Sisko and Dukat are marooned together on a planet, awaiting rescue from the Defiant. The search has a ticking clock, a time limit at which point the ship must leave for another mission. But there's more of a time bomb in the mix too: Dukat is mentally unstable, having full conversations with hallucinatory figures, and lying to Sisko about their true situation.
"Waltz" is almost a one-act play; were it not for the cutaways to the Defiant, it would be a story that takes place primarily on a single set, and primarily between two actors. There are even long stretches without any music underscoring it. Who better then to direct this "play" than actor Rene Auberjonois? His earliest episodes of Deep Space Nine were almost too theatrical in their staging, but he always had a knack for getting great performances from his castmates. By this, his eighth episode, his skills behind the camera had caught up. He's able to do a lot to make this simple scenario more visually dynamic, with very dark lighting you must sometimes strain to see, creative staging of the imaginary characters, and extreme closeups to emphasize the unraveling of Dukat.
Still, I'm of two minds about this episode. Deep Space Nine is the Star Trek most interested in shades of gray, and until this point had given even Dukat some redeeming character qualities. This episode abandons what the show is good at, casting him in the Kathy Bates role of Stephen King's "Misery," to lie to and lord over a wounded Sisko from whom he seeks to extract something he desperately needs.
On the other hand, one could argue that Dukat really shouldn't be very sympathetic. The writers did. Show runner Ira Steven Behr complained of actually reading fans defending Dukat with arguments like "only five million Bajorans were killed during the Occupation," and felt that attitudes had to change. In Ronald Moore's final script, what might have been subtext is explicitly made text: Sisko says that there is such a thing as true evil, and Dukat is it. While the show still had more than a season to go at this point, it clearly wanted a real villain for the long term, and Dukat really was the best choice for that.
One imagines many of the production choices here were made to save money -- we don't see the destruction of the Honshu, or Dukat's rescue of Sisko -- but the limitations actually serve this story. As soon as we see Dukat strike up a conversation with a Weyoun we know isn't really there, everything he has said becomes suspect. How did they really get to this planet? Is it really as desolate as Dukat claims? Does Dukat even know that he's lying to Sisko, or does his break from reality extend beyond imagined people?
Still, Dukat's psychosis isn't as crisply delineated as it might have been. His vision of Damar is there to stroke his ego and provide the adoration he craves. But his visions of Weyoun and Kira are fairly interchangeable, taunting and belligerent figures who take joy in Dukat's failures. All three are fun to watch, as Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs, and Nana Visitor all shade their real characters with a streak of venom, but it feels like the opportunity to really get inside Dukat's head is lost. Much of the episode is just playing the character's authoritarian hits: he never got enough credit for trying to be a nice guy, but he doesn't deserve any of the blame for the dark pages of his past.
Things do shift in the final act, though. After Sisko spends much of the episode bottling up his true feelings, he first deploys sarcasm, then acts as devil's advocate, to goad Dukat into revealing his true self. And what Dukat reveals is ugly. He quite literally regards Cardassians as a superior race. For the Bajorans' crime of not accepting their subservience, of not loving him enough, Dukat wants to kill all of them.
Though it's Dukat's episode, and a showcase for Marc Alaimo, Avery Brooks does get a lot to play here: feigning greater weakness to relax his foe, providing just enough pushback to Dukat to avoid suspicion without triggering him, and ultimately serving up a full meal of Sisko's trademark righteous anger. There's a physical struggle between them in the end, and plenty of verbal sparring matches along the way.
I could do without the scenes on the Defiant, though. There's an attempt to subvert a Star Trek trope here that I do appreciate -- for once, the starship captain is not going to blow past a deadline to continue a search and rescue. But I feel this subplot lies to us too much. The Defiant does hang around a few moments extra in the end. There's also a Silence of the Lambs-style bait-and-switch where we're made to think our heroes are about to arrive on the scene, only to discover they're at a different scene. With lies and distortions of reality being such a key part of the Dukat story, I could have done without these deceptions in the objective reality of the B-plot.
Other observations:
- No prison outfit for Dukat? Does he just wear that Cardassian military uniform day in, day out? He must smell pretty ripe by now.
- Dukat calls Sisko "Benjamin" a lot in this episode. As I remember it, anyway, he's hardly ever (never?) done this before. It's definitely part of his revisionist effort to paint the two as "old friends."
- It seems that in the end, Dukat sends out a distress signal that leads the Defiant to Sisko. Why does he do that? He's already committed to killing all Bajorans, and seeing to it that their Emissary won't save them. So... I don't get it.
- In early outlining of the episodes, the writers planned to do "inside Dukat's head" in somewhat the same way "Distant Voices" had gone "inside Bashir's head." Sisko would come see Dukat in prison, but then we'd push into Dukat's mind, where he was running the station with Kira as his wife. The fantasy life would slowly unravel, intercut with conversations with Sisko in the real world. But when the writers felt that the Sisko material was where the more compelling material could be mined, they reconfigured the story into its final form.
- Another revision came late, when the writers cut a final threat Dukat was to have made to Sisko: "You too will learn what it's like to lose a child." This might have better explained Dukat's decision to let Sisko live, but it certainly would have locked them into too restrictive a story. The writers wisely chose not to have this hanging over any future Jake/Ben interactions in the future.
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