Hippocratic Oath, what happened to that?

[Charles Phipps]

I felt like it was one of those episodes where the storytelling got in the way of the practicality.

Julian: I can't free you of your addiction. I can replicate some more ketracel white, though.

Jem'hadar Rogue: No. I must kill them to give them a warrior's death.

*how I would have continued it*

Julian: You don't think that having your own supply of ketracel white is just as good? You will be free from the Founders and their supply plus you will live long enough to continue researching a cure.

 

[Kor]

I got the sense that those Jem'Hadar weren't going to last much longer after the end of the episode.

Kor

 

[Crewman6]

They didn't tend to leave threads intentionally for later episodes...for the most part.
.

That's literally the opposite of what they did. They set up countless open story threads across the show. Every thread starts somewhere, with one episode. Many of those threads were picked up on and expanded, but some fell by the wayside. It's the nature of the beast.

This is one of those threads that could have been picked up later, but it's hardly a glaring hole that it wasn't. We know what happened to the characters at the end of this episode, it wasn't a dangling, unanswered question.

 

[Tosk]

What I meant was that they didn't leave them for specific, known later use. Obviously you seed good ideas for dramatic use, but for the most part when later episodes picked up on old threads it was done on the fly. There wasn't an, "Okay, let's set this up and then we'll reveal what it means in season 5" thing going on.

 

[Crewman6]

What I meant was that they didn't leave them for specific, known later use. Obviously you seed good ideas for dramatic use, but for the most part when later episodes picked up on old threads it was done on the fly. There wasn't an, "Okay, let's set this up and then we'll reveal what it means in season 5" thing going on.

Well, I agree with you. Mostly. Certainly, they didn't always know where things were headed when they created something. Certainly so much was made up as they went. But certainly there were lots of things that they created that they knew would expand and become significant, even if they didn't have all the specifics completely nailed down.

Certainly when they created the Dominion, for instance, they knew it was going to be the new "big bad" of the series, but they probably had no idea that it would literally escalate into a war that would occupy the bulk of the last couple seasons of the show.

 

[Tosk]

That's why I originally said "for the most part".

 

[JirinPanthosa]

When you get to To The Death it gets to the question of whether the Jem Hadar are loyal because of the white or because of all their genetic programming and conditioning.

That and Rocks and Shoals explore that the Gem Hadar are loyal to the Founders because of their conditioning, but they have their own culture and do it on their own terms.

 

[at Quark's]

O'Brien was in the right, personally.

It's the classic tale of the difference between the idealistic young person, and the battle hardened veteran, who, even though he might still appreciate the other's ideal, has learned through hard experience that life simply doesn't always work out that way. In short, O' Brien probably understands Bashir a lot better than Bashir thinks he does and better than he understands O' Brien, in return.

 

[tomalak301]

I just watched this episode and I started thinking about the origins of the Jem'Hadar, and if they had always been addicted to the White. Goranagar had a defect and Itactica was also defiant towards the Vorta, but I wonder if after the war if they were ever freed. Maybe Odo, in teaching the link about solids, convinced the Founders to free the Jem'Hadar and let them live freely. I know the Season 8 relaunch books goes into this a little but I wonder what ever happened to the Jem'Hadar post war.

 

[at Quark's]

I just watched this episode and I started thinking about the origins of the Jem'Hadar, and if they had always been addicted to the White. Goranagar had a defect and Itactica was also defiant towards the Vorta, but I wonder if after the war if they were ever freed. Maybe Odo, in teaching the link about solids, convinced the Founders to free the Jem'Hadar and let them live freely. I know the Season 8 relaunch books goes into this a little but I wonder what ever happened to the Jem'Hadar post war.

While it's nice to imagine Odo would have such a monumental effect on his people, realistically he would just be a drop in the ocean of the Great Link - just the experience of one single individual. It might require many such positive experiences from the 100 infant changeling that were sent out, returning, to finally convince the Founders that perhaps they should modify their attitude towards Solids.

If he really does convince the Great Link on his own, it might indicate that they were already doubtful on their own, and Odo's influence is just, erm, the last drop. But frankly, based on how we see the Founders act, I don't think this is the case.

 

[Farscape One]

I just watched this episode and I started thinking about the origins of the Jem'Hadar, and if they had always been addicted to the White. Goranagar had a defect and Itactica was also defiant towards the Vorta, but I wonder if after the war if they were ever freed. Maybe Odo, in teaching the link about solids, convinced the Founders to free the Jem'Hadar and let them live freely. I know the Season 8 relaunch books goes into this a little but I wonder what ever happened to the Jem'Hadar post war.

In "TO THE DEATH", Weyoun said the Jem'Hadar devotion was 'overstated', and they addicted them to the White afterward. So it looks like they were not always addicted, though I do wonder how long the Jem'Hadar existed before they started doing that.

 

[JaxsBrokenHeart]

I always did like the fact that the show demonstrated that the engineering of the Dominion was not flawless. There were Jem'Hadar not addicted to the white, those capable of disloyalty to the Founders, and even Vorta like Weyoun 6 that could reject the nature of the Dominion's ways. Its not really enough to make a big difference (especially when there are so many failsafes built into dealing with those exceptions) but it did feel realistic and puncture the notion of the Founders as gods pretty well.

 

[kkt]

While it's nice to imagine Odo would have such a monumental effect on his people, realistically he would just be a drop in the ocean of the Great Link - just the experience of one single individual. It might require many such positive experiences from the 100 infant changeling that were sent out, returning, to finally convince the Founders that perhaps they should modify their attitude towards Solids.

If he really does convince the Great Link on his own, it might indicate that they were already doubtful on their own, and Odo's influence is just, erm, the last drop. But frankly, based on how we see the Founders act, I don't think this is the case.

And looking at it from the Founder's point of view, the Romulans and the Cardassians intended to commit genocide against them. And Section 31 engineered a disease that awfully near succeeded. Section 31 wasn't Starfleet, but they did work on behalf of Federation. Starfleet Medical, Starfleet Command, and top levels of the Federation government knew about the disease and the cure and did not share it until Bashir, O'Brien, and Odo forced their hand. So the Alpha Quadrant races are three for three attempted genocides. If I were the Founders, I'd certainly keep the Jem Hadar around.

 

[tomalak301]

I get what you guys are saying, but wasn't a commonality throughout the series from Season 3 to the end was bringing Odo home? Didn't that mean more to the founder than anything else, and Odo also brought the cure with him. Yeah maybe the Dominion does keep the Jem'Hadar around, but maybe reforms start happening where the Jem'Hadar, if they wanted to, looked at life more than just death and "victory is life". I'm thinking about the comparisons to the Klingons, at least to the Klingons in the Enterprise episode Judgement. You can have multi-faceted races after all.

 

[Farscape One]

An interesting and good point.

But those genocidal attempts were a direct result of the Founders wanting to take over and subjugate the Alpha Quadrant, and if only a couple things happened differently they would have succeeded. The Dominion has done very much the same, and worse, things that was attempted on them. Hell, Weyoun said the first thing they should do after the war is eradicate Earth's population. And that was long before we find out about the disease.

The Dominion are not a nice bunch of people.

 

[at Quark's]

Hell, Weyoun said the first thing they should do after the war is eradicate Earth's population. And that was long before we find out about the disease.

When we find out about it, yes, but Odo was infected 3 years before that, around the time of Paradise Lost, presumably. Back before war broke out, although they were already committing hostile acts of infiltration. Assuming one doesn't develop such a virus overnight, not even in the 24th century, that means that Section 31 had been working on it some time before that, even.

That said, I agree with the main idea of your post. Whatever they did, the Dominion was worse. Section 31 acted in self-defense, even if proactive, not to subjugate, and they probably had no sadistic intent (the Dominion does; see the Teplan Blight). Finally, the casualness with which Weyoun places his remark of exterminating the Earth's population is telling (and chilling).

 

[Timo]

Then again, the Dominion needed to expand as much as they needed to breathe. (Well, okay, Founders, so perhaps a bad analogy, but still.) So if they find out that those to be crushed by the expansion resort to genocide, then preemptive genocide on the part of the Dominion would be sheer self-defense, too. They can't realistically opt not to expand, so they gotta do what it takes.

Sadistic and prudent can be treated as synonyms, too. Today, the type of crime management most commonly practiced is based on deterrent, on the threat of really bad things happening to those who indulge. The degree of bad has to be scaled appropriately for this to work. The Teplan yardstick seems fairly realistic if one really wants to curb valiant if hopeless resistance without having to constantly execute suspects at the market square.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[at Quark's]

Then again, the Dominion needed to expand as much as they needed to breathe.

Eurm, perhaps a dumb question, but why is that? Why couldn't they opt to not expand?

 

[Timo]

Because unconquered folks in their worldview were an immense existential threat, and sheer survival demanded the total subjugation of the universe, preferably yesterday.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[at Quark's]

We don't really know if this is true. All we know for sure is that the Founders have an innate sense of craving for order, and that they say they have had very bad experiences with Solids in their past, to the extent that they feel they cannot trust them. That may well be true, or it may simply be window dressing to hide the fact that they're simply jackasses that do these things just because they can, and feel superior and entitled -- or anything in between. However, if we assume it is true, that would probably also mean the other statement in that same declaration is - that they initially tried to come in peace. Which would mean that this distrust isn't inborn, or at least not to the degree that they cannot overcome it, and it's more a culture thing. And cultures can be changed if there's no compelling biological imperative behind it, if one really wants to.

At any rate, the Founders don't strike me nearly as much a victim of their own ideology as, say, the Borg do.