“Empok Nor”
Written by Bryan Fuller and Hans Beimler
Directed by Mike Vejar
Season 5, Episode 24
Production episode 40510-522
Original air date: May 19, 1997
Stardate: 50901.7
Station log: O’Brien and Nog are working on repairing a conduit, using tools that are sufficiently loud that it’s driving business away from Quark’s. (Kira, Dax, and Worf take all of three seconds’ worth of noise to decide to go to the Klingon restaurant instead.) Unfortunately, the problem is worse than O’Brien thought. They need to replace the plasma manifolds, which can’t be replicated, and relations with Cardassia these days preclude the notion of acquiring spares from them.
O’Brien leads a salvage team to Empok Nor, a station of the same design as Deep Space 9 (formerly Terok Nor) in the Trivas system, a sector that the Cardassians abandoned a year ago and have shown no interest in reacquiring since they became part of the Dominion. Odo warns of booby traps geared toward non-Cardassians, so Sisko convinces Garak to go along. The rest of the team includes Nog, two engineers (Pechetti and Boq’ta) and two security guards (Stolzoff and Amaro).
Garak and Nog play a game of Kotra, a Cardassian strategy game. Nog is playing it like a Ferengi, hoarding assets rather than being aggressive, and as a result is getting his ass kicked. Garak tries to convince O’Brien to play the winner, especially given his military record against the Cardassians, but he isn’t interested.
The runabout approaches the station. Transporters are a bad idea, as there are probably pattern scramblers, and even the airlock’s risky. But Garak is able to disarm the traps and also turn the power on. However his doing so also wakes up two Cardassians in stasis in the infirmary…
O’Brien splits them into three teams to salvage what they need, which Pechetti sorted into must-have (which O’Brien, Nog, and Stolzoff go for), could-use (Pechetti and Amaro), and would-be-nice (Garak and Boq’ta).
While climbing a staircase, Garak gets some gunk on his hands, which Boq’ta identifies as a biogenic compound. They immediately go to the infirmary, where they see that the stasis tubes are open and empty. There’s a third tube that’s been damaged, and there’s a Cardassian body in there that’s been dead for a year.
Nog left a tool in the runabout, but when he gets back to the airlock, the runabout is tumbling through space and then explodes. Everyone gathers in the infirmary. The Cardassian corpse had the badge of the Third Batallion, which is a special forces-type regiment whose motto is “Death to all.” Stolzoff theorizes that they were left there to guard the place. They’ve activated a dampening field so their tricorders won’t work, and the subspace antenna was ripped out when the Cardassians abandoned it. O’Brien comes up with a way to get the deflector grid to send out a series of pulses toward DS9 to let them know they’re in trouble.
Garak is not sure that Stolzoff’s hypothesis is correct: even the Third Batallion isn’t so fanatical that they’d leave three people behind, possibly for years, to guard an abandoned station.
Stolzoff guards Pechetti while he works, and they’re ambushed by the two Cardassians and killed. The surviving members of the team have to finish their work so they can alert DS9 to their predicament. O’Brien and Nog finish what Pechetti started, while Boq’ta and Amaro finish O’Brien’s task (Boq’ta got his previous job finished). Garak, meanwhile, has decided that he’s going to go after the Cardassians himself and neutralize them—and is being particularly nasty and mean to the Starfleet personnel while he does so. He’s also gotten itchy. This of course has absolutely nothing to do with the gunk he touched…
Garak lures one Cardassian into the infirmary, then hides in the broken stasis tube and ambushes him. After killing him, Garak is surprised to realize that the act of doing so felt really good. He takes a tissue sample from the corpse and learns that his body is filled with a psychotropic drug designed to increase a Cardassian’s xenophobia. When he reports this to O’Brien, the chief figures that the experiment to create a more loyal, motivated soldier failed, which is why the three were left behind in stasis.
Garak goes off to kill the other Cardassian. Meanwhile, Amaro hopes he fails, because he wants to kill the Cardassian himself. Stolzoff was his Academy-mate and sparring partner, and he very much wants to avenge her death. Boq’ta asks Amaro for a coil spanner, and while he’s digging through the toolbox, the other Cardassian ambushes them, killing Boq’ta. Garak shoots the soldier before he can kill Amaro—but then Garak stabs Amaro with the very tool he had been about to give Boq’ta. (Ironically, it wasn’t even a coil spanner, it was a flux coupler. Oops.)
O’Brien and Nog find Boq’ta’s body and a dying Amaro, who lives long enough to tell O’Brien that Garak stabbed him. O’Brien figures that Garak was exposed to the drug. They have to go after him, especially since he knows about the use-the-deflector-to-send-a-signal plan.
Garak, however, has been spending his time in the prefect’s office, where the station commander left a Kotra game, and he’s been assembling the pieces, which were scattered all over the floor. Garak contacts O’Brien and Nog to ramble on for a bit about Kotra, which gives them time to get to Ops. But when they arrive, there’s no sign of Garak—until O’Brien tries to leave the office, at which point the door closes, a force field goes up, and Garak takes Nog hostage, not shooting him because he’s a series regular and therefore can’t actually die.
Once Garak leaves Ops, the force field goes down and the doors open. Garak insists that O’Brien is as much a predator as he is, that he wants to kill Garak as much as Garak wants to kill him. O’Brien denies it, and talks Garak into meeting him on the Promenade.
O’Brien arrives to find the bodies of the four crewmembers who were killed strung up (which had to have been a lot of trouble), then finds Garak holding a phaser rifle on Nog. O’Brien drops his rifle, his hand-phaser, and his tricorder, and then Garak puts his own rifle down so he and O’Brien can fight it out hand-to-hand like real men!
When Garak stands near where O’Brien put the weapons down, the chief activates his combadge, at which point the tricorder activates and the phaser explodes, badly injuring the erstwhile tailor.
Nog and O’Brien complete the modifications (and also salvage what they need from Empok Nor) and are rescued by DS9. Bashir is able to expunge the drug from Garak’s system (and fix his other wounds). Garak asks O’Brien to express his regret to Amaro’s wife, as he doesn’t think she’d appreciate it coming from him.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently things made with a beta matrix compositor can’t be replicated. Which kinda sucks.
Rules of Acquisition: Nog is apparently doing a rotation in engineering now, after his security rotation last time, though he’s still acting like he’s in security, boarding the runabout and wandering around Empok Nor with a BFG (which he never actually fires).
Plain, simple: Garak is taken aback when O’Brien says he’s glad Garak is on the mission, as generally everyone on the station has been very trusting of him, and it’s freaking him the hell out. To help combat this, he spends the trip over making fun of Nog’s Kotra-playing skills and tries to get O’Brien’s goat regarding the Setlik III massacre.
For Cardassia! After abandoning Empok Nor, the Cardassians left behind a bunch of booby traps, as well as three psychotic Cardassian soldiers. The actual reason for leaving them there is left unclear, as both Stolzoff and Garak’s notions have merit, but also problems—if Garak is right, why were they cued to unfreeze the soldiers when the power went on, and if Stolzoff is right, why did the Cardassians leave them there for potentially years (as Garak pointed out)?
Keep your ears open: “What’s the matter?”
“It’s just that lately, I’ve noticed that everyone seems to—trust me. It’s quite unnerving. I’m still trying to get used to it. Next thing I know, people will be inviting me to their homes for dinner.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I promise I’ll never have you over.”
“I appreciate that, Chief.”
O’Brien and Garak discussing the latter’s assimilation into life on the station.
Welcome aboard: Aron Eisenberg is back as Nog for the second week in a row, and we get Andrew J. Robinson as Garak as well. Tom Hodges, Jeffrey King, Marjean Holden, and Andy Milder play the security team; Milder will return on Voyager’s“Renaissance Man” as Nar, and also provide voices for the videogames Bridge Commander (Brex) and Elite Force II (Chell). Tom Morga and Christopher Doyle, both regular stunt performers on the modern Trek series, played the two Cardassian soldiers.
Trivial matters: This is Mike Vejar’s second DS9 directorial endeavor, after “The Darkness and the Light,” which was also based on a story by Bryan Fuller. His next one will be “Rocks and Shoals,” which has no involvement from Fuller (though that episode will have a reference to this one, as Nog will mention it when explaining why he won’t ever turn his back on Garak).
Fuller’s original pitch was for a Worf-and-Garak storyline where they come across a derelict ship. Given how well Michael Dorn and Andrew J. Robinson have worked together, notably in “Shattered Mirror,” “In Purgatory’s Shadow,” and “By Inferno’s Light,” this feels like a missed opportunity.
Empok Nor will be seen again in “The Magnificent Ferengi” and “Covenant,” and the station will also be used in the post-finale DS9 fiction, as Nog leads a team of ships to tow Empok Nor to the Bajoran system to use as a spare-parts facility, as seen in the Section 31 novel Abyss by David Weddle & Jeffrey Lang. Empok Nor was also seen in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers novellas Cold Fusion by your humble rewatcher and Lost Time by Ilsa J. Bick.
In the 25th-century future storyline for Star Trek Online, Empok Nor is used as the headquarters for the Cardassian True Way movement.
O’Brien’s involvement in the Setlik III massacre was first mentioned in “The Wounded” on TNG, and has come up numerous times since, most notably in “Tribunal” when it was evidence in his trial. This episode is the first time he’s been referred to as “the hero of Setlik III,” but given that Garak was the one using the phrase and he was trying to get O’Brien’s goat, it’s unlikely that anyone else has ever called him that.
Garak wears an environmental suit, the first time we’ve seen one on DS9, indeed the first time such suits have been seen on any TV episode of Trek since “The Tholian Web” on the original series (though they’ve been used in several of the Trek movies). The suits were made for the movie First Contact, and Nog, Stozloff, and Amaro are using the type-3 phaser rifles designed for the movie as well.
Walk with the Prophets: “That’s not the face of a tailor.” Back when I reviewed “The Ship” I discussed the redshirt phenomenon, and this episode is both a superior and inferior example of the breed. Its superiority comes from the fact that the four guest stars who die in order to make the plot work are actual people, not just faceless grunts. We actually get to know them a bit, from Pechetti’s collecting hobby to Boq’ta’s cowardice to the snarky banter of the two security guards.
But its inferiority comes from how appallingly telegraphed their deaths are, and how equally telegraphed the survival of O’Brien, Nog, and Garak are. While the latter two don’t have the relative safety of being opening-credits regulars, they’re pretty well established recurring characters, going back to the first couple of episodes of the series.
As a result the suspense is completely drained from the episode. We don’t even have the minimal investment that we had in Muniz, who at least had appeared twice before, just four people we’ve never seen before and know that, even if they survive, we’ll never see again. The unfortunate flip side to DS9 developing such a strong ensemble cast is that whenever we see someone outside that ensemble show up as a person who’s supposed to have been there all along, there’s no reason to expect them to make it to the end of the hour.
This is made worse by the climax, in which we’re supposed to believe that Garak, who has been sufficiently taken over by this psychotropic drug that he enjoys killing the first Cardassian soldier, gleefully pursues the second, and has no trouble whatsoever killing Amaro, will suddenly decide not to kill Nog. We’ve seen this before, notably in “The Adversary” and “Shattered Mirror,” where regulars are put in danger and survive it for no other reason than the actor has a contract to continue appearing on the show. Sure, it’s ostensibly in order to manipulate O’Brien, but this version of Garak doesn’t do manipulation, he’s a psychopath who wants to kill people a whole lot.
So instead of giving us a compelling story, we get a series of writer tricks to create the illusion of suspense, but nobody we really care about gets hurt, so it’s hard to give a damn. I’m grateful for the attempt to at least turn Pechetti, Boq’ta, Stolzoff, and Amaro into actual people, but it just makes their inevitable deaths more frustrating. (I will say that the banter between the security guards and the engineers was a big inspiration for a lot of the crew banter in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series that I supervised…)
On top of that, the story doesn’t really make any sense. This very episode establishes that this particular station design is fairly common in the Cardassian Union. I find it impossible to credit that there isn’t someone out there who can provide them with a plasma manifold. Hell, what’s the good of having a Ferengi cadet if he can’t scrounge for useful spare parts? It just seems to me that going from “it’s broken and the Cardassians won’t give us a new one” straight to “let’s go to the scary abandoned space station” without taking a few intermediate steps is, at best, ill-advised. (More so given the result, of course…)
One thing the script does get right is how it shows us O’Brien’s character. While “Hard Time” isn’t mentioned, the lessons of that episode can be seen here. O’Brien isn’t the man he was at Setlik III. He’s the guy who fixes things, the tinkerer, and he refuses to revert to that type, resulting in one of the episode’s better moments, when he reminds Garak for something like the hundredth time that he’s an engineer, not a soldier, using a technical trick to stop Garak instead of fisticuffs. And bravo to him.
The final problem with “Empok Nor,” though, is what it does to Garak. We know from way back in Dirty Harry that Andrew J. Robinson can do a psychopath with chilling skill, but one of the reasons why Garak is so interesting is that Robinson imbues him with complexity and charm. This version of Garak has neither of these things, and that makes him spectacularly uninteresting as an adversary. It’s not so bad with the two Cardassian soldiers, who are stunt guys with no dialogue who are pretty much force-of-nature villains, but Garak insists on talking, and being a much more boring version of Garak than what we’re used to. It’s another thing that takes points away from what should be a suspense-filled horror story, but instead just comes across as a leaden action piece that is far less than it could have been.
Warp factor rating: 4
Author’s note: Your humble rewatcher has a Kickstarter for a new story in the Dragon Precinct universe: Danthres and Torin’s second case! (It’s the sequel to “When the Magick Goes Away,” which was their first case…) For just two bucks you get the story, plus other nifty rewards if you pledge more. Check it out!
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at the Highland Library Comic-Con tomorrow, the 26th of July, in Highland, New York, along with authors Linda Zimmerman and C.L. Schneider, comics writer Todd Dezago, cartoonist Roger L. Phillips, and makeup effects artist Danielle Masterson, as well as a dozen local cartoonists and various fan clubs. Information can be found here.
Hmm, you don’t seem very happy with season 5 Keith…interesting. I think it’s a much more superior season to the previous one, myself. I look forward to reading your season recap.
This one really seemed to go to the dark side, to no good purpose. I know this isn’t Roddenberry’s universe, but the slaughter of Starfleet personnel and especially their stringing up just seemed really disturbingly gratuitous.
As noted, it wasn’t even GOOD horror as we knew perfectly well all along who would live and who wouldn’t. I think I’ve read elsewhere that Andrew J Robinson really didn’t like what this episode did to his character, and I’d have to agree. It also fits in the “recurring character does something awful with no consequences” mold.
Story-wise, this isn’t one of my favorites from Season Five, either.
But in terms of direction, it’s one of my favorites. Mike Vejar really hit it out of the ballpark and I love the little touches made to modify the DS( sets for this episode.
Hell, what’s the good of having a Ferengi cadet if he can’t scrounge for useful spare parts?
It’s clear the writers realized this mistake, because they made up for it, two seasons later, with the episode Treachery, Faith and the Great River.
This always happens when you have 26 episodes to produce within a year. Empok Nor was number 24 out of 26. Ron Moore had an inspired take for In the Cards, but Beimler had no idea what to do for this one. They were hurting for time and needed a script fast. I assume they thought: “might as well dig Bryan Fuller’s original piece and make a cheap haunted house story out of it”, because that’s what this episode is. A messy, clichéd haunted house story with no real stakes. Had they thought this episode in advance, they would have taken the time to introduce these secondary characters throughout the season.
Naturally, Ira always goes for the hollywood homages. He’d jump at the chance to do a horror story, no matter the clichés and contrivances.
O’Brien-centric shows usually deliver on Colm’s performance alone. Sadly, this wasn’t enough to save this one. Even Vejar’s touch didn’t do much for the atmosphere either.
I do like Nog’s bravado on this one, though, because it indirectly sets up the leg trauma down the road. And yeah, what a waste of Garak and Andrew Robinson.
“I know this isn’t Roddenberry’s universe, but the slaughter of Starfleet personnel and especially their stringing up just seemed really disturbingly gratuitous”
Considering the ‘redshirt’ trope originates from the original series, the telegraphed slaughter may be a part of the episode he would have had felt right at home with!
Heh, probably.
@5,
It’s not the deaths per se, but the gruesome cartoon-violence flaunting of them that I think Roddenberry would object to. As did I. Compare to the Siege episode in Season 7 for a story with tension, violence, stress, and horror, but all done with nuance and respect and realism.
This one left me feeling disturbed for a long time, and not in a good way.
I know this isn’t Roddenberry’s universe
@2
Except this is Roddenberry’s universe. He created it in the first place. The writers even had to follow a set of rules and guidelines affectionally known as Roddenberry’s Box. Some of them resented the rules. This is discussed in Michael Piller’s Star Trek Insurrection book in detail. Even in 1996, on Voyager’s second season, there were still debates among the writers whether the box was still worth it.
@8, I’ve never understood what the hell Gene was thinking with his ‘Kumbuya Edict’ in 1987.
I mean, I know WHY he wanted to depict the uptoian future and how he went from Gene the Storyteller to Gene the Preacher.
But I wish he’d understood how much damage this edict would end up hurting the franchise.
You NEED character conflict for drama and I applaud Piller and the other writers who did the best they could.
Quoth Daniel Kukwa: “Hmm, you don’t seem very happy with season 5 Keith…interesting.”
No one is more surprised than me. I honestly thought I would like the season more, but there’s a lot of disappointing episodes here. Of course, it’s leavened by the sheer brilliance of “In Purgatory’s Shadow”/”By Inferno’s Light,” “Trials and Tribble-ations,” and the season’s other high points, but still, I had thought the season to be better overall than it’s turning out to be doing this rewatch….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This really could have turned out to be a good episode with just a few tweaks. If there had been even the slightest precendent for a semi-regular being killed out of hand (Eddington doesn’t quite count, since he was at the end of fairly long arc), there would have been a bit more tension. And letting at least one of the never before seens live would have helped as well.
The whole biogenic compund thing was also less than convincing. If they really wanted to go that way, then let if affect everyone (except perhaps Nog who can finally get a distress call out) and have them all turn on each other. Though that story may have already been done; it seems familiar. Anyway, it might have been more interesting to have something on the station trigger a subconscious command in Garak, who was, after all, a spy and assassin. They could have delved a little deeper into Garak as a character and a person as he struggles with the conflict of his implanted orders and his newfound look on life after having drunk the root beer.
Just to be clear, I’m not supporting the Utopian ideal. I really like the realistic arc of DS9. But this took it as far out to one edge as some of the sappiest TNG episodes did in the other direction, to no good purpose.
Interestingly, I agree 100% with everything said in this article, and yet I really enjoyed the episode anyway. As an exercise in “Star Trek does slasher flick”, if you could switch off your critical faculties and just go along for the ride, the pacing, the lighting and the general atmosphere were excellently done. And while the outcome and the “who lives, who dies?” elements were a foregone conclusion, it was fun seeing how they got there.
@10
Some episodes always fall short, but I think in retrospect, season 5 holds up a lot better than season 4 simply because it feels more cohesive and unified. This is where the serialization really started to have a good effect, especially in the season’s second half.
What I always wondered was why Empok Nor was even booby trapped. I mean, this station wasn’t lost or evacuated, it was decomissioned. Everything of value should have been stripped from it. What’s left is just the junk that it wasn’t cost effective to haul away.
I understand that the cardassians are xenophobic but it they didn’t want anyone messing with their stuff they could have just set the reactor to overload and walk away.
A better question is why didn’t they booby-trap DS9 before they withdrew from Bajor?
That’s a plot hole this episode raised and it’s always bugged me.
Keith, there are a few episodes where I don’t agree with your assessment (such as “Doctor Bashir, I Presume”, and “Blaze of Glory”), but I do think you also slightly under-rate some first rate eps such as “Nor the Battle to the Strong”, “Rapture” and “Children of Time”.
Mind you, as someone who disagrees passionately with your assessment of TNG’s “Who Watches the Watchers”, I’m not surprised. Talk about IDIC at work…but it’s certainly stimulating debate material. :)
When I flew out to pitch to DS9 in December 1996, one of the proposals I pitched (badly) to Robert Hewitt Wolfe was called “Terok Hel,” and was set on an abandoned Cardassian station that was a duplicate of DS9. A team including O’Brien, Rom, and Gilora (Tracy Scoggins’s character from “Destiny”) went there to try to repair the station after it was damaged in the Klingon invasion, and several expendable guest engineers started to get killed off by an unknown threat, which turned out to be some kind of energy creature in the power grid.
My pitch didn’t get anywhere, but then, five months later, this episode came along. I did not, however, assume that my idea had been stolen. I figured, well, I came up with my story as a money-saving idea, a way to reuse the standing sets as another location. I surely wasn’t the first person to suggest such a story, or to suggest using an abandoned duplicate station to save on guests/extras. So I figured the similarities were just coincidence, the sort that happens all the time in the industry. Although now that I look back on it, there do seem to be some surprising similarities, like how both feature a team including O’Brien, a Ferengi engineer, and a Cardassian character. Still, Robert didn’t seem too interested in the story I pitched, as I recall; he thought it was too much like “Civil Defense.” And I’d never believe him capable of swiping an idea. Later on, when he produced Andromeda, we reconnected through the fan boards and I found he remembered me from my pitch, and I even got the impression he was interested in letting me pitch for Andromeda before he was let go. So if he had wanted to base something on my pitch, I’m sure he would’ve contacted me and seen that I got paid for it. Therefore, it must have been a coincidence that this story was similar in certain ways. Still, it’s a bit frustrating to consider how close I came.
So that may have colored my view of this episode, but even so, I don’t think it’s very impressive. I’m not sure mine would’ve been any better, but “Empok Nor” didn’t do much for me. This kind of horror story isn’t my cup of tea (despite the similarities in my idea — but that just shows that it probably wasn’t a great idea). And the character stuff didn’t work so well for me. Even knowing that it was probably just Garak blowing smoke, all the stuff about O’Brien being this great tactician and worthy adversary and whatnot rubbed me the wrong way. After all, he’s supposed to be the everyman character, the working stiff. So that just didn’t sit right. And the focus on the one-shot sacrificial lambs didn’t really do much for me. Ideally they should’ve seeded a couple of these characters in earlier episodes. Voyager in its early seasons was actually pretty good about setting up recurring characters who’d eventually be killed off. It’s rare to see VGR be better at something than DS9 was.
I’m a bit surprised that this was Marjean Holden’s only Trek appearance, since I thought I’d seen her more than once here. But I guess I’m just remembering her for her work in other shows, like her regular roles in BeastMaster: The Series and Crusade. Not that great an actress, but really beautiful and statuesque.
@9: Actually, I’m sympathetic to the view I’ve heard from a few TNG writers (I think including Piller) that the Roddenberry edict could be a positive thing because of the challenge it posed to the writers. Roddenberry’s dictum, as I understood it, wasn’t really “no conflict whatsoever,” it was “no petty conflict.” Meaning that writers couldn’t fall back on the standard lazy tropes of having characters get into conflicts because they were neurotic or jealous or selfish or had a foolish misunderstanding or were just mean-spirited jerks, so that an easily resolved situation was gratuitously made harder to work out. If the characters were basically well-adjusted and meant well and respected one another, then conflict between them would have to arise for genuinely good reasons — say, because they had a fundamental conflict of priorities or beliefs or were faced with a situation where there was no clear, easy solution.
So the Roddenberry edict meant that writers couldn’t fall back on their usual cheats for generating conflict, and instead had to challenge themselves to come up with situations that would produce meaningful conflict even among characters who wouldn’t normally be at odds.
Granted, I think Roddenberry himself did make the rule a little too strict; even well-adjusted, reasonable people who like each other can still have bad days and misunderstandings and screwups and blind spots. But it wasn’t completely a bad thing. I’d much rather see a story about a conflict that’s really hard to resolve because both sides have a genuinely valid point of view, and thus end up at odds even though they both mean well. It’s so much more interesting than a story about a conflict that only happens because the characters are too neurotic or dysfunctional to cooperate, or because one is lying to the other for no good reason.
@16: I think the Withdrawal was too abrupt for the Cardassians to rig any elaborate traps, but they did do their best to sabotage the station’s systems when they left. And though this has never been established onscreen or in a novel, I’ve always assumed that Dukat didn’t want the station damaged too badly because he always intended to retake it at some point.
Yeah, I can buy Dukat wanting to leave the station intact to reclaim it someday.
I’m sure he thought the Bajorans would evict Starfleet after a short period of time and then the Cardassian leadership would see the errror of its ways and resume business as usual.
The discovery of the wormhole, of course, would have screwes up those plans.
Funny enough, I have this mental image of Dukat getting raked across the coals by Central Command for failing to find the wormhole in his backyard during his time as Prefect.
The soldiers were experiments that did not work out (or possibly accidental victims of the goo, just like Garrak) and were put into stasis until they could decide what to do with them. When the Cardassians abandoned the station it was decided not to bring along such a dangerous element and so the soldiers were abandonned too. However their stasis was set to release them should any looters board the station (might as well put them to some use). The Cardassians didn’t skuttle the station completely in case they later had a use for it or some of its parts
So both the theories make sense when put together.
A better question is why they decided to slather the inside of the station with phychotropic-xenophobic-crazy-juice. Empok Nor is a bloody big place yet Garak manages to put his hand on the one railing where a medical intern just happened to spill the PXCJ on his way out a year ago? No, clearly they made too much and decided to use it up as a cheap paint thinner for scrubbing graffiti off the walls (they wouldn’t want looters thinking the station looked scruffy before getting horribly murdered now would they).
Well we know from the episode Civil Defense that Cardassians do booby trap stuff as a matter of course (not just Dukat), as the crew first trip one of Dukat’s old booby traps, and then Dukat manages to trip one of his old bosses’ traps whilst gloating. And many, many, many episodes hammer home the point that Cardassia’s “hat” is not so much Nazi-ism as it is Orwellian complexity. They have plans within plans. If a Cardassian wants you to go to the store to get milk then they have a seventeen step plan which culminates in you stopping off at the store after tricking you into buying a house first.
I can buy pretty much everything in this episode, even them setting an old station adrift. It would make a great covert listening post after all, provided the people sent to man it were properly prepared for the murder juice left to thwart any other Cardassian faction’s plans.
Given the withdrawl from Empok Nor would have been during the middle of the Klingon invasion, the abandonemnt may have been done for financial reasons.
If so, I have this amusing image in my head of the Cardassian military not even having the money to booby trap their own installation.
Oh yeah, speaking of the “adrift” station, one thing that amused me was how they showed it was abandoned by having it be at an angle relative to the frame rather than “upright” as DS9 is. Which is really silly when you remember that there’s no up or down in space! There’s absolutely no difference between the orientations except for how the camera is positioned relative to the station. It’s such a total cheat.
@23 – I may be completely wrong, but I assumed while watching that the unusual angles from which everything was shot was an attempt to emulate the unusual camera angles Hitchcock would use in his suspense thrillers in order to keep the viewer disoriented and heighten the suspense. The director also regularly uses Hitchcock’s trademark low-angled camera shots throughout,
@24
Too bad they didn’t go all Bernard Herrman with the score either. But then again, Rick Berman had the composers reigned in. They couldn’t extrapolate on the music side. It had to be secondary to the episode.
My thought on this episode was always this: If Garak were in his right mind, The Chief wouldn’t stand a chance against him.
In a “fair” fistfight, yeah, O’Brien’s probably pretty tough. But this is GARAK. No such thing as a fair fight with him. In his element, I don’t think anyone on any ST series except Odo (who always has a certain Deus Ex Machina risk about him, and had to be badly nerfed throughout the series) could stand against Garak if he made up his mind to kill them. Not Worf, not Data, not even (shudder) Spock himself.
Ooh, I had the same thought about it being way too plot covenient that Garak decided to hold Nog hostage instead of killing him like he did everybody else – especially because none of the plan really seemed to hinge on him having a hostage (presumably O’Brien would have come after him anyway).
But yeah, kind of a forgettable episode where you know they’re just going to hit the reset button anyway. There were some parts that were atmospheric and creepy but we’ve done that before.
Also, they should probably think about renovating DS9 so they don’t have to keep scavenging creepy Cardassian stations every time some special/unique part breaks down.
First, the whole suspended bodies was done by Kahn, so Garak isn’t even an original psychotic killer (minus three psycho points). I actually thought that Garak should have had Nog (and maybe the others) in some sort of death trap so that not only does O’Brien have to play the most deadly game but do it against the clock. (Will Chief Obrien save not from certain death? Find out next week-same chief time, same chief channel). That would have been more interesting than this, which ends with Obrien only one step more involved than Indiana jones in the raiders marketplace.
One other question- the nor stations (terok, empok, neither) were built for resource mining. Yet Empok Nor is in the middle of nowhere- no planet or minefield…. What the hell is it doing there? And for that matter, why did the Cardassians just leave it. I figure that Terok Nor was surrendered to the Bajorans, but why would the Cardassians not tow off Empok? Not only is it creepy, but conveniently located and nowhere in range of anyone who might want it. It’s an interesting concept, but way too many holes.
@15:
In the case of Terok Nor/DS9, the station wasn’t being fully abandoned; Bajorans were still there and actively resisting them. The withdrawal was also fairly hasty and we don’t get the impression it was planned very far in advance, so booby trapping that station was presumably far less feasible.
As for those wondering why Empok Nor existed, who knows for sure? With no obvious resources or strategic value it was likely a research installation of some sort. Covert operations maybe or various things that needed to be kept under the rug. They did have those Third Battallion guards and that biogenic compound; perhaps the guards and compound were part of an experiment and the Cardassians decided to just use them as the booby trap.
Regardless, I think it’s a fun episode.
As for Garak sparing Nog, I think I interpreted that as some vestige of Garak’s conscience remaining — he didn’t know any of the redshirts personally, but was more familiar with Nog, so maybe a bit more of his merciful side was able to assert control there.
@28: “the nor stations (terok, empok, neither)”
:lol:
You forgot Gover, Demea, Monsig, and Misdemea.
Perhaps Empok Nor was an asteroid-mining station. Despite how asteroid belts are portrayed in fiction, you wouldn’t actually be able to see the asteroids with the naked eye because they’d be millions of kilometers apart. Presumably the station would normally be close enough to a given asteroid to mine it conveniently, but it could’ve drifted away since it was abandoned.
you wouldn’t actually be able to see the asteroids with the naked eye because they’d be millions of kilometers apart.
@30
You learn something new every day. There goes my vision of dense, impenetrable asteroid fields like the ones seen on Empire Strikes Back and Attack of the Clones (although the one in Episode II was more of a Saturn-like ring of rocks; whether that’s scientifically plausible or not, who knows?).
@31: The rings of Saturn are composed of particles that average about a kilometer apart and range from dust-sized to house-sized. So almost, but not quite, as dense as a standard movie/TV asteroid field, and made of smaller, icy particles. Also they’re extremely thin and flat, so it would be quite easy to get out of the path of the ice chunks just by moving a couple of kilometers perpendicularly to the rings. There’s no reason a ship would have to contend with them as an ongoing obstacle course unless it chose to for some reason.
@18, Yeah, I was over-simplifying a bit.
I know Roddenberry meant well and there were benefits to the Roddenbery Box.
I just agree that he took it too far sometimes during early TNG.
@23
good point but the askew space station was one of the best visuals we got in this entire episode. the way i think of it, DS9 is stable, and maybe Empok Nor was rotating in an abandoned way. Although the shot didn’t make the station seem like it was slowly spinning out of control, that’s how I interpreted it.
I liked this episode. I didn’t love it. But it kept me entertained.
My biggest complaint is, these space stations have to be hugely expensive. Here is one (booby trapped sure, but in good condition). Why is no one trying to salvage it?
Especially when the next time we see it, we see it becuase six Ferrengi are going over there. Why don’t the Ferrengi try to salvage it?
@34: That would’ve worked much better. A station that lost attitude control might well be in a slow spin. It would’ve been an effective and far less arbitrary way to convey the idea.
@34 Space stations may be expensive (although given the advances in space-construction, probably not as expensive as they are now – the Galaxy class starship is essentially a space station with a warp drive attache, although the same could be said of anything from Miranda Class-sized on up), but salvage is not cheap either. To salvage it you have to have a ship, so you’ve already got a space station with warp drive, and crew and equipment, and all the hazards of dismantling and/or towing stuff, and you need a market for reuse (and the market has to be big enough to sustain those costs).
None of that is cheap for those cultures still wedded to currency. It could quite easily be that the cost of salvage exceeds the return you’d get from it. Unless it was posing a direct threat to shipping, it wouldn’t even be worth blowing up as navigation hazard.
I guess what bothers me about all this is episode is, as much as I enjoy Garak, he killed one member of Starfleet and threatened the life of another one, and at the end, everyone’s just okay with that. Just because he “wasn’t in his right mind.” He can go back to his tailor shop and everyone can pretend like nothing happened. At the very least, you’d think he’d be kicked off DS9, because how could anyone trust him again?
Of course, you wonder why Picard would trust Data after he hijacked the Enterprise-D that one time. But that kind of question just screws up the whole format, doesn’t it?
@36: Yes, and there’s also the fact that in a replicator-based society, salvage would be pretty unnecessary for the most part. You need a part, you just program its pattern in the replicator, feed it the necessary raw materials, hit the button, and voila.
@37. People being mindcontrolled goes all the way back to TOS (and in-universe Enterprise Era at least) by goo, or aliens, or computers, or precursor aliens, or Khan-worms, or their past/future selves, or…well you get the idea. I tend to give it a pass just because of that long history. Once you’ve established something is not an uncommon hazard, then you need to look at how society works around it. Since it seems almost all starfleet officers, and a huge number of civilians, will be people puppeted in some form or other at some point in their careers, then you have to stop taking it as a relationship breaker. There is probably just a form to fill out by now.
The suspense in this episode might have worked better had they not actually shown Garak killing the Cardassians, and at some point they discover the soldiers’ corpses and realize that Garak’s the one who’s been hunting them since the halfway point in the episode.
Another thing that kind of bugged me about this episode is the way it treats Garak like this totally unstoppable murderer. I somehow got the impression that, when he was a spy, when he killed it was more often some sort of assassination that had been planned at length, so he’d had time to devise ways of avoiding a fight in the first place. Not like commando that he mostly comes across as here.
-Andy
This is one of those episodes that I remember really liking at the time it first aired, but which upon re-viewing later I could really see the seams showing.
I get the idea that this was a budget-saving “bottle-show,” since it featured only “regular” characters (with just a few expendible redshirts) and took place on what had to be a just a re-dressed version of the DS9 standing sets.
I only vaguely remembered this one, and was not looking forward to rewatching it. That’s mainly because I remembered it as the one where a bunch of redshirts die on an old station that looks like Deep Space Nine. After rewatching, that vague recollection is pretty much spot-on, except Garak kills one of the redshirts. Ahem. Yeah, that’s fairly disturbing, and gets worse when Garak strings up the bodies. But hey Garak wasn’t in his right mind, so see you for lunch at the Replimat, Garak. Try to avoid Amaro’s widow, like forever.
Yeah, let’s pretend this episode didn’t happen.
Nope, this episode doesn’t really work. “The spare part can’t be replicated”. Why exactly? Has this been explained?
What bothers me the most is that EVERY CHARACTER who’s not mentioned in the opening credits, dies. One even killed by Garak, which is the second time he threatened someone from the station (the first one being Odo) and other than Nog mentioning it a few episodes later, it again has no consequences for him. I really don’t like how the main cast is always above the rules so much. Of course this isn’t only a problem in DS9 or just Trek, but it’s so very apparent here. Dax going on a personal vendetta, Worf trying to kill his brother, Garak killing Star Fleet personell or torturing the Chief of Security… All they ever get is a stern look and then nothing else happens. This is just silly.
At least in DS9 it’s not just the main cast. Garak is only recurring, as much as you’d think he is main cast. He’s in less than 1/5 of the episodes, but he’s so well developed, so charismatic, and so important to the plot, that it makes you think he’s in a lot more episodes than he actually was.
This really is a weak episode – nothing about it makes particular sense and the callous death of four Starfleet characters just to get some equipment isn’t what I expect from Trek. As many technical wonders as O’Brien and Bashir are able to pull off on a regular basis and they can’t manufacturer a new plasma manifold or whatever doohickey was needed?
Garak was affected that much just by a bit of skin contact from some residue on a post? Really??
As others have said, the idea that the Cardassians would leave a fully equipped and powered station behind with three soldiers in stasis is particularly unbelievable.
What bothered me is that people were able to sneak up on or past Nog. He’s a Ferengi. He should be able to hear people walking, even if they are trying to move really quietly, especially before they are 2 feet away from him.
Lockdown Rewatch.. wow some harsh reviews here, it might just be me but I quite enjoyed this one, it’s not a classic by any means but it’s entertaining and redesigning the station we are all familiar with and making it look sinister is excellent work from the set designers. Plus I’m a sucker for a sinister corridor scene. I’d give this sold 6 out of 10.
@@@@@46 From the front or side maybe, but while would amplify noise from those directions, their bulk would cause an aural blindspot directly behind them. To properly utilise big ears in a three-sixty orientation you need them to be able to move on their own, to flick around. For whatever reason, nature did not bless Ferengi with omnidirectional ears. I suppose if they evolved to move in packs, as their capering in various episodes suggests, then there would always be a pair of ears pointed in every direction and the metabolic cost of ear muscles was no longer worth it.
Regarding Roddenberry’s Box: Sometimes imposing limitations on a artist challenges them to create better pieces.
As an example: I’m a costumer. At Costume-Con we have various competititions other than pure masquerade. One of those is a doll competition. A number of years ago my wife and I were the Doll Contest Directors. We were inspired by a Threads Magazine (a sewing magazine) to have a category which limited color. Someone who wanted to compete in that category had to contact us and we assigned them two random colors. Their piece had to be 90% in those colors.
Another tradition competition is the Single Pattern Competition. In this competition a commercial pattern is chosen and the challenge is to design a costume which must be recognizably that pattern; the costumer can use any type of material, construction method, color, embellishment they wish; they can even distort pieces, to an extant, or use them in unexpected ways.
It can be amazing to see what can be produced when your creative choices are limited: it can lead to extension of one’s creative juices and lends a certain discipline to one’s design process.