Picard requires his officers to resign their commission first, and reinstates them after they’re done.
The Federation operates on the "we were on a break" rules
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
Classic Asimov
I like Sisko because he makes the difficult choices other captains don't. It's not to say that he's always right (poisoning a planet just to catch Eddington, the lamest Star Trek villain since the Pak'led, seemed a little extreme), but he's willing to make decisions with lasting consequences, as opposed to Picard whose problems tend to get resolved by the end of an episode. Ah, if only EVERY issue could be fixed in 44 minutes!
Just once or twice a season… Please?!! I haven’t committed treason in two years!
Then there's Janeway with her 1st officer being a former member of a literal terrorist organization along with a substantial fraction of her crew.
How is that any different from Sisko? His first officer and lots of his crew were former members of the Bajoran Resistance.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Sisko wasn't a perfect Star Fleet commander but he was the perfect Star Fleet commander for a frontier outpost like DS9. Any regulations and by the Academy officer would've been eaten alive by DS9, the station needed someone with the power of The Federation behind them while able to turn their back on certain necessary evils.
Also get his hands dirty too. It needed a Star Fleet officer who wasn't afraid to flip the switch during The Dominion Wars and utilize the military side of the peace force. It only cost him his humanity, but he sacrificed it to be the officer that would unleash human's capacity for savagery upon The Dominion, knowing it was the only way to defeat them.
It reminds me a bit of Murtry from Cibola Burns of The Expanse series, "We fly out here to this new place, and because we're civilized, we think civilization comes with us. It doesn't. We build it. And while we build it, a whole lot of people die. You think the American West came with railroads and post offices and jails? Those things were built, and at the cost of thousands of lives. They were built on the corpses of everyone who was there before the Spanish came. You don't get one without the other. And it's people like me who do it. People like you come later. All of this? This is because you showed up too early. Come back after I've built a post office and we'll talk." Murtry was a murdering psychopath but he wasn't entirely wrong either. The Federation is just another form of manifest destiny but at a grand scale. But instead of using muskets and murder, The Federation uses something much more insidious: politics. Sisko is charged with bringing The Federation's values and system of governance to the final frontier, and like most changing of the guard, it will cost bodies. Sisko is like Star Fleet's Murtry, someone like Picard is like Holden who comes later after we built a post office.
Janeway: those are cadet numbers
Janeway: "If anyone on this ship is going to be a terrorist, it's me! Now move aside and let me push the button!"
Archer: "Can you all please stop committing acts of terror for five minutes?!"
Pike: "Nobody will want to become a terrorist after they've tried my cooking."
To be fair, most of the galaxy will do anything Pike asks you so you can stay in his quarters...
Ok ... so do we need a Lawful-Chaotic + Good-Evil matrix for Trek?
Im on season 3 of DS9 and I’ve been waiting the whole season to hear the backstory of Sisko’s goatee that he’s sporting on the FVD cover and then they spend a total of 5 seconds on it that amounts to “I wanted to try something different”
Avery Brooks wanted the look he had playing Hawk in Spenser: For Hire back.
And can you blame him? It's a fantastic look.
Good for him, let the man live.
What's "pspsps" in Cardassian?
The uncorking a bottle of Kanar. That or the sound of a dying Bajoran priestess.
The Federation are the biggest terrorists out there.
So brave
