alt Hacker NewsDS9 had an actual instance of torture too, but it was a hero being tortured by... half-hero, half anti-hero[0]? Not sure that one led anywhere, beyond being a very disturbing way to do character development.
Section 31 angle is tricky, because the writers unintentionally[1] made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide. The Dominion was known to systematically subjugate and ultimately eradicate solid life, and other than the Federation Alliance bloc (that prevailed only because of Section 31's bioweapon short-circuiting the war[2]), the only power left in the known galaxy strong enough to resist the Dominion would be... the Borg Collective, which wasn't really that much better[3].
So, as much as I love DS9, I feel the show (and the larger franchise) has so much unintentional depth, that most obvious takes don't work with fans, because they don't survive scrutiny :).
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[0] - The simple tailor was anything but.
[1] - At least as far as I recall, Section 31 were written to be the rotten apples that got revealed and removed by the heroes, in a pretty straightforward way - but IMO, they failed at this, and instead created something more of Deus Ex Realpolitik.
[2] - And a little bit of actual fleet-eating Deus Ex Machina, on the account of having a demi-god in their midst.
[3] - And nobody in or out of universe really wants to talk about what happened to the latter, except the last season of PIC that tacitly acknowledged it in a "blink and you'll miss it" way.
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> Section 31 angle is tricky, because the writers unintentionally[1] made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide.
I mean, Jack Bauer, too, saved America from all kinds of unspeakable evil by his clever use of torture. I'd say it's not tricky at all. The morally gray "it's bad but we'd be even worse off without it" justification is kind of the point of those narratives.
> DS9 had an actual instance of torture too, but it was a hero being tortured by... half-hero, half anti-hero
If you’re talking about Garak torturing Odo, that seems different than the 24 case because in that instance Garak was explicitly working for “the bad guys”. And even so he was doing the torturing reluctantly and only doing so because the alternative was the torturing being done by another operative which wouldn’t restrain themselves. In other words, in that instance the show was explicitly treating torture as bad.
> made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide.
Technically it wasn’t the disease which defeated the Founders, though I supposed one can argue it debilitated them enough. Even so, despite the results I didn’t feel like the show was necessarily approving of Section 31 (the main characters actively tried to defeat them).