The Bajoran Gratitude Festival is in full swing, a holiday season in which Bajorans set aside their troubles and focus on the good. But trouble comes to the station all the same. Lwaxana Troi arrives to comfort Odo after his sad meeting with his people... and she unknowingly brings a medical condition that psychically projects her feelings of lust onto everyone around her. Meanwhile, Keiko returns from her job on Bajor for a short stay. But she and Miles are feeling friction in their marriage as never before.
Show runner Ira Steven Behr deliberately wanted something fun here, knowing that the intensely dramatic "Past Tense" two-parter was next up on the schedule. The idea was pitched to basically do Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on the station, and this was the result -- an episode Behr admits was "dangerously wacky." The lightness itself wasn't a bad idea; as staff writer Ronald Moore observed in one interview, the original series would do a "romp" every now and then, leading to famous episodes like "The Trouble With Tribbles." The Next Generation, by comparison, had been (in his words) "so straight-laced and stiff."
Unfortunately, this particular "funny" episode just feels like a hopelessly watered-down version of TNG's "Sarek": an aging diplomat inflicts psychic mischief on the crew, making them act out of character. But horny instead of angry. Near the end of the episode, it's suggested that people are only acting on preexisting latent attraction. But that doesn't stand up to scrutiny when you think back on what you just watched. Jake chases Kira. Bareil chases Dax. Kira and Bashir chase each other -- funny only if you know those actors were a couple in real life. Dax chases Sisko -- an idea so out of place that it's how Sisko immediately knows something unnatural is going on. Quark chases Keiko -- an idea that does nothing but embarrass everyone (Armin Shimerman called this his least favorite of all DS9 episodes).
Even if the humor had been done well, it still would have clashed with the more serious elements of this episode -- elements which actually are pretty good, if you consider them in isolation. Lwaxana's reason for coming to the station is actually quite sensitive when you think about it; she's the only one who has ever really seen Odo be emotionally vulnerable, and she's right to think that Odo needs a friend now.
Odo's crush on Kira is also articulated here for the first time (again, sensitively), by Lwaxana Troi, who knows what it's like to love someone who doesn't love you back. This is the culmination of something that began back in the second season, when the writers noticed (in "The Collaborator") that Rene Auberjonois seemed to be shading his performance with an unexpressed love for Kira. But this expression of actual love gets bulldozed by the facsimile that dominates the main story line.
An even more profound exploration of love is happening in the B plot, focusing on a real trial in Miles and Keiko's marriage. They've been suffering the strain of living apart, and now Keiko reveals they'll have to keep doing that for half a year longer than they'd planned. Minor squabbles over unimportant things explode into full-blown arguments. Each of them is forced to really think about what they'd sacrifice for the sake of the relationship.
Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao each give an excellent, pained performance. And in the end, their characters recommit to loving each other more genuinely than I think any couple on Star Trek ever expressed (certainly before this episode; quite likely since too). Yet juxtaposed against the rest of this episode, you're always wondering in the back of your mind if this is a real argument they're having, or if this is also somehow being caused by Lwaxana's psychic "leakage" as well. (For the record, I doubt it is -- but I don't think the episode makes this explicitly clear.)
It's probably not a coincidence that Meaney and Chao are so good here, as actor Avery Brooks directed this episode (just as he did another time when the O'Briens were a more natural and believable couple, in "Tribunal"). Brooks shows more directorial confidence here, using several impressively long takes with complicated camera moves, allowing crew to play with lighting, and guiding actors to stretch their performances. Of this episode, he once said: "I guess it was over the top. But what is over the top, after all? If you're having a pint of Guinness and you see the foam pouring over the top, you think, 'That's great!'"
"Over the top" or not, there are some small moments, peppered throughout the episode, that really do work. There's Kira and Miles waiting side by side for their loved ones to disembark from the shuttle. There are scenes in which we see that Julian and Miles really have become the best of friends, after their initial friction. Dax sticking up for herself by throttling Bareil is the rare comic moment in this episode that actually is kind of funny. Then again, it may just be that the few good moments stick out because they're surrounded by such silliness.
Other observations:
- Not long after we finally got to meet Jake's girlfriend Mardah, they've broken up.
- Odo is handing off security to a Starfleet deputy for the holiday. But it's not Eddington. After the series introduced him at the start of the season, Eddington has gone missing for a long while.
- It feels to me like a particular challenge to take an alien character who always wears makeup and put them in "makeup." Kira in particular is a character who basically never dresses up. But her formal look here feels particularly well-executed.
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