“Prodigal Daughter”
Written by Bradley Thompson & David Weddle
Directed by Victor Lobl
Season 7, Episode 11
Production episode 40510-561
Original air date: January 6, 1999
Stardate: unknown
Station log: Kira, Odo, Dax, and Bashir are sharing a drink in Quark’s. Odo informs Dax that the gagh she—or, rather, Jadzia—ordered for Martok’s birthday has arrived. Bashir is distracted, which he says is because he’s looking forward to O’Brien returning to the station. But he’s not on the transport he was scheduled to be on. Bashir then reports to Sisko that O’Brien wasn’t actually on leave to visit his father like he said he was, but he was instead trying to track down Bilby’s widow, Morica. He’d remained in contact with her since the mission on Farius Prime, but she disappeared weeks earlier, and after failing to get anywhere with New Sydney authorities, he went on his own to investigate. And now he’s missing, too, as Bashir hasn’t heard from him in three days.
Sisko goes to Dax. Before being implanted, she was Ezri Tigan, and the Tigan family owns one of the largest pergium mines in the Sapporo system, which is where New Sydney is located. Sisko’s hoping that Dax’s mother can intervene with the New Sydney authorities to help find O’Brien. Dax’s relationship with her mother, Yanas, is a bit strained, more so since joining, as Dax refused to go home to New Sydney to recuperate, instead going to Earth to hang out with Sisko.
Yanas is only willing to help find O’Brien if Dax visits home, as she hasn’t been home in three years. Sisko accedes to the guilt trip and grants her leave, and she heads off. Bashir sees her off—sympathizing, as he doesn’t get along with his parents, either—and provides her with everything Starfleet knows about Bilby, the Orion Syndicate, New Sydney, and all the rest.
She arrives home, and is greeted first by her younger brother Norvo, whom she greets warmly, and her older brother Janel, who’s somewhat less warm. Janel provides a preliminary police report on O’Brien—they haven’t found him, but they’re still looking—and then Yanas shows up. She’s friendly to her daughter, but treats her sons like employees, wanting Janel to fire someone named Lorcan and Norvo to finish a bookkeeping report he’s spent far too long on.
Yanas takes Dax off, and Norvo asks why Janel is firing Lorcan. It’s because of a part that failed, and Yanas thinks it’s due to poor maintenance, but Janel thinks it’s more likely that it’s because of a member of the Orion Syndicate named Bokar. Norvo is worried, but Janel says he’ll take care of everything.
The family has dinner, and Dax talks about adjusting to life on DS9 and being joined. After dinner, she visits Norvo in his very messy quarters. For the second time since her arrival, he denigrates his own paintings, and then shows Dax his rejection from the Andorian Academy of Art. He insists that his art is just a stupid hobby, but Dax recognizes that as their mother’s words—she said the similar things to Dax, but her response was to leave home. Norvo’s is to believe her and languish as the company bookkeeper.
The next morning, Yanas complains to Dax that she found Norvo hung over in the entryway after defacing his own painting. Yanas blames Dax, but Dax blames her—she’s smothering him. Their argument is cut off by Janel’s arrival, along with a New Sydney cop named Fuchida—and O’Brien.
The chief has been pretty well beat up, and is handcuffed. O’Brien found Morica’s body—she’d been hit on the head and thrown in the river. O’Brien assumed the Orion Syndicate to be responsible, and tried to infiltrate them. The New Sydney police took him into custody after saving him from being beat up by two Nausicaans. Fuchida says that the Syndicate would never harm the family of an operative, then takes his leave.
O’Brien gets cleaned up and has a good meal, and then Yanas asks him—over Janel’s objection—to look at a malfunctioning drill that no one on her staff can seem to fix. Dax is appalled that she’d even ask, but O’Brien’s happy to get his hands on a problem he can actually solve.
Dax goes to Norvo’s room, where he’s still hung over, and has destroyed all his paintings. Dax suggests he come back to DS9 with her, even if it’s just for a few weeks. Norvo insists that he can’t leave mother and Janel in the lurch.
O’Brien finds the problem: a transtator was mislabeled. Bokar shows up and says that if he hadn’t fired Lorcan, the part might have been the proper one. Bokar claims to be a commodities broker when he introduces himself to O’Brien, but he’s obviously with the Syndicate. Once O’Brien leaves, Bokar tells Janel that O’Brien was searching for Morica, who’s been missing for six weeks. The mere mention of Morica’s name sends Janel into a panic. Bokar makes it clear that O’Brien better get his ass off New Sydney pronto, or he’ll meet with an accident.
Janel tells O’Brien he needs to leave as soon as possible, but he can’t leave until Dax does, as she’s his superior officer (plus he’s not in any rush to return to the station, as Sisko has a boot with his name on it). O’Brien then tells Dax that Janel has the look of someone being pressured by the Syndicate—equipment failures and the like, with threats of more if they don’t do business with them—and Bokar seems like a Syndicate operative to O’Brien. Dax doesn’t think it’s possible—Yanas would burn the company to the ground before going into business with the Syndicate—but they check the family records. To O’Brien’s anger and Dax’s shock, Morica was on the company payroll when she died. She’d been hired as a “shipping consultant,” a very well paid one, with no indication as to what, exactly, she was doing.
Norvo goes to Yanas with Dax’s notion of a vacation on DS9, and she talks him out of it. Dax then confronts Yanas, who’s never heard of Morica Bilby, so she confronts Janel and Norvo. Janel explains that hiring Morica was a favor to the Syndicate. It turns out that Janel got into bed with the Syndicate after they had a downturn in profits with the added bonus of a Jem’Hadar raid destroying a major shipment. The Syndicate bailed them out, which Janel did without Yanas’s knowledge or permission. In return, they gave Morica a nonsense job that required no actual work on her part, but would continue to pay her. She kept insisting on raises because she wasn’t living comfortably as she was promised. Norvo was supposed to alter the payroll records, and Yanas is furious that Janel dragged his little brother into it.
Even as Yanas and Janel argue, Dax figures out the truth: Norvo killed her. He hadn’t intended to, but she kept yelling at him, she was so angry with the Syndicate, with the Tigans, even with her husband for getting himself killed, and Norvo realized that killing her would solve all their problems. Norvo says that he’s proven to Yanas that he handled a tough problem, even though she always said he couldn’t.
Norvo is arrested. Dax tells Janel to do what she did: go away from there and find something—anything—else to do. He’ll be happier. For her part, a tear-laden Yanas asks Dax if this was her fault, and Dax can’t answer.
Back on DS9 a few weeks later, O’Brien joins Dax for a drink in Quark’s after her return. Norvo was sentenced to thirty years. O’Brien thinks he got off easy, and also that Dax shouldn’t blame herself, but Dax doesn’t agree on either count—and she also thinks she should have gone home sooner.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently there’s a big difference between a 52J transtator and a 52L transtator. So don’t go mixing them up, or your drill will never work…
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko is livid that O’Brien went on leave under false pretenses, and he’s just as livid at Bashir for being in on it. When Sisko decides on a course of action, Bashir asks what he’s planning, and Sisko very pointedly doesn’t tell him.
The slug in your belly: When Dax first saw Yanas, she said, “Hi, it’s me, Curzon!” And when Yanas asks about someone she was seeing on the Destiny, she says it couldn’t have worked after joining because he reminded her too much of Audrid’s son.
Keep your ears open: “What’s wrong with your painting?”
“Well, the composition is puerile and obvious, the colors belong on a child’s toy, and the technique is laughable.”
“But other than that?”
“It’s perfect.”
Dax and Norvo discussing his painting.
Welcome aboard: Leigh Taylor-Young plays Yanas; Taylor-Young is the sister of Dey Young, who was in another episode involving the Orion Syndicate, “A Simple Investigation.” Dax’s brothers are played by Kevin Rahm and Mikael Salazar, while John Paragon plays Bokar and Clayton Landey plays Fuchida.
Trivial matters: Besides providing backstory on Ezri’s family, this episode serves as a sort-of sequel to “Honor Among Thieves.”
The episode title is derived from the parable of the prodigal son as told in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 15, verses 11-32.
The Tigan house design by matte artist Syd Dutton was based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
Pergium, the element mined by the Tigan family, is the same one that was being mined in the original series’ “The Devil in the Dark.”
The character of Brinner Finook, mentioned by Yanas as someone Dax was interested in on the Destiny, appears in the short stories “Second Star to the Right…” and “…And Straight On Till Morning” by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens in The Lives of Dax.
Walk with the Prophets: “I haven’t talked to my mother in almost six months.” There are times when you don’t want to know the behind-the-scenes stuff. It just isn’t always necessary to know how the sausages are made, y’know? Having the background information can sometimes ruin the magic, spoil one’s enjoyment.
But in this case, I’m really grateful that books like The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion and web sites like Memory Alpha that kindly inform me of the process behind the making of this episode and the feelings that the producers had on it. This was a story that was originally supposed to be something else, but writers Bradley Thompson and David Weddle couldn’t make it work, and they were coming down to the wire of how soon they needed the script, and so they trashed it and started over by doing the Ezri Dax’s Family Episode—and then that wasn’t working because they wanted to give the Tigan family a connection to the Orion Syndicate, but it pointed to a level of corruption in Starfleet that they weren’t comfortable with, and then they decided to do a sequel to “Honor Among Thieves,” so the connection would be with O’Brien and it was already the eleventh hour at this point and they just threw it together and hoped for the best.
And this happens when you’re producing fiction on a schedule. Sometimes it needs to be good. More often it needs to be done by Tuesday, and you just hope for good. I’m intimately familiar with the problem—one of my movie novelizations was written in ten days, and more than one of my works of fiction was written in only three weeks.
Sometimes, of course, this works. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” was written over a long weekend, and it’s one of the most highly regarded episodes of TNG.
Sometimes, though, it really really doesn’t, and to the producers’ credit, they admit it, as “Prodigal Daughter” is considered by many of the folks on staff to be the weak link of season seven.
How-some-ever, knowing that the episode had a troubled beginning and that even the people who made it admit that it didn’t work doesn’t change the fact that the actual act of watching it is incredibly painful. Because man does this episode suck the wet farts out of dead pigeons. I get that we have a new character in Ezri Dax, but the attempts to sledgehammer her into the ensemble have been abject failures so far, and this has the added lack-of-bonus of being the totally unnecessary sequel to one of the low points of the sixth season.
There’s just nothing here. The family drama with the Tigans is tired and spectacularly uninteresting, with impressively nowhere acting by the guest cast. O’Brien’s search for Morica is solved off camera, so whatever emotional involvement we might have in the Bilby family is squandered.
Warp factor rating: 1
Keith R.A. DeCandido has a bunch of things coming out in 2015. Some of them are: the Stargate SG-1 novel Kali’s Wrath, the graphic novel Icarus (adapting the novel by Gregory A. Wilson, with art by Matt Slay), and the short stories “Down to the Waterline” in Buzzy Mag, “Back in El Paso My Life Would be Worthless” in The X-Files: The Truth is Out There, and “Streets of Fire” in V-Wars: Night Terrors.
I haven’t watched more then 10 minutes of this episode before I go to the next one. Erzi is working a perfect derp face though
Wow.
I guess you really hate this episode. I did not see that coming. Sure, there were a lot of clichés and tropes, but on the whole, I’d say this episode was average at worst. There are definitely way worse episodes in season 7.
I did find it peculiar that a place called “New Sydney” was not a Federation world. I suppose there are explanations for how that could happen, but it seems odd at first glance.
Finally! An episode Keith and I dislike equally.
Wow, really? I think this was one of my favorite episodes of the season so far, as I love seeing family backstory type stuff. I wouldn’t give it a 10 or anything, but I certainly found it way more entertaining than the first few episodes of the season.
Random: John Paragon played Fletcher’s son in UHF. So I actually can’t EVER see this actor without immediately thinking, “Happy Father’s day…Daaaaaaaaad!” witha big dopey grin (He’s also Cedric, a semi-recurring character on Seinfeld, but of course you don’t want to mention that ;) ). So kind of ruins any attempt to be sinister and threatening, lol.
Norvo has a totally perfect slasher smile. And I actually didn’t see the end coming until just a few moments before Ezri did.
The scene where Ezri’s mom greets her actually didn’t strike me as friendly at all – in fact, it reminded me a lot of Mother Gothel in Tangled. Just kidding!
I dunno, guess I’m just really interested in dysfunctional family dynamics! I don’t really care one way or the other about the Orion Syndicate plot, but I thought the look at Ezri’s family was interesting.
Heads-up, this article isn’t showing up on the main Rewatch page so far.
This episode … yeah. Whether it was the acting or the script, the new characters were just really hard to get emotionally invested in. Because we’re still struggling to be emotionally invested in Ezri herself, and Yanas and Janel are so thoroughly unlikeable. All the new characters look and act too similar and make it actually somewhat difficult to remember who is who (at least if the lack of immersion makes your attention span wander like my did).
Plus, the story is too thoroughly dark for what Dax’s character development needed. And it’s annoying that O’Brien’s incredibly idiotic violation of protocol doesn’t get followed up on by proper consequences.
I’m surprised this episode warranted a ‘1’, based on how truly terrible other 1’s are, but I can’t exactly argue based on the level of enjoyment I personally got out of Prodigal Daughter.
@5 – thanks for the heads-up, we’ll get added to the index as soon as possible.
I didn’t hate this one, but it just sort of lies there. I found Ezri’s family unmemorable; to this day I can’t keep the names of the brothers straight, and I had trouble following the story the first time because I had trouble remembering who was who. And I never cared much about the Orion Syndicate — at least in its 24th-century form. (It’s much more interesting when it’s run by sexy green babes.)
Also, given the sheer vastness of the galaxy, the odds that Ezri’s family would be coincidentally connected with the widow of a friend of O’Brien are infinitesimal. It’s pretty hard to believe.
@2: Not all humans are in the Federation. We’ve seen various independent human colonies over the course of the series. New Sydney is probably one of them.
I didn’t mind this one either. It’s a middle of the road episode for me, but I’d never skip it. Nicole de Boer is great in the part. Many aspects are a bit forgettable, but none of it is *bad*. I think the worst you can say about this episode is that it’s somewhat boring. The other 1’s in the rewatch haven’t been boring, though; they’ve been aggressively terrible and offensive. So this doesn’t quite seem to belong in that category. But, you know, minor quibbles.
Krad’s reviews are mostly great, and always entertaining, but he and I have general disagreements on a few major points. He loves Klingon episodes almost universally to a nearly unreasonable degree (do any Klingon episodes rate lower than a 5 on his scale?), and he has no use for Ezri. I find the Klingons increasingly tedious as the series goes on, and I think Ezri is a breath of fresh air.
I imagine it’s hard to enjoy Season 7 if you don’t like Ezri, because she’s suddenly the character with the most screen time. And she significantly leads all characters in lines of dialogue this season, incidentally, and don’t ask me how I know that, lol. (If you’re curious, Ezri speaks 1088 times, plus or minus a couple due to human error.) Anyway, no complaints from me. Ezri took full advantage of the character’s premise in a way Jadzia never did.
@9: Keith may well rate Klingon episodes highly, but he also probably knows them better than any of the other Trek authors. I’d say his opinion is at least well-informed, but he’d be the first to say you don’t have to agree with it.
As for the episode, a giant “meh” from me. Like Lisamarie, I enjoy family backstory, but it wasn’t very good here. I would love to have explored more of Norvo’s messed up relationship with his mom, and seen how Ezri’s choice to become a counselor may have been influenced by her upbringing and that mother of hers. That would have been more interesting to me than all the Orion Syndicate blather.
I give it a 2, with the extra point coming from the extended opportunity to look at Nicole de Boer bein’ all pouty and cute.
Quoth gilbetron: “He loves Klingon episodes almost universally to a nearly unreasonabledegree (do any Klingon episodes rate lower than a 5 on his scale?), and he has no use for Ezri.”
There are two misapprehensions in the quoted passage. The first is easily dealt with:
“Heart of Glory” — 4
“Redemption II” — 4
“New Ground” — 4
“Aquiel” — 3
“The Icarus Factor” — 3
“Rules of Engagement” — 2
“You Are Cordially Invited” — 4
And while “Sons and Daughters” earned a 5, it was only that high because of the non-Klingon parts of the episode — had it just been about Worf, Alexander, Martok, and the Rotarran, it would’ve dipped way below that.
So to answer your question, yes, Klingon episode can rate lower than a 5. :)
As to the other point, my issue is not with the character of Ezri Dax, whom I’ve written twice (in Demons of Air and Darkness and A Singular Destiny, the latter as a starship captain) and enjoyed immensely. It was the execution of the character that I found lacking. I think the character could have been excellent, and was used well a couple times, most notably in “Tacking Into the Wind.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Misapprehension, indeed! Lol. You’re right, of course, there are a few low scores mixed in there, so I stand corrected. (Though do we really have to count “Aquiel” as a Klingon episode? That may be stretching the definition a bit…)
I’ve been lurking the rewatches, mainly, because I’m horribad at keeping up with my RSS reader, and I usually end up reading them days later… but this one, I actually got to read on time!
I think I must be the odd one out. I should mention upfront, I haven’t been rewatching along, in part because of time, and in part because I have rewatched DS9 at least a half dozen times, if not more, so there’s only been like… one episode I didn’t remember in great detail. (Random factoid: When I was younger, and dealing with insomnia, I used to lull myself to sleep by “playing” the episodes in my head, with exact dialogue.)
This one, I remember being the first episode where I actually started to LIKE Ezri. I always hated losing Jadzia, and I admittedly did not give Ezri the fairest of shakes. But, this is the first one where she really felt “real” to me, and where I felt that we got to see more of her character and background, vs. her trying to awkwardly fit into the Dax role. I’ll admit this may in part be due to my own abusive family dynamics; I could recognize a lot of my own family (immediate and extended) here, and I was very much able to emphasize with Ezri and her brothers.
I won’t say the episode is perfect, but I enjoyed it, and since, for me, it was a turning point on being able to like a character that I had extremely disliked up until then, it’s still an episode I would watch fondly.
I rather liked Ezri, coming to prefer her over Jadzia. Jadzia was the smart, clever, popular girl while Ezri was the vulnerable one who was not so self-assured.
This ep though? Meh. I don’t mind the dysfunctional family bit but I never bought into the Orion Syndicate being like the Mafia. I mean, they’re green aliens, you know? Can’t they be alien and not human-like?
I’d give the episode a four or five.
@15: For what it’s worth, DS9 never explicitly connected the “Orion Syndicate” with the green Orions from TOS. After all, Orion is the name of a constellation, and thus it isn’t uniquely associated with that species. The involvement of the Orions in the Orion Syndicate wasn’t confirmed until the fourth season of Enterprise.
Any particular reason this isn’t on the main index of the STDS9 Rewatch page?
“…wet farts out of dead pigeons.” Okay, I think we need to know the history behind this description, including citations to other sources that use it, and/or a complete explanation of how you came up with it, if it’s original. I really, really think we need to hear it.
This is one of the few episodes that left me just – meh. I wasn’t invested enough in Ezri to care about her personal tastes let alone her family. And other people’s families squabbles are just tedious to listen to. Now if it had happened a few seasons earlier and this was about Jadzia’s family – I would have cared more. I was invested in Jadzia.
@17: The main index fell into the time vortex on New Year’s Eve and emerged a bit worse for wear. Either that, or it’s a posting glitch that’ll get fixed Monday…happens sometimes.
Finding out that Ezri was not raised on Trill or, apparently, on a Trill colony contributed to why she had little ambition to be joined. She had limited exposure to regular Trill cultural norms.
Why would there not be varieties of gagh? There are different kinds of shrimp and lobster.
DRS: The phrase originally comes from Cerebus the Aardvark #69 by Dave Sim & Gerhard, originally published in 1984, and collected in the graphic novel Church and State Volume 1. It’s a particular favorite of mine.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Ah, well anything to do with aardvarks is self-explanatory. They’re unique.
There also isn’t a “next” button for this rewatch on the previous one. For that reason, I only just discovered it today, as I usually navigate to the next episode that way. I just assumed krad had been caught up in the new year.
Anyway, for me, as with many others it seems, this episode was just a big bag of meh. Not offensively bad in any way, but the series wouldn’t have been any worse off without it. And the name Norvo made me chuckle because you could imagine the writers thinking “he’s a bit nervy, what shall we call him?” But my main objection to it is that, again after the Bilby episode, it just seems to turn the concept of the Orion Syndicate from this big scary shady organisation into just a bunch of protection racket thugs and petty criminals.
I’m with a lot of the other posters in considering this episode to be a fairly boring, clichéd sequel to a fairly boring, clichéd episode. I’ve also always been annoyed that we got this level of backstory for Ezri but never met Jadzia’s parents or siblings, despite seeing the characters visit Trill and Jadzia’s own wedding.
Then again, if this kind of trite mess is what we might have gotten for Jadzia’s family, maybe it’s best that we never did see them…
-Andy
This might be trolling, but… I love the rereads and rewatches. I’d like to see a Babylon 5 and Stargate SG1 rewatch. Please and thank you!
@10 MeredithP sums up exactly how I think of this episode. It gets all its points from “the extended opportunity to look at Nicole de Boer bein’ all pouty and cute.” I have a hard time saying any episode featuring Ezri is bad, because reasons, but this one isn’t good. I saw the ending within minutes of meeting her brothers, the dominating mother is a way overused trope, and the Orion Syndicate story never made sense to begin with. That said, it’s more boring than bad. I’d give it a 3. Because of “the extended opportunity to look at Nicole de Boer bein’ all pouty and cute.” :)
This episode deeply disturbed me: the fact that a member of a DS9 opening-credits regular’s family commited murder just didn’t sit well with me. (I’m sure there are others that I’m forgetting, oh like Worf killing a Duras etc…but for some reason this one and it’s motives just, well, unsettled me. Dark, dark episode.)
As for the portrayal, I wish we’d had Ezri instead of Jadzia all along.
Jadzia’s interest in Klingon culture never seemed genuine to me and her portrayal always seemed off and over-confident with an air of superiority.
*its
I don’t really hate this one. It’s the kind of episode that really lays low, not calling attention to itself.
The problem is the whole story boils down to the family drama, which is so predictably designed with multiple 100 pound clichés, you can call the ending 20 minutes in advance. Of course it was going to be the feeble young brother who did it. And even though I had a better opinion on Honor Among Thieves, this one really fails to properly close that particular thread.
It certainly doesn’t help that we’re dealing with a one-note murder mystery, which the DS9 was about to revisit in two weeks on Robert Hewitt Wolfe’s upcoming Field of Fire.
@27: We’ve seen main characters with criminal family members before. Spock’s brother Sybok was a terrorist, kidnapper, and hijacker. Data’s brother Lore was a mass murderer. Tasha Yar’s sister Ishara was a spy and saboteur, and her alternate-timeline double’s daughter Sela was a ruthless Romulan agent and officer with a lot of blood on her hands. Odo’s family, so to speak, were the rulers of a vast dictatorship. Bashir’s parents broke the law to have him genetically engineered. Quark himself is a criminal, his brother Rom tried to murder him once, and his cousin Gaila is an arms dealer. And T’Pol’s mother T’Les was technically a criminal due to her Syrannite affiliations, although that was only by the standards of a regime that was itself corrupt. By the same token, Kira was a criminal under Cardassian law (and in a far more violent way than T’Les ever was).
Indeed, in Voyager, multiple members of the main cast had criminal pasts themselves, namely Chakotay, B’Elanna, Paris, and Neelix.
Also, I actually dreamt that Keith finally published the DS9 series finale rewatch, with tons of praise, analysis and bittersweet moments.
Allow me to join my voice to the few others who also found this an enjoyable episode. To be frank, I found it one of the better episodes of the season. The Pah-Wraith crap is unquestionably the low point. This, by contrast, gives us a chance to see the family dynamics that resulted in Ezri being the way she was. By the conclusion of the episode, I thought to myself “I feel like Ezri makes more sense to me than she did before.” By any measure of quality, that can’t be a 1 in my book.
As always, Krad, your behind-the-scenes insight and cross-universe ability to contextualize is astonishing. And it finally helps me to undersatnd why the episode still felt unfocused. O’Brien and the Bilby’s widow parts could have easily been removed with little change to the story beyond needing a reason to be there. Understanding that this was a rush job and a third-stage rewrite makes it make sense.
I still found it a refreshing, enjoyable change of pace. If there’s one thing Deep Space Nine offered over all of the other Star Treks, it was the opportunity to see non-Starfleet people about their lives (and despite my love for it, it didn’t do it nearly enough). Whether or not people found the Orion Syndicate’s involvement fun or not, it was still a unique opportunity to see a family and a family business who didn’t wear Starfleet badges.
I’d give it a 5 or a 6.
New year, new deadlines. Well, actually an old deadline I’ve fallen behind on. In any case, the rewatch for “The Emperor’s New Cloak” won’t go up until Wednesday. The management apologizes for the delay.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who probably shouldn’t presume to speak for the management….
Just turned on an old episode of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” and suddenly made the connection that John Paragon, who played Bokar here, was also Jambi the Genie. Mekka lekka hi, mekka hiney ho…
Honestly, I can’t stand this episode, nor can I stand Ezri as a whole. I know that some in her species can be joined and they take on the whatever-whatevers from the symbiont, but I just don’t think we needed another Dax after Jadzia was killed. It was bad enough she went out in a Pah-Wraith storyline. To that point, I think that is why I have no idea why she became a captain of her own ship in the novels. I just cannot see it for the life of me. Sure, she was crucial in the oft-loved Destiny trilogy, but every time I see her as a Captain, I keep waiting for the holodeck program to end. Again, I’m biased because I don’t like the character, and we haven’t even gotten to “Field of Fire” yet.
@30 thanks! What a thorough account! I knew there were more, but for some reason this particular episode bothered me far more than the others. Can’t say why. Perhaps because I couldn’t reconcile how Ezri, so nice, sweet etc. could have come from such a shady family. Then again, I’m sure there are other examples.
Thanks CLB! The way you just pulled those examples out makes you a great choice, since our beloved KRAD has declined, to lead us on the VOY rewatch!
That’s actually kind of why I liked this episode – Ezri is sweet, but I could tell that she had some insecurity/unresolved issues too. That could perhaps be explained by the joining she was unprepared for, but in some ways I think it shed some light on her (and also I wonder if it influenced her decision to be a therapist, or to join Starfleet and get away). I’d probably give it a 5 or 6 too. I agree that the Bilby stuff is a bit too contrived.
The next episode though. Oh my God. After your review on this episode came out I told my husband, “If he actually rates the next episode as higher than this one, I’m giving up on the rewatch forever!”. Except not really :)
I knew, even before clicking on the link to the review, that Krad is going to rate this one very low.
The epsiode itself is medicore at best, the story has nothing to do with Trek (or even sci fi in general) and it is centered around Krad’s least favorite DS9 main character. It was a ‘1’ just waiting to happen.
As for myself, I would give at 4. The simple fact is that I enjoyed viewing this one, and I was curious to see how it will all end.
Oh, and I’m very curious to see what treatment “Field of Fire” is going to recieve on this rewatch. A very interesting and powerful episode, that one.
This is the only episode of DS9 that I had no clear memory of until reading this rewatch. Except for Dax describing the different kinds of gagh, there isn’t much about this episode I feel I’ve missed out on.
I’m gonna go with krad on this one. As much as I love Ezri, this was really, really BORING. We never met Jadzi’s family, because we never needed to. The same is true of Ezri. I couldnt give a crap about her family backstory and their dysfunction. Coming from a dysfunctional family myself, I don’t need it played out on screen in Star Trek; of course if its done right, it can be very entertaining. Here, that was certainly not the case. The writers really phoned it in here, but at least they copped to it.
I was watching this going, hmm how much longer is this? Never a good sign, and just a very painful, weak hour.
@40 DanteHopkins:
There’s an old saying that I’ve heard since I was a teenager, and I agree with it: “All families are dysfunctional.”
There’s really no family out there that does everything perfectly and meets every emotional need of every member.
A member of Ezri’s family whacks a friend of the Orion Syndicate because of the minor inconvenience of having to pay that friend a stipend, and we’re seemingly to believe that the Syndicate won’t completely destroy Ezri’s family’s business and all family members in retaliation? Because everyone seems awfully relaxed about everything. Villain Decay at work.
Just watched this episode, and Keith DeCandido just nails it. Boring mystery about a woman we never see. The teaser raises hopes that we are going to see a charming story about mother-daughter conflict a la the Trois on TNG but acting by Nicole deBoer and the performers playing her character’s family is pretty bad. And it is just jarring that we have all this crap about cash reserves and no-show jobs in this post-capitalist universe where business and profit motives are seen as either unfortunate relics of humanity’s past or a bizarre obsession of an alien race like the Ferengi.
@27 – if you’re upset about a DS9 regular’s “family” member being a murderer, I must regretfully remind you that Kira was a terrorist who murdered innocent women and children in the name of “rebellion”; Odo is capable of erasing the existence of thousands of people for the love of Kira- and Jake will do the same because he misses his daddy. Sisko is an accessory to murder for his shenanigans in thinking he knows better than everyone in bringing the Romulans into the Dominion war on his terms. Garak, of course, is morally reprehensible and responsible for who knows how many deaths, but at least he has a code that he follows, unlike most of the rest of the cast, which does what they want whenever they want and then wring their hands for awhile before moving on….
Aside from that, I guess I don’t really understand all the hate for Ezri. Jadzia, in her first few seasons, was less than half as interesting – took the writers and the actor awhile to really get that character down. Ezri seems to be holding her own. I’m reading the rewatches and the comments as I do my own personal rewatch, but haven’t noticed yet – has anyone commented on Ezri’s penchant for gently kissing everyone on the cheek. She’s got a fetish. :)
JohnC: Any particular reason why you put the Bajoran rebellion in quotes? That diminishes it and attempts to write it off as irrelevant, and it very much isn’t……
As for Ezri, I explain my position pretty aggressive in the various seventh season episode rewatches, and I stand by them — including the praise I give her in “Field of Fire” and “Tacking Into the Wind.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad- no I did not put the word in quotes in order to try to minimize the conflict. Obviously it was a horrible devastating time for the Bajoran people. For me, though, Kira’s actions in refusing to discriminate between cardassian occupiers and their families make her less a freedom fighter and more a terrorist.
As for Ezri, I wasn’t referring to your excellent rewatches as much as the comments to them. It’s just surprising to me there are so many people that have a lot of open dislike for what I thought was a relatively pleasant and interesting character…
@46/JohnC: Kira was a terrorist. She never denied it. She described herself with that exact word on several occasions. Despite the tendency of political propagandists to define terrorism as “What our morally inferior enemies would do but we never would,” the objective fact is that it’s a tactic used by the powerless against the powerful, which is why it’s so often used by occupied populations. If an occupied population lacks the resources to overcome their occupiers and oppressors through sheer military force, then the only option left to them is to make the occupation so costly and intolerable that it loses popular support in the occupiers’ home nation and they choose of their own volition to abandon it. Targeting civilians is not something done simply out of malevolence or cruelty as an end in itself, but — like anything else in war — is a cruelty inflicted to serve a specific strategic goal, in this case to make the occupiers feel unsafe and the occupation feel undesirable to the leaders back home.
JohnC: What Christopher said — Kira was a terrorist. She said so out loud many time, most aggressively in her conversations with Tom Riker in “Defiant.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Yes, I know Kira has admitted to deliberately killing innocent people. The fact that she is a murderer is not why I find her so repugnant. It’s her insufferable uppity and self-righteous attitude when judging others. She lacks any moral authority yet might be the most judgmental character in the entire series. And that’s what makes her my least favorite of them, except when she’s her Mirror Universe self and goes around making out with other women, which I find entertaining for my own questionable reasons. :)
In the past few months I’ve been working my way through first the TNG and now the DS9 rewatches. (Although for about 50% of TNG and all but a handful of DS9, they are first-time, rather than re- watches). All that by way of saying it’s a bit strange that I should feel this episode is the one I need to comment on. I agree with with Keith’s opinion that this is primarily empty filler. As another comment put it, “it’s not Trek;” I felt I could have – and probably did – see this plot in some 70s serialized crime/law and order drama. (Banacek, perhaps?) In short, I, unlike many previous commentators, have no problem with a rate of ‘1.’
My point, however, is that while watching – and intensely disliking – this episode, I found myself increasingly baffled by a point that was entirely omitted in the story. “Honor Among Thieves” established that, in addition to a wife, Bilby had two young children. They’re incredibly important to Bilby: he repeatedly mentions them to O’Brien, the need to buy the daughter a gift is discussed, and Keith even has a still with their picture in that episode’s recap.
And yet, they’re NEVER mentioned in this episode? Even O’Brien, whose motivations are explained as concern for the wife (and, I assume some guilt over Bilby’s fate) doesn’t refer to them. Nor, of course, do the police. Neither the syndicate boss nor the brother indicate that Morica is a mother. This strikes me as incredibly lazy on the part of the screenwriters. It also, incidentally, casts younger screwup brother’s actions in orphaning two small children in an even worse light.
Just another something to hate about this episode…
Here’s a bit of trivia… Kevin Rahm, who plays Norvo, is currently in the cast of Lethal Weapon, playing a character named Brooks Avery.
Wouldn’t go so far and rate this with Warp 1. Sure, it’s not a great episode, but it’s really not that bad either. It’s interesting to see a Trill family, after all.
I’d give it a 4, anyway. It’s another example of Starfleet personnel just taking off on their own with no consequences and for O’Brien to do it with his family to consider is particularly wrong.
I liked O’Brien’s casual mention of the “organic solvents” in the river. New Sydney really seems to be a hellhole. I don’t blame them for frosting all the windows – the view is depressing.
I respect the idea of them trying to flesh out Ezri’s backstory and I found Norvo’s reveal to be plausible. I really did feel sorry for him. Otherwise, it wasn’t an essential story by any means.
@30/ChristopherLBennett: Terrorism, though, almost never ends up being successful in the long run because it inevitably wounds or kills people who aren’t even responsible for the situation. It is ultimately self-destructive because the people who commit terrorism end up turning the people they supposedly represent into the villains, they lose sympathy, and they usually provoke a response that puts their own people on the defensive.
@54/RMS81: I think you’re replying to comment #47 rather than #30. And even there, it’s a non sequitur. I wasn’t saying anything about the effectiveness of terrorism, just countering misconceptions about the definition of the term and the actual motivations behind it.
I would say that conventional warfare is just as ineffective in the long run, doing more harm than good and turning its victims into enemies in the exact same way you describe. All violence is a bad solution. My point was that the only difference between terrorism and conventional warfare, usually, is in the resources available to the users. Powerful elites and regimes can employ violence through huge armies and warships and missiles, while smaller, disenfranchised groups must employ violence through tactics like suicide bombers and IEDs and the incitement of terror in the hopes of convincing a more powerful state’s own people to abandon its policies. The pretense that murdering hundreds of thousands of people with expensive tanks and bombers and missiles is somehow more honorable and civilized than murdering dozens of people with homemade fertilizer bombs is nothing more than classism. Terrorism is not good, no, but pretending that organized state warfare is any better is corrupt and hypocritical.
Well, at least they didn’t have Ezri forgive her mother for her bad parenting like so many other ‘Meet the Parents’ Trek episodes have done.
Lockdown Rewatch…
one word review…
BORING !!
onto the next one.
This episode is pretty boring, but a one is really harsh. It’s definitely more than one point better than “Profit and Lace.”
I thought it was a shame that Ezri’s mother was written as being so horrible. There was an opportunity here to show the turmoil Ezri’s semi-nonconsensual joining would have caused her family, and for a moment it looked like that was where they might go–her mother was obviously displeased with the situation. But then her mother ended being unpleasant and generally displeased with everything.
This episode definitely feels undercooked, to be sure. In particular, I think that it really missed an opportunity to show what relations are like between unjoined Trill and the joined minority (and I wonder how Keiko felt about Miles running off on his little Orion Syndicate escapade). But it does get at one of the reasons why I prefer Ezri to Jadzia, namely: we actually get a feel for who Ezri was before joining. In six years, we really don’t learn anything about pre-joining Jadzia other than (1) she really wanted to be joined and (2) Curzon was a dick to her. Within a single season, Ezri still manages to come across as a more fleshed-out character.