3x07 Civil Defense

[8.5/10] I’m a fan of “People Trapped Together” stories. Everything from the claustrophobic horror of Saw to the psychodrama of Breaking Bad’s “Fly”, to this episode’s spiritual predecessor from The Next Generation have their distinct charms and captivating takes on the idea. Something about throwing people together in a room, forcing them to strategize, confide, commiserate with one another just brings out the best in the characters and the writers.

“Civil Defense” is one of the great entries in that genre for a simple reason – it offers three distinct but equally great flavors of this kind of story. From the comedic, to the rough-and-tumble, to the technical and political, Deep Space Nine hits every superb note in the “confined problem-solving” sheet music and blends them together to craft a beautiful melody.

Hell, I even love the premise of this one. There’s something so perfect about the fact that what traps everyone on board the station and creates the threat our heroes must overcome is a legacy Cardassian security program meant to neutralize slave revolts. The catalyst for the plot has a practical elements, as the defense measures against the “Bajoran workers” create solid obstacles for the various members of the crew to overcome. But it’s also telling for the Cardassians in general and Gul Dukat specifically.

The fact that this is a regular enough occurrence that Dukat has specific protocols and recorded messages in place is a sign of the regimented oppression on board Terok Nor and the fight that remained in the poor Bajorans imprisoned there. Dukat’s arrogant, faux-benevolent, blame-shifting tone represents the Cardassian ethos toward the Bajorans, with a failure to recognize slave revolts as a product of their own cruelty rather than the “Look what you made me do” posture Dukat takes. And the fact that the ultimate protocol is to self-destruct the station instead of yielding to the revolt shows the extreme lengths these taskmasters would go to avoid giving their victims the slightest bit of quarter.

All that ballast aside, my favorite story thread in the episode may very well be the lightest of the three. Odo and Quark have been magic together since the earliest days of the series, so locking the two in the constable’s office for these proceedings is a real treat. DS9 has already played this setup for fantastic drama with Odo and Lwaxana Troi in the elevator, so letting Odo have a more humorous bent this time is a deft choice.

The Ferengi and the shapeshifter remain the show’s best odd couple. I love how their dynamic turns insults into compliments and compliments into insults. When Quark thinks he’s done for, he throws himself a pity party about not having achieved more, only for Odo to reassure him that whatever Quark’s self-described shortcomings, he’s the most “devious” Ferengi Odo knows, something that soothes Odo’s lobed counterpart. And when the force fields penning in the station’s residents dissipate everywhere except Odo’s office, the changeling concludes that Gul Dukat must have assumed he’d side with the Bajorans in any revolt, only for Quark to upbraid him that they wouldn’t be in this mess if Odo weren’t so conspicuously honorable. The opposites attract friendship between the two of them brings plenty of laughs, and even the way they comfort and scold one another highlights them as one of the series’ best and most important duos.

The most substantial subplot, though, comes from the folks who are trapped in Ops. Kira, Dax, and Dr. Bashir struggling to override the Cardassian failsafe that has taken over their station is the most traditionally Trek story thread of the three. Their solutions are mainly technical, finding creative ways to prevent the ship’s legacy defense mechanisms from triggering and attempting to mask their presence as “unauthorized users” through other console-based trickery. As with the last episode, things kick up a notch when Garak joins in, using his command codes to move about the station and attempt to save his home, with the irony of this being the one place where his authority is still recognized not lost on him.

Even when this portion of the episode is in pure-problem-solving mode, it’s still superb because of the limitations and character traits that come to the fore. Dax has the technical knowhow, but burns her hands attempting to fix the problem, meaning she can’t fix many of the issues personally. Dr. Bashir can heal, but without his usual supplies, he can’t cure. Garak can use his codes to solve small problems, but Dukat’s mistrust of him prevent him from deploying his usual talents to solve big ones. Kira invokes her favorite solution to any troubling situation – just fire a phaser at it – but it’s not enough to overcome these challenges. All our heroes are stymied in organic, interesting ways that makes this nut all the tougher to crack.

To the same end, “Civil Defense” is a great example of threat escalation keeping the stakes high, the problem evolving, and the challenges riveting. What starts as simple confinement turns to mortal threats for those captive to a jaw-dropping willingness to kill civilians to a station-wide threat. Twelve hours of life support left becomes two hours until self-destruction becomes thirty minutes in which to decide whether to let a Cardassian garrison post on the station or let two-thousand souls perish instead. Every time the good guys have one issue rectified, another, graver one pops up.

None is graver than Gul Dukat. Marc Alaimo’s villain is an unctuous treat every time he arrives, but he’s in rare form here. It’s unusual for him to have so clear an upper hand, so watching him smugly, menacingly lord it over the team in ops is wonderfully villainous. The irony of his revolt-busting plans giving him a foothold to force Starfleet and the Bajorans to allow him back on the station is a cause for great joy to the show’s biggest antagonist (give or take a certain Bajoran pontiff). The way he offers his help, for a serious price, while sitting in his office again, and forcing Kira to weigh her Bajoran pride against a Federation-esque principle to protect innocent life at all costs shows both his cravenness and savviness as a operator.

The vision we get of Dukat as a preemptive crusher of righteous slave rebellions matches with the one willing to use a mortal threat to thousands of innocent people to his political advantage. That's why it’s so delicious when his smug attempt to beam off the ship is met with a similar failsafe, as his superiors feared him abandoning his post, so leave him stranded here as well. His lot being thrown in with the people he was just trying to extort, and he and our heroes having to work together to save all of their butts makes for a great turn and dynamic in the climax of this story.

That just leaves the simplest, but arguably the most traditionally exciting story of the trio: Benjamin, Miles, and Jake stuck in an old mining corridor and having to work their way out. While Odo and Quark are comedic, and the Ops crew (plus two Cardassians) is technical and political, the mining crew is the most action-packed. The chief, the commander, and his son working together to patch their way through old corridors and shafts has a “Die Hard on a Cardassian refinery” quality to it.

The most compelling part of it is how the trio’s forced to be resourceful with less than their usual compliment of available support. Jake has to crawl his way through an old mining tunnel to open a hatch and save them from inhaling toxic gas. Chief O’Brien must use the handle of a minecart to jimmy his way into a light fixture, and jury rig an explosive to get out of another room. And Commander Sisko must cover his hands with torn strips of his uniform to make it through a piping hot Jeffries tube to redirect the power core’s blasts meant to destroy DS9. These challenges push the group to their physical limits, scrapping and crawling and using whatever’s at their disposal rather than resorting to the usual Starfleet technological fixes.

In truth, there’s little tension in the final tally. Granted, I know who lives and who dies by the end of the series, so that certainly dampens some of the danger for me. Even if you’re watching the season for the first time, you can probably guess that no one is going to perish in a random episode in the middle of the season (give or take a Tasha). And in truth, the episode struggles to come up with new tricks once Dukat is trapped there too, resorting to more technobabble solutions all around, with less than balanced visits to each corner of the plot.

Still, by the final act, it’s a thrill to watch Commander Sisko face down the danger and race against time to realign the whatever to stop the core from self-destructing. More than that, it’s rousing to see Jake disobey his father, and put himself at risk to rescue Chief O’Brien from the same perilous passageway, valuing his teacher’s life more than his own safety.

At the end of the day, “Civil Defense” asks the best of everyone here. The solutions at play – from Odo’s kindness, to the Ops crew’s creativity, to the mining team’s bravery – provide something for everyone to do to save the station from a desperate threat, and forces unlikely partners in even more unlikely scenarios to rely on one another. The benefit of a “stuck together” episode is just that: people who don’t trust one another being forced to do just that by circumstance and people who do trust each other having to find inventive solutions to unanticipated challenges. “Civil Defense” is a memorable (and meme-able) episode for just that reason – an all-around classics that finds everyone, even the bad guys, rising to the occasion.