Parts of Deep Space Nine are breaking down, in need of replacement Cardassian parts that can't be replicated. The solution: travel to the abandoned station Empok Nor and scavenge for what's needed. But the Cardassians are known to booby trap their facilities when abandoning them, and a particularly diabolical trap awaits: killer soldiers acting as sentries, infected with a xenophobia-enhancing drug that also compromises Garak. Soon, he and Chief O'Brien are on opposite sides and determined to kill each other.
The road developing this story was a little bumpy. The original pitch involved Worf and Garak finding a derelict ship, but the decision was made to pair Garak and O'Brien instead -- perhaps because branching out with Garak, rather than just playing all his scenes with Bashir, had begun to pay dividends. The ship was changed to a Cardassian station to make production easier (more on that later). But the first draft was still a dud. Show runner Ira Steven Behr felt it lacked character and meaning, and actor Andrew Robinson was quietly cringing -- always living in the shadow of his breakout role as the Scorpio Killer in the movie Dirty Harry, he was reluctant to portray Garak as a psychotic murderer.
The version actually filmed seems like a vast improvement. It plays up O'Brien's soldiering past (inherited from The Next Generation, and often shied away from by Deep Space Nine), and isn't so much a story about "Garak going crazy" as it is about "O'Brien having to face his own inner darkness." If Robinson still had any reservations about the story, he doesn't let them get in the way of a good performance, as Garak pokes and prods O'Brien at every turn in an effort to unleash his demon.
In filming the episode, they really pushed the envelope beyond what Star Trek usually allows, embracing many horror movie tropes. There's lots of handheld camera, dim lighting pierced by flashlight beams, lens flares (well before J.J. Abrams ever touched the franchise), and tight close-ups that restricts our view of the environment. Empok Nor converts the regular DS9 sets into a haunted house, from obvious changes like the lighting to more subtle changes like swapping out the regular carpet for a drab grey.
Story-wise, we get a big cast of victims for a "cabin in the woods" style narrative that will kill them off one by one. They have personalities, different skill sets, and a range of temperaments from nervous to aggressive, but they are here to be killed off and heighten the mood. Nog is cast as the abducted friend whose rescue motivates the final confrontation (amid a mass of hanging bodies). O'Brien faces down the killer, relying on his own ingenuity to triumph. Amid these horror staples is this character revelation for him: the man he has become really is a better person -- it's his newer skills as an engineer that save him, not the soldier background he wants to forget.
Other observations:
- Much is made of the board game of Kotra, and what it says about Cardassian culture compared to, for example, Ferengi values. It's interesting to ponder whether the enduring popularity of chess says something about the human race.
- They raided the props and costuming from First Contact for this episode, using the movie's phaser rifles and spacesuits. But there's at least one great original prop in this episode too: the dessicated body of a dead Cardassian.
- It's unfortunate that the music here isn't allowed to be as daring as the visuals. This episode is written like a horror movie and looks like a horror movie, but it has fairly typical Star Trek music -- which, as limited by Rick Berman's intractable tastes, is largely forgettable.
- A minor moment in this episode turned out to spark a bit of controversy. One of the minor characters, Amaro, uses the racial slur of "spoonhead" in referring to Cardassians. Though Bajorans had used the word before, it had never been spoken by a Starfleet officer -- and probably never would have been written for one, given what everyone could imagine Gene Roddenberry would have said. But this line of dialogue wasn't actually in the script; it was created later on an ADR stage as "walla" to flesh out a scene, and wound up being fully audible in the final sound mix. Behr and Berman did catch it, and debated removing it... but ultimately decided that it underscored the tension of the situation: the character was forgetting himself and cracking under the pressure. As another staff writer, René Echevarria, put it: "It was racist. But it was also very real."
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