Blogging DS9, S1E8: "The Passenger"

S1E8: "The Passenger"
Or The Tragedy of Dirty Fingernails

"It's hard to keep secrets in a place like this."
-Commander Sisko

Sisko's warning to newly arrived Lieutenant Primmin is a coy wink from "The Passenger"'s writers and a clever nod to how important events that happen on the station and in front of our own viewing eyes can be. In this episode, which uses the single-episode-mystery-arc formula often successful across the series, the DS9 writers show a level of nuance missing from many of the first season's heavy-handed introductions.

Although "The Passenger" yet again eschews any secondary plot arcs in developing the primary story, it smoothly transitions from a whodunit first half into a relatively climactic second half, punctuated by a classic Star Trek in-the-nick-of-time solution. The beginning stage is incredibly effective, as the writers show in the enough information before the credits to know all along what the episode's big reveal turns out to be.  It is a classic example of how a twist can be hidden in plain sight by deft writing.

If there is one flaw with the alien consciousness hiding within Bashir, it is that a) The Star Trek franchise uses mental invasion very frequently b) the rules of this mechanism have never been clear to me. I understand Rao Vantika hiding within the unused part of Bashir's brain like dormant malware, waiting to spring to action. But if this kind of cerebral attack is as common as DS9 and TNG make it seem, I imagine the Federation would have taken more preventative action against it. You can't have senior staff members who possess vital passcodes and secrets being neurologically hijacked this often. With that said, "The Passenger" is one of the franchise's more successful uses of this mechanism, and Siddig El Fadil deserves a solid B for depicting the shift in consciousness through menacingly plodding diction.

While this episode does not have a true secondary story, the introduction of Lieutenant Primmin as chief Starfleet Security officer is noteworthy at this point in the series. I admit, I barely remember Primmin from my first run viewing, and part of me was expecting the squeaky clean stranger to be caught up in the sinister plot. I can say with honesty that I do not remember exactly how long Primmin's role lasts on the show, though I can promise he does not stay long enough to leave a lasting impression on the show's development. In retrospect, I'm not quite sure what motivated the writers to introduce him. Yes, I guess on some practical level, Starfleet would want its own security presence on this new frontier, and the stodgy Primmin reads well as some kind of G-man trying to bring iron-fisted order to the Wild West. But like Dr. Pulaski before him, Primmin's insertion is both awkward to the lives of the characters, as well as the exposition itself. Only nine hours into the series, we still have not seen a Kira-centric episode, and only glimpses into the pasts of the Siskos, Quark, and Bashir. In this episode, Primmin comes across incredibly stiff (probably by choice, not poor acting) and not as a character I would want to see studied in depth. I say this with little memory of what lies ahead for the Lieutenant: He seems poised to be a piece of furniture that doesn't fit comfortably in any room.

My other quick thoughts:

• Dax finds a chip in the ship transporting Rao Vantika that contains a map, she declares with some suspense, of the humanoid brain! This is another "out there" piece of science that only 18 years later I have a hard time believing would still be a mystery in the 2300s.
• You noticed Bashir taking off the comm badge, right?
• This is hardly limited to Star Trek, but won't villains eventually figure out that giving the good guys time to make a decision is a recipe for disaster. Vantika gives Sisko and company "one minute to decide" whether to let him go or risk killing Bashir with him. The trend continues in "The Prisoner;" that one minute is enough time for Dax to recalibrate the tractor beam to attack Vantika's consciousness.
• On the other hand, I thought the trick at the end to use the transporter to remove the cells with Vantika's consciousness through a transporter was a slick idea. 

3 bars of gold-pressed latinum out of 5