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.