S5E13 “For the Uniform: he hunts down that Marquis spy and poisons the atmosphere of Maquis colonies, forcing evacuations. Deliberately targeting civilian habitats to make them uninhabitable is a straight up war crime.
It wasn’t portrayed as “bad assed”, it’s explicitly a retelling of Javert from Les Mis.
Remember, Eddington was using the same tactic on multiple Cardassian worlds and was planning to do it again. It’s not presented as “Whoa Sisko is so awesome for doing that!” but more as a moral dilemma, do you poison one planet to save many more from the same fate? Sisko did poison a planet’s atmosphere, but he prevented Eddington from poisoning many more. And of course the fact that Sisko was indeed a bit too obsessed with capturing Eddington makes it all a grey area. If it wasn’t a so personal, could Sisko have found another way to prevent Eddington from continuing to do the war crimes he was committing?
So it’s very reductive (and missing the point of the episode) to call that a “straight up war crime”.
S5E13 “For the Uniform: he hunts down that Marquis spy and poisons the atmosphere of Maquis colonies, forcing evacuations. Deliberately targeting civilian habitats to make them uninhabitable is a straight up war crime.
Eh, we do the same to our own planet.
It wasn’t portrayed as “bad assed”, it’s explicitly a retelling of Javert from Les Mis.
Remember, Eddington was using the same tactic on multiple Cardassian worlds and was planning to do it again. It’s not presented as “Whoa Sisko is so awesome for doing that!” but more as a moral dilemma, do you poison one planet to save many more from the same fate? Sisko did poison a planet’s atmosphere, but he prevented Eddington from poisoning many more. And of course the fact that Sisko was indeed a bit too obsessed with capturing Eddington makes it all a grey area. If it wasn’t a so personal, could Sisko have found another way to prevent Eddington from continuing to do the war crimes he was committing?
So it’s very reductive (and missing the point of the episode) to call that a “straight up war crime”.