6x19 In the Pale Moonlight

[9.0/10] There’s a telling moment in “In the Pale Moonlight”. When Captain Sisko tries to convince Senator Vreenak that the Romulans should join the war, he responds that the Dominion will win the war at any costs. We’ve seen that. Weyoun will lie to your face and then stab you in the back. The Founders infiltrated the Romulan and Cardassian intelligence agencies and the Jem’Hadar fleet made short work of their attack forces. The Female Changeling told Garak that his countrymen were already dead for daring to try to disrupt their hegemony.

There is a swift, almost reflexive brutality to the Dominion, one seemingly unconcerned with decency or decorum; only the will of the Founders, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to ensure victory.

On the other side,though, war is not in the Federation’s DNA. Starfleet officers are trained to seek out diplomatic solutions. Their leaders are instilled with certain values, of tolerance, acceptance, peaceful coexistence, shared understanding, that don’t fit neatly into the realm of existential, militaristic threats. When Vreenak scoffs that the Federation has already sent out feelers seeking peace, he notes that Starfleet is outmanned and outgunned right now, but also such efforts are in the UFP’s nature, that Star Trek’s heroes are unsuited for this kind of conflict, so why would he ally with them?

He has a point. We’ve seen plenty of Starfleet commanders make tough calls in the field. We’ve seen them show guts and guile. But being outright dishonorable, underhanded, dirty is not in the manual. When you’re faced with an enemy unconcerned with moral or ethical limits, how far you’re willing to go to save yourself, to save innocent lives, is a valid question.

Because that’s the other telling motif in the episode. It all starts with Sisko posting the weekly casualty reports. The list of names grows longer and longer as the war rages on. A day where the only known person lost is a friend of a friend is a good day. It’s harder and harder to stand on principle as the names, and the bodies, pile up higher and higher. How many would it take before you were willing to sacrifice those values so central to Starfleet in the name of staunching the wound before the whole Federation bleeds out?

That is the thrust of “In the Pale Moonlight”. It asks how much of your soul you would sell to save a life, and to save a billion lives. It openly questions whether you should hang onto your deepest principles if doing so means annihilation. And it examines the personal costs, to your psyche and your self-respect, of being the one to make those calls and weather those blemishes on your conscience.

It’s that last point that marks the episode as one of Deep Space Nine’s finest hours. You can easily imagine this being one of The Next Generation’s boardroom debates, where the senior officers go back and forth over whether to be pragmatic or principled in the shadow of war. You can even imagine it as a more plot-heavy story, where our heroes navigate the web of espionage and backroom dealings to lure the Romulans into the fray, without much in the way of personal stakes. “In the Pale Moonlight” might still be good, even great, if that’s all we had.

But what makes it extraordinary is that, at the end of the day, this is a character story. The episode isn’t just about the machinations of war, or even the moral degradation necessary to succeed within that context. It is, instead, about what it feels like for Sisko to have to do this, to bend and break his own values in the name of the greater good, to have to deal with unsavory individuals doing unsavory things to potentially save the quadrant, and the toll it takes on him.

Much of that comes through the structure of the script and the direction of the episode. The tale of Sisko’s ploy is told via a frame story after the fact, with Benjamin relaying what happened through a log, to help himself work through these events and reconcile them with his own mental struggles. The choice gives us the chance to be in his head, to understand what he was thinking and going through in all of these moments, rather than having to intuit them.

That is a bit of a shortcut, in the way most voiceover is. But that’s counterbalanced by how vulnerable and personal Sisko seems through it all. Director Victory Lobl and company make the choice to have Benjamin look directly into the camera for all of this. You rarely see that on television. The Captain isn’t breaking the fourth wall, because of the conceit of the log. But it’s startling to have the character looking directly act you, speaking directly to you, in a way that breaks the normal grammar of how Deep Space Nine is shot.

It engenders a certain intimacy, a certain directness, a breaking down of the barrier between show and audience that helps us to connect with Sisko in this fraught moment. The decision feels theatrical. This is, in effect, one long monologue. And while in moments, Avery Brooks overacts the material a bit, he also carries the load remarkably, giving his all to moments both quiet and extreme, giving us insights into the mind of a man forced to reconcile the ideals he believes in most and the choices necessary to protect the people who can carry them on.

What I love about how the narrative unspools, in the hands of screenwriter Michael Taylor (he of the superlative “The Visitor”) and a story by Peter Allan Fields, is that this is a steady case of escalation. Sisko doesn’t set out to sacrifice his principles; he sets out to convince the Romulans to join their cause. His goal is a noble and practical one. But the steps to achieve it drag him further and further into the muck.

If you’ll pardon the provincialness of the reference, it’s a real If You Give a Mouse a Cookie situation. Convincing the Romulans means retrieving hard evidence of Dominion plans to invade Romulan space. Obtaining that evidence means retrieving top secret files from Cardassia Prime. Nabbing those files means availing yourself of Garak’s services.

And that’s the first point where things start to go sour. This isn’t the first time Sisko has used Garak as a resource. He knows what Garak’s methods are, the way he opens certain doors and closes others with a certain viciousness. It’s a familiar concession at this point, one that’s served the DS9 crew well time and again in the past.

But from there, things spiral even more. The contacts Garak seeks out start dying, and so his connections to Cardassia dry up. His alternative is to fake the evidence, which requires Sisko to call in a favor to parole an expert forger from Cardassian prison. And it means trading dangerous biomimetic gel that will likely be used for questionable purposes in order to get the data rod that will survive Romulan scrutiny. And it means being harsh with your subordinate who raises legitimate objections to the secrecy and danger involved. And it means bribing Quark not to press charges against your forger while he preens about your ability to think like a Ferengi.

Quark tells Sisko it’s proof that every man has his price. (That great Ferengi, “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase would no doubt agree.) Sisko doesn’t come to these choices easily though. He’s clearly uncomfortable with them. He’s sheepish with quark, testy with Garak, barely hiding his contempt for the forger. He’s short, even violent when things start to unravel and require more and more ethically questionable actions to shore things up. This noble quest, turned bitter and more mercenary every minute, is taking its toll on him.

I love it as a story about how one compromise begets another, about how an honorable purpose can steadily be corrupted into ignoble actions in service of a good cause. Benjamin doesn’t mean to violate his principles, but he’s in for a penny, in for a pound. Each new complication requires another moral compromise, until before he knows it, he wakes up and realizes he’s in bed with weasels and snakes, and to add insult to injury, earning Quark’s admiration for it. The insidiousness of that, the steady degradation of principle that leads you further and further down a disquieting path, shows how easy it is to let worthwhile ends lead to base means.

Beyond the ethical and psychological ideas the episode engages with, the way it uses that structure to tell the story, and build stakes, remains impressive. Romulan Senator Vreenak is only in a few scenes, but he makes a big impression because of how his presence reinforces those ideas, and how much is on the line. One more indignity Sisko must suffer is hearing this legislator demean him and his organization with a straight face and even a smile, because he needs this man’s support, another small but personal sacrifice Benjamin has to make in all of this.

We understand why though. I’d seen this episode before. I knew what would happen. Nevertheless, when Sisko shows Vreenak the forgery, when he talks about how its ability to pass muster could mean the difference between the Romulans joining the Federation-Klingon alliance and turning the tide of the war, or actively aiding the Dominion and putting the nail in Starfleet’s coffin, when he walks into the wardroom and waits for Vreenak’s response, I still felt the tension, the worry, the peril that all of this corruption and betrayal of your principles could be for nothing, or worse yet, signing the death warrant for all that you love and hold dear.

It is, famously, a fake. And the episode lets Sisko, and the audience, sit with the fact that this may all have been for naught, Worse yet, it may have doomed them all. The only thing worse than bending your moral code in the name of a good cause is losing that cause in the process.

But thankfully, the cause isn’t lost. Enter plain simple Garak, who sabotaged Vreenak’s ship, made it look like an assassination attempt by the Dominion after Vreenak learned the truth of their plans, and ensured that any inadequacies of the data rod will be chalked up to damage from the explosion. And for good measure, he kills the forger to tie up any loose ends.

It is a brilliant twist. It’s well set up with Garak telling Sisko he plans to skulk around Vreenak’s ship in the guise of gathering intel. It is very much in Garak’s nature to have a back-up plan all along, demonstrating his tactical genius in a way that elevates the character. His ploy is airtight, revealing a keen understanding of how his enemies and allies work (and showing cleverness on the part of the writers.) And most importantly, he hides it all from Sisko, knowing that whatever compromises the captain has been willing to make so far, killing two men would be a bridge too far, even though deep down, it’s what Benjamin really wanted.

Garak is nothing if not insightful. And while he gets beaten for his efforts, he recognizes that whatever Sisko’s frustrations and protestations, he wanted these underhanded tactics, these unseemly acts, from someone willing to do the things he couldn’t stomach, but still absolutely wanted to see happen. It is a damning indictment of Sisko in its way, and also a quiet admission, that however much the Federation prides itself on its values; its greatest champions will set them aside, or at least look the other way, when the stakes are big enough.

Sisko gives a now famous speech, about how he broke every rule, violated every principle, engaged in deception, bribery, and murder, but that he’d do it all again to save his comrades and countrymen from ending up on another one of those lists. What is the value of two innocent lives against a billion? As Garak says, it’s a bargain. The ugly thing isn’t that a Starfleet officer would stoop so low; it’s that such grim things feel necessary when the alternative is oblivion.

But as Garak notes, it also comes with another cost -- the self-respect of a good man. What I admire about “In the Pale Moonlight” is that it recognizes the personal cost in all of this. Killing, lying, covering things up go against the underlying ideals of the Federation, but perhaps they can be justified in extraordinary circumstances. That seems to be the characteristically dark point Deep Space Nine wants to make here. The usual Starfleet playbook, and the moral precepts that underlie it, go out the window in the face of an enemy who will obliterate you if you adhere to it. It’s the sort of realpolitik that’s emblematic of *Deep Space Nine’s worldview.

At the same, it acknowledges the stains on the soul, the pangs of a guilty conscience, what such moments require of decent people in indecent times -- to degrade themselves for the greater good.

Sisko’s now famous closing line is simple, “I can live with it.” This sort of thing isn’t in the Federation’s DNA. It’s definitely not in Sisko’s DNA. But if surviving the Dominion, and saving billions of lives, means acting like the Founders might to the smallest degree, it’s a price he’s willing to pay. Nonetheless, there is pain, hardship, difficulty at sacrificing your principles in the name of being able to preserve them for others -- a pain Sisko is willing to live with. It’s a peculiar kind of heroism and self-sacrifice, the kind we don’t see often in Star Trek, but that just makes it all the more piercing.

Only, he repeats that line once more, right after -- “I can live with it.” You can read that multiple ways: as mere rhetorical effect, as an affirmation for emphasis, or simply as an acknowledgement. But I read it as Sisko trying to convince himself, saying out loud what he wants to be true, even as the corruption and cravenness he facilitated and participated in still weighs heavily upon him.

There’s a good argument that Sisko did the right thing. Sometimes the hardest thing is to debase yourself so that others don’t have to. Sometimes the most challenging mission is to try to balance making the compromises necessary to defeat a heedless enemy while still managing to hold onto your soul. Sometimes you can persevere through that and make the choice that helps win the day. But as Quark might tell you, everything -- survival, self-respect, principle, and peace -- comes at a price.