the m0vie blog

Inquisition is a superb piece of television, and a highlight of the sixth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It is a very clever extrapolation of various themes and ideas that have been bubbling across the length and breadth of the series, particularly concerns about what happens when incredible power is concentrated in institutions that find themselves under threat. One of the underlying assumptions of the Star Trek universe is that mankind is somehow different than any other sentient life form, somehow more enlightened and more idealistic than the other major powers that make up the broader shared universe.

Deep Space Nine has always been wary of this assumption, in part because it is frequently made with no real exploration of what specifically makes mankind more evolved and more compassionate than the Romulans or the Klingons. More than that, Deep Space Nine has been openly suspicious of that idea because of the moral complacency involved. If Star Trek assumes that mankind is so special and so unique that it has evolved past all of its darker impulses, the franchise has a massive blindspot that could be readily exploited.

This is nothing new. Although the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation leaned heavily into the idea of mankind as a hyper-evolved species with much to teach the wider cosmos, that series really came of age when it followed this train of thought to its logical conclusion in The Measure of a Man. A society that deems itself beyond moral reproach is capable of anything, because it lacks the introspection to really consider the moral weight of its actions. Even in peacetime, the Federation was only a single court case away from re-instituting slavery.

Inquisition is very much a logical extension of this idea. Beyond the sprawling epic six-episode opening arc, the sixth season of Deep Space Nine arguably works best when it sits outside the Dominion War and explores the impact that the conflict has beyond the space battles. Statistical Probabilities ponders the war in numerical terms. Honour Among Thieves inquires about life in the underground and at the margins. In the Pale Moonlight touches on the backroom politics and the moral compromises. Inquisition looks at how the Federation itself has been changed by the war.

Like Homefront and Paradise Lost, Inquisition has aged well. Less than half a decade after the episode originally aired, the United States would be trying “enemy combatants” in secretive military tribunals, detaining suspected terrorists without trial in secretive holding facilities, and engaging in “enhanced interrogation” including sleep deprivation to make subjects more pliable. Although the production team could have no idea at the time, the image of a dark-skinned man being paraded in irons is a lot more evocative two decades after the fact.

To be fair, it is not as if the writers working on Deep Space Nine conjured the plot from thin air only for the United States government to realise it during the War on Terror. Deep Space Nine is a show that suggests history tends to repeat itself, and that humanity (and people) tend to fall into cycles of behaviour. The humiliation and abuse inflicted upon Bashir in Inquisition has any number of historical precedents in human history, playing as a grim commentary upon mankind’s fascination with casting blame and punishing perceived enemies.

The title evokes the inquisitions that were organised by the Catholic Church, most notably the Spanish Inquisitions. These tribunals would enforce orthodoxy by publicly punishing those who had been perceived as refusing to conform to orthodoxy; it is estimated tens of thousands were burned alive. However, there are countless other examples. During the Cold War, the House Unamerican Activities Committee would publicly and aggressively pursue people with alleged communist sympathies, often destroying lives and ruining careers based on hearsay and speculation.

Deep Space Nine draws upon any number of historical conflicts to flesh out the Dominion War, from the First World War to the Vietnam War. However, the show also draws rather heavily from the Second World War, which makes sense given the importance of the conflict in both the national memory and in the franchise history. After all, the Second World War was a formative experience. It defined the role of the United States in the world during the second half of the twentieth century, and also coloured Star Trek‘s vision of the future.

The most famous hearings and tribunals concerning the war were held in public. The Nuremberg Trials exposed the horrors of the Holocaust to the world, immortalised in a popular cinematic film that featured an early performance from William Shatner. However, not all justice relating to the Second World War as administered so fairly. Indeed, the use of a military tribunal to prosecute a collection of German saboteurs in 1942 under the authorisation of President Roosevelt would become a touchstone for debates about the legality and morality of Guantanamo Bay.

Even after the end of the Second World War, was the Nuremberg Trials were taking place, the United States was conducting more secretive hearings in Dachau between November 1945 and August 1948. The decision to conduct these inquiries as closed hearings was controversial, and condemned by Senator Homer Ferguson in December 1948:

Aside from the reduction of sentence itself, the most serious error made by the military authorities was their failure to make a public announcement of the reduction. To mete out justice was important, but to do it so that our action made sense to the people of our own nation and the rest of the world was also vitally important. The action of the military authorities appeared to be an effort to suppress the facts. Nothing so quickly arouses the public to the belief of possible impropriety as concealment. Our concern in the case is based on our paramount interest in the democratic principles of justice.

As such, the sort of brutal investigations and miscarriages of justice suggested by Inquisition are not abstract threats to democracy. They represent a clear and present danger, particularly in times of crisis. As controversial as the Dominion War might have been, it allowed the writers on Deep Space Nine to plunge the Star Trek universe into a perpetual state of crisis. It allowed the show to interrogate what its characters were really like, what the Federation really stood for.

In The Maquis, Part II, Sisko argued that it was “easy to be a saint in paradise.” Over the course of its run, starting in the third season and really amping up the tension in the sixth season, Deep Space Nine dared to ask how these characters in this world would act if paradise was placed under threat. The Federation could engage in very questionable practices during times of peace and stability, as suggested by episodes like Too Short a Season or The Drumhead. However, what happened when the chips were down and their backs were against the wall?

It is a provocative question. Deep Space Nine courted controversy in its refusal to offer easy answers and tidy solutions. Many fans came to think of Deep Space Nine, whether fairly or not, as the most cynical of Star Trek shows. However, the series repeatedly suggested that its characters were more fundamentally decent than their government, that the power invested in structures like the Federation would ultimately corrupt and that such large-scale institutions were susceptible to compromise when their interests were truly at stake.

In the episode’s final scene, the lead characters meditate upon the revelation that a character like Sloan might be sanctioned by Starfleet and the Federation. “I can’t believe the Federation condones this kind of activity,” Bashir laments. Sisko seems similarly upset. However, the outsider characters seem less surprised. “Personally, I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t,” Odo observes. “Every other great power has a unit like Section thirty one. The Romulans have the Tal Shiar, the Cardassians had the Obsidian Order.”

Odo certainly has a point. It seems incredibly naive to believe that an organisation as large (and powerful) as the Federation could exist without an intelligence agency, if only to engage with threats from other major powers. Visionary revealed that even the Klingons had an intelligence service; just not a very good one. A similar argument could be made about Deep Space Nine‘s fascination with the economy of the Federation; the Federation might exist in a post-scarcity economy, but it still needs to regulate its interactions with the other major powers.

The franchise seemed to acknowledge this pragmatic reality. Characters had been alluding to “Starfleet Intelligence” as early as Chain of Command, Part I. This seems entirely appropriate, given that the Next Generation sixth-season two-parter provided a lot of set-up for Deep Space Nine. Nevertheless, Starfleet Intelligence had always seemed like a very passive organisation. They had an unfortunate habit out outsourcing dangerous missions to series regulars, as in Chain of Command, Part I and Honour Among Thieves.

Still, Inquisition is something different. Starfleet has a rich tradition of rogue senior officers, from Commodore Decker in The Doomsday Machine to Admiral Kennelly in Ensign Ro. However, the franchise has a tendency to imply that these officers are merely bad apples. The issue is seldom with Starfleet or the Federation itself, and more to do with the person wielding authority. Inquisition is as much about the system as about the characters tied up in it. Sloan is not a rogue individual. He exists within an organisational framework.

Indeed, there is something quite appropriate about building this episode around Bashir. It is not simply Bashir’s affinity for espionage antics in episodes like Our Man Bashir or A Simple Investigation, although Sloan cites that in particular. It is not simply the fact that Bashir is relatively dark-skinned and that Alexander Siddig was born in Sudan, a country very much tied up in the War on Terror and whose citizens have been subjected to the sort of practices depicted in this episode. Sudan was included on both of Trump’s travel bans.

Bashir is an interesting choice to anchor Inquisition, and an interesting foil for Sloan, because he is perhaps the most idealistic member of the Deep Space Nine cast. Bashir genuinely believes in Gene Roddenberry’s utopia, and is the Deep Space Nine character who would feel most at home on The Next Generation. That remains the case no matter how cynical Deep Space Nine might appear. Garak might quip about Bashir losing his boyish charm in A Time to Stand, but Bashir is still the only officer to stand up to Sisko in In the Pale Moonlight.

Interestingly, Inquisition began as a very different episode. As writer Bradley Thompson explains in The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, it had a more absurdist and surrealist approach to the material:

“Bashir went to a planet to do something really nice, like saving the lives of everyone on the whole planet,” Thompson says. “He parked his runabout in orbit, and when he finished doing this wonderful thing, he found out that his runabout had been towed and he had a parking ticket! So he had to go up against the bureaucracy. It was the ultimate genetically engineered human against the ultimate bureaucratic red tape.”

That reads almost like the comedic subplot of an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Given that the sixth season was saturated with light comedic episodes like You Are Cordially Invited…, The Magnificent Ferengi, Who Mourns for Morn? and One Little Ship, it was probably a good idea to steer into drama.

At the same time, there is still something uncomfortable and uncanny about Inquisition, a sense of absurdity gnawing away behind the horror of it all. Deep Space Nine engaged with timeless themes, but it could never entirely escape its cultural moment. There are definitely elements of Inquisition that are rooted in the existential ennui of the nineties, with several plot elements feeling like they might have been lifted over from Voyager. This is appropriate, given that the bulk of the episode takes place on what looks like Voyager’s holodeck.

There is a recurring sense of the unreal about Doctor Bashir’s experiences, the recurring suggestion that the world is not quite right. There is a paranoia in Inquisition, one that obviously parallels and enriches Sloan’s witch hunt, but one which also runs deeper. Bashir is not just confronted with a rogue Starfleet Intelligence officer chasing conspiracies, he is repeatedly forced to acknowledge that his world might not be real. Inquisition suggests that Bashir cannot take anything for granted, even those things that he experienced directly.

“And you were there five weeks?” Sloan challenges Bashir on his stay in the Dominion prison camp. Bashir clarifies, “Thirty seven days, actually.” Sloan presses his question, “You’re absolutely sure about that?” Sloan seems to reject the notion of objective reality outright, suggesting that all anybody can testify to is their own subjective experience. When Sloan talks about Bashir’s week in solitary, Bashir corrects him, “It wasn’t seven days, it was five. Five days.” Sloan observes, “Now that’s odd, because General Martok said you were gone for seven days.”

It’s a little detail, but Sloan picks at it. Later, Sloan suggests that Bashir could be a spy without even realising it. “I’m not working for them,” Bashir insists, forcefully. “How can you be sure?” Sloan counters. Bashir is taken aback. “Excuse me?” he asks. Sloan elaborates, “How can you be sure you’re not working for them?” Sloan might be trying to catch a Dominion double agent, but he also seems to take a great deal of pleasure in shattering Bashir’s sense of reality. Like Gul Madred in Chain of Command, Part II, Sloan wants to break Bashir of his tether to reality.

Sloan seeks to convince Bashir that he is compartmentalising his betrayal of the Federation through “engramatic dissociation.” The idea is that Bashir could hold two contradictory ideas in his head at the exact same moment, meaning that he could be both a loyal Federation citizen and a Dominion spy without ever realising it. If Sloan is to be believed, Bashir cannot even trust his own awareness of himself. His memory and identity are corrupted, flawed, eroded. Bashir cannot be sure what is real and what is not.

It turns out that everything in Inquisition is fake. Chandler and Kagan do not exist, so Kagan never had a buddy who died during the Dominion attack upon the Seventh Fleet. This version of Weyoun is holographic, alluding to events that never happened. As part of the holographic program, Sisko tells Bashir that Sloan lost a son to the conflict, and that this is motivating his overzealous pursuit of Bashir. It turns out that this is also a lie. Even Sloan’s Starfleet uniform is an illusion, a construct pasted over black leather.

In The Hyperreal Theme in 1990s American Cinema, Randy Laist points to the nineties as a moment when the American consciousness became fascinated with the space between what was real and what was unreal, and the divide (if any) between them:

To be sure, the end of the Cold War was not the only significant cultural change underway during the 1990s. As American society experienced the sense that established polar narratives of good vs. evil had collapsed along with the Berlin Wall, technological innovations such as cloning, virtual reality, 24-hour cable news channels, the internet, and CGI cinematography all seemed to operate simultaneously to collapse other polar narratives such as real vs. illusory, original vs. derivative, and authentic vs. artificial. Writing in 1999, cultural critic Neal Gabler argues: “After decades of public-relations contrivances and media hype, and after decades more of steady pounding by an array of social forces that have alerted each of us personally to the power of performance, life has become art, so that the two are now indistinguishable from each other.” To explain his troubled impression that American social life in the 1990s had been characterized by an incapacity to differentiate reality from its representations, Gabler recounts Lewis Carroll’s description of a map that is so accurate that if it were unfolded, it would bury the actual world underneath the representation. A similar fable from Jorge Luis Borges became the starting point for Jean Baudrillard’s famous essay, The Precession of Simulacra, in which he argued “[t]oday abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”  Baudrillard formulated his doctrine of hyperreality throughout the eighties, and it had been extremely influential on the art and literature of that decade, but Baudrillard’s breakthrough into popular awareness did not come until the heavily marketed 1988 debut of his book America. Most of his books were not translated into English until the 1990s, when hyperreality came into its own as a widely-acknowledged condition. Baudrillard drew attention to himself in the early nineties with his provocative statement that the Gulf War “did not take place,” a statement which, like another controversial statement from later on in that decade, hinges on what the definition of “is” is. For citizen-consumers in the heartland, does seeing a war on television, through cameras mounted on computer-guided ordnance, make the war real? Or does it make it hyperreal, so spectacularly vivid that it has spun off into its own ontological register – neither real nor unreal, but hyperreal. A book on the Clinton presidency is titled Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Image-Making in Postmodern Politics. Hyperreality might have been first theorized in the seventies and eighties, but it is not until the nineties that the end of the Cold War, which had held reality at gunpoint since the middle of the century, along with the proliferation of new reality-bending technologies, made hyperreality come true. In the “lost decade” between 11/9 and 9/11, the texture of reality itself seemed to quiver, a psychic condition which is extremely evident when we turn to that seismograph of American consciousness, Hollywood cinema.

This anxiety played out in a number of ways through the nineties, in television shows like V.R. 5 and Harsh Realm, or through movies like Dark City, The Matrix, eXistenz, The Truman Show and The Thirteenth Floor. In fact, Deep Space Nine even played with this paranoia in Whispers.

To be fair, Voyager was much more interested in these stories about fungible memory and identities, reflecting its status as the Star Trek series most firmly rooted in the mood and tone of the nineties. Even a cursory glance the fourth season reveals this recurring theme, whether in the distortion of history in Year of Hell, Part I and Year of Hell, Part II, the traded experiences of Random Thoughts, the untrustworthy memory of Retrospect, the stolen history of The Killing Game, Part I and The Killing Game, Part II, or the warped record in Living Witness.

As such, it is fascinating to see Deep Space Nine play with these themes even within the background of an episode. Inquisition is about much broader political and historical themes, about the need to balance security (or the perception of security) against liberty, but these ideas still bubble through the episode. They play with the episode in interesting ways, informing the other themes. It is a relatively rare moment of thematic intersection between Deep Space Nine and Voyager, two franchise siblings that were often at a remove from one another.

Still, there is a clear difference between how Inquisition approaches these themes, as compared to Voyager. Throughout Voyager‘s run, it is repeatedly suggested that the crew exist in a universe with a static history that is under constant existential threat. Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II cemented the idea that the twenty-ninth century would not be so radically removed from the twenty-fourth, with Starfleet standing guard over time as well as space. Voyager often felt stuck on one extended moment, with no tangible sense of growth or movement.

Voyager was about a ship crossing tens of thousands of light years, but with most of the crew trapped in amber. Deep Space Nine was about a station stuck in one place, but with a crew constantly changing and growing. Indeed, Inquisition is an episode built upon the idea of continuity. It is an episode very firmly rooted in the history of Deep Space Nine, cleverly using the show’s history to construct a damning indictment of Julian Bashir by reference to events that the audience have actually seen depicted on screen.

Sloan builds a compelling case against Bashir by citing episodes like Hippocratic Oath, In Purgatory’s Shadow, By Inferno’s Light and Statistical Probabilities. It is a wonderful argument, because it hinges on information that is readily available to the audience and which can be taken together to imply a pattern of behaviour. Had Sloan not leveled these charges in Inquisition, it seems like these circumstantial links might have been fashioned together into a subversive fan theory, like the speculation about Riker’s functional alcoholism on The Next Generation.

There is an astonishing attention to detail in Sloan’s accusations. Sloan draws attention to the fact that Bashir was in solitary confinement before being released into general population in In Purgatory’s Shadow. It was a plot element that was obviously designed to conceal the fact that he had been replaced by a changeling, but Sloan uses that seemingly innocuous detail as the cornerstone of his accusation. Why was Bashir in solitary? How long was Bashir in solitary? What happened while Bashir was in solitary?

Inquisition even shrewdly capitalises on a lingering plot hole in By Inferno’s Light. Most television shows would gloss over the absurdity of the Dominion leaving a fully-functional runabout orbitting their penal colony to provide a means of escape, but Sloan returns to it. “Why would the Dominion leave your runabout orbiting the camp unattended?” Sloan nitpicks. Bashir sighs, “They didn’t think we’d be able to contact it.” Sloan jumps on that with the enthusiasm of an internet commenter. “Why not? They left you everything you needed to build a transmitter.”

It is an exaggeration to say that this sort of continuity was entirely absent from Voyager. After all, the fourth season did maintain a surprisingly tight continuity in the episodes immediately following Message in a Bottle. However, this sort of continuity was the exception rather than the rule on Voyager. Often, memory functioned as a trap on Voyager. In Course: Oblivion, the crew are doomed by their connection to the episode Demon. In The Voyager Conspiracy, Seven of Nine quite literally overdoses on continuity. In Latent Image, memory almost kills the EMH.

Instead, Deep Space Nine has come to understand continuity, and the opportunities that it presents. The show is still producing standalone episodes, but those standalone episodes exist in a broader context. More than that, they are strengthened by the fact that these details and plot elements exist outside these individual forty-five minute chunks. Indeed, Inquisition even includes a sly continuation of a small gag from Change of Heart, with Casperia Prime usurping Risa’s place in the Star Trek canon.

Even beyond that creeping sense of unreality, there is something delightfully uncomfortable about Inquisition. This is the first episode of Star Trek to be directed by Michael Dorn, which is remarkable. Dorn is the longest-serving regular in the history of the franchise, even reportedly offered a guest appearance on Star Trek: Discovery, so it is surprising that it took him over a decade to step behind the camera. Dorn is not as assured a director as Frakes, Burton, McNeill, Dawson or Brooks. However, Inquisition is an impressive debut.

There are not too many impressive technical shots in Inquisition, which makes a great deal of sense. This is a dialogue- and idea-driven episode, largely anchored in the interplay between Alexander Siddig and William Sadler. However, Dorn does make a number of interesting directorial choices. In particular, he keeps the camera moving. This is most striking in a short cut of Bashir leaving his quarters only to be interrupted by a phaser drill.

The surreal nature of the scene is heightened by the decision to track Bashir through the doorway out into the corridor, a rare camera manoeuvre on televised Star Trek. The scene cannot be structured as a long take, likely due to the layout of the standing sets. Nevertheless, keeping the camera with Bashir helps to ground the audience in his perspective, which in some ways sets up the episode’s big twist in the final act.

Indeed, Inquisition does an excellent job of quietly and slowly heightening the stakes and amping up the tension as it goes. There is something decidedly Hitchcockian in the way that the episode escalates. The sight of armed officers in Ops during the teaser is unsettling, but so is the unexplained tactical drill, and the signs of disturbance in Bashir’s quarters. Even when Sloan presents himself as a “good cop”, there is a creeping sense of anxiety. Something is wrong, even if its never clear exactly what is going on.

That said, Inquisition works largely due its casting. Luther Sloan is an instantly memorable character, even before his true identity is revealed. William Sadler has an incredible screen presence, one that sets him apart from Deep Space Nine‘s other Starfleet personnel. Sadler is a compelling enough presence that Inquisition can effectively close its teaser with a close-up on his face. The teaser does not end on the suggestion that there is a spy on Deep Space Nine, the teaser ends because this is the man who has been sent to deal with it.

Sloan would become one of Deep Space Nine‘s most iconic characters, which is remarkable for a character who only appeared three times across the final two years of the show. In fact, even Sadler seems to remember Sloan in these archetypal terms:

I had a great time doing that. They called me up and asked me if I’d do it—that was another offer—and I had been a Star Trek fan, but I hadn’t watched Deep Space Nine. I didn’t follow that series. But Star Trek was such an important part of the fabric of the culture when I was growing up that I was thrilled. And I had a ball, too. But what a fun character to play. I think the first time we see him, he’s sitting at Dr. Bashir’s bedside, and he’s been there all night. Or you don’t know how long he’s been sitting there watching Bashir sleep. [Laughs.] It’s just an extremely creepy entrance for a character, and it’s great. Very unsettling.

Of course, Sadler is misremembering. Sloan is never glimpsed inside Bashir’s quarters in Inquisition. Sloan reintroduces himself to Bashir in that manner in Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges and Extreme Measures, and that is how most casual viewers will remember him. Sloan perched at the end of Bashir’s bed is an evocative image, one that captures the essence of the character.

Of course, Inquisition introduces one of the great legacies of Deep Space Nine. In many ways, Deep Space Nine become an evolutionary cul-de-sac for the larger Star Trek franchise. There was very little continuity between Deep Space Nine and the later Star Trek shows. Ronald D. Moore would be the only member of staff to continue on with the franchise after Deep Space Nine came to an end, but his tenure on Voyager would be measured in weeks. A lot of the experience learned on Deep Space Nine was allowed to slip away after the show ended.

When Star Trek: Enterprise launched, there was a clear continuity from Voyager. Rick Berman and Brannon Braga were the showrunners. Mike Sussman and Phylis Strong were the first writers to be hired. André Bormanis also returned. As such, Enterprise had to learn to do serialisation from scratch, leading to a bizarre situation where Ira Steven Behr was brought in to consult towards the end of the second year for a session that was less than productive. This is to say nothing of carrying over pet interests like time travel or the Borg.

As such, Deep Space Nine had a relatively subdued influence on the rest of the Rick Berman era. Taking a holistic view of the second-generation Star Trek shows, Deep Space Nine could seem like something of a narrative and creative dead end for the franchise. If anything, Star Trek actively retreated from the ambitious spirit of Deep Space Nine. Its influence would be more keenly felt on television series outside the Star Trek banner. There is a much stronger evolutionary link to Battlestar Galactica, for example.

However, it is often surprising what elements of Deep Space Nine took root outside the show. The Cardassians never quite became iconic Star Trek baddies, never measuring up to the Klingons or the Romulans in popular consciousness. The Dominion would only receive a few fleeting references in other concurrent Star Trek stories. While characters from The Next Generation and Voyager seemed to frequently overlap with one another, the characters from Deep Space Nine seldom crossed over to other shows, barring Birthright, Part I and smaller appearances from Quark.

However, Section 31 endured. Section 31 might just be the most lasting contribution that Deep Space Nine made to the larger Star Trek continuity, the textual element that has endured long beyond (and well outside) the series. Section 31 would appear in episodes of Enterprise like Affliction and Divergence, with Malcolm Reed revealed to have some history with the organisation. Section 31 would also appear connected to the antagonist of Star Trek Into Darkness, albeit in a very muddled and confusing manner.

To be fair, it is easy to see why Section 31 has stuck around. Inquisition makes it very clear that they are not a new organisation, with Sloan insisting that the organisation “was part of the original Starfleet charter”, making them more than two hundred years old. As such, they are a rare part of the Deep Space Nine mythos that can be integrated into prequel settings. Indeed, Sloan’s line all but invites an appearance on Enterprise, which is built around the idea that Starfleet predates the Federation. Plus, clandestine organisations and secret societies are inherently cool.

At the same time, there is something slightly frustrating about Section 31. As author Keith R.A. DeCandido argues, Section 31 becomes a convenient scapegoat that can be used to defuse potential criticisms of Starfleet and the Federation:

I have a hard time figuring out how I feel about this episode, partly because I think the introduction of Section 31 was one of the great missteps of DS9. One of Ira Steven Behr’s oft-stated goals on DS9 was to challenge the Federation’s utopia, but this failed to work because it didn’t challenge the utopia, it just provided a too-handy scapegoat for non-utopian actions by the Federation. Indeed, S31 has far too often become a writer’s crutch, a way to work around the ideal society of the Federation for the ease of storytelling.

Suddenly, any major missteps of Federation policy and Starfleet directives can be blamed on a small cadre or rogue officers operating without any direct oversight. These problems are not institutional, not rooted in a culture of unquestioning devotion to a large organistion. Section 31 are a barrel of bad apples.

One need only look at how tie-in media has approached the concept of Section 31, using the organisation to effectively write around any portrayal of the Federation as less than ideal. Many authors have retroactively suggested that Section 31 was secretly involved in any number of questionable decisions that Starfleet made over the franchise’s fifty-year history. As such, Section 31 allows authors and fans to re-write the franchise’s history, to downplay any implicit or explicit criticism of the Federation by claiming that there is a secret society of “bad” guys at work.

The novel Cloak ties the organisation to the theft of the Romulan cloaking device in The Enterprise Incident, to the conspirator Admiral Cartwright from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, at to the disastrous experiment referenced in The Omega Directive. The novel Abyss suggests that the Starfleet plot against the Bak’u in Star Trek: Insurrection was largely driven by Section 31. In These Are The Voyages…, Riker even retroactively suggests that “a secret section of Starfleet security” was responsible for the events of The Pegasus.

At the same time, this might not be an intentional effort to downplay the Federation’s more morally ambiguous actions. It might just be authors indulging in the apophenia that drives so much licensed tie-in fiction, the insistence that everything must be tied together by the the threads of continuity. After all, what is the point in having a secret organisation within Starfleet if their invisible hand was never at work? The clandestine nature of Section 31 allows writers (and fans) to write them into the history of the fictional universe without explicitly rewriting continuity.

Inquisition is endearingly vague when it comes to the particulars of what Sloan is doing. Sloan suggests that he is operating in something resembling official capacity. He describes his organisation as “a branch of Starfleet Intelligence”, with an “official designation.” This suggests that Sloan is not a rogue operative operating without any official support within the command structure. In the closing scene, Sisko suggests that Starfleet Command is maintaining plausible deniability. “Starfleet Command doesn’t acknowledge its existence, but they don’t deny it either.”

Still, Inquisition is careful to maintain a clear distance between Section 31 and the rest of Starfleet. “Starfleet sanctions what you’re doing?” Bashir demands. Sloan almost chuckles at the idea. “We don’t submit reports or ask for approval for specific operations, if that’s what you mean. We’re an autonomous department.” As such, it feels like Inquisition is trying to have its cake and eat it, insulating Section 31 from the larger Starfleet organisation. The Federation can be passively complicit in Sloan’s actions, but they cannot explicitly endorse him.

Inquisition would probably be even more effective if the production team were willing to paint Sloan as a member of Starfleet Intelligence, to suggest that the organisation was willing to suspend due process and torture Federation citizens in their efforts to protect the organisation from all threats foreign and domestic. After all, Starfleet had been willing to forceably relocate settlers in Journey’s End, seemed okay with Picard’s plan to commit genocide in I, Borg and would sign off on Sisko’s plan to lie to the Romulans in In the Pale Moonlight. Is this a bridge too far?

In some ways, this delineation feels like another illustration that Deep Space Nine has pushed as far as it can within the Roddenberry box. The series has repeatedly shattered the expectations for a Star Trek show, demonstrating just what could be done within the established framework. However, it seems that boundaries still exist. Honour Among Thieves cannot abandon the credited regulars. Change of Heart cannot kill off a credited lead mid-season. Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night cannot explore the true horrors of “comfort women.”

Inquisition suggests that Starfleet can be passively complicit in this behaviour, but cannot be directly implicated. Even in the midst of an on-going war for the very fate of the Alpha Quadrant, there are some lines that will not be crossed. The Deputy Assistant Attorney General and the Assistant Attorney General of the Federation are not sending memos on “enhanced interrogation.” The Federation’s Justice Department is not sending legal memos to Starfleet Intelligence about extraordinary rendition.

In the context of Inquisition, this is minor concern. The production team seem to recognise it as a potential issue. When Section 31 returns in Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges, Ronald D. Moore aligns recurring guest star Admiral Bill Ross with the organisation. When Bashir investigates the changeling virus in When It Rains…, he discovers that Commander Hilliard is certainly sympathetic to the attempted genocide. However, while these episodes place Section 31 closer to the heart of Starfleet and the Federation, their support is still rendered largely in passive terms.

Still, none of these are necessarily problems with Inquisition. Much like Sloan’s case against Julian Bashir, the argument against Section 31 tends to build up over time rather than rest upon a single inciting episode. Inquisition is a superb piece of television, and one of the best episodes of the sixth season. It is a clever script, built around some challenging ideas, anchored in two great lead performances. Inquisition is a paranoid and claustrophobic thriller that has aged remarkably well, and a testament to all involved.

You might be interested in our reviews of the sixth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:

• A Time to Stand
• Rocks and Shoals
• Sons and Daughters
• Behind the Lines
• Favour the Bold
• Sacrifice of Angels
• You Are Cordially Invited…
• Resurrection
• Statistical Probabilities
• The Magnificent Ferengi
• Waltz
• Who Mourns for Morn?
• Far Beyond the Stars
• One Little Ship
• Honour Among Thieves
• Change of Heart
• Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night
• Inquisition
• In the Pale Moonlight
• His Way
• The Reckoning
• Valiant
• Profit and Lace
• Time’s Orphan
• The Sound of Her Voice
• Tears of the Prophets

Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: 9/11, Bashir, cynicism, due process, luther sloan, section 31, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, tribunals, war on terror, william sadler |