Exploring in the Gamma Quadrant, our heroes come upon a planet in squalor, afflicted by the Dominion with a deadly bioengineered plague known as the Blight. Dr. Bashir is determined to help these people by finding a cure, but he's soon humbled -- the disease seems to be far beyond his skills.
Show runner Ira Steven Behr was inspired here by two sources -- a 1995 historical drama called Restoration, and the recent death of an office assistant, Gregg Duffy Long, lost to AIDS. He wanted to bring those threads together into a story for Bashir, but didn't have time to craft the script himself. He brought in Naren Shankar, who'd worked on The Next Generation, to have a go at it. Shankar dropped the AIDS metaphor to a degree (saying that he didn't feel these aliens were "outcasts or pariahs, which is how AIDS patients are often perceived"), but nevertheless presented a society afflicted with a plague that felt very real.
The Blight brings into sharp focus the conflicting opinions surrounding assisted suicide, the clash between pain management and the wishes of a patient vs. those who think of such measures as immoral. And the society of the Teplans can be seen as a metaphor for many kinds of people who have learned suspicion the hard way -- the character of Trevean speaks of many snake oil salesmen who have promised cures in the past only to steal what little his people have left.
Bashir arrives on what he thinks is the moral high ground (written in the beginning of the episode much more like the unknowingly pompous character of season one). Why wouldn't he? In every other Star Trek episode before this, the doctor would indeed find the cure within the hour, then warp off triumphant to the next adventure. We get a bittersweet ending instead, with the woman who trusted Bashir the most, Ekoria, dying as she gives birth to her son; that child and its generation can be vaccinated from the disease, but there is nothing to be done for this generation.
This episode doesn't have a B plot, an important and valuable decision that makes plenty of room to flesh out Teplan society. We learn about their customs surrounding death in a way that makes it meaningful when Ekoria dips into the stash meant to feast her death so she can feed Dax and Bashir. We see the uphill battle of getting test subjects to volunteer for Bashir's research, and this drives it home all the more when his hubris does them more harm than good. We see that Trevean really isn't wrong to believe as he does, given the life he's lived, which makes his conversion in the end a meaningful turn for the character. And in making all this struggle real, it matters in the end that Bashir isn't able to help these people as much as he'd like.
This episode was directed by Rene Auberjonois, and I think it's a real milestone for him behind the camera. He's been good with actors in all his episodes -- and is again here. He gets great performances from Terry Farrell and Alexander Siddig, with Dax translating Bashir's doctor-speak into a more humane bedside manner. Dax's "tough love" in Bashir's darkest moment is exceptional -- him realizing his arrogance for thinking he could cure the disease in a week, her calling out his real arrogance for thinking that if he couldn't find a cure, there must not be one.
But this time out, Auberjonois demonstrates a skill with the camera that matches his facility with the performances. There's inventive staging throughout, and numerous standout shots. A clever switch of focus ties Bashir's bubbling beaker to his patient/assistant Ekoria. A slow zoom in on Bashir during an examination of Ekoria lets us know from his expression how dire the situation has become. And there's an amazing shot near the end that flies across the village, from the people gathering around the healthy baby to an isolated Bashir who watches their celebration without sharing in it. (It's the sort of thing one could do easily with a drone today, but back in 1996 must have been a hell of an effort.)
Of course, it helps Auberjonois that the show was willing to devote a good amount of money to this episode. There's extensive filming outdoors, on location, to create the village -- and great use of matte paintings (both day and night) to further expand what we see. There's also very early use of a form of motion-capture technology to depict the spreading lesions of the Blight; rather than do a hokey "werewolf transformation" that required an actor to hold a pose through multiple makeup applications, a computer was used to animate the lesions based on dots applied to the actors' faces.
Other observations:
- Though, as I mentioned, there is no B plot to this episode as such, there is a tonally dissonant opening scene that involves Quark hacking computers to advertise his bar with an obnoxious jingle. It's good for a laugh... in an episode that really shouldn't have many laughs. It's a good thing this thread isn't followed throughout the episode.
- Because Dax gives away her hair clip early in the episode, we get to see her with her hair down through most of it. It's a striking look that I think could have been used more often.
- The Dax/Bashir pairing in this episode is especially good when you remember that just a couple seasons earlier, they really couldn't have been put together for so long without him getting awkwardly flirtatious with her.
- Who actually did engineer the Blight? The Teplans attribute it to the Jem'Hadar, but that sort of medical expertise doesn't seem like their thing. Nor can I easily believe the changelings would know enough of the actual biology of "solids" to work out such a thing. Perhaps it's the Vorta. In any case, the twist that using technology to try to cure it actually makes it worse is an especially cruel touch.
- Bashir's story about his "first surgery," on his teddy bear Kukalaka, is a nice bit of character building. Neat to still be learning things about the main characters four years in.
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