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.
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