6x11 Waltz

[9.5/10] In season 1’s “Duet”, Kira shared a series of dialogues with a Cardassian about the war and his role in it that helped her see there are, in fact, shades of gray to the people she’d hated for so long. And now, Deep Space Nine gives us its dark-tinged counterpoint. In “Duet”, Sisko shares a series of a dialogue with another Cardassian about the war and his role in it, and a man prone to see the complexity of the thorny situations Starfleet captains cannot help but encounter, is left with nothing but the moral clarity to stamp out that which is pure evil.

It is a masterful episode, one of the series’ very best, and at heart, it’s a character study. All-star Trek scribe Ronald D. Moore ensures that the episode has the right nuts and bolts to keep things exciting. There are two characters stranded, the rest of our heroes in search of them with a ticking clock, the looming threat that a Dominion vessel could reach them first, and false finishes like the Defiant seeming poised to beam Sisko out just before a rampage, only to instead pull up a pair of garden variety officers. There is tension, stakes, and narrative propulsion here in an episode that could otherwise be accused of being too talky.

Because while those things matter, and add to the urgency at the core of “Waltz”, this is first and foremost a plunge into the blackened soul of Gul Dukat. As Sisko himself puts it, whatever misdeeds the man has committed, he lost his child, his empire, his dream. He is a broken man, who’s suffered such karmic punishment that you cannot help but feel sorry for him. Moore and company take that beginning, and use it as fodder to remind you why Dukat isn’t just Deep Space Nine’s greatest villain (sorry, Kai Winn, you’re a close second), but the greatest villain in all of Star Trek.

Much of that owes to actor Marc Alaimo, who gives his best individual performance with a track record not short on great ones. Avery Brooks gets pl;enty to do here, but this is Alaimo’s hour, and he more than delivers. The warring sides within Dukat, the faux genteelness he puts on that starts to slip, the roiling rage that bubbles to the surface, steadily at first until it explodes, the unhinged nature of his final moments in the story -- Alaimo plays them all with grace and believability. In lesser hands, this might all be too much. There are big things going on here. But Alaimo holds the center of the character brilliantly to make his mental breakdown and descent back into villainy viscerally plausible.

Much of it owes to Moore and the rest of the writers who use this quiet aftermath of the Dominion’s occupation of DS9 to ask those all important questions about any significant characters: What makes them tick? How do they see themselves? How far is the gap between that and how others see them? What are their wants and anxieties? And for shows still in their later seasons, what is it that drives the characters after having been through so much?

The script uses a clever device to convey both those internal thoughts and Dukat’s loosening grip on reality. He hears the voices of Weyoun, Damar, and Kira, cajoling him, supplicating him, taunting him, playing the various urges to deal death or show mercy or feel the insecurity of his position. There’s a stagey quality to some of the material here, but unleashing these almost-there scene partners to convey Dukat’s inner feelings is a deft approach.

So is the choice to make Sisko his verbal sparring partner for this mental breakdown. Part of that is that having him injured and stranded on a planet with a duplicitous, slowly-unraveling Dukat helps add suspense to the situation. This is essentially Star Trek’s version of Misery. Seeing Sisko try to provide for his escape, while gravely injured, and having to placate someone who walks the line between wanting to be his best friend and wanting to kill him ensures that there’s tension in the center of every conversation.

The other part hinges on what, exactly, Dukat wants. He wants to be admired by his adversaries. He wants to be thanked and revered by the Bajoran people. He wants to be respected and admired by the denizens of DS9.

In short, he wants to be Sisko. He wants everything that Benjamin has. From the very first episode of the series, Deep Space Nine established a tension between the two men, founded on the fact that Sisko was now in Dukat’s old post, and Dukat would play ball, but by god, he wanted it back. Over time, that desire curdled into a deeper jealousy, a more desperate anger at the fact that his adversary had everything he coveted so badly.

Sisko isn’t just Dukat’s foil here. He’s the symbol of everything Dukat feels the universe has denied him, instead granted to a man who loathes him despite Dukat’s efforts to count him as a friend.

That’s one of the most fascinating aspects of the voices in Dukat’s head. On the one hand, they reveal that he’s deluded. He believes that Sisko puts up a tough front because of the war, but that deep down the Captain secretly admires him. He believes the same of Kira and Odo and Quark, that they put up resistance, but cannot help but like him despite themselves. He thinks that if he just made the right moves, showed up with the right gesture (or the right corpse), the Bajorans would accept his beneficence and see him as their liberator, not their oppressor.

This is his comfort, a pollyanna view of not just his role in politics, or history, but of his interpersonal relationships. And it reveals the way he doesn’t understand how the people of Bajor will always see him as an occupier, that Kira will always detest him, that his formidable opponent, Sisko, harbors nothing but contempt for him.

Or maybe he does. Because the other voices in his head whisper the poison of intrusive thoughts, that the people whose respect he so desires view him as lower than vermin, that his empire is lost, his “children” on Bajor want nothing to do him, and the man he’s all but torturing to get to express some bond between them is out of sympathy for his erstwhile captor.

The depth of delusion, though, the peak of Dukat’s self-flattering excuses and justifications hinge on the Occupation of Bajor. And they also reveal the depths of his depravity. When Sisko challenges him to explain his action during his time as prefect in moral terms, Dukat offers comprehensible answers. He did what his superiors asked of him! He tried showing benevolence and was met with nothing but harsh and oft-lethal rebukes! What choice did he have?

What’s striking is how his justifications don’t just take on the rationalizations of war criminals and other monsters of history; they have the character of an abuser. His pronouncements have a “Look what you made me do” quality when it comes to Bajor. Millions of peoples’ blood is on his hands, and he still views himself as a benevolent caretaker, a loving father, still waiting for his kids to grow up and thank him for all he did for them.

And when he realizes they never will, the only answer he has left is their wholesale slaughter.

The deal is complete. Gone is the Dukat who wanted to make nice, who thought that someday they’d all be friends, that there’ll be a statue of him in Bajor. In his place is a genocidal madman, prone to fits of paranoia, violent tendencies, and self-aggrandizement mixed with latent self-loathing. We thought the heel turn came when Dukat welcomed the enemy to the Alpha Quadrant, so long as he could be their puppet king. But there were deeper depths to sink to, where patience and appeasement metastasizes into grievance and obliteration.

And evil. The closing dialogue lays it on a little too thick. In truth, the entire final act goes a little off the rails, with physical struggles and convenient rescues and on-the-nose dialogue. You can feel the show needing to reset Sisko and Dukat on the game board, however implausible. But the emotional crescendo of Dukat’s madness and, yes, evil laid bare, carries the day.

A dangerous but complicated foe has become simple and unsavable. The man who wanted it all now only wants to burn it all down. A man whose scruples always bent to fit his actions is now unbound by any sense of decency or understanding, only self-righteous vengeance. Mick Foley once said that a good villain believes what they’re doing is right. Dukat’s always believed that about himself. Now he believes he’s justified in annihilation, a scary place to be. And in a show and a universe filled with moral and ethical complexity, Sisko believes that he’s pure, uncomplicated evil. That seems to be the point here.

But I don’t. To my mind, the goal of “Waltz” is to reverse the process of “Duet”, to flip the “evil to sympathetic” stance of a character and instead go from “sympathetic to evil”. Unfortunately, the writers are too good at writing characters to make that stick. For me, at least, evil is flat. Evil is plain. Evil is a straightforward “Bajor cost me my daughter and so now I want revenge” motivation.

Dukat is still more complex than that though. He is a good villain because he isn’t just a bad guy; he’s a character. He is comprehensible. Despite everything, he is still a certain sort of tragic figure. He’s a man who lost everything, up to and including his daughter, and is clearly still shattered by the experience. His tether to the world of sanity is thinner and thinner.

Most of all, he’s someone who wants desperately, furiously to be loved and appreciated, and yet is utterly incapable of understanding how to achieve that, if it were even possible in the first place. Someone who wants something desperately, and is fated never to get it, cannot help but earn our pity, especially when it's to feel wanted and loved.

Dukat is such a brilliant antagonist not because he’s pure evil, but because he’s a more recognizable form of insidious, the kind that emerges from real events, human failings, and unspeakable loss that spurs people to inflict their pain on others.

Even when Deep Space Nine is trying to simplify things, trying to provide that moral certitude where so much ambiguity normally lies, it cannot help but add in those layers, the nuance, the broken psyche of a man given over to malevolence, but whose path there is all too pitiful and too frighteningly real. “Waltz” fails in its effort to reverse its predecessor; but in its goal to expose the wounded, dark heart of Star Trek’s greatest villain, a man who is at once utterly pathetic and utterly terrifying, it is an unrivaled success.