DS9 Flashback: Honor Among Thieves

It was essentially an edict among the writers at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine -- "O'Brien must suffer." As the most accessible "Everyman" character on the show, putting him through emotional turmoil (even actual torture) would almost always yield moving results. The sixth season's "Honor Among Thieves" isn't quite an "O'Brien must suffer" story. And perhaps that's why it's not quite as good as those other episodes.

Starfleet Intelligence has a security leak, and their operatives within the Orion Syndicate are being exposed and executed. To identify the mole, they've tapped Miles O'Brien to go in undercover as a tinker/repairman to work his way up in the criminal organization. But when O'Brien begins to sympathize with Bilby, an oddly likeable family man amid this den of thieves, he worries what will happen when the mission is over.

"Honor Among Thieves" didn't actually start out as an O'Brien story. Outside writer Philip Kim pitched a story in which Jake Sisko happens to save the life of a girl whose father ranked high in the Orion Syndicate. This soon earns him special "friends" and privileges, which soon turns threatening as he tries to extricate himself. Meanwhile, Quark is trying to buddy up to Jake because he wants in. Kim said in an interview that when he got the call that his story was being bought, he thought they might have had the wrong person, so unrecognizable was what the staff pitched back relative to his original idea. But show runner Ira Steven Behr explained that they'd never even considered doing a story about the Orion Syndicate, and that germ from Kim's story is what inspired them.

The result feels almost like an episode from a completely different show. Aside from two short scenes set on the station (right after the credits, and at the end of the show), it really isn't. For one, the story takes place in a completely new setting -- and the show's budget doesn't quite reach far enough to fill it out, with the same establishing shot being used multiple times, and the sets being a bit more threadbare than run-down. For another thing, the only character we know is O'Brien, who is masquerading as someone else; meanwhile, some of the new characters don't get enough time to become truly distinct from one another. There's a reference to the often-sabotaged weather systems on Risa, a reappearance of computer hacking neck implants, and a plot thread that ropes in the Dominion. Otherwise, this show could be an installment of a sci-fi anthology series.

There are a lot of mob tropes in here, and your usual reaction to those probably governs how you respond to them here. There are familiar scenes like "testing the new guy to see if he'll lie to you" and "having another traitor in the mix so that you worry, for just a moment, that our guy has been found out." There's all the expected talk of family and loyalty -- including threatening the former to secure the latter. This story hits pretty much every beat of one of these tales, and gets the job done in a tight little 40-minute package.

On the other hand, it might have been nice to have more. There isn't really a two-part episode worth of story in here, but more time with these characters might have helped in giving the story more stakes. We might have actually met Bilby's family in person, or seen more menace from him. There is, after all, a delicate tightrope to walk here: Bilby has to be a dangerous enough character to seem like a threat to O'Brien, but has to be likeable enough for O'Brien to care what happens to him by the end. The episode has to rush through scenes at these extremes to get everything in. Bilby is nothing but nice to O'Brien for the first third of the episode. When he finally kills a guy, O'Brien does seem rightly horrified and aware of how deep he's fallen in... but then there's not quite enough time to explain a shift back before the end, when O'Brien is punching his "handler" to run to Bilby's aid.

Of course, it's also a heavy lift to believe O'Brien ever being put in this situation to begin with. The episode establishes that real Starfleet Intelligence agents were compromised and an outsider had to be brought in. Why O'Brien, out of every possible Starfleet officer? That isn't really explained. He is the right choice from a "who are the characters on our show" perspective, though -- the right combination of savvy but human, duty-bound but open-hearted. Bashir could almost have worked (and indeed, the series would thrust him into an espionage tale soon enough), but "family" is a key theme here, making O'Brien the right fit for the narrative; he can bond with Bilby over that.

The acting does fill in many of the gaps, though. Colm Meaney and guest star Nick Tate do have a good rapport together. They feel similar in all the right ways, as though O'Brien and Bilby might naturally have become friends in some other life. It helps the important emotional beats play better: Bilby taking interest in O'Brien's semi-fictional "girlfriend" Kumiko, O'Brien's hidden guilt when Bilby goes on about how well he can read people, and O'Brien promising to look after Bilby's cat. Interestingly, though, Tate was the second choice to play the role. The show had cast Charles Hallahan (perhaps best known to genre fans from the movie The Thing), hoping to bring a father/son dynamic to the Bilby/O'Brien relationship; Hallahan died of a heart attack just days before filming was to begin, and Tate (knowing he'd lost the role the first time around) was brought in.

Other observations.

• The one early Deep Space Nine scene establishes how quickly the station falls apart without O'Brien around to fix things. All the more reason you'd imagine Starfleet would want to tap "anyone else" for a mission like this.

• The Vorta here, Gelnon, is the same one from the previous episode. But he and a shrunken O'Brien never met. There's talk of similarity between the Dominion and the Orion Syndicate, and how loyalty means everything in both organizations. That said, Gelnon seems quite surprised by the "vouch"-based system of trusting one's co-workers.

• In a moment that feels subtly quite racy for 1990s Star Trek, O'Brien actually does pay the prostitute Bilby procured for him.

• Script writer René Echevarria wanted to name Bilby's cat Sweet Pea. Show runner Ira Steven Behr says this was another "Kukalaka," giving a too-serious thing a too-dumb name. He put his foot down, and the cat became Chester.

• I know this is the farthest thing from being a story about O'Brien's handler Chadwick, but I think it would have injected a little more Star Trek into the episode if that character had been a Vulcan. Seeing a Vulcan deal with the world of espionage, and justifying lies like the one told to keep O'Brien on mission (that Bilby will be arrested, not abandoned to execution by the Syndicate) would have been a neat texture.

Though I have pointed out some shortcomings here, it's because by this point in the run of Deep Space Nine, the audience can expect more. In truth, it's a decent episode -- thanks largely to the acting. I give "Honor Among Thieves" a B.