Quick recap: Quark disables the security which results in four people taking over the station.
A trill tries to steal Jadzia's symbiont.
Anyone else felt it was a bit weird how Quark never really got punished for endangering the entire crew by bringing aboard four terrorists?
Kira even said "one thing is certain you are through here" .Yet nothing really happened.
Posted Aug 13, 2019, 6:24 AM UTC
Luckily for Quark he was instrumental in helping them fix the situation, so they evidently let it slide.
This.
Quark never really gets punished for much. I just watched Meridian in S3, and he broke into personnel files to make a holo-suite image of Kira. Kira and Odo modify the program but Quark doesn't get more than a funny comment and a dirty look from the pair as punishment.
I always assumed that Quark spent time in a holding cell between episodes. Also Starfleets judicial punishment system is widely considered a joke across the galaxy because if how lenient it is. Remember when Cassidy Yates did a few months for aiding terrorists?
Although that's a good argument for Quark doing more time. Maybe the Federation did not recognize the group Quark aided as terrorists?
Remember when Cassidy Yates did a few months for aiding terrorists?
I think Kasidy actually does a longer sentence than Garak does for attempted genocide, though.
They both did six months. Except Kasidy did her time in prison, Garak had to spend six months in a holding cell.
That is 100% true. Guess he's the one that gave Section 31 the idea.
Just watched that episode, it's pretty clear quark was barely involved he was in-fact attacked immediately by one of the invading Klingons and as 54 explains hes a force for good. so there
He knew they would fake the ship damage, and helped by disabling the security. Sure, the people he helped turned on him, but he was still quite heavily involved.
He was a part of fixing the problem, but also kinda caused it in the first place.
the people he helped turned on him - this is a really key point, i suppose one reason quark escaped punishment was the fact that he was only shown to be on their side for about one minute. Great post i enjoy these types of questions greatly and you raise a good point i just cant help but think of quark as good.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
A station like this, you need to know where your clearinghouse of illegal stuff is. And who is running it, of course. As long as the good outweighed the bad as far as Quark was concerned, they let stuff slide. I'm convinced that's why Odo LET him operate. If you eliminate him from the station, someone else, someone you might not be able to work with and who won't give you info might take over the role. Quark's the devil you know.
So in Invasive Procedures, he does the terrible thing of letting people in--but as soon as he knows what they are actually about, he does help the DS9 crew.
It helps me to think of DS9 as a continuation of Gene Roddenberry's original "Wagon Train to the Stars" analogy. Where the ships are the wagon trains and calvary patrols, DS9 is one the American Western frontier towns. Think of shows like Gunsmoke or Bonanza. In those stories, there are many instances of a character who causes trouble and then is allowed to continue being a part of the community.
This is because of the difficulty in punishing middle-severity crimes on a frontier. Building a prison to hold someone who then has to be fed and clothed, and provides nothing to the survival of the community is impractical. In the early American colonies, this was remedied by having many (what we would now consider) minor crimes simply punishable by death. However, after the revolution and during the expansion westward, the threshold for a death sentence crept upward. This created a need for punishments that were not as severe as a hanging but did not remove a useful worker from the community. In general, in this situation, minor crimes are handled locally (sleep it off in the sheriff's office if you get drunk and get in a fight), major crimes are handled by a larger entity (telegram for a US Marshal to transport the offender to court), but everything in between has a lot of gray areas, and a lot of discretion available to the Sherrif and the Mayor.
Now we apply the analogy to DS9. Sisko is the Mayor, Odo is the Sheriff. There is one twist, however. The Federation and (as far as we can tell) Bajor don't use capital punishment, under any circumstances. For minor crimes, Odo might have someone sit in a cell for a day or two, but there are only 3 cells (as far as we see), so anything longer is probably done via confinement to living quarters. For most situations, this is probably sufficient, especially if the terms of confinement allow for work-release. Serious crimes are handled by the deportation of the suspect to Bajor, the Federation, or potentially the homeworld of the suspect for trial and rehabilitation.
Clearly, Sisko and Odo know that Quark is trouble. But they have determined that keeping him around is less of a risk than the unknown troublemaker who would come to fill the void if he were to be sent to Bajor or the Federation and that he wouldn't be punished at all by Ferenginar.
Quark at the same time knows that he has it pretty good where he is. As long as he doesn't run schemes that are too over the top, he's mostly left alone by the local Law. Also, as much as he refuses to admit it, Quark is a good guy. He is frienemies with Odo, tongo partners with Dax, friends with Bashir and O'Brien, and respects the way Sisko runs things. Especially after the war starts, and Nog joins Starfleet, Quark knows that he wouldn't fit in back on Ferenginar, DS9 is his home.
M-5, nominate this for... wait, wrong subreddit.
NGL, I thought this was DaystromInstitute when I was writing it.
Absolutely beautifully written, I have never thought of it this way. Explains why ds9 formula works so well, aside the good writing.
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Absolutely beautifully written, I have never thought of it this way. Explains why ds9 formula works so well, aside the good writing.