Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2 - "The Search," or "Odo Phone Home"
The Search is alright, I guess. Thanks for reading my review.
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Anyway, my opinion on The Search is as complicated and varied as my experience watching this two-part intro to DS9's third season. I don't really know what to make of the entire package. Ostensibly a two-part episode, "The Search" follows on the heels of the Jem'Hadar within days of the episode's conclusion, so we're really dealing with an episode in three parts.
In that sense, "The Search" is clearly a pivot point. I can sense the narrative of DS9 turning, and these three episodes are its hinge. The Jem'Hadar, the fragility of the Federation's alliance systems, the emergence of a dangerous new threat, and the fanfare'd introduction of the USS Defiant suggest the show is entering into a brand new arc. I fully expect entire seasons of stories devoted to Jem'Hadar incursions into Federation territory.
On the one hand, I'm not really surprised. The Wormhole was always a gateway into dark and alien territory. Star Trek is ostensibly a show about exploring the unknown places of the galaxy, but DS9 turns this principle of Star Trek on its side: some places in the galaxy are best left unexplored; strange and mighty powers lurk in the fringes of the Gamma Quadrant; sooner or later the Federation's anthropological curiosity is bound to yield a dangerous and hostile enemy. The Wormhole is an open portal to distant stars, and the Jem'hadar are the monsters that come oozing forth.
Wait, I'm sorry. Did I say the Jem'Hadar? I meant the Borg. We've already seen this happen in TNG; Picard and the Enterprise go too far at the edge of the known galaxy and run afoul of the Borg, a being so strange and inscrutable that their very nature threatens the foundations of sentient civilization.
We've been here. We've done this. I maintain that the Borg are everything the Jem'Hadar seem to be, yet twice as terrifying. I'm just not frightened of the Jem'Hadar, and DS9's every attempt to instill terror in me doesn't work. It occurred to me halfway through the episode that, if I was expecting the Jem'Hadar to compete with the Borg, I was bound to be disappointed.
The Jem'Hadar are closer to the original, old-school Klingon during the earliest years of the Federation and the Original Series: a brazen, violent, warlike species of conquerors conditioned toward violence for its own sake. And to that end, Jem'Hadar culture is potentially interesting. The warring cultures of Federation space are in a deadlock: Klingon, Cardassian, Bajoran, Vulcan, Romulan, and Human exist in a fragile ceasefire trembling with incipient tension. War exists only in potentia, capable of breaking out at any moment yet somehow held at bay by the collective will of the Federation Alliance.
The Jem'Hadar don't really care about peace, which is why it's so weird to me that their first overture toward the Federation is the olive branch. The Federation tangles with the Jem'Hadar, loses, and the Jem'Hadar offer them peace and ask for a place in their alliance? I've played enough Crusader Kings to know that's never how things work.
So you can see why I don't know what to make of the Jem'Hadar at all. Every political archetype already exists in our setting. We have the devious and arrogant cultural imperialists known as the Romulans; we have the warrior-caste Klingons coming to terms with the sunset of their imperial years; we have the xenophobic fascists in the Cardassians, a people for whom nationalism and racial supremacy are exactly the same thing. So where the hell do the Jem'Hadar fit? Are they warriors like the Klingons or schemers like the Romulans? Do they play political games like the Cardassians? Are they xenophobes or aggressive cultural imperialists? Do they want to convert, subjugate, or destroy?
I just can't understand what danger the Jem'Hadar pose that any other extant species doesn't already pose. They feel like a redundant people, a representative of the Gamma Quadrant yet so familiar and well-worn that they actually bore me. I think I would've been happier seeing the Gorn make a comeback.
My ambivalence toward the Jem'Hadar aside, I don't really think "The Search" is an episode about them; I think these are episodes about Odo, and Odo's personal story happens to dovetail nicely into an overarching arc about the Jem'Hadar and their threat to Federation space.
I loved absolutely everything about Odo, and his presence in these episodes are the difference between a tedious and slightly confusing introduction to a redundant new enemy faction and a genuinely outstanding story.
I've always read Odo as a kind of emotionless hardass, masking his feelings as readily as he masks his own appearance. Changelings are by their nature inscrutable, and underneath his grumpy hardass of an exterior, Odo is a sensitive person with real feelings. I appreciated that a lot.
It occurred to me, watching the first episode, that Odo is a foil for Data. Hear me out.
Odo and Data are, as far as they know, one of their kind. Neither of them are fully human; Odo does his best to pass for a human out of necessity, and Data resembles a human the way a robot's chassis resembles a human. Odo and Data both grapple with what it means to be human; Data believes he's human but, being an android, constantly searches for some evidence to justify his yearning for a place to belong. Odo realizes he can never belong among the very people he imitates, and for that reason he resents them.
Data wants to do Starfleet proud; Odo hates Starfleet and resists them at every turn. Starfleet is deeply suspicious of both Data and Odo, but where Data tries to win over Starfleet's acceptance through reason and patience, Odo rejects them outright. Data is Roddenberry; Odo is Post-Roddenberry. Data realizes he's different and believes that the Federation has a place for everyone, including him; Odo realizes he's different and believes the Federation will never welcome him.
I love Data and sympathize powerfully with his own self-awareness; the constant search for his own humanity has made Data ironically the best example of humanity in his entire crew. By that same token, I also love Odo and sympathize powerfully with his own sense of isolation. Odo is trapped in an impossible circumstance where he has to put on a mask just to be accepted by the people he protects and serves. Starfleet and the Federation don't represent him or have his best interests at heart, and yet he is still of the Federation and serves the Federation's interests.
Odo's yearning to find other people like him, other people who understand his isolation and know how it feels to exist, is essential to the human condition. I will go so far as to say that what Odo feels is what humanity has felt ever since it went out of the cave, and explored the world, and went out into the stars: our search for life is a search for ourselves. We want to believe that we're not the only ones who experience what it is to be alive. Finding someone else like ourselves allows us to feel like we're not a freak accident, a fluke in the arcane chemistry of life.
I'm not going to summarize the events that lead to Odo's discovery of his own species, or his painful and haphazard reintegration into that culture. All I can say is that I sympathize with that, too. The shapeshifters Odo returns to are no more capable of understanding who he is than his friends back on DS9, and Odo's arc of yearning, finding, and becoming disillusioned is a very human thing to do.
I came away from these two episodes with a stronger appreciation for Odo than I did for the Jem'Hadar. I know DS9 wants me to start taking the Jem'Hadar seriously, and I was on the verge of taking them seriously after the episode seemed to commit to its own massive plot changes--we saw the Federation agree to an alliance with the Jem'Hadar, saw Sisko lose his position, saw Garak die to a phaser shot and the Bajorans declare war. And part of me thought: is this for real? Is this happening? Is the show actually taking these risks, committing to these massive changes? I'm in a post-GoT world, and I'm willing to believe anything is possible, but...
...In the end, none of it was true. The episodes fell back into the comfortable old trope of a virtual reality simulation, thereby invalidating everything that happened over the last episode-and-a-half under the convenient evocation of "it was all a dream." And while I realize that memory manipulation and virtual reality simulations are well within the technological limits of Star Trek (and we've seen both used to powerful effect), as a viewer I felt let down.
Even if the Jem'Hadar's scheming and political maneuvering wasn't real, even if the alliance never happened and the Bajorans and Romulans didn't drop out, Odo's journey was still real. I've always liked Odo as a character, but this is the first time I really appreciated him as a person.
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