The Darkness and The Light

DVD, DS9 S5 (The Darkness and The Light)

How can something so important have slipped my mind? Even though there are so many episodes, I'm amazed how completely I'd forgotten the origin of Kira's earring! So it was a very pleasant surprise to be reminded in this episode that it was her friend Lupaza that made it for her after her first mission with the Shakaar resistance cell, from the metal of the Cardassian skimmer they attacked! It's such a nice retcon of something that had been inconspicuously in our faces ever since Kira first appeared in 'Emissary,' but it's given new meaning here. I'm really pleased by the inclusive return of Bajoran stories regularly again, after Season 3 became more about the other characters, going off exploring in the Defiant, and the Dominion, then Season 4, the Klingons, but this is at least the third Bajoran-themed episode this season, after 'The Assignment' and 'Rapture.' Something else that took me back to 'Emissary' was Lupaza herself and the way she shows Kira in her current light: someone who doesn't just run off and seek revenge, someone who's gained a maturity since her time on DS9. Lupaza actually reminds me of the Kira from the pilot: fiery, flame-haired, belligerent, rule-flouter, but it's Kira who now advises care and thought. Until her dear friends are murdered which reverts her to the rebellious state she used to exist in.

When Lupaza and Furel are killed offscreen we have a greater investment in what's happening to Kira's associates. Not that we don't care before, but the first death is unexpected and initially unexplained, with the second we get to know the woman a little so that when she dies in a 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture' Transporter agony we're already forming an interest in her because of her terrible fear and complete trust in Kira. I wonder how clear a plan Silarin Prin had? Did he always assume Lupaza and Furel would come to protect Kira or was that serendipity for him? Maybe he planned to kill off more people and only Kira's arrival at his hideaway on a planet near the DMZ prevented him from carrying out more murders? For all the talk of Kira's old friends it's somewhat surprising that Shakaar doesn't figure in the story. He's mentioned, and would be in the following story, but doesn't show up in this one. I suppose his presence would have been too calming for the escalating tension, Kira would have felt much safer, plus, being the First Minister he would have had high levels of security, making more attacks difficult. The last thing you want to do in a horror story is turn the lights on and brighten all the dark corners. And the story works much better with Kira facing things alone.

She's not alone, of course, she has all her station friends there, but there is an impression of isolation, I don't know whether it's seeing her solitary in her quarters, or little eerie moments like hearing one of the death count messages on the Promenade (which I always think is going to appear on a screen in a pillar, but was actually on a padd which should have been delivered to Kira and which Quark's broken into to hear something of value), but she does seem more vulnerable than usual. The pregnancy is one of the main reasons, I think. For much of the time she's carried the O'Brien's baby boy she's been kept from getting involved, working in Ops or whatever, nothing much outside of pregnancy-related issues to deal with, so to have a killer going around offing her friends, and to have her stuck taking medicine and not holding herself back adds greatly to a feeling of restriction, where normally the Major would be out there, confidently strutting around, doing whatever she could to hunt down the assassin. Carrying a baby also gave the episode two of its greatest story points - not content with just using Kira during her pregnancy, they also make it a logical and brilliant part of the story: Prin won't outright kill her because he doesn't believe in hurting the 'innocent,' only the 'guilty' shall perish, providing a reason Kira isn't summarily executed early in the story. The other twist is the medicine Kira has to take making her almost immune to sedatives, giving her a way to trick Prin into lowering his guard and the full-body forcefield!

The restraining field over the chair was a nice touch, since it isn't something we see used in that way much, and emphasises Prin's technical ability. I would have loved to see the hunter probe that carries out the attacks, the closest we get is seeing the monk get blasted head-over-heels across the room by a device in front of him. I imagined something like that scene in 'Star Wars Episode II' with the hovering drone that drops a killer centipede thing into the Queen's room as an assassination attempt, though Kira was in no shape to leap out the window and take a hanging ride on the probe, Obi-Wan style! She does show her determination by beating her way through Starfleet and Bajoran security to reach the O'Briens' quarters, but it was fortunate that overdoing it made her collapse before she could open the door or she and others might have been sucked into space.

Not seeing the explosion (the station doesn't even rock from it, being fairly small in relation to the size of the structure), the attack gains the imagination of the viewer - we've already seen one grisly scene in the burnt out corpse of Trentin Fala on the Runabout pad, so not showing us what happened to Furel and Lupaza is very effective, and that handheld action scene of Kira  stomping resolutely to the O'Briens' tells the story better than a CGI visual ever could. Apart from the danger, it was fortunate Keiko and Molly were away, as a big-haired pushy Bajoran woman and a large, one-armed Bajoran man beaming into their bedroom might not have gone down too well with the O'Briens! Miles is suspicious enough when they're just standing in his living room! There's an example of Kira not thinking straight, or it could be one of the necessity's of directing: where she foolishly walks in front of the lighted windows in the O'Brien quarters when the lights are out, her silhouette visible thanks to the stars behind. Surely something she would never normally do, though it may be that the environment is 'supposed' to be darker than we're seeing it, as they rarely do proper blackness on TV.

If that was a minor directing flaw, then it was absolutely an anomaly, because something that stood out in this episode was the quality of the directing. Apparently Mike Vejar hadn't done a Trek since 'TNG' Season 1 ('Coming of Age,' another great episode), and from this evidence they missed a trick not using him more often, as he shows great craftsmanship in his style. Often with an episode there'll be a memorable shot that stands out, but there were many this time: the circle of monks with the camera lifting over them to view from above, like the Prophets looking down at this perfect circle, which is then broken by the blast, is easy to notice, but my favourite is the scene with Kira telling Odo about her first raid with the resistance, seen from far out, the horizontal biobed in front, Odo standing behind, together making a stark cross shape, with the camera gently moving in. It's the kind of quality you wouldn't expect from most of the Trek series', both in the writing, the direction and the acting, and all combine to create a terribly sad monologue scene. I also liked the shot towards the end, after Kira's gone vigilante, and Sisko's giving orders in his office - his profile violently pushes into frame, his swift anger evident, the focus shifting between whoever's talking, and then panning quickly as he strides across the room. Also in Sisko's office, a shot earlier, with him and Odo talking by the window at the side of the door, we can see Kira, Dax and Nog behind in Ops before the scene cuts to them.

Nog didn't need to be in this episode at all. They could easily have stinted on him and had Dax decode and show that it's Kira's voice speaking the death count message, but they went the extra mile and used the young Ferengi in the most fitting way: Dax knows never to argue with a person's lobes! I was confused early in the episode when they're trying to work out who's contacting the station anonymously (again, you're immediately kept off-balance and then it turns out to be this woman who's a friend of Kira's), and there's Sisko working away at a console and I'm wondering where Dax is, and why she isn't doing her job? Not for long, as we're soon in a Runabout with her and Worf returning from Starbase 63. I didn't catch why they were there, except to play (and lose), at Tongo. This scene reminded me of a later one (possibly 'Change of Heart'?), where Worf admits to understanding a joke she's made and there's a bit of banter, only this time it's about whether he's smirking or not. They work so well together, and the fact they are two of the best Starfleet officers around somehow makes Fala's death more awful. If Worf and Dax can be beaten, what can this killer accomplish?

It continues to irritate me, if only in a small way, that the Runabouts have lost their personality by not being given clear names. I wanted them to say which ship they were on, and when Kira's making her log she could have recorded the name of her Runabout, but this season they mostly zip around without letting us know which is which. I don't remember a Runabout having a full-on mini Transporter room at the rear of the cockpit, so that narrows it down, but even so… One equally minor detail I did enjoy was seeing the inside of the Runabout docking bay, which is a very rare sight indeed. It wasn't until I noticed the window wasn't displaying the starfield of space, but grey, metallic shapes that I realised where the craft was!

The creation of Prin's bunker on the planet was well-designed, both as a miniature (loved the way the camera pans down from the light-giving star to this foggy, dingy facility, then we actually see Kira's beam in through the window), and the full-sized set, so dark and confined and full of technology. Prin's isolated way of talking, describing 'the plight of the creature' and such, made him some kind of fairytale character, hunched in the shadows. Randy Oglesby in his second (or third if you count the Miradorn twins as two), role on the series, is excellent, much better than his most famous character, the Xindi Degra in 'Enterprise.' They could have pushed the horror of Prin’s disfigurement, which does look too much of a prosthetic - if they'd used a whited out eye, it would have helped. The true physical horror of what he’s about to do is however, vivid, from the suppressed violence of the laser scalpel. But Oglesby gives this deformed servant a degree of sympathy in his insistence he only punishes the guilty. Kira's outcry that all Cardassians were fair game and the enemy is creepily reminiscent of Dukat's later statement that he hates all Bajorans and they all should have died, and could be seen as a backward step for her character after the devastating events of 'Duet' back in Season 1. It would be, but for the fact that she's frustrated, dealing with someone who's probably insane, and that she's desperately angry for putting the baby at risk, for the deaths of her friends, how she hasn't slept in three days (some of this comes out in an outburst at Odo), so she's not fully herself, and there may be a degree of guilt in what she says, too. We've certainly seen much healing of her wounds from dealing with Aamin Marritza or Tekeny Ghemor.

It all leads to her sitting morosely on a box when the others find her, she having shot and killed Prin, since the weapon was set to kill and she didn't have time to change the setting. She spouts a couple of morals and it's a strange moment as if the writers felt there had to be some kind of resolution or lesson to be learned after such a horrible event for her. She says something like light only shines in darkness and innocence is sometimes an excuse for the guilty, but like Picard in 'First Contact' where he's saying how humans have evolved beyond wanting gain and stuff, and he's saying it in this voice as if he doesn't quite believe it (though it's really because he's preoccupied with looking out for Borg), Kira speaks in a tired, halfhearted way. I agreed with the second statement about innocence sometimes being used as a shield or excuse for those that have done wrong, as if they didn't know better, but I couldn't disagree more with the light only shining in darkness - if light, as it seems in this case, is being regarded as good, Kira's basically saying that good can only exist with evil. I could agree that evil (or darkness) shows up the strength of good (or light) much more, but it would be wrong to say goodness can only 'shine' with evil there! Maybe I'm reading too much into it, and if she'd said light shines brighter in darkness I might have had less of a problem with it, but it was an odd moment in the episode, needing to be addressed.

The final shot with the Defiant gliding over the camera with the orange-brown planet in the background was a beautiful visual to end with, and as a whole, the ending was another great Season 5 conclusion to what was a mix of genres, being an investigative mystery and a kind of horror story. There's a question as to how much Kira had planned in advance. We see she has a special beam-out code that gets her to a Runabout, but is that something she's always had ready in case of emergency, or, as is more likely, a plan of action she'd initiated since the deaths began to occur? Either way she should have known better than to leave Odo's chair in a different position to where she found it, as of all people, Odo's going to notice a little detail like that (don't get him started on people moving his furniture!), even now that he's a solid. Perhaps Kira deliberately left that tiny clue, or she just didn't care, intent on getting to the criminal before anyone could reason with her. She knew Odo would soon realise his list of suspects had been deleted and that would mean the Defiant would be coming after her, and perhaps subconsciously she wanted them to back her up eventually, after she'd dealt with the problem herself.

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