YMMV / Star Trek: Deep Space Nine S04E24 "The Quickening"

• Esoteric Happy Ending: Even if you accept that Bashir's vaccine will work completely, and even if you assume that Bashir will discover a way to cure the Blight from the existing population, the planet is still in the path of regular Jem'Hadar patrols, so it seems quite possible that the Dominion will realize that their punishment of the planet has been neutralized. They could easily react with an even worse punishment.
  • The fact that only infants who aren't born yet can be vaccinated (and that is assuming the mother gets the vaccine fast enough) has the potential to create some bleak prospects for the future of both the vaccinated children, and the alien society as a whole. How long till a parent of a child who died early because they were born just before the vaccine was created lashes out against vaccinated children? How long till enough grieving and angry people like that coalesce into an extremist group who declare the vaccine to be "unnatural" and commit violence against vaccinated children and pregnant women receiving the vaccine?
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Quark basically made an annoying pop-up ad. This episode aired in 1996. Quark might have given some ideas to generations of internet advertisers.
• Moral Event Horizon: If you didn't want Sisko to saddle up in the Defiant and wipe out every last Founder in the galaxy before this episode, then you certainly do after seeing what they've done to the people of this planet.
• Squick: The idea of giving birth in a preindustrial society while being at the same time infected with a horrible disfiguring disease that's not only causing lesions all over your skin, but threatening to kill you within the next few weeks.

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