12 Darkest Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Moments
2. Dukat's Breakdown - Waltz
By season 6, Gul Dukat was not having a fun time.
His empire had been shattered, his mental state had gone off the rails and rolled off a cliff, and his beloved daughter was dead. This is usually around the point where any other show would cut the guy a break because I mean, c'mon. But of course, Deep Space Nine instead said "actually no, he hasn't hit rock bottom QUITE yet, but we'll fix that".
In the best episode of the entire series, Waltz, Sisko and an imprisoned Dukat crash land on a deserted planet, forced to rely on each other to survive. Which Sisko finds increasingly hard as he realizes that he's stuck on an empty planet with a crazy person. Throughout the episode, Dukat slowly goes more and more mad as everything he did to the Bajorans is finally laid out before him. Leading up to a final breakdown where his excuses for everything he did finally disintegrate before our eyes and he admits just how much he truly loathed the Bajorans as a species and how he really should have just killed them all.
For a season or two there, it really looked like Gul Dukat would end up on the side of good. But Deep Space Nine, always the show that made the harder narrative choice, instead reminded its audience that the only good fascist is a dead one.