DS9 S3.E7 - Civil Defense

Season 3, Episode 7 - "Civil Defense," or "Alexa, Overreact"

I want to see the blooper reel from Civil Defense. Not the blooper reel of the episode--no, I want to see all the out-takes from Gul Dukat's series of pre-recorded contingency videos in response to a theoretical Bajoran rebellion.

At some point in Gul Dukat's career as Overseer, he had to work with a production team to make a series of videos designed to play in case of a Bajoran rebellion. Sort of a "If you're seeing this, the world has already ended" deal. There was probably a script, camera direction, maybe a makeup artist. I'm pretty sure Gul Dukat asked for multiple takes.

"Bajoran workers. You are in direct violation of your orders. Return to your posts immediately or I will be forced to release Vespene gas--wait, damn it. Sorry. Neurocine. Neurocine gas. Can we go again?"

At what point in his career did this recording session happen? Was it something he penciled in between meetings? Which department of Cardassian government is responsible for contingency videos? Did Gul Dukat harbor secret fantasies of making it in the movies? Was this his big break?

In "Civil Defense," Jake, Sisko, and O'Brien accidentally trigger an anti-rebellion failsafe embedded in DS9's central computer system. This failsafe is a relic of Cardassian control and wasn't removed from DS9 during the transition. It's a bit like someone else giving you their computer but forgetting to tell you their password. And after entering the wrong password, instead of locking you out of the computer, there are now nukes headed to your destination.

There's something interestingly fascist about the way Cardassian security systems automate counter-insurgency programs. The calculus for determining the location, size, scope, and risk of a rebellion is built into the system itself. There's no intelligent being to reason with. No one is making any decisions at all. The computer just decides that a rebellion must be happening based on certain immutable parameters, and by cold Cardassian logic, deduces that the threat must be eliminated by any means possible.

"Civil Defense" is about trying to outfox a Cardassian security system designed by ultra-paranoid Cardassians. Redunancy after redundancy after redundancy is built into the program. Every attempt to shut down the program triggers another redundancy, heightens the perceived threat. The effect is darkly comical. It goes a little bit like this:

Sisko accidentally triggers a contingency interpreted by the computer as a Bajoran uprising. Non-existent guards fail to put down a non-existent rebellion, triggering another contingency. The computer now believes the rebels must have won, and locks down the rest of the station. Up in the Bridge, Jadzia Dax tries to cut off the ship's life support to shut down the contingency system, which triggers another contingency. The computer now believes the rebels have destroyed the life support system and triggers a total self-destruct mechanism.

The entire system spirals horribly out of control. It's like getting a Blue Screen of Death that actually wants to kill you. It's like getting an Illegal Operation error that's actually illegal. It's like if McAfee Antivirus determined that human life itself was a virus upon the consciousness of the universe. It's like if Alexa interpreted you shutting it off as a terrorist act.

"Civil Defense" is a series of unfortunate fuckups, at least on the surface. But digging a little deeper into the episode, and it's clear that the Cardassian computer system is an expression of Cardassian paranoia and Cardassian logic. It's Murphy's law taken to a Cardassian extreme: anything that CAN go wrong WILL go wrong and therefore must be controlled and blamed on the Bajorans.

It's interesting to me that the Cardassian's computer security system sees no real difference between "security threat" and "Bajoran." In fact, it sees no real difference between "security anomaly" and "Bajoran." Security is a matter of life and death to Cardassians, and to be secure is to obey the rules, no matter how irrational or inhuman those rules may be. The entire episode plays like a darkly hilarious exercise in dystopian security.

This episode is at its best when it's about Cardassian security devouring itself through raw paranoia. Gul Dukat himself falls victim to his own system when he tries to transport off DS9. To absolutely no one's surprise, this, too, is a contingency, which the computer interprets as cowardice on Dukat's part: an attempt to abandon ship during a time of crisis.

How deep do these contingencies go? Is all of Cardassian security just an elaborate contingency system? A Jenga tower of worst case scenarios whereby the one precipitates the other until all of society collapses into self-destruction through teleological inevitability? What exactly is the code at the heart of Cardassia?

While true: Escalate?

I could go on and on about the central idea behind "Civil Defense," because it's so interesting to me. There are shades of hostile AI here. The Security Program feels SHODAN-esque in its ruthlessness. And I liked the central premise being explored here.

But I didn't really like this episode.

This is partly because I've seen this episode before. It was called "Disaster," and it happened during Season 5 of TNG, and it was one of the best episodes of that series. "Civil Defense" has a very clever premise, which it executes admirably, but there's nothing else outside that premise. It's an episode about Cardassian paranoia, yeah, but they're ALL episodes about Cardassian paranoia. It's an episode about security contingencies and how irrational they are, and to the episode's credit, it is a very clever way to explore that particular angle of Cardassian society.

But it's also an episode that abandons its central premise three-fourths of the way through. Where "Disaster" is ostensibly an episode about a massive technological failure aboard the Enterprise but actually an episode about the capacity for heroism and leadership among the Enterprise's most neglected characters, "Civil Defense" is at its heart just another bottle episode about a computer failure.

It's an interesting computer failure with devious Cardassian tricks embedded in its code, but in the end, it's just another computer failure. Inevitably, the solution to the episode hinges on discovering some marginal exception to the contingencies, explain it away in technobabble, and save the day with two seconds left on a self-destruct countdown.