10 Reasons Why What You Leave Behind Is The Best Star Trek Finale

For a long time, Martok had promised Sisko and Admiral Ross that together, they would stand on the streets of Cardassia Prime and that they would share a bottle of Klingon blood wine to toast their final victory over the Dominion.

Martok's prediction comes true, to a point.

Though he boasts about bringing a barrel of 2309 (there is no finer vintage), neither Starfleet officer feels inclined to toast to the mountain of death that surrounds them. This is something of a pyhrric victory for the Federation Alliance. In the time that it took the invading forces to fight their way to Cardassia, the Cardassian military finally rose up against the Dominion.

The Dominion responded by the systematic destruction of the Cardassian population, moving from city to city, block to block, killing any and all Cardassians that they found. While the damage that the Cardassian union with the Dominion wrought upon the Alpha Quadrant was extreme, the allies arrive to find the streets littered with the dead.

Martok sees a savage victory in this, going so far as to say that the Bajorans would call it a poetic justice. Yet Sisko and Ross pour their blood wine on the ground, their morals offended by the idea of toasting to the deaths of all these people. In times of war, there are only losers.