The pair arrive in an underground hospital on the colony amid a sea of casualties. Bashir leaps into action tending to the wounded while Jake tries to stay out of the way. Quickly he's recruited as an orderly and becomes overwhelmed by the slaughter. One patient admits to shooting himself in the foot with a phaser to take himself off the front line. Jake talks about the soldier with Bashir, who notes that no amount of psych tests and battle simulations can predict how you'll react under fire.
Meanwhile, things are peaceful on the station. Quark gathers everyone to try out a non-caffeinated raktajino for the pregnant Kira, but it's disgusting. Sisko later meets with Odo, who admits to injuring himself during a foot chase when he instinctively tried to shapechange. Then Sisko receives news about Jake entering the war zone and grows concerned about his son.
Jake learns that the hospital is not safe from Klingon attack and wonders how the other medical staff remain so calm. When the power gets cut, Bashir volunteers himself and Jake to run to the runabout and fetch its generator. As they get close to the runabout, the Klingons start shelling their location, and Jake runs away in fear. He bumps into a dying Federation soldier who stayed behind to cover the escape of his comrades. Jake believes that rescuing the man will atone for abandoning Bashir, but the man is mortally wounded and criticizes Jake with his dying breath.
On the station, Sisko learns that the ship sent to Ajilon Prime, the Farragut, was destroyed; this prompts him to take the Defiant instead. While en route, he makes various repairs to keep himself busy to distract himself from his concern over Jake. Dax tells him a story about how her previous host Audrid dealt with the illness of her child, and Sisko is glad that the story has a happy ending, though Dax admits that Audrid became estranged with her daughter a few years later. Sisko decides that's enough stories for now and returns to making repairs.
Jake makes it back to the hospital and learns that Bashir heroically recovered the generator himself. Ashamed, Jake lies about what happened to him while cursing himself inwardly for his cowardice. He passes the soldier who wounded himself and commiserates with him, understanding the terror they both felt when confronted by mortal danger. The battle is turning dire, and the medical staff start joking about the method of death they'd most prefer, causing Jake to shout at them and leave. Bashir, now fully healed, tries to get Jake to talk. As much as Jake inwardly wants to confess his actions, he refuses and leaves to cry by himself.
Explosions rock Jake awake. The Klingons have advanced into the caves. Jake flees with the rest of the medical staff but gets pinned down by Klingon soldiers. After the remaining Federation soldiers have been gunned down, Jake grabs a phaser and begins wildly firing at the ceiling, causing the caves to collapse and bury him and the Klingons in debris. He awakens to Bashir and Sisko standing over him. Federation reinforcements have arrived and the ceasefire has resumed. Jake's cave-in sealed off the hospital and saved everyone, making Jake a hero, though he doesn't feel like one.
Jake writes his article and comes clean about the whole story. Sisko reads it and says that anyone who has been in battle can relate to Jake's feelings, and it took courage to bare his soul to his readers. Sisko says he's proud of his son, and they embrace.
Tropes
- A Day in the Limelight: Jake Sisko after being absent completely from quite a few episodes.
- Accidental Hero: During the climax, Jake grabs a phaser rifle and starts firing blindly at the Klingons out of sheer panic. It turns out he caused a cave-in that buried his attackers and gave the hospital enough time to get everyone out, and he's hailed as a hero.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: While on the runabout, Jake laments how boring the medical conference he was supposed to be writing about was, and wishes for something more exciting. He certainly gets it.
- Captain's Log: Jake gets his own version as he's a journalist writing down what he witnesses.
- Continuity Nod: The ship that was sent to relieve Ajilon Prime, but was intercepted and destroyed by the Klingons prior to reaching the colony was the Nebula-class USS Farragut, one of three ships that picked up the surviving crew of the Enterprise-D.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: In a failed attempt at an Offscreen Moment of Awesome, Odo jumped off a flight of stairs when pursuing two Yridians, planning to morph into a condor in mid-air. Unfortunately, he's no longer a Changeling, and his little stunt landed him in the infirmary.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: The Klingons deliberately target hospitals and kill wounded enemies in their beds. They honestly think they're doing them a favor by giving them an honorable death.
- Died Standing Up: Well, sitting up. Burke was determined to see the sky when he died.
- Dirty Coward: Deconstructed.
- One of the wounded confesses that he shot himself in the foot with his own phaser to get out of combat.
- Jake sees himself as a coward after running away and leaving Bashir during the attack (although the fact that he's a civilian with no combat training muddles the waters a bit). Eventually, he comes to realize that the line between courage and cowardice is far thinner than he ever realized.
- Dude, Not Funny!: When the doctors lightheartedly joke about how they'd like the Klingons to kill them, Jake, who had just witnessed Burke die alone in the dirt, doesn't take it well and angrily chews them out before Bashir steps in.
- Family-Unfriendly Death: Burke's death is rather gruesome by the standards of Star Trek. In a franchise where people tend to get hit with an Instant Death Bullet or instantly vaporized, Burke coughs up blood as he dies painfully from internal injuries.
- Foreshadowing: A completely inadvertent case; the generator is supposedly too heavy for one human to carry, and yet Bashir somehow manages to transport it back to the hospital by himself while seriously injured.
- Gallows Humor:
- After a marathon session of operating on wounded and dying war victims, Bashir jokes about making a surgical incision on his chicken dinner, which nauseates Jake.
- Three veteran medical staff joke about the way they'd prefer the Klingons to kill them. Jake, having just learned firsthand that War Is Hell, lashes out at them for casually joking about such a subject.
- Hard-Work Montage: Jake and Bashir helping at the hospital.
- Instant Death Bullet: In contrast to the Family-Unfriendly Death of Burke, the other Federation soldiers we see are instantly killed by disruptor fire.
- Internal Monologue: Jake has one that runs under most of the episode. This turns out to be the narrative of the story he wrote about the events after the fact (the one that Sisko reads in the final scene).
- Limited Wardrobe:
- Bashir has changed into OR scrubs midway through his Hard-Work Montage, yet later he's changed back into his Starfleet uniform for no explained reason.
- While this episode provides a rare look at Starfleet military attire, we still see Federation war casualties wearing nothing more than standard uniforms.
- Literary Allusion Title: The title of the episode is an abbreviated quote from Ecclesiastes, Chapter 9, Verse 11.I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to the intelligent, nor yet favor to men of knowledge; but time and chance happeneth to them all
- Mandatory Line: Kira, O'Brien, Worf, and Quark appear in one short scene with no relevance to the plot of the episode.
- My God, What Have I Done?:
- Jake beats himself up pretty good over running away and leaving Bashir.
- At the same time, Bashir is beating himself up over bringing Jake into a war zone.
- And for the guilt-tripping trifecta, the nameless ensign beats himself up for phasering his own foot.
- Oblivious Guilt Slinging: When Jake returns to the hospital, he's told that Bashir (despite being wounded and abandoned by Jake) made it back and even retrieved the generator they were sent to get (despite it supposedly being too heavy to be carried by one man). When a guilty Jake visits Bashir in his sickbed, Bashir is furious... at himself, for bringing Jake into a war zone in the first place. This only makes Jake feel worse.Bashir: Jake! Oh, th-thank God! I thought you'd been killed. Once the shelling had stopped and I couldn't find you, I assumed the worst. I am so sorry.
Jake: It's all right.
Bashir: No. No, it isn't. I should never have brought you here in the first place. Now we're stuck here, the Klingons are massing to attack. What was I thinking?
Jake: Forget it, okay?! What's done is...is done. (voice-over) I couldn't stand hearing him apologize to me like that. Not after what I'd done to him. - Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
- After Jake ran away, Bashir managed to make it to the runabout and somehow hauled the generator a kilometer back to the hospital all by himself, picking up serious disruptor burns along the way.
- Odo had an attempted Moment Of Awesome in a scene not shown in the episode. It didn't work out the way he intended.
- Papa Wolf: As soon as Sisko hears that the Farragut was destroyed before reaching Ajilon Prime, he takes the Defiant there to help Jake.
- Seen It All: Three veteran doctors are unfazed when Jake has a vomit attack during lunch."First day?"
"Yeah."
"Pass the salt." - So Proud of You: Sisko after reading Jake's story, praising him for his honesty.Jake: I wasn't sure whether to show it to you or not.
Sisko: Anyone who's been in battle would recognize himself in this, but most of us wouldn't care to admit it. It takes courage to look inside yourself and even more courage to write it for other people to see. I'm proud of you, son. - Technobabble: Lampshaded by Jake during one of his inner monologues while Bashir's babbling about medical stuff."I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about."
- This Is Reality: Burke calls out Jake's wish for redemption, noting that in real life, that sort of thing doesn't happen the way it does in books.
- Tuckerization: Burke's unseen commanding officer is named Brice, after the episode's story writer, Brice R. Parker.
- Uncoffee: Decaffinated raktajino. It tastes awful.Odo: So much for "Quark-tajino."
- War Is Hell: Jake goes into the episode eager to see what the front-lines are like and look for new writing material. Then he gets to experience all the pointless violence, bloodshed and psychological scarring.
- Whole-Plot Reference:
- To The Red Badge of Courage, about a soldier in the American Civil War who runs from his first battle and struggles to redeem himself when a wound he picked up causes his regiment to think he heroically fought to the last.
- The doctors quipping and partaking in Gallows Humor is also a fairly heavy pull from M*A*S*H, right down to the "Pass the salt" joke.
- Vomit Discretion Shot: Jake runs off screen to puke.
