6x11 Chain of Command (2)

[8.8/10] Torture is self-defeating. It’s a simple but powerful statement from Jean-Luc Picard. The brutal poetry of “Chain of Command pt. 2” is the way that Gul Madred destroys Captain Picard physically while Picard steadily destroys him mentally. And there is no greater moment of that in the episode than when he turns the very fact of his torture into an admission of weakness by his tormentor. It is a folly, an error, a sign of a failed civilization losing its way.

The tet-a-tet between Picard and Madred is tremendous, volcanic, arguably unmatched in all of Star Trek history. The decision to put two great actors in a room for most of the episode and simply let them play off one another is brilliant. All we have from them is one man torturing another, with a personal and political backdrop to give it context. The Next Generation chooses to let those men’s performances fill the space and provide more intrigue and investment than any intergalactic firefight could.

All due credit to the legendary David Warner. Beyond showing his chops in Trek in both The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country, Warner had practically perfected the role of the gentleman villain, something he would bring to bear as Ra's al Ghul in Batman: The Animated Series among many other roles. His tone and affect expertly convey dignity and menace -- satin dipped in cyanide. He is Picard’s equal in refinement and intellect, not some one-dimensional brute, which establishes him as a worthy adversary and gives Warner the space to do what he does best.

And yet, as fantastic as Warner is in the role, Patrick Stewart may give his best performance in the whole damn series here. After five and a half seasons, it’s easy to take Stewart’s effortlessly great acting for granted. But here, he digs deep and finds a vulnerability, a rawness, a strength of will in the most difficult of circumstances, we rarely get to see from the polished officer he normally portrays.

Kudos to Stewart for approaching the material with such vulnerability and to veteran director Les Landau for eliciting it. Stewart allows himself to be stripped naked and strung up (tastefully obscured, of course), putting him in a state of weakened exposure that’s rare and meant, in-universe, to be humiliating. His scraggly unshaved face and tremoring hands communicate his debilitation and the distance from his typical dignified presence. His howls of pain are not the gritty grunts of an action movie hero who grimaces gruffly with each strike and blow, but the noises made by a wounded animal no longer in control of its own body. The commitment of his performance, the lengths he’s willing to go to show how much Picard is debased and vulnerable here, is an unparalleled achievement.

So when you set these two great performers against one another, the results are magical. Gul Madred has dimension as an antagonist here. He lies to the good captain, manipulates him, even toys with him. But he is also a true believer, the equivalent of a Picard for the Cardassians. He admires archeological treasures and wrinkles his nose in disgust at how they’ve been squandered on his home planet. He rejects Picard’s critiques of his people’s militarism with the argument that the Cardassian armed forces put food on its people’s plates and provided for his countrymen. He has a child whom he loves, even as he does such unspeakable, violative things to his “prisoner of war.”

In short, he’s more than a one-dimensional, easily bested adversary, but rather a formidable opponent with his own comprehensible motivations and defensible perspective on this clash of civilizations. That makes him no less cruel or reprehensible, but it makes his cruelty more interesting, and gives his clashes, verbal and otherwise, with Captain Picard, that much more depth.

My one complaint about “Chain of Command pt. 2” is that after a great start, we don’t get nearly the same depth in the Enterprise-set half of the episode. Jellico is still a jerk. His negotiating position takes a hit when Gul Lemec reveals that the Cardassians have captured Picard snooping around their facility. He and Riker continue to butt heads. There’s not much more shading adding to their conflict, or Jellico’s general crappiness, than we got in part one.

But there’s a couple of new instances where Jellico does something Picard never would. The first is the breaking point between the new captain and Riker. Jellico refuses to prepare a rescue mission to save Picard, and more than that, he refuses to admit Picard was acting under Starfleet orders so that Jean-Luc could receive proper treatment under Federation-Cardassian treaties. It’s a bridge too far for Will, who half-respectfully calls out his new commanding officer out of a sense of loyalty to his old one, and gets relieved of duty for insubordination.

It’s the most hateable thing Jellico does in the “Chain of Command” duology, which is no small feat. What’s interesting is that if you squint, you could see Picard considering the same options. As devoted as Jean-Luc is to his crew, you could see a “needs of the many” argument, or at least a trademark moral dilemma, when the threat of a war that could result in the deaths of thousands if not millions hangs over our heads. In the same way, you could see Picard himself being reluctant to admit the existence of a secret mission to infiltrate enemy territory, for fear of sparking that war.

But even when Picard’s made hard choices, he’s considered them, felt anguish over them. Jellico is single-minded and seems focused only on the strength of his bargaining position. His dismissal of Jean-Luc being unrecoverable seems callous rather than pragmatic. His concern about confessing the circumstances of Picard’s orders isn’t due to broader concerns about the war, but a more nebulous “It could weaken my stake at the negotiating table.” It’s a hard-headedness we never saw in the Enterprise’s regular captain.

And it’s never fully resolved. After Riker’s relieved of duty, he and Jellico have it out, “dropping the ranks” and telling each other what they think of one another. Jellico is, I suppose, adult enough to admit to he needs Will’s skills as a pilot for his mission, and Riker is professional enough to agree to do it despite his differences with his new commander. I guess Will has something of a last laugh by proving that, whatever their mutual objections, he’s invaluable enough that Jellico has to come to him and ask for his help. But something about their issues still feels unfinished, simply relieved through Picard’s return to duty than fully taken care of.

But that’s partly due to Jellico’s second big decision. In his most Picard-like maneuver yet (short of pulling his shirt down), Jellico relies on his team to figure out where the Cardassians are likely hiding. Still, to his crew’s chagrin, he uses this information to gamble on the fact that what’s waiting for him in that spot is a military force, not a group of research vessels. More to the point, he assumes any armed conflict will be worth it, despite the risk of great casualties on both sides.

He dictates this plan to the senior staff, dismissing their grievances over the riskiness of the plan and the prospect of lost lives. They don’t quite get to Riker levels of calling him out, but they bristle at this very un-Picard-esque choice to go spoiling for a fight and assuming that a military solution to diplomacy is the best, if not only, option available.

Here’s the thing though -- he’s right! Or at least he guesses correctly. And I’m not sure what The Next Generation is trying to say with that. On the one hand, Jellico is a craven asshole who earns the loathing of practically all of our regular characters, who does things our usual paragon of virtue would never do. On the other, it’s his demanding style and risky, life-threatening gamble that solves the immediate conflict and even secures the return of that imprisoned paragon of virtue. Jellico wins, and I’m not quite sure how to take that.

But the best spin I can put on it comes from the other half of the episode. It comes when Gul Madred speaks lovingly to his daughter, seeming to admire her as much as Jellico admires his the son whose pictures he plasters on the walls of his ready room. When confronted by Picard on how he could let his daughter witness such suffering at his hands, Madred affirms the righteousness of his cause, excuses the brutality he doles out as a necessary evil, and justifies his actions as required to preserve his people’s way of life in a time of hardship and danger.

It’s not far removed from something Captain Jellico himself might say.

Maybe I’m going too far. Maybe I’m overreaching. Jellico and Madred certainly have different styles and demeanors. Jellico is the bulldog general, and Madred the poison-tongued sophisticate. But their view of this conflict seems the same. Their justifications for military solutions to diplomatic problems ring with the same tone. And their views of those across the table as merely an enemy that needs to be brought to hell or neutralized largely align.

For all the torture and cruelty in “Chain of Command”, the most chilling thing Gul Madred says or does in the episode comes when he tells his daughter that humans don’t really love their children, not like Cardassians do, that they’re not like us. It is, if you’ll pardon the expression, the sort of dehumanization that hate-mongers conjure whenever they want to justify the morally dubious actions they want to take. It’s worse than brutality; it’s planting the seeds for more brutality.

And the only consolation is that Picard never fully succumbs to it. His body weakens, feels the pain of his enhanced interrogation, but his will remains strong. Even without power or privilege, Picard stands firm. He pokes holes in Madred’s excuses for Cardassians branding their neighbors as enemies who get what they deserve. He calls out the weakness of using such tactics. He seizes on Madred’s story of surviving on the streets of his homeland, declaring his captor a scared little boy who never recovered from the bullies he encountered at that age. He chooses to suffer rather than let another member of his crew suffer his fate. He is defiant, steadfast, principled to the last, the man we know and admire even when he has every mental and physical reason to give in.

But in a strange way, Madred wins too. Picard doesn’t actually know the information Madred wants to give up, so no kind of persuasion, neither pleasure or pain, could get the Cardassian interrogator what he wants. He doesn’t even succeed in getting Picard to tell him what we wants to hear, to gain full submission even when the choice between a life of peace and intellectual challenge versus one of continued abuse hangs over his prisoner.

Still, as Picard admits to Troi, for all his grand show of defiance, for all he’d done to hold onto himself and his faculties amid unfathomable pressure and misery, Picard genuinely saw five lights, rather than the four that were actually there.

There is the rub. When you resort to the tactics of Madred and Jellico, you may achieve your objective. You can strongarm an enemy into doing your bidding and even seeing the world as you demand it. But you darken your soul in the process, pulling yourself further and further away from the high-minded ideals you’re so zealously ready to defend. You reduce the value of human life and the dismiss the cost of human suffering. And you become more and more like the caricatured villains you’ve made out of your opponents, no matter what side of the line you’re on.

Worse yet, you don’t get what you truly want. As Picard himself once put it, a Starfleet officer’s first duty is to the truth. To distort that truth, in yourself or others, is a trap. Jellico wins the day, but he loses the respect and trust of his officers, and the Cardassian conflict wears on. Madred tames his quarry, but finds himself undone by Picard’s disarming questions and challenges, and only succeeds in forging a man who would tell him whatever he wants to hear, rather than the truth.

The same folly accrues to the Federation and the Cardassians. Any method that only generates mistrust in your compatriots, opens more wounds rather than heals them, and dictates truths rather than discovers them, is merely a slow-burning method of self-defeat.