DS9 Flashback: Vortex

Though all the characters on Deep Space Nine would become nuanced and interesting, the one with the most compelling hook right out the gate was arguably Odo. The mystery of who/what he is and where he comes from was articulated right in the first episode, and was revisited early on in "Vortex."

When an alien from the Gamma Quadrant is arrested for killing a Miradorn, he tries to bargain his way out of trouble with information: he claims to recognize Odo as a "changeling," knowing where the shapeshifter's people come from and how to find them. Odo is torn between getting the answers about himself he so desperately desires, and extraditing his prisoner back to the Gamma Quadrant. Further complicating things is the threat of the Miradorn victim's twin brother, who vows revenge.

Deep Space Nine aired well before the rise of "puzzle box" television. The average viewer would never have imagined we'd get an answer to Odo's background any time before the final days of the series, or that the revelation would be part of what kicked the series up to a higher level. An episode like "Vortex" was always just going to be a tease, giving us the tiniest tidbits about Odo -- information that may or may not even be true. So for me, the questions of what we learn here about changelings and whether it lines up with what the truth actually turns out to be aren't really a weak spot of this episode.

For me, the flaw is really in the character of Croden, the vehicle through which all the maybe-truths are conveyed. I find the character, both in the script itself and as portrayed by actor Cliff DeYoung, to be a complete failure. He's supposed to be a lot of things in this episode, and isn't nearly enough of any of them to make the story work. He's supposed to be desperate enough to kill, yet he's relaxed enough to loan his most prized possession (the key to his daughter's stasis pod) to a stranger. He's supposed to be charismatic enough to engender trust, yet smarmy enough to engender doubt, but on a scale of 1 to 10 between those two extremes, he remains clustered around the 4 to 6 range. He's supposed to be manipulative enough to best Odo, but instead Odo seems stupid for being dragged down to his level.

Most of all, Croden is supposed to be sympathetic because of his true motivations to save his daughter. Yet why he ever would have left her alone on a lifeless asteroid in the first place feels inexplicable. The fact that Croden's homeworld is governed by a fascist regime is supposed to put him in the right, but it's also a fact that he is a murderer (or, at the very least, is guilty of manslaughter), and the episode doesn't really give any weight at all to the moral implications of that.

Because Croden falls so flat as a character, Rene Auberjonois as Odo must do a lot of heavy lifting opposite him. The actor has given many interviews on how formative this installment was for his ideas about Odo. In particular, Auberjonois came to feel that Odo really has a soft spot for children ("even though he's sort of harumphy and grumpy with Jake and Nog"), with his feelings for Croden's daughter being why he ultimately breaks the rules and lets his prisoner go. He even bestows a rare Odo smile (his first of the series) on the young girl. You might argue how creepy it looks, though to some extent the powers-that-be knew this; recognizing how hard it was to smile in that makeup without it coming off as a Mephistophelean rictus, it would be used sparingly.

Ironically, the same episode that would tell Auberjonois so much about the emotional drive of his character would thoroughly muddy the waters on the physics of the character. Of course, the answer to "how Odo works" was always going to be "according to the needs of the story." But you'd hope for that to remain consistent at least within one episode. Yet here, Odo is both light enough to be carried by Rom as a glass on a tray, though heavy enough for Croden to remark that "you're heavier than you look." He actually shatters and breaks in glass form. He can be knocked unconscious in humanoid form. Chew on all that for a while, nitpickers.

Regretably, some of the most standout work in the episode is by the visual effects team. They repurpose nebula footage from The Wrath of Khan to create the Chamra Vortex, adding to it with great use of light and shadow on the Miradorn ship. There's also what I find to be perfectly imperfect work in replicating the same actor twice to play the two Miradorn twins. (Perhaps there was no thought of casting actual twins because one dies so early in the episode?) There's something balanced right on the edge of the Uncanny Valley in the two shots we see of the brothers together, though I think that subtly reinforces the notions that they function as two halves of one individual.

But that's about it for this episode, other than this one observation:

• This is the episode where the gag of Morn being super-talkative (even though we never see him talk) is born.

I suppose the episode carries some interest because Odo as a character is interesting. And by telling a story centered in character, the series' heart was in the right place. That's about the limit of this one for me, though. I give "Vortex" a C-.