DS9 Flashback: Babel

I remembered "Babel" as being one of the real turkeys of season one of Deep Space Nine. When I watched it recently, however, I found it wasn't really as bad as I'd recalled.

A virus spreads aboard the station that afflicts people with aphasia, scrambling their minds and rendering them incapable of communication. When the disease turns out to be genetically engineered, Major Kira must track down the Bajoran freedom fighters who created it during the Cardassian occupation.

There are enjoyable elements throughout "Babel," but there's something about the "everyone contracts a disease" premise that feels to me more like The Next Generation than Deep Space Nine. That turns out to literally be the case, in fact; co-creator and producer Michael Piller said that the "aphasia" premise had been around for years at Next Generation, pitched by outside writer Sally Caves (who also gave them "Hollow Pursuits").

The script does garnish the premise with a few Deep Space Nine elements to compensate. The avenue into the story is O'Brien, trying to keep up with the constant repairs that this falling-apart station needs -- a far cry from the pristine environment of the Enterprise. When the disease spreads, the father-son relationship of the Siskos is placed front and center. (On TNG, a ship-wide crisis at this point in the series simply had Beverly talk about her off-screen son, who didn't even appear in the episode.) How the disease spreads is also a DS9 geopolitical flourish; what is initially suspected to be Cardassian sabotage turns out to be a defunct counterinsurgency by the Bajorans.

There's also more screen time for the emerging frenemy relationship between Odo and Quark. Again, we see them verbally spar with each other without mercy, but the moment someone from the outside threatens (the customer who wants to force-feed Quark bad soup), they've got each other's backs. And the last act, which leaves Odo and Quark the only uninfected characters on the entire station, is a real showcase for both characters. It's the best part of the episode, though the fact that we've seen so little of the characters in their element so far does make it a little harder to appreciate them being out of their element here.

Still, it was plenty of insight for the man playing Quark. Armin Shimerman has said in interviews that this was the moment when he felt he started to really grasp the character, thrilled to be in charge alone in Ops. "Ah, this is the character," he said, "this guy who likes to have a good time, who enjoys life and who feels that no problem is insurmountable. And that fun-loving spirit and delight became ingrained in my character at that moment."

He wasn't the only actor working hard this episode. Nana Visitor has a few great accents tossed in, from Kira's swaggering walk through the promenade to the way she punctuates a threat by actually getting in a guy's face as if to breathe virus directly onto him. But it's not all fun and games for the cast. This gibberish "aphasia dialogue" requires some real commitment. It doesn't just feel like nonsense words strung together, it's as though the writers deliberately picked things that would sound silly too. The whole cast has to just power through like it's Shakespeare.

Other observations:

• Many people probably recognize their own work day in O'Brien's, constantly being pulled in different directions by different people to do different things.

• Major Kira's makeup in this episode is way over the top, with cheeks so brightly rouged that she looks like a James Bond villain or something.

• Quark mentions an "old Ferengi saying" in this episode, but the idea to group these things as "Rules of Acquisition" hasn't been hit on yet by the writers.

• I wonder if Bajorans are predominately left-handed rather than right-handed, given the placement of their combadges on their uniforms?

• Odo's not the only one who doesn't know the rules of Dabo; the audience is definitely getting some mixed clues about it. In this episode, the way Quark talks about hitting "Dabo," it sounds like a bad thing. This would make sense if the game was named like Craps, for something you don't want to have happen. But before many more episodes, "Dabo!" would clearly become a great event for the whole table.

There are some super-cheesy moments in this episode. But there are also enough solid moments in the mix to make the episode more good overall than bad. I give "Babel" a B.