Dr. Bashir and Chief O'Brien succeed in luring Sloan of Section 31 to the station. But when Sloan realizes he's been trapped, he activates a suicide response rather than give up the cure to the changeling disease. Before his brain fails completely, Bashir intends to modify a Romulan memory scanner to invade Sloan's mind and extract the information. But there's less than an hour to do it, and anyone trapped inside Sloan's mind may die too.
Where every other episode in the final arc juggles multiple story lines, this one is devoted to a single plot: giving Bashir and O'Brien one last adventure together before the end of the series. (And if you re-frame that just a little as "finding a cure for Odo," even the opening scene between Odo and Kira fits in neatly.)
The writers' disappointment with the final result stems largely from "what might have been." Apparently, they'd always planned for "someone to go inside someone else's mind" here, but the players involved changed a lot due to the overall arc change that sent Bashir in search of the cure instead of Odo. When it was an infected-but-not-symptomatic Odo on the hunt, he was to have learned that his own "father," Dr. Mora, was somehow responsible for the disease -- recruited or coerced by Section 31. Without Odo at the center of the story, that twist seemed superfluous.
Where I do agree with the writers is that this doesn't work out to be the best Bashir-O'Brien adventure one could imagine. O'Brien's role feels very much tacked-on here; his job is ultimately to keep Bashir focused on Odo and not "bringing down Section 31." That might have been enough, but for two issues. First, the idea that Bashir could destroy Section 31 is a false one, since he'll die if he lingers in Sloan's mind. Second, the writers have Bashir spell out to the audience in the final scene just what O'Brien contributed, not trusting us to grasp the point on our own (or trusting themselves to have conveyed it effectively).
But there is some good fun along the way, much of it because of the character of Sloan (and the performance of William Sadler). We see how the calculating villain reacts when he's cornered: almost admiring of having been caught, threatening O'Brien's family, appealing to Bashir's sense of logic, then ultimately getting angry that goody-goody people like Bashir would destroy the Federation if given the chance. We see the nobler side of Sloan made manifest inside his own mind: the part that regrets choosing career over family, that actually wants to help. We see Sloan fight until his very last moment.
What I wish we'd also seen was confirmation that Sloan himself was genetically enhanced. It might have been an unnecessary detail, but it sure would have gone a long way toward justifying how he always got the drop on Bashir. Here, it would have explained how his mind is so disciplined that he momentarily fools our heroes into not knowing the difference between reality and simulation. (And "we're still in Sloan's mind" is a fun fake-out, even if the episode is really only set on the station to save money on new sets in advance of a budget-busting series finale.)
This "one last episode" devoted to Bashir and O'Brien gets more explicit about their friendship than ever, with a key scene in which Bashir observes that they like each other more than the women they love. That's plainly true inasmuch as the show has utterly sidelined Keiko as a character, but it's also a deliberate point that show runner Ira Steven Behr wanted to make here about the separate value of friendship and love. Behr recalls being summoned to the set because neither Alexander Siddig nor Colm Meaney wanted to play the scene as written, both having to be coaxed into it. I think the scene steers mostly clear of "gay panic" (and I'd like to believe that wasn't the objection), though I think it isn't quite direct enough in making the case for friendship -- that it can be okay if not every married couples derives every ounce of happiness in life from each other.
The opening scene does make a great case for romantic love, though. With Odo looking almost like a pile of dead leaves about to blow away (great makeup and costuming!), he asks Kira to leave so that his death won't be her final memory of him. Explicitly setting aside what she wants for herself, she gives him what he wants.
Other observations:
- Like Kira, Sisko makes a big impact with just a single scene. Avery Brooks' reactions to being filled in on Section 31's machinations are great, from the aghast response to calculated genocide to the knowing acceptance of moral compromise in order to catch their amoral prey.
- It might have been nice to have a quick mention of the last "mind adventure" of Chief O'Brien before this, surely the most upsetting experience of his life.
- The somewhat wishy-washy Federation president we met a few seasons back is here referred to as the former president.
The intention of this episode seems good, even if the execution falls a bit short. It isn't really "bad" in any case. I give "Extreme Measures" a B.
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