Odo in the episode Profit and Loss - Were there any consequences?

[Timo]

Yup. For some reason, those detectors never detected a weapon except in that specific episode. Or at least Odo was never shown interfering when various people walked around with either Starfleet, Bajoran or Cardassian weapons drawn. And when he did interfere, such as with the Duras sisters in "Past Prologue", alarms were not indicated to be the reason he did.

And there never was a detector to indicate that a weapon was firing, unlike the starship-board ones from ST6:TUC (although even those only seemed to pick up unauthorized firings and did not react to authorized ones in any of the movies or the TOS or TAS episodes).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CommanderRaytas]

We get an entire episode about Cardassian dissidents, and what is done with this? Nada.

We might draw the conclusion that this episode was even more "romantic" (as in "pathetic") than the writers perhaps intended - that the visiting protagonists were doomed from the start and were defeated the moment they left the story. It's not as if Casablanca really ends in an Allied victory or anything, either: the main thing is what happens to Rick, not what happens to those two McGuffins and their de Gaulle -signed McGuffins on their way to McGuffin.

The lesson of the day: dissidence on Cardassia doesn't pay.

Timo Saloniemi

It probably doesn't, but the few dissident episodes we got (including the two involving Tekeny Ghemor) implied that this was a movement to be taken seriously...I mean, the Obsidian Order went through some lengths to catch Ghemor, who was head of the resistance.

I realise that the "resistance" was sort of a McGuffin, and that the story was - in both the cases of Ghemor and Lang - about the characters and their interactions...but I would still have liked to see them delve deeper into the social structure of Cardassia. They do seem like people who do well with paradoxes: on the one hand, they have no problem with an oppressive state; on the other hand, they won't tolerate an unlimited amount of bullshit.

We hear about the Cardassian populace rioting in the streets...and there's Damar's movement against the Dominion. But we see little of the former, and we get only a glimpse of how many Cardassians are actually content with the way their society works.

As far as ST races go, the Cardies are amongst the more interesting, because they aren't all the same. More depth would have been even more brilliant.

 

[R. Star]

What made the Cardassians such interesting antagonists in DS9, wasn't that they were super powerful or anything, but they were a multi-layered complicated society, and not much different than certain darker aspects of humanity.

There were good and bad people, and the bad ones were just predominantly in charge. Even then, some of them, as Damar showed, could change.

 

[CommanderRaytas]

Exactly! Whilst everyone else is kind of a cliché (Vulcans, Romulans, Bajorans, Klingons (and don't get me started on them), and even humans to a certain extent, as the resident goodie-two-shoes until the Dominion War started), the Cardassians are just...people. Still, I would have loved to see even more of them.