"Blaze of Glory": why did the Writers soften Sisko

[cwalrus2]

One thing that I've thought about recently is how the writers softened Sisko's attitude towards Eddington in "Blaze of Glory." By the end of the episode, Sisko says: "I called him a traitor once, but in a way, he was the most loyal man I ever met. He was a Maquis, right up to the bitter end." I just think that for someone who was willing to poison an entire world over the threat that Eddington posed at the time of "For the Uniform" it's out of character for Sisko to ascribe loyalty to Eddington's deeds. Sisko held nothing but utter contempt for Eddington in "For the Uniform", but by the end of "Blaze of Glory" Eddington is "the most loyal man I ever met." What the F$$%? Could it be that since the Cardasians allied themselves with the Dominion since his last encounter with Eddington, that now Sisko finds Eddington's actions justified? or is it that the writers just committed a major oversight by allowing Sisko to not only sympathize with someone who betrayed him but to praise him as well. Anyway, just thought this would be an interesting topic for discussion.

 

[Navaros]

I think the problem is that the Sisko was way too extreme in For the Uniform. The problem is with the For the Uniform episode, not the Blaze of Glory episode.

I agree that's way too big of a jump in the writing the way it's presented in the series. But how they should have fixed that is by softening the Sisko more within the For the Uniform episode. Have a scene at the end of For the Uniform showing the Sisko realize that he did indeed become Javert and cross the line, instead of having the laugh-it-up with Dax at the end (there is another recent thread on this board that criticized that scene). Then leave Blaze of Glory as-is.

The Sisko also sympathized with and praised (and married) Kasidy who was also a Maquis traitor, so given that he gets a free pass about that regarding Kasidy I don't see why he should have been made to hold on to his Eddington grudge forever. The Sisko forgiving Kasidy so easily yet holding a vendetta against Eddington is IMO is another huge Maquis-related writing fubar in the series.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The Sisko forgiving Kasidy so easily yet holding a vendetta against Eddington is IMO is another huge Maquis-related writing fubar in the series.

Well, to be fair, Kasidy wasn't a full member of the Maquis. She smuggled medical supplies to them, but that was it. She didn't participate in their terrorist activities.

 

[intrinsical]

One of the troubles I have with "For The Uniform" was that it required the viewer to be familiar with "Les Misérables".

Sisko wasn't obsessed with Eddington at all. Sisko was merely play acting as if he were an obsessed Inspector Javert, hunting down Jean Valjean the fugutive. In other words, Sisko pulled an extremely risky bluff on Eddington but he was never ever insanely obsessed. So if Sisko was play acting in "For The Uniform", "Blaze of Glory" showed Sisko's true view of Eddington as a person.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

[/I]Sisko wasn't obsessed with Eddington at all. Sisko was merely play acting as if he were an obsessed Inspector Javert, hunting down Jean Valjean the fugutive. In other words, Sisko pulled an extremely risky bluff on Eddington but he was never ever insanely obsessed.

Agreed. Eddington was a narcissist and a jerk, in addition to a terrorist. He *thought* he was Valjean and Sisko was Javert, but that doesn't make it true. Sisko was just playing along.

 

[Snaploud]

Regarding For the Uniform:

I think they really needed to spend more time spelling out why Sisko's plan to destroy that planet likely wouldn't lead to any deaths. Were there starfleet ships waiting to evacuate people? Would the planet be completely safe during the evacuation? What would have happened to the planet had they not evacuated? Were the Cardassians planning to wipe out the population in the near future?

I needed a bit more grounding in Sisko's rationale.

 

[Timo]

...The way it was portrayed, it seemed the effects were the mirror of Eddington's nerve gas attack: they would kill the human colonists unless they could be evacuated very quickly (hours probably mattered). And how does one evacuate an entire planet?

Sure, the Maquis were said to have ships. But time and again, it had been said they were short on such resources. Would it make sense for them to keep enough of their scarce ships idled at that particular planet to allow the entire population to be launched to space?

Given that Eddington had also made clear there were no other Starfleet assets in the vicinity, we are basically led to believe that thousands died in Sisko's attack. Nothing is known about how many died in Eddington's.

Then again, when Sisko and Eddington finally slug it out verbally and Eddington yields, neither side even remotely suggests that anybody would have died. Both only speak of displacing people from their homes. Possibly the writers thought this would be sufficient to clarify the situation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cicero]

^ I was under the impression that the effects would make the planet uninhabitable over time, such that a fairly leisurely evacuation would be possible.

 

[Timo]

Yet both the Cardassians under Eddington's nerve gas, and the humans under Sisko's trilithium soot, began frantically evacuating within minutes of the attack. This while they knew that there were hostile starships in orbit!

Why did the colonists evacuate in such panic? Because their instruments had told them there was deadly poison in the air? I have some doubts about these colonists really having instruments tuned to such exotic and unlikely things as Eddington's nerve gas or trilithium. Because Eddington and Sisko issued ultimatums? But we never heard Sisko do anything of the sort - he only spoke directly with Eddington, who didn't think Sisko would actually go through with his plan, and thus probably wouldn't have informed the colony of the threat.

This leaves the most ominous alternative: that sensitive organisms (canaries, cute puppies, infants) started dropping like flies around the colonists, telling them in no unclear terms that it was time to get out immediately.

In dramatic terms, I have no problem with the Sisko/Dax laugh-in at the end of "For the Uniform". Sisko wouldn't have had any time to get pangs of conscience yet: he knew what he was doing, and he believed in it, so why should he stop there? And Sisko and (Curzon) Dax had a long rapport with things that don't quite follow Starfleet regulations. Curzon Dax doesn't cry for the enemy dead - he's too much a Klingon for that. And we've never seen Jadzia Dax act as Sisko's McCoy-style conscience, either: she has always been the adventurous if coolly composed one, ready for drastic measures when needed, much like Spock in "Balance of Terror" or "Immunity Syndrome" et al.

What I do find problematic is the lack of Starfleet reaction to Sisko's actions, especially if there were fatalities (and quite possibly massive ones). But then again, we can easily argue that the reaction came after the end credits rolled, and that Sisko was able to squirm out by the time of the next opening credits. Plenty of people in Starfleet who wouldn't shed a tear for dead Cardies or Maquis, I'd think...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[PKTrekGirl]

I don't think there is a problem with either For the Uniform or Blaze of Glory. I think that in combination, they made Sisko more human - a flawed hero. He's wanting to do the right thing and in the end DOES do the right thing...but was capable of 'losing it', just for a second, like any other human being.

I don't think Sisko ever wanted Eddington dead. He wanted him captured and nailed for his betrayal of the uniform, and for his betrayal of Sisko personally.

At the beginning of For the Uniform, Sisko was going after Eddington, but wasn't doing anything any other Starfleet officer wouldn't have done. It was only after repeated 'wins' by Eddington, both of which he achieved in rather underhanded and 'fighting dirty' ways, did Sisko finally lose his temper and poison the Maquis planet.

This act, and this act alone showed that even Sisko had his limits. But it certainly did NOT mean that he needed to continue along that path. By Blaze of Glory, Sisko had calmed down, just like any reasonable person would, and was ready to deal with Eddington in a much more reasonable fashion.

 

[Navaros]

^

But the Sisko never owned up to his doing wrong in becoming overly-obsessed with Eddington and in poisoning the Maquis planet. Therein lies the problem that the OP is getting at IMO.

A transitional scene of the Sisko admitting on-screen that he lost his temper and did some wrong things regarding that issue, would have gone a long way to making the transition be presented in a more appropriate manner.

 

[Timo]

Such a scene in some later episode would have made more sense than a scene in "For the Uniform", though.

Also, what we see on screen in "For the Uniform" may be somewhat different from what was scripted. The script emphasizes that everything that Sisko says to Eddington during the final confrontation is pretense, intended to "reel in" Eddington and lure him into adopting the noble self-sacrificial role. However, the onscreen delivery makes it equally possible to say that Sisko really was truly angrily lashing out at Eddington, then truly taken aback by his claim that Sisko was not only overstepping his jurisdiction but also betraying Starfleet ideals.

If we accept that Sisko was mostly acting, then he could "mellow" at once after Eddington was in custody. If we say he was truly pissed off, then it's not likely he would see his own actions in different light after mere hours. Perhaps after a few days? But that would be beyond the scope of the episode.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[PKTrekGirl]

^

But the Sisko never owned up to his doing wrong in becoming overly-obsessed with Eddington and in poisoning the Maquis planet. Therein lies the problem that the OP is getting at IMO.

A transitional scene of the Sisko admitting on-screen that he lost his temper and did some wrong things regarding that issue, would have gone a long way to making the transition be presented in a more appropriate manner.

Well, this is just my opinion, but I think it was implied via the stunned looks on the faces of the senior crew members when Sisko gave the order to poison the Maquis planet. I believe they showed a few of them with that look on their face, and that, IMO, was meant to alert the audience that we weren't the only ones to wonder if Sisko wasn't going 'round the bend on this particular issue of Eddington. That, coupled with his own questioning himself via the reading of Les Miserables sorta does the trick for me. He was walking the line and he knew it - even before he actually gave the order. I don't think every little thing needs to be spelled out.

I'm not sure what they could have done later to have him 'admit' anything on-screen in any event...unless they did something like they did in In the Pale Moonlight. I mean, we'd already had the usual heart-to-heart with Dax during the Les Miserables sequences...

 

[Kira Nerys]

I don't think they softened the character they made Sisko see it from Eddington's POV I never saw a softened ,only a realization.

 

[TeutonicNights]

I don't think anyone died on the Maquis planet that Sisko poisoned.
Even Eddington talked about "turning hundreds of thousands of people into homeless refugees" when confronted with Sisko's threats.
If Sisko had indeed started an action that would start killing people immediately, that would have been the perfect opportunity to throw it at him and label him as a murderer.

Imo we can therefore only conclude from Eddington's words that the writers tried to stress here that those people weren't in immediate danger of death and that the available "transport ships" were numerous enough to take care of the entire population being evacuated in time.

 

[Timo]

Oh, agreed about that. It's just that the writers failed to present a plausible case. By the internal logic of the story, thousands should have died.

Similarly, Nimoy once expressed the feeling that nobody died in ST4:TVH, making it a rather exceptional Trek movie. Yet story logic suggests that plenty of people died on Earth (as there were near-fatalities even at the well-protected Starfleet Headquarters), and that the starships rendered powerless by the Probe had low odds of survival.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TeutonicNights]

Oh, agreed about that. It's just that the writers failed to present a plausible case. By the internal logic of the story, thousands should have died.

yeah, agreed.
I also thought this Eddington talk was a bit too forced, almost the quivalent of the A-Team goons moaning in their crashed cars, so the viewer knows they aint dead .