SDS9 – S5E13: "For the Uniform" (Patreon)

This episode was recorded on March 26, 2025.

We recap "For the Uniform" and discuss how Eddington was right.

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Transcript

[Note: Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors.]

This is Southpaw Deep Space Nine Season 5.

We are your hosts, Scott and Sam. On this star date, March 26, 2025, we are discussing For the Uniform. Scott, can you tell us about this episode?

I think so. You know, there might be a couple musical interludes today. We'll see. Yeah. So Ben is in his civilians on Marva IV to rendezvous to find Eddington, the former Starfleet officer, the security dude who a few episodes ago revealed that he is the captain of the McKee,

which is a rebel group of Federation colonists and ex-Starfleet officers fighting Cardassian rule and sort of sharing Cardassian space in a demilitarized zone known as the Badlands. Ben is to meet his informant, but instead it is Eddington who says the informant has met unfortunate circumstances. Ben accuses Eddington of treason for his doublespeak, his espionage, his conniving ways,

but Eddington explains that these people are angry. because Starfleet gave away their homes. They gave Starfleet's people land to Cardassia, almost like an occupation, if you will. They have been offered placement to other places, but Eddington chides Ben that eminent domain for their enemies is immoral and illegal and unjust.

Ben accuses Eddington for giving these dispossessed people false hope, and if they meet again, someone may die. Eddington disappears and goes to the Badlands, which again is the post-war DMZ zone. Ben asks for the help of Captain Sanders of the Malinche, which is a ship that's in the Badlands and is there to help.

Ben calls Sanders using this new hologram tech where it sort of gives this hard light appearance that there's a real person on the ship. Ben asks the Malinche who are in the Badlands to stop Eddington, but Eddington's ship stops and moves on to the Defiant and blams the ship with a cyber attack,

making the ship wipe a cascade virus that hard reboots the ship. Um... You know, the parallels to the world we live in now are wild in this episode. Eddington hologram calls Ben and explains he left the virus way before he left. It was smart tech making the team not see it. Many steps ahead. This guy's good.

Eddington warns that for him, this is not personal, but for Ben, it is. Eddington is self-righteous, steadfast in his movement, a character that is a villain to some, but seems that they see injustice and fight it, even if it goes against establishments. Eddington shoots the Defiant a bit, but leaves, saying he doesn't kill,

and continues to explain that this isn't personal, that he doesn't want to kill anybody, he just wants to help these people. The Defiant is left all messed up, and it'll take a long way to get home. Odo is on Deep Space Nine. He's sweeped the virus there.

Odo reminds Ben that Eddington was sent to Deep Space Nine because they didn't trust Odo. How the turns have tabled. Worf reports two bullion freighters. They have disappeared. They are in the Badlands, but they have suspiciously harmless cargo. Selenium, rhodium nitrate. It is believed that it's the McKee.

What they're trying to do with this stuff is mysterious at this time. And we'll see what happens. You know, it's Chekhov's Selenium. Sanders comes in and explains he has been assigned to find Eddington, and Ben is relieved of his duty, for he's not been able to find him for eight months and is too personally involved.

Ben is like, I've been fooled, and I've got to do something. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you never shame me again. Later in the hollow suite, Ben is hitting the heavy bags and is... upset because he's never been sent off an assignment and just is hurt for being duped.

Avery Brooks is chewing the scenery in this episode. Jadzia says it is good that he's punching the bag. It's good that he's feeling feelings, but he has to let it go. But at this time, Ben is called by Akira. It turns out that Eddington strikes the Cardassian colony with cobalt disenilide.

See, you take the cargo, you mix it. Harmless to humans, lethal to Cardassians. You know, basically a biological weapon. The McKee is staking their claim. They are armed with enough biotech to poison every Cardassian in the DMZ. The Maliche is a little too far to get to them. Ben knows that he can do this.

He steps into his elevator, takes off his gloves. The team follows, and he says, let's do this, and then says, defiant. The defiant, however, is barely functioning. They don't have a cloaking device. They can only do warp six. The stabilizers are running poorly.

And they don't have comms, so all info will need to be relayed by someone with big ears. So they do a little racism and send Cadet Nog, a Ferengi, with big ears to help. And he is both excited and scared. Ben asks Jadzia to tell him that he is wrong for putting his team in danger,

that he is being selfish to go for a vendetta. And Jadzia says, nope. But you're acting like Curzon more and more each day. Curzon is the Dax that Jadzia was before she was Jadzia Dax. And she's like, you just need to be understanding of rash behaviors when possible.

The operation gets ready to start the possible one-way mission to Eddington using physics and science. En route to the Badlands, they practice moves, and Ben writes in his diary. They get to the Badlands and see a Maquis raider. It's Eddington. Eddington chides Ben, yes, I use the word chide a lot, it makes sense in these contexts,

and sends a book to Ben, Les Miserables, the tragedy of a man chased by cops for years for stealing bread, Jean Valjean, 8-4-6-0-1. But Ben, in this, is Javert, the zealous cop whose bloodlust keeps him chasing this man. 24601. Eddington actually sent a false warp. It wasn't the ship. He is two steps ahead.

They wanted the defiant in the plasma field of the Badlands. We don't know why. On the trip, they encounter the Malinche, dead in space after being disarmed by the McKee. So now the Defiant comes in to help the Malinche. The Malinche has lost warp. The Defiant gives them power. What's going on?

As Odo decrypts the data and analyzes the McKee info that has been floating, it is a Breen musical nursery rhyme, which is probably a signal. It makes Ben believe that Eddington is working with the Breen. you know, which is a mysterious alien race that sometimes works with, they work with whoever they need to.

So the Defiant goes on a chase. The intel of Starfleet says that there are drones monitoring the system, tracking visitors. Jedzie and Worf are looking at the Dorvan sector and with the intelligence they have and Ben's understanding of Eddington's psychology, he pinpoints where Eddington is going next, Katal Prime. But they are too late.

The nerve weapon is spreading to Cardassian civilians in a ship. The Defiant has a choice. They can stop the McKee, or they can save the Cardassians. I skipped a beat. Maybe the Defiant can stop the McKee. A battle starts. They destroy one raider, leaving one raider with Eddington in it.

Again, if Ben goes after Eddington, the Cardassians will die. So Ben, being the hero, I suppose, chooses the Cardassians over Eddington. And then Eddington does a little Cardassian racism. As the Defiant transports the civilians, Ben starts to read Les Miserables and worries to Jadzia that he is Javert, whose inflexity meets his demise. 24601.

Jadzia tells Ben that Eddington is getting under skin. Sorry, I love Les Mis. What can I say? It's also a musical. Eddington's favorite book is Les Mis. It shapes his psychology. So Eddington sees himself as Jean Valjean, who is robbing hood, helping others, fighting the good fight, helping the French, becoming a mayor,

doing what he must do for the crime that he committed. Ben tries to use the book to understand Eddington. As Eddington views his actions as heroic, Ben understands in fiction the villain must create a last stand of evil to force a fight. So we have a turning point. Ben will be the villain.

Ben tells the McKee that he is going to detonate a bomb, making their home planet uninhabitable for 50 years. They head to the planet in an hour to response, and they give them time before they unleash their terror attack. There is no sign that the Maquis will evacuate. At one minute's detonation,

Eddington continues to believe that Ben is bluffing, so Ben sends one of the missiles and promises Eddington he will make the whole Maquis homeless and destitute because they are a threat. Through victim-blaming, Ben starts a warpath to destroy the living quarters of the Maquis, even the innocent. Ben has become the villain.

Eddington offers to turn over weapons and himself if he stops the attack. Ben agrees. Checkmate. The Cardassians and the human colonists trade poisoned worlds because the Cardassian poisoned world the humans can be in, and the humans poisoned world the Cardassians can be in. But they are forced to resettle.

On Deep Space Nine, Eddington is handed to Odo and... Jadzia gets Ben to admit that he never even cleared his behavior with Starfleet. This was a rogue action that Jadzia says is a gamble. Ben explains that there's risk to being a good villain. And as they leave Jadzia Muses, sometimes I like it when the bad guy wins.

Holy cannoli. Yeah.

Yeah. As far as the morals, I got a lot to say. So let me just start with a little observation I've had for a long time, and it actually fits perfectly with this episode. Something I've learned after moving to the US is that whenever I'm watching entertainment media and there's a revolutionary or someone putting out the flaws

and fascism of the status quo, they're always going to end up being the baddie. I noticed this even as a kid. this was an episode that kept in line with that tradition. Like how people felt with the first Black Panther movie, where they felt Killmonger was right, I felt Eddington was right. And just an aside here,

but I don't think anybody ever noticed, and I've never seen this brought up, but in the beginning of the original Black Panther, you had the original Black Panther, right? The father... And then you had his brother who was a member of the Black Panther. So it was Disney's The Black Panther versus real life Black Panther.

Nobody ever talked about that. That's what the opening scene was. And it was good guy, Disney Black Panther, bad guy. original Black Panthers. And this is in a long history of how the Black Panthers have been portrayed in US media as always like just gangs, thugs, like terrorists. I mean,

there's like whole essays just about how the Black Panthers were portrayed in Forrest Gump. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. And so just the beginning of that is just so subtly like fucked up the message that they're spreading. And it goes just back to what I was talking about in US media.

Revolutionaries, people who challenge the status quo are going to be the baddie. Even like the whole Killmonger was right. If you just think about it from the way it was portrayed from the beginning, it was like they always wanted that person and the Black Panthers and revolutionaries to be like not even subtly, but just like the baddie.

So I understand the dialectic that there are people who really have never seen themselves in a superhero movie the way that they saw in Black Panther, which had a very strong Pan-African celebration. So I don't want to take away from the people that saw that movie and felt seen and

all the kids that do the Wakanda forever and all that. That's great for them. However, when I watch the film and I see a member of the CIA being the hero and what Killmonger was trying to do seems somewhat righteous, I'm just like, I understand why people say Killmonger was right. Except what happened in this episode,

so what they didn't do in this episode that they did in the film Black Panther is that they had Killmonger do enough... evil things to make you be like, oh, he's evil. He kills a couple civilians. He does some not nice things, even though his goal is to liberate people and share stuff.

If you look at it from a commodity world and a scarcity world, this country could help a lot of people if they were less isolationist while understanding why They need to be isolationists. And also, I think they're sort of realizing how much people love Killmonger,

and I have a feeling that that character will continue to show up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is an aside. Secondly, talking about the Black Panthers, there's a reason why the government killed Fred Hampton at 21. I believe that he would have been one of the most significant characters

American leftist figures if he was allowed to continue what he was doing because he was so smart. He was so empathetic. He looked at things from a multidimensional way. He was feeding the poor, educating people, trying to create rainbow coalitions. I think he would have had as big of an impact, if not bigger,

than Martin Luther King or Malcolm X or really any leftist personality in America. I truly believe that. What they did with Eddington, though, is that he doesn't really have the the villainous edge at first that, that killed that they do with Killmonger. Like he's mostly like nonviolent for a lot of this.

I was waiting for the bad things to happen. And then I was like, wait, what?

So like, as I watched this under, under the lens that I watch things now, I'm like, you know, Sending bioweapons to Cardassia was not cool, but he is less evil than I thought he was when I watched when I was 16 years old.

Yeah, I want to touch on that. Because that's how people were portraying it to me. There were so many things people told me about this show, and it's nothing like they remember. And so in this episode, it was kind of like flipped. Everything they said Eddington did, those were things actually like Cisco did,

and they misattributed it to Eddington. So in this episode, Cisco was the fascistic cop chasing after the criminal. Metaphorically and in the text. And also, he's always the police chief of DS9. Odo is his lieutenant. But this episode just highlighted that role, that he is the top cop, he is the police chief,

and that he enjoys that role. Now, Eddington, in the text, through his actual words, explicitly posed tough ethical questions to Cisco. And also just through his actions and the whole plot, there was tough ethical questions. And Cisco, at least this far in DS9, didn't care. He's not looking to challenge himself with tough moral questions or whether what

he's doing is actually right. He has that liberal smugness to him that by virtue of him doing the thing, it must be right. A big part of this episode was about loyalty, followed by the badge and the uniform and Cisco's own ego. Going back to loyalty... Cassidy Yates had to prove her loyalty several times to Cisco,

not only by going to prison for him, but then coming back to him also to show her loyalty and doing whatever he asks. And yeah, just being his prop. There's a lot of casual, unquestioned fascism in DS9, and I can't just conveniently pretend to not see it.

Loyalty is only a thing that needs to be proven when someone is doing something bad. Otherwise, you don't need to prove loyalty. Loyalty is often just sticking with something even though you know it's wrong, which is why it's important in fascism, in police, and in military because they want you to do bad things without question,

purely out of loyalty. The U.S. constantly does this so its citizens will sign off on anything out of loyalty. You're always indoctrinated, brainwashed, trained in loyalty. You're always indoctrinated in US fan fiction, even before you even move here, even before you're born. And it's not just the media, the educational system, the institutions,

it's also your parents will teach that and put that in you. And so out of all of that, We see things that the U.S. does, and out of loyalty, we're like, okay. Or they're pre-training us to do things we might not want to do out of loyalty,

whether it's even to be future soldiers or who knows what our job roles will be later on, right? Especially with the kids, they don't know what you will be, so they want to train everybody just in case. Now, in this episode, we saw Cisco and Dax also be willing villains,

gleefully be villains and do harm to get the good guy, quote unquote, criminal. Because the uniform automatically makes what you do good. Once you put on the uniform, you're a good guy. It does not matter what you do. There was no thin goo line here, just traditional thin blue line logic,

which is that even if cops do harm, it must be for the better good. Cisco committed crimes against humanity without guilt, and everyone went along with it. Worf, who we've talked about being problematic, he's the only one who hesitated. But he still followed orders. Why? Out of loyalty. Procedural fascism, something Scott has talked a lot about.

So just people following orders. And afterwards, Dax and Cisco were giddy about it, like liberal politicians were over destroying Iraq or Libya. And even how Eddington ended up on DS9 in the first place was because of racism against Odo by Starfleet.

Exactly.

And that's something you mentioned, right? Their use of Nog. Someone young and inexperienced who shouldn't be even on that mission is on this dangerous mission just because he has big ears and you don't value his life that much. And if you go back to the early episodes, Sisko never valued Nog and was not nice to him ever.

Yeah. So that tracks with all of Cisco's actions in this episode as well. This episode is great if you start from the assumption that imperialism is good and rebellion is bad. If you don't start from that assumption, then the actions of the show's heroes are not great, but morally bankrupt.

That's a feeling people and especially fans watching today and listening to us ought to sit with. And no one is above U.S. indoctrination. So a lot of the thoughts you have, beliefs you have, you should also question those and sit with that as well, that discomfort.

But Scott, what did you think of this episode, the performance, the mythology? How did you rate this episode? How was it crafted and made?

So I'm going to be a little controversial. This episode is a 4.5. It's almost a 5. And I'll tell you why.

It's a good episode. I hate a lot about it, but it's good. No, I hate it.

I hate it because I'm like, crap. By the end of this rewatch, I'm going to hate Cisco because he represents a lot of neoliberal establishment, moderate Democrat behavior that I do not feel is effective in the world. If you're listening currently and not in the future, which I truly believe will exist,

the American country is being dismantled quickly by the second Trump regime. I'm sorry to say, and the establishment Democrats are just like vote harder and not understanding that them being unwilling to change and sabotage more left-leaning ideas, if they don't change, I do not believe there will be a Democratic president possibly ever if they don't change.

We have to change our praxis. We have to. And this manicured, controlled perception of establishment democracy that I'm starting to worry that Benjamin Sisko is part of is not consistent with the prime directive of making sure that everybody has their basic needs met. So this episode is 4.5.

It's about as close to a five as an episode can get. It is incredibly important to the mythology because this is the point where you see Ben is changing and what he's willing to do.

His acting was flawless.

I mean, Avery Brooks is a classically trained actor. definitely the most talented actor to ever play a captain on star trek though there have been some wonderful actors um but he just he's just incredible and just plays the part so well and eddington plays such a good foil to him

And if you have watched the disaster piece musical Les Miserables with Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman, you see what happens when you become Javert. And it's not good.

I'm glad you brought up the actor who played Eddington because yeah, this episode wouldn't have been what it was if that actor didn't play it so well. And he could have played it cartoonishly like super villain-ish but he didn't there was this humanity

to him typically the way it's played is like the bad guy with a point is played so cartoonishly whereas it wasn't like that here so I appreciated that and so the two actors the way they played off of each other actually like really made this even

more tense and definitely made you want to pick sides at least it made me want to pick sides Yeah. Definitely high drama.

And if you're curious about the Maquis and find them interesting, watch Voyager.

Oh, okay.

Voyager gets a bad rep.

And now there is some overlap, right? The two shows aired at the same time at some point?

Around the same time, yeah.

Scott, can you tell us about the next episode?

Double episode.

Until then...