Star Trek DS9 is an Ethical Play

(SPOILERS ahead)

To me, the best thing about Star Trek is its moral and ethical tales, and DS9 raises some very dep ethical questions and offers some important insights. As one example, there are 4 episodes of DS9 that address collaboration with fascism.

1. Necessary Evil
2. The Collaborator
3. Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night
4. Things Past

In each of them we have to struggle with what it means to be a collaborator, aiding a fascist occupying force; with whether we can do any good by going along with the evil — by limiting an evil that is unstoppable — like Kai Opaka sacrificing her own son and about 40 others because if she did not she was certain that they would be killed anyway plus 1200 others (“innocent” others). But to say those others are innocent because they were not fighting against the occupying fascist forces is odd, which brings us to Things Past, in which Odo allows — helps, really — the fascists murder 3 innocent men, instead of the actual “terrorists”, but those freedom fighters were, like Kira, only fighting for their freedom — and as we see also in Necessary Evil, Odo would have handed Kira over to those fascists had he known she had killed a collaborator.

But she did it as part of trying to uncover collaborators. Those collaborators as we see in that episode and in The Collaborator (not Vedek Barail but others in that episode) were helping the occupying fascist force and it was right for Kira to try to uncover them, and in self defense kill one of them. And then in Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night we are faced with the personal decision of Kira’s mother to save her and her family by shacking up with the fascist Gul Dukat. If she had not done that Kira likely would have died, or anyway not been able to fight and defend her land, and eventually help liberate it, and go on to do all the good she did later.

So we are faced with the complexities — along with the black and white in some cases — of ethics. Kira says “I guess during the occupation all of us had to get our hands a little dirty“, Kira says this to Odo — and it is true but not necessarily in the way she saw it at that moment. Yes, Odo should not have let those innocent men die — but is it really better to let freedom fighters like Kira die in their place? Odo was more a collaborator for doing Dukat’s will in killing “terrorists” — of which Kira would be counted — yet she saw his wrong as killing non terrorists, not in his killing of freedom fighters like herself…. Is that how ethics should work? If we believe in democracy, freedom, peace and non-violence, I am not so sure that it is. This is why some have made videos calling Odo a Nazi — that may be going too far, it is debatable, but certainly DS9 gives us a lot to chew on.