Valiant (''Star Trek: Deep Space Nine'')

"Valiant" is the 146th season episode of the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the 22nd episode of the sixth season. It was first broadcast on 6 May 1998.

Jake and Nog, on a visit to Ferenginar, find themselves on board a rogue starship, piloted by members of the Red Squad, a crew of elite Starfleet cadets.

Plot

While en route to Ferenginar in a runabout, Jake Sisko and Ensign Nog are attacked by a Jem'Hadar vessel, but are rescued by the USS Valiant, a Defiant-class starship. Jake and Nog find that the crew are all members of the Red Squad, an elite squadron of Starfleet cadets. They were originally part of a training mission to circumnavigate the Federation. However, the Valiant was attacked by a Cardassian battle cruiser, which resulted in the loss of the entire commissioned staff. Before dying, the late Captain transferred command to now-acting Captain Tim Watters. Watters has continued to follow their last directive without any further orders from Starfleet, and has recently learned of a new Dominion battle cruiser. Nog is quickly integrated into Red Squad and the ship's engineering staff thanks to his knowledge of the Defiant warp system, but Jake is seen as an outsider. When Jake attempts to talk to Chief Collins about her personal life, she breaks down emotionally, and Watters orders Jake not to talk to her further.

Watters reveals that they have located the Jem'Hadar battle cruiser and orders the ship to approach it, raising the crew's morale to levels Jake fears are irrational. The crew of the Valiant is able to successfully scan the battle cruiser and discovers a possible weak point. Watters makes plans to attack it. When Jake attempts to warn Nog and Collins that Watters is actually on a suicide mission, Watters has Jake thrown in the brig. The Valiant attacks the vessel, but the Jem'Hadar ship remains undamaged. The Valiant is assaulted by the battle cruiser, which critically damages the ship and kills much of the remaining crew. Nog, Collins and Jake leave the ship in an escape pod before the Valiant explodes. The three are rescued by the Defiant, and learn they are the sole survivors. Nog pronounces that the Valiant was a good ship with a good crew, whose only mistake was blindly following Watters's disastrous orders. Despite pleas from Collins that Watters was a great man, Nog replies "He may have been a hero, he may even have been a great man, but in the end, he was a bad Captain."

Arc significance

• Red Squad, an elite team of Starfleet Academy cadets, was first seen in the fourth-season two-parter "Homefront/Paradise Lost"; in those episodes, they followed the direct command of senior Starfleet officers to sabotage Earth's power-grid, as part of an attempted coup d'état by a Starfleet Admiral.
• Nog told Captain Sisko, during "Homefront", about an intense desire to join Red Squad – which Sisko points out did not exist during his own time at Starfleet Academy.
• Cadet Riley Aldrin Shepard, who served as helmsman on the Valiant, confessed to Captain Sisko in "Homefront/Paradise Lost" (believing he was speaking to a member of the command structure of the attempt) that he had taken part in Red Squad's sabotage during the coup attempt. Sisko subsequently commented to Odo that Shepard had just "admitted to committing acts of treason against the Federation."
• For reasons that were never explained in the series, the members of Red Squad who proudly followed orders in the attempted coup d'état were not expelled from the academy, though Admiral Felton confirms that he sent Red Squad on a distant "training exercise" so that Sisko could not use them to expose the coup attempt. While this would be in keeping with the distant and time-consuming training mission to circumnavigate the Federation detailed in this "Valiant" episode, this link is not explicitly mentioned during "Valiant".

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Valiant

• Valiant on IMDb
• "Valiant" at TV.com

• Valiant (episode) at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)

• Valiant at StarTrek.com