In the Pale Moonlight

an enduring lesson from Star Trek: Deep Space 9

---

What follows is an in-depth discussion of my thoughts on the lessons that I have learned from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. It includes massive spoilers for the entire series, especially the season six episode called, “In the Pale Moonlight.”

---

“Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?”

—the Joker, in Batman

---

My name is Holly MathNerd, and I’m a Niner

Star Trek: Deep Space 9 is my favorite Star Trek series.

DS9, and especially my favorite episode, has been on my mind for two weeks now, to the point that I know there’s something for me to discover there.

Writing is how I discover almost everything, and if you’re reading this, I apparently decided to share the journey this time.

We Trekkies who love it the most, among all the Star Trek series to love, are sometimes called “Niners”. The captain of DS9 loves baseball, so there’s a whole line of merch that lets Niners find each other.

Just Enough Context To Get The Rest of This Post

The series is set on a space station, the Deep Space 9 of the title. It has a cast of characters who live on the station full-time, a combination of Starfleet officers and residents of Bajor, the nearest planet. The Bajorans have just recently won a war against the Cardassians, an enemy that occupied their planet for fifty years in a brutal analogy to the Holocaust. The Federation has an uneasy peace with the Cardassians and are trying very hard to help the Bajorans recover from the occupation and ready themselves to join the Federation.

If you’ve seen the show “Little House on the Prairie,” you already get the dynamic. Just as Star Trek: the Next Generation was a workplace drama, DS9 is a small town epic. DS9 is in every way its own small town, with people who live there full-time and new people moving in and out for various reasons. The starships that come in and out bring in friends, enemies, and in-betweens, with conflicts arising and being settled. The people who live there include characters from Star Trek: the Next Generation — Miles O’Brien and later Worf—and a Cardassian exile named Garak, a tailor who is also a former spy.

Captain Benjamin Sisko, a widower with a teenage son, commands DS9. They are represented as being from the New Orleans area on earth, so the show presents, among other things, a powerful model of devoted fatherhood among black Americans, which is an aspect of the show that I enjoy and appreciate.

“In the Pale Moonlight”

In season 6, the Federation is at war with the Dominion, a powerful race hellbent on authoritarian domination of the entire Alpha Quadrant.

And the Federation is losing. Badly. Losing to the tune of weekly lists of casualties on which nearly everyone recognizes a name.

At the beginning of episode 19, “In the Pale Moonlight,” Captain Sisko breaks the fourth wall, over and over. He stares right into the camera and tells his story, and the viewer is immediately drawn in.

He says: “I need to talk about this... I have to justify what's happened, what I've done - at least to myself. I can't talk to anyone else, not even to Dax. Maybe if I just lay it all out in my log, it'll finally make sense. I can see where it all went wrong - where I went wrong.”

He has realized that the only hope the Federation has is to get the Romulans to enter the war as Federation allies.

The Romulans have been neutral to this point, determined to stay out of it—a position that makes sense to them. Sisko has to change the calculus to make it seem, to the Romulans, that it makes more sense to get involved than to continue staying neutral.

To do this, he enlists Garak’s help and together they concoct a scheme to assassinate a Romulan Senator and blame it on the Dominion. Their scheme requires the help of a criminal, an expert forger, who must likewise be killed rather than left alive to possibly reveal what they have done.

It is impossible to exaggerate the violation of his own ethics, and his Starfleet training, that this behavior represents. Starfleet officers are known throughout the galaxy as trustworthy, upstanding citizens who are reliably ethical and honest.

And he, a proud Starfleet Captain, now suborns murder to achieve his aim.

Garak, the spy who is much more accustomed to making ethically murky and difficult decisions, comforts him:

“….and if your conscience is bothering you, you should soothe it with the knowledge that you may have just saved the entire Alpha Quadrant. And all it cost was the life of one Romulan senator, one criminal, and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer. I don't know about you, but I'd call that a bargain.”

The scene where Sisko admits to himself what he has done, but worse—that he can live with it—is chilling for its rawness and honesty.

He stares right into the camera, making a full confession to his personal log. He says:

I lied.

I cheated.

I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men.

I am an accessory to murder.

But the most damning thing of all... I think I can live with it.

And if I had to do it all over again? I would.

Garak was right about one thing: a guilty conscience is a small price to pay for the safety of the Alpha Quadrant.

So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it.

I can live with it.

Computer - erase that entire personal log.

I embedded a YouTube clip of that scene below; you may have to click and watch it on YouTube, depending on the limitations of your device/app.

This gives me enormous fodder for thought, always, and certainly during my periodic re-watches of DS9.

The Longest Negotiation

Three, almost four, months ago, I had an important realization about myself and one of the ways that a past trauma has shaped me. It took something I thought was true about myself and falsified it, in rather grand fashion.

Typically, when this happens, my therapist and I work through it in a couple of weeks, at most. I try to integrate it, and then I move forward.

That hasn’t happened this time. I haven’t managed to process this one at all, largely because this is one of the ones where my therapist’s expertise, in contextualizing it and making sure I see it clearly—challenging my assumptions and not letting me get away with bullshitting myself—is not the part I need help with.

What I have to do is figure out how to assign meaning to it that adds something to my life, rather than subtracting.

How to forgive myself for having gotten it wrong for so long, and how to change its meaning and go forward.

This is proving to be beyond me, I’m afraid. I’m to the point now of having to consider the possibility that I may never be able to do more than live with it, or try to. Try to turn it into some psychic equivalent of my bad shoulder, a permanent injury that flares up from time to time and hurts but is not an issue, in-between flares.

This possibility is so horrifying that the only thing keeping me from panic is the hope of some helpful tradeoff. After three months, it’s still interfering with my sleep more often than not, and it’s causing serious depression of an unusual (for me) sort—not the gloomy sort, but the everything-I-used-to-enjoy-feels-like-a-distraction sort.

And it really, really sucks.

Tradeoffs Are Everything

One thing I know for sure is that everything has tradeoffs. That sounds like a tautology, something obviously true, but it really isn’t.

It’s something that most people understand intellectually but surprisingly few understand on the level of reactions and nervous system involvement.

I have learned an incredible amount about tradeoffs by learning just a little evolutionary theory, primarily from the DarkHorse podcast and the book written by the co-hosts, Drs.

Heather Heying

and Bret Weinstein.

A couple of experiences always spring to mind when I think about tradeoffs.

Going to high school in a church basement and getting very little in the way of math teaching was something that I saw as wholly negative for years. I resented it when classmates found things easy, after years of math homework being assigned and checked to give them practice and fluency. I was especially angry about this when I first heard of logarithms, on the day my Calculus 1 professor introduced logarithmic differentiation.

But there’s a lovely tradeoff there; I adore logarithms now. They feel fun and exciting, more of a toy than a tool, and I quite literally find doing advanced logarithmic equations to be a relaxing and self-soothing mechanism that helps me control my anxiety.

I can’t hear, but I can see in unique and helpful ways, which in turn has meant that it was fairly easy for me to develop a new, life-enhancing skill; I can draw very well.

I wrote something a few days ago about violence, and what I’ve learned from being on both the giving and receiving ends of it.

There are tradeoffs there as well, to be sure. Having both experienced and enacted the brutality of violence gives me a respect for it that is missing among many. Having to actually do the work to overcome that kind of trauma is why I understand the profound evil of the arrogance and naivete in those who would consciously inflict trauma for their own ends—especially as a means of control to punish heretics. (Which is what all child abuse is, in particular—punishing a heretic for giving evidence of a thought crime.)

I can spot the malignant motives that violence stems from more easily than most, which has helped me protect myself more than a few times.

So yes, I get it. Everything has tradeoffs. And learning to live with the uglier ones is part of being an adult—as is coming to understand the grand context of what you can live with, and what it means about you.

Captain Sisko’s Tradeoff

Captain Sisko traded his innocence, his morality, and his self-respect for a shot at winning a war.

Ah! There it is.

Now I know what it was. Now I know why I had to write about this.

I love “In the Pale Moonlight” because Sisko gets to choose his tradeoff.

Most of the time, I have not experienced myself as consciously getting to choose mine. The experience is always something more like: suffering until I decide I’m ready to stop, then finding a framing for whatever has happened that seems to give me some power, and then going on from there.

There’s some element of choosing the tradeoff in choosing the framing, I suppose, but this has more often seemed like finding something than deciding something.

This realization I can’t process is tormenting me in part—probably mostly, if not pretty damn close to entirely—because I can’t assign enough meaning to it to choose a better framing.

Yet…..she whispers.

In something very much like a prayer.

---

A Thank You Note: on My Post-Pivot Writing

I’ve lost a noticeable amount of paid subscribers since I officially pivoted away from politics and the culture war. I’m not complaining about this. I am glad that people who were only interested in those topics have decided to stop paying for access to a place where those topics will no longer be brought up.

Writing about politics and the culture war is, I have learned, extremely easy. Shockingly easy. So easy that I’m embarrassed to have focused on it for so long.

I swear, I really did not know that my main topic was something so intellectually lazy. This has been a huge surprise, a piece of information I’m happy to have but simultaneously chagrined by.

I very much appreciate those of you who have stuck around. It means a lot to me. Thank you.