DS9 Flashback: In Purgatory's Shadow

By season five of Deep Space Nine, it had become customary to do a mid-season two-part episode. They upheld the tradition with "In Purgatory's Shadow" and "By Inferno's Light."

Garak and Worf are sent to investigate a signal from the Gamma Quadrant that suggests there might be survivors from the failed attack on the Dominion by the Cardassians and Romulans. They're quickly captured and imprisoned, joining Enabran Tain, General Martok, and... Julian Bashir, who has been replaced on Deep Space Nine by a changeling infiltrator. As evidence mounts that a Dominion fleet will soon invade the Alpha Quadrant, the station makes defensive preparations -- and Dukat tries to convince his daughter Ziyal to leave with him.

The genesis of this episode came from a desire to do a Star Trek take on "The Great Escape." The writers considered telling a prison break story from the perspective of Michael Eddington, but decided the audience might not fully get behind him. Eventually, they hit on pairing Worf and Garak, who had clashed in an interesting way in the fourth season finale. From there, they continued to find this episode a good home for ideas they'd long wanted to try -- revealing that Enabran Tain was Garak's father, bringing the real General Martok onto the show (after killing his changeling doppelganger), and trying again to convey changeling paranoia by having infiltrators not on Earth, but in our heroes' very midst.

While these are all good ideas, this episode is a whole lot of setup without much payoff -- even more so than is usual for the first half of a two-part episode. The one story arc that plays to completion here is between Garak and Tain. The moment of revelation between them -- and Tain's death -- is a great performance from both Andrew Robinson and Paul Dooley. It's well written too, with Tain refusing even at the last moment to directly give Garak what he's looking for; he must cloak his admission of fatherly pride in a story from Garak's youth. And that's only after Tain is a withholding scold throughout the episode, up until his final scene. Garak has to cobble together closure from scraps. (Or tailor it, as it were.)

There's another story arc at play for Garak in this episode, though I find it an awkward one. A romantic relationship is played between him and Ziyal. It's hard to know the degree to which Garak is pursuing this just to dig at Dukat -- but that seems the most likely possibility here, given how far Garak goes just to manufacture entertainment for himself. In this episode alone, he tries to talk Bashir into stealing a runabout with him, toys with Worf about wanting to join Starfleet, gets quippy with a Jem'Hadar soldier just for kicks (getting a camera-eye view rifle to the face for his trouble). His questionable flirting with Ziyal is of a piece.

Perhaps knowing that the age difference between Garak and Ziyal is a bit icky, Ziyal is recast yet again, with Melanie Smith being the third actress to play her. (But who knows the real reason for the change. Show runner Ira Steven Behr once joked that they should have changed the performer "every single time.") The fact that this Ziyal looks older helps the optics a bit... but it makes all the bickering about her look worse. Her father wants to basically order her back to Cardassia. Kira is arguing that she's better off away from him. All the while, Ziyal definitely looks old enough to be making that kind of decision for herself.

Fortunately, Garak/Ziyal is not the only romantic relationship at play in the episode. Dax and Worf share a meaningful goodbye as he heads off on a dangerous mission. And even though there's been an interrim episode since Odo regained his shifting abilities, the opening between him and Kira is still nice to see. He's putting his old room back together; she catches him reading a book on dating and encourages him in that pursuit.

The reveal that Julian Bashir has been replaced by a changeling is a great idea. It would have been better still if the writers had thought it up far enough ahead of time to seed earlier episodes with clues -- though I have noted a couple of occasions where the coincidental ramifications are interesting. There's fun suspense played throughout the episode in just what the changeling might do -- is he making poisoned sandwiches? His sabotage of the plans to collapse the wormhole make for a great cliffhanger ending as the Dominion fleet pours from the wormhole.

Other observations:

• Dukat is very on brand when casually dunking on Bajoran religion as "backwards superstition." Kira responds in kind by noting, after Dukat calls Garak a killer, that "yes, he's a Cardassian."

• It's nice that the episode makes room to bring up the spiritual implications of collapsing the wormhole. To assuage Kira's concerns, Sisko notes that the Prophets have always found a way to speak to the Bajorans.

• In a nice bit of continuity, it's mentioned that the theory on how to close the wormhole comes from Lenara Kahn.

• Detail-minded fans have noted that while this episode makes mention of the Borg attack in First Contact, the stardate here places this before the events of that movie. Staff writer Ronald D. Moore gave an amusing, self-depracating explanation: "I am not at liberty to reveal the secret messages contained within the seemingly 'mistaken' stardates, but rest assured that it is another brilliantly conceived and skillfully executed Star Trek moment brought to you by the people who wrote 'Meridian.'"

Even though this episode sets up a lot of hugely important story for the series, it is mostly just that -- setup. Between that and the uncomfortable ways Ziyal is woven into the story, I think "In Puragtory's Shadow" comes out a B-. Fortunately, though, part two was much stronger.