For The Uniform

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Maquis leader Michael Eddington spanks the mighty Defiant with a computer virus and an outdated raider. This dingus worked every day with Sisko for a year and a half and nobody even knew he had a personality until he turned traitor.

Now Eddington uses biogenic weapons on Velos Prime- specifically poisoning the atmosphere against Cardassians but not humans. He made the weapons out of Selenium and Rodian Nitrates (a healthy part of Greedo's Balanced Breakfast). He's running circles around Sisko and the Captain's head is about to pop off.

Starfleet gave Alien Nation's Tenctonese cop Captain Sanders the "Catch Eddington" mission and it sticks in Sisko's craw.  So he goes out anyway, with the Defiant still half-functional. The ship nearly hits Deep Space Nine while trying to launch from it.

Downgraded from fancy new holocommunicator to communicating with a Nog, a tin can and some string. In fact, Nog has Sigourney's job from 'Galaxy Quest': repeating everything.

Eddington compares Sisko to obsessive Inspector Javert from Les Miserables. Casting himself as Val Jean, nest-ce pas? For such an Anglo looking guy, he's even more vocal about his love of romantic French history than Picard.

Sisko decides if Eddington wants to play the hero, then that makes him the villain. Twirling his mustache and Dr. Doom cape, Sisko salts the atmosphere of a Maquis world with Cardassian-safe Human poison. Threatening to take his poison sprayer out on the road, Sisko forces Eddington to surrender himself.

Cardassians and Maquis swap worlds, possibly forced to put their nonsensical fight on hold briefly, and NOBODY wants that. Sisko admits that even though it worked, he didn't clear his poison plan with Starfleet ahead of time. Imagine that: Starfleet probably wouldn't have given thumbs up to planet-wide bioweapons deployment. You learn something new every day.

"For The Uniform" introduced the holocommunicator and I really liked that idea. Holodecks that can manifest whole cities but they're still chatting on Skype? I understand why the FX guy might not want to make a switch decreasing the amount of FX viewscreen conversations, but there's a certain dramatic improvement in scenes where the actors are actually face-to-face. I wish they'd used it more often, but this was pretty much it.