Blogging DS9, S1E2: "A Man Alone"

S1E2: “A Man Alone”

Or Get Some Rest, You're Looking a Little Pail

"You don’t know me… I’ll take care of my own best interests."

-Constable Odo

One area where the Star Trek series typically stumbles is the transition from momentous season- or series-opening epics to the following "return to normal" episode. One week Picard is kidnapped by the Borg, destroys half of Starfleet, and is cunningly rescued; the next week, he's getting drunk on Earth with his cranky brother.

The beginning of DS9 suffers from the same awkward transition. With Starfleet’s presence and Deep Space 9’s importance established in the pilot, “A Man Alone” begins business as usual for the patchwork crew. Still, the series’ second episode offers a glimpse of the typically morally-weighty themes that set DS9 apart from many of TNG’s slick-but-empty adventures.

The main story arc follows the framing of Odo for the murder of a Bajoran rable-rouser. While the story introduces the theme of Odo’s isolation among non-shape shifters, it does so with a rather blunt hammer (best demonstrated by the brutally obvious title) and clumsy parallels to history. In particular, the vandalism and mob scenes try way too hard to summon images of the persecution of blacks in the United States post-slavery. Any member of the crew, including most plausibly Kira, could have stood in front of Odo’s office door as the crowd gathered. But the writers went to great lengths to put the station commander, the only black major character on the show, in front of Odo. And yet, the symbolism might have worked if that had been its extent, but when the leader of the mob asked rhetorically, “How do you hang a rope around a shape shifter’s neck?” well, it was quite enough already.

My other problem with the main story arc was Ibudan’s motivation for framing Odo. I am more than willing to accept black boxes of prior relationship collateral (see below), but we are supposed to believe Ibudan would grow and murder his own clone just to remove Odo from his post? Chaos and terrorism eventually become much bigger themes in the show and perhaps this was an amuse-bouche of those flavors, but on its own, I find the inception of the main story arc improbable.

On the positive side, the episode did introduce the give-and-take between Quark and Odo that Rene Auberjonois and Armin Shimerman execute so well. The subtext of their conversation in Odo’s vandalized office acknowledges that Odo, typically a strict constructionist of law interpretation, tolerates Quark as the preferable “devil he knows,” while Quark relies on Odo to keep his underworld markets civil. Perhaps in another review, we can compare their give-and-take to Picard and Q’s less successful repartee in TNG.

A few other quick thoughts:

• The secondary arc of the episode focuses on Keiko O’Brien’s establishment of a school on the station. I never enjoyed Keiko’s wet blanket cameos on TNG, and she continues to disappoint on DS9. To be fair, I think this is more a criticism of how one-dimensionally the character is written than Rosalind Chao’s portrayl. To paint broadly, TNG and DS9 both seemed to struggle with avoiding stereotypes in romantic relationships. As such, Keiko O’Brien could be the nagging wife on a 23^rd Century Ed O’Neill sitcom.
• Speaking of awkward romances, Bashir’s advances toward Dax are strange, overt, and quite a bit unprofessional. One of the few things I remember from my original viewing of the first season is Bashir continually embarrassing himself pursuing Dax. I recognize that Bashir was intended to play a comic relief role in a cast of otherwise very serious characters (a la Data in TNG), but I have a hard time accepting his medical genius moments after seeing him flailing toward a B+ of a woman.
• In the episode’s most dramatic moments, I caught pieces of the contemporary TNG soundtrack that were used in that series’ final few seasons. I’m not sure if this was done to invoke the established sister series or because it was cheaper than scoring new music, but it definitely distracted by bringing to mind some later TNG memories.

2 bars of golf-pressed latinum out of 5