“Behind the Lines”
Written by Rene Echevarria
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 6, Episode 4
Production number 40510-528
Original air date: October 20, 1997
Stardate: 51145.3
Station log: Sisko is back on the Defiant, and they’ve been conducting raids on Dominion territory, trying in vain to turn the tide of the war. Every time a power cell from the phaser array wears out, Sisko places it in the mess hall alongside the other exhausted power cells after giving a speech about the character of the crew and how they’ll fight to the end.
Ross then arrives to inform Sisko of new intelligence that explains why the Dominion has had such an advantage: they have a massive sensor array in the Argolis Cluster that can detect ship movements as far as five sectors away. Sisko’s next assignment is to construct a battle plan that will take it out.
Damar has written a report on the diminishing supply of ketracel-white in the Alpha Quadrant (no doubt due to the white facility our heroes destroyed in “A Time to Stand”). In it, Damar concludes that they should poison the final ration of white when they get that far so that the Jem’Hadar won’t turn on everyone. On behalf of the station resistance, Rom has managed to steal the padd on which Damar wrote that report and gotten it into the Jem’Hadar’s hands. Sure enough when an agitated Damar enters Quark’s for his post-shift kanar (and to see if Quark knows where his padd is), he is soon confronted by some seriously pissed-off Jem’Hadar, who have the padd. The inevitable bar brawl erupts while Kira and Rom look on, having stirred the pot of tension between the Cardassian military officers and the Jem’Hadar.
The brawl results in several fatalities. Dukat is furious at Damar for letting it get out of hand. Weyoun is equally pissed that Damar left so inflammatory a document lying around, though Dukat believes Damar’s accusation that the Jem’Hadar stole it, while Weyoun insists that the Jem’Hadar are not thieves. Meanwhile, Odo is furious at Kira because he thought instigating the bar brawl was a bad idea, but Kira went ahead and did it anyhow after discussing it further with Jake and Rom. Their argument on the subject is interrupted by the female changeling, who has come to the station to see Odo. She was trapped in the Alpha Quadrant when the wormhole was mined, and she’s been spending far too much time among solids, and wishes to be with one of her own. Odo, though, isn’t feeling all that chummy, since the Founders condemned him to live as a solid. The Founders may have forgiven Odo for his crime of killing another changeling, but Odo hasn’t forgiven them.
Sisko proposes a battle plan that involves navigating through the cluster, which is incredibly dangerous, but Dax thinks she can navigate through the gravimetric distortions and catch the Dominion off guard. Ross approves the mission, but Sisko won’t be leading it. Ross’s adjutant has been promoted, and the admiral taps Sisko to replace her, leaving Dax to captain the Defiant.
The female changeling arrives at the end of a meeting of the station ruling council, and Weyoun and Dukat struggle to show her who can suck up the most efficiently (Weyoun wins mostly by virtue of Dukat’s arrogance getting in the way), while she wants to know what’s taking Dukat so long to bring the minefield down. She then walks Odo to his quarters, and is impressed with his jungle gym. She’s pleased that he’s learned the lessons she taught him when he first visited the Founders’ homeworld.
Odo insists that he doesn’t regret rejecting the link, but he also admits that his love for Kira is devastating, because he loses all control with her. He says he wants peace, but the female changeling says that what he needs is clarity. And then they link. It’s an expert seduction on her part, and Odo falls for it hook, line, and sinker.
Kira isn’t at all happy to find out about this. Odo assures her that the Founder didn’t learn about the resistance from him, but she isn’t truly worried about that—she doesn’t trust the Founder, as she has lied, manipulated, and stood in judgment of Odo. But Odo thinks he might be able to influence her to make her realize the Federation isn’t a threat. Kira, however, points out that this is a really crappy time for a personal quest as there’s a war on, and she needs him there and focused. Odo agrees to not link with her again until the war is over.
Sisko sees Dax off on her mission as O’Brien and Nog complete repairs. He’s incredibly wistful as he watches the Defiant leave Starbase 375. Sixteen hours pass with no word, and Sisko can’t sleep. He contacts the Rotarran to fill Worf in.
Damar comes into Quark’s and orders the top-shelf kanar. He can afford it, as he’s gotten back into Dukat’s good graces with a plan to bring the minefield down. Quark manages to get it out of him by getting him drunk. Quark then comes to the resistance meeting, equally drunk, to share this with Kira, Odo, Rom, and Jake. Dukat wants him to start field tests right away. Damar said something about the deflector array, and that’s enough for Rom to work out how they’re likely to do it. The only way to sabotage this effort is to shut off an EPS tap that’s in a secure area. Odo can deactivate the security long enough for Rom to commit the sabotage, which he’ll do at 0800.
Odo gets together again with the female changeling and acts like an eight-year-old, pestering her with questions about the Great Link. But words are a clumsy method of communicating—it would be so much easier for them to link. Odo says he promised Kira, but the female changeling dismisses her concerns as that of a solid. This is about what Odo wants.
Rom shows up at Kira’s quarters and they toddle off to commit sabotage. At 0800, Rom is ready to go—but Kira then sees that Odo isn’t in his office. She contacts Odo, but he’s linking with the female changeling and doesn’t hear her. Kira is unable to warn Rom in time, and he sets off the alarm. Damar and his troops capture Rom and put him in a holding cell.
Dax returns with the Defiant, battered and bruised, but successful. The sensor array in the Argolis Cluster has been destroyed. O’Brien then brings Dax a depleted phaser power cell, and she does the same ritual Sisko did at the top of the show.
Kira storms into Odo’s quarters, but Odo’s all blissed out. The link is all that matters to him now, and Rom being imprisoned, the minefield coming down, it all has nothing to do with him. And after Kira storms out, Odo’s not even all that upset.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko really really really really really doesn’t like not being in the thick of things. Avery Brooks’s facial expressions when seeing the Defiant off, when waiting for them to return, and when watching Dax go through the ritual he pioneered, is of someone who can’t stand being stuck behind a desk when he can be out there doing stuff.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira does an expert job leading the resistance, and they’re done in only by the female changeling’s seduction of Odo.
The slug in your belly: Dax takes command of the Defiant and is successful in her mission. We only see bits and pieces of her captaincy, but you can tell she commands with her own inimitable style, as seen in her interactions with Nog and O’Brien and later with Bashir.
Rules of Acquisition: There may be a war on, and Nog may only be a cadet, but he’s still a Ferengi, and he manages to get his hands on real Saurian brandy for the senior staff.
For Cardassia! Damar gets promoted from glinn to gul in this episode after coming up with a minefield-takedown plan.
Victory is life: Odo learns a whole bunch about the Great Link: on the homeworld, they mostly stay in the link, only occasionally taking other forms; they’re individuals but also collective; they don’t have names because they have no need of them (thus forcing your humble rewatcher to keep using “the female changeling”); etc.
Tough little ship: The Defiant destroys the array in the Argolis Cluster, thus negating one of the Dominion’s best tactical advantages.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Sisko assures Worf that Dax won’t miss their wedding for anything.
Keep your ears open: “Just a few more minutes, Commander.”
“That’s ‘Captain.’ It’s an old Navy tradition. Whoever’s in command of a ship regardless of rank is referred to as ‘Captain’.”
“You mean, if I had to take command, I would be called ‘Captain,’ too?”
“Cadet, by the time you took command, there’d be nobody left to call you anything.”
“Good point.”
Nog and O’Brien discussing naval parlance.
Welcome aboard: Barry Jenner officially cements his recurring status by reappearing as Ross following “A Time to Stand,” while Salome Jens is back as the female changeling for the first time since “Broken Link.” Plus we have recurring regulars Marc Alaimo (Dukat), Casey Biggs (Damar), Jeffrey Combs (Weyoun), Aron Eisenberg (Nog), and Max Grodénchik (Rom).
Trivial matters: While the previous three episodes were novelized by Diane Carey in The Dominion War Book 2: Call to Arms, she covered this and the next two in Book 4: Sacrifice of Angels (with Books 1 and 3 being a parallel new story of what the Enterprise-E was doing at the same time, written by John Vornholt). In addition, the station arc throughout the entire six-episode run was expanded and shown through the lens of a nascent friendship between Jake and Ziyal in Terri Osborne’s short story “Three Sides to Every Story” in the DS9 anthology Prophecy and Change.
An early attempt to bring down the minefield is seen in Greg Cox’s short story “Night of the Vulture” in Tales of the Dominion War (edited by your humble rewatcher), in which a changeling spy acquires the codes to deactivate the minefield, but the ship she’s on is destroyed before it can reach Terok Nor.
The original title for this episode was “Life During Wartime,” and I for one am deeply disappointed that they didn’t go with that, as it would be the first Star Trek episode to be named after a Talking Heads song.
The Enterprise-D twice visited the Argolis Cluster, in “I, Borg” and “True Q” (both also written by Rene Echevarria).
The female changeling showed Odo the joys of shapechanging (inspiring his jungle gym, which he installed in “The Abandoned”) in “The Search, Part II.” She tricked him into thinking she was Kira in “Heart of Stone,” and she and the rest of the Great Link found Odo guilty of murder (committed in “The Adversary”) and sentenced him to live as a solid in “Broken Link.” Odo became a changeling once again in “The Begotten.”
The destruction of the ketracel-white facility in “A Time to Stand” is obviously an issue, given that it leads Damar to write a report suggesting they poison the white when they get to the last bit of it.
Walk with the Prophets: “I didn’t forget, it just didn’t seem to matter.” As with last time, the station plot is far more interesting than the front-lines plot, only the contrast is greater. Part of the issue is that there’s no real thematic link between the two plots this time around. After “A Time to Stand” established the new status quo, “Rocks and Shoals” gave us both Sisko and Kira confronted with difficult choices based on the Dominion’s insidiousness, while “Sons and Daughters” both dealt with cross-breed children of regular characters who have trouble finding their place in the galaxy. This time, though, the two plots really didn’t have anything to do with each other.
Which is too bad for the Starbase 375 plot, because it’s a total fizzle. Sisko is unhappy about being marginalized, which is established when Ross promotes him—and then again when he sees Dax off—and then again when he stays up all night worrying and talking to Worf and Ross—and then yet again when the Defiant returns and Dax does the power cell ritual.
That would be okay if those scenes were broken up with showing us what the Defiant was doing. They’re going behind the lines (look, it’s right there in the title!) engaged in a highly important, very risky mission. It’s Dax’s first command. Why aren’t we seeing this??? Instead, we’ve got Sisko furrowing his brow over and over again over losing his command, a state of affairs that’s going to last all the way to the next episode, when he’ll be back in the captain’s chair, anyway, so not only are we overloading on the angst, but it’s angst that has absolutely no long-term meaning or consequence. Sigh.
The good news is that when they cut away from yet another iteration of Sisko’s discontent, it’s to the station plot, which is superb. After hearing about the resistance for two episodes, we see them in action, Rom engaging in a bit of thievery in order to start a vicious bar brawl between the Jem’Hadar and the Cardassian soldiers, and setting up a way to sabotage Damar’s plan to take down the minefield.
But once again the Dominion is victorious because their greatest asset isn’t their genetically bred supersoldiers, it’s their ability to be smarter than their opponents (something Ross actually mentions to Sisko at one point, sorta), and use misdirection and subtle suggestion and disguises and smoke-and-mirrors to gain the upper hand. Prior to all-out war commencing, all their biggest victories came from tricking the Alpha Quadrant powers into doing stupid things (the Klingons invading Cardassia, the Obsidian Order/Tal Shiar suicide mission to the Gamma Quadrant, martial law on Earth, and so on).
And we get it again this time with the female changeling—whose primary motivation is to get Odo to rejoin the link, screwing the resistance is just a fortuitous side effect—working on Odo to the point where he’s become as disconnected from the solids as the other Founders are. The female changeling’s methods are meticulous and perfect, playing on Odo’s heart’s desire (which we know from way back in “The Die is Cast” is to return to the link), as well as his growing frustration with how vulnerable his love for Kira makes him, especially since her own feelings in return are not the same. The Founder slowly seduces him away from his concerns with the solids in general and Kira in particular, to the point where he’s too busy getting down and gooey to take down the security field, thus leading to Rom’s capture.
It’s a ballsy move to make one of your main characters into a scumbag, and Odo has performed—or, more accurately, not performed—in a manner that is pretty dang close to irredeemable. Not that it’s in any way out of character, because of what we know about Odo—not to mention what he became in another timeline in “Children of Time,” willing to wipe thousands of people, with whom he’d lived for centuries, out of existence just to save Kira.
Mention must also be made of Quark’s magnificent drunken speech, where he spends quite some time talking about how the Cardassians are mean and the Jem’Hadar just stand there and he misses the Federation and he wants to sell root beer again. It’s a bravura performance by Armin Shimerman, and a nice follow-up to his “hey, this occupation isn’t so bad” speech in “A Time to Stand.” But a gilded cage is still a cage. Kira had to be reminded of that two episodes ago, and now it’s Quark’s turn.
We end the station plot in a very dark place: Rom’s in jail, Kira’s beyond livid, and Odo’s pretty much gone over to the other side. Plus, the minefield’s gonna come down. Makes you really wanna know what happens next week, doesn’t it?
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido feels real loose like a long-neck goose.
Excellent episode. I do wish Dax varied her speech a little during their power cell celebration. It was so identical to Sisko’s, and he was watching and unhappy, that it almost seemed like mockery.
The B-plot was definitely weaker than what was going on at the station. But this story arc is so awesome, that I could watch Weyoun pick his nose for the entire B-plot and be happy.
Anyone else think Dukat was purposfully delaying the clearning of the mine field in hopes the Dominion and Cardassia could take care of the Federation and then still have the worm hole mined and declare independance from the Dominion? Sure didn’t come into fruition, but that is where my mind was going.
“Tough little ship: [/b]The Defiant[/i] destroys the Argolis Array[/b], thus negating one of the Dominion’s best tactical advantages.” (They don’t destroy the entire cluster)
Also, the Ketracel-white shortage subplot started by A Time to Stand will appear again in “Statistical Probabilities” and arguably “One Little Ship” (yes, that episode happened).
Finally, I think you could also describe Sisko’s desk job as being “behind the lines” in it’s own way, just not specifically behind enemy lines.
This is the part, as I mentioned before, where Diane Carey’s novelization diverges most from the episode, because she has Sisko orchestrating a master plan of his own throughout the book, so in her version, he’d have no reason to feel frustrated and useless behind a desk. I think she also cut out most of the Dax/Defiant subplot for space, showing just how little impact it had on the arc.
I never cared for the ceremony with the phaser power couplings. It feels like it’s glorifying weapons and killing, and that’s not the way I see the Federation. I guess to some extent it’s necessary in war not to encourage people to feel too guilty about the lives they have to take, but still, that’s one of the things that makes war so ugly.
I’m glad they acknowledged the naval tradition of referring to a ship commander as “Captain” regardless of rank, but unfortunately there’s too much prior Trek that was unaware of this practice, notably the movies: ST:TMP actually demoted Kirk to captain (with corresponding stripes) once he took command, while TWOK and its sequels referred to him as “Admiral” even while he was in command of the ship. It’s something I wish the franchise were more consistent about. (And then you’ve got the bizarre Abramsverse variant where any junior officer given temporary command while the captain is off the ship is apparently given an actual field promotion to captain!)
As for the reason they focused on Sisko puttering around on the starbase instead of the Defiant in action, I assume it’s because they were saving their money for the big finish.
On the station side, I found Odo’s change of behavior to be unconvincingly abrupt and extreme. I wish they hadn’t tried to cram the whole thing into a single episode.
@1 I never thought of that but it does kind of work if we look at Dukat’s aggrandizment of himself and Cardassia’s achivements under the Dominion. Especially of the latter since we’ve seen a couple occasions of him taking almost all the credit for Cardassia even though the Dominion provided the gear and resources to pull off these projects.
The only issue with this plan, which makes it a bit more credible, is that once the Jhem Hadar died off Cardassia would still be pretty weak and would fall victim to any surviving powers. But that makes it seem more like something Dukat would pull off in his current state.
With that said, what was Dukat’s career like prior to his position as Prefect of the occupation? Did he have any credible skill in command or tactics? Was he a politically oriented officer who used his connections to gain rank? Just trying to get the measure of the changes he went through before we meet him.
The phaser power cell thing is reminiscent of WW2 bombers and fighters with their “kills” and raids recorded somewhere on the fuselage. I only wish the show had gone one step further and painted an Orion slave girl on the nose of the Defiant. Sigh…
@1 im sure that if Dax had been given more time amd missions in the big chair the ceremony would gradually change.
It never seemed mocking to me but almost sad for Dax because she is just a placeholder for Sisko.
Just caught up with the Rewatch this evening! On a five year mission to watch all of Trek in order, from TOS to DS9 via movie franchise, animated series and TNG. Wasn’t immediately convinced by DS9, but I can’t believe how good it’s getting in series five and six. Moving away from episodic structure to extended narrative, and introducing conflicted morally ambiguous characters really makes it the first ‘modern’ Trek series. I was wondering what they were going to do with the Kira/Odo relationship after ‘Children of Time’, and it makes perfect sense that Odo would turn back to the Link for comfort.
I really love this arc, and DS9 in general. I just watched it all the way through for the first time over the last month or so. Found this rewatch near the end, and have enjoyed following along. Thank you for all your hard work. This is my first time commenting. I had a few thoughts to throw out here.
I always got the feeling that Dukat was happy to let the Federation (and Klingons) and the Dominion have at one another, until both were weakened, leaving Cardassia as one of the few relatively stronger entities left in the AQ. Of course, he also wanted Bajor (or power over it). Arguably, he wanted that more than for Cardassia to be great itself. I never knew (even in the end of the series) whether Dukat was that high on enlarging himself and his power/impact or whether he really thought he was doing “good” in whatever he was doing (the occupation, the war, etc.).
I wasn’t really comfortable with the power cell ceremony thing in the moment, but I guess it was less “look at the killing we did!” and more “we live to fight another day!” Especially given how the war wasn’t going their way. Any morale booster, any positive outcome means the world at this point. If anything, I found it sort of strange that Dax would just mimic the ritual rather than give it her own flavor. It does feel harsher as a direct copy of Sisko’s ritual. Had she Dax’ed it up, it would have felt new, but still a continuation of the old tradition.
As for Odo, I was shocked how easily he essentially turned on Kira and the “good guys.” Of course, he always pointed out that the link was impossible for non-changelings to understand, so certainly it would have a strong draw. Still, he just goes about his changeling business, and lets the others languish, with minimal remorse. Maybe he felt guilty about the injustice he had committed against the link. It just wasn’t that credible that he would turn so fast (in a matter of hours/days). Especially given how strongly he is attached to Kira. It would have been one thing to betray Sisko or Quark or someone else, but Kira, after all they went through…it was just unsettling.
One last thing, I understand that Terok Nor is the hub (of sorts) for the Dominion/Cardassian war effort (though aren’t some things going down on/around Cardassia Prime? Can someone clarify?), but I just wan’t sure how much the unrest they were sowing between the JH and the Cardassians was really going to help anything. Would other JH and C’s out on other ships/planets/stations hear about it? Who cares if a few JH on Terok Nor hate Damar? Damar is fairly expendable (as Weyoun would probably consider any Cardassian). It wasn’t going to bring the whole alliance down.
I never thought Dax conducting the phaser cell retirement ritual as a mocking of Sisko but as continuity for the crew of the Defiant. The ceremony does not belong to Sisko but to the ship and its complement. Though Sisko may feel uneasy that he is not part of them anymore. Also, I don’t think Sisko’s general antsiness through the episode is him being genuinely useless, but as a man of action who has been forced into a more passive role. Him coming up with plans and not playing any role in their execution would be a strain on his personality type. Much for the same reason as Kirk telling Picard to never let them get you out of the captain’s chair in “Generations”. Ron Moore had Battlestar Galactica play around with this idea in “Hand of God” with Starbuck having to plan an attack on asteroid but unable to fly due to an injury. Adama telling her it was the hardest thing to get used to after having been a fighter pilot. Odo’s linking bothered me with his reassurances to Kira that the Founder could not have discovered their conspiracy through the Link. Perhaps it is possible but Odo has so little understanding and experience of how the Link works that it does not seem like he can know that he could block her out of the entirety of his mind with any reliability. He reaction to regular Linking seems like a developing addiction more than anything else, dropping all commitments and responsibilities in favor of the new experience.
As a morale-boosting exercise in the midst of an epic beat-down by an enemy planning to celebrate victory with a little light genocide, the phaser cell thing is fairly mild. Now, O’Brien welding a stake to the prow of the Defiant in order to impale a Jem’Hedar head on it, or Dax striding about wearing a necklace of Vorta ears – that would be disturbing. (Almost as disturbing as, say, Sisko engaging in large-scale bio-warfare.)
I’m all in favour of the nose art idea, though.
@3 (And then you’ve got the bizarre Abramsverse variant where any junior officer given temporary command while the captain is off the ship is apparently given an actual field promotion to captain!)
What do you mean? Just curious…I missed signs of that in those films.
The B-plot felt like filler for the most part but it was interesting to see Sisko having to adapt to his new position and not be out on the Defiant- first loses Ds9 and now the ship— but it would have been nicer to see that change last a bit longer. I always felt Odo turned to easily and that if it was that easy why had they never done that to him before so completely as they do here. Still an interesting turn io of events to be sure though and the plot is ramping up! Deep Space Nine only gets better and better!
@11: When Pike leaves the ship to go to the Narada, he tells Kirk:
He’s not just placing his first officer in command and having his second officer back him up, he’s explicitly promoting them in rank.
I think the point of the dax/sisko plot was to show the changes in war and how we aren’t always where we want to be. We seek Sisko is always involved, hands on whatever project. He’s a line officer – used to leading the charge… but now he’s needed back behind the lines planning. Sending other people off to danger that he isn’t part of on the basis of his plans… and that has to eat at him.
We’ve seen before and will see again (In the Pale Moonlight in particular) that Sisko tends to be affected very strongly by the losses in war. Here… he’s not even able to toss himself into the crucible of fire and instead has to wait.. and see. Wait to see if he’ll lose his crew and ship like he lost his wife and in its own way just as unable to prevent it.
@12 – Thanks for sharing- Was that the only incident where they did this? I recall now in Into Darkness where Sulu is in command and he announces himself as Captain to Harrison, but I think there he was just pulling a Chekov of ST:V.
I think in that scene, Pike assumed he wasn’t coming back from the Narada and that’s why he needed to implement a chain of command while he was gone? I didn’t take that as him promoting Spock to captain, he was just saying “you’re the captain” as a way of saying, “I’m putting you in charge so find a way to work with Kirk”– Still, he does field promote Kirk to first officer here- does he actually gain the rank of Commander here or just the position? Either way, promoting a cadet to first officer certainly put’s Pike’s command ability into question in my book, but I guess thats another story…given the situation (the whole mess with the Narada and that he assumed he was not comng back any time soon if at all), I can see him field promoting someone to first officer- but if he wanted to “keep the chain of command” wouldn’t the 2nd officer on the ship become the first officer?
@14: I still feel the ’09 movie should’ve inserted a 4-year jump between the Academy scenes and the attack on Vulcan, giving Kirk time to reach lieutenant commander’s rank and be a more plausible candidate for first officer, as well as restoring Chekov to his correct age.
@15 That would have certainly made more sense! It would still keep Kirk at the age to plausably be the youngest starfleet captain ever too— was that ever established anywhere on screen that Kirk was the youngest captain ever or was that just something made up by fans along the way?
was that ever established anywhere on screen that Kirk was the youngest captain ever or was that just something made up by fans along the way?
@16
I’m pretty sure there Captain Tryla Scott (from TNG’s Conspiracy) rose to the rank faster than anyone in Starfleet history.
I’d forgotten how forgettable the Sisko B-plot really was. Even Avery couldn’t save those scenes. Echevarria violated rule number one of screenwriting with this plot: show, don’t tell.
Fortunately, the station once again saves the show. A natural follow-up to Children of Time, putting Kira and Odo as the pivot of conflict. It also works as a follow-up to Broken Link, as it puts Odo back in the Female Changeling’s good graces, even if she is using him to divide and conquer the quadrant.
My one complaint with Odo’s betrayal is that despite this ballsy move, it didn’t have enough of a payoff in later episodes. Putting him and Kira inside Dax’s closet wasn’t satisfying enough. If it were me, he’d be a fugitive renegade for half a season (but of course, there’s no way a Rick Berman produced show would have a main castmember not appear for several episodes; those contracts were so strict castmembers had to have token scenes to simply make the episode’s quota).
But overall, this is one of the better episodes. DS9 at its most confident when it comes to using its characters to further the plot. You couldn’t do this episode without Quark and Nog’s contributions. Once again, the Ferengi prove their worth.
As a side-note, I just remembered one of the Charlie Reynolds scenes from the novelization (which I haven’t read in decades). The one he slashes his hand to prove to Ross he’s not a changeling.
@16: The 1968 book The Making of Star Trek — which used to be the definitive book on the series but that’s oddly not that well-known anymore, but anyone who likes TOS or is just interested in TV production should absolutely buy it right away, right now, go ahead, I’ll wait — said that “Kirk was the youngest Academy graduate ever to have been assigned as a Starship Command Captain.” A lot of things that are widely accepted fan lore but never mentioned onscreen originated in that book.
@17: It’s easy enough to assume that Tryla Scott broke Kirk’s record.
@18: Jake was a main cast member, but he appeared in only 71 episodes. Although, yes, he was the exception to the rule.
Then they don’t really have individuals then. If they did, they would need to distinguish between them.
@20: There’s a difference between “really” and “how I’m used to thinking of it.” We assume there’s a binary divide between individual and collective, but there may well be a continuum. Even humans are capable of subsuming our individual identity and thought into a larger mass, such as a mob or an army, or of losing the sense of ourselves as individuals through an alteration of brain activity induced by meditation, drugs, injury, or whatever. So even in humans, there is a middle ground between being a separate individual and being part of a whole.
I see no reason there couldn’t be a group mind consisting of parts that are able to act autonomously. Indeed, arguably the human brain itself fits that description. Studies of brain activity show that when we’re awake, different regions of our brains communicate and coordinate with each other, but while we’re asleep, the connections fade and the individual regions remain active independently of each other and without intercommunication. So what we perceive as our own minds could really be emergent collectives of multiple distinct thought processes that are capable of running on their own, though perhaps at something less than a fully sapient level (which might we why we have so much trouble thinking or remembering clearly in our dreams).
I think the Great Link could almost be described as something like a Portuguese man o’ war: a colony of individual organisms that function as one whole. It’s not a one-for-one comparison, seeing as Changelings can obviously function independently, where the zooids in a man o’ war can’t, but I think it works as an illustration.
As for not needing names, maybe they just don’t need verbal identifiers of individuality because they have other ways of recognizing and signalling each other, e.g. by briefly Linking just to convey communication. Heck, we know from “Things Past” that Changelings’ “morphogenic enzymes” can create a telepathic link between physically separated beings, so maybe Changelings are telepathically aware of each other even when not physically joined and thus don’t need verbal identifiers. And really, why would a species that doesn’t have mouths be expected to have verbal names for themselves?
Regarding Jake not appearing in every episode, Cirroc Lofton was underage when the show started, so his contract was probably different.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“Take a good look at this, people. It says something about this ship. It says that we will fight, and we will keep on fighting, until we can’t fight any more.”
Normally I tend to agree with most of the comments, but for once I find myself very much disagreeing with the majority here. I LOVED the phaser array power cell ceremony. It might be that I was active duty military when I saw this, but it never felt to me like they were glorifying war and killing. War is Hell, and no one knows that better than the people who have to fight them. It’s not about glorifying what they’re doing (fighting and killing), it’s about the fact that they’re still alive to do it. That they’re going to keep doing it as long as they must, because it must be done. It’s about taking a stand, and standing together. I would have been shocked if Dax changed the ceremony, because that’s not how these things work. Once the tradition is established, then that is how it’s done. Period. When it comes to preserving rituals, no one does it better than the military. You can debate about whether Starfleet was a military or not during the original series and TNG, but that debate becomes irrelevant once the Dominion War starts. If Starfleet doesn’t become a military organization then, it’s Game Over for the Federation.
@25: Maybe, but wouldn’t it be more fitting if the ceremony were commemorating, say, all the innocent lives that were saved, rather than all the phaser beams that killed people? It’s not about the need to fight, it’s about remembering what the fight is for. It seems to me that the weapons themselves are not the part worthy of commemoration. Particularly this week, when we’re seeing what happens when police forces are more in love with their heavy artillery than with the citizens they’re supposed to protect. (Although I freely concede that if the police actually did behave like soldiers, rather than recklessly trying to playact as soldiers, they’d know better than to point loaded weapons at unarmed people and would have some training at de-escalating tensions with a hostile populace rather than inflaming them.)
I would actually imagine that the Great Link probably functions like the original concept of Athenian Democracy, where there is open debate amongst any who are eligible to do so. Yes, the original Athenican system was heavily modified after only a couple of decades (the population size made it unwieldy at best) but given the likelihood of a smaller number of changelings it could conceivably work. Each member participates and shares thoughts/ideas/etc with the whole group. Odo seemed to think that he would be able to hide information from the link (and the fact that Kira/Jake weren’t immediately arrested suggests that he was able to do so) which suggests that only those ideas the individual wishes to share can do so. So it is less a shared consciousness (a la the Borg) than it is an ongoing open forum.
I’m not entirely sure where everyones consciousness resides, since as Odo points out he doesn’t actually have a brain, but that’s not really the point.
Also, in regards to the phaser cell ceremony, I’m going to have to disagree with CLB @25 on this… I think the ceremony boiled down to “we fought hard and lived to see another day” which in a conflict zone is really all that is immediately important. The phaser cell was simply a symbol that the crew was still alive more than anything else. I think if the writers had added text that “and we were able to help save millions of lives today blah blah blah” it would have seemed clunky and forced, especially since the mission the Defiant had been on was an offensive mission. If the Defiant had been doing convoy duty and had protected a ship filled with needed medicine to keep a colony on the front alive, they could have said “We fought and kept a million delta rigellans alive today” but there is no link between the mission and the bigger picture outcomes to make. At some later point in time, maybe each crew member thinks about how the missions they undertook impacted the bigger picture, but after a mission everyone is just happy to be there.
Actually in retrospect, that could have been a good episode in and of itself… what did the crew think of the days before the mission happened. O’Brien stressing that if this power coupling isn’t fixed it could cost the ship, Dax talking about what it means to be in command for it, Bashir talking about how he tries not to think about all the lives lost as part of the mission, etc. If you’ve seen the M*A*S*H episode “the Interview” it is done entirely from an outsiders perspective and about what everyone is thinking- it could be a very good episode about how the war has changed them and how they don’t want to be in combat, they want to be exploring and helping people. It would have gone a long way to balance the bigger Starfleet mission that we’ve come to know and the immediate conflict that the episodes are focusing on.
I like this episode but agree with others that the preferable B story would’ve been to see Dax commanding the Defiant in the mission. As for Sisko being in the thick of things and apparently not being used to sitting behind a desk… Erm is this not the same guy who was the commanding officer of a space station. Yes circumstances made his job a lot more hands on but people forget he wasn’t a Captain boldly going, he was an administrator whose primary mission was to facilitate Bajor’s entry in to the Federation.
It’s a shame we didn’t get more of life on the station; as I’ve said on another thread I would have loved a whole season with the station under Fominion rule and we could have had more lay in time to explore these great ideas. Not that their execution in 6 episodes was bad, but it would have been nice to see Kira’s journey to ” collaborator” unfold, Jakes frustration at his stories not airing, Rom as a spy. Odos turn here is not out of character at all, but with only 45 minutes and a huge cast it can seem like it.
I’m torn about what the B-plot should have been. Showing Dax’s mission and command would have been awesome, but it would have taken away our ability to empathize with Sisko about feeling left out.
Then again, “watching Sisko furrow his brow over and over” doesn’t prove such a moving story arc anyway, even if it does give us a new empathy experience with the character.
Perhaps the extremely dull B-plot would have been just right, if it hadn’t TRIED to be a real B-plot. If it was a little shorter, basically, with not so many minutes focusing on Sisko’s frustration and desk duties.
Anyway … I’m all for heroic characters having personal flaws they have to overcome, but Odo in this episode seriously pisses me off, to the extent that I have trouble enjoying his character as much in all 7 seasons of the show because of this betrayal. I have more trouble forgiving him for leaving his friends out to cook than Kira, Quark, and Rom apparently have.
That dramatic betrayal going so far was good for this episode and its dramatic tension, but IMO a little bit harmful to the whole series.
Still, it’s hard not to enjoy an episode full of such masterful performances by Quark, Rom, Weyoun, Dukat, Damar, and Kira. (Not that Odo and the female changeling acted their parts poorly. Just that their parts pique my ire anyway.)
I’m interested to see if they can redeem Odo for me going forward, becuase right now he’s kind of dead to me. I was hoping Kira would deck him at one point. But it was superbly done, and, I am sure the temptation for Odo was very strong since he HAS been living as something else for many years and would naturally want to experience life as he is predisposed to.
I would have liked to see Dax as captain, I was a little dissapointed we missed that.
I had the same niggling thought about the phaser ceremony as CLB and others…but I can appreciate that it represents more than just killing to them as well.
Odo was like a 13yo being given sex and herion by an adult woman. Literally drugged out and cut off from his former perceptions of his life with solids meant the war was temporary and life would go on and Kira would live and be fine, sunshine roses. We aren’t anywhere near to being Changlings to REALLY understand Odo’s weakness/needs and drug addicts don’t care about anything but their next hit.
I easily forgave Odo but Kira and him reconciling so fast in the later episode needed about 2-3 then leading to HIS WAY. The key thing is Alpha Quadrant was saved ONLY by Odo’s undying love for Kira that SNAPPED him out of his drug addled state and later when he agreed to leave to the Link knowing she was safe and okay he would see her again.
The lack of real consequences to Odo’s actions apply to more than him and Kira, even if that’s where the meat of the drama lies. Odo and Rom never have a conversation about this. Quark never throws it in Odo’s face. Not only that, but no one apparently says anything to anyone else, either; which, really? Jake doesn’t mention anything to his father? No one asks – or was debriefed – about what happened while the station was in Dominion hands? Kira, Quark, Rom and Leeta all agree to cover for Odo because why, exactly?
Was the attack on the Founders homeworld a suicide mission KRAD? Enabran Tain wanted to take over as the head of the Obsidian Order again, so he obviously expected to be coming back from that mission.
I would expect the relationship between Odo and Kira to take a serious hit, even though Odo changed sides again at the end, they WHERE “way past sorry”. But knowing how the main cast is almost completly above consequences, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them completely forgetting about this matter before too long.
Lockdown rewatch. I do love Salome Jens in this role she quietly and sinisterly embodies evil in every scene, she has complete disdain for The Vorta and The Cardasians and the barley concealed loathing for Kira is chilling. The manipulation of Odo is also cold and clinical and really upsetting first time around to see one the series genuine hero’s brought down so easily.
I, for one, am glad they didn’t go with “Life During Wartime” as the title for this episode. It sounds incredibly clunky to me.
Thierafhal: As a Talking Heads fan, I can’t agree. *chuckle*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who ain’t got time for that now