Day 3: DS9, A Man Alone

Show: Star Trek; Deep Space Nine

Episode Particulars: S1EP3, “A Man Alone” (interesting sidenote; apparently this was the second [or third, depending on how you look at it] episode made, but it aired after “Past Prologue”. Even so, I’ll be watching them in the order they were released).

 

Summary: As people start to settle in to life on the station, Odo is not pleased to see Ibudan (Stephen James Carver), a Bajoran mercenary who cared only about personal gain, hanging out in Quark’s bar. Shortly afterwards, Ibudan is murdered in a locked room (holosuite, actually), and the evidence increasingly points to Odo as the murderer. Most of the officers believe he’s innocent, but the civilians on the station, especially the Bajorans, think otherwise, and show their displeasure in increasingly nasty ways. In addition, there’s an unrelated subplot involving O’Brien’s wife Keiko (Rosalind Chao) trying to set up a school on the station, partially due to the antics that Sisko’s son Jake (Cirroc Lofton) and Quark’s nephew Nog (Aron Eisenberg) are getting up to without supervision. Both plots are resolved happily, if not entirely satisfactorily.

Standalone Thoughts: Based on this episode, the crew absolutely made the right decision to swap this episode with “Past Prologue”. To be blunt, this episode is a mess, and if it had come after the pilot, there’s a good chance the show would have seen a major drop in viewership. There are some good ideas in the script, but for whatever reason, they just couldn’t pull it off.

Part of the problem may be trying to fit too much into one episode. I think I know what they were going for—showing that there’s more going on on the station than the plot of the week—but the end result is having a whole bunch of plot threads that keep interrupting the action. Yes, two of those plot threads (Keiko trying to find her place on the station, Jake and Nog getting into trouble) relate to each other, and make a perfectly fine subplot, but it just doesn’t mesh well with the murder investigation plot. Couple that with Bashir’s interest in Dax that takes up most of the pre-credits opening, and you wind up juggling too much. Maybe if they’d focused solely on the murder investigation, things would have felt a lot smoother.

It also might have made that plot better as well. The entire story is a collection of poor decisions. First, the script and filmmaking try so hard to suggest that Odo was the murderer that it’s immediately apparent that he’s not the murderer, simply because they’re overdoing it. If you don’t know what’s coming (and I didn’t remember this episode, so I was in that camp), it just looks like really shoddy writing. Then, once it’s established that Odo is being framed for murder, the story takes a sharp right into prejudice-town, turning the Bajorans against him and eventually forming what looks like a literal lynch mob outside his office. It’s introduced with barely any setup, and the longer it goes on, the more heavy-handed it feels. Sisko turning up to stand against the mob and make an impassioned speech winds up feeling like someone getting on a soapbox, and I cynically feel like the reason they did it was to draw parallels between this situation and the Civil Rights conflicts of the 1960’s. Just as you’re recovering from that, we get a deus ex machina, technobabble answer that could have been clever in different circumstances but pretty much comes out of nowhere here. And to put the cherry on top, the actual murderer is revealed by pulling a mask off his face, like this was some sort of episode of Scooby-Doo. It might almost be mock-worthy if the episode wasn’t so astoundingly inconsistent.

How it Relates to the Whole: What’s probably most frustrating about this episode is that the main plot is bad enough that I’d suggest skipping over the episode entirely…if it wasn’t for the fact that it sets up a lot of things that will come into play later down the line. Nog and Jake meet, we learn more about how Odo’s shapeshifting works, Dax and Sisko start providing more information on how the Trill species works (complete with a line from Dax that winds up running completely at odds with what we see of her later), and we get a glimpse of the Odo/Quark dynamic that will continue throughout the show (see below). We even get introduced to Nog’s father, Rom (Max Grodénchik), though he’s very different from the character he’ll become later in the series. How much of what we see here was meant to go somewhere, it’s hard to say, but enough of it becomes relevant that I feel like you need to watch at least some of the episode. Maybe watching it at double speed, or only watching scenes that don’t involve Odo will suffice.

This is also where people who aren’t familiar with Next Gen will be introduced to Keiko O’Brien, who winds up being a semi-important player. Given my gushing love letter to Garak in my last writeup, I’d better put my cards on the table here too; I’m not particularly fond of Keiko. She never really came across as a sympathetic character to me, and I think the show would have been better had they gone in a different direction with her. I bring this up mostly because she does not make a good first impression here. Our first glimpse of her is her arguing with O’Brien, and when we finally get to hear their conversation, O’Brien is clearly the more level-headed one, while Keiko seems determined to complain. Like I said, though, she winds up being somewhat important to the plot, so for the sake of future episodes (and the fact that you’d probably be somewhat confused about her otherwise), you should probably watch her scenes.

Other: *The opening scene between Bashir and Dax really makes Bashir look like an idiot and makes you wonder how he ever managed to become a doctor. Does he really not understand that a brain teaser is the same thing as a puzzle? That being said, there could have been some nice foreshadowing here about later developments…if that had been the writer’s intent all along.

*I’m kind of intrigued by Odo’s long rant about being in relationships. The situations he describes are so specific, and he sounds so bitter about it, that I get the sense he’s speaking from personal experience. I’ll be interested to see if this is ever touched on again, especially given later developments.

*The Bajoran guy who shows Odo around Ibudan’s quarters both sounds and acts like a robot. It’s very distracting, though fortunately he doesn’t stick around for long.

*I suppose it makes sense, given that Odo is a living creature, but it still strikes me as odd that Odo has DNA. You’d think that a sentient pile of goo would leave behind residue, not DNA. Then again, Google tells me that amoebas have 200 times the amount of DNA that humans do, so what do I know? I’m a reviewer, not a scientist.

Best Line/Exchange: Only one exchange stood out this time, but it’s a good one;

Quark (speaking to a group of Bajorans who were trashing Odo): Nobody knows him like I know him. Let me tell you something; he’s an ill-tempered, overbearing crosspatch. But he was no Cardassian collaborator and he’s no killer.

Bajoran: I can’t believe you’re defending him, Quark. You’re his worst enemy.

Quark: Guess that’s the closest thing he has in this world to a friend.

It’s a semi-profound statement, and it pretty much sums up the relationship between Quark and Odo going forward. They have issues with each other, but when it comes right down to it, they respect each other, and therefore, in a weird way, have each other’s backs.