6x18 Inquisition

[7.9/10] There’s a lot going on in “Inquisition”. It is part paranoid thriller, part examination of justice and fairness in the face of exigent investigations, part standard Trekkian mind-bender, and part commentary on the contradictions of the Federation. That is a lot of ground to cover in forty-four minutes, but thankfully, Deep Space Nine does it well.

The episode sees Deputy Director Sloane from Starfleet Internal Affairs investigating a potential Dominion mole and setting his sights on Bashir. William Sadler plays the rock-ribbed, manipulative, and intimidating officer convincingly, with a mix of sly smugness and military certainty that makes him a good antagonist in the episode.

He’s an unknown quantity in a known setting. If there’s one thing “Inquisition” does well, it’s helping the audience share in Dr. Bashir’s disorientation and bewilderment at the turn of events during Sloan’s investigation, which helps link the disparate ideas in the episode together. Julian gets hints as to what’s happening at the same time we do, with Sloan playing mind games while he’s confined to quarter, pretending to be friendly before turning into a hardass, and leaving us as uncertain as he is about what’s really going on. The vibe of maddening uncertainty and sense of unfairness to all of this puts the audience in Dr. Bashir’s shoes in a nice way.

At the same time, though, the writers do a good job of putting us in Sloan’s shoes as well, at least when the story’s still maintaining the pretense that this is a standard Starfleet investigation. To some extent, Sloan comes off like a biased investigator when he lays out his case against Julian. As with Lt. Cdr. Remick in TNG’s “Coming of Age” or Admiral Satie in TNG’s “The Drumhead”, the story features a motivated Starfleet interrogator taking the least charitable interpretation of events the audience has witnessed.

The way Sloan invokes Dr. Bashir’s sympathy toward the Jem’Hadar in “Hippocratic Oath”, his time in Dominion captivity that could have let the Vorta get their hooks in him from “In Purgatory’s Shadow”, his recommendation that the Federation surrender in “Statistical Probabilities”, and even the improbability of his escape from the Dominion prison camp in “By Inferno’s Light”.

I’m always a sucker for when a show remembers its continuity, and has another character use it against our protagonists. (Hello Game of Thrones fans!) Sloan seems like a biased asshole, taking the worst possible spin, the least generous interpretation, of every action Dr. Bashir’s taken, even though the audience has seen him and his earnest intentions in action. As Sisko himself relays, while Julian may have made mistakes, his motives have always been pure and loyal.

But even in the face of our obvious sympathies, the show does two very smart things to combat them. One, it plants a seed of doubt in both Julian and the audience. And two, it raises a suggestion that, however much of a jerk he may be about it, Sloan may not be unreasonable in trying to put these pieces together to finger Julian as a possible traitor.

For the former, Sloan suggests that Julian might have suppressed his memory of being turned, or had it turned for him. So while viewers may be skeptical that Julian is a turncoat, it’s much more plausible that he’s been brainwashed or coopted somehow, a la Geordi’s Manchurian Candidate experience in TNG’s “The Mind’s Eye”. At the same time Dr. Bashir is questioning himself, wondering if there might be something under the mental surface he’s not privy to, the audience wonders the same. The choice is another nice dovetailing between the character’s experience of these events and the viewer’s.

For the latter, as much of a Prick as Sloan is, you can see how, to an objective observer, who hasn’t had the privilege of the nigh-omniscient vantage point of the audience, would be skeptical of Dr. Bashir. Sloan’s right that Julian lied to get into Starfleet and didn't admit the truth until he was caught. He’s right that even Chief O’Brien questioned Dr. Bashir’s choices with respect to the Jem’Hadar they were stranded with. Sloan’s right Julian and his augment association’s recommendation that the Federation surrender was, at a minimum, unusual. And Sloan’s right that it was odd that the Dominion just let a functional Starfleet runabout hang around one of their prison camps. (And hey, good for this episode for acknowledging the show’s own narrative shortcuts and even putting them to good use!)

Add those things up, and you have a surprisingly reasonable case that, if there's a suspected traitor in your midst, Julian might very well be your number one suspect. I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for television series threading past events together like this, especially when they use the collective whole to put them into a new light.

That said, it’s still easy to feel indignant on Julian’s behalf. He still seems railroaded, mistreated, unjustly cornered by Sloan and his men. We know with the benefit of hindsight that it’s all a sort of endurance trial to test Julian’s mettle, resolve, and loyalty. But if I didn’t know better given the timeframe, I’d think this was a Patriot Act commentary. The truth is that it’s an unfortunately recurring trope in real life, but the way Sloan uses war and special dispensation from command to let suspicion lead to detention and strip the doctor of his rights ties into the broader theme of this episode, about the Federation perhaps losing its soul in the throes of war, or its principles having been cracked from the beginning anyway.

The same goes for the interrogation Julian endures, which plays like a commentary on law enforcement methods and pressure placed on the accused. The sense in which the deck is stacked against Dr. Bashir, in how his interrogators blame him for the deaths of their comrades and family members, in how his rights are being disregarded despite the protections of his captain, how his privacy is being invaded, make you understand why someone would give in just to make it all stop.

So too does the sense from Dr. Bashir that he’s not certain he can trust his own memory. There are shades of Kira’s experience in “Second Skin” here, where you wake up in a dizzying scenario out of nowhere that forces you to reckon with how much you can rely on your own recollections. By the same token, this episode is of a piece with Riker’s experience in TNG’s “Future Imperfect”, and the Doctor’s experience in VOY’s “Life Line”, where the protagonist isn’t sure what’s real and what isn’t, and keeps having the rug pulled out from under them, to where eventually the audience is forced to play the same guessing game, and wonder who’s telling the truth and who’s mixed up.

“Inquisition” does well at that game, when Dr. Bashir is purportedly beamed out by Weyoun, who tries to remind Julian of their methods for getting him to remember his complicity in the Dominion’s actions. It’s a brilliant use of Weyoun, whose entire M.O. is genteel manipulation. The way he tries to paint Dr. Bashir’s supposed betrayal as a move to save lives, that history will remember as a humane act, is in keeping with Bashir's principles. And superstar Jeffrey Combs has the perfect silver-tongued salesman’s bent to persuade both Julian and us that the doctor did succumb to the Dominion’s entreaties, and it’s been programmed out of him.

Savvy viewers can probably guess that Dr. Bashir isn't really a turncoat, even a brainwashed one. But Deep Space Nine is not above major twists like this, many of which have involved Bashir (i.e., he’s secretly a changeling, he’s secretly an augment, he’s secretly a yorkshire terrier). Weyoun puts the idea just close enough to the line to make you wonder if the Vorta might just be telling the truth, and Julian’s been caught up in another Dominion ploy.

Thankfully, the way the show snaps out of it in the perfect way. I particularly appreciate how the script has Julian, and by extension the audience, clued into what’s wrong with this scenario on both an interpersonal and a practical basis. Julian realizes something is off when everyone on the Defiant believes the worst about him and doesn’t even hear him out. I love the fact that what reassures him that this whole thing is some kind of scam comes from knowing his friends well enough to recognize that they wouldn’t treat him this way, and trusting that they’d have his back even in the roughest of circumstances. It speaks to the bonds he’s formed over the past six years.

And on a particle basis, the show sets up that Miles injured his shoulder in one of trademark kayaking runs, allowing Julian to smell a rat when he shrugs off a touch of the arm with remarkable dexterity. It’s some good setup and payoff, and enough to feel like “Inquisition” is playing fair when Sloan turns off the holodeck and reveals that this whole thing was a ruse to see if Dr. Bashir had the right stuff.

Enter Section 31, which may be the most Deep Space Nine concept in all of Deep Space Nine. There’ll be more time to talk about them later, but in short, there’s something dark, and galling about the idea that there’s an autonomous agency, using questionable methods to recruit people, doing whatever it deems necessary to protect the interests of the Federation, using loopholes in the charter. Julian is right to be aghast, not only at how he was treated, but at how this runs counter to everything Starfleet has been about since fans first saw the organization.

The dialogue lays it on a little thick, but if there’s been a guiding principle for the UFP, it’s that the ends don’t justify the means; that there are certain principles that are inviolable, and our heroes would rather lose fairly or suffer justly than survive at the cost of their ideals. Section 31 is the opposite of that, an organization that believes the lives saved, the paradise preserved, is worth whatever tactics and dirty work are necessary to ensure it.

It’s hard to imagine a concept truer to showrunner Ira Steven Behr’s view of the show, and of the Federation, that something so ostensibly so shiny and upstanding must have a dark underbelly and a pit of compromise in order to sustain itself. I’m a fan of deconstructions, and recognition of unpleasant pragmatism beneath the glistening ideals, but Section 31 is a big deal, arguably the largest betrayal of Gene Roddenberry’s vaunted vision there’s even been in the franchise. That’s the point.

I love how the rest of the DS9 crew is galled by the revelation, all except Odo, who recognizes that the great powers of the quadrant have each sported a secret organization to protect their interests. The Federation is supposed to be above such things. Roddenberry’s excuse for why Starfleet didn’t use cloaking technology was, “We don’t sneak around.” Well, apparently we do, and what we’re willing to cover up, and look the other way over, is much broader and more bracing than anything the great bird of the galaxy might have been able to stomach.

It’s tough for Julian to stomach too. He loves his James Bond-inspired fantasies, but as with his interactions with Garak in “Our Man Bashir”, he’s come to discover that the actual espionage is much less glamorous, much more harrowing, and much more morally compromised than he’d countenanced before. As is so often the case in Deep Space Nine, the truth is darker and more complicated than the fiction.

That is, of course, a lot to encompass in a single hour of television. “Inquisition” arguably bites off more than it can chew here. And yet, what it gnaws on is good stuff, with room to explore more of it down the line. The world of Dr. Bashir, and of Deep Space Nine, would never be quite the same after this, when the show questions if Julian might be compromised, and instead reveals that, instead, it’s the whole damn Federation.