History Recap / StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS06E19InThePaleMoonlight

** The point of Garak killing Grathon Tolar after the forgery is finished, along with KilledToUpholdTheMasquerade.

* WhatYouAreInTheDark: Sisko's delivery makes it clear that his real reason for recording the log entry is to convince ''himself'' that his actions were justified.
* WonTheWarLostThePeace: One of the ways Sisko tries to appeal to Vreenak, by pointing out that if the Dominion wins and ends up controlling the Cardassian Union, the Federation, and the Klingon Empire, then the Romulans will find themselves facing the same opponent on each side. The term for that? "Surrounded." It doesn't sway Vreenak, but he notably has no response to it and moves the conversation onto the not-quite-perfect Romulan Ale replication.

** Garak tells Sisko to claim that the recording cost the lives of "ten good men" to sell it. Later, Garak actually kills two men (assuming Vreenak drove his own shuttle) to create a convincing narrative.

** Garak tells Sisko to claim that the recording cost the lives of "ten good men" to sell it. Garak also tells Sisko that it cost Garak several contacts to make, which is basically the exact same story. Garak ends up actually killing two men (assuming Vreenak drove his own shuttle) to create a convincing narrative.

* LeaningOnTheFourthWall: Sisko's monologue is spoken to the station computer, but most of the time he's staring directly at the camera.

** The ''USS Cairo'' was the ship commanded by Captain Jellico before his temporary transfer to the ''Enterprise'' in Next Generation's episode [[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS6E10ChainOfCommand Chain Of Command]]. Jellico was no longer commanding the ''Cairo'' at that point the ship was destroyed.

* PlausibleDeniability: It's easy to miss, but nobody aside from Sisko and Garak even know that Senator Vreenak visited the station at all. Worf and the security officers simply seal off the area and Vreenak's shuttle arrives and leaves while cloaked. To anyone else, it probably looked like a security exercise, hence why Worf simply comments later on that "a high-ranking senator" was killed when his shuttle exploded, rather than naming Vreenak personally. Sisko then knows very well that only one other person on the station even knew what went on, and immediately pays a visit to Garak to make him TalkToTheFist.

* AwakenTheSleepingGiant: With the Romulans freshly joining the war on the Fed-Klingon side, the Dominion advance into the Alpha Quadrant is rapidly blunted, helping turn the tide of the war.

* WhamEpisode: Sisko takes a big step into morally ambiguity, while the Romulans change the dynamic of the war by allying with the Federation.

* SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale: The casualty list is a little short for a quadrant-wide war.

* KansasCityShuffle: Garak expected from the start the Romulan senator would realize the recording was a fake, and planted a bomb on Vreenak's ship as soon as he arrived. And in fact, after the senator departs with the fake recording to expose the perceived con on himself, Garak promptly blows up the ship. The real con was having Vreenak's superiors discover the recording in the wreckage of the ship of a member of their government coming back from a meeting with the Dominon, as now all the imperfections in the forgery will be assumed to be a result of the explosion instead. With a seemingly legitimate rod in one hand and a dead senator coming from a meeting with the Dominion in the other, the Romulans promptly join the war against the Dominion, as Garak and Sisko wanted.

'''Garak''': Oh, but I think that there is! You see, when the [[StateSec Tal Shiar]] finishes examining the wreckage of Vreenak's shuttle, they'll find the burnt remnants of a Cardassian optolythic data rod, which somehow [[ContrivedCoincidence miraculously survived]] the explosion. After painstaking forensic examination, they'll discover that the rod contains a recording of a high level Dominion meeting at which the invasion of Romulus was being planned.\\

'''Garak''': ''Precisely!'' And the more the Dominion protests their innocence, the more the Romulans will believe they're guilty, because it's ''exactly'' what the Romulans would have done in their place!

* SurprisinglySuddenDeath: One minute, Vreenak has called Sisko in for the final determination of the data rod and thusly proclaims it to be a fake in hushed anger. After Sisko goes over how bad of an outcome this was in his data log entry, Vreenak has already departed back for Romulan space, the crew discuss a report of one Romulan pod having inexplicably detonated in that exact space as Garak enacted his backup plan. This likely [[IntendedAudienceReaction catches the audience off-guard]] as much as it does Sisko, who ''immediately'' knows what caused it and marches off to Garak to give him a [[TalkToTheFist piece of his mind]] in untethered rage.

* GrayAndGreyMorality: Probably the messiest moral dilemma in all of ''[=DS9=]'', and quite possibly all of ''Star Trek.'' Sisko willingly enlists the assistance of unsavory individuals, suppresses evidence of a FalseFlagOperation attack on a politically neutral state, and chooses to do nothing about the [[HeKnowsTooMuch elimination of witnesses]], all so that said politically neutral state will join his side, condemning them to terrible causalities in order to minimize his own (which are already terrible and getting worse ''daily''). [[BlackAndGreyMorality On the other side]] is a relentless and insatiable alien empire with superior weapons, technology, and numbers, led by a genocidal former dictator and unwilling to respond to diplomacy, that's conquering peaceful planets by the day and putting ''billions'' at stake. Sisko's monologue at the end lays it out brilliantly.