S2E13: Armageddon Game

O'Brien and Bashir are on a mission to provide technical assistance with a project aimed to permanently destroying bioweapons from a war between two systems that have recently made peace. After many attempts they finally find a procedure that can completely neutralize all stocks. As they are putting the last container into the machines, soldiers come into the lab and shot everyone, but O'Brien manages to overpower one, take his weapons, and kill the others. They can't get to their ships with all communications blocked, but use the transporter on the science ship to beam down to the planet that was completely destroyed during the war. They hide in one of the ruins where they find a broken communicator and O'Brien starts working on it.

Ambassadors from the two alien species fly to the station to inform Sisko that the whole science team was accidentally killed by a high security containment system in the lab that vaporized every living thing inside it. They have a video recording of if, in case Sisko wants to see it for himself. When O'Brien's wife is watching the video, she notices that it shows him with a cup of coffee and she knows that he never drinks coffee in the afternoon and think that the recording is a forgery. Sisko takes a ship to go visit the lab on the science vessel himself.

O'Brien keeps working on the communicator but Bashir notices that his health is turning very badly and realizes that he must have come into contact with the bioweapon when the decontamination machine was destroyed during the shooting. But since he can't fix the broken machine, O'Brien keeps working on it. They are eventually found by soldiers searching for them, but as they are about to be shot, they get beamed up by Sisko. The ambassadors tell him that they are very sorry, but to make sure that the bioweapon won't be produced again they have to destroy all samples and all records, and kill everyone who ever worked on it. If he doesn't turn Bashir and O'Brien over to them, they will destroy his ship. They set their ship on autopilot to make a run but beam over to the ship Bashir and O'Brien came on and when the alien ship realizes that they have been chasing the wrong shuttle, the other one has already escaped.

Back on the station, Bashir cures O'Brien, who is quickly back to full health. But he would like to have a cup of coffee, because he's always drinking coffee in the afternoon.

--
(Destroyed Shuttle #2)

Among the okay episodes, I think this is even one of the better ones. Just not really a great one. This is the third time that O'Brien and Bashir are doing something together, which does become a more regular thing in the future. With O'Brien being fatally poisoned, his rude and agrresive behavior on the planet seems like it's more of a side effect that any specific complaints about Bashir.

On the downside, everything that has to do with technobabble seems to be opening a new plot hole, that could easily have been fixed with writing better technobabble. If the aliens want to destroy all stockpiles of the bioweapon, they don't need a machine for that. They have warp travel and at least the federation can provide technical help with transporters. They can beam all stocks to a ship and then throw it into a star to safely be rid of it. What they seem to have really needed is a way to reliable decontaminate areas that have been made uninhabitable by the bioweapon. Though when Bashir was in the ruins of a city wiped out by the stuff, he didn't seem to get infected by it.
Next, killing all the scientists in the lab with guns seems weird. They are on a space ship. They could have just filled the room with deadly gas or something. Anything that doesn't require soldiers with guns shooting everyone at close range. And if they are so super committed to killing everyone who ever worked with the bioweapon, they really shouldn't have any reservations to go all out and just blow up the entire ship and destroy all evidence.
Then there is the thing that O'Brien can't call the shuttle to beam them over so they use the transporter on the ship they are on to beam down to the planet. Why not beam over to their shuttle? Are the shields up? These are not big things, they don't terribly harm the story, but they would be very easy to avoid with just a little bit of attention to detail. This is just half-arsed and all around shoddy.

It's a decent episode, but without any real highlights or great performances, so I don't have much more to say about it.