“Field of Fire”
Written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe
Directed by Tony Dow
Season 7, Episode 13
Production episode 40510-563
Original air date: February 10, 1999
Stardate: unknown
Station log: Kira, Bashir, Dax, O’Brien, and some others are toasting recent arrival Lieutenant Hector Ilario, who has been doing some superb piloting of the Defiant. Later, Dax escorts a spectacularly drunk Ilario back to his cabin, where he shows her a picture of him laughing with two of his Academy classmates and flirts with her a bit before she heads back to her own cabin. The next morning, she awakens to a commotion: Ilario has been shot and killed at close range with a tritanium bullet. Sisko recognizes the bullet as belonging to a TR-116, a Starfleet prototype that was basically a modern take on an old-fashioned rifle. Starfleet abandoned the TR-116s, but a Starfleet officer could have access to the replicator pattern. Chemically powered projectile weapons leave powder burns when fired at close range, but there are no signs of such residue on Ilario’s body.
Dax is appalled to realize that he was shot only ten minutes after she dropped him off. She joins Bashir and O’Brien in a reminisce of Ilario—what little they know of him, given that he’d only reported to the station ten days ago—and everyone is a little freaked out given how uncommon straight-up murder is in the Federation. Dax also has trouble sleeping because she actually knows what it’s like to take another human life thanks to Joran. When she does sleep, she has nightmares that include Ilario’s animated corpse and Joran playing music and taunting her.
There’s a second murder, of Lieutenant Commander Greta Vanderweg, a science officer, killed in the exact same way with the same weapon. There’s no connection between the victims that anyone is aware of.
Bashir and O’Brien talk about the weapon used, which leads to a discussion of anthropomorphizing weaponry, particularly how Davy Crockett (their new favorite holosuite dude) named his rifle, which leads to Bashir mentioning setting up a series of frying pans to ricochet off of to hit a target, which leads to O’Brien figuring out how the killer used the weapon without powder burns: using a transporter at the muzzle and an exographic scanner to aim, the killer can fire from anywhere to a few inches in front of the victim’s heart. He demonstrates this by shooting a melon in the science lab from the corridor outside it.
Sisko orders Dax to create a psychological profile of the killer. Encouraged by both her nightmare and by Worf, she undergoes the Rite of Emergence, which brings Joran to the fore in her mind to consult him on the mind of a killer. His first bit of advice is to actually hold the modified TR-116 in her hands and feel what the killer felt. This person kills from a distance—it’s someone methodical. Dax then goes to the victims’ quarters—they were killed when alone in their homes. What is there that the killer saw? Ilario’s quarters are neat and spare, and he was a single kid only a couple of years out of the Academy; Vanderweg’s are filled with a ton of stuff, as well as a wedding photo, and she was a married Starfleet veteran who’d been there for three years. Dax worries that the victims were chosen randomly, which means she’s wasting her time.
Security starts chasing Ensign Bertram. Dax tackles him and, egged on by Joran, almost stabs him. Dax thinks he’s the killer, but he isn’t—he was on Bajor during the first murder. He was being chased because he replicated a TR-116—but as a weapons collector, not to use it. Sisko almost pulls her off the case, but she talks him out of it. She almost subsumes Joran, but then is interrupted by Odo—there’s been another shooting with the same MO, this one of Petty Officer Zim Brott, a Bolian. (Strangely, Dax goes out of her way to mention that Jadzia knew Brott, something she didn’t mention about Vanderweg, even though the latter had to be part of Jadzia’s staff as a science officer…)
Dax finally figures out the commonality among the victims: they all have pictures of themselves with people they care about, smiling. Brott has a picture with his children, Vanderweg’s wedding photo, Ilario’s picture with his classmates—they’re all smiling. The killer hates emotion, is threatened by it. She hypothesizes that it’s a Vulcan who looks into people’s quarters and sees emotions being frozen by the photograph as mocking and threatening to last forever. There are 48 Vulcans on the station, and 28 of them have suffered a personal loss—that’s not enough to narrow the field. A Vulcan enters the turbolift, and Joran is certain that he’s the killer. Dax, however, needs more concrete proof than Joran’s instinct, so she looks up his service record: Lieutenant Chu’lak. Prior to being posted to DS9 he was one of only a half-dozen survivors of the Grissom, which was lost at Ricktor Prime.
Dax then pulls out the rifle and the exographic scanner and looks into Chu’lak’s quarters, only to see that he’s looking at Dax’s own service record. Joran eggs her on to use the rifle to kill him. Instead she shoots him in the shoulder just before he can shoot her. She goes to his quarters and asks him why. He says, “Because logic demanded it.”
Dax subsumes Joran, knowing that she won’t be able to bury him as deeply as Curzon and Jadzia did. She’ll just have to be careful.
The slug in your belly: Joran complains that Curzon and Jadzia buried him so deeply he was all but forgotten. This conveniently forgets that Curzon had no idea he ever existed, and Jadzia was the same until “Equilibrium.”
There is no honor in being pummeled: When Dax is wandering around the Promenade late at night, Worf keeps an eye on her, worried for her safety. He insists that it’s the same concern he’d show for anyone, not just the new host of his dead wife, really, truly, honest. Dax very kindly pretends to believe him. He also offers to assist, which Dax declines, apparently forgetting that Worf was the chief of security for the Federation flagship for seven years.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo’s enjoyment of 20th-century detective fiction proves useful, as he recognizes that Ilario should have powder burns if shot at close range, something Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien were unaware of.
O’Brien also tells Odo to put on goggles when he demonstrates the modification to the TR-116, but he’s a shapechanger! He doesn’t need goggles, the eyes aren’t real! (Sorry, that really bugged me…)
Victory is life: There was a battle at Ricktor Prime in which the U.S.S. Grissom was destroyed, all but a half-dozen of its complement of 1250 killed. Lieutenant Chu’lak was one of those survivors.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: At various points in the episode, Quark, Bashir, and Worf all express concern over Dax’s well being. It’s to the script’s and the actors’ credit that these all come across as concern for a friend and comrade, with any sexual undertone left under where it belongs in this circumstance.
What happens on the holosuite stays on the holosuite: Bashir and O’Brien tell Ilario that if there’s anything he wants or needs, he has but to ask. He asks to join them on the holosuite, and they give an empahtic “no,” saying that it’s too personal to share. This despite the fact that Odo, Garak, and others have joined them on the holosuite in the past. Either way, this scene was fodder for O’Brien/Bashir slash fiction for years. (After Ilario’s killed, they feel incredibly guilty about not letting him join them.)
Keep your ears open: “You know something, Lieutenant—you’re very beautiful.”
“And you’re very drunk.”
“True enough. But in the morning, I’ll be sober and you’ll still be beautiful.”
Ilario and Dax riffing on a legendary (and probably apocryphal) conversation between Winston Churchill and Elizabeth Braddock.
Welcome aboard: Art Chudabala is very charming in his brief appearance as Ilario and Marty Rackham is fine as Chu’lak. With Jeff Magnus McBride (who played Joran in “Equilibrium”) unavailable, the role is recast with Leigh J. McCloskey, who previously played an Ilari in Voyager’s “Warlord.”
Trivial matters: The Rite of Emergence appears to be a much lesser variation on the zhian’tara seen in “Facets,” allowing a joined Trill to summon forth one previous host and converse with him or her.
Because half the writing staff (Ronald D. Moore, Bradley Thompson, and David Weddle) were trying to salvage “Prodigal Daughter,” and the other half was writing the two episodes on either side of this one (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler working on “The Emperor’s New Cloak” and Rene Echevarria writing “Chimera”), Behr approached former staff writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who took a break from the development of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda to pen this script freelance for his erstwhile writing partner.
TR-116s are seen to be used against the Borg—following the use of bullets against the Borg by Picard in First Contact—in the DS9 novel Lesser Evil by Robert Simpson and the Destiny trilogy by David Mack. They’re also used in Mack’s A Time to Heal and are an optional weapon in Star Trek Online.
The Battle at Ricktor Prime was dramatized by your humble rewatcher in the short story “Four Lights” in the TNG anniversary anthology The Sky’s the Limit.
Chu’lak was seen as a science officer on the Grissom in the short story “Performance Appraisal” by Allyn Gibson in the New Frontier anthology No Limits. The character’s name is also a homonym for the planet where Teal’c from Stargate SG-1 comes from. That’s probably a coincidence…
Walk with the Prophets: “We have a killer to catch.” Unlike “Afterimage” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” which mostly highlighted Dax’s inadequacies as a counselor, and unlike “Prodigal Daughter,” about which the less said the better, this is a good use of the newest member of the ensemble. Having Dax serve as a profiler in the investigation makes complete sense, and given how rare homicides are in the happy-happy-joy-joy Federation, Dax drawing on Joran’s past experience as a triple murderer also makes complete sense. So does her keeping it a secret from the rest of the crew, since it comes with huge risk.
I’m glad it was at least clear that Dax wasn’t doing this alone. Even as she was trying to profile the killer, Odo was busy investigating things off-camera, which is how they found the poor weapons collector who had no idea he’d replicated a weapon that would be used in a multiple homicide. And the TR-116 itself is an interesting piece of tech, especially with Chu’lak’s transporter modification.
Having said that, there are some issues. Dax’s reasons for suspecting Chu’lak boil down to “the voices in my head told me he was guilty,” and her method of proving it is to violate his privacy—something she already did a couple of other times when she was peeking through the ship with the exographic scanner, which is, if nothing else, a horrid ethics violation, if not totally illegal.
Also, in Leigh J. McCloskey we’ve gotten our third straight Joran—first “Equilibrium,” Sisko channeling him in “Facets,” and now this—and it’s been a different Joran each time. Unfortunately, McCloskey comes across as a third-rate Hannibal Lecter, with very little undertone of menace. He’s more obnoxious than psychopathic, and I really wish he’d taken more of a cue from how Avery Brooks played the character in “Facets.” That Joran would’ve made the episode far more effective.
Still, it’s the good spotlight for Counselor Dax that “Afterimage” damn well should have been, and it’s a decent little procedural that—like “It’s Only a Paper Moon”—reminds us that the psychological damage of war is just as bad in its own way as the physical damage.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido actually wrote the Battle of Ricktor Prime as a victory for the allies over the Dominion, since it worked nicely as a we-won-but-the-price-is-too-damn-high bit.
You could probably put O’Brien asking Odo to wear goggles down to him simply thinking of Odo as a solid. But it’s likely because the actor needed to wear them for the exploding melon.
Really, this is just The Silence of the Lambs, isn’t it? Hannibal Lecter just has the added benefit of starting out in Clarice’s head and not having to worm his way in first.
You pointed out Odo didn’t really need glasses. You’re probably right, but it should be noted that the show has established time and again that Odo tends to mimic certain actions of solids, in order to make them feel more comfortable around him.
This was evident when Odo shapeshifted a fake coffee mug on his hand, during the season 4 premiere in order to share the dining experience.
As for the episode, this is how you do a good murder mystery, unlike Prodigal Daughter. Great use of technology, and it actually manages to involve the whole ensemble for once, instead of just Dax. Obviously, a story like this would have to involve Odo and O’Brien a fair bit. One recurring problem in these last two seasons were the character-centric episodes that reduced the rest of the cast to token appearances.
Thankfully, Robert Hewitt Wolfe knows better than that and knows how to employ the strenghts of a cast he wrote for five years. He really should have stuck around for those last two seasons, even if only as a consulting producer, so he could split his time between DS9 scripts and Andromeda development.
I enjoyed this one a great deal, actually. It was creepy. My favorite scene was with Worf checking up on her – that was almost chilling, thanks to some good intensity from Michael Dorn. I don’t love Joran here, and it is a bit Silence of the Lambs, but I like how it was executed.
While Dax looking through the habitat ring for a “victim” was, indeed, a horrific violation of privacy, I actually thought it was one of the most effective scenes in the episode. It was a creepy and uncomfortable scene, and I think it was supposed to be. It was an example that while Joran could be a help in the investigation, he could also be a highly corruptive influence.
After three episodes in a row focussing quite heavily on Ezri, this was such an improvement on the other two that I can’t really complain about anything. But I did feel that, having built the situation, the resolution was too pat. Not only the “voices in the head” thing, but just “he hates emotion, must be a Vulcan” was just too simplistic. But in general, thumbs up.
Crime dramas are usually not Star Trek’s forte and I think this episode is also pretty thin. Some “discover the evil side in you”, some rather inconclusive detective puzzle work.
What really bothers me is the weapon which is essentially something you can’t defend yourself against and which should therefore be used around the clock by assassins against all high profile persons with enemies. Sisko and lots of other important people should be dead by now. Despite the tech rationalization it comes across as magic.
As one might guess, any episode featuring Ezri will be a favorite of mine. But there were parts of this one that I found rather annoying. Mostly it’s the handwavium about the technology. It doesn’t make sense that they would have such trouble finding the killer given the weapon he’s using. Sure, they’ve forgotten a bit about how a old-fashioned rifle works, but it’s still a chemical explosive pushing a projectile. Did the designers of the TR-116 completely eliminate the noise of a firing weapon? And what about the powder? If they’re thinking there should be powder burns, that means that the propellent doesn’t completely burn when it is fired, and that residue goes into the air. Wouldn’t the sensors on a space station be capable of detecting that and narrowing down where the weapon was fired? Surely they monitor the air quality. And the exographicc scanner bugged me too. If someone is able to just cobble together a device to look through bulkheads like that, shouldn’t that be a problem? Why has no one done it before and if someone has done it, why aren’t they shielding the bulkheads better to prevent it?
Anyway, if it hadn’t featured Ezri this would have been a mediocre episode (IMO). I agree that Joran was more obnoxious than scary, and he didn’t seem all that useful for the trouble he caused. The idea that Ezri would find the killer right at the exact time he was targeting her was just a bit too cute of a way to increase the dramatic tension at the end. But … Ezri. So I therefore declare I will ignore all these annoyances. It’s a great episode. :)
Wasn’t it also that she just happened to share a random elevator with the correct Vulcan.
“I saw a Vulcan, it must be him”
It occurs to me that I could’ve made a joke about how Robert Hewitt Wolfe used this episode as an audition piece for joining the writing staff on Elementary, on which he still serves…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I don’t recall liking this episode too much. I think I was a little uneasy with the premise, though maybe we were supposed to be. I guess I was just getting a little tired of all the “Here’s the horrible cost of war” stories. And I guess I felt Ezri was being implausibly reckless in summoning Joran, and I didn’t find his presence all that effective.
Also, though I didn’t know it at the time, the whole idea of a “profiler” story is rather fanciful. Despite their popularity in fiction, I gather that profilers’ methods in real life don’t really work much better than random guessing.
This is also another of the many DS9 episodes that introduce huge, game-changing inventions that we never hear from again. Those exographic scanners are the ultimate voyeur device, and a transporter gun is the ultimate assassin’s weapon. True, both voyeurism and murder would be rare in the Federation, but these inventions should have a profound impact on combat tactics, yet we never hear of them outside this episode. (Except in the novels.)
And why is it that if someone’s uneasy with emotion, they must be Vulcan? There are humans who dislike emotion too. For that matter, sometimes I wonder: If Surak’s philosophy worked so well, why did it never spread beyond Vulcan? Why hasn’t any other species ever adopted it for themselves, or invented it independently? We’ve seen multiple “warrior races” in Trek (Klingons, Andorians, Talarians, Kazon, etc. ad nauseam). We’ve seen several hedonistic/sexually uninhibited civilizations (Argelians, Deltans, Edo, Risians). So why have we only ever gotten one civilization that esteems logic and emotional control?
The flaw in the powder-burns idea is the assumption that the only possible way to fire a bullet is with a chemical explosion. It could’ve been a coilgun, aka Gauss gun, a magnetic-accelerator firearm type commonly found in science fiction — and actually existing in the real world since the 1930s, though never made efficient enough to be competitive with standard firearms. And I’d think in the Trek universe, with all its forcefields and antigravs and tractor beams, there’d be even more methods for accelerating a pointy bit of metal to lethal velocity. Ironic that Robert Hewitt Wolfe would make that assumption, since Andromeda did feature Gauss rifles.
ARGH…
– Railguns in hand-carryable fashion currently exist.
– “Powder Burns” is more accurately Gunshot Residue (GSR), which is, as the name implies, essentially unburned powder and solid combustion remnants. I realize this episode was well before CSI became a thing, but you’d think a show with a staff devoted to plausible technobabble would be able to look in one of their forensics manuals about that.
– Speaking of GSR, unless the transporter is keyed to tritanium only, it’s going to transport the GSR that emerges from the barrel of the gun along with the bullet itself. I suppose it could be hand-waved around as I just described.
And yes, noise. Rather a lot of it, since the TR116 doesn’t appear to be suppressed. (Suppressed w/ a subsonic round? Okay, that’s probably not going to be heard outside of the room it’s fired in.) Even a railgun will make noise and if the slug is supersonic, rather a lot of it.
And yes, SGR should have been detectable from orbit using ST-universe scanning technology, which would have been all over the shooter and the shooter’s quarters since that’s where the gun was fired.
Argh.
@10 – the writing staff may have been able to look in forensics manuals, but Odo could not. He got the expression from pulp 1940s detective novels, which undoubtedly would have called them “powder burns”. Therefore, on that issue at least, the writers got it spot on.
JimCrider: Ashcom is correct, Odo wasn’t basing this on forensic knowledge, but mid-20th century pulp mysteries. “Powder burns” is therefore the correct term for him to use in that context.
As for everyone’s complaint about the sound, unless someone was in Chu’lak’s quarters with him, they wouldn’t have heard it — or it would’ve been a sound that wouldn’t be easy to identify.
Using sensors to scan for the gun components is kind of a big plot hole, though, ’tis true….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
DemetriosX & Eduardo: I don’t buy either explanation. Odo has never been that accommodating, especially not for Dax who is one of the people on the station least likely to be impressed or give a damn or expect Odo to act like a solid. And O’Brien has served with Odo for seven years, during which he has been a shapechanger for all but about half a year. He wouldn’t think of him as anything but that.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
To be fair, they are at war and have an assassin aboard who can kill anyone he likes, whenever he likes. He could just as easily have shot the Emissary, with incalculable effects on the Federations relationship with the Bajorans and the wormhole aliens.
BTW – did anyone else see the Episode title and leap to the (wrong) assumption it was a Game of Thrones reference?
I didn’t think the time between “All Good Things…” and “Generations” was a whole year. Or maybe you forgot about Tasha Yar and meant to say that Worf was security chief for six years?
Anyway, when I realized O’Brien was going to shoot a melon with a bullet, all I could think of was Dave Chappelle’s “Black Gallagher” sketch.
@15: Going by stardates, Generations is about 7-8 months after “All Good Things.” (The stardate difference is about 644 units, and a year is 1000 units, so that’s a bit under 2/3 of 12 months.) Of course, stardates are inexact at best, but it’s a decent rough estimate.
@14 – wouldn’t that justify violating the privacy of an untold number of people in order to root out potential infiltrators, sympathizes, or others opposed to Federation involvement or victory?
@17 – anyone embarking on a war is starting a campaign of mass killing. It would be mass murder, if it wasn’t done by the people who write the law. If you can justify that in the name of victory, you can certainly justify violating someones privacy.
crzydroid: I was counting the time between “All Good Things…” and Generations as about a year, yes.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Makes more sense. For some reason I thought that movie was set closer to the end of the series.
I had the opposite reaction to you in regards to Ezri episodes. I thought Prodigal Daughter was better (as an Ezri episode, at least) than this one.
In terms of the episode itsef, it was interesting and entertaining. But a few things kind of bugged me in regards to Ezri:
1)Just because she’s a counseller doesn’t mean she’s a forensic expert or an expert on criminal minds/profiling.
2)Wasn’t Joran’s crime a crime of passion? So, is he necessarily an authority on ‘how killers think’?
3)On a similar vein, even if he does know how killers think, it would be how TRILL killers think. What if the killer ended up being a totally different species (as is actually what turned out -and others have pointed out the silliness inherent in the ‘this person hates emotions – MUST BE A VULCAN!!’ conclusion)?
This seems to me like it maybe would have been more interesting as an Odo episode, but I kind of miss seeing Odo’s detective work.
Also, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we never actually see any consequences in terms of Ezri’s personality regarding ‘letting Joran out of the box’, so to speak. But if I’m wrong, I will count myself happily corrected.
@21: Joran committed three murders in all, according to this episode. And while the murder described in “Equilibrium” was a crime of vengeance, there’s no evidence that it was a crime of passion, i.e. impulsive and unpremeditated. Certainly he seemed to be quite the sociopath when we “met” him in “Facets.”
@23 – I will probably need to go back and look at that one because I don’t remember a whole lot about Joran. But – I think I misspoke when I said ‘crime of passion’, because now that I think about it, that term generally means killing somebody in the heat of the moment. But, what I meant was that Joran had a somewhat ‘logical’ reason for killing the people he did (are the 3 victims all the same crime, or is that supposed to be a new bit of information), as opposed to somebody who seems to be targeting people at random with no connection to him. But, I kind of forgot about ‘Facets’.
It feels to me as though there is no privacy in Star Trek, at least on a ship or station with a computer monitoring, well, everything. There also doesn’t seem to be a concern for privacy, after all, the computer knows everything, and anyone in command or security or staff, can just call it up on video. It might bother those of us in today’s world, but it obviously doesn’t really bother anyone in the Trek future.
This episode was reasonably good, but some parts of it really drag it down for me. The biggest is just the notion of “Joran was a murderer, so naturally he’s an expert in how murderers think.” Maybe I’d gotten the wrong impression, but somehow it had seemed to be that he was a gifted musician who, through mental incompatibility with Dax, resulted in an imbalanced gestalt. It didn’t seem to me that anything in that hints that he was amazingly gifted at reading people, or could even really play the seducer to the dark side that we saw in the episode. I tend to think of the joined Joran Dax as not having really been able to act very psychologically “normal” and conversant the way he does here.
Also, once they knew how that the killer was using a transporter, why didn’t they enact a transporter suppression field or something along those lines?
-Andy
Am I the only one who thinks that this Joran looks a LOT like a lighter-haired Mitt Romney?
The thing that bothered me the most about this episode was the transporting bullet. It’s been shown in Star Trek that when you beam something that’s going at speed it halts the momentum. People falling my be on the floor of the transporter pad, but they don’t go splat. Obviously I’m thinking of the 2009 movie and now that I think of it I can’t remember if/when this may have been demonstrated on any of the series. So maybe I really shouldn’t be bothered by it, but I am.
@28: That’s the thing, though… teleporting something shouldn’t cancel its momentum. If you’re recording, transmitting, and reproducing every quantum property that defines a particle, that needs to include its momentum. In theory, if you’re in a shuttle flying at Mach 1 relative to the ground and you beam up someone standing still, they should materialize, then slam into the back of the shuttle at Mach 1.
So we have to assume that transporters are able to “edit” the data pattern in order to compensate for such differences in momentum — not to mention the differences in gravitational potential energy between the ground and a ship in orbit. It’s not something that would happen automatically; the transporter must actively correct for it. That’s mandated by the laws of physics. And the TNG Tech Manual actually does refer to “Doppler compensators” that correct for relative motion between the transporter and the target. I think that’s a misuse of the term “Doppler shift,” but the principle is there.
Therefore, it stands to reason that if you wanted a transported object — such as a bullet in flight — to maintain its original momentum, then you’d simply disable the “Doppler compensator” and let the laws of physics take over.
I guess I’m showing my age but I was surprised Keith let it pass without comment that this episode was directed by Tony Dow – Wally Cleaver from “Leave it to Beaver”.
And yes, GregR, Joran is indeed a bit Romneyesque….
Tony Dow did a lot of stuff, including as visual effects supervisor for Babylon 5, where he also directed several episodes. Check his Wikipedia page – he was a busy guy, post-Wally
The solution to Jadzia not knowing Vanderweg, who had been on the station for 3 years, is that Vanderweg only became a science officer, switching sections, after Jadzia died and, before that, she was part of some other department on a large station with hundreds if not thousands of Starfleet people assigned to it and barely if ever interacted with Jadzia.
This is among my least favorite ds9 episodes. I found the dialogue between Ezri and Joran excruciating after awhile. Kill him. No, no, I am not like you. Kill him. No, no….. zzzzzzzz.
I was expecting some kind of payoff about the killer’s motives beyond- they smile too much. And I can’t help getting my dander up about a comment like #14. You know what I find to be the most implausible thing about Star Trek? It’s not teleportation. It’s not traveling back and forth in time. It’s the thought that an idealistic organization like Starfleet, which seems to exist for the purpose of securing freedom and free will among all life-forms, would still be so permissive about invasions of privacy in the name of “security”.
When I watch this episode I always think that everyone on Star trek doesn’t follow basic firearm safety rules.
Oh dear, I seem to have missed something. I thought Odo liked to read romance novels. When did he start reading crime fiction?
34, Back in Profit and Loss, Odo was given one by Miles O’brien.
CathWren: He was established as reading crime fiction (given to him by O’Brien) waaaaaaay back in season 2’s “Profit and Loss.” It was also referenced in the third season’s “The Die is Cast.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’ve been binge watching and it all seems to be blurring together in my mind. I remember him reading the romances because someone teased him about it. But, now that you mention it, I do remember something about someone giving him a … was it Mickey Spillane? … crime book sometime.
That was “Profit and Loss” where he was reading Spillane.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
#33 Right you are, Hyperion, I cringed as combat veteran O’Brien chatted with the muzzle of the super-deadly rifle casually aimed point-blank at his colleague. Good thing 25th-century medicine is so advanced.
As already mentioned, the crazy-dangerous tech in this episode was far too easy, far too consequential to be ignored. It’s pretty late in the run for Star Trek to be learning that lesson, but one can still hope!
But one point not yet raised: the climactic moment, two snipers drawing a bead on each other – a second more delay and Ezri would be dead, and none the wiser since she shared no findings with anyone. She could have shot his rifle early on, but no.
But far worse: she shot him in the shoulder, then ran unarmed and alone to his quarters, seemingly without calling security. She couldn’t see him after taking her shot – for all she knew he had reached the rifle again and was waiting for her (or shooting random crewmembers for the heck of it). Or he had pulled a phaser. Or a knife, or was simply going to use his superior strength despite his injury. Her only weapon was HIS rifle, which very fortunately he hadn’t… quite… reached.
What is it about heroes, that they can’t wait to throw their weapon aside at the first sign of success? Smarter still would be to remember that you live in the future (ha), use your communicator to send security to pick him up, and stay put with your magic rifle trained on Mr. Killer.
That was meant to be “no-one the wiser”, oops. Certainly dead Ezri would also be none the wiser.
I liked Jadzia as a character, but she made a lot of dumb decisions, doing a lot of things that she should have at least had Odo or Worf involved in. She wasn’t a great investigator, nearly got herself killed, and probably broke a lot of Starfleet regulations in the process. She’d have been better off telling Worf or Commander Sisko what was going on & staying put in her quarters while Odo ran the investigation.
I also don’t get how a Vulcan went off the deep end as he was NOT human and presumably PTSD wouldn’t have affected full-blooded Vulcans the way it might have Spock or even T’Pol. It sounds more like the “crazy veteran” stereotype seen all too often on other shows.
CSI, DS9 ain’t.
@41/mspence: I think you mean Ezri, not Jadzia.
As for Vulcans, remember that they are innately more emotional than humans; their logic and discipline are learned, hard-won through a lifetime of training and meditation. It’s got nothing to do with their biology or genetics. (Also, T’Pol was a full-blooded Vulcan.) If anything, many Vulcans would probably have a harder time dealing with emotional trauma because they tend to repress and deny their emotions rather than admitting them and facing them.
Lockdown Rewatch.
with all the 20th and 19th century obsessions we have seen Bashir display for 7 seasons and that he comes from a science background I raised an eyebrow that he didn’t know what powder burns were.
I liked Ezri in this and it has her one scene of the season with Worf that I thought actually worked well. Nicole Deboer played Erzi’s uncertainty in herself perfectly and really starts to come into her own as Dax from this point. Joran however is a disappointment I agree with Krad this was a Cut price Hannibal Lector knock off. Nor was I overly convinced by the resolution of the episode but it works just about I think and overall this was episode was mighty relief for the Ezri character after the disaster of Prodigal Daughter
@43/chad: Bashir playacts historical settings in the role of a warrior or spy, not a detective or medical examiner, so he’s probably never had occasion to come across powder burns. He just shoots holographic bad guys; he doesn’t examine the bodies afterward.
@44/CLB: Bashir playacts a James Bond analogue. Have powder burns never come up in Ian Fleming’s works? Bond has investigated murders as part of his spycraft before
@45/terracinque: You’d have to ask someone more familiar with the Bond canon, but it seems to me that Bashir’s program is based more on the movies, and is focused more on flashy action than meticulous investigation. After all, it’s where he goes to escape from that kind of work in his real job.