Quite the opposite. That's one of the times I came to love Sisko - he's not a perfect human being, like Picard, and when faced with decisions that AREN'T winnable, he makes a choice. The whole "Oh, it was harmless, we fooled them!" option frequently isn't available to the world, and that sort of bullshit is why I HATED TNG at times.

No. He gassed a world, in an attempt to get a criminal who might have committed more crimes. It was a murky gray shaded to black, and I loved it.

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Hm. I guess that's valid, and my substitution would be kind of lame, although I continue to think the episode went too far.

Doesn't it seem to you, though, that the writing of that episode gave the moral dilemma way too little emphasis? He did the war-crime very near the end, and everyone was walking and talking as if nothing had happened afterwards. By contrast, he agonized over his actions much, much more in "In the Pale Moonlight," even though they were an order of magnitude less monstrous.

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Commenting without familiarity with the plotline, just to observe that gassing a world in an attempt to get a criminal strikes me, as an outsider hearing about it for the first time, as pretty far over into the dark.... I mean, what part of that is defensible at all? Or is it a sci-fi thing where the criminal has the potential to destroy EVEN MORE worlds and peoples and life and things?

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The criminal had done a similar thing to Cardassian worlds and was going to do more, yes. He hit them with toxins that humans could survive but Cardassians couldn't, so Sisko hit them with toxins that Cardassians could survive and humans couldn't.

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Your user icon is epic.

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OMG yes your icon is AMAZING.

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Oh whoops. I got completely sidetracked because I saw xuenay's comment and then started watching your icon, which is, in truth, the most epic animated gif icon I've ever seen.

but to your remark: whoa, okay, that's a very high-contrast way of dealing with a rogue/criminal-on-our-side-type plot.

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The whole "Oh, it was harmless, we fooled them!" option frequently isn't available to the world

I've not seen the episode, only read the plot summary, but judging from the comments, it sounds like people have problems with questions like:

* When it says Maquis "colony" does that mean only active maquis fighters, or does it include people who are generally sympathetic but basically civilians?
* How many people on the colony died? In the real world, I think there normally aren't poisons that are convenient enough that they're reliably deadly long term, but safe enough that no-one would die before they got off planet, and only work on one species. Or people refuse to believe him until its too late. (Or was it a genetically engineered bacterium or virus? But then, you've got to realise that it's going to escape the planetand start a plague.)
* Does the series treat Sisko like a man who committed war crimes, or does it sort of go back to being episodic?

Obviously those aren't insurmountable problems (in real life, people who commit war crimes on the winning side probably do go back to their everyday lives afterwards). But it sounds like it's an excellent, excellent story if you accept the premises and don't get hung up on whether it fits into a partially episodic series. but many people have too much cognitive dissonance to be able to accept it -- "heroic startrek captain slaughters thousands of people to bring criminal to justice, goes back to being heroic startrek captain" and "heroic startrek captain finds ethically questionable but non-genocidal ingenious scientific strategy to blackmail criminal into surrender" are both good stories, but it's hard to have them both at once.

I don't know if that's accurate, as I've not seen the episode, but it's what I suspect.

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I don't think anyone *dies* from it; they're forced to evacuate the planet though.

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But I think that's the thing. Without watching the episode it sounds like the emotional arc and characterisation is really good for a moral dilemma of "is it worth displacing (but not killing) a civilian population to blackmail a dangerous enemy into surrender". But the dilemma looks a little contrived, in that it postulates the convenient existance of something poisonous enough it forces everyone to leave, but not so poisonous many people die, and assumes that they _do_ all leave, and don't martyr themslves and hope Sisko doesn't follow through on his threat to other planets.

So if the episode sells the premise (as many people thought it did) then it works really well, but if something jars someone out of their suspension of disbelief (as many other people thought), then it looks like Sisko is practically committing genocide, but not really showing a characteristic level of concern about it before and after, given his normal personality. So different people view it very differently.

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