Extreme Measures

DVD, DS9 S7 (Extreme Measures)

And that closes the book on another integral part of DS9 - the epic friendship of Julian Bashir and Miles Edward O'Brien. I know they appear in the remaining episodes, but this is the last one that looks at them particularly, reminding us of all the great adventures they've been on together. There are a few niggles that don't quite let the episode reach full potential, but mainly that's because the previous two Section 31 stories were so strong, and it was always going to be a hard act to follow. They had already succeeded in a sequel this season, but I'm so glad they chose to enter the dark and twisted world of agent Luther Sloan once again.

That brings me to what is possibly the main complaint - they go inside his head, but it really isn't surreal enough. I quite understand their reasoning and desire to puzzle us a bit more by pulling the old trick of 'they haven't really woken up...', but the episode wasn't really about that, and to have the directive to set it on the station so they could pull off that twist wasn't a good enough reason not to have more surrealism and iconic imagery. The plot had been done better several times before ('Distant Voices' being the standout, along with Voyager's 'Waking Moments'), and they slipped up by talking too much about what they were going to do, that they might see all kinds of wonders of Sloan's secret mind, but then we don't get that. William Sadler's multifaceted performance as Sloan, and the buddie buddie conversations between our two heroes, were what saved it.

I always felt the episode did a little too much to lessen Sloan's huge shadow. Previously he's always been several steps ahead, so it seemed a little too easy that he could be captured so simply and that he would resort to suicide also. The first time I watched it I was waiting for the revelation that this had all been engineered by Sloan somehow, to get some other kind of information through Bashir's studies, or that we would find out that Bashir's enhancements as a child were actually paid for by Section 31 and that they had always planned to use him in the future - a complete turnaround. They would still have managed to secure the antidote to Odo's disease, but Sloan would have gotten some valuable information out of them which turned the tide of war, but was unethical or something.

Instead there are no clever twists, but it does give us a glimpse of a different part of Sloan, one that regrets his actions. We see his family, hear his apologies - multiple Sloan's would have been another interesting angle for them to follow, as they have to track down the right version of him in his mind. I also always imagined that he had the ability to clone himself and that it was a clone that died at the end of 'Inter Arma', so he could still be alive.

Even though the writers didn't quite pull off a story to top the others, it certainly fuels debate and ideas over the character and the organisation. It may be conspiracy theories, but with Sloan you never know which way is up, or what's fake and what's real! The scene at the start with Odo and Kira was so sad even when you know what happens, and it conveys their dignity and pain so well. Most of the other characters don't feature as largely, with Quark absent again. Perhaps he'll get one last episode next time... (clue: he will).

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