O'Brien is fleeing in a runabout, reflecting on the circumstances that led him there. The last few days have been a slow descent into paranoia for him, with everyone aboard the station behaving oddly. Though he worries it has something to do with pending peace talks being prepared with an alien race, he can't explain how the change has come over every single person he knows -- even his own wife and daughter.
I remembered this episode of Deep Space Nine more clearly than most from the second season, because I remember it being one of the truly great episodes of the season -- a sign of the improvements to come in the series. I remember effective suspense. and a great twist I don't think anyone could have seen coming. Of course, I also specifically remembered that twist as I now watched the episode again, and that made all the difference.
I generally write these Star Trek reviews without regard to spoilers. The series are decades old, and I assume the readers who hang in with these longer-than-usual posts have watched them already. Still, it feels like I ought to throw up a warning here and say I'm totally going to spoil the twist here. It's worth noting because I did think the episode was really great the first time around, and really not the second time.
So, having honored the internet custom, let's get to it: O'Brien is a duplicate, created by aliens and sent back as a sleeper agent to sabotage the coming diplomacy. (He's actually called a "replicant," an homage to Blade Runner selected by episode writer Paul Robert Coyle because "android" felt too evocative of Data and "clone" was not accurate by his reckoning.) The episode is more or less what it appears: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's just that there's only one Body Snatcher. It's the main character, and he doesn't know it. The weird behavior he sees in everyone else is their reaction to his potential alienness.
This is a really fun premise that I think collapses under even the slightest scrutiny -- which is, of course, exactly what you give it when you watch it a second time. First, the replicant technology is overpowered and/or underused. If aliens have the ability to read the mind of O'Brien and transfer it into a replicant with such fidelity that even the copy thinks he's real, why do they even need to do that? Is O'Brien's knowledge itself somehow not enough to carry off the espionage they have in mind? What's the sleeper agent going to do that's so much more effective? Indeed, to make the audience believe everyone else is "possessed" and O'Brien is the hero, we don't see O'Brien do anything nefarious, making him basically the least effective sleeper agent ever.
The far bigger problem, though, is that the weird behavior of everyone else in the episode makes no more sense once you actually know the twist. While you can understand why our heroes might not take the word of "some strange aliens" at face value, the measures they take to contain a major security threat are just this shy of non-existent. Even short of throwing O'Brien in the brig (which, obviously, would be pretty terrible if there's any reasonable chance they're wrong about him), they could be more insistent and more exhaustive with Dr. Bashir's tests. They could relieve him of duty. There's some hand waving at the end about how they didn't know what the replicant would do if found out, but it's hard to believe those consequences could be worse than letting him roam the station.
In a way, the entire episode becomes a Keiko episode once you know the twist, and if anything, she's underreacting more than anyone. She could declare a sudden trip to Earth to see family, anything to avoid sleeping at night next to someone who might suddenly kill her and her daughter, for all she knows. Instead, she hangs in there (understandably shifty and weird) until... at some point I guess everyone gets confirmation that O'Brien is a replicant?
The atmosphere of the piece works even if the logistics don't, with several great scenes. The dinner where Miles wonders if maybe his own wife is poisoning him is wonderfully tense, framed in unusual, super-tight closeups. The behavior change of Odo is creepy, between when O'Brien first gets to him and later "everyone else" has. There are also fun little bits of character sprinkled throughout -- from learning about O'Brien (his mother died, his father remarried, his birthday is in September) to getting concentrated doses of quintesstial hothead Kira and science-mode Dax when O'Brien listens to their log entries.
Other moments don't work so great. The framing device of having O'Brien narrate his last few days in a log are dull -- and, as it turns out, originally unplanned. The first script reportedly came in short, and without the option to cut away from O'Brien to other characters (whose conversations would give the twist away), the writers came up with the flashback structure as a way of padding the page count. Unfortunately, it feels like a detective device, a film noir element, which is very much a different style than the "body snatchers" vibe the story is trying for. The action at the end is rather languidly paced too, between small sets (that don't really allow running) and generically dry music (as dictated by producer Rick Berman's sensibilities about how Star Trek music should sound).
Other observation:
- Well, not so much as observation as some research I did: another way of padding the episode -- but one more grounded in established character -- was to have O'Brien calm himself in the runabout by singing "Minstrel Boy" (a callback to the Next Generation episode "The Wounded"). What, you don't remember this in the episode? Apparently, an error in the script had him naming the wrong shuttle chasing him during the scene. They filmed the mistake, and couldn't cut around it or go back for a re-shoot, so the entire sequence was cut.
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