of a mortuary, with human beings stretched beyond their limits and expecting death at every turn. Some of that is the production design, which uses (presumably) the usual Planet Hell set to evoke the sense of some barren, forbidding locale where comforts are scarce and pain points are abundant.
But much of it is just the tone and the pace. One of the best things the episode does is convey the creeping horror of waiting around for the inevitable strike. We get the sense of soldiers waiting around for what they know is coming, forced to settle their nerves and resign themselves to the onslaught ahead. We get a sense of the grim business of turning an enemy’s own deadly weapons against them, turning their craven trespass into your righteous defense.
Most of all, we get the sense of the fog of war. Worf calls it a glorious battle, but it doesn’t feel that way in the moment. The combat is not beautiful or triumphant. It is dizzying, fast, and harrowing. At times, it’s not clear who’s living and who’s dying. They don’t play the rousing score of a brilliant defeat of the Dominion like in past episodes, but rather a morose lament, as the Jem’Hadar storm the base and too many of those we know well and briefly fall at their hands. This is not a noble battle or a glorious victory. It is just another brutal fight, with too many dead in its wake.
When Captain Sisko starts the episode, he confesses that over time, he’s become inured to the reams of the names of the fallen. It’s easy to do the same in Deep Space Nine. Even in the franchise’s most committed exploration of conflict and battle between nations, the war is often at a remove, conveniently popping up at times when it’s exciting and dramatic. Who wouldn’t see it as another adventure, another sweetener, that distinguishes Deep Space Nine in its devotion to that idea, but not that far removed from Kirk’s conflicts with the Klignons or Picard’s stand-offs with the Romulans.
“The Siege of AR-558” is something different. Its bleaker, starker, more devoted to the on-the-ground misery and suffering and loss that war always entails, far away from comfortable admirals and exciting storylines. When it ends, Sisko is stirred anew to remember those names on the casualty list, to feel those losses, to remember the costs paid by those who’ve fallen for the cause. And by devoting this time to the same losses, to the people who die in war and the conditions under which they fight, the show urges the audience to do the same.
War in fiction can be fun and thrilling. War in real life is anything but. It’s good, maybe even a moral obligation, for a show like Deep Space Nine to remind us of that.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2024-05-30T22:23:50Z
[8.5/10] “The Siege of AR-558” is a grim, dispiriting episode, but in a weird way I’m glad for it. We haven't had a committed “war is hell” episode in a while-- certainly not one this stark since Jake Sisko saw the front lines in “Nor the Battle to the Strong” back in season 5. They’re important. I think of them as the necessary cost of doing rousing episodes where our heroes retake the station in glorious battle and for the fun larks when they play baseball on the holodeck in wartime.
War isn’t fun. You wouldn’t necessarily want to rub the audience’s nose in that every week. Forcing viewers to face bleak horror on a weekly basis might be a recipe for disaster. (Or maybe not. Hello Walking Dead fans!) But episodes like “The Siege of AR-558” are crucial reminders, that behind the four-color excitement and political intrigue and comic relief that are the necessary stock and trade of a network television show, real mortal conflicts are not so pristine or so bloodless. Doing an arc like The Dominion War wouldn’t feel right without them.
The truth is that Deep Space Nine won’t, and probably can't, make any of its major characters a casualty of war. (Hell, even Jadzia was killed by magic demonic lightning rather than as a realistic death in the throes of battle.) Soi savvy viewers know that, outside of a key finale or special event, the chances of anything serious happening to our heroes is slim. “The Siege of AR-558” gets around that in a few interesting ways.
The first is introducing a crew on the front lines and integrating them with our own. Introducing a raft of new characters, who’ve been on some godforsaken rock fending off Jem’hadar attacks for five months, is a dicey proposition. There isn’t time to develop all of them in depth, or establish deep relationships with the main cast. Instead, you have to rely on the strength of performance and a certain degree of recognizable archetypes to carry the day.
Thankfully, the episode and the guest stars pull that off pretty darn well! The actor who plays Vargas, the young shell-shocked soldier, overdoes it in many places and seems overmatched. But he’s also clearly giving it his all and making some big choices, which I appreciate. Lt. Larkin is a bit generic in her conception, but you get the clear sense of an underranked officer stepping into the leadership vacuum and trying to hold everyone together in an impossible situation.
Deep Space Nine isn’t going to spend months in a foxhole, but it can give us characters who have. Through Vargas and Larkin, you get that sense of exhaustion, that sense of constant terror, the sense of being alone in the struggle, and most of all the sense of abundant and looming death, in front of and behind you. The likes of Sisko and Bashir slip into that mode pretty easily, and they’ve both seen some action, but their part is more to recognize and appreciate the hell that their comrades are going through, and show their acknowledgement by stepping into the fray alongside them.
The closest friendship we see is the one between Ezri and Kellin, the spritely-if-tired engineer tasked with decoding the Dominion comms station. He and Ezri working together to reprogram the Jem’Hadar’s “houdini” mines gives them a chance to bond. The episode doesn’t belabor it, or pretend that they’re instantly the best of friends. But we see them relating to one another through working on the same problem, commiserating over what it’s like to be in harm’s way, whether you’ve had nine lives or one. There’s a shared humanity between the two of them. So even if it’s not as deep a relationship as the one between Dax and Sisko, you feel it when Kellin goes to save Ezri in the final fray and dies in the process. The stasis of 1990s television means DS9 can't kill off the people with care about, but it can give us the untimely ends of people they care about.
It can wound our heroes, though, and if there’s a piece of “The Siege of AR-558” that truly rends the heart, it’s Nog’s piece of the battle and the loss that comes with it. The young Ferengi is relatable, admiring the Jem’Hadar-slaying, knife-sharpening commando who represents a kind of badassery Nog aspires to. He is enthusiastic, devoted to his duty, ready and willing to put himself in harm’s way for the good of the mission and his brothers- and sisters-in-arms. Which makes it all the more tragic when he loses his leg in a skirmish after scouting the enemy.
Nog is a child. He’s noble but naive. He’s grown since we first met him, but is still not far removed from being a green cadet. That means he’s extra motivated to prove himself, to show his courage. The same goes for his Ferengi heritage, which he seems low-key resentful of. He has a chip on his shoulder and devotion to duty that is admirable,but also worrying for someone we’ve watched grow up. So when he loses a limb in this fighting, when his ability to walk is put in doubt by how quickly they can get him to a hospital, when his friends and allies have to look at him lying immobilized on a table as he tries to keep a brave face, it breaks your damn heart.
So does his uncle looking after him. Quark’s inclusion here is a bit strained, with a fig leaf that Zek wants him on a fact-finding mission for some reason. But it’s worth the contrivance to get his perspective in all of this. Once again, he offers an outsider’s perspective on war and the Federation, resisting the values fans like me take for granted and making legitimate counterpoints. He is a nice foil for Sisko in that.
More than anything, as venal and self-serving as Quark can be at times, he represents the idea that war is senseless, and the loss of life and health that goes with it is gallign. Sisko cuts the figure of someone who understands the necessity of this grisly business, but who feels every name on those casualty reports anew. They work as counterpoints to one another, essentially focused on the same problem -- the misery and loss of life involved in war -- only differing on whether it’s worth it or not.
He’s also an oddly appropriate mouthpiece for how dehumanizing and dangerous all of this can be. His speech about how people can become animals when you put them in impossible situations has become rightly iconic. We see that devolution, in Vargas, in Reese, in the soldiers who are at their wits end having been stranded on some far flung planet of some strategic importance and under constant attack. Quark gives name and verse to the crumbling of the soul they might not have the words for. He’s an unexpected spokesman, but an eloquent one as always.
But he’s also an uncle, and that's the other role he plays in all of this. He represents the civilians at home, worrying about their loved ones, wanting them kept out of harm’s way. It’s unfair when he accuses Sisko of not caring after he sends Nog on an operation. But he’s also understandable in not wanting his loved one to be thrust into danger, in not understanding why it can't be somebody else, in being angry and resentful when harm comes to a young man he cares about.
Quark has had some laudable moments to go with his shameful ones over the course of the series. But there may be none more touching than him hovering over his sleeping nephew, tending to his fevered brow, and using his acute Ferengi ears to detect an incoming Jem’Hadar soldier and blast him before he can dare hurt Nog even more. In a script co-written by the series’ showrunner, Quark has his faults and his selfishness and his dim view of humanity, but he is also a loving family member, who protects a barely-grown young man from the worst of a war he abhors.
He has reason to abhor it. Much of what carries the spirit of “The Siege of AR-558” is not just the crisp dialogue or the withering performances, but the haunting atmosphere of the piece. The Federation base has the vibe of a mortuary, with human beings stretched beyond their limits and expecting death at every turn. Some of that is the production design, which uses (presumably) the usual Planet Hell set to evoke the sense of some barren, forbidding locale where comforts are scarce and pain points are abundant.
But much of it is just the tone and the pace. One of the best things the episode does is convey the creeping horror of waiting around for the inevitable strike. We get the sense of soldiers waiting around for what they know is coming, forced to settle their nerves and resign themselves to the onslaught ahead. We get a sense of the grim business of turning an enemy’s own deadly weapons against them, turning their craven trespass into your righteous defense.
Most of all, we get the sense of the fog of war. Worf calls it a glorious battle, but it doesn’t feel that way in the moment. The combat is not beautiful or triumphant. It is dizzying, fast, and harrowing. At times, it’s not clear who’s living and who’s dying. They don’t play the rousing score of a brilliant defeat of the Dominion like in past episodes, but rather a morose lament, as the Jem’Hadar storm the base and too many of those we know well and briefly fall at their hands. This is not a noble battle or a glorious victory. It is just another brutal fight, with too many dead in its wake.
When Captain Sisko starts the episode, he confesses that over time, he’s become inured to the reams of the names of the fallen. It’s easy to do the same in Deep Space Nine. Even in the franchise’s most committed exploration of conflict and battle between nations, the war is often at a remove, conveniently popping up at times when it’s exciting and dramatic. Who wouldn’t see it as another adventure, another sweetener, that distinguishes Deep Space Nine in its devotion to that idea, but not that far removed from Kirk’s conflicts with the Klignons or Picard’s stand-offs with the Romulans.
“The Siege of AR-558” is something different. Its bleaker, starker, more devoted to the on-the-ground misery and suffering and loss that war always entails, far away from comfortable admirals and exciting storylines. When it ends, Sisko is stirred anew to remember those names on the casualty list, to feel those losses, to remember the costs paid by those who’ve fallen for the cause. And by devoting this time to the same losses, to the people who die in war and the conditions under which they fight, the show urges the audience to do the same.
War in fiction can be fun and thrilling. War in real life is anything but. It’s good, maybe even a moral obligation, for a show like Deep Space Nine to remind us of that.