In today’s episode, a quiet cowboy with a loud gun helps Chief O’Brien pull off an important operation. But when the Dominion scores a huge W by disabling the minefield that’s defending the wormhole, Sisko goes in singing “I Need a Miracle”. Is it a good idea to mute the holodeck? Would Gul Dukat use the R-word? And how does a language just not change? All this and more in …Sacrifice of Angels, the much-anticipated finale to the show’s 24th season.

…Sacrifice of Angels
Author: Diane Carey
Pages: 269
Published: December 1998
Prerequisites: “Behind the Lines” (6×04), “Favor the Bold” (6×05), and “Sacrifice of Angels” (6×06)
Timeline: Early season 6
Borrowable on Archive.org? Yes

With the fully original half of the Dominion War miniseries brought to a decent enough close, it’s now time to wrap it up by chugging through the last three episodes (and some change) of the Dominion invasion arc. This one did not, as far as I could tell, pull anything as egregious as cutting the entire Vedek Yassim arc from “Rocks and Shoals”, which Carey wouldn’t care about because it’s super-important character development for Kira and she doesn’t give a shit about women, but I also didn’t rewatch any of these episodes to be sure, because it already feels like I’ve been trying to read and find things to say about this miniseries for a hundred years.

Despite opting to not rewatch the episodes covered by this installment, a lot of it felt like it was happening out of order, with “Behind the Lines” in particular being spread across the whole book while events from the other episodes happened in-between. Maybe that’s what happens when you have to figure out how to fit the events of 3.1415926535 episodes into the standard 270-ish pages, plus the crew you made up for the Centaur, which for some reason your editors couldn’t bring themselves to advise you to cut. Mama never said the novelization beat was easy, I guess.

The biggest original inclusion is more detail on the sixteen hours where the Defiant is away and Dax is in command rather than Sisko. That mission occurs off-screen, but we get to see a lot more of the particulars, including O’Brien being the one to go down and detonate the sensor array. One baffling addition, however, is that of an unnamed, unexplored character referred to only by O’Brien and only as Tex (as in “Nice shooting, ~”), who bails him out when he gets discovered and helps him finish his operation of blowing up the sensor array.

It’s tempting to say that it’s unclear what Tex is doing here or what value he’s supposed to add to the war effort, but that’s never really true when it comes to Diane Carey. The fact is that Carey hasn’t respected the talents of any crew since TOS, and she thinks they’re all namby-pamby pantywaists who have been made fatally soft by things like holodecks and ship’s counselors. So they need a big man like Tex to come in and use a handheld cannon to blow giant holes in Jem’Hadar torsos because the Federation has forgotten how real men win a war when the chips are down. He doesn’t need to have a coherent past or anything, he just needs to be able to show those hoity-toity raktajino enjoyers what’s what.

But the difficulty is not so much in the usual Careyness of it all as it is in the fact that I almost never wanted to pick this book up. These aren’t the kind of episodes that merit having novels dedicated to them. Contrast this with a book like Relics, a standalone episode that has enough thematic meat to chew on to invite, accommodate, and justify the expanded outlook. A few random skirmishes in the middle of the Dominion War don’t have the heft to, and have too many moments of fast fury to be compelling in text form. Just revisit them in a DS9 rewatch and forget about Tex and Charlie Reynolds.

MVP & LVP

• I’m giving MVP to Sisko for persuading the Prophets to literally wipe out the Dominion forces with a deus ex machina. It’s kind of weird that he had to walk them through the logic to get them to agree, but at least they did it, right? I think if I was the Dominion, I’d have just gone home once I realized the other side had cheat codes.
• My LVP goes to Odo. It doesn’t matter if it’s on television or in a book, that decision to link with the female changeling is guaranteed to piss me off all over again every single time. How could you leave poor Rom of all people in the lurch like that, Odo? And then how floaty and out of it he is when Kira tries to smack some sense into him, all like, “It just didn’t seem important.” Makes my blood boil. You know what seems important right about now, Odo? Tossing you out an airlock and hiring a new constable.

Stray Bits

• “A wooden case, covered with gold stencils in the ancient Klingon language, unchanged for nearly four thousand years.” — Is it even possible for a language to not change for that long. I guess it could be saying that the ancient version of the language is that old, but language changes. It just does! You can’t stop it! Weird bit. (19)
• Speaking of language, I actually got a significant shock out of seeing Rom described as “[that] r_____ed Ferengi stump” (29). Given the POV of the scene, I suppose it’s mildly arguable that it’s natural for someone like Dukat to think in such nakedly ableist terms. But considering also that the word is in the midst of a distressing comeback, I’d just as soon not see it at all.
• And there’s yet another thing in here that’s no longer linguistically savory, though it’s perhaps not one Carey or anyone else might have seen coming. Quark plying Damar with drugged kanar: “That’s right. Savor it … swallow it … good boy.” You might not have heard it if your life doesn’t situate you in the vicinity of high school boys, but here’s a dispatch from the trenches for you: they have this extremely grating tendency to ask their friends to do things for them and then say “gooood booooy” in the most unctuous, skin-crawling tone you can imagine. I actually had to ban it from my classroom!1The uniquely American history of “boy” being used derogatorily by white men to refer to Black men of any age also figured into that decision. (62)
• “[O’Brien had] never heard a concussion weapon go off in real life. On the holodeck, sure, but the automatic program muted any potentially damaging element, and that included noise.” — This is one of those things that seems like a good idea until you think about it for about two seconds. What if you’re running a Wild West program in the holodeck and you get tagged by a bullet because you didn’t hear the gun going off behind you? Can you really have a naval simulation without the booming cannon fire? Sound cues are important! (123)
• A minor but clear tell that Carey’s understanding of these characters remains perfunctory at best: Dax tells Sisko that Bashir is off flirting with an ensign somewhere (164). Understandable in, but not really a going part of his character for a long while at this point in the show.
• Going to bring out the inner Itchy & Scratchy nerd for this one…

Final Assessment

Bad. This is somewhat of a course correction, because I really should have rated the last one bad as well, as there’s really no excuse for binning the entire Vedek Yassim plot. This one isn’t as blatant about deleting plots that represent great development for characters who realize they’re becoming complacent collaborators, but the original characters add nothing interesting to the war effort, and this is one of the hardest books I’ve had to force myself to pick up since I’ve been writing on this site. Some episodes make for great novelizations, but these? In different hands, perhaps, but as it stands, not so much.

Books 1 & 3: Average

Books 2 & 4: Bad

Programming Notes

• Before we move on to the books of 1999, we’re going to take a couple of detours. First, we’re going to hit some novelizations of video games I realized we’ve missed in the past.
  • The first is for Star Trek: Klingon, by Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch, published in May 1996, for those who I suppose prefer a good old-fashioned paper novel to an interactive CD-ROM one.
  • The other is Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, written by Diane Carey and published in June 1997.
  • These will be slotted in where they would originally have gone numerically. All reviews past their respective points have already been re-numbered to accommodate this.
• After those, I have a Side Trekked planned. The subject won’t be revealed until it’s posted.
• Only then will we move on to the first book of 1999, Republic, the first of three installments in the My Brother’s Keeper miniseries, which follows James Kirk and Gary Mitchell as Academy cadets in more innocent times, before the latter got them silver eyes and had to be put down the hard way.
• Going forward, books that are part of a miniseries will receive a First Assessment as they are reviewed, and a Final Assessment once the whole miniseries is complete. If a later installment significantly alters the complexion of an earlier one enough to change my mind about it, the final assessment can be different from the first. But if my opinion remains the same, it can serve as simply a summary. I hope this will be able to satisfy all contingencies.

NEXT TIME: Star Trek: Klingon (or, Pok’s World)