DS9 Flashback: Distant Voices

After more than a dozen story credits on Star Trek: The Next Generation (including the widely loved "Darmok"), writer Joe Menosky was allowed to leave Star Trek without really leaving Star Trek. He gave up his job on staff and moved to Europe, but was still allowed to lob story ideas at his former co-workers whenever he had them. One of these became the Deep Space Nine episode "Distant Voices."

Bashir is attacked by a telepathic alien, sending him in to a strange coma. Struggling against both the dreamlike environment in which he lands and his accelerated aging, Bashir must find a way to escape the mental prison. But to do it, he'll have to confront his own secrets and fears.

Menosky was known for unusual premises (like TNG's "Masks" and DS9's "Dramatis Personae"), and this started out as no exception. Bashir's comatose dreamscape was to have featured guest stars playing concepts like "youth," "age," and "joy," in a literally introspective trip through his psyche. Staff writer Ronald Moore suggested the tweak that convinced the writing staff that this far out idea might actually work: have the regular actors play parts of Bashir's psyche, and set the whole thing on a falling-apart version of the station itself.

This gives the lighting crew a chance to present the show's traditional sets in a very different... well... light. There's fun spookiness throughout, from near-black corridors to a sinister visit to Quark's bar to a broken-down Infirmary. The main cast cuts loose too; particularly fun are Armin Shimerman as a frightened Quark, and Rene Auberjonois as a hyper-suspicious Odo who doesn't even trust the other characters. There's also a fun horror movie quality to the way they're all taken down one by one.

If the end result is a bit more grounded than Joe Menosky originally conceived, he can at least take consolation that it's all still pretty weird; the episode is crammed full of dream "logic" that includes unintelligible whispering, rapid jumps in setting without explanation, a Marilyn Monroe-style rendition of "Happy Birthday," and tennis balls spilling out of opened consoles. But the weirdness is in service of a solid character-driven story about Bashir's own insecurities -- chiefly fear of aging and fear of failure.

The story has Bashir lamenting his 30th birthday -- a milestone that had just been reached in real life both by the co-writer of this script, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, and the actor embodying the character, Alexander Siddig. As a belated gift, Siddig got to be featured in every single scene of this episode, a rarity even when a script focuses on a particular character. He also got a taste of what some of his co-workers dealt with, having to endure three-hour makeup sessions to apply the "old age" look as his character rapidly ages inside the coma delusion.

It is not a good makeup effect, in my opinion. By the end of the episode, Bashir's face looks troweled on -- not pliable enough to look real, or for Siddig to work through it. Unfortunately, he brings a performance to match, affecting a Yoda-esque sing-songy cadence as he shuffles around. Much to my surprise, this episode actually won the Emmy for Outstanding Makeup -- even though other Trek episodes such as "All Good Things..." had far more convincing old age looks. Perhaps they won more for the admittedly cool and scary look of the Lethean alien?

It's an interesting episode for Andrew Robinson as Garak. For the second time this season, we spend most of an episode with a Garak who isn't actually real. Here, Bashir is projecting behaviors onto a psychic version of him -- those of a disguised villain secretly leading him to his doom. (The reveal of Garak as the Lethean is an especially neat morph, by the way.) Robinson threads the needle between "regular Garak" and the intentionally large performances the other cast members give, offering a chance to know something is off without giving the game away. He also has great fun in the bookending scenes in the real world, where Garak speaks of age as a mark of power and status, and compliments Bashir on not fully trusting him.

The episode also has interesting revelations for Bashir, of course. We learn here that his real aspiration was to be a tennis star, but that he went into medicine for his parents' approval. That's an intriguing notion, given how proud he's always been of healing people -- though it also explains his talents at racquetball.

Also explained is Bashir's previously established mixup of a preganglionic fiber with a postganglionic nerve. When this was first mentioned, many fans in medicine wrote in to point out that, similar as the names may seem to the average person, the two things are actually nothing alike and could not possibly be confused. Robert Hewitt Wolfe's own wife, in pre-vet studies, needled him about it too, so here he wrote those words into the mouth of the villain. Bashir must have messed this up on purpose! (A few more seasons down the road, the writers would come up with a further explanation of that.)

Other observations:

• Actually.... nope, I think I covered it well enough this time.

This isn't one of Alexander Siddig's better performances, and the makeup is truly unfortunate. Still, I find the story itself and the secrets it reveals about Bashir to be fairly compelling. I give "Distant Voices" a B.