“Meridian”
Written by Hilary J. Bader and Evan Carlos Somers and Mark Gehred-O’Connell
Directed by Jonathan Frakes
Season 3, Episode 8
Production episode 40512-453
Original air date: November 14, 1994
Stardate: 48423.2
Station log: Odo joins Kira in the replimat and their conversation about taste and eating is interrupted by Tiron, someone she met in Quark’s the previous night. Tiron hit all over her then and he attempts to take another shot at her, forcing Kira to pretend that Odo’s her lover to get rid of him.
Sisko has convinced Starfleet to let the Defiant explore the Gamma Quadrant despite the Dominion threat for reasons passing understanding. They investigate a gravimetric disturbance in a star system that has no planets—and then a planet suddenly appears with thirty human inhabitants.
They make contact and invite the crew to dinner. The planet is called Meridian, and it only intersects with this dimension every sixty years. In the other dimension, they become noncorporeal beings of energy, aging only when they’re corporeal. One of the natives, Deral, hits on Dax like whoa. He also explains that they’re the descendants of an expedition that crash-landed on the world centuries ago. Their numbers are diminishing, especially since they’re only corporeal for a limited time—and that time keeps shrinking. At the moment, it’s down to twelve days, and as it gets shorter, eventually the planet will cease to exist. Dax and Sisko offer to help out, using the Defiant’s resources to try to determine what’s causing the destabilization.
On the station, Tiron expresses displeasure with one of Quark’s holosuite programs. What he wants is Kira, and he’s willing to pay top dollar for it. Quark is reluctant at first, especially given the challenges of recording Kira’s image, but he takes it on. He fakes a summons from Morn and then announces that she’s his one millionth customer: she wins some champagne, five free spins at the dabo table, and a free hour in the holosuite (the latter being the important part, as he can record her image once she’s inside). But Kira hates the holosuites (as Quark well knows), and so she gifts the free hour to an ensign who’s having a birthday.
The one thing the Defiant has that Meridian doesn’t is scans of the sun when Meridian was in the other dimension. They find a gamma-ray burst just before the planet’s reappearance, so O’Brien launches a probe. While they wait for the probe to do its job, Deral takes Dax on a walk through all the pretty parts of Meridian, eventually winding up smooching a lot.
In addition to getting romantically involved, Deral and Dax also are able to figure out a way to stabilize the dimensional shifts. That’s the good news; the bad news is that it’ll take more than the five days they have left to perform the stabilization. The next time Meridian appears, it’ll remain for thirty years. However, Deral wishes to stay with Dax, so he decides to leave the settlement and come back with Dax to DS9.
Quark gets his hands on a high-level clearance that enables him to access Kira’s voiceprint, retinal scan, psych profile, and other personal info that he can use to create the holosuite program. However, Odo detects the download, and alerts Kira. But Kira doesn’t want to arrest him, she wants revenge. So she and Odo muck with the program so the holosuite superimposes Quark’s head on Kira’s body. Tiron is, to say the least, displeased.
Deral has second thoughts about leaving. Meridian has a future now, and there are only thirty of them left. Dax, however, has worked out a way for her to shift with the planet and the people when the changeover happens, so she can be with Deral even after they go to the other dimension. Dax hands Sisko a request for sixty-year leave of absence. They have an emotional goodbye, with Dax saying that she’s looking forward to existing as pure consciousness after being a humanoid for centuries, and Sisko saying she can call him “Old Man” for a change when she gets back.
She beams down to Meridian to prepare for the shift. But something goes wrong—Dax’s presence destabilizes the shift and they have to beam her back or the planet will be destroyed. Once she’s beamed off, the shift occurs as normal, leaving Dax without her wubby for six decades.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity?: Meridian turns to energy every sixty years because of reasons. The Defiant is able to scan the sun and determine how to fix it, but it won’t take until the next shift. Meanwhile, the transporter somehow magically makes Dax compatible with the shift—or at least it’s supposed to, as it actually fails to adjust her quantum whatever properly.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Apparently Sisko thought it was important to convince Starfleet to let them continue to explore the Gamma Quadrant. It’s unclear exactly why they need to continue to explore the GQ, unless Sisko also counts poking beehives with a stick among his hobbies.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira is genuinely touched when Quark tells her she won prizes for being his one millionth customer. She’s less touched when she realizes that Quark is making a holographic blow-up doll for Tiron.
The slug in your belly: Dax informs Deral that her spots go all the way down. I’m sure you were all wondering. She also comments that Curzon fell in love every other week, which is consistent with what we know about the old man.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Shortly after assuming humanoid form for the first time, Odo tried to eat. It wasn’t a very edifying experience, as he has no taste buds. It was also messy, though he refuses to go into specifics. (However, given the lack of internal organs, one can, perhaps, make a guess or two…)
Rules of Acquisition: Quark is willing to do anything for money, including the massive risks involved in getting an accurate holoimage of Kira for a skeevy dude.
Victory is life: Apparently Talak’talan was bluffing when he said that the Dominion would view any further incursion into the GQ as an act of war in “The Jem’Hadar,” since the Defiant encounters no Jem’Hadar patrols. Their fear of same is given lip service in the teaser, when O’Brien says they can’t beam down to a planet for fear of being attacked by the Jem’Hadar while “picking flowers”—and then they spend the next hour beaming down to a planet a lot.
Tough little ship: Unlike “Equilibrium,” the use of the Defiant here instead of a runabout makes sense because of the Dominion threat. Why the Dominion threat is being risked remains unclear.
What happens on the holosuite stays on the holosuite: Tiron apparently owns his own holosuite. Makes you wonder why he’s using Quark’s in the first place.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Let’s see: Tiron has the hots for Kira. Kira pretends to be Odo’s lover to get rid of him. After Kira leaves, Odo looks longingly at the hand Kira held when she was pretending to be lovers with Odo. And Dax falls in total love in a few days.
Keep your ears open: “I want Major Kira.”
“What are you going to do with Kira in a holosuite? No! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know.”
Tiron expressing his wishes, Quark asking the obvious question and then wisely thinking better of it.
Welcome aboard: Jeffrey Combs makes his first of many many many appearances on Trek as Tiron. He’ll later have two different recurring roles on DS9, as Weyoun and Brunt, and a third as Shran on Enterprise, and he’ll make single appearances as other characters in “Far Beyond the Stars,” Voyager’s “Tsunkatse,” and Enterprise’s “Acquisition.” Christine Healy plays Setlin, while this week’s Robert Knepper moment is longtime character actor Brett Cullen, best known the past few years for his recurring roles on Lost and Person of Interest, as Deral.
Trivial matters: Combs originally auditioned for the role of William Riker on TNG, so it’s amusing that he was cast in his first actual Trek appearance by director Jonathan Frakes, the man who actually got the role.
The image of Kira’s body with Quark’s head was supposed to be Nana Visitor wearing a foam headpiece, with the image of Quark to be superimposed over the headpiece in post-production, but she was still feeling the claustrophobic aftereffects of the Cardassian makeup from “Second Skin” and couldn’t do it. Body double Leah Burrough filled in for her.
This episode is obviously based on the musical Brigadoon, about a Scottish village that only appears once every century. Co-executive producer Ira Steven Behr has always been a big fan of the musical, and the notion of a Trek episode based on it was originally his.
Walk with the Prophets: “Next time we see each other, I’ll probably be a great-grandfather.” What an awful episode. The A-plot feels like a mid-level TNG episode, and not a particularly good one. In fact, in some ways, it reminds me unfavorably of both “The Masterpiece Society” and “The Outcast,” with an unconvincing love story amidst a tale of the crew helping a planet technobabble their way out of something. It’s absent the controversy of the latter, at least, but it’s also absent the philosophical questions of the former. Worse, it sets the precedent that the Dominion won’t follow through on their threat to keep the Federation out of the Gamma Quadrant and does so for absolutely no good reason that the script bothers to supply (especially since there’s nothing about Meridian that requires it to be in the GQ; why not just have it be a star near Bajor that they’re checking out the gravimetric disturbances from?).
Ultimately, as with every romance-in-an-hour episode, it’s on the back of the guest actor to make it work, and Bret Cullen doesn’t pull it off. His sodden attempts at chemistry with Terry Farrell fall completely flat (tellingly, there’s more emotional depth to Dax’s single-scene talks with Bashir and later Sisko than in any single moment between Dax and Deral). His reversal in deciding to remain on Meridian is unconvincing (any society so reliant on one person is going to fail, even if they get thirty years instead of twelve days next time), and the willingness of either Deral or Dax to uproot their lives (and in the latter’s case, her very state of being) for each other is never at any point even a little bit convincing. The script tries to insist that Dax has thought it through, but Sisko’s concern that she’s buggering off to spend sixty years as a light blob with someone she’s known for a week is never properly addressed.
The B-plot is only mildly more interesting, if for no other reason than we see the sleazy underbelly of holo-re-creation, something we saw treated with kid gloves on TNG in “Booby Trap” and “Hollow Pursuits” and insufficiently addressed in “Galaxy’s Child.” Unfortunately—and this is surprising, given who’s playing him—Tiron creates very little impression, either. He’s neither sleazy enough nor pathetic enough nor menacing enough to work. He’s just sort of there. And, again, Quark does something horrible (cf. “Invasive Procedures”) and there are no consequences, beyond his never getting paid for his time. Yes, Kira and Odo’s practical joke is entertaining, but it feels more like the solution to a sitcom plot than something that two characters as serious as Odo and Kira would implement.
An episode that could possibly have been good, but fails to manage even the dregs of a decent story.
Warp factor rating: 1
Keith R.A. DeCandido thinks, therefore he is.
It deserves at least a warp 2 for the image of Quark’s head on “Kira’s” body. Any image that has stuck with me for that long has to be worth a slight upgrade. :::shudder:::
Tellingly, I’d totally forgotten about the supposed main plot.
This one was so forgettable that I didn’t even remember watching it until halfway through the summary. And then I mostly just remember not liking it much. The Dax storyline wasn’t at all believeable. That she would quickly fall for someone and have a fun few days? No problem. That she would give up everything to spend 60 years waiting around as pure energy for that same person? Not one bit. So yes, definitely one of the low points for the season.
You know…I don’t always agree with you when you pan a story…but this one? I’m with you 100% It doesn’t QUITE fall to the level of “The Royale” (one of only two stories I actually rate a 0, the other being VGR: “Threshold”), but Lord, it’s not good!
Why, why did _anyone_ think using “Brigadoon” as a plot source was a good idea??
( headdesk)
@2 When you have already lived 300 years, whats another 60? After having seen all your family and friends age and die atleast twice, I can see why Dax might not think it such a big deal to have the current set age a little faster than scheduled. Not that she ever said anything like that in the episode.
It appears that I liked this episode more than most. However, the one thing that bothered me was Dax’ decision to stay. What obligation does she have to the symbiont? Can the symbiont survive the change to a noncorporeal being? It seems to me she was taking a big risk by staying.
I had forgotten that these two plots were in the same episode. The A-plot is absolutely terrible. One thing I remember even after close to 20 years since I’ve last seen it is the line where Dax suggests to Deral they go somewhere private and count each other’s spots. Which really says everything you need to know about the writing on this episode. I’m also guessing the script was floating around for a while and that’s why it involves a trip to the Gamma Quadrant. They just gave O’Brien a couple of throwaway lines to cover.
The B-plot at least has a mildly amusing resolution. But it isn’t enough to even save the plotline, let alone the whole episode.
I find it funny that Quark has any uncertainty at all wondering what Tiron would do with Kira in a holosuite.
Wow, that’s just a bad episode. I haven’t seen it in a long time, but I didn’t know Jeffrey Combs was in it.
I’ll say one positive thing about it — in later episodes where Dax is wearing a more revealing outfit, like the ones set on Risa, it’s clear that the spots DO go all the way down. I didn’t particularly need a line of dialog to tell me that, and it was probably unofficially established before this episode, but this is the first time it came up. So there’s that.
My biggest issue with this episode was the romance. The A-plot hinged entirely on the romance between Dax and Boyfriend Of The Week, and on how believable it would be that they’d fall head-over-heels for each other. It was not believable, and so the whole plot fell flat where it might otherwise have been tolerable.
Now that I’m partway into Season 4 and we’ve established that Dax is the “shameless romantic” of the series (I would say “ladykiller”, but…), it’s even less believable. For someone in such good company as Kirk, Riker, and (snicker) Kim, this just isn’t a plot that works, even if they do have chemistry. And they didn’t.
A truly miserable episode. The technobabble is incoherent, the character motivations are incoherent, the chemisty is nonexistent, the plot is basically nonexistent, and the pacing is terrible.
The idea that Dax would just uproot herself for this nothing of a guy is preposterous. That goes without saying. It’s also not at all clear why they continue to STAY on the planet. Why don’t they just all leave? And if they are going to stay, why is his presence necessary? It makes no sense at all.
The scene with Dax and Sisko is the only thing in the episode with real quality, but it’s completely wasted because there’s absolutely nothing to back up what she is saying. If there had been a whole arc’s worth of development behind the romance and a more coherent reason why she had to leave, that scene could have been very powerful. As it is, it’s just aggravating.
I think this one might be worse than an episode like “The Royale,” which was mind-blisteringly stupid but nothing more. This episode actively insults the believability of its characters, and therefore insults the audience for watching it.
Even more, the supposed crushing loss produced in this episode ALSO serves to reduce the impact of the much much much much better single episode Dax romance coming up – which actually does manage to generate a believable sense of loss in 40 minutes, but which is tarnished by the memory of this one.
Ugh.
Yeah, for many years, you’d always see this episode topping various “worst of” Trek lists. It boils down to one thing: The reset button. We all know Dax will go back to the station at the end, and her new boytoy will never be mentioned again. Perhaps this one would’ve been better as an unrequited thing, where she makes a connection with the guy, only to have his planet fade away, with her going back home and forever wondering “What if?”
The Quark gag was inspired by that old Joe Namath pantyhose commercial, correct?
The decision to have the Dominion bar access to the Gamma Quadrent seems to have been one of those ones which was almost immediately regretted and so pretty much ignored, like the speed limits on starships in TNG.
You can make it work with the Federation deciding that no-one can be allowed to simply close off part of the galaxy to exploration by others, especially not a whole quadrent. Furthermore, is it established that the space by the wormhole is Dominion controlled? It appears not so the position is not analogous with, eg, Romulan space. All of which is a lot of work for the viewer to cover a regretted single line.
Otherwise, this episode is not as bad as I remembered, but as I remembered it as being truly appalling, that’s not much of a recommendation. No tension as we know Dax won’t be leaving, only a mild interest in how they’ll keep her in the show, and the B plot is weirdly underpowered.
The main thing I remember about this episode was liking the music. Dennis McCarthy always did lovely romantic scores.
The Gamma Quadrant thing doesn’t bother me, because space is huge. The idea of any state, no matter how vast, maintaining any real control over a volume of space the way an Earthbound country can control its borders is ridiculous, considering that we’re talking about a volume billions of times larger and in three dimensions (plus even countries on Earth tend to have much more porous borders than they’d like). And the wormhole isn’t even in Dominion territory — in fact, it seems to be a fair distance away, considering that it was nearly a year before travelers from the Alpha Quadrant first began hearing about the Dominion (although it was believed by the writers that our first GQ contacts, the Tosk and Hunters, were within the Dominion’s sphere of influence).
The idea of Quark creating a holographic replica of Kira for sexual purposes had previously been used in the first original DS9 novel, The Siege by Peter David (no relation to the later episode by that name). In that case, Quark, on his own initiative, had downloaded both Kira and Dax’s medical files and uniform-fitting measurement scans to create accurate simulations of them. Bashir accidentally found out and made Quark erase the program by threatening to tell Kira and Dax what he’d done and leaving him to their mercies. I suppose it’s fortunate that in the actual show it was much harder to achieve that kind of invasion of privacy.
As someone said earlier, usually I disagree when you pan an episode, but this one? Blech. Usually I can find something to redeem the episode overall, and in this case it maybe Kira and Odo’s dealing with Quark, but since they didn’t at least give Quark a week in jail or an hour at least for breaking into personnel files, the whole thing just falls completely flat. Just an overall terrible hour.
I will say that I understood why Starfleet would let the Defiant continue exploring the Gamma Quadrant. Exploration is Starfleet’s top mandate, and as CLB and I have said before, the Dominion can’t possibly control every single star system in the GQ. Its a risk, but so is being in Starfleet in any part of the galaxy.
But, damn, what a terrible episode.
I also wonder why they wouldn’t ask the crew to take them off the planet. Maybe there was a line explaining how much they like being in energy form?
And yeah, apart from the unconvincing speed of their love and how readily Dax abandons her life, I too wondered about her responsibility to be part of the chain of Dax’s life and eventually die (on or within reach of Trill) so the symbiont could live a new life.
-Andy
While I agree with all your other complaints about this episode, I don’t think you can fairly blame it for setting the precedent that the Dominion won’t follow through on their threat to keep the Federation out of the Gamma Quadrant. That precedent was established back in The Search when the Federation first sent the Defiant into the GQ, and it did not encounter any Dominion opposition until it was deep in Dominion space.
I’m with Nick @2…I had completely forgotten I had seen this episode until the picture of Quark on Kira’s body (well at least her body double’s body)… I was better off when I hadn’t remembered it.
The A-Plot is exactly what KRAD says it is- a bad TNG episode with Dax playing the Troi role. Hot chick beams down, falls madly desperately in love with first random guy she sees, wants to spend all eternity together but something bad happens and she can’t. It wasn’t very plausible when Troi did it, but Dax, who is supposed to be wise from 7 lifetimes and a scientist to boot- to borrow a word from the grand nagus- inconceivable. And the fact that Sisko, who’s known Dax for years and has the power (being her commanding officer) to stop it, just goes along with it…
Then there’s the B-Plot. While I personally believe that the Holodecks are frequently used for *ahem* adult fantasy purposes (as opposed to portraying it as a huge invasion of privacy a la Barclay or for comedic value a la Quark’s Vulcan love slave) the fact that Quark spends an entire episode trying to scan Kira is rediculous. Why spend the effort to get her into the holosuite to be scanned. If you can’t do it in some surreptitious way (say a secretly mounted scanner somewhere) then why not hack the system for visual images and medical records? By being weird, all you’re doing is tipping her off.
There are very few terrible episodes of DS9- but this is one of them.
@CLB, I agree but aren’t we meant to assume that in this universe, the different cultures can, in fact, patrol their border? otherwise, there would be no point of a neutral zone, let alone two of them, and a DMZ.
@19: Sure, that’s the conceit of the franchise, but for me, it’s a ludicrous enough conceit that I’m not upset when they do something more plausible instead.
I fully agree
When you posted the review for “The Abandoned,” I tried to remember the remaining two episodes on the disc. I recalled “Civil Defense” fairly quickly, and after a while, I was able to remember this one had the gross plot of Quark trying to get the holo-image. I never could remember the A Plot until I saw this post go up, even though I had watched the episode only a week or two before.
Amusingly, without having been aware of this episode, when we did “Brigadoon” in high school I did a Star Trek: Brigadoon parody where they find this planet that appears once every 100 years. Except it was the TNG crew.
I’d hate to add another loop to the broken record regarding the “romance,” but Ifound myself wondering if they cast creepy, unconvincing guys as the romance of the week on purpose. Do writers somehow think this is sexy? Are they forcing all these creepy characters to act this way? It was so bad that I even got the impression that he was manipulating her to stay…like he lied to her in saying he was going to leave for her, and then said, “Oops, they said I can’t leave.” I found the screencap of him necking Dax to be highly amusing. I feel like that should have been her expression and attitude towards all his advances.
But yeah, I wondered why Sisko allowed it and also, as wascojimw commented, I wondered what the Symbiosis Commission or whatever it is would have to say about her whisking the symbiont away for 60 years. We just had an episode establishing what a commodity the symbionts were that they had to lie to their population about the potential for joining. The symbionts even had special guardians in that episode. So why can she just go off and do this?
Really, why, why, why do they still leave Quark to run around the station?
crzydroid: Well, one reason why they leave Quark to run around the station — besides the social function his bar serves — is that he’s sometimes useful (he’s the one who let everyone know how well armed the Circle was in “The Circle,” and he helped Kira and Odo with their investigation into the Kendra Valley Massacre in “The Collaborator.” And if they get rid of him, there’ll just be someone new to take his place — better the devil you know, and all that.
And they’re not always creepy guys. Honestly, I didn’t find Deral creepy at all, just bland. And I can think of two Beverly Crusher love interests who weren’t creepy at all, in “The Host” and “Transfigurations.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Nope, I have to say, I found this guy creepy. The whole asking about the spots thing was kind of a turnoff to me…if I were the one at that banquet, I’d just have given him a withering glance and not deigned to respond. And that would be the end of the A-plot ;)
I actually found Tiron quite effective, actually – something about him and his demeanor, from his first appearance, seemed very sinister and intimdiating (and well, creepy), and honestly, I don’t want to think about what he does in his holodeck!
I ACTUALLY enjoyed this episode (FFwd past ALL Dax crap) if only as a Kira/Odo shipper who loved(s) to rewatch earlier episodes to see which developed the slowly revealed but beautiful friendship and relationship they have. It is deep and wonderful to me and I love the dynamic between Odo, Kira and Quark, which could be a spin off on it’s own. The PARTNERSHIP and of one mind Kira and Odo have in always working together is a joy to watch, due to Rene and Nina. I got to meet them and eat with them at a Trek convention. Joy!!
I always *cough*forget*cough* that Jeffrey Combs made an appearance before he came onto the scene as Brunt (at least, I think Brunt came before Weyoun). He is, hands down, my favorite recurring actor on Star Trek (not including the “recurring” characters on The Original Series who we recognize as the regulars), with Weyoun and Shran being my favorite roles for him. I’m so used to seeing him with alien makeup that I didn’t initially recognize him when he made a guest appearance (as a human, of course) on “Gotham” a little while back.
But man, what a godawful episode. So much to be said, and it’s all been said above. I’m going to agree that the biggest offense to me in Jadzia opting to leave a corporeal existence behind for 60 years is that the Symbiont commission would probably have some choice words to say in response to that, given the revelations in “Equilibrium” a few episodes back.
@26/JamesP: Honestly, I don’t think the Symbiosis Commission would have a problem with it. It’s a host’s job to provide a symbiont with a wide range of new experiences to add to its memory store, and spending a few decades on an incorporeal plane would be one hell of a novel experience. And sixty years is hardly any time at all in the lifespan of a symbiont, especially since it wouldn’t age physically.
Something I hadn’t thought of Christopher. Interesting thought.
Regarding Dax’s spots, it was already shown in Equilibrium that they do in fact go “all the way down,” so that was hardly a titillating revelation. I had to double-check the rewatch episode list to see if they changed the order or something (I’m rewatching currently on Amazon Prime) but nope, that episode definitely aired before this one.
Other than that, agreed that this was a terrible episode. I remembered both the A and B plot but didn’t remember that they were part of the same episode. The only thing I looked forward to was seeing Quark’s head on Kira’s body (double).
I’ve always suspected that life as an energy being is overrated. Therefore I quite liked it that the Meridianites celebrated their return to a corporeal existence with a feast. On the other hand, I could understand that Dax, adventurous as she is, would want to give it a try.
I agree with everybody that Deral was incredibly bland, but Dax radiated so much joy that I still enjoyed watching the episode.
I had never heard of Brigadoon and had to look it up. Instead I was reminded of the sunken city of Vineta in the Baltic Sea, which is sometimes said to appear on certain days for a short time. I guess it’s a common fairytale trope.
I just saw this episode again last night after… geez, what is it, 24 years, thereabouts? Time has not been kind.
So much to dislike here. What I find particularly irritating is that a lot of the biggest issues with the episode could have been… if not fixed, precisely, at least alleviated fairly simply. For instance, if they had simply said that they spent several weeks on the planet, as lame as Dax’s romance is, at least then it would seem a little more credible than this whole “I met this dude a day or two ago and now I’m going to turn into an energy being for sixty years” situation…
…which, incidentally, reminded me of the terribly misguided storyline in Avengers, in which Carol Danvers discovers that she’s pregnant, and within a day gives birth to a baby, who grows up to be an adult, professes love for Carol, and whisks her away to another dimension, which is presented as an epic romance that leaves everyone in awe, and the rest of the Avengers just look on with smiles and wave as she goes. Later on, this sort of gets corrected when Chris Claremont retcons it a little bit, and has Carol come back and tear into the rest of the Avengers with utterly deserved rage. Essentially, it’s her going “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE MATTER WITH YOU, I WAS OBVIOUSLY BRAINWASHED, I MEAN I WAS IMPREGNATED AGAINST MY WILL AND THEN I WANTED TO MARRY MY BABY WHO WANTED ME TO LEAVE MY ENTIRE LIFE BEHIND, ARE YOU ALL REALLY THIS STUPID?!” for one issue and everybody sort of staring at the ground and shuffling their feet. The rest of the DS9 crew really are the Avengers in this scenario — not that there is an actual ulterior motive here, but nobody raises any kind of objection beyond Sisko’s mealy-mouthed “are you sure you’ve thought this through?”
Also, there are 30 people on that planet. At no point does nobody even suggest that hey, maybe you could all just leave? That’s another bizarre thing about this episode — why establish that there are only 30 people there? Because they could all fit on the Defiant, no problem. They don’t have to end up in the other dimension. If there were, say, 300,000 of them, that would be a problem, because obviously they can’t cram that many people on the Defiant, and organizing evacuation in that time frame might not be possible. But 30? They could cram 30 in the corridor outside the bridge. I might even accept some dumb “but this is our hooooome we can’t leeeeeave” argument, but nobody even bothers to acknowledge that the concept of everybody leaving exists — not even when Deral himself says he might stay behind when the rest of the planet shifts into the other dimension.
Such a stupid episode. It’s just unrelentingly dumb.
@31/Mikki: I checked the transcript, and they did, in fact, say that Meridian spent 12 days in our continuum. So Dax had nearly 2 weeks to fall for Deral.
As for why they didn’t consider leaving en masse, the transcript doesn’t clarify that any.
Fair enough, I totally missed that.
…I mean, two weeks still seems like a pretty short time to decide that you love somebody so much that you want to become an incorporeal energy being so you can spend decades with them in some kind of an ill-defined state, but even so, it does seem more credible than just a couple of days.
The only thing this episode had going for it imo, was Sisko’s tearful goodbye. Granted, it was hard to take the scene seriously because we knew Dax wasn’t leaving the series at this point, but Avery Brooks sells it.
Some additional problems with this episode:
1. Of all the questions our regulars asked the inhabitants of Meridian, nobody thought to ask, “When does the planet vanish again?” It isn’t quantified until sometime after First Meal, and then the information is volunteered by Deral. Sisko does express concern initially, but is only told that the planet will be around “for a while.” I would think Starfleet, or any scientifically-minded people, would want to know that precise time figure before ever beaming down to the planet.
2. Deral speaks of “finding” another companion after his wife died. When your entire universe consists of 30 people, I wouldn’t think there would be any “finding” involved. There’s either someone available, or there isn’t.
3. Jadzia Dax is, at this point, a mere Lieutenant in Starfleet…yet they’re granting her a sixty-year leave of absence? I don’t buy it. Symbionts may think in terms that long, but I’ve never seen Starfleet showing that kind of long-term thinking when it came to individual officers. Picard balked at granting Lieutenant Warf a leave of absence to go play Klingon, and that might only have taken him away for a year or two. Dax would have, should have, had to resign her commission if she wanted to disappear for 60 years.
4. I never bought the premise that Quark would need to scan Kira in order to create a holo-version of her. Geordi LaForge created a holo-version of Leah Brahms just from her personnel file. Surely Quark has access to that kind of information on Kira.
5. I didn’t believe Kira would fall for the ruse that she was the one-millionth customer, merely because she had never won anything before. That was completely out of character for her.
6. It would be a simple matter for the Dominion to post a guard, or a probe, or a nanny-cam at the GQ end of the wormhole, to monitor traffic exiting it. That would be much simpler than guarding a “neutral zone” in space, a concept that falls apart quickly when you start thinking three-dimensionally and understand how big space is. But the GQ end of the wormhole is a single locus in the galaxy. If the Dominion wanted to deny the GQ to AQ denizens, they could do so easily, whether they previously “controlled” the space around the wormhole or not. Why wouldn’t they just expand their territory to cover the wormhole locus? Who could stop them? Or why wouldn’t the Dominion simply collapse the wormhole, as was demonstrated to be possible (in a Dominion simulation) a few episodes earlier?
It almost seems as if this episode was written by someone who was unfamilar with science, humanoid behavior, and the Star Trek canon.
@35/Poker Player: “Symbionts may think in terms that long, but I’ve never seen Starfleet showing that kind of long-term thinking when it came to individual officers.”
Perhaps just because the Starfleet characters we’ve seen have mostly been human. There might be other species with very different life cycles, so Starfleet regs might be designed to accommodate them.
” I never bought the premise that Quark would need to scan Kira in order to create a holo-version of her. Geordi LaForge created a holo-version of Leah Brahms just from her personnel file. Surely Quark has access to that kind of information on Kira.”
Holo-Leah was created only from publicly available images and documents, as well as her psych profile to simulate her personality. Given the circumstances, it seems implicit that Tiron wanted a simulation of Kira’s entire body that was anatomically accurate, which would require more detailed, invasive scans. (See my remarks in comment #14 about the similar subplot in the novel The Siege, where Quark hacked Dax and Kira’s medical records to accurately simulate their bodies.)
“Why wouldn’t they just expand their territory to cover the wormhole locus?”
As I said before, the wormhole is probably pretty far from Dominion space, given that it was a year or more before explorers from the Alpha Quadrant first started hearing about the Dominion and even longer before they made direct contact with any Dominion members.
“…it seems implicit that Tiron wanted a simulation of Kira’s entire body that was anatomically accurate.”
I don’t wish to be indelicate or crass, but put Kira’s face onto a holo-body that’s shaped like Kira’s, and the remaining anatomical “accuracy” is anybody’s guess. Would Tiron have had some way of knowing the difference?
@37/Poker Player: “I don’t wish to be indelicate or crass, but put Kira’s face onto a holo-body that’s shaped like Kira’s, and the remaining anatomical “accuracy” is anybody’s guess. Would Tiron have had some way of knowing the difference?”
If Tiron were willing to settle for something that generic or approximate, the story wouldn’t have happened in the first place. The whole point of the situation is that he was dissatisfied with the holosuite’s simulations because they weren’t what he really wanted, which was Kira. I presume he has the mentality of a voyeur — part of what he gets off on is that sense of power from invading her privacy. She rejected him, so he wanted to get back at her by obtaining through stealth what she wouldn’t give him willingly.
Also, Brahms had probably been in many instances where her holoimage was taken: symposiums, etc, because she’s a citizen of the Federation, where such technology is commonplace. Kira is from Bajor, where they might not have that tech so readily available.
It’s analogue to creating a deepfake video with a famous actress, of whom hours of high quality footage exist, as opposed to a non-famous, of whom you might have a couple of of low quality videos available on their social media.
Poker Player: I’m with Christopher, a big part of what Tiron wanted was the power over Kira by having sex with an accurate simulacrum of her. Having it be just her face on any body would be too obviously fake for him. He’s pretty much a super-science version of a rapist here, trying to wield power over Kira by having sex with her against her will.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@39-41: I understand Tiron’s motivation. I was looking at it from Quark’s point of view. He could have set out to deceive Tiron by creating a holographic version of Kira that had her exact face (easy enough to do, since she’s visible all over the station), and had the exact same dimensions as her body (also easy to do, for the same reason). The remainder of her anatomy (especially the parts a potential holo-rapist like Tiron would be interested in) could have been standard-issue Bajoran female parts, with which Quark would be familiar, from all his other holo-programs. For all practical purposes, he would have created a holo-Kira to present to Tiron. Only Quark would have known that it hadn’t been created from a full scan of the genuine article.
Tiron would enter a holosuite and see a female body that looked like Kira’s, with a face that looked like Kira’s. Once he “engaged” with her, he wouldn’t have any way of knowing that her other parts weren’t like Kira’s. I’m thinking here of Minuet’s comment to Riker: “I’m as real as you need me to be.” Minuet wasn’t built from a real person, yet she would have felt like one to Riker. I’m assuming Quark’s holosuites are of comparable quality.
This kind of intentional deception would have been perfectly in-character for Quark, and in keeping with multiple Rules of Acquisition (3, 19, 27, 39, many others, and especially 239: “Never be afraid to mislabel a product.”) What means would Tiron have of discovering the deception?
@42/Poker Player: First off, Tiron’s a scary guy, and also apparently an established business partner. Quark might not want to risk his wrath — or the end of a profitable business relationship — if a deception is found out. Second, Tiron seems pretty familiar with Quark’s holosuite characters, and the whole plot is predicated on the idea that he finds them boring compared to the real thing, perhaps because they’re too generic or too perfect. It’s a bad idea to try to fool him with the same holosuite software he’s already well-acquainted with — he’d recognize the artist’s hand, as it were. He’s not just some first-time rube off the Promenade.
@38 – 43: I think both sides of the argument are valid. I could certainly see Quark attempting to take a chance at deception once he discovered how difficult the task at hand really was. But I do understand that Tiron is a valuable client that Quark, at first, would most certainly go the extra mile to try and make happy.
@43: “…Tiron seems pretty familiar with Quark’s holosuite characters…”
That’s an argument I possibly could buy. It might explain why Quark wouldn’t slap a Kira face and body onto a generic holo-tart.
So let’s imagine Quark had been successful in holo-imaging Kira. Let’s even go a (huge) step further, and imagine Kira cooperating fully in the creation of her holo-doppelganger. How would the resulting holographic Kira have been any different in her, uh, abilities? Ultimately, wouldn’t the sexual performance of any holographic character be 100% down to software programming? If Quark had the ability to program a holo-Kira to be, I dunno, kinkier, more enthusiastic, more athletic, more in love, whatever, wouldn’t he be able to program that into any character? And then we’re back to slapping a Kira face and body onto a generic template, but upgrading the programming. This inclines me to stand by my original statement, “I never bought the premise that Quark would need to scan Kira in order to create a holo-version of her.”
Ultimately, I suspect Tiron wouldn’t be satisfied with holo-Kira anyway, even if she was a perfect simulation, because Tiron would always know it’s a hologram. The most important sex organ is the brain, and apparently Tiron’s brain is done with fantasizing. The only thing he cares about now is the conquest, but holo-conquests no longer count…which further causes the premise of the story line to fail.
@45/Poker Player: As Keith and I have said, it’s not about the sexual performance, it’s about power and possession. He wants Kira, not because he imagines the sex would be better with her, but just because he wants her, and the fact that she resists him makes him want to possess her even more. For a sexual predator, the gratification comes from the conquest, the domination — from the act of taking without permission, of triumphing over resistance, whether or not the sex itself is any good.
So yes, he’d know it was a hologram, but he’d know it was an accurate recreation of what Kira’s body looks and feels like, and that would be his victory over her, his success in obtaining the knowledge that she denied him.
Lockdown rewatch. When this episode first aired in the 90s I was at college and working a shift in a bar and had recorded this to watch after I get home from work.. and I fell asleep watching it. That’s about as good a summing up of the storyline as it deserves. I wish I’d fell asleep during the rewatch but stuck with it to see if there is any redeeming feature and the only bit is Odo’s reaction to Kira taking his hand. The main story is complete rubbish from start to finish. There had been some great episodes so far in season three but it’s noticeable that the two weakest have been Dax episodes, poor service for Terry Farrell who had proved herself in the latter half of season 2 and deserved better.. fortunately Worf is not to far away now.
I can’t help but laugh at this episode having now watched Lower Decks where people changing into energy is shown to be not all that it’s cracked up to be.
@31 regarding that ridiculous plot with Carol Danvers, wasn’t there something similarly cringey on Angel? The audience hated it, as I recall.
tjareth: sorta, yeah.
BTW, I posted my own thoughts on that particular Carol Danvers plot on my blog a while back…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
When the only thing anyone remembers about an episode is an image of Quark trying to be sexy…that says all you really need to know here.
I will say one thing I appreciated about this episode, aside from the hilarity of Odo and Kira’s prank on Tiron: the A and B plots had an at least mildly interesting connection between them, both literally and symbolically–they were both about something that wasn’t real. The “Kira” holosuite character obviously wasn’t, and while Meridian and its people are real, during the time they’re out of phase, they’re not. Most importantly, however, Dax and Deral’s feelings are (to judge by the comments) at least unbelievable if not actually based on something false. So a case could be made that just as much as Tiron was wanting to possess and control something that wasn’t real (but which he could convince himself was, under the right circumstances) and he could never have, Dax (and probably Deral too) was trying to find romance and make a life for herself that also wouldn’t be real. The difference being, of course, that Tiron was furious over the discovery about his “Kira” (and we’re meant to despise him) while Dax was heartbroken (and we’re meant to sympathize with her). Whether the episode was written or acted well enough to live up to this underpinning is a different matter entirely (and clearly most think it wasn’t…I would have to agree, if less virulently than most). But I appreciate that the attempt at nuance was there on some level.
@16 AndyHolman, the leader of the colony did at least imply to Sisko at one point that aside from the not-aging bit, there were perks the people of Meridian enjoyed about being noncorporeal. And near the end, when the shift was soon to happen, Deral actually more directly told Dax that the experience was like nothing she could imagine, or some such phrasing. But that could have been made a lot clearer, if that was one of the reasons (or the only one) for them not wanting to try and evacuate.
I had to laugh when Sisko intercepts the ball tossed from one kid to the other. He then passes it along to the boy meant to catch it but does so poorly enough that the boy can’t quite get hold of it. Smooth move there, Benjamin. Of course he’s redeemed when he picks up the first kid so effortlessly and lovingly to move him out of the way that there’s no doubt Avery Brooks is, like his character, a dad.
We get some neat shots from Jonathan Frakes, like the bird’s-eye POV as Dax and Daral get down from a tree. I agree, however, that it’s a decidedly subpar episode in general.