DS9 Flashback: Captive Pursuit

The production schedule of broadcast television is a merciless, inexorable beast. Sometimes, bad episodes get made even when everyone knows it at the time, because something has to get in front of the camera to make the air date. Later on, with perspective, the creative forces behind a show recognize their "less than best" efforts. Not so with Deep Space Nine's "Captive Pursuit."

The first visitor from the Gamma Quadrant arrives through the wormhole, a secretive reptilian alien who calls himself Tosk. (Name? Species? Job? He's secretive about that too.) O'Brien tries to befriend him and draw him out, but things grow more complicated when more Gamma Quadrant visitors arrive, hunting Tosk for sport like an animal.

There are a surprising number of people behind the series who regard "Captive Pursuit" as one of the best episodes of the first season. It's understandable actor Colm Meaney would feel this way, since it focuses on his character, O'Brien. (Though he cited less personal reasons in an interview, noting that the question of whether to interfere with an alien society's patently barbaric practices was a "classic Star Trek story.") Producers and series co-creators Rick Berman and Michael Piller also called this a favorite from year one.

I think perhaps the good feelings stem from the way this show marked a big step forward in establishing the identity of Deep Space Nine as a separate thing from The Next Generation. It's a problem that comes to the station, not a "new life form" the crew "seeks out." And the resolution is more morally ambiguous. For one, O'Brien cheats the straight and narrow rules to help Tosk in the end. Moreover, it's really not lasting help; Tosk goes free only to be surely captured somewhere down the line, and certainly without any change to the society that engages in this bloodsport.

All that is great on paper, at least. The problem is that on screen, it's not very engaging. To my mind, it comes down to problems with pacing and urgency. No one seems particularly bothered that Tosk is withholding information... though you could argue that almost makes sense, given that Tosk doesn't really act like someone being hunted. He should be running for his life, afraid he could be caught any moment, but gives only lip service to the idea that he's in a rush. Perhaps the current depiction of Saru on Star Trek: Discovery casts a shadow here; Saru has learned to live with the feeling of being hunted, yet still comes off more credibly like "prey" than Tosk does here.

The pacing remains lax even when the hunters arrive. There's a fire fight on the promenade that includes plenty of phaser shots and even a loose sense of tactics, but it all feels less kinetic than a laser tag or paintball match, never mind a situation where lives are actually on the line. And the action suffers even more from Rick Berman's edict that the musical scores of his Trek shows never do anything flashy. There's no tension or sense of stakes at all.

It also doesn't help that Tosk plays like a first draft of a later element of Deep Space Nine that here hadn't been thought out fully. So much of Tosk ended up a part of the Jem'Hadar -- existing only to serve a more powerful race, the reptilian appearance, the ability to cloak. Even the actor who plays Tosk, Scott MacDonald, would wind up playing a Jem'Hadar in a later episode.

There are a few decent character moments scattered throughout that do pull the episode back to middling. Because O'Brien doesn't know his new commander well enough yet, he can't confide in Sisko his plan to set Tosk free. (Even though Sisko implicitly approves of it in the end with a sly "I guess that one got by us.") This is the also episode where Odo makes explicit the fact that he never carries a weapon, a detail that actor Rene Auberjonois then dutifully safeguarded going forward any time someone tried to hand him a phaser prop.

However, the one element of the episode that plays worst today is the opening scene, in which a dabo girl comes to Sisko to complain that Quark has been sexually harassing her, and has even made accepting such harassment a condition of her employment. It's quite timely to be watching this scene now, when similar allegations are cropping up daily, and being taken seriously. On the other hand, how dated the scene appears, in that it's played just as a comedic slide whistle, a cold open to start the episode that has no thematic connection to the plot and is never brought up again. Still, it could have been worse. According to episode director Corey Allen, an early draft of this scene actually had Sisko flirting with the vulnerable dabo girl and trying to land a date. Whoever saw fit to cut that, bless you.

Other observation:

• Just this one, really: how bonkers is it that anyone can just ask the computer where the weapons are stored on the station (whether they're in a "secure" area or not)?

The weakest episode of Deep Space Nine so far, I give "Captive Pursuit" a C. The show had been hitting better to this point than The Next Generation in its early days, but it had to stumble eventually.