“Extreme Measures”
Written by David Weddle & Bradley Thompson
Directed by Steve Posey
Season 7, Episode 23
Production episode 40510-573
Original air date: May 19, 1999
Stardate: 52645.7
Station log: Kira has brought the Jem’Hadar ship with the Breen weapon, along with an incredibly dry and flaky Odo, back to the station. Bashir is still looking for a cure, and he has some therapies that help Odo deal with the pain. Odo refuses to let Kira stay and watch him die, especially given how important her assignment is. After one last kiss, she goes off.
O’Brien has forwarded the Breen weapon to Starfleet Command, and Kira and Garak go off to rejoin Damar. Bashir and O’Brien then confide in Sisko their plan: to lure a Section 31 operative to the station with a false report of a cure. To hedge their bets, they don’t actually tell Sisko this until after Bashir has sent the false message.
Sure enough, one night Bashir wakes up to see Sloan sitting in his chair, just like he’s done several times before, and this time Bashir is ready with a containment field that surrounds the chair. Sloan is also genuinely surprised that Bashir’s message was fake, simply bait to get Sloan there. The doctor turns off the containment field and stuns Sloan, then brings him to the infirmary. Sloan tries threatening O’Brien’s family, he tries pleading ignorance, he tries pretty much every verbal tactic at his disposal, and when that doesn’t work, he activates a neural depolarizer to commit suicide. Bashir manages to stabilize him, but it’s a temporary stopgap.
Undaunted, Bashir instructs O’Brien how to construct a doohickey that will allow Bashir to interact with Sloan’s conscious mind. O’Brien insists on going along, partly so someone “with an ounce of sense” goes along, and partly so that he isn’t stuck explaining to Sisko by himself what they’re doing.
And so they ENTER SLOAN’S BRAIN! The man himself shows up, seemingly amenable to helping them out, but his mouth can’t form the words needed to explain the cure. This Sloan is very much like the affable one we first met in “Inquisition,” before he whipped out the thumbscrews. He insists on taking them to the wardroom, where a whole bunch of people are gathered—they’re avatars of the most important people in Sloan’s life. Or, at least, they would have been if he hadn’t spent all his life covering his tracks and being married to his work, as it were. He denied himself the chance at a life, and he is sorry for that. But in death, he can finally come out of the shadows and say he lived.
His wife is holding a padd that has the cure, and Sloan asks her for it. Just as he’s about to hand it to them, though, another Sloan—dressed in black and very nasty—shows up and shoots him. The wardroom is suddenly empty. O’Brien and Bashir chase Sloan through several corridors, and then are stopped by another 31 agent, who shoots them both. They actually feel pain, and collapse onto the deck. They spend several minutes having a hilariously ridiculous conversation about their friendship and the women they love and how they like each other more than the women they love (Keiko and Bashir’s theory, one O’Brien doesn’t subscribe to), and then they see a bright light. Eventually, they get to their feet, go to a door—
—and then they come out of Sloan’s mind to see Sisko, Worf, and a medical team, who got them out before Sloan could die. Despite the best efforts of Bashir and the medical team, Sloan dies.
After telling Odo that they lost their best shot at curing him, Bashir goes to his cabin—only to discover that the book he’s reading, A Tale of Two Cities, starts over on page 294, which is as far as Bashir had gotten in the book. They’re STILL IN SLOAN’S BRAIN! He couldn’t fill in the rest of the book because he’s drawing on Bashir and O’Brien’s own memories (and apparently he’s never read Dickens).
Sure enough, they find themselves back in the corridor where they were “shot,” and go into the door that they tried to go into when they “woke up.” Sloan is there, surrounded by a mess of padds and papers that are all over the floor, the desk, the shelves. Sloan is subdued, saying that this used to be tidy, but now that he’s dying, it’s a mess. Bashir learns that 31 had a person in President Jaresh-Inyo’s cabinet, and another on Qo’noS.
Bashir is captivated by all the secrets he can learn in this room. He tries to read all the padds and papers so he can remember them when he wakes up and bring down 31, but Sloan is tempting him with all this information so that when Sloan dies, they’ll die, too. Luckily, O’Brien is there to be the sensible one, and he convinces Bashir to wake himself up now that they have Odo’s cure.
Sure enough, they wake up just before Sloan dies. Bashir remembers the sequence, synthesizes the formula, and injects it into Odo. After a few moments of pain, he reverts to his liquid state and then reforms as the Odo we all know and love. He’s cured.
Bashir and O’Brien have a game of darts in Quark’s after hours, and then O’Brien says Keiko held dinner for him—he invites Bashir along, who tosses the dart right into the bull’s eye before departing.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Bashir instructs O’Brien how to construct a multitronic engrammatic interpreter, which enables him to ENTER SLOAN’S BRAIN!
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko is kinda pissed that Bashir and O’Brien went ahead with their harebrained scheme without consulting him, but he gives the plan his full support while admitting that it’s probably a long shot.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira initially refuses to leave Odo’s side in the infirmary, but goes only at his insistence.
The slug in your belly: Dax is the one who discovers what Bashir and O’Brien are doing, mainly because O’Brien missed his appointment to fix Dax’s sonic shower so he could ENTER SLOAN’S BRAIN!
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo insists that Kira not have to sit in the infirmary and watch another lover die the way she did with Bareil, and he doesn’t want the last thing he sees to be her being sad about him dying.
Plain, simple: Garak is in the episode for no compellingly good reason, just to mention that they need to get a move on back to Damar’s base before the Jem’Hadar change their patrol pattern on them. Quite possibly the easiest paycheck of Andrew J. Robinson’s career—or, to put it another way, he had to sit in a makeup chair for several hours for about 75 seconds of screen time…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Bashir declares that he’s in love with Dax. Dax has already declared that she’s in love with Bashir. Since they’ve only been onscreen together for four-and-a-half seconds, we have to take their word for it, since they haven’t even had the chance to see if they have chemistry, we’re just being told that they’re in love. Okay.
Keep your ears open: “I knew Quark was hoarding a bottle of the good stuff.”
“This is older than I am.”
“What? I’m drinking with a child!”
O’Brien being forcibly reminded how much younger Bashir is than him via booze.
Welcome aboard: William Sadler is back for his third and final appearance as Sloan, while Andrew J. Robinson makes a token appearance as Garak.
Trivial matters: This is the final chronological appearance of Section 31. The organization will be seen again in the fourth season of Enterprise in the 22nd century and Star Trek Into Darkness in the 23rd.
The original plan was for Odo and Kira to be the ones searching for the cure, but it was decided to have the pair of them working with Damar’s resistance, so it was changed to Bashir and O’Brien. In addition, they needed to save money so they could blow the budget on the finale. So instead of going to a planet to find Sloan, they had it take place on the station, and even the virtual scenarios were filmed on existing DS9 sets. Plus scenes involving other guest stars were cut (the script called for a scene on Cardassia involving Weyoun and the female changeling), which also saved money.
Jaresh-Inyo, who was seen as president of the Federation in “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost,” is established as no longer being president as of this episode. The novels expanded on this, primarily in the A Time to… and Slings and Arrows miniseries, establishing that Jaresh-Inyo ran for reelection in 2372 (the same year as the two-parter in which he appeared), and lost badly—the widest margin of any sitting president who ran for reelection in the Federation’s history—due to falling for Leyton’s coup attempt in those episodes. He was succeeded by Min Zife, who was president during the Dominion War.
Odo refers to Kira watching Bareil die in the infirmary, which occurred at the end of “Life Support,” when Kira sat with Bareil in his final moments.
Bashir intends to use the same mind probes on Sloan that Koval (working with Sloan) tried to use on Bashir in “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges.” (Sloan tries to appeal to Bashir’s better nature by saying that they’re illegal in the Federation. Bashir, however, is too consumed with laughter at the hilarious irony in Sloan, of all people, quoting Federation law.)
Spock gave Kirk a copy of A Tale of Two Cities as a birthday present in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The copy Bashir is reading was given to him by Dax, and the copy was Jadzia’s before it was Ezri’s.
Walk with the Prophets: “If it’s going to be painful, just say so.” This closing arc has been all about momentum. What’s been thrilling about the ride is watching all the different plotlines happening, the huge tapestry of this war that has consumed the Alpha Quadrant.
And then we have this, which grinds all that momentum to a halt. We get a quick reminder of what’s going on elsewhere with Odo’s return to the station and the Breen weapon now in Starfleet’s hands, but after that it’s The O’Brien and Bashir Bromance Hour.
Mind you, I love the O’Brien-Bashir friendship. It’s been one of the cornerstones of the series. But it works best when relegated to a comic relief sideplot (see “The Changing Face of Evil”) or as part of an interesting plot (see “Armageddon Game”).
“Extreme Measures” is neither, as it gives us no B-plot or C-plot. We don’t know what’s happening elsewhere. How is Damar’s rebellion? Is Dukat still begging on the streets? Is Winn still staring at ancient texts and furrowing her brow a lot? How many times has the female changeling threatened Weyoun this week? How is Martok settling in as chancellor?
The answer to none of those questions is provided—indeed, they’re not even acknowledged for more than half a second, if that. The opening fools us into thinking this will be a broad-ranging episode, showing us a sick Odo, a desperate Bashir, and a smitten Kira. Honestly, the scene between Odo and Kira is agonizingly heartbreaking, played magnificently by Nana Visitor, and especially Rene Auberjonois, who has to emote while covered in enough crap to make him look like an Ent.
But then Kira and Garak leave, and that’s it—the whole rest of the episode is turned over to O’Brien and Bashir’s wacky scheme to ENTER SLOAN’S BRAIN!
Look, there’s only three episodes left. There’s a lot of stuff going on. So it’s really hard to get anything but frustrated over an episode that consists of Bashir and O’Brien walking through corridors a lot. And they’re not even real corridors, they’re PART OF SLOAN’S BRAIN! And they don’t even make much an effort to make the corridors super-surreal (like, say, the Enterprise corridors were in Data’s dream sequences in “Birthright I”), they’re just corridors. That they walk through. A lot.
At least until they get shot, so then they sit in the corridor. A lot. And talk about their bromance. A lot. O’Brien protests too much that he likes his wife better than his best friend and Bashir gives him crap about it and at this point I’m driving spikes through my head because it’s more pleasant than this conversation which is simultaneously endless and pointless.
On top of that, William Sadler is wasted. His sad speech to his family and friends about how he sacrificed having a life so he could be a bastard in the name of preserving a Federation he constantly undermines is almost touching, but it falls flat. In “Inquisition” and “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges,” Sloan was a worthy foe, a complex character. Here he’s just a plot device. Both the character and the actor deserve better.
I would rather have seen Bashir and O’Brien do the Alamo on the holodeck for an hour. But that probably wasn’t in the budget…
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be a guest at Farpoint 22 this weekend in Timonium, Maryland, both as an author and a musician as part of the Boogie Knights. Other guests include actors Tim Russ and Colin Ferguson, author Timothy Zahn, Klingon language guru Marc Okrand, and fellow Trek fictioneers Rigel Ailur, Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Dave Galanter, Allyn Gibson, Robert Greenberger, Glenn Hauman, Robert T. Jeschonek, David Mack, Aaron Rosenberg, Howard Weinstein, Richard C. White, and Steven H. Wilson, and tons and tons more. Here’s his schedule.
Now you’ve made me wish the episode had been called “Sloan’s Brain.”
Yeah, the combination of the budget-saving bottle-show requirements and the usual Weddle-Thompson mediocrity makes this the weakest part of the arc. It was painful how obvious it was that they were forced to recycle the standing sets to save money. “Welcome to the inside of my brain, guys. I’ve made it look like your station and ship so you’d feel at home.” WHAT??? That’s just dumb. How could Sloan’s dying brain have that much control over its hallucinations? For this to make sense, we would’ve needed to see things from Sloan’s own past. I understand the need for a bottle show, but they should’ve come up with a story wherein using the standing sets would make sense, rather than this incongruous silliness.
Moral of the story: if you want to be a hyper-competent anti-hero spy who always wins via Batman Gambits, you must read the classics.
Do any of the novels feature this groundbreaking ENTER SOMEONE’S BRAIN technology and show what effects it has on the Quadrant’s later history?
This is a silly pointless bottle show that I skipped the second time around. To top it all off why would SLOAN create a cure for the changeling disease in the first place? I also doubt his brain looks anything like the station couldn’t they have relabled something, so you can pretend your at the “secret” offices of section 31.
To be fair, the beginning, up until Sloan
reverses the polarity of the neutron flowdepolarizes his brain, it’s a pretty snappy episode, and almost sets up the moral quandry of good guys acting like bad guys for good reasons (hmm, irony).Could’ve easily fixed it by having Sloan say “it looks like the station? That’s not what it looks like to me at all”. That way the shared hallucination caused by the ENTER SLOAN’S BRAIN machine looks like the standing sets because our POV characters are familiar with the standing sets, and we can imagine Sloan sees something familiar to him. An easy piece of handwaving they couldn’t be bothered to do.
Oh boy this sucked. I feel like this was a case where they needed to get the cure, they wanted to revisit Section 31 and they lumped them together. They probably should have had O’Brien/Bashir do their brain scan thingy as a B-Plot a few episodes ago and then had a seperate episode where they had to go get the cure during the closing arc. Why seperate it? BECAUSE THERE IS NO REASON THAT SLOAN SHOULD KNOW THE CURE!!!!
Sorry for the shouting. Sloan is a really good at being secret agent guy and is a bigwig in Section 31. He probalby knows the complete details of how the virus was implanted, made the decision to create it and unleash it, and a million other secrets. He also probably understands the basics of how the virus work, but since he isn’t a scientist or a doctor, there’s no reason for him to understand the nuts and bults of how the virus is- certainly not enough for Bashir to whip up a cup of cure in a snap. In my job I have computer programmers working for me- I understand the basics of what they do and what information they need from me to deliver what I want, but I don’t know what the specific code says, nor do I need to. I know what I want and I know how to test it to make sure it does what I want. The rest is a black box for me. The same should go for Sloan and the virus- he should know that it causes them to break down and depends on frequency of form shifting, but he just wouldn’t know the biochemistry of it.
I get why writers oversimplify- they’re trying to not get bogged down in the minutae and keep the plot moving. However, Star Trek writers have a bad habit of just glossing over some stuff. Weapons are ineffective against the Borg because they “adapt.” Adapt how? Don’t know, it’s never explained and weapons magically do nothing. The Breen have a weapon that drains all energy from starships? How does it work? Don’t know and it isn’t explained to us (nor is how they re-engineered the whole fleet to make the weapon ineffective). There’s a virus for the Founders- obviously Sloan knows everything!
This episode doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on any level, nor does it work on any level. One interesting thought though- despite the fact that Avery Brooks as Captain Sisko is the theoretical lead, he plays a minor role in a lot of the closing arc- outside of battle scenes and strategy scenes, there is no real Sisko story here (until the last half of the last episode, which is a Sisko story). It goes to the strength of the cast that they were able to do this.
Yeah, this was a pretty disappointing “conclusion” to DS9’s Section 31 episodes. In addition to feeling like it’s only got half an episode’s worth of plot, I’m also annoyed by Bashir just being able to whip up a telepathy device, and that Sloan even had the cure “in his brain.” (Or should that be “IN HIS BRAIN”?) Even if Sloan has a photographic memory, I’d assume that there’d be some separation of knowledge between the scientists who developed the disease/cure and the front-line agents.
A sadly ignoble end to Sloane, who was, at times, a compelling antagonist.
-Andy
I hated this episode. No, not because it’s about Bashir ;)
But, pretty much everything you said – I was really enjoying the interweaving of arcs in this set of episodes, and this is just a big giant halt. Plus, I feel like we’ve already had several episodes of TNG and DS9 where people are inside others’ heads and all that, so it just seemed totally repetitive.
Also, they missed some potential – how ironic was it that Bashir was basically willing to torture somebody to get the cure? This is never really touched on!
And I know O’Brien is this genius engineer, but this still stretched credibility big time for me. I also wasn’t quit esure what they were trying to get at regarding Sloan’s various avatars. Is he truly semi-regretful? Does he really want to give them the cure? But it was all just kind of thrown together and not explored.
I actually did like the concept of the “Sloan’s brain office”, the idea that Section 31 doesn’t exist in any real, physical way, but only in the people who are a part of it, but as the previous commenter said, while Sloan would know the who and the where and the why, there would be no reason to know the intricate chemistry of the disease or its cure, just that it had been developed and tested and it worked.
And I’m glad krad found the whole “you like me better” conversation. I was sat there nearly shouting at the screen “shut the hell up, this episode only lasts 40 minutes, stop wasting it on this interminable bumf.” But that was a problem with the episode all the way through. Bashir already made the point that they were racing against the clock to get the cure from Sloan before he died, so they stood around talking about it for a while. If you’re racing against the clock, get on with it!
@6: The thing about your analogy, though, is that Section 31 isn’t actually an intelligence agency — it’s a conspiracy within Starfleet. And the larger a conspiracy is, the harder it is to hide. I’ve always figured that Section 31 must be fairly small and limited, more like a resistance cell than a full-fledged agency or organization, staying as compact and unnoticed as possible. It’s not like Sloan would be able to conduct job interviews and hire a whole large staff of scientists to work underneath him, since he couldn’t be sure who he could trust to keep things secret. Okay, maybe he could give parts of the work to people in Starfleet who didn’t know what they were working on, but he’d probably want to let as few people as possible into the loop. So it’s possible that Sloan is actually the one who designed the virus.
I like this episode. I mean I’m always a sucker for a “journey into someone’s mind”-plot. I just love those. However I like that Sloan gets what is coming to him. It would have been a lot nicer to drag him out into the light and scour Section 31 with the full and visible force of law, but they cleaved to close to the darkness to do that. Well, they who live by the sword and all that. Now, since they wanted to be rats in the sewer, Sloan gets to die like the rat he is. Unloved, unmourned, and unsuccessful. Good! I have a special loathing for Section 31-style “spy” agencies. To borrow from “A Man For All Seasons”, Sloan spent his life cutting down all laws to get to his goal, now his quarry has turned on him and there are no laws he can hide behind for his own safety.
I remember reading somewhere that the writers really didn’t know how to close off the Bashir/O’Brien bromance (also one of my favorite trek relationships), but knew they wanted to give them one last hurrah. It’s a shame all the budgetary constraints relegated it to a cheap reuse of the corridor sets and some stupidly forced sounding lines from Sloan. Even when things got a bit sinister after Bad Sloan shoots Good Sloan, all I could think was “well, now it’s the Defiant corridor with a different carpet”.
Also, just realising that this time next week there’ll be no DS9 rewatch anymore. While I missed the TNG rewatch, I’ve been in on the ground floor for the DS9 one, and it’s been awesome. Something to look forward to twice a week from one of my all time favorite trek authors, and not having it around anymore is going to be not a little bit lame.
Alright, done gushing. Bring on “Dogs of War”, part two of the Defiant with different carpet.
I had to look at this waste of an hour as giving the O’Brien-Bashir romance one last hurrah. It truly is a damn shame that the budget wouldn’t let us see O’Brien and Bashir in one of their holosuite programs, as that would have been fun, and a real payoff for us wondering what they do in there all these years, it being the end of the series and all.
I had an active dislike for Sloan, played so well by William Sadler, and was not sad to see Sloan die. Its the sort of undignified death Sloan probably was destined for in any case, given his line of work.
Nice to see O’Brien and Bashir have one last moment of bromance; too bad it had to be at the cost of finding out all the things krad lists, particularly seeing Dukat begging on the streets. Damn,why were Weddle and Thompson on the writing staff again? They were definitely the weakest links.
Still a terrible waste of an hour, especially with only a couple episodes left.
When I was a kid, I might have liked a “going inside someone’s brain” episode like this, but yeah, it’s just too contrived and tiresome. Also, as Lisamarie says, it’s been done before on the show (I’m thinking of the one where the alien mindzaps Bashir and he’s walking through the station and stuff, so it’s even the same character).
When they had Sloan captured, my wife said, “Why don’t you bite down on your hollow tooth?” and then he did the neural polarizing thing.
If I had been the All-Powerful Showrunner, I would have sent Garak into Sloan’s brain to search for the cure. As you say, the actor’s made up anyway, Garak likes Odo, and the challenge would have appealed to him.
Actually, I would have put Garak up against Section 31 earlier in the series. Best game warden is a former poacher and all that. I had a hard time believing Bashir as an effective foe.
@15, Garak versus Section 31 is an amazing idea! I can’t believe I never thought of it. It’s a realy shame the showrunners apparently didn’t either.
-Andy
@12 – I’m trying HARD not to think about that :(
Winding down both TOS and DS9 with themes makes you wonder what SPOCK’S BRAIN! would have been like had it been SLOAN’S BRAIN! themed exploration instead.
Hell, Star Trek Online did a better corridors-of-the-mind episode…
@13: I’ve got it! They could’ve established that Bashir and O’Brien had a holosuite program where they pretended to be 20th-century TV actors appearing in a show about Deep Space 9 filmed at Paramount Studios. Then they could’ve used the soundstages themselves at the holosuite program! That would’ve saved plenty of money! And been nicely surreal too, like the UFO episode “Mindbender.”
So bassically all this episode was good for was showing off the fact that our resident genetically-enhanced uber-genius designed a device that lets non-Vulcans perform a Vulcan Mind Meld. Ahh–science! lol
PS: KRAD pleeeeeeeeese do a Voyager rewatch when this one is over!!!!
Count me among the many who find this episode pointless. I don’t really consider it part of the ending DS9 plot; you can skip it entirely and lose…well…nothing, really. It just grinds the ending arc to a halt, and it doesn’t hold up on its own. I can understand not wanting to blow the budget, but geez. Low budget doesn’t mean it needs to be a low-quality story or script…
The episode is not entirely pointless, it closes ouy Sloan and explains how Odo gets cured, unfortunately it does so using some tired sci-fi/spy tropes to accomplish that task.
Fridge logic here: Forget Sloan having the cure memorized for the moment, why did Section 31 develop a cure in the first place? This disease does not effect anyone Section 31 does not mind seeing dead. A cure, if used, only confirms that the Federation attempted genocide by biowarfare, which may be suspected but not provable. Aside from the trope that every newly developed mad scientist poison and bioweapon must have an antidote known to the developer.
@22 – I think that can be explained (maybe glossed over) by saying that at the point where the disease was developed, Section 31 had not precluded the possibility that they may be able to negotiate with the Dominion from the strong position of holding the cure, to bring about a situation that was to theirs, and the Federation’s, mutual benefit. A Federation with the backing of, but not under the control of, the Dominion would have a distinct military and economic advantage over the Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians etc. That’s not the way the utopian Federation would think, but it is the way Section 31 would.
ChrstopherLBennett@19
Ah, the ‘Mindbender’ episode of UFO. One of the finest bits of TVSF going in my opinion (I’m quite the UFO fan as my avatar attests). Strongly recommended, though you probably need to watch a few other episodes first for the full impact to work. That episode and the others are available on youtube.
As to this effort. Can’t argue with most of the comments. Rather dull and showing its budgetry restraints.
@22. Agree. It would have been more realistic to have Sloan give Bashir more information about how the virus worked which would lead Bashir to develop a cure.
@24: UFO is also available on Hulu, which is where I saw it. They have Space: 1999 and some of the puppet-based Anderson series too.
How did I never caught on to the obvious parellels to Spock’s Brain?
Extreme Measures pretty much falls flat for all the reasons listed above.
It should be noted though that despite Weddle and Thompson’s shortcomings, the blame can pretty much fall on Ira Steven Behr’s shoulders. He was the one who pushed the staff hard to produce a Bashir/O’Brien-centric adventure full of pitfalls and unrequited bromance.
My favorite memory from this episdoe is easily Kira saying goodbye to Odo. Poignant, emotional and true to DS9 (not to mention the obvious parallels with Bareil’s death). I couldn’t care less about the obnoxiously paced adventure within Sloan’s brain (despite a potentially interesting scene with his family).
Even bottle shows can fail.
I liked it. Can’t help it, just did. But then I’m a loner, Dottie – a rebel.
I also liked it. Compared to the previous few episodes, however, I think it’s a bit of a letdown. And the limited budget is no excuse, because the major problems with this episode have nothing to do with sets or special effects. The story simply didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Most of all, I find it strange that Sloane and Section 31 could have been lured into this trap so easily. I mean, come on… After seeing what Section 31 is capable of in “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges”, the idea that Bashir (or anyone else) could have out-witted them with such a simple trap is rediculous.
Then there is that absurd bromace talk in the midst of a race-against-the-clock. I actually didn’t mind the conversation itself, but the timing just didn’t make any sense.
I still enjoyed watching the epsiode, though. And I actually liked the general idea of ENTERING SLOANE’S BRAIN very much. With a bit more careful writing, it could have been a truely excellent episode.
Oh, and I agree that DRS’s suggestion of using Garak for this kind of mission is pure genius. Right there is another way the episode could be improved, without any additional cost.
Thank you for your review.
For me, when I rewatch the episode, I wonder about what happened to Bashir and Section 31 afterward. By going against Section 31 to save Odo’s life, Bashir basically did the equivalent of bitch slapping Section 31 in the face. I’m sure Section 31 isn’t too happy about getting their plans thwarted by an Augment who they regarded with suspicion from the very beginning.
So given that, what did Section 31 decide to do with Bashir after this incident? Did they come to see Bashir as a threat and try to kill him or jail him? Or did they try to somehow bring Bashir into their organization so that they can use him for their cause? (A Post-Eugenics Human Augment can be of value to them, whether they use him as an agent or as a guinea pig for experiments to produce more Augment agents.)
Yes, I know there are some novels about this subject, but novels are non-canon, so I’m just sticking to the canon stuff (TV series and movies).
@30: Canon isn’t a value judgment. If you want to know what happened to the characters next, and the canon says nothing, then what’s wrong with exploring one conjecture about what might have happened? After all, it’s all you’re gonna get.
To put it another way, if you think the question is worth asking other posters on an Internet forum about, then that means you’re open to opinions, right? And the novels are just their writers’ opinion of what might have happened, expressed in rather more detail than a blog comment. Just think of them as part of the conversation.
@31: I apologize if I somehow came off sounding as if novels aren’t worth discussing. That wasn’t my intention at all, so please forgive me for not conveying my intent properly. There are many Star Trek novels that are amazingly well written and worthy of discussion. So it was not my intent to slight the novels by stating that they’re “non-canon”. I’m just reiterating what is a given consensus that “canon” is TV series and movies and everything else is “non-canon”, and that the canon left a hanging thread regarding what happened to Bashir afterward.
Whether a work is “canon” or “non-canon” has nothing to do with the quality of the work itself, so I never meant to say that novels aren’t worth discussing. I apologize once again if I offended anyone with my comment regarding this.
@32: I just found it puzzling that you’d ask a question about something that we all know was never addressed in canon, and then make a point of excluding non-canonical answers. What other kind of answers could there possibly be? Canon is beside the point here (as it usually is), since the whole question is a speculation beyond canon.
Well, Christopher, speaking only for myself, I can say that it can sometimes feel somewhat unwelcoming for non-professional writers to post opinions on these threads. It can be intimidating to be discuss things with people who site their credentials in their posts re the series. I’ve been reading since the TNG rewatch and I only recently began posting.
@33: Actually, when I wrote that question in comment #30, I meant to say that I wished the showrunners had addressed the question in the actual show. I’m surprised that they didn’t, since all they had to do was tell us or show us very briefly what happened to Bashir in the very last episode of the series (What You Leave Behind). For example, they could have him resign Starfleet and leave the Federation or have him be reassigned elsewhere as a Starfleet officer. A very brief scene of maybe a minute or so would have easily taken care of this hanging thread, since we can infer from that information about what Section 31 decided to do with Bashir.
I’m a bit hung up about this, because this hanging thread makes the Section 31 people look like the most incompetent and out to lunch covert operatives. It makes no sense for Section 31 to just let Bashir be as is on DS9 after all that has happened. Regardless of one’s preference for Section 31, it is an important part of the Star Trek universe now since it transferred from DS9 to other series. So it’s not a good idea to have a hanging thread in DS9 that makes Section 31 look incompetent.
Having said the above, I reread my comment #30. I realize now that it is a very poorly written comment on my part. So I apologize for any confusion that my poorly written comment may have caused. I guess I did a terrible job at trying to convey what I really wanted to say.
@35: Ahh, I see what you mean now. You’re just saying that it’s a question the show itself left hanging. Honestly, there were a lot of those. They got so caught up in the war arc that it marginalized a lot of the key threads of the series, like f’r’instance Sisko’s original mission statement to bring Bajor into the Federation.
Of course, that turned out very well for the novels, since it gave them plenty of story fodder.
I like the idea of “beta canon” – novels are vetted. It’s an author’s idea of what happens, yes, but it has various levels of approval required by people who are concerned with maintaining the property’s integrity. No, it’s not “real,” because it wasn’t screen-aired…but in a world where Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty can be successful on TV and Star Trek can’t, I’ll take beta canon happily.
To some extent this includes major independent projects like Renegades and Axanar, as those have large collaborative teams that include people who value the property’s integrity as well. I’m not sure I’d quite consider them beta canon, but they are certainly valuable contributions to the body of work.
@37: Except there is no “beta canon” where Star Trek is concerned; there’s just the canon and everything else. Different Trek tie-ins, while required to stay consistent with the canon itself, are under no obligation to stay consistent with each other. If they do so, as most of the Pocket novels do, that’s by choice rather than CBS policy. That’s why there are a number of separate, incompatible tie-in continuities. The bulk of novels do one thing, occasional other novels do something else, Star Trek Online does something else, the IDW comics are in a variety of continuities, etc.
@38: You’re right, of course, Christopher – but I still like the idea. I admittedly don’t know anything about STO, but I accept the novels as “this is what happened next” in a way I don’t with fanfic. I guess it’s hard to qualify why I feel this way, as there are other continuities, but perhaps it comes from reading TrekLit for over 20 years – over time I’ve come to accept it that way, and even more so now that canon stories are hard to come by.
@34: Just wanted to pick up on your comment about non-professionals feeling intimidated here. I’m sorry to hear you feel that way. I’m not a writer, but I do consider a number of the usual pro crowd friends (including our humble rewatcher), and I’ve never felt intimidated. I think if there’s anything to be intimidated by, it’s the sheer breadth of knowledge – I’ve seen Christopher and Keith cite minor details that I could never remember. But it’s their job, and I’m more impressed by it than intimidated.
Their opinions are no more important, correct, or valid though, just by virtue of their being professionals. In Christopher’s case in particular (sorry for picking on you, CLB), when I see him in the rewatch comments I consider him no more than a particularly knowledgable fan. Keith writes the rewatches, so maybe I give his opinions a little more weight because we’re on his playground, but I’ve disagreed with him on a number of occasions (including this episode, which I liked and he didn’t), and his response has always been “you don’t have to agree with me” and that my opinion is perfectly valid and welcome here.
I actually felt that Christopher was saying in @31 that he’s not any more “right” – that’s we’re all just riffing on ideas, here. There’s a forum over on reddit called the Daystrom Institute that delves into similar discussions, and it’s all just bouncing ideas around. This is what keeps Star Trek alive. We get new canon material so rarely (and for the foreseeable future it’s JJ-verse only) that the novels, discussions, blogs, and comments are what keep Trek going for the fans. This is where we live, now. We’re all just chatting. Even the novels are just chatting – when I say I take them as beta canon, I mean they’re just more material to go discuss online (usually over on TrekBBS).
Don’t let anybody’s stated credentials scare you off. I’m glad you’ve added your voice to the conversation. Let’s keep talking…for two more episodes, at least!
@40 – Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I was in the process of writing something similar in response to #34 and any others who may feel the same way, but I feel like you’ve said everything I wanted to say! We do indeed value all voices at Tor.com, be they professional or fan or something in between.
Stefan, moderator.
We’ll be talking for two more episodes and a seventh-season overview, anyhow. ;)
Part of the fun of the tie-in fiction (and fanfic) is exploring the things that the TV shows and movies don’t have the time (only 42 minutes an episode! only 26 episodes a season!) or ability (the actors are unavailable/too old/dead/too young) or inclination to pursue.
And HelloVifam’s question is actually dealt with pretty significantly in the novels, as Bashir’s ongoing and twisted relationship with Section 31 has gotten plenty of play in the novels Abyss by David Weddle & Jeffrey Lang, Zero Sum Game by David Mack, The Poisoned Chalice by James Swallow, Peaceable Kingdoms by Dayton Ward, and Disavowed by David Mack.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Thanks for the rewatch krad, excellent as always. I liked this episode more than most of you… But, I was always a sucker for the Bashir-O’Brien episodes (or basically anything O’Brien). Plus, I was just tired of the dominion war arc by this point in the series. maybe I am the only one, but I thought the war went on a little too long.
@35: Here’s another opinion of what might have happened ; )–I don’t know if I necessarily see section 31 as having to do anything. In the end, Bashir’s cure is what helped end the war. If s31 feels that Bashir’s only motivation was getting the cure, then they don’t assume he’s going to come after them, and maybe they figure he can’t that much, since they usually cover their tracks very well. Since the whole premise of section 31 is keeping themselves secret, there’s not a whole lot overtly that they’d want to do. I don’t think they would kill a good Starfleet officer unless he was showing himself to be a direct threat to their plans.
And then there’s the matter of do they KNOW what happened to Sloan? Were they monitoring him? Did the DS9 crew file a report with Starfleet? We’ve seen how well that’s worked in the past regarding section 31. Remember that the bait was that Bashir already HAD the cure…so they don’t even know that he got it from Sloan. For all they know, his neural scrambler thing was totally effective, and Bashir got nothing. For all they know, it wasn’t a trap, but they were somehow able to stop and kill Sloan before he destroyed the cure.
Which leaves a question for me…what did they do with Sloan’s body? Did they report the death, or did they secretly dispose of it?
Presumably Sloan’s body was filed as a John Doe who passed away in the infirmary and sent whereever they sent people who died on the station? Presumably Bajor. Maybe they even fudged the paperwork so he was a John Doe Bajoran? That is a kinda creepy thing, though, now you raise the question.
I think O’Brien had access to any number of ways to dispose of a body. From overriding safeties on the transporters to dumping it in space on the right trajectory to burn up in a convenient atmosphere, or parking it in a plasma conduit.
@46: Oh, I don’t doubt that they had ways to dispose of the body. I was just wondering what they chose to do.
I don’t know if there is still anybody out there, but I would love an explanation from Christopher Bennet as to how Section 31 is not an intelligence agency. Not that I’m arguing the claim, I just don’t get it Section 31 seems to pretty clearly be a Federation type Tal Shiar or Obsidian Order.
If I get an answer, thank you, if not, thanks for the rewatches, I love them.
@48/Kurt: No, Starfleet Intelligence is the equivalent of the Tal Shiar or Obsidian Order, because those are organizations that are officially sanctioned and authorized by their governments (indeed, the Obsidian Order was a full 1/3 of the tricameral Cardassian government). Section 31 is not an intelligence agency, because an agency is a governmental bureau or administrative division, or a company or organization that provides a service. Section 31 is an extralegal conspiracy with no official existence and no legitimate authority. It is not a part of the Federation government in any way, shape, or form. It is not answerable to any elected or appointed official of the government or Starfleet. It’s a finite number of rogue Starfleet officers who have taken it upon themselves to break the law in order to perform actions which they unilaterally believe to be justified in the Federation’s defense, using an ambiguously worded part of the Starfleet charter as their excuse. Not even the Articles of Federation — just the Starfleet charter. It’s a cabal within Starfleet, that’s all.
I think Odo summed it up rather well in The Dogs of War. After all, Starfleet and the Federation have known about Section 31 for hundreds of years.
ODO: Interesting, isn’t it? The Federation claims to abhor Section Thirty One’s tactics, but when they need the dirty work done, they look the other way. It’s a tidy little arrangement, wouldn’t you say?
Add to that the fact that they refused to give the cure to the Founders and they certainly were advocating genocide against them. I’m surprised that they let Odo leave instead of charging him with aiding and abetting the enemy in wartime.
The way the Federation handled the Founder cure thing shows that by trying to have things both ways they came up with the worst of all worlds. They were so determined not to acknowledge Section 31’s dirty little genocide that they prolonged the war. If they’d come clean about infecting Odo and the Link and officially offered a cure on grounds the Founders surrendered (something the Klingons and Romulans would have been 100% fine with doing) then the war may have been shortened considerably. They tried to cover it up to maintain their moral high ground, but the truth came out anyway (as the truth always does). I wish they’d done more, perhaps with Voyager, to show the result of the Federation losing their moral authority like that.
I see Section 31, at best, as the IMF from Mission: Impossible.. “As always, should you or any of Section 31 be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.”. At worst, they are officially sanctioned by the Federation but are classified at such a high level that everyone except for those at the highest levels are unaware of it’s existence. Either way, there’s no way that Starfleet could be so incompetent that Section 31 would exist for hundreds of years. Either way, the Federation isn’t the squeaky clean organization that they like to claim. Sure, they aspire to be more but, in truth, their hands are just as dirty as the Obsidian Order and the Tal Shiar. They’re just better at pretending that they’re outraged by the actions of Section 31.
@51: Would revealing the Federation had a cure for the Founders disease prior to the defeat of the Dominion’s fleet in the Alpha Quadrant really have shortened the war any? Given the Dominion’s biological warfare capability, it seems more likely that as long as the Dominion still had a fleet in being in the Alpha Quadrant, they would have responded to learning the Federation had infected them by simply unleashing their own nastiest biological weapons on the major Federation, Klingon, and Romulan planets and then offered to trade cures. The Allied powers pretty much had to wipe out the Dominion fleet first (to neutralize the Dominion’s retaliatory capability) before it would be feasible to trade the cure for a peace agreement, and they didn’t accomplish that until the last episode.
@53/bguy: Plus, it’s a mistake to interpret the end of the war as “peace for a cure.” Odo gave the Female Shapeshifter the cure without demanding anything in return. She could’ve just gone on to cure the others and then carried on the war regardless. Instead, she ended the war because of the insights that Odo shared with her in the Link (i.e. his trust in the Federation’s benevolence and lack of interest in conquest), and because of Odo’s agreement to come home to his people.
54. ChristopherLBennett – Would the information of the Federation’s benevolence include the fact that it was the Federation that created the disease that infected the Founders and that they had also refused to sanction giving them the cure? Or would Odo have lied to her (however that would work among changelings)? I would say that Odo’s promise to return to the Great Link would have carried more weight than anything else.
I always kind of dug Sloan’s fetishy black rubber outfit, but I’m glad he’s gone. I wish Section 31 did a better job of staying secret because I’d prefer never to have been acquainted…..
Ironically, I wrote a story set just before this one (either just before DS9’s closing arc or in the very early stages of it, round about the time of Penumbra) in which Jaresh-Inyo was still president. So when I saw this one, I grimaced a bit, then decided in my head that he was killed during the Breen attack on Earth.
There’s no indication that Jaresh-Inyo is dead — in fact, Sloane wouldn’t really need a file on him if he was. The assumption that we made in the tie-in fiction was that he lost his reelection bid, which is pretty dang realistic considering that he was played like a two-dollar banjo by Admiral Leyton and his cronies………….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Oh yes, I know, but you had a time frame of three and a half seasons to play with. I had a couple of months at best and it seemed a bit of a stretch to say there’d been an election in that time.
No one has really talked about the “who does O’Brien like the most”-thing. It’s disturbing me on so many levels. Firstly, the strict separation of love and like, because that’s not the way it works, and especially not considering O’Brien already confessed he loved Bashir. Presumably it’s in a different way than he loves his wife, which is a different way from how he loves his kids, but still. It also plays into the whole “you (meaning men) can love women but you can’t be friends with them ’cause they’re strange creatures that no one (meaning men) can understand” which is a thing that crops up in nineties tv sometimes, but it’s still stupid. Also, why would you marry someone who’s not your friend? No, apart from the bit with Odo and Kira in the beginning I’m declaring this episode Not Canon and you can’t stop me!
I wished they would have done more with this “enter the brain” stuff. They could have done more surrealistic things, instead they went for a run-of-the-mill “show many doors and have a character talk backwards for a short time”. Started off really well, but ended rather disappointing.
So much I found unlikely in this episode. I can’t believe Sloan wouldn’t know Bashir had lied about the cure; a guy like him would have listening devices in Bashir’s infirmary, at least, if not also in Sisko’s office.
And he wouldn’t have had the regrets he expressed to Julian and Miles INSIDE HIS BRAIN, either; he was nothing if not a true believer.
And Bashir was entirely too blasé about the war crime he commits upon Sloan, and the fact that it indirectly caused Sloan’s death. He is a physician, after all, and he did take the Hippocrates oath
Only good thing about this one is still no Ducat / Winn nonsense but that’s about it, we have done the walking around in someone else’s reality so much before that I was sat thinking “couldn’t they have come up with something better than that?”
The last real Bashir O’Brien episode deserved better as did Sloan who up to this episode was well played by William Sadler.. he tries his best with the material but it’s a real mess of an episode.. and this Section 31 that has seemed to formidable falls for Bashirs story so easily? Nope not buying it.
I actually liked the idea Sloane is Section 31 and it’s more a directive than an actual agency. There’s no bases or organization, just a guy or two that the Federation recruits to do the things against their ideals but are necessary (or apparently necessary).
@55:
Would the information of the Federation’s benevolence include the fact that it was the Federation that created the disease that infected the Founders and that they had also refused to sanction giving them the cure? Or would Odo have lied to her (however that would work among changelings)?
S.D. Perry actually addressed that in the DS9 Relaunch’s opening novels.
IIRC, her take was that Odo’s initial attempts to reform the Great Link ran into problems after his return because of this.
The knowledge of 31’s role in the pathogen was shared with the Link and they echoed the Female Founder’s messaging in the series finale (that the AQ could not be trusted and they would invade, that the surrender had been a moment of weakness, etc.).
Odo’s counterargument was correctly pointing out that S31 did what it did because of the War — a War which, after all, the Dominion did start (never mind the hypocrisy of condemning the Solids for attempting genocide when the Founders have done the same in the GQ).
Re: Luther’s speech to his family & loved ones.
Julian’s face was NOT BUYING ANY OF IT