DS9 S3.E8 - Meridian

Season 3, Episode 8 - "Meridian," or "Sixty Year Latency"

I swear I've seen this episode before. Something about Meridian's idyllic beauty and bucolic lifestyle reminds me of a TNG episode where the crew visits some Edenic planet, mingles with beautiful locals, and discovers some horrible secret buried underneath.

Meridian is different because by all accounts it seems to be a real Utopian society. Somewhere in the Gamma Quadrant, the crew discovers a planet that shifts in and out of existence. This is Meridian: a planet trapped in an interdimensional bubble, the properties of which drag the planet in and out of our dimension at steady intervals of sixty years.

Even Meridian is vulnerable to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, though. Entropy always ruins everything. Meridian's internal clock is degrading, and after every 'shift,' the planet lingers in our dimension for a shorter and shorter duration before vanishing again.

As for the people of Meridian, they exist in a state of pure conscious, incorporeal but aware, waiting sixty long years for the moment of their return. In this interstitial place, the people of Meridian do not eat, sleep, or age; they just exist.

The ephemeral quality of Meridian sets up an effective story of (literally) star-crossed lovers. Jadzia falls in love with a Meridian man named Jeral. It's a classic dilemma, but a compelling one: when Meridian returns to its own dimension, Jeral must go with it. Jadzia will not see him again for sixty years. Will she stay with DS9 or follow her love into the unknown for sixty years? Will Jeral let Jadzia go and keep her memory in silent vigil until they meet again, when she's grown old? Or will he walk away from his own people and live with her on DS9?

I didn't think I'd like the romance between Jadzia and Jeral, but in fact I did. It's an oddly genuine and sweet romance, occasionally flirtatious and occasionally intimate. I was surprised by the speed with which Jadzia fell head-over-heels in love with Jeral, but I believed it. I don't think I'm cynical enough to believe that love at first sight is a myth, and there is something to the idea that you could meet "the one," and then never see them again because of impossible circumstances.

The show respects my skepticism, though. Even Sisko is skeptical of Jadzia's motivations: Curzon Dax was an incorrigible romantic who chased one love after another, but Jadzia always thought things through. Jadzia insists she isn't Curzon, but we've heard that argument before, haven't we? As much as Jadzia insists on her fundamental individuality outside of Curzon's influence, she and Curzon are part of the same gestalt entity. They are, together, Dax. And Dax can be an incredible romantic.

The episode was at its best when it explored the genuine love and pain between Jadzia and Jeral, carried by Terry Farrell's excellent acting. Yes, I was even okay with the delightfully cringe-inducing "count each others' spots" joke. It was nice to see Jadzia participate actively in her own courting, to flirt back even as she's flirted with. She has this independent, bon-vivant energy that I really admire.

I wasn't wild about the secondary plotline, though. I wanted to be, because I'm fascinated by some of the questions suggested by (but never properly explored) this plotline. Back on DS9, Alien Donald Trump Tiron pursues an unhealthy obsession with Major Kira. Kira has absolutely no interest in his receding orange hairline or his creepy advances, so she rebuffs him (by, adorably, pretending she's already with Odo. Poor Odo.)

Tiron doesn't take no for an answer. He waves several bars of latinum in front of Quark and convinces him to create a custom holosuite program involving a perfect likeness of Major Kira. It's horrible--but also raises an interesting question:

What is the difference between a flawless holographic simulation of Major Kira, and Major Kira herself? If there is no difference at all, are they the same person? If they're not the same person, is the hologram a person? If the hologram is a person, does the question of consent come into play? If the question of consent does not come into play, can we say the hologram is sentient? If the hologram is not sentient, is it truly a flawless simulation?

This is a subtle and compelling question in latter-day science fiction. Even Destiny has a fascinating little snippet of lore where a Warmind creates a perfect simulation of various scientists and subjects that simulation to horrible torture, and the scientists (the real ones) don't know if they're in a simulation--because if they are, then they've already lost.

I'd love to see an episode about the question of simulated sentience. TNG kind of touched on this idea when it gave us Holographic Moriarty, and Data explores the question of simulated humanity through his very existence.

Unfortunately, all my philosophical navel-gazing is for naught. This sub-plot has absolutely nothing to do with the ethics of sentience, and everything to do with green-screening Quark's leering bedroom eyes on the exquisite legs of a lingerie model. Possibly with a smoky saxophone solo.

It's hilarious comic relief, but I would've preferred the philosophy.

Some episodes have problems trying to figure out what they're about. Meridian knows exactly what it's about. It's a star-crossed lover story set in a dimension-shifting planet. Because the episode is committed so hard to its central premise, everything tangential to that premise really suffers. Most Star Trek episodes that are any good at least try to explore the drama in their science. A character will die if Bashir can't synthesize the right amino acids. A society will collapse if a power source dies out.

But in Meridian, we have an episode that feels impatient and distracted by its own science. Jadzia breezes over the complex problem of stabilizing Meridian's "quantum flux" over an afternoon of datapad calculations and coffee. The problem and solution present themselves with a wave of a hand and a sentence or two of jargon, which made the whole problem of Meridian's stabilization seem scientifically trivial.

It was nice to see Jadzia's romantic side, though. I like just about every side of Jadzia I've seen, which, I suppose, is also every side of Dax that I've seen.

DS9 S3.E7 - Civil Defense

Season 3, Episode 7 - "Civil Defense," or "Alexa, Overreact"

I want to see the blooper reel from Civil Defense. Not the blooper reel of the episode--no, I want to see all the out-takes from Gul Dukat's series of pre-recorded contingency videos in response to a theoretical Bajoran rebellion.

At some point in Gul Dukat's career as Overseer, he had to work with a production team to make a series of videos designed to play in case of a Bajoran rebellion. Sort of a "If you're seeing this, the world has already ended" deal. There was probably a script, camera direction, maybe a makeup artist. I'm pretty sure Gul Dukat asked for multiple takes.

"Bajoran workers. You are in direct violation of your orders. Return to your posts immediately or I will be forced to release Vespene gas--wait, damn it. Sorry. Neurocine. Neurocine gas. Can we go again?"

At what point in his career did this recording session happen? Was it something he penciled in between meetings? Which department of Cardassian government is responsible for contingency videos? Did Gul Dukat harbor secret fantasies of making it in the movies? Was this his big break?

In "Civil Defense," Jake, Sisko, and O'Brien accidentally trigger an anti-rebellion failsafe embedded in DS9's central computer system. This failsafe is a relic of Cardassian control and wasn't removed from DS9 during the transition. It's a bit like someone else giving you their computer but forgetting to tell you their password. And after entering the wrong password, instead of locking you out of the computer, there are now nukes headed to your destination.

There's something interestingly fascist about the way Cardassian security systems automate counter-insurgency programs. The calculus for determining the location, size, scope, and risk of a rebellion is built into the system itself. There's no intelligent being to reason with. No one is making any decisions at all. The computer just decides that a rebellion must be happening based on certain immutable parameters, and by cold Cardassian logic, deduces that the threat must be eliminated by any means possible.

"Civil Defense" is about trying to outfox a Cardassian security system designed by ultra-paranoid Cardassians. Redunancy after redundancy after redundancy is built into the program. Every attempt to shut down the program triggers another redundancy, heightens the perceived threat. The effect is darkly comical. It goes a little bit like this:

Sisko accidentally triggers a contingency interpreted by the computer as a Bajoran uprising. Non-existent guards fail to put down a non-existent rebellion, triggering another contingency. The computer now believes the rebels must have won, and locks down the rest of the station. Up in the Bridge, Jadzia Dax tries to cut off the ship's life support to shut down the contingency system, which triggers another contingency. The computer now believes the rebels have destroyed the life support system and triggers a total self-destruct mechanism.

The entire system spirals horribly out of control. It's like getting a Blue Screen of Death that actually wants to kill you. It's like getting an Illegal Operation error that's actually illegal. It's like if McAfee Antivirus determined that human life itself was a virus upon the consciousness of the universe. It's like if Alexa interpreted you shutting it off as a terrorist act.

"Civil Defense" is a series of unfortunate fuckups, at least on the surface. But digging a little deeper into the episode, and it's clear that the Cardassian computer system is an expression of Cardassian paranoia and Cardassian logic. It's Murphy's law taken to a Cardassian extreme: anything that CAN go wrong WILL go wrong and therefore must be controlled and blamed on the Bajorans.

It's interesting to me that the Cardassian's computer security system sees no real difference between "security threat" and "Bajoran." In fact, it sees no real difference between "security anomaly" and "Bajoran." Security is a matter of life and death to Cardassians, and to be secure is to obey the rules, no matter how irrational or inhuman those rules may be. The entire episode plays like a darkly hilarious exercise in dystopian security.

This episode is at its best when it's about Cardassian security devouring itself through raw paranoia. Gul Dukat himself falls victim to his own system when he tries to transport off DS9. To absolutely no one's surprise, this, too, is a contingency, which the computer interprets as cowardice on Dukat's part: an attempt to abandon ship during a time of crisis.

How deep do these contingencies go? Is all of Cardassian security just an elaborate contingency system? A Jenga tower of worst case scenarios whereby the one precipitates the other until all of society collapses into self-destruction through teleological inevitability? What exactly is the code at the heart of Cardassia?

While true: Escalate?

I could go on and on about the central idea behind "Civil Defense," because it's so interesting to me. There are shades of hostile AI here. The Security Program feels SHODAN-esque in its ruthlessness. And I liked the central premise being explored here.

But I didn't really like this episode.

This is partly because I've seen this episode before. It was called "Disaster," and it happened during Season 5 of TNG, and it was one of the best episodes of that series. "Civil Defense" has a very clever premise, which it executes admirably, but there's nothing else outside that premise. It's an episode about Cardassian paranoia, yeah, but they're ALL episodes about Cardassian paranoia. It's an episode about security contingencies and how irrational they are, and to the episode's credit, it is a very clever way to explore that particular angle of Cardassian society.

But it's also an episode that abandons its central premise three-fourths of the way through. Where "Disaster" is ostensibly an episode about a massive technological failure aboard the Enterprise but actually an episode about the capacity for heroism and leadership among the Enterprise's most neglected characters, "Civil Defense" is at its heart just another bottle episode about a computer failure.

It's an interesting computer failure with devious Cardassian tricks embedded in its code, but in the end, it's just another computer failure. Inevitably, the solution to the episode hinges on discovering some marginal exception to the contingencies, explain it away in technobabble, and save the day with two seconds left on a self-destruct countdown.

DS9 S3.E6 - The Abandoned

Season 3, Episode 6 - "The Abandoned," or "The Care and Feeding of Jem'Hadar"

Jake's got game. That's all I'll say about his side story involving a ridiculously attractive Bajoran Dabo-girl.

It's been interesting watching Odo transform from a hard-assed, humorless, iron-fisted Chief of Security who spends his downtime sleeping in a bucket to a hard-assed, humorless, iron-fisted Chief of Security who spends his downtime practicing art. Let's be honest, here. Odo's private quarters are his studio. Furnished with elegant and complex works of abstract architecture, Odo practices the art of being a shapeshifter. That's what art is. It's something you do to express your feelings and ideas.

Being a shapeshifter must be like being an artist. You convey your relationship with the world around you through physical transformation. Actors do that. So do musicians, if you think of their music as an extension of themselves. Odo still values privacy, which I find really interesting. He's a security chief, and part of his job involves getting into other peoples' personal business.

But in this episode, I saw Odo deliver a passionate defense on the importance of private spaces. You can be yourself in private spaces, where no one is watching. It's interesting to me that instead of berating the young Jem'Hadar for his violent tendencies, or trying to turn him into someone else, Odo teaches the young Jem'Hadar to control himself in public, and express himself in private. If what you want to do is fight and kill, then fight and kill in the safety of a private simulation.

This idea of bifurcating the public from the private is fascinating and important to me. There is a Japanese concept known as honne and tatemae; broadly, the distinction between the face we show in public, and the person we are in private. Both identities can be wildly different. Both identities are true. Both are real. You can be multiple people in multiple different situations, and that doesn't make you a fraud. Who else but a shapeshifter would so perfectly understand the multitude of identity? All of us are many.

Odo adopts a troubled young Jem'Hadar in this episode. We don't know his name. The Jem'Hadar boy struggles with his own genetic conditioning. He was genetically designed to express certain behavior patterns, to obey certain hierarchies of power. All shapeshifters--"changelings"--are gods to the boy, and so Odo wields authority over him without even trying. Similarly, all other races are enemies. Jem'Hadar are defined by their violence, their need for destruction. They're genetically designed to be dependent on a certain enzyme, injected externally into their blood. Without this enzyme, they become uncontrollably violent. With it, they're still violent--but they're also lucid.

There's a salient line the young Jem'Hadar tells Odo. "As a shapeshifter, I know that you are better than me. And I know that everyone else in this space station is beneath me. Therefore, you must be better than everyone else."

It's really hard to break through the concrete foundation of Jem'Hadar psychology, but Odo makes a valiant effort. He tries so hard to teach the Jem'Hadar boy some enlightened ideas about equality, freedom of choice, justice, lawfulness. He's trying to instruct the Jem'Hadar boy, but the problem is that his psychological programming can't be undone by logic and reason.

The Jem'Hadar aren't driven by logic or reason. They're driven by violence and power, which they internalize into their own logical arguments. They've been programmed from an early age to think a certain way, to treat everyone other than themselves as enemies. Every feeling the boy has--isolation, confusion, hope, admiration--is filtered through the lens of competition, domination, and violence.

And in the end, Odo can't really save him. Odo believes that everyone can choose who they want to be, and even if you're born into one culture or species, you don't have to live the same way everyone else of that species does. But either he can't get through to the Jem'Hadar, or his psychological programming is too strong.

For my part, I'm not convinced Odo was wrong to try. I just think his methods were inadequate. You can't teach a Jem'Hadar not to crave violence just through a few days of lessons. Undoing that kind of programming takes a lot of effort, and it's never a smooth process.

I knew an older guy, back in middle school, who'd impart brotherly wisdom to me now and then. Something he said that still sticks with me is: "Everyone is many people. You're one person at work. One person with friends and family. One person with your spouse. One person in public. And one person when you know nobody is looking."

The Greek word for "persona" comes from the name of the mask worn by Athenian actors. We all wear masks in front of different people. The person we are underneath--sometimes we're the only one who knows who that is. Sometimes even we don't know.

This was a bittersweet episode. Odo and Sisko both experience critical moments as fathers. Sisko realizes he underestimated his son. Odo treated the young Jem'Hadar as his adopted son, and in the end, he overestimated his own influence and the Jem'Hadar's willingness to change.

DS9 S3.E5 - Second Skin

Season 3, Episode 5 - "Second Skin," or "Shampoo and Conditioning"

"Treason, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder."

I'd be a little annoyed at Garak's talent for theatrical larceny if he wasn't so entertaining. It's a little unfair to Nana Visitor and Kira Nerys that Garak, with something like ten minutes of screen time, steals the entire show. I'll explain later.

"Second Skin" is the third, fourth, fifth-or-so episode exploring Cardassian mind games and psychological torture. I went through about three-fourths of this episode paying a nominal degree of attention, because I'd seen it all before. I've seen Cardassians kidnap their enemies and subject them to insidious psychological tortures exquisitely devised to extract information and scar the subject's ego forever.

One of the first truly great DS9 episodes--"Duet"--was about false identities and the lengths a Cardassian will go to conceal their true feelings. Cardassia is a culture enslaved by its neurotic need to be Cardassian; the masks worn by Cardassians become second skins, impossible to remove.

To that end, I wasn't really surprised by anything I'd seen in "Second Skin" until the very end. I'd seen Cardassians play with the heads of everyone from Picard to O'Brien. It seemed only inevitable that Kira have her turn on the Gaslight Ferris Wheel.

"Second Skin" has Kira kidnapped, transformed into the daughter of a Cardassian Legate, and pressured into believing her entire life was an elaborate deep-cover lie of an agent of the Obsidian Order. Kira is not Kira at all, but Iliana Ghemor, or so they would have me believe. The problem is, no matter how hard Cardassian Jake Gyllenhaal wants me to believe it, I know Kira Nerys is Kira Nerys. This is an incontrovertible fact. I can't possibly suspend my disbelief long enough to believe the premise of this episode, so I don't feel any suspense.

Kira doesn't crack either. Not really. She plays this episode with a completely straight face. She's an absolute stick-in-the-mud and refuses to play nice with the Cardassians. She has no sympathy at all for Tekeny Ghemor, a doting and worried father convinced that Kira--that is, Iliana--is his beloved daughter come home and suffering from a terrible loss of memory.

For the longest time, I was convinced I was one step ahead of the Cardassians, and by extension, one step ahead of this episode. I was so sure Ghemor and Entek were playing an elaborate game of Good Cardassian Bad Cardassian in order to trick Kira into -- into what, exactly? That was the problem with this episode that I couldn't quite resolve. Why go through all this trouble just to mess with Kira's head? Cardassians, with the exception of Garak, aren't trolls.

If there's anything I've noticed about Season 3, it's that this season really wants to (forgive me for using this phrase) subvert my expectations. It's as if DS9's writers are keenly aware of the tropes of their own IP, and enjoy stringing along viewers who know exactly how "this whole Cardassian thing is going ot pan out," and then throwing a fourth act twist my way.

In this case I admit the twist was clever enough to pique my attention.

The Cardassians never wanted Kira at all. They wanted Tekeny Ghemor, the proud Legate, the doting father. Ghemor is a dissident, and Cardassia is a police state. Even Legates fall under the surveillance of the Obsidian Order, whose insistence on cultural purity and state-enforced loyalty extend to the highest reaches of Cardassian government. Cardassia has a very Soviet-style political milieu, where every Cardassian public official shakes with their left hand and carries a poniard behind their back with their right.

The only thing more satisfying than being a good Cardassian is killing a bad Cardassian.

Maybe that's why Garak takes so much obvious pleasure in vaporizing Corbin Entek during a daring rescue operation? The last ten minutes moved in a blur. Kira figures out what's going on. Corbin anticipates this and moves to intercept Kira and Legate Ghemor. Then Garak, Sisko, and Odo intercept Corbin and rescue Kira. Garak delivers a few brilliant one-liners worthy of a swashbuckling musketeer swinging to the rescue on a chandelier, then phases Entek into a landing a role in Spiderman: Far From Home.

It's hard for me to really qualify whether I like this episode, because it's hard for me to actively dislike any episodes of DS9. Unlike TNG, Season 3 hasn't had any weak episodes so far. I haven't run into any ridiculously campy episodes or cringe-worthy scripts. DS9 is so consistently good that its set its own bar consistently high.

If Second Skin were an episode of TNG, I would've loved it. Measured by DS9's high standard, it's merely pretty good.

DS9 S3.E4 - Equilibrium

Season 3, Episode 4 - "Equilibrium," or "Jadzia Flips A Table"

A Trill symbiont is legion. Every Trill host that bears a symbiont is a gestalt entity. The memories and experiences of previous hosts, their personalities and their emotions, become threads in the tapestry of a host. The act of joining is carefully curated. Hosts must be disciplined, must exercise self-control, and must possess a spirit wide enough to accommodate so many minds. For this reason, only a few Trill ever become hosts--and yet the basis of Trill culture has the symbiont at its foundation. Everyone aspires to be a host, even though very few Trill can ever become a host.

What happens when something goes wrong? DS9 has a habit of asking that question. Where TNG was concerned with the Enterprise's relationships with the cultures and planets they visit, DS9 is more concerned with the problems of alien cultures. It's a question the show asks again and again. What happens when the Cardassian system of oppression unravels itself? What happens when Bajorans become terrorists? What happens when Klingon obsession with honor leads them to destroying themselves?

I suppose it's only reasonable that the Trill should have their turn on the Wheel of Cultural Deconstruction. I admit I didn't see this episode coming, largely because the "Equilibrium" plays itself along the lines of familiar Star Trek tropes--a crewmember behaves irrationally, which leads to medical investigations, which leads to a potentially dangerous treatment--that the true stakes of the episode aren't obvious until the very end.

For about thirty minutes, I was convinced this episode was about Jadzia Dax struggling with a psychological condition related to being Trill. It wasn't until the last ten minutes that I realized "Equilibrium" was about how Trill society is built on a lie, and how vulnerable it is to completely falling apart.

Briefly: Jadzia Dax discovers she can play an instrument like a maestro despite having no previous experience or talent for music. She doesn't know why. She loses her temper at Sisko, threatens Kira's life, and doesn't know why. She hears a melody and doesn't know why. She has vivid, violent hallucinations and doesn't know why.

Bashir, Jadzia, and Sisko try to discover the source of her troubles. Something is imbalanced. There's some kind of Trill hormone or enzyme or something associated with sanity or control over her gestalt personalities, and it's a lot lower than it should be and dropping fast. Bashir doesn't know what to do, so they head to the Trill homeworld to find out.

What I liked about "Equilibrium" was how well this episode balanced the personal and the universal. I loved the personal moments between Jadzia and Bashir. I know Bashir has feelings for Jadzia, but he's a gentleman and a professional in her presence. The way she confided her fear of doctors in him was touching, and his response was likewise heart-warming. I admit I sympathize with Jadzia. It's easy to be afraid of doctors, but Bashir's answer--a doctor is there to help you, and to heal you--is reassuring and reminds me of just why I love Bashir as much as I do. He even offers her a bunk in his quarters, and there's nothing sexual about it. (Well, aside from the subtle tension.)

"Equilibrium" also does an excellent job staying internally consistent. This is one of those episodes that unravels slowly over time. As Bashir and Sisko dig into the mystery behind Jadzia's condition, they discover an elaborate and suspicious cover-up and evidence of a conspiracy. Indeed, Jadzia isn't suffering from a psychological condition at all. She is host to one more mind than she ever knew. Somewhere in the history of her symbiotic joinings, Dax joined with a violent, troubled (but musically brilliant) young Trill named Joran. Joran's mind is part of the elaborate, many-faceted mind of Jadzia Dax, but because she never knew of his presence, and never internalized his personality, Joran has been reasserting himself over her.

Joran is a ghost buried by the Trill Symbiosis Commission, concealed and locked away inside Dax's mind. His life, his crimes, and the records of his joining were all systematically purged. But he still exists inside Dax, as a part of Dax.

This is a subtle, multi-layered episode with a lot going on. In a way, Joran is a metaphor for the fragility of Trill society. Joran was able to join with a symbiont despite being clearly unqualified. He's living (well, formerly living) proof that Trill society is built on a lie. At least half of all Trill are capable of joining, which means the elaborate rituals and traditions of the Symbiosis Commission and the Academy are all false. The Commission erased any records of Joran's existence in order to save their society.

What would happen if everyone learned the truth? The symbiont organism would become a market commodity. Trill would buy and sell symbionts like slaves, and the entire moral framework of Trill culture would fall apart to the ravenous excesses of a market. An entire species might be wiped out in the process.

Sisko keeps the Trill's secret, but I can't help but wonder what will happen when someone else discovers the truth, someone less scrupulous than Sisko. An entire society cannot be built on a lie and expect to last. It's like building a house on a shaky foundation. Sooner or later, the Trill are going to have to come to terms with reality.