The down-on-his-luck Martus Mazur arrives on Deep Space Nine, and is promptly arrested by Odo for engaging in an investment scam. When Mazur's cell mate gives him a strange alien gaming device, his luck begins to change. The charges are dropped, he's released, and he quickly finds an investor to open a wildly successful casino to rival Quark's. And his is not the only tale of strange luck; all over the station, wildly improbable events (good and bad) are coming to pass.
In various interviews with writers and producers over the years, this episode has widely been acknowledged as one of the stinkers of season two. To hear their stories, it sounds like they were worn down over time into believing there was a good kernel of a story here. Maybe even there was, though it certainly wasn't realized in the end product.
Outside writers had apparently been coming into Star Trek for years pitching episodes about chaos theory and/or the butterfly effect, stories about the great impact that small and unlikely events can have. None of them gained traction until Jim Trombetta pitched an episode about Quark finding a device that spiked his luck at the expense of other people's. But even then, the pitch wasn't a slam dunk. Show runner Michael Piller bought the idea in season one, but then sat on it for almost a year as he tried to figure out the right way to improve on it.
The angle Piller eventually settled on was to give Quark a recurring foil, a Harry Mudd-style rival who might pop up on the show from time to time and mess with his business (figuratively and literally). Piller got the idea to combine this with an idea that had been floating around The Next Generation writers' room for years: "what if we met that trouble-making son of Guinan's that she mentioned that one time?" Ultimately, Whoopi Goldberg wasn't available for filming in this episode as the writers had hoped, but the idea of an El-Aurian using his "listening" skills for self-enrichment had become so rooted in the story that it stayed to the end even when the Guinan angle was dropped.
With this background, it's possible to understand how this episode ended up being so much about the guest star. It was supposed to be Guinan's son, which would have been of some interest to long-time Trek fans. It was supposed to be a new semi-recurring character, which would have justified the set-up time (just as similar time had been spend building up Rom, Vedeks Winn and Bareil, and Garak). But absent those angles, there's far too much time spent on Martus Mazur. We get his whole hard luck story, a detailed tracking of his rise and fall, a subplot of him hound-dogging around, and more. All this comes at the expense of the main characters getting meaningful screen time in this episode. Mazur's story only really touches Quark in any significant way.
There might have still been something salvageable here if Mazur had actually gone on to be a recurring character. But it feels like the casting doomed that right out of the gate. Don't get me wrong, I do love Chris Sarandon in The Princess Bride. But none of that gleeful swagger is detectable here. Mazur seems to take no joy in besting Quark, which is really the one and only requirement a long-lasting rivalry needs. As staff writer Ira Steven Behr put it in one interview: "We were looking for a Michael Caine, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels type, and Chris Sarandon was a lot more stolid and less effervescent." Dirty Rotten Scoundrels between Quark and a recurring Harry Mudd-type character? Man, that would have been fun. But why revisit Martus Mazur, ever, when it didn't work the first time around?
As a result of all this, the episode's secondary story line ends up being by far the far most compelling part. It's also about a rivalry, a racquetball squabble between the aging O'Brien and the skilled Bashir. We see Bashir squirming not to embarrass or offend the man he still is trying to befriend. We get the moments in the episode when the comedy really works, such as when sci-fi-altered luck takes O'Brien's side and he suddenly can't lose. We also get what feels to me like the first genuinely loving interaction between Miles and Keiko. Up until this point, Keiko has too often been depicted as a controlling shrew (as written by young, unmarried men); here she actually tries to console Miles and talk him out chasing lost youth, but then comes around and fully supports him when she sees how much this means to him.
Other observations:
- Like Martus Mazur, racquetball was another idea planned as recurring but ultimately abandoned. The set was built over the existing holosuite. Putting it up and taking it down again proved to be costly and time consuming, so by the next time O'Brien and Bashir needed some friendly competition, they'd settled on darts.
- Usually on Star Trek, it's the holodeck functioning in unintended ways that create dangerous consequences. This time, it's the replicator. Apparently, a civilian can just have it scan, enlarge, and mass produce some random alien item without anyone knowing exactly how it works or what it does. Surely that won't be a problem.
1 comment:
Needs to be tagged as Star Trek
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