“Indiscretion”
Written by Toni Marberry & Jack Treviño and Nicholas Corea
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 4, Episode 4
Production episode 40514-477
Original air date: October 23, 1995
Stardate: unknown
Station log: Kira gets a message from Razka, an old friend from the resistance, who claims to have a lead on the Ravinok: a piece of the ship’s forward sensor array. The Ravinok is a Cardassian prison ship that went missing six years earlier. Among the people on board: Lorit Akrem, the person who recruited Kira into the Shakaar resistance cell.
Razka is hiding in the Badlands—in trouble with the Tholians again, Kira guesses, though Razka neither confirms nor denies—so Kira has to go to him. Her departure is delayed, however, as the Cardassians want to send a representative to accompany her. Kira isn’t thrilled about it, but in the spirit of cooperation between Bajor and the new Cardassian civilian government, she agrees.
Yates informs Sisko that she’s applied for a job with the Bajoran Ministry of Commerce to captain one of their freighters—which would keep her in the sector somewhat permanently. Sisko is a bit gobsmacked, as this would be a bigger step forward in their relationship than he was expecting.
The Cardassian representative shows up: it’s Dukat. Kira is even less thrilled, but the two of them hie off in a runabout. Dukat is on this mission because the Ravinok was under his authority as prefect of Bajor—those were his troops on board. Dukat and Kira have a tense conversation on the subject of the occupation before Kira gets fed up and announces that she wants to spend the rest of the transit time in quiet meditation, mostly by way of getting Dukat to shut the hell up.
Over dinner, Yates enthuses over the job, which the Bajoran ministry offered her before the interview was over. Sisko, however, isn’t enthusing at all, which concerns Yates to the point where she thinks may be shouldn’t accept the job, and then she walks out on dinner. (Given how good a cook Sisko is, that’s a major statement of how pissed she is.)
In the Badlands, Razka brings the sensor array on board. He bought it from a Ferengi scrap metal merchant. Dukat confirms that the piece is from the Ravinok. (He and Razka also establish their mutually assured destruction: the Maquis have a price on Dukat’s head, and Razka has twelve outstanding warrants on Cardassia.)
The Ferengi Razka got it from salvaged it in orbit of Dozaria. Kira and Dukat are both surprised, as Dozaria is way off course from the Ravinok’s flight plan. Dukat reads ionic interference in the atmosphere, which interferes with sensors and transporters. Kira lands the runabout near a magneton signature Kira scanned, and they find the wreckage of the Ravinok. The hulk is covered in phaser hits. They also find twelve graves; there were fifty people on board, so they need to find out what happened to the other thirty-eight. But first, they have to identify the twelve corpses. Dukat takes care of that while Kira works on the ship.
In Quark’s, Sisko discusses his fight with Yates with Dax and Bashir, who both agree he royally screwed the pooch and needs to fix this.
While Dukat’s excuse for being the one to dig up the bodies alone is Cardassian funerary customs, the truth is, he’s looking for a Bajoran: a woman named Tora Naprem, who was Dukat’s mistress. Dukat insists it was more than that, of course—he even gave her a Bajoran pledge bracelet.
Kira, meanwhile, got from the Ravinok computer that the ship was attacked by two unidentified warships. She also finds traces of an isotope that resistance fighters were implanted with that would allow them to be tracked if they were captured.
The pair follow the trail until it gets dark, and they make camp—during which Dukat sits on a sharp spindle. The act of getting it out and Dukat applying a dermal regenerator to his own ass results in Kira collapsing in a fit of giggles—soon followed by Dukat doing likewise.
The conversation gets serious again when Kira asks who Tora Ziyal is. It’s a name she found on the manifest, obviously someone related to Dukat’s mistress. Both Naprem and Ziyal were civilian passengers, neither crew nor prisoners. Dukat admits that Ziyal is his daughter—and also that if she did survive, he has to kill her. Kira is very much not on board with this plan, especially since Dukat put them on the Ravinok in the first place to send them away to Lissepia to live out their lives in peace once he realized the occupation was coming to an end, and he’d no longer be able to protect them. But he can’t let the truth come out about his affair or it will ruin his reputation and hurt his wife and seven legitimate children—not to mention his precarious new career as a legate in the brand-new-and-very-unstable civilian government.
Over dinner Jake tells Sisko that he’s worrying over nothing, that he should let Yates do what she wants to do, and if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. Sisko is a bit taken aback by Jake’s detailed analysis (apparently arrived at with Nog’s help).
Kira and Dukat find the survivors engaged as slave labor in a dilithium mining operation run by the Breen. Ziyal is among them, dispensing food to Bajorans and Cardassians alike. They concoct a rescue plan, Kira making it abundantly clear that if Dukat even tries to hurt Ziyal, she’ll kill him.
They take out two guards and put on their suits as disguises. They learn from a Bajoran prisoner that Lorit is dead and that there are only thirty-two survivors left. (The prisoner, meanwhile, is stunned to learn that the occupation is over and there’s a peace treaty between Bajor and Cardassia.)
During a firefight, Dukat sneaks off to find Ziyal. Kira catches up just as Dukat points his rifle at her. Ziyal says that the Cardassian prisoners insisted that this day would come, that Dukat would kill her if he found her, but the only thing that kept her going was the thought of his rescuing her. Dukat is unable to pull the trigger, and finally pulls her into an embrace.
Sisko goes to a cargo bay to apologize to Yates, who says that she already took the job on Bajor because she’s not about to pass up an opportunity because Sisko got cold feet. He promises to help her pick out quarters on the station when she gets back.
Before departing DS9 for Cardassia with Ziyal, Dukat says goodbye to Kira. He doesn’t know what will happen to him, but Ziyal deserves a home after six years in a Breen mine.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Bajoran resistance fighters were implanted with subcutaneous thingies that they could activate when captured that would leave a bread-crumb-like trail of isotopes that would enable them to be rescued. Dukat seems surprised by this, which means the Cardassians never figured it out.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko makes a pig’s ear out of Yates taking a job in the Bajoran sector that will bring them literally closer together, finally admitting—after being badgered on the subject by Bashir, Quark, Jake, and especially Dax—that he’s scared of getting involved with someone again, especially since his wife died because of his job.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira manages her usual balance of professionalism and passion, saying right off to Dukat that the mission is personal—to find Lorit—but she also leads the mission with consummate skill and brilliance. And she also sees through Dukat: she knows that if he really wanted to kill Ziyal, he would never have told Kira of that intention.
The slug in your belly: Dax gleefully pushes Sisko toward having to commit to a serious relationship with Yates, which is more than Sisko is willing to do, at least at first.
Preservation of matter and energy is for wimps: As soon as Kira mentions the Ravinok Odo does his trademark eye-roll—but he also knows that Kira won’t rest until she finds out what happened to the ship, no matter what Odo may think on the subject, so he holds his counsel and instead wishes her good luck.
Rules of Acquisition: When trying to dispense advice to Sisko on his relationship with Yates, Quark asks, “Who knows more about women than me?” to which Bashir magnificently replies: “Everyone.”
For Cardassia! Dukat has been made a legate in the new Cardassian civilian government. He also says that his new position has gained him a lot of enemies.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: The Sisko-Yates relationship hits a roadblock when Sisko’s response to Yates’s job offer is, “It’s a big step,” delivered quite lamely. When discussing it, Dax and Bashir take some solace from the fact that at least he didn’t say “It’s a very big step,” which would’ve been disastrous.
Keep your ears open: “You’ve been talking to Jake.”
“How did you know?”
“Oh, he’s a smart boy. Must take after his mother.”
Yates making Sisko’s life hell while he tries to apologize for being a twit.
Welcome aboard: Marc Alaimo is back as Dukat and Penny Johnson is back as Yates. Roy Brocksmith—last seen as Kolrami in TNG’s “Peak Performance”—plays Razka.
Cyia Batten is the first of two actors to play Ziyal in this season; she’ll return to the role in “Return to Grace” before being replaced by Tracy Middendorf in “For the Cause.” Next season, they’ll be replaced by Melanie Smith, who will continue to recur in the role for seasons five and six. Batten, a member of the Pussycat Dolls, will also appear in Voyager, as the Terrellian woman Irina in “Drive,” and Enterprise, in “Bound” as the Orion woman Navaar.
Trivial matters: This is the first DS9 episode to be directed by LeVar Burton (a.k.a. Geordi La Forge), who had already directed a couple of TNG episodes (“Second Chances” and “The Pegasus”) and a Voyager episode (“Ex Post Facto”). He’ll become a regular director on all three spinoffs, with nine more episodes of DS9, seven more episodes of Voyager, and nine episodes of Enterprise going on his resumé when all is said and done.
After being mentioned in TNG’s “The Loss,” “Hero Worship,” and “Interface” and in Star Trek Generations, we finally see the Breen for the first time, who dress in much the same way that Princess Leia did in the opening sequence of Return of the Jedi. They’ll continue to recur on the show, particularly during the Dominion War.
This episode makes multiple references to the Bajoran-Cardassian treaty, signed in “Life Support,” and the new Cardassian civilian government established in “The Way of the Warrrior.”
The plot for this episode was inspired by the 1956 film The Searchers, directed by John Ford, a favorite of much of the writing staff.
Exterior shots of Dozaria were shot in Soledad Canyon, the same location used for the Cardassia IV labor camp in “The Homecoming,” and which will be used again in “The Ship” and “Rocks and Shoales.”
We’ll see the consequences of Dukat’s choice to acknowledge Ziyal and bring her home in “Return to Grace” later this season.
At one point, Dukat quotes Kai Meressa. The Terok Nor novel Day of the Vipers by James Swallow will establish that she was the kai at the time of first contact between Bajor and Cardassia, though she died before the occupation officially started.
Walk with the Prophets: “It’s a big step.” The humanization (so to speak) of Dukat continues, though it’s a mistake to think of this as an attempt to make him more sympathetic. It can certainly seem that way, what with his warm embrace of Ziyal at the end, his willingness to damage his career to bring her home (said damage, as we’ll find out in “Return to Grace,” will be considerable), and him and Kira sharing a laugh over his sitting on sharp spindle.
The real danger is in Marc Alaimo’s considerable charm in the role. He has such a great speaking voice, such tremendous charisma, such a larger-than-life presence (both in person and in reputation) that seeing him cry over Tora’s corpse and hug Ziyal (and bend over to apply a dermal regenerator to his ass) is even more impressive. Look at this massive figure—he’s just a regular guy! He cheats on his wife! He sits on spindles! He looks crazy bending over to apply a dermal regenerator to his ass! (Which never gets old…)
And that’s the danger. Forgive me for Godwinning the rewatch, but the thing that people don’t really remember about Adolf Hitler is that he was an unimaginably charismatic person. Most of what we remember of Hitler is caricature, the leering insane figure of American propaganda and Warner Bros. cartoons, so we forget that leering insane figures don’t generally turn destitute, broken countries into superpowers that rule most of Europe and plunge the world into war. He was incredibly compelling and attractive to people, which is how he rose to power in the first place.
For better or worse, Dukat is a Hitler figure, even though he didn’t actually rule Cardassia. This episode in particular is where the notion of Kira and Dukat as a romantic couple first started really getting legs, and I was always repulsed by the very notion, and the analogy to me was Anne Frank falling for Hitler.
Of course, the way it’s played, the interest is entirely on Dukat’s side. We already got hints of this in “Civil Defense,” and this episode firmly establishes that Dukat has a thing for Bajoran women. Kira would prefer to never have to deal with Dukat at all, and at the end she makes it clear to Dax that even their shared moment of amusement after Dukat sat on the spindle served mostly to give her a memory of Dukat helpless and in pain to cherish.
For that matter, the script takes pains to remind us that Dukat’s an asshole, mostly in the runabout when Dukat tries to claim that the occupation was good for Bajor in that patronizing-parent manner of his. Plus there is the fact that he cheated on his wife. Said wife has such a minimal presence (this is the first time she’s been directly mentioned) that it’s easy to forget she exists, but she does, and Dukat has treated her with the same disdain that he treats everyone.
Ultimately, everything with Dukat is about control. He kept Tora and their daughter on Terok Nor until he saw the way the wind was shifting, and shipped them to Lissepia. Once he learns that she might have survived the Ravinok’s disappearance, he thinks only in terms of how the two of them being alive will affect him. Even though Kira’s likely right that he subconsciously told Kira about his plan to kill Ziyal precisely so she’d stop him, that doesn’t change the fact that murder was his go-to notion.
On the other side of the spectrum, we have Sisko, who’s been gliding along comfortably in his relationship with Yates, seeing her when she’s around, cooking her fantastic food, and getting lots and lots of smoochies (and likely more than that, but this is commercial television of the 1990s). Now, though, she’s looking at taking a job working for the Bajoran government which will keep her in the sector full-time. She tells this to Sisko and Dax and it’s the latter who points out that she could then take quarters on the station, and Sisko’s standing there with his mouth hanging open as the two most important women in his life at the moment completely change the playing field on him. Avery Brooks does a wonderful job of playing the rest of the episode gobsmacked, and it’s played for laughs (watching Bashir and Dax tag-team him in Quark’s is epic) at first.
The highlight, though, is the last scene in the cargo bay where we get a rare instance of Sisko’s vulnerability: the last love of his life died because of his job. That’s some emotionally scary stuff right there, and you get the feeling that Yates knew about it all along (which is why she took the job anyhow) and was just waiting for his dumb ass to get around to figuring it out.
What makes the plot work particularly well is the superb talent and chemistry of the actors. Brooks and Penny Johnson attained instant sparkage from their first nanoseconds on screen together in “Family Business,” and it just gets better with each of Johnson’s appearances.
And that goes double for the A-plot. Nana Visitor and Alaimo have already established themselves as powerful presences, and we’ve seen them paired up to entertaining effect before, most notably in “Civil Defense.” Note that at no point does Kira ever come to an understanding with Dukat, she never trusts Dukat, she never gives any indication that she will ever think of Dukat as anything other than a monster, except in the spindle scene, where she’s willing to think of him as a buffoon. That cliché is nicely avoided, and it’s all on the back of Visitor’s brilliance in playing Kira’s nuances. She’s regularly on her guard with Dukat, the armor only buckling when she’s with Razka, at which point we see the comfortable ease that we only see with Kira when she’s around fellow underground fighters (with Tahna in “Past Prologue,” with the remnants of her resistance cell in “Shakaar”).
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido is running a Kickstarter for a new story in the Dragon Precinct universe, featuring the characters of Gan Brightblade and his friends from that novel. He hopes you’ll support it—just two bucks will get you a copy of the story itself! Details can be found here.
That picture of Sisko facepalming in his quarters is kind of creepy, because the lighting and wall decorations on the left side in the background combine to create the impression that there’s a Romulan lurking in the shadows back there.
I was never crazy about the idea that Bajorans and Cardassians could interbreed by accident. They’re so anatomically different, with Cardassians supposedly being pseudo-reptilian. You’d think they wouldn’t be interfertile without at least requiring advanced medical intervention, as would later be established to be necessary for Trill and Klingons or humans and Vulcans (well, the latter wasn’t made canonical until Enterprise, but the idea that Spock was created through genetic engineering goes as far back as the 1976 Inside Star Trek record album by Gene Roddenberry, and was used in various ’80s novels).
I’m not sure if the writers had the Hitler analogy in mind at this point. I seem to recall them saying in the DS9 Companion that they eventually realized they’d “humanized” Dukat a bit too much and fans were thinking of him as a good guy, which was why they tried so hard to make him blatantly evil in later seasons (and I think they overcorrected there, but that’s a discussion for some time from now). I think they were writing to Alaimo’s charisma and didn’t really realize the ramifications until later.
I asked this a few reviews earlier about Galyn Gorg’s first name (and never got an answer), but does anyone know how “Cyia” is pronounced? I’ve always assumed it’s like “See ya,” but it’s hard to be sure.
Christopher: According to her IMDB bio, she pronounces it “see yuh,” as you figured. It’s an unusual diminutive of her full first name, Cynthia.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m glad I’m not the only one who saw the similarities between the Breen and Boussh the Bounty Hunter.
This episode really highlights the thing DS9 almost always got right: chemistry between pairs of actors. Farrell and Brooks, Johnson and Brooks, Visitor and Alaimo… In the latter pair, Kira loathes Dukat and Dukat has this strange fascination with somehow winning her over, which will never happen, and the two actors play it out PERFECTLY EVERY TIME. Circumstances keep throwing them together in working situations where Dukat gets to try to charm Kira and utterly failing, even while they actually make a tolerably good team in terms of what they’re objectively trying to acocmplish!
I’m sort of ambivalent about this episode (well, the A-plot; the B-plot is fine). On the one hand, it does everything right. All the reasons krad gave it an 8 are perfectly legitimate. And yet, I think I’ve always been too uncomfortable with the humanization of Dukat at this point. It just went a bit too far and too fast.
According to Memory Alpha, they hadn’t really intended for any implication of a Dukat/Kira ship, but the subtext was there anyway. Then Alaimo suggested playing it that way from Dukat’s point of view and they all thought it was a good idea, as long as Kira never saw it that way. And they stuck with it for a long time and it becomes progressively creepier on Dukat’s part, almost stalkery.
Probably the most important long-term effect of this story is Ziyal helping Kira start to see Cardassians as people rather than The Enemy. I seem to recall that she’s had a somewhat negative reaction to Cardassian/Bajoran halfbreeds before, hasn’t she? Somewhere in the first season maybe?
The Breen wind up being one of the biggest open storylines at the end of the show. I wish we’d seen more of them and gotten a few answers.
I guess Kira and Dukat taking out a couple Breen and snagging their costumes contradicts what (I think?) was later established about no one knowing what the Breen look like under their uniforms. I guess it was really dark when they stripped these two Breen. ;)
Yeah, I think this episode is a pretty clear starting point for tracking when they started to humanize Dukat too much. Or, at least, mellow out Kira’s relationship to him. During the standoff when he was threatening Ziyal, I kept thinking that Kira would actually welcome the excuse to kill Dukat. I suppose she refrained because she didn’t want Ziyal to have to witness her father’s death the way Kira had, but in that case, I think the episode could have stood to hit that point a bit more clearly. As it was, that moment seemed to me too much like Kira’s going along with the writers to humanize Dukat.
-Andy
#5. DemetriosX, check out TOS Season 3 reviewer David Mack’s Zero Sum Game for a comprehensive take on the Breen in all their contradictory appearances, and some of his and David R George III’s later Trek books too (Plague of Night, Raise the Dawn, Silent Enemies and A Ceremony of Losses) for more Breen exploration.
Is there a better run of episodes in Trek than the beginning of this 4th season? I mean, talk about firing on all cylinders.
Oh, and that first screengrab of Kira pulling the spike out of Dukat’s backside? Priceless! It should be at least in the top 5 of screengrabs from both the TNG or DS9 Rewatch…
Glad I wasn’t the only one to see the Romulan in Sisko’s quarters!
@@@@@ 6 & 7, Mack’s novel helpfully suggests that some types of Breen self-destruct when exposed to warm air. It’s possible that Dukat & Kira’s victims went “pffft” as soon as they broke the seals.
I can totally see where they are going with Dukat, since if I didn’t know what I know, I MIGHT be tempted to think, “oh, he’s not so bad, maybe he’ll be kind of redeemed in the end”.
Of course, then I just have to remember his justification of the occupation (uh, no) and the fact that he had a Bajoran mistress. Besides the fact that it is cruel to his wife, could this woman actually meaningfully consent to a relationship like that? Honestly, I found the whole thing rather creepy. And then trying to combine it with the whole spindle scene was just very odd mood whiplash to me.
I didn’t think for a second he’d kill Ziyal though, as others have pointed out, he never would have told Kira if he was actually going to do it or really wanted to. He knew his culture dictated that it happen and maybe told himself he was going to, but I don’t think he actually wanted to.
@1, that REALLY does look like a Romulan standing back there.
Behind every great man, there is a great woman. Such is the case with Sisko. As KRAD pointed out, she’s just chilling in the cargo bay, getting some work down, waiting for dumbass to get the point. She knew, but couldn’t let him know without him coming to that conclusion first. Good stuff.
Dukat is insane, I don’t care how much they “humanized” him. The occupation of Bajor was very Nazi Germany-like in what they did and Dukat, being in charge, was, if not Hitler, than certainly a Himler or someone close to the top, one of the men on Crystal Night 38. Alaimo’s portrayal is brilliant because it shows him as not just some mustache-twirling villain, rather, an actual person, a man of many dimensions who goes ever more insane.
@5 That “stalkerish” view of Dukat concerning Kira gets really creepy when we learn about her mother’s actual fate in a later episode, alongside his general fascination with Bajoran women, which continues through the series in terribly uncomfortable ways in regards to him abusing positions of authority and even trust (his little religious commune on Empok Nor much later on).
@5: I think Kira started to see Cardassians as people way back in “Duet” at the end of the first season. I feel like there may have also been a few other episodes that gave Kira some “ah ha” moments (Maybe “Second Skin” is one of them). Not to deny that Ziyal maybe helped her in that, but I think this journey was started long ago.
That Romulan thing is hilarious.
@5
I have to agree. Personally the whole scene with Dukat sitting on a spike was just really awkward and ruined the episode for me.
The scene with the spike was pretty much ruined for me by Nana Visitor trying WAY too hard to laugh. As Keith pointed out several times, she’s an outstanding actress – EXCEPT when she has to go to extremes. Her tears when Opaka died in Battle Lines, and her “uncontrolled” laughter here, to name just those two instances, are dreadful.
It’s funny about Dukat = Space Hitler.
Alaimo’s performance as Dukat left such an impression on me that he was my de facto mental voice for the DC Comics villain Sinestro during much of Geoff Johns’ 9-year tenure on Green Lantern.
There are obvious differences between the pair, but I think some aspects of the way Johns wrote Sinestro — especially as a Space Hitler — reminded me of Dukat.
My mental casting of Alaimo didn’t get any serious challengers until Victor Garber’s vocal performance in 2009’s Green Lantern: First Flight.
Dukat is a charming evil s.o.b. who gives us a glimmer of his “humanity” in this episode. I never shipped for Kira and Dukaht I knew it would never happen because of Kira’s attitude and Cardassia’s past on Bajor. I do wish that they could have gone deeper into what happens to Dukat and Ziyal on Cardassia once she is acknowledged in the series rather than the tie-in fiction . In Cardassian culture it is very shameful to have a child out of wedlock and a half Bajoran child I think could be worse for that Cardassian. The child’s fate is worse ; the closest Earth cultural referent I can think of are the “dust” children of the Vietnam war era. Dukat’s power mellows that a bit though not as much as you’d hope.
One thing not addressed in these comments so far is that, much as they may be trying to “humanise” Dukat in this episode, you can’t get round the fact that he is essentially going on this mission hoping to fail. The best possible result for him is to find everybody already dead. The second best result is for it to be a wild goose chase. In the first instance, it saves him from having to deal with the consequences, and in the second it at least delays the day when he might have to. So, essentially, I think the point is not that he was never going to kill the girl, but more that he didn’t really know himself right up until the last moment what he would do if he found her, he was hoping for what, in his case, would be one of those best case scenarios.
As to the spike up the jacksee thing, I quite liked that and saw it as an “even the Queen has to poo” moment. Villains don’t spend 24 hours a day being villainous, and they are not immune to undignified things happening to them. It was simply a reminder that this person has a life beyond being a one-dimensional “evil alien guy” which, quite honestly, too many Star Trek villains over the years have been.
I never noticed the Romulan ghost in Sisko’s quarters. Now I can’t unsee it. Maybe it’s the temporally displaced ghost of Vrenak. Ha!
Bobby
Visitor’s acting is definitely the best thing about this episode — I don’t even mind the hysterical laughter scene. She pulls it off IMO. And I never minded the subtext of romance between Dukat and Kira, as long as Kira always stayed sensibly 100% opposed to it happening (which she did, thankfully).
I never really liked the B-plot in this episode, possibly because I dislike when difficulties in romantic relationships are portrayed as entirely the (well-intentioned) man’s fault. The film Hitch, for example — it’s a good movie, up until the climax when Hitch has to apologize his guts out when it’s in fact the girl who should be doing the apologizing. Ugh. So wrong. This is forgivable on DS9, because other episodes of the Sisko/Yates relationship have an acceptable amount of complexity on both sides. But that doesn’t make me actually enjoy this subplot.
I forgot about Bashir’s zing against Quark, “Everyone.” Love it — even though Quark arguably is more popular in romantic contexts than Bashir. (Although being a Ferengi, he’s also incredibly sexist at heart, which perhaps justifies Bashir’s bravado.)
And I guess I have a higher opinion of Dukat than most others (at this point in the series). I never thought they “humanized him too much.” Rather, they gave us a very good portrayal of a genuinely morally gray, complex character, who had both faults and virtues in great abundance. A character that, starting from this point in the series, could have ended up as either a good guy OR a bad guy. I think he’s sincerely made a lot of personal progress since he ruled Bajor. Which makes it all the more interesting and poignant to watch the direction he eventually takes.
Keith,
You spelled Cyia Batten’s name wrong. :(
NickM: Huh?? No, I didn’t…..
—KRAD
@21 Yes! Yes! A million times yes! Its such a horrible cliche. Especially with Sisko. He’s mature, very itelligent, very capable of handling complicated situations that involve intense feelings. And he’s been married.
But no, he’s the man which means whatever position he takes he’s automatically the moron. I’m so tired of this relationship trope. I grew up with this.
And here’s the thing, as with Hitch, Sisko is right. Yates and Sisko, if they’ve maintained their dating pace up to this point, have had maybe 6 or 7 dates. They’ve been seeing each other for 4 or 5 months. He is absolutely 100 percent correct that its a big step. And he’s right to say it when she looks at him so pointedly.
And she’s being entirely unreasonable to have the reaction she does. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think she’s out of bounds for reacting like that but its an irrational reaction on her part and she needed to come around at some point and recognize that.
Whats more, if she knew about his wife and how she died, she should have been a lot more forgiving. She should have apologized to him for snapping like that after she’d inadvertently dredged up his pain.
And if she didn’t know that about his wife, then it only reinforces my point that they haven’t been dating long enough and that there are still important things for them to get past (like, oh, the fact that she’s in the Masquis).
The Sisko/Yates thing was kinda stupid, precisely because of what @24 says.
@1 – Chris: LOL at the hidden Romulan!
@21 – McKay: Sorry, no. Dukat had no chance at redemption, he was still an evil bastard, no matter how gray they made him.
Kira looks like Cyclops in the first picture, or RoboCop or Judge Dredd. Sisko is getting good at the Picard face palm look. That spine doesn’t look so bloody considering where it’s been, but that is one of my top 3 DS9 scenes, and I’ll resist making any lewd comments that scene implies. I’m surprised the Bajoran prisoner doesn’t recognise Gul Dukat when he sees him. Has Bashir nodded off in that picture (Alexander Siddig was probably thinking wake me when it’s a Bashir-centric episode again)? I think Dukat is always keeping an eye on what way the wind is shifting, like switching sides to the Detapa Council. 1: Yeah, that does look like a Romulan back there. Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe it’s a member of the Tal Shiar doing reconnaissance on Sisko’s love life?! And if the Cardassians are pseudo-reptile, maybe that’s why they enjoy the heat so much?
I like the Searchers homage in this one. I noticed it when Kira and Dukat were on their way and Kira says I won’t let you kill her. Then some puzzle pieces clicked in my head and I went back through some of the other scenes. Even that setting sun (see the screen shot) is well done. Dukat even adds the “let’s go home”, just like the Duke in the original. And while I understand that Dukat has done some evil horrible things, I have to echo thecomments of others. I love the fact he is not a cardboard cutout evil character. In fact most of the characters in the show are multifaceted and flawed. It adds to the overall texture, and makes this one of the best science fiction series ever.
Someone just read my last comment and pointed out that “Dukat” plays the same role as the “Duke” in this Searchers homage. :)
A thought I’ve started kicking around about Dukat recently is that occasionally you kind of get the feeling that he probably could be a better person if he cared to be, which kind of shows itself through these moments of “humanity” you see in this episode and others.
The fact that makes him irredeemable is that he doesn’t care to be. He continues to make decisions based on what’s easiest for him or what will benefit him the most. Occasionally he may make the “right” decision, like he does here, but even bad people do sometimes do the right thing.
I feel like the fact that the viewer can still see Dukat’s actions as conscious decisions to do evil, rather than “he does bad things because he’s the villain, and that’s what the villain does,” says a lot for the writing, and the acting, of this show. It’s very well done.
What I don’t get is why Worf is DS9’s receptionist for personal phone calls from Bajor.
@30/Ndds: All the other jobs were already taken.
When I watched this, I was not at all convinced that Dukat wouldn’t change his mind again and kill Ziyal in her sleep on their way back to Cardassia. Oh, and “Naprem and I loved each other”? I agree with comment #11 that Naprem probably wasn’t in a position to say no.
@31, of course she wasn’t. However a smart woman would see the advantage in playing up to Dukat’s fantasy of romance so he’d continue to treat her well.
@32/Roxana: This thought apparently never occurred to Dukat.
@33, Of course not.
I’ve always loved episodes with Dukat (that makeup is amazing!) because he’s such a complex and charismatic villain. Then I feel icky. But that’s what makes it real and therefore good and not boring television for me. He did such a great job of being a real person who you might be friends with (especially when he talks about his children in a couple of other episodes with Sisko, or just tries to solve a problem with one of the gang, as in many episodes). Then his charisma is attractive. Then you think he will redeem himself. Then you remember what he did. Then he does something else completely selfish. And you feel icky all over again for having any of the other thoughts. It’s like, some real villains I’ve met! (The really intelligent, charismatic ones…yikes-o-rama just as Keith mentioned). He elicits all this without one once of gore. Except the spindle…
STOP SPOILERS – just a little.
I liked the one scene down the road where Dukat and Kira get along because of Ziyal, and Dukat gives (lol selfishly secondhands) a dress to Kira, who thinks it is really pretty and has had a good time when Ziyal was included, and starts to try it on, then completely flips into “what the hell was I thinking??” Real life again (and why it never would have made sense for them to actually get together). The character arc Dukat has is tremendous where he slowly goes insane, and also gets more stalky towards Kira when she denies his advances (very close to real life). You realized the flip was switched and it is now going to become an all out creep fest during their amazing scene from A Time to Stand (where he actually does now have some power over her). Indiscretion was such a great episode in their relationship and realistic arc.
I’m so sad he turned into the mustache twirler after such a phenomenal run, but that’s for commentary way down the line.
@35 – yes!
It’s a dynamic I found really interesting. In fact, about a year ago, I was mentally constructing a story (I tend to make up stories in my head to pass the time when I travel) about a character who ends up in the hands of her enemies and a similar type of dynamic emerges – she has to ally herself with him out of self preservation, but there’s also a charisma/grudging affection/complacency that she snaps in and out of (trying to maintain her own grip on reality) and he of course is completely indulging in the fantasy (to an almost delusional degree) but yet occasionally showing glimmers of something that COULD be a good person if he could let go of his selfishness and actually display self awareness. And something was tugging on my mind until I realized that one of the main inspirations was in fact Dukat and his mistress.
I was also thinking about this recently in the context of Loki in the MCU. He doesn’t seem interested in using his power for romantic/sexual conquest, but he is a character that part of me is always rooting for, always thinking ‘maybe this time he will be redeemed!’ and wanting to like and think of as ‘not such a bad guy’, and then something happens to remind you that he is practically a sociopath who is almost incapable of going a day without backstabbing you as soon as it is in his best interest. In some ways it’s a frighting commentary on charm, charisma, attractiveness, etc. and how much we are willing to forgive because a character is funny (although perhaps part of that also has to do with people generally being more forgiving of movie villains anyway).
Kira and Dukat work very well together. Who would have thought? Even though you can see that Kira is disgusted by Dukat and still can’t forgive the Cardassians for the occupation, she’s willing to let her personal feelings behind for the greater good of Bajor (something already established a few seasons ago when she realized not all Cardassians are monsters, and mourns the murder of the Cardassian accountant who pretended to be a war criminal on the station.. I have forgotten the name of the episode).
I think I complained on one of the many TNG episodes that deal with the staff’s love life that I’m not really interested in seeing this, but I have to say it’s refreshing (in a way) to see Sisko finally being able to move forward and to risk the next step in his relationship with Yates. The continuus format of DS9 allows for greater character developement, which is a huge advantage over TNG.
@37/waka: The episode you’re thinking of is “Duet.”
The difference between DS9 and TNG in matters of character development is not just the more serialized format, but also the fact that DS9 is (among other things) explicitly about Sisko and him “moving forward”. TNG was more about the exploration, and the characters were secondary.
@39/MaGnUs: “TNG was more about the exploration, and the characters were secondary.”
I can’t agree with that. Maybe that was true in the first two seasons, but not once Michael Piller came aboard in season 3. Piller’s overriding priority in everything he wrote was character. Every story proposal was assessed in terms of whether it revealed or advanced some character in a meaningful way, and any story that was just plot-driven or gimmick-driven and didn’t have some character significance would be rejected. It was because of Piller’s emphasis on character that TNG became an admired drama after being more mediocre in its first two years.
You’re right, I should have said about the first two seasons. After that, it was character-driven, but I still don’t feel it was very much centered around long term character development. At least not when compared to DS9.
@41/MaGnUs: That’s actually a thing I like about TNG. In real life, people tend to change only slowly, so it feels plausible to me when the characters in a TV show don’t change all that much, either.
On a side note, it’s weird that the characters were less important in early TNG, when twenty years earlier one of Roddenberry’s key ideas was that the stories had to be about people to be meaningful.
It’s not about speed, it’s about depth. I never felt there was enough detail and depth in TNG. As for your other comment, I don’t agree, I love TOS as much as the next trekkie, but the stories weren’t really about the cast, they were mostly generic stories that sometimes centered around the guest characters. YMMV, though.
@43/MaGnUs: Yeah, but a story driven by a guest character is still a character-driven story. In early TV, the classiest shows were the anthologies, so even shows with continuing casts often aspired to an anthology-like feel with the main characters as catalysts or supporting players in stories about the weekly guest stars. It’s hard to understand in this age of box sets and season binges, but when you only experienced a series one episode at a time, with no way to record or catch up on a missed episode, it made more sense to focus on making each individual installment a complete, self-contained experience with no dependence on anything before or after it. So a guest-focused approach made sense, because you could change guest characters’ lives radically (or end them) in the course of a single hour, while you couldn’t do so with main characters who had to be back to normal by the next week.
@43/MaGnUs: It does :)
First, what I was referring to was a quote from the TOS writers’ guide: “Tell your story about people, not about science and gadgetry.” Of course, these people could be the guest characters too, but often they were the people from the main cast. “The Paradise Syndrome”, for example, was about Spock’s loneliness and repression. “The Ultimate Computer” was about the guest character, but it was also about Kirk and how he dealt with having his beloved job taken away from him, and how his “adopted family” supported him throughout. To add a TNG example, “Family” was about Picard, his relationship to his brother, and how he dealt with having been violated and turned into an instrument of murder.
I can’t really compare it to DS9 because I have only watched the first half of it. One thing I liked was that the characters had the same kind of deep, warm relationships I was used to from TOS. I missed that in TNG. The Riker/Troi friendship was so uneven, and the Picard/Crusher friendship only became real to me in the later seasons. But Sisko had great relationships with both Jake and Dax right from the start.
@45/Jana: I believe the original idea behind TOS was to make it a more guest-driven anthology; that’s what Roddenberry was pitching to network execs when he said it would be “Wagon Train to the stars.” (People today think that meant “space Western,” but there were dozens of TV Westerns he could’ve named — he chose that one because it was known as an acclaimed adult drama that focused on guest characters.) And we can see that in the early first season, where many stories focus heavily on guest characters’ journeys or are even named for them, e.g. “Mudd’s Women” and “Charlie X.”
But then Spockamania happened — female audiences went crazy for Spock and inundated Leonard Nimoy with more fan mail than the rest of the cast combined. So the network pressured Roddenberry to make Spock the center of the show, and since neither Roddenberry nor Shatner wanted Spock to overshadow Kirk, the consequence was that the show came to center on Kirk and Spock equally, followed by McCoy due to his close connection to the other two. So the early guest-star focus, and the early ensemble focus, got sidelined in favor of a focus on the core trio.
@46/Christopher: I believe that Coon and Fontana were also partially responsible for this change. They developed the main characters and told stories about them because it was what they were good at.
I know all of that, I understand how things worked in that era of TV. I’m not arguing against that.
@47/Jana: It’s not a question of quality. Just because we today are fond of serialized writing centered on the main characters, that doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically better than episodic writing centered on guest characters. Like I said, in the ’50s and ’60s, the best-written shows on TV were the pure anthologies, the shows that put on a different play every week and were written by prestigious playwrights like Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, and Rod Serling. That’s the other reason anthology-like writing was popular even with ongoing series — because episodic writing was considered smarter and better than serialized writing (the stuff of soap operas and children’s shows), the reverse of today’s assumption. The difference between the two is not one of worth or ability, merely one of approach.
Anyway, nobody’s saying that writing guest-centric stories and writing lead-centric stories are mutually exclusive. On the contrary — the formula was to use the familiar leads as audience identification figures to get the viewers to care about the guest characters through their relationships with the main characters — e.g. Charlie Evans with Rand and Kirk, Sarek with Spock, Eleen with McCoy, etc. But it was the guest characters whose journeys drove the narrative and had the most change and resolution, while the main characters stayed essentially the same.
And I disagree with you about Coon and Fontana being more focused on the leads than the guest stars. Certainly they did develop the leads well, but between the two of them, they gave us many of TOS’s most prominent and memorable guest characters. (Again, the two complemented each other rather than being opposing goals.) Coon gave us Kor and Zefram Cochrane, not to mention the Gorn and the Horta, and had a hand in creating Khan; while Fontana gave us Charlie Evans, Eleen, Sarek & Amanda, and the female Romulan Commander.
@49/Christopher: “It’s not a question of quality.”
Uh, did I say it was?
“Just because we today are fond of serialized writing centered on the main characters, that doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically better than episodic writing centered on guest characters.”
Personally, I dislike serialised writing. It leads to cliffhangers, which I find annoying, it encourages sloppy writing (start half a dozen story threads without knowing how to end them), it makes it harder for me to ignore a show’s bad episodes and concentrate on the good ones, all the episodes tend to run together in my head, and I can’t rewatch anything because I would have to rewatch everything.
I’m fifty-one years old. I’m allowed to be old-fashioned.
“Certainly they did develop the leads well, but between the two of them, they gave us many of TOS’s most prominent and memorable guest characters.”
Oh, absolutely. I should have said that they had a big part in turning the lead characters into real people and having scenes or sometimes entire episodes about them.
I just re-watched this and Cyia Batten’s performance was incredible. Her realization of what Dukat was there to do was heartbreaking to watch.
I fast forwarded through much of the B-plot although the scene with Dax and Bashir’s analysis of “It’s a big step …” was hilarious. It was at this point in the series that Kassidy really got on my nerves with her over-reactions. For crying out loud, isn’t the guy allowed to be nervous about such a sudden change in a relationship, especially being, y’know, in Starfleet and Commander of the station with all that goes with that? I can understand now that he needed to come to terms with his fear, I just wish Kassidy had been presented as a little less of a hothead.
Lockdown rewatch. This is another of those Dukat episodes where I am still convinced the writers didn’t know where they were going with the character, I don’t think at this stage they planned for him to end up as the series big bad. This is still a very good episode Dukat and Kira continue to bounce off each other very well the scenes in the runabout are excellent as is most of the stuff on the planet apart from the forced slapstick of Dukat sitting on the Spindall. The Zyal reveal I was worried about at the time it was originally broadcast, was this initially an attempt to soften Dukat’s image even further then they had so far? I think going forward the character just about works especially when she comes to the station but I wasn’t sure at the time what the idea was. The “big step” B plot work very well too, Avery Brooks and Penny Johnson really shine when on screen together and Brooks in particular was really adding a lot of depth to Sisko’s character this season we had not seen before. Also big kudos for the hilarious advice on women from Quark which would have made this subplot worthwhile in any circumstances. Another 8 to continue the strong start to the season.
I think comparing Dukat to Hitler gives him too much credit. He’s more like Hans Frank, who oversaw the occupation of Polish territory. A monster to be sure, but never top monster.
I’ve been quite enjoying following these reviews while rewatching DS9 in lockdown, and the excellent combination of writing, narrative and acting involved in Dukat made me want to say something, despite the article (and most of the comments!) being a few years old.
Alaimo’s performance is sublime. He is charming, disarmingly so, and his charisma, personability and cleverness go a long way towards explaining how he keeps clawing his way to power. In response to some of these comments, and in agreement with others, I don’t think Dukat is humanised in a lapse of consistency of writing, or to rehabilitate the character or to ameliorate his crimes, though. Rather the opposite.
The way he talks about his relations with Bajoran women – raising dark implications about consent from the very start, and culminating in the more horribly explicit reveal of Wrongs Darker than Death or Night – brings to mind slavers with slaves, of prison and concentration camp guards with inmates, of colonial officials with locals. He speaks with warmth about these women and may or may not have convinced himself there was some reciprocity despite the obvious imbalance in power and freedom, or this may all be a facade. We never find out. His love for his daughter – which at least seems authentic, as he makes immense sacrifices for her – becomes difficult for us to reconcile with the mass-murdering, ruthless, ambitious tyrant we know he is. We want to believe we could spot such people a mile away and hate them reflexively, that they are so far removed from humanity that they do not have lives or desires outside of their crimes, that we could sense their evil. Like the narrator of Lolita, we catch ourselves liking him for his personality, enjoying his easy-going humour and quick wit and maybe, horrifyingly, wondering if there is something to his rationalisations and excuses. There’s a consistent pattern of emotional manipulation – he repeatedly, breezily explains away his crimes by saying he meted out lesser cruelty to protect the Bajorans from worse, and becomes offended and hurt when this obvious nonsense is questioned. Like so many slavers.
That is what makes Dukat so insidious and his arc so compelling, I think. Most shows try to make villains interesting by having their underlying motivations be well-intentioned or even right. Never so with Dukat, and yet we almost fall for him. He really is very charming.