> At no point did the episode show this as a good thing. But the question isn't whether it's shown as a good thing, the bar was "Violence [is] the failure to s

> At no point did the episode show this as a good thing. But the question isn't whether it's shown as a good thing, the bar was "Violence [is] the failure to solve a problem, never [a] true solution." Presenting the violence as necessary is still diametrically opposed to this, in some ways even more than showing violence in a positive but unnecessary light. That's a genuinely uncommon attitude in genre fiction. Reducing it to any situation where a show posits "do the ends justify the means? perhaps!" - which is the basis of like, every piece of high-stakes TV today - does a disservice to the original critique and the TNG episodes which argue otherwise (and frankly, also to the deftness with which DS9 does usually present it).