“The Search, Part II”
Written by Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe
Directed by Jonathan Frakes
Season 3, Episode 2
Production episode 40512-448
Original air date: October 3, 1994
Stardate: unknown
Station log: We get a summary of the events of Part 1, then see Odo surrounded by fellow changelings. The female changeling explains that all of Odo’s people are part of the Great Link: a merging of thought and idea and sensation among all changelings. Against the objection of one of the others, the female changeling links with Odo, their arms merging into one for a second. It’s a profound experience for Odo, who realizes after the link that it’s all true: he’s home.
However, the issue they have is with Kira, a “solid.” Changelings have a bad history with monoforms, and they also won’t let Kira send a signal from the shuttlecraft and risk revealing the location of their planet. The changelings value their privacy. However, Kira knows some tricks from the resistance that will mask the signal, making it untraceable.
Sisko and Bashir are in a badly battered shuttle, which they’ve been in for six days. They’re rescued by Dax and O’Brien, who were last seen captured by the Jem’Hadar, but apparently they were successful in convincing the Founders of the Dominion that the Federation was interested in peace. Sisko is greeted at DS9 by Admiral Nechayev, who informs Sisko that the Founders are meeting with the Federation Council, and other Alpha Quadrant powers.
One of the Founders meets with Sisko: his name is Borath, and he’s the same species as Eris. Borath explains that the Dominion was impressed by Sisko risking his life for peace, and that an alliance between the Dominion and the Federation will be beneficial to all.
Bashir meets up with Garak, who is concerned that the treaty negotiations between the Dominion and the various AQ powers are a mistake they may or may not live to regret. As if to punctuate the point, Bashir bumps into T’Rul who says that the only AQ power that has been excluded from the peace talks are the Romulans, which T’Rul is pretty damn pissed about.
The female changeling encourages Odo to change his shape into the various items in the garden—the flowers, the rocks—in order to better understand them. He tries that, but it doesn’t work very well, as he explains to Kira with great frustration. Kira’s pretty frustrated also, as there’s a power source on the planet that’s interfering with her ability to send a signal to Sisko.
Sisko asks Nechayev why the Romulans have been excluded. The Dominion feels the Romulans would be a disruptive influence. Besides, if they balk, they won’t stand a chance against the combined might of the remaining AQ powers and the Dominion.
Odo asks the female changeling what they have against “solids.” She explains that many years ago the changelings roamed the stars to add to their knowledge of the galaxy, but they were mostly met with fear, suspicion, hatred, and violence. However, they still wished to learn about the galaxy, so after they went into hiding in the Omarian Nebula, they sent a hundred infants out to experience the galaxy. Thanks to the wormhole, Odo is the first to return—they weren’t expecting anyone to come back for three hundred years. They link once again, this time more fully combining.
A Jem’Hadar starts a bar brawl with O’Brien. Bashir defends him, but Eddington calms things down by telling the Jem’Hadar that it won’t happen again. Bashir’s more than a little pissed off that Eddington is all but letting the Jem’Hadar get away with assault. Meanwhile, Sisko’s apprehensive about the entire situation, made worse by the news of the bar brawl and Dax angrily informing him that she’s been transferred to the Lexington without his knowledge or consent. He storms into the meeting Nechayev is having with Borath to express his extreme displeasure with the situation—and his mood doesn’t improve when Nechayev informs him that the Federation is pulling out of Bajor, leaving it to the Dominion to watch over. All Starfleet personnel are being reassigned, and Sisko’s being promoted to captain.
Kira tries to trace the interference, which leads her to a big metal door. Confused as to what shapeshifters would need with a door, she tries to scan past it, but can’t. She returns to the garden, to be met by an Arbazan vulture—which is really Odo, who is finally starting to see what the other changelings get out of immersive shapechanging. Kira asks for Odo’s help in getting through that door.
Garak meets with Sisko to talk about the fact that the Bajorans are less than happy with the situation, and have signed a pact with the Romulans against the Dominion and their allies. Their conversation is interrupted by T’Rul being shot in the back by the Jem’Hadar. Sisko beats up the Jem’Hadar in retaliation, and is put in a cell. Eddington won’t let Dax, Bashir, and Garak see him, so Garak hits him with a sedative, and they break Sisko out. Next stop: the Rio Grande, where O’Brien’s waiting with a full complement of photon torpedoes to collapse the entrance to the wormhole in order to keep the Dominion on their side of the galaxy. Garak is killed en route to the runabout, but the remaining crew manage to escape and destroy the AQ mouth of the wormhole.
Odo examines the door and realizes that it’s meant to keep whoever’s inside from getting out. He uses his mad shapeshifting skillz to pick the lock—but there are two Jem’Hadar on the other side, who lead them into a room where Sisko, Dax, Bashir, O’Brien, and T’Rul are all hooked up to a virtual-reality machine. Everything that happened on the station was a VR experiment—by Borath, who explains to Odo and Kira that he ran a simulation to see how they’d respond to a Dominion foothold in the AQ.
The female changeling enters then. Odo is shocked that she was okay with this, but she drops the bombshell: the changelings are the real Founders of the Dominion. They wanted to impose order on a chaotic universe, and besides, what you control can’t hurt you.
Odo announces that he’s not remaining. The Great Link is very appealing, but he has a link to Sisko, Kira, and the rest, and he won’t allow them to be harmed—and he’s going home with them, unless they try to stop him. But the female changeling declares that no changeling has ever harmed another, and so she lets them all go. But she also says that the next time, they won’t be so generous.
The female changeling returns to the link, saying that they’ll miss Odo—but that he’ll miss them more. With that, everyone goes back to the Defiant, which is in orbit around the planet, and they all go home.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko is spectacularly unhappy with the turn of events in the VR simulation, culminating in a truly epic rant at Borath and the image of Nechayev.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira is incredibly supportive of Odo at first, thrilled that he’s found his people, but as the episode wears on she becomes more and more disillusioned, not aided by the not-even-a-little veiled contempt the female changeling shows toward “solids” in general and her in particular. (This will come up again when we next see the female changeling in “Heart of Stone” and several more times in the Dominion War arc of the final two seasons.)
The slug in your belly: Dax anticipates Sisko’s desire before they ever break him out of the cell, having O’Brien get the Rio Grande ready and loaded with torpedoes to destroy the mouth of the wormhole.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo learns a great deal about his people, and that he was sent out as an infant to learn about the galaxy. (Amusingly, they sent him and the other 99 out to seek out new life and new civilizations…) He also starts to embrace his shapeshifting ability even more than before, something he’ll continue even though he rejects the Great Link.
Plain, simple: We don’t see the real Garak, but the image of him is pretty convincing. He’s the voice of doubt from the git-go, and he’s very valuable in the plan to bust Sisko out and blow up the wormhole, getting “killed” for his efforts.
Rules of Acquisition: We don’t see the real Quark, either, but his image has a hilariously Ferengi take on Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech: “I have a dream. A dream that one day all people—human, Jem’Hadar, Ferengi, Cardassians—stand together in peace around my dabo table.”
Victory is life: We’re led to believe that the Founders of the Dominion are Eris and Borath’s people (not yet identified as the Vorta) in the VR simulation, until the ending when we find out that Odo’s people are, in fact, the Founders. It’s also obvious that they still have designs on the Alpha Quadrant.
Tough little ship: We don’t actually see the Defiant, but Borath apparently had it towed to the Founders’ homeworld and repaired it enough to get it home. We never do find out how many crew lost their lives in the battle.
Keep your ears open: “I’m glad to see the plan is going as scheduled.”
“What plan is that?”
“You mean no one told you? You see, I pretend to be their friend—and then I shoot you.”
The image of Garak to the image of a couple Jem’Hadar right before he shoots them, thus saving Sisko, Dax, and Bashir’s lives after seeming to betray them.
Welcome aboard: Back from Part 1 are Martha Hackett as T’Rul; Salome Jens as the female changeling, who’ll return in “Heart of Stone”; and Kenneth Marshall as the image of Eddington, who’ll be back for realsies in “The Die is Cast.” Making her second DS9 appearance (and final Trek appearance) after “The Maquis, Part II” is Natalija Nogulich as the image of Nechayev. Andrew J. Robinson also appears as the image of Garak.
And this episode’s Robert Knepper moment is Dennis Christopher—possibly best known as Cyvus Vail on Angel and the “Jack of All Trades” on Profiler—whom I totally forgot played Borath in this episode. He’ll be back on Enterprise as a Suliban in “Detained.” (Christopher and I were both guests at the Big Damned Flanvention in 2005, a convention mostly for Firefly/Serenity—the entire main cast save for Gina Torres was there, as well as Christina Hendricks, who played Saffron, and Yan and Raf Feldman, the twins who played Fanty & Mingo—but which also featured a bunch of other Joss Whedon-related guests, including Christopher, Camden Toy, and Jason Carter. I was there because I wrote the novelization of Serenity and wrote a bunch of Buffy books.)
Trivial matters: In addition to Quark and Garak, Jake, Eddington, and Nechayev don’t actually appear in this episode either, as what we see of the five of them is all from Borath’s VR simulation. In fact, the episode truly takes place entirely in the Gamma Quadrant, the first to do so, though we don’t know that until the very end.
While T’Rul never appears again onscreen, she does appear in the short story “The Devil You Know” by Heather Jarman in the DS9 anthology Prophecy and Change.
This is Jonathan Frakes’s first time directing DS9, after having become a prolific director onTNG. He’ll direct two more season-three episodes, and also appear in one, “Defiant.”
The monolith seen in the background of the garden on the changeling homeworld is identical to the one Odo, Dax, and Dr. Mora found in “The Alternate,” referred to as a relic of Odo’s people in that episode.
Borath was originally supposed to be Eris from “The Jem’Hadar,” but Molly Hagan was unavailable, so the role was recast. While the Vorta have been identified as the administrators of the Dominion, it has not yet been established that Eris and Borath are both Vorta (since Borath spent most of the episode pretending to be a Founder).
The female changeling says she might visit Odo in the AQ to see what his life is like, a promise she’ll keep (to his surprise) in “Heart of Stone.”
Walk with the Prophets: “I don’t believe it—I’m talking to a tree.” On the one hand, I can’t really point to anything that’s actively wrong with the VR-simulation plot, but there’s nothing actively right with it, either. It’s actually more effective when you know the ending, because you can look for the clues that it’s not real—starting with the fact that way more time is passing on the station than is passing on the Founder homeworld with Kira and Odo. Also Quark and Nechayev in particular are a little off—a little too simplistic. Nechayev in particular is just way over the top in her nastiness. She’s always been an antagonistic character, going back to her first appearance in TNG’s “Chain of Command,” but she has none of the depth she had in her previous TNG appearances—then again, the only time Sisko dealt with her was in “The Maquis, Part II,” where she was an unreasonable hard-ass, and it’s primarily Sisko’s memories Borath was using.
Of course, that applies to the others, too. Quark is a pretty simplistic greedhead, but it’s likely how a lot of the crew—especially Bashir and O’Brien, who are the ones who interact with the Ferengi—view him. And Eddington is practically a blank slate, because nobody really knows him yet. (Garak, though, is spot-on, which bespeaks Bashir’s observational prowess…)
But everything just barrels forward willy nilly—and most of it irritatingly off-screen via characters talking about it rather than seeing it happening—and so much of it is arbitrary. The Romulans would be disruptive but the Klingons wouldn’t be? Abandoning Bajor to the Dominion? There’s nothing about any of that that makes sense (which calls Borath’s entire simulation into question).
However, the trick is, that isn’t the A-story, and it’s not the heart of the episode: Odo is. The entire sequence on the Founders homeworld is masterfully done, from Odo’s initially treating the female changeling like a witness he’s interrogating—it’s Kira who has to tell him to dial it down a little, amusingly—to the female changeling* basically verifying the legends about changelings that we heard in “Vortex” and “Shadowplay,” to Odo’s initial frustration and later joy at the immersive shapeshifting that the other changelings want him to do, to the brutal revelation that the changelings are the Founders.
*And while I totally understand why the character is never formally named, because that helps to make the changelings more alien, it is really really annoying from a rewatcher’s perspective to have to refer to her by so ridiculous an appellation as “female changeling.”
That revelation is a masterstroke, as it provides the episode with its bite. Initially, there’s no reason to (necessarily) connect Odo’s finding his people with Sisko’s attempts to open relations with the Dominion, especially since they’re hiding in a nebula. Tying it all together at the end is brilliant.
But best of all is what it means to Odo: he finally gets his greatest wish, to find his people, and they turn out to be assholes. It changes everything for the character, in more ways than one, underlined by a simply superb performance by Rene Auberjonois, who shows that there’s far more to Odo than the gruff constable—yet without ever completely losing the gruff constable, either. And I love his response to the female changeling telling him he’ll always be an outsider: that having an outsider’s perspective can be valuable, and that he’s sorry they’ve forgotten that.
Ultimately, while it’s not an episode I’m ever going to feel the need to watch again (that’s why Dennis Christopher was a Robert Knepper moment, I hadn’t really watched this episode hardly at all since initial airing twenty years ago, even when I did Dominion research for various bits of Trek fiction over the years), it’s an important one with a mostly clever structure that finished the job Part 1 did of setting up the show’s new status quo in general and Odo’s new status quo in particular.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at the Morris County Library in Whippany, New Jersey on Saturday the 26th as part of an all-day celebration by the U.S.S. Justice fan club of the 20th anniversary of DS9. He’ll also be one of the instructors at the Pocono Writers Conference on Sunday the 27th, an all-day workshop being held at the East Monroe Public Library in Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania; other instructors include Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Kathryn Craft, Mike McPhail, Bernie Mojzes, and Michael Ventrella.
I agree. The episode isn’t high on my re watch list but it’s not a bad episode. Siskos speech and T’rhuls death always galvanizes me because I am seeing my beloved federation being twisted for no apparent reason and garaks lines along with delivery are hilarious.
The ‘death’ of Garak was definitely the point where you have to say, “Okay, there is no way this is real” (if you hadn’t already). Because there was no way they were going to kill off a great character like Garak in a generic action scene. Even this early in the show, they knew what they had in him, and they wouldn’t have done that.
As for the female changeling, I know she’s always referred to that in the scripts, all the way up to the end, but I much prefer Female Founder. It says exactly the same thing but is much easier to say.
Haven’t read yet, but it looks like the break isn’t working properly; the whole post shows up on the front page.
I believe the character was officially referred to in scripts as Female Shapeshifter. I always tended to think of her as Salome.
I never bought the whole Odo-origin story, the thing about the Hundred. It makes no damn sense. The Changelings profoundly value their unity and interconnection. They consider separation from the whole to be anathema. And they take pride in never having harmed one another. Yet they blithely cast a hundred infants adrift in space? Possibly to die in some cosmic accident or be destroyed or tormented by whoever found them? There’s an enormous contradiction there. Sure, some societies have enormous contradictions in them, like founding a nation based on freedom and equality while keeping slaves and persecuting the natives of the territory you’re conquering. But the writers of the show never acknowledged or addressed this particular contradiction, so it’s like they didn’t even notice it, or didn’t care enough to explain it.
The difference in time frames between the two plots doesn’t conclusively prove that one is unreal, not by itself, since this isn’t the only time it happens. In “What You Leave Behind,” the series finale, the main action plot seems to span at least a week, while the parallel subplot with two characters wandering around in a cave can’t take more than a matter of hours, maybe a day or so at most.
The Female Founder’s name is Trudy.
There. Problem solved.
@5: Except she’s all about deception, so shouldn’t it be Untrudy?
I think where this episode really falls down is in having Borath conduct his VR experiment on the Changeling world. There really isn’t a good reason for it beyond “because plot”. I just don’t see the Founders letting this take place there. Too many things that can go wrong (as they do) and I’m not entirely sure about them even letting the Vorta onto their world (though that’s based more on later developments).
I suppose Odo’s many years of being apart from those around him and avoiding any sort of intimacy at all helped him resist the temptations of the Great Link. Maybe like a monk who suddenly finds himself in a situation where he gets laid (really, really well), but is still able to reject that as a permanent situation through his established habits and ties to something else.
Is this the first time we see Odo shapeshift into an animate object? (Tentacle Monster from “The Alternate” notwithstanding…) (Wait, no, he was a rat once, nevermind)
I was surprised to see the VR plot in this once since that was my guess for the plot of “Whispers” (or, as I shall always remember it, the Faux’Brian Episode)
Also, was there a Watchmen reference in there? “The treaty was signed half an hour ago…”
This episode always kinda struck me like a cruel cheat (much the same way Lost ended) , in that the rug is pulled out from under us in the last 5 minutes. A “holodeck” episode… really? C’mon, havent we had enough of those?
Watching this again, I struggled to remember where I first saw Dennis Christopher, and it hit me… Breaking Away. A far better showcase of a fine actor doing an impressive character. Better than here.
The Decipher CCG called her the Founder Leader, so that’s what I think of her as.
I though the simulation to be pretty easy to see through the first time I saw the episode, as soon as I saw O’Brien and Dax. Maybe I’m just too jaded by holodeck episodes.
On this episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Odo finds out what his real name is…Ikari.
Speaking of Robert Knepper moments, I turned on The Blacklist…and who was a guest star? Yep, Robert Knepper :)
To all who keep repeating “Female Founder”, please stop. Every time I see it, I see “Female Flounder”.
As for the episode, I liked it the first time I saw it, tolerated it the second time, and now I get annoyed. Not totally sure why, but part of it is that the Founders are more sympathetic than our AQ heroes.
The fact that Kira and Odo don’t appear in the simulation also seems contrived. They are really only missing becuase the writers needed to fool the audience.
During the opening scene between Odo, Kira, and the Founders, I thought it was a great opportunity for them to see a solid that actually cared about one of their own. Too bad they were blinded by everything else and so set in their ways.
I also saw through the deception plot pretty quickly, though I thought it was a holodeck, not a mind device. Still, it’s very suspicious that the Federation would act that way and basically insinuate that they would go to war with the Romulans now that they know they can wipe them out. It did make me a little suspicious at first that Dax and O’Brien were part of the simulation, though.
@15: Odo and Kira not being in the simulation probably would make sense to the characters there; it could be explained by them not having been found yet. In the real world, they left in a shuttle during the fighting.
@14: In what way are the Founders sympathetic? The fact that they were persecuted in the past? That does not excuse their actions now in setting up the Dominion. And how are the AQ heroes unsympathetic with regards to all this?
Quoth Rancho Unicorno: “Not totally sure why, but part of it is that the Founders are more sympathetic than our AQ heroes.”
You are not the first person to make this assertion, and it frankly boggles my mind. The Dominion introduced themselves to the Alpha Quadrant with kidnapping and mass murder on a planetary scale. In what way, precisely, are they sympathetic?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Hey, I actually know a little trivia for this episode. That weird-looking tree with the bluish-purple leaves on the Founders’ planet was not a prop, but an actual exotic plant that they had transported to the set. This is why the camera keeps panning lovingly across it in establishing shots.
The dream/simulation fake-out is contrived, I agree, but at least it establishes a stalemate of sorts between the Federation and the Dominion, by making it very clear that if the Dominion makes serious waves the Alpha Quadrant, Sisko is willing to risk it all by collapsing the wormhole. This means the Dominion has to come up with sneakier ways to gain a foothold in the Alpha Quadrant, which makes for more interesting stories down the line. I’m OK with it, I guess is what I’m saying.
Also for many people my age, I believe they will all remember sitting there as an eight-year-old watching Dennis Christopher playing Eddie in the Mini-Series, IT. I didn’t mind that it was a VR simulation so much because it is sort of a Sci-Fi Staple to do the “Fake out” episode. Stargate did it, twice I think. A lot of shows have done that whether it was VR, someone showing the main characters a possible outcome through psychic ability or something of that nature. It doesn’t exscuse it outright, but it is something that many shows worth their salt seem to do. There’s the evil twin ep (Star Trek TOS, Star Trek TNG, Supernatural, Stargate), the Groundhog Day Ep (Star Trek TNG, Supernatural), etc.
I did really like this episode, but I was yelling “SHE’S A POD PERSON!” from the minute Admiral Nechayev came on screen and said they were willing to let the Romulans be pissed at them since they’d be able to crush them in a war anyway. That just does not seem to be the Federation way (despite the fact that DS9 is attempting to deconstruct a bit, or at least make a bit more nuanced, the idealisitic view of the Federation) – especially after they loaned them a cloaking device!
So, at that point I was pretty interested to see what the ‘twist’ would be, although I didn’t guess the actual mechanism of it.
I found it highly contrived that the Defiant crew was behind the wall on the Founders’ planet. First of all, don’t the Dominion have like a billion planets they could’ve used instead? Why bring them to the actual home planet? (Especially since they’re all about staying hidden?) And then even using that planet, there’s still a whole planet they could’ve used, not just within walking distance of the visitors. Plus they were obviously mistrustful of Kira. Why not have a changeling or 2 keep an eye on her?
It seems possible in hindsight that one of the things the simulation was intended to game out was a takeover done via the replacement of senior Federation personnel like Nechayev with Founders – even if no-one knows that’s even possible, it shows that if the Federation starts giving weird and evil orders, people will rebel.
@21
I always assumed that they did keep an eye on Kira. She just didn’t do enough for them to intervene. It’s not like a race of shapeshifters would have trouble with surveillance. In fact, I always thought it odd that she would assume that she and Odo would be able to have any sort of private conversation at all.
@17
Krad
If thats a reference to my comments in “Jem’Hadar”, I never made any such assertion as to the Founder’s being sympathetic.
As to the episode, its a cheat on many ways. I hated it when I first saw it. Now I am indifferent to it. The Odo segments are the best.
Ah yes. Sadly for Odo, this episode shows, as Spock said (I paraphrase), sometimes having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. Odo spent his whole life waiting to meet his people, and they turned out to be diabolical evil.
Despite the VR plot, which I am no fan of, this one is done well. Its pretty obvious something is off, and finding out it was all VR was mitigated by the big reveal that Odo’s people are the Founders (!). The fact that Odo was one of them is really the only thing that saves the Defiant crew here, and the female changeling (sorry krad, I find it as annoying as you) makes it clear that even that fact won’t be enough to save them next time. The ice in her voice right there is chilling.
And I’d like to know how in the blue blazes are the Founders sympathetic. @14 offers that inexplicable tidbit with no follow-up as though its obvious or something. Is it the mass murder? Kidnappings? Yes we can totally sympathize…(?)
To the extent that we don’t know that the changelings are the Founders, they’re sympathetic. They’re just a simple peaceful people, mistreated by a cruel universe and forced into hiding. That’s how they present themselves to Odo initially. Once they’re revealed as the true power of the Dominion, any sympathy goes out the airlock.
On a completely different note, for a LONG time I thought they said “Great Lake”, not “Great Link”. I mean it looked like a lake and all (well, a lake made out of glowing translucent changeling stuff), but I still thought it was a weird name. It wasn’t until several seasons later I realized they were saying “Link”. That made much more sense, but I still think of it as the Great Lake.
@26: So you thought the Founders were actually from Michigan?
@27 – I’m from Michigan, and I had the same thought about that post. And now I think I’m going to always think of it as the Great Lake :)
@27: I assume lots of folks on here could tell you that there is some great Founders up in Michigan.
@26: Thanks for making everyone think of it as “The Great Lake” from here on out.
I thought this was the DS9 re-watch, not The Fishing Channel. All this talk of flounders in the Great Lakes …
DemetriosX@7, it’s worse than that. Not only is this interrogation-of-sorts conducted on the Founder’s top-secret world, it’s conducted five minutes from Odo’s landing site! Given that nobody but Odo knew what Odo’s landing site was going to *be*, either this world is the size of a Hollywood backlot or… the writers forgot that worlds are not the size of a Hollywood backlot and they need to explain the coincidence of the interrogation being done there rather than in an interrogation centre ten thousand miles away. (Or five hundred light years away.)
Very minor note, but one thing I liked a lot about this two episode set is the fact that the first one starts off with Starfleet folks talking about getting their butts kicked by the QG folks in simulations, and the second one *ends* with the GQ people mentioning that they’re withdrawing because the humans were so effective in their own simulation. I love that type of mirrored narrative structure.
“The Romulans would be disruptive but the Klingons wouldn’t be?”
Before I knew it was a simulation, I didn’t think this was an arbitrary point – I figured it was part of a Dominion plot to deliberately antagonize the Romulans and prod them into war with the Federation. I suppose they could have chosen the Klingons for the same reason, but I assume since the Federation and the Klingons were allied, it’d be easier to get them fighting the Romulans.
At the end, Kira and Odo beam up to the Defiant. What happened to their shuttle?
Also – wouldn’t we have to assume from this point forward that the Dominion possess all of the Defiant’s tech specs, including the Romulan cloak? Is that dealt with in any way?
I didn’t really mind the VR plot, the whole thing ties up nicely, and I got tho relive the surprise at the Founder’s being Odo’s people while rewatching with my kid.
When I first saw the The Search, Pt II I found it unusual that Bashir is in a shuttlecraft with someone and for the first time manages not to annoy his travelling companion. And then the ending reveals why – it was all a dream!
Am I the only one who thinks the rapid jump cut from the station to Odo and the Female Changeling talking about her dislike of humanoids is a bit sloppy? I’m sure there was a ton of dialogue left on the cutting-room floor.
I have to say, I never really found this episode too interesting. The whole “it’s secretly a holodeck!” thing has just been done too many times.
And, I have to say, it’s a shame to see the Romulan guest character killed off after just two episodes. Given how well DS9 was able to, for want of a better term, humanize the Bajorans, Cardassians, Klingons, Ferengi, etc., it’s a shame they never got around to doing the same for the Romulans–and having a recurring Romulan guest star would have gone a long way to that end.
Anyway, Rene Auberjonois’ really is at the top of his game in this episode. A lot of people point to Leonard Nimoy and Brent Spiner, as they had to be able to inject all kinds of emotion into “emotionless” characters, but I really think Rene had it harder. Odo may have emotion, but he lacks all of the means to project that emotion that “solids” have. He can’t cry, he can’t sweat, he can’t blush, he can’t twitch, he can’t even breath. When Odo first sees other changelings, his reaction struck me as very odd at first (the choking half-cry)–it felt both sincere and artificial. And, of course, that’s exactly what it was meant to be.
Arsene: They didn’t actually kill T’Rul, they just never used her again. She does appear in the short story “The Devil You Know” in the DS9 short story anthology Prophecy and Change that was published for the show’s tenth anniversary in 2003.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
RJ does a lot with his voice as Odo, and he does it great.
What is it with the Dominion leaving enemy ships in orbit for convenient beam-outs?
#40: No kidding, Tyler. Perhaps, in The Jem’Hadar, it was somehow connected to their intent to let the good guys escape, with a brutal “warning” and planted spy. But this time, there was absolutely no reason to give them their shiny warship back, and great reasons not to.
Of all the things that could bother me, that actually came out on top. The Dominion should have been dissecting the ship – the cloaking device particularly – and they could quite reasonably have taken the moral high ground in doing so: “We told you to stay away, you deliberately entered our space and hacked our relay station. This toy is ours now… but your (surviving, regular-cast) people can go home, because we’re just that nice.”
Of course, the Defiant, seemingly the only thing standing between the Dominion and the AQ, is just two episodes away from taking a 5-day joyride to Trill. Sometimes I wonder if the Federation cares about security at all.
In rewatching, though, I’m much more bothered by the lack of respect shown to Odo by the Jem’Hadar and especially by Borath – who definitely knows.what Odo is and still sasses back.
@41: I suspect Borath’s attitude can be explained by the saying, “No man is a hero to his valet”. Borath is stationed on the Founder’s homeworld, so he’s around them all the time, and that constant exposure to the Founders has probably eroded his reverence for them. (Since he would see first hand evidence every day that the Founders aren’t infallible, divine beings.) We see much the same thing happen in the episode The Abandoned where continuous contact with Odo causes a Jem’Hadar soldier to gradually overcome his reverence for the Founders.
This might also explain why we never see Borath again after this episode. Maybe the Founders decided his line was getting just a little too independent to be trusted and thus decided to replace Borath with the much more obsequious Weyoun as their chief minister.
@42: Oh, I like that explanation very much, and the corollary speculation about Borath’s replacement by Weyoun. Wonderful, and I think we’re all the better off for the replacement itself… Borath was excellent in the fake-Founder role, but Weyoun is terrific as the oily toady.
The Founders coming out looking like Odo makes perfect sense. They went with the form that he chose. If he’d shown up looking like a three-headed Kavarian tiger-bat, they would have done likewise. It was just as much a communication of “we are like you, Odo” to Odo as it was to the audience.
Now, the sexual dimorphism, that’s another story–unless their leader figured that if Odo was going to take a male solid’s form, he might have picked up a male solid’s tastes, so being lumpy in appropriate places might come in handy.
I’m going through this series for the first time, and I figured it was a fakeout as soon as Sisko wasn’t in a Dominion prison cell. One shuttlecraft escape from that massacre made me doubtful, but I’d just seen the Jem’Hadar allow a strategic captive escape; two, on the other hand, seemed ridiculous, and when O’Brien showed up, I was like “pfft, no.” Near the end, though, I changed my mind–it seemed clear that Odo’s side was real, and there just wasn’t enough time to pull off a twist ending. Oops. I could not have conceived of the idea that the Dominion would just let them go.
Always enjoy reading the rewatches after a viewing.
I actually enjoyed Nechayev’s portrayal in this episode; her absolute passiveness towards maintaining peace with the Romulans and her complete agreement with Borath on all matters including abandoning Bajor give her a very Invasion of the Body Snatchers feel. It had been so long since I’d seen the episode that on MY rewatch I had forgotten it was all a computer simulation and was waiting for her to be revealed as a changling!
Also, one possible reason for the Romulans being excluded and the Klingons not even being mentioned was the fact that the Founders simply didn’t have a Klingon on hand to place in the VR to gauge their reaction. After all, the whole point of the simulation was to see the reactions of those involved.
Oh, and in the plot summary, Bashir met up with Garek, not Quark. ;-)
Sisko getting fed up was pure gold to watch, and learning more about Odo is always a good thing. However, the first clue that something is amiss is when Dax and O’Brien show up on the shuttle with Bashir and Sisko. What? How? And then O’Brien says “our orders are…”? How could he have recieved any orders regarding Sisko and Bashir?
I still don’t know what to make of all this dominion stuff, and it will take a while to figure it out as I will be going to Norway for 3 weeks on Saturday. :)
But the statement of “imposing order” somehow reminded me of the Krikkit from The Hitchhiker’s Guide. Of course, THEY where a lot more evil and tried wiping out the entire Galaxy…
Lockdown rewatch. I have to agree with the main review in that this episode just about works mainly because of the performances from Rene Auberjonois, Salome Jens and Nana Visitor on the Changeling home world those scenes are superbly acted and written. The fake station plot never worked for me the first time I watched it, mainly because I guessed from the first scene in the Runabout with Sisko and Bashir that this was at the very least a holodeck simulation of some sort as they never showed how they got away from an overwhelming Jem Hadar force at the end episode one. Once you released that it’s just a bit of a long slog until the reveal, Although it was only when Kira discovered the door that it crossed my mind that the simulation may be taking place on the Changeling World. A good set up episode for things to come but a bit of a disappointment to what had up to then been an intriguing three parter going back to the end of season two
I find the immersive shapeshifting idea kind of amusing when thinking back on all the things Odo had been up until this point. If Odo was able to take that perspective from the get-go, just think of the unusual things he’d know what it was to be: The negative space of a bucket, a cart with sticky wheels, a puddle in a dress, a shipping label, a tripwire, the cream filling of a Klingon lockbox, The Thing…
I really didn’t like this episode. It had some good and well-acted moments, but the whole “it was all a simulation” thing just felt lazy and cheap. The fact that it was happening on the planet that Odo feels drawn to, and behind the door that Kira found, was all just painfully tacky silly, and the high school play set the VR experiment happened in wasn’t doing it any favors.
I’m really surprised not to see an overwhelming flood of similar comments. To me, this episode was just ridiculous, undid some of the good and scary work of the previous two, and would have turned me off watching more as a young impetuous thing.