“Rocks and Shoals” takes place shortly after “A Time to Stand’ as the stolen Jem ’Hadar ship crash lands on a Cardassian planet with scenes that are an obvious homage to the opening of the original Planet of the Apes. Perhaps a little too coincidentally, another Jem’Hadar ship crashed sometime before carrying a platoon and the Vorta master, Keevan.Keevan is wounded, so the Jem’Hadar capture Garak and Nog to use as bargaining chips in order to get him medical attention. Garak tries to betray Nog ad the rest of the Starfleet crew by claiming he is a captured Cardassian loyal to the Dominion. The Jem’Hadar do not buy it. I do not buy it, either. While self-interest is in Garak’s character, the whole point of him joining the Defiant crew was to keep him from the certain death awaiting for him among the Cardassians. He should not have been so quick to try switching sides.
The exchange works. Bashir performs emergency surgery and saves Keevan’s life. Keevan reveals he only has two vials of tetracil-white left. When it is gone, the Jem’Hadar will gang up and kill him before they die of withdrawal. He tells Sisko they are going to attack the Defiant crew, but he will reveal the battle plan beforehand to make defeating them easy. Keevan will be taken as a prisoner of war then since he believes he will have a better chance of survival that way.
Sisko desperately tries to talk the Jem’Hadar into surrendering rather than facing certain death in battle because Keevan is not worth dying for. But their genetic engineering compels them to fight anyway. Keevan is true to his word. The intelligence he gave on their battle plan was accurate and all the Jem’hadar are slaughtered. Keevan strolls comfortably into the crew’s camp as a POW, assuring them they would all be dead if he only had two more vials o tetracil-white, while O’Brien repairs a communicator to send out a distress call.
The lesson here is a grim one on the absurdity of war. The Jem’hadar were condemned either way, but decided to go down fighting because that was the only thing they knew. Keevan did not bat an eye at any point. His attitude reminded me of the passage in All Quiet on the Western Front in wich the soldiers remark with biter humor that they are being used to settle the petty disputes of political leaders who will never taste combat at all, much less death in war. They ought to fight it out instead of sending young men with no quarrel with one another to die.
Meanwhile, Kira is struggling with self-loathing for cooperating with the Dominion. Back during the Cardassian Occupation, she would have marked for death someone like what she has become. When a vedek commits public suicide to protest Bajor’s cooperation with the Dominion, Kira decides she has had enough. She, odo, Jake, and rom decide to form a resistance cell to fight back.
Rating; *** (out of 5)
