Hippocratic Oath, what happened to that?

In the episode Hippocratic Oath, Bashir tries to help the rogue Jem Hadar with their Ketracel White addiction.
When I saw this on my second viewing of the series I thought this might have been a set-up for some later plot points where the rogue Jem Hadar played a part.
However this never happened, and the doctor's role in that episode was only mentioned again once, in the episode where the Section 31 guy interrogates him.
Just the idea that Jem Hadar would go rogue on their own is huge, but as far as I know is never mentioned again. Much less the idea that the Federation could somehow "cure" them of their addiction.
Does anyone know if this was supposed to be a later storyline that was dropped?

 

They didn't tend to leave threads intentionally for later episodes...for the most part.

They could have brought him back, but it's much more likely he was killed very soon after Bashir and O'Brien escaped.

 

It was an element both in To the Death and Rocks and Shoals.

 

Most of the internal Jem'Hadar conflicts went nowhere, scriptwise/arcwise. They very briefly touched on rivalry between "Alphas" (Jem'Hadar bred in the Alpha Quadrant) versus "Gammas" (Jem'Hadar bred in the Gamma Quadrant), but that also went by the wayside.

For things like breaking the addiction to Ketracel White, Stargate SG-1 did more to develop those concepts with regards to the Jaffa (which have some parallels between the series).

 

Oh right, I had forgotten about those. I also forgot about the Iconian gateway in To the Death, which I believe was also somewhere in TNG.

 

The writers avoided solutions that smacked of technobabble. A "cure" to ketracel white probably looked like such a solution.

 

I actually like that we never return to specific Jem'Hadar characters & plotlines. With most of the aliens, we primarily learn about them thru one or two key recurring characters that becomes our entry point for learning about the full race. But there's no recurring Jem'Hadar, just a lot of exceptional one-off characters, like Goran'Agar in "Hippocratic Oath", that together builds out a very compelling, full portrait of the species. And the fact that we never see any of these guys more than once underscores the tragedy of how they were bred for the purpose of being disposable.

 

The DS9 novels introduced a Jem'Hadar character called Taran'atar. He was free of addiction to the white.

 

Right, when I said "rogue Jem Hadar" I meant the rogue ones as a group or type rather than a specific one. Sorry I wasn't clear on that.

 

Plus it makes sense that the system should work despite its many imperfections; after all, we know for historical fact that it does (the Dominion continues to exist).

Not only is the tragedy of the Jem'Hadar implicit here, but so is the impotence of our heroes, or any set of heroes, in face of that. The DS9 bunch try and fail to liberate the warriors. This just topples them from their pedestal and hints at the futility of the exercise, at scores of previous attempts by previous opponents of the Dominion. Indeed, we learn the whole liberation concept is faulty: the Jem'Hadar who have free will and freedom of action still devote their brief lives to supporting the Founder cause, simply because it's the right thing to do.

I wonder what really happened in "To the Death". Two groups of Jem'Hadar operated without supervision there, and were at odds with each other. One swore (un)dying allegiance to the Founders in the end, despite fighting the other and siding with the heroes. Did the other, too? Were they exploiting the Iconian gateways because they thought this would best serve the Founders? Their side of the story is only ever told by the lying Vorta - yet even he lets slip that the "renegades" rebelled against "a group of scientists" over what to do with the gateways. Jem'Hadar are known to be loyal, groups of pretty much anything and everything else in the Dominion are known for the opposite trait...

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'd have rather heard back about the Skreen.
Did they find Kentana?
Are they happy?

 

Or all clobbered in the Klingon-Cardassian war, or the Dominion counteroffensive, or the Federation, Klingons, and Romulan return offensive back into Cardassian space...

 

I'd like to think they were left alone by the Dominion and they found some hospitable planet to settle on and farm.

"The Skreeans are farmers."

 

In the novel warpath by david mack,another jem'hadar soldier whom is in a similiar situation as the one in the episode (being non-addicted to ketracel white) ponders his existence - the book which goes into way more detail about this character race is very well written!! I consider this more or less a sequel to hippocratic oath

 

Yes. The only had a few days left before being totally out of White, if I remember. The other Jam Hadar probably killed their first and each other within a week.

Unless the Dominion tracked them down and rescued them and killed the rogue First at the last minute.

 

This was the O'Brien vs Bashir episode.

I reckon that viewers of this episode instinctively wound up either siding with O'Brien, the simple soldier who had one simple goal: to get the heck off that planet in one piece; or with Bashir, the cerebral officer with the lofty goal: sticking around, risking his own life to find the miracle cure that would change the course of Jem'Hadar evolution and might ultimately help win the war for the good guys.

Who had the more sympathetic position. Self interest and self survival vs achieving a potential greater good.

"...there are larger issues here. We're dealing with a complex situation." I remember this line well. It was spoken by Bashir. He was trying to convince O'Brien to see things his way. O'Brien would have none of it.

Bashir's intention was noble, and he showed his physician's empathy. But to O'Brien, it was naive and dangerous.

This was an excellent episode. "Hippocratic Oath" is one of my favorite DS9 episodes. It may have been just another episode of the Dominion War, but this one was on a small individual scale that should be easily relatable to the viewer, imho.

At the end of the day, for better or for worse, it was O'Brien who won out. O'Brien's sheer will for self survival overcame Bashir's own determination.

 

And thankfully, their friendship survived. Flourished, even.

 

I think it would have been an uphill battle.

 

Had Bashir found a way to free the Jem'Hadar of their addiction to the White, that wouldn't stop them. They were bred to be soldiers, to fight, kill and die in the name of the Founders, with 99.9% of them being loyal to them even without the White--it was really in place for the Vorta to show their position above the lowly foot soldiers. Without the White, they would still have fought for the Dominion.

It would've been interesting if they'd gone a Stargate Atlantis route, found a cure and managed to spread it to a group of Jem'Hadar, only for them to completely lose it and go on a murderous rampage that no one could control, or for another attempt to break the conditioning/brainwashing that is programmed into them, leaving them as blank slates.

 

O'Brien was in the right, personally.

Baahir had a noble goal, but it just wasn't attainable. Sisko later would say the Jem'Hadar conditioning couldn't be broken through... pretty sure it was "ROCKS AND SHOALS". And he's right. "THE ABANDONED" proved that, and that was with a young Jem'Hadar before Dominion conditioning. Imagine after it.