Deep Space Nine 5x12 "The Begotten"

rating: ****

the story: Odo finds himself in possession of an infant Founder.

what it's all about: Every time a character gives birth in a TV show, it's big news, one of the biggest events of the whole series.  And yet, when Kira finally gives birth to O'Brien and Keiko's baby (it's sci-fi, not your traditional surrogate route), the event is completely overshadowed by the summary I just gave above, and this is a very, very good thing.

Tangentially it solves the needless problem of Odo having lost his shapeshifting ability at the end of the previous season as a punishment from his fellow Founders.  Without comment it also reflects a story thread about the Founders, that they sent off hundreds of infants into the galaxy long ago to explore space and find out what the "solids" were like again (Odo himself was one of these infants, and he meets another in the seventh season's "Chimera").

But it's really about Odo finally finding some peace in his life, a sense of closure that finally allows his relationship with Kira to move forward (she herself becomes open to the idea in part because of the aforesaid birth, which presents a void in her life Odo is able to fill, which the end of the episode subtly reflects).

This is achieved by his second reunion with Dr. Mora, the Bajoran scientist we first met in "The Alternate."  Mora was responsible for studying Odo when he, too, was merely a lump of indeterminate matter, which the infant Founder seems to be without having learned anything about its nature on its own.  In fact, Quark is once again the agent of discovery (he was with a Jem'Hadar infant, too, in "The Abandoned"), handing off to Odo what seems to all intents and purposes already a lost cause.  Odo refuses to give up, but he makes very little progress until Mora shows up offering his advice.

Yet Odo remains extremely bitter about his treatment under Mora's care, regardless of the results.  Despite the fact that he retains the general appearance of Mora to this day (notably, the hairstyle), Odo's resentment at being considered a science experiment, with all the implied indignities, has never abated, and their prior reunion certainly did nothing to change his mind.

This is a season of remarkable change, however, perhaps most symbolic in "Begotten" itself.  A war was about to be shown in Star Trek for the first time ever, and this necessitated bold storytelling in order to justify, with all the safety nets frequency imposed in the franchise removed.  For the first time, there would be acknowledgment that even something a character thought was an immutable wrong had in fact been a good thing.  This is the very antithesis of Gene Roddenberry's original vision, and yet it shines boldly on the core of that vision, which is the search for humanity at all costs, the shattering of all illusions.

Anyway, this one always struck me as one of the defining moments of the series, even before I had properly experienced Odo and Mora's previous encounter in "Alternate."  It's hard not to be choked up when the infant Founder mimics Odo's face, or when the poor little dude dies.  It's a true cathartic moment.  You'd never think a face thickly covered in prosthetics could be so expressive, and yet this is one of Rene Auberjonois's best such feats.  For that matter, although James Sloyan (Mora) appears a number of times in the franchise with a variety of faces, this is his best performance.

Shakaar makes one final appearance, but unlike Bareil before him Kira finds it relatively easy to say goodbye, and that's another indication that everything is about to change...

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Come for the birth, stay for the miracle.
• series - One time everyone loves changelings in this thing!
• character - One of Odo's defining moments.
• essential - As I mentioned above, this is a true catharsis.

notable guest-stars:
James Sloyan (Mora)
Rosalind Chao (Keiko)
Duncan Regehr (Shakaar)

Deep Space Nine 5x11 "The Darkness and the Light"

rating: ****

the story: Kira is targeted by a vengeful Cardassian.

what it's all about: When this originally aired I wasn't terribly impressed with it, thinking someone tried a little too hard to play up the drama of the scenario.  Then I started thinking of it as more of a horror experience, which is rare enough in Star Trek.  I can think of fewer chilling scenes in franchise lore than the Cardassian preparing to carve Kira up to take the baby growing inside out of her. 

The baby, of course, belongs to O'Brien, and his wife! which is an extremely odd creative solution the producers came up with at the end of the previous season to explain why Kira looks pregnant even though she doesn't seem the type, because Nana Visitor was and short of dropping even temporarily one of the show's best characters, this seemed like a good idea.  Except for this episode, it's actually a pretty lousy idea, one of the worst the series ever had, but a pregnant Kira ratchets up the drama of this particular story considerably.  It contrasts nicely with the notion that she finally has to confront an innocent Cardassian who became a monster because of things she did during the Occupation.

"Things she did" means that Kira was a terrorist.  In the '90s being a terrorist was an acceptable thing to be for a character who was supposed to be unambiguously a good guy.  That's why Voyager had all those Maquis terrorists, too.  Post-9/11, this is hugely inconceivable, of course, and as a result these are creative decisions that continue to be the unspoken elephant in the Star Trek room.  In fact, until "Darkness" there had really been no question as to whether or not Kira's prior actions were justified.  The more I thought about this, the more I realized just how important this episode really is.

The Maquis, when they debuted, had a thousand reasons given to them, and all the moral ambiguities spelled out.  The Bajorans were given the relatively simple story of the Occupation, and the need to reclaim their world from the Cardassians, at any cost. As Star Wars has shown, and especially Rogue One, selling terrorism as entertainment isn't as hard as you'd think, even after 9/11.  It's called resistance when it's the good guys, right?  Well, innocent people still die, and that's still tough to deal with. 

The messy Bajoran/Cardassian past was something Deep Space Nine used to great creative success from the very start, including the acknowledged classic "Duet," in which Kira meets a Cardassian who pretends to be a war criminal just so someone among his people will be punished for their crimes.  And yet, as late as the third season, "Shakaar" glorifies the "resistance group" Kira belonged to and never considers for a moment that some evil was done, too, regardless of whether or not it was for the greater good.

This is the moral ambiguity of the series in a nutshell.  Kira's group is targeted by a Cardassian played by Randy Oglesby.  He'd later portray one of the key Xindi in Enterprise's 9/11-themed season, the one who makes the big moral breakthrough in that arc, deciding it's not worth supporting his people unconditionally no matter how evil he's been told humans are.  In "Darkness" he's a Cardassian who was scarred in one of Kira's acts of terror, and wasn't even a soldier but civilian.  Kira still tries to argue that he played a part, that basically because he was Cardassian...he was guilty anyway. 

All this plays beautifully into the rest of the series.  Presenting a Cardassian who seems to be evil with a capital E is in some ways a preparation for the looming entrance of the Cardassians into the Dominion, and thus the start of the Dominion War.  But even the enemy can't be clear-cut in this series, since Odo's people are the Founders, who run the Dominion, and every appearance of the Jem'Hadar to this point had presented them in a sympathetic light (although this changes in a few episodes), despite their debut marking the definitive villainy of the Dominion...

This is a hugely complex episode, and it reflects extremely well on the complexity of Deep Space Nine itself.  It's a classic that reflects the past and future of the series, and you can't ask for much more than that.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The difficult subject of terrorism enacted by main characters examined for the first time.
• series - Reflects backward and forward.
• character - One of the truly necessary Kira spotlights.
• essential - Uncomfortable in all the right ways.

notable guest-stars:
Randy Oglesby
William Lucking
Aron Eisenberg

Deep Space Nine 5x10 "Rapture"

rating: ****

the story: Sisko begins having visions that lead him to a hidden Bajoran city.

what it's all about: "Rapture" arrives with a thunderclap, and leaves a massive void in its wake, one that isn't really filled again until the seventh (and final) season.  It is at once a culmination of Sisko's journey to date in the series, and a massive hint as to where it goes next.

It's also visually different from every episode before it, for one very important reason: the revised Starfleet uniforms first seen in Star Trek: First Contact are seen in a TV series for the first time.  This would be because it's the first episode to air after the movie had settled comfortably into the collective fan imagination ("The Ascent" actually debuted a few days after the film's release, but it also focused primarily on non-Starfleet personnel and would've made a far less dramatic reveal, plus the timing would've given the movie less of a chance at establishing the new look, which was its right).

It helps the episode look bigger than anything that came before it, and it helps that the story is kind of bigger than anything that came before it.  Sisko had always been reluctant to embrace the trappings of the Bajoran culture he'd been forced to represent as commander of the station tasked with bringing it into the Federation fold.  This was complicated by the fact that the Bajorans immediately declared him a religious figure, which tended to baffle him, even if he became comfortable with it over time.  Yet, he'd never previously exhibited any particular ability to warrant it, until now. 

The visions, and Sisko's obsessive need to follow them, recall to mind two key episodes: "Explorers" (in which he builds an ancient Bajoran solar sail ship) and "The Visitor" (in which his son Jake obsessively pursues Sisko's rescue from a predicament no one else understands).  That both involve Jake is also key to "Rapture," since while Starfleet and Bashir are reluctant to embrace Sisko's new vocation, it's Jake who ultimately must make the call to end it.  This is the last great Sisko/Jake story, and while it leans more heavily on Sisko than previously, it also finally pushes him in his own direction, a culmination, too, of the new drive he'd discovered at the start of the third season, where he and his son had begun to drift apart.  They needed one last moment together, one last big emotion to be shared, before being thrust in opposite directions.

In the seventh season, Sisko discovers that his mother was actually a Prophet, the nonlinear "wormhole aliens" the Bajorans worship as gods, and the source of his designation as Emissary over them.  This comes with visions, too, tellingly.  Left unsaid but certainly implied is the connection back to "Rapture."  This is far more deft storytelling than was managed earlier in the season with "The Assignment," which featured the introduction of the Pah-wraiths, who would also factor prominently in the seventh season.  It's just as if "Rapture" were produced as a reset button, after too many episodes in which the future of the series was left in question despite an earlier drive to make it clear (appropriately enough in that third season).

What general fans will appreciate about "Rapture" is that it revisits a very old trope of the franchise, which is what to do with a character who suddenly "evolves" to a new level and seems to become a problem.  From "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (the second pilot) to "Charlie X" (another of the earliest episodes of the original series) to "The Nth Degree" (Next Generation), Star Trek always seemed to think this was a terrible thing, just as everyone does around Sisko in this episode, even though with the benefit of hindsight and knowing how it's knitted directly into the fabric of the series, we know how important and resonant a moment this really is, not just another in a series of random moments, so therefore once again an opportunity to showcase how it's different from the rest of the rest of the franchise.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Seems to embody a typical trope.
• series - But portrayed in-line with the material around it.
• character - Hugely significant to Sisko.
• essential - Another elevation of the whole series.

notable guest-stars:
Penny Johnson (Yates)
Louise Fletcher (Winn)

Deep Space Nine 5x9 "The Ascent"

rating: ****

the story: Quark and Odo discover that in order to survive an impossible situation, they will have to trust each other...basically for the first time ever...

what it's all about: Unlike its immediate predecessor, "Things Past," "The Ascent" is a successful attempt to remind long-time fans that everything that happened before the third season, really does still matter. 

While the emerging Dominion arc couldn't be discarded, and that was in large part what make the third season so important, there had been a concerted effort in the fourth to totally revamp the series so that a broader audience might be able to enjoy it.  This meant that old standards of the series began to recede into the background.  "Things Past" consciously set out to evoke the simple horrors (this explains why fans might have been hesitant previously to embrace the complexity of Deep Space Nine) of the first few seasons, when the Bajorans were more important.  But it really only duplicated the earlier "Necessary Evil" (while admittedly further increasing the significance of Dukat) rather than really build on anything.

So "Ascent" would have to something a little more obvious, which was to finally feature a showdown between Odo and Quark.  In the best franchise tradition, people who thought of each other as enemies would have to try and work together, which made the prospect not only familiar but more palatable than Odo finally having to decide if his Ferengi nemesis was more than a mere nuisance (the popular term these days is "frenemy"). 

The added benefit is that it actually gives the fifth season the excuse it needed to finally do something worthwhile with the Odo arc introduced at the end of the fourth: his people removing Odo's trademark ability to shapeshift.

In hindsight it was both a worthless gimmick (the removal) since it was undone so quickly (just a few episodes after "Ascent") and also, perhaps, the best thing that could've ever happened to the character.  At this point in the series, after two seasons of mystery surrounding his origins had finally been answered, Odo had become tangled in two fairly limited arcs: whether he would embrace his people (the Founders, who run the Dominion), and when the romance with Kira would begin.

The loss of his shapeshifting ability put Odo in a new context, one that unbalanced him as never before.  This wasn't really evident, or showcased properly, because the third element of the character, which had more or lain dormant for a few seasons, had been left out for eight episodes.  How do you forget how important Quark is to this guy?

That's what makes "Ascent" so compelling.  On the surface it seems pretty formulaic, almost forgettable, on the whole.  Yet its significance has great resonance.  This is the point in which the season finally starts to come into focus, and thus the rest of the series. 

It's a totally different kind of classic, in a very Deep Space Nine kind of way.  There's also a subplot in which Jake and Nog finally reunite (another arc from the third season finally coming full circle), and they find their roles in the friendship totally reversed.  Nog can't stand to be reminded of the life he used to lead, which was one of the defining elements of the early episodes (they're together, really, for the last time, as originally envisioned, in the crucial second season finale, "The Jem'Hadar," fittingly enough).  This is what it means for the characters of this series to mean so much to each other, and for their relationships to evolve over time, as they advance in their lives well past anything possible aboard a starship, where roles are easier to define (and nearly everyone is a member of Starfleet; of the four characters featured in the episode, only one is, and that's Nog, which as a Ferengi had been unthinkable until he did it).

It's an episode that general fans can appreciate (in much the same way general fans who watched the last episode of Lost could appreciate Jack and Locke finally fighting it out, even though they would've had no clue as to why), but for fans of the series means so much more.  Odo's composure (we'd had a preview of this in the earlier "Crossfire") finally totally cracks, and it's easy to see why, because everything he knows about himself has been stripped from him, and he's going to die, and the only person who'll know how it happened is Quark.

This is also the start of Quark breaking away from the way he'd been presented previously, almost totally defined by Ferengi hijinks, which opens up room for the far darker "Business as Usual" later in the season.  It's the beginning of his needing to reconcile all the radical changes happening around him (which is to say, the development of the series) with how desperately he'll need to cling to constants, like his bar. 

In a lot of ways, "Ascent" ends much as "Amok Time" did some thirties year earlier, with one character convinced another one is dead, and he's responsible.  Is that context enough?

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Seems to evoke the tradition of the survival experience.
• series - But actually speaks to the heart of Deep Space Nine.
• character - Odo, and Quark, at a crossroads in their lives.
• essential - Loathe as they are to admit it, they're indispensable to each other.

notable guest-stars:
Aron Eisenberg (Nog)
Max Grodenchik (Rom)

Deep Space Nine 5x8 "Things Past"

rating: **

the story: Odo and several colleagues relive one of his investigations while the station was still under Cardassian control.

what it's all about: This is something of a curious clunker.  One the one hand it was always nice to revisit Terok Nor, the station's name under the Cardassians, because the Cardassians were always ridiculously compelling in this series.  On the other "Things Past" seems like an unnecessary duplication of the second season classic "Necessary Evil."

One gets the sense that the producers were struggling to rediscover the tone of the series, and so they revisited a point at which everything clicked into place so compellingly.  But the timing is extremely curious.  Odo is four episodes away from regaining his shapeshifting abilities, one away from finally receiving a spotlight at all relevant to their absence ("The Ascent").  The big question: why now, for a story like this?  What does it say about him now?  Except as a vivid example of his uncertainty, the newfound doubt introduced by his fellow Founders, it has nothing at all to do with his present circumstances.  Still further along in the season, "A Simple Investigation" reads like a hugely lost opportunity, Odo doing, well, an investigation, which would've been a hugely compelling lead story at a time when he couldn't use his shapeshifting tricks, but instead comes off equally trackless...

In a lot of ways, the Dominion War brought badly needed focus to the series, and you can see it in the ways the fourth and fifth seasons so often didn't know what they should be doing to advance a plot that had been disrupted by the studio, that had built to such a crescendo in the third...The producers were told they needed to broaden their scope.  But it only introduced, well, doubt.  And episodes like "Things Past" happened as a result.

This is not a bad episode.  But it's brought down considerably by the certain knowledge that it could've easily been better.  Even Deep Space Nine wasn't at a point where setting an episode, with no gimmicks, in the past could've been possible. Enterprise later helped lead such storytelling innovation with "In a Mirror, Darkly," a two-part romp set entirely in the Mirror Universe, while Lost would deliver several episodes offering self-contained narratives.  The episodic mindset is a hard thing to shake, the fear of alienating viewers who might have no idea what's going on if they sample a random episode and find something that's not at all what they expected.

The idea would be revisited again in the sixth season ("Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night"), this time with Kira in the lead, and while I don't think that one hits the high notes of "Necessary Evil" either, at least it has a fresh perspective and something to say about a character, directly rather than obliquely.

Still, as I said, Cardassians!  Cardassians everywhere!  Regardless of their moral caliber, always fascinating to watch, especially when they think they're in control of a situation...

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Not a good episode to sample randomly.
• series - Fits into the general framework of Deep Space Nine.
• character - A sort of allegorical look at Odo.
• essential - Still, an unnecessary duplication of previous material, and otherwise ill-placed.

notable guest-stars:
Marc Alaimo (Dukat)
Andrew Robinson (Garak)
Kurtwood Smith

Deep Space Nine 5x7 "Let He Who Is Without Sin..."

rating: ***

the story: Worf and Dax vacation on Risa, but end up fighting the whole time.

what it's all about: The idea of morality in Star Trek seemed so often to veer toward the '60s counterculture ideals of total freedom (except in the case of Harry Mudd) it's extremely eye-opening for an episode to question how far, if indeed too far, they've gone.  This is one of those controversial episodes for that very reason, an uncomfortable viewing experience that happens to feature Worf coming to peace with his new home. 

Like every other character in Deep Space Nine, Worf was incredibly uncomfortable in his life when he first came to the station.  He'd had a home, famously, with the crew of Next Generation (to the point where he appeared in every movie derived from it, even though two of them, First Contact and Insurrection, overlapped with his tenure at the station), and despite the occasional inconvenience (or outright crisis, which basically explains every time he met another Klingon) he was another happy member of Picard's merry band (though he would protest such a characterization).  His addition to Deep Space Nine at the start of the fourth season was kind of apropos of nothing, just like the Klingons the studio insisted be added to the series to broaden its appeal.  Subsequent appearances only compounded the problem, until someone finally realized the perfect solution in pairing him with the Klingon-loving Dax, which finally happened earlier in the fifth season ("Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places"). 

Yet to attempt to craft a happy ending for Worf so abruptly wouldn't have been true to the series or character.  So this is the episode where all the ugly details are ironed out, and once and for all Worf can either decide to make peace with the universe...or not.  Even in his Next Generation glory days he never quite got to do this, but rather avoid it at every opportunity, finding temporary happiness with Troi, who was the other most likely personal in that crew to understand the desperate need to find acceptance (thanks to her overbearing mother).

So he does a lot of bad things in this episode.  In short, Worf is a jerk.  To Dax, to Federation principles, you name it.  Never before had all those troubled Deep Space Nine characters tried to take it out on each other, even in the early days when Kira wanted to rip Sisko's throat out. 

Of course, Worf serves as a metaphor, contrasting his motivations with those of his "friends" who are out to question what the Federation has become, the comparatively shallow nature of their actions compared to what we eventually learn about Worf's reluctance to truly share himself with anyone (something he got to avoid with the empathic Troi).

That it's set on the pleasure planet Risa (Next Generation's "Captain's Holiday," Enterprise's "Two Days and Two Nights") is a nice little link to franchise lore.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The rare episode that questions the basic tenets of Star Trek's philosophy.
• series - I think this has less to do with Deep Space Nine as a result.
• character - But plenty to say about Worf.
• essential - It's a fascinating case study.

notable guest-stars:
Vanessa Williams
Chase Masterson (Leeta)

Deep Space Nine 5x6 "Trials and Tribble-ations"

rating: ****

the story: The crew is literally inserted into "The Trouble with Tribbles."

what it's all about: The 30th anniversary of the franchise saw a lot of work put into celebrating it, between the release of Star Trek: First Contact (regarded as the best of the movies featuring the cast of Next Generation), "Flashback" from Voyager (which gave a lot of fans what they wanted, which was bring back George Takei's Sulu), and "Trials and Tribble-ations."  A lot of fans will probably argue that "Trials" was the best of them.

This is arguably the most accessible episode of the whole series, one that any fan of the franchise could really enjoy, and a technical feat (inserting Deep Space Nine characters into and using footage from the original series, two years after Forrest Gump made the idea cool) that goes above and beyond what's normally expected from Star Trek.  This was always a series that let its characters enjoy themselves now and then ("Fascination" similarly features a whole cast romp), far more than its grim reputation would suggest, which makes it all the funnier that this episode happened within it.

What might have seemed like a gimmick instead just dazzles from start to finish, with one particularly hilarious scene in which Dax and Sisko are tossing tribbles from the bin Kirk stands beneath as the little fuzzy creatures, as they did in the original episode, continue to trickle down on him well past the point he'd inadvertently opened it to find them there and dumped the creatures on himself, the most classic moment from one of the most classic episodes of the whole franchise.

Nowadays there's a term for this sort of storytelling: "fan service."  And yet, the episode does everything with a wink and a nod, from the Department of Temporal Investigations (around which a whole series of novels was later based) that goes along with the joke of Starfleet officers having a penchant for causing time travel mischief, to Worf having to account for the smooth foreheads of Klingons from an earlier era (Enterprise would finally give an explanation in "Affliction"/"Divergence").

The actor who played the Klingon double agent Arne Darvin in the original episode even returns!  It's literally impossible not to love this one, just one of the most genuinely fun experiences of the series and franchise.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A legitimate classic inserted into a legitimate classic.
• series - The episode any fan will love, including Deep Space Nine partisans.
• character - The whole cast shines.
• essential - Usually you need Q to pull off something like this.  But, no Q in sight!

notable guest-stars:
Charlie Brill (Darvin)