Comment by latexr
8 months ago
> DS9 had an actual instance of torture too, but it was a hero being tortured by... half-hero, half anti-hero
If you’re talking about Garak torturing Odo, that seems different than the 24 case because in that instance Garak was explicitly working for “the bad guys”. And even so he was doing the torturing reluctantly and only doing so because the alternative was the torturing being done by another operative which wouldn’t restrain themselves. In other words, in that instance the show was explicitly treating torture as bad.
> made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide.
Technically it wasn’t the disease which defeated the Founders, though I supposed one can argue it debilitated them enough. Even so, despite the results I didn’t feel like the show was necessarily approving of Section 31 (the main characters actively tried to defeat them).
> Technically it wasn’t the disease which defeated the Founders, though I supposed one can argue it debilitated them enough.
It put a countdown clock on their remaining lifespan. Infecting all the Founders simultaneously with a lethal disease made the entire war (that they were very much winning) moot. For the Founders, the entire reason behind the conflict was to ensure their own safety from hypothetical future threats (they were a paranoid bunch); that obviously is not achieved when all Founders are dead, so the entire calculus changes.
That's what I mean by saying that the virus short-circuited the war. It may have been the compassionate and extremely risky act of Odo that, in true Star Trek fashion, changed hearts and minds and got everyone back to the negotiating table, but even without it, the virus would've ended the war within a week or such - leaving alpha and beta quadrants in a bad state (fighting against now feral but still superior Dominion invasion force), but still much better and more survivable than the war itself was.
> Even so, despite the results I didn’t feel like the show was necessarily approving of Section 31 (the main characters actively tried to defeat them).
The show was very much not approving of Section 31; that one was communicated quite clearly. What I'm saying is that, if you ignore what you're being told and look at what you're being shown - the events that happened, not the main characters' opinions on them - it's becomes much harder to paint Section 31 as villains of the story.
I believe this outcome was not intended by the writers; it's just what the whole storyline ended up adding up to.