Dukat contacts Major Kira with a taunting revelation: years ago, he had a long-standing romantic relationship with her mother Meru. Increasingly tormented by the possibility, Kira consults the Orb of Time and is sent back into the past the see the truth for herself. She learns that the stories her father told about her mother were lies... and her relationship with a mother she barely remembers is complicated indeed.
This story might be unique in science fiction: it's a tale featuring time travel into the past in which concern about changing the past is barely a consideration. Because of this, you have to overlook a lot throughout the episode -- Sisko giving his blessing for her time hopping, Kira's misguided faith that Prophets who don't even understand linear time would stop her from messing something up, or that Kira would fail in the end to "kill Hitler." (That's the one thing you do with a time machine, isn't it?)
Then again, there are far more conventional elements the episode also doesn't quite take seriously. Kira spends a day as a "comfort woman" to Cardassians, but it never feels particularly dangerous -- just a bit icky. Dukat seems not to have aged a day in almost 30 years. (But what do we really know about Cardassian aging, I guess?) And he held the same job, running Terok Nor, for two decades? In all these years of interacting with Major Kira, why did Dukat sit on the information about her mother until now? (I guess because until now, he was always trying to seduce her?)
It's a lot of issues to overlook. But much of the rest is good enough to help you do that. The evil of being a collaborator is embodied in Basso, played with smarmy venom by guest star David Bowe. The character wields the little power he's been given with sickening gusto, acting almost more oppressive than the oppressors, and instantly making you hate him. Dukat's initial approach to Meru, a carefully rehearsed lie, is both perfectly on-brand for him and exactly the sort of stunt that seduces people into liking bad men. Kira's scene with a handsy Cardassian Legate may not feel particularly dangerous, but it is a good illustration of a man flexing his power at a vulnerable woman.
Then there's the rapport between the Kiras, Nana Visitor and guest star Leslie Hope (who would later play Teri Bauer on 24). The story is working toward a morally murky ending, where you're meant to be unsure whether Meru has done the right thing. A lack of specificity is basically an impossible acting challenge. But Hope helps the story reach that ending with a series of strong scenes that hit different emotional targets. She sheds tears over the loss of Meru's family, and shows giddiness in how smitten she is by Dukat. She even hits both extremes in one scene, as her joy in feasting after years of starvation devolves to sorrow that her family isn't there to share in it.
Nana Visitor has an equally tough job, in that she has to feel some measure of sympathy in the end, even though she shows very little along the way. In a series of carefully deployed looks, we see Major Kira's growing disgust with her mother and her emerging resolve to treat her as she would any other Cardassian collaborator. But she also is strong in the episode's final scene, confessing her conflicted emotions about her mother to Sisko. (Reportedly, Visitor pushed for that scene to be rewritten, the first draft falling too much on the side of forgiveness for an emotional wound so new and raw.)
Other observations:
- Perhaps some of the rough areas of this episode can be explained by the speed at which it was written. The writers had less time on this after scrapping a story they couldn't get to work: the "ghosts" of Cardassian children were appearing at random aboard the station. Ultimately, it would be revealed that a Josef Mengele-like scientist had been sending them from the Occupation into the future to gather intelligence for the Obsidian Order. A cool nugget of story, but one can see reasons why they couldn't make it work -- Bajoran kids as Cardassian intelligence assets?
- The sixth season has firmly established a formula of giving almost every character a brief scene in every episode. Here, it's Worf and Dax arguing playfully about throwing another big party, Quark procuring flowers for Kira's remembrance of her mother, O'Brien and Bashir first discussing the Battle at the Alamo on the holosuite (which would be a recurring thing for the rest of the series), and Odo giving Kira the push to go do something about her feelings rather than stew in them.
- We've heard before that Kira has brothers. This episode does make me wonder, though... had brothers? You might expect at least one not to have survived the Occupation.
- Guest star Thomas Kopache, returning as Kira's father Taban, is strong in his two scenes -- particularly the last one in which he's acting opposite no one (since it's a recorded message.) That's the moment we have to accept to believe that Kira saves her mother, and it works.
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