“The Sound of Her Voice”
Written by Pam Pietroforte and Ronald D. Moore
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 6, Episode 25
Production episode 40510-549
Original air date: June 10, 1998
Stardate: 51948.3
Station log: Odo is dinging Quark with tons of minor regulations violations—and then is interrupted by Kira, who wants to have lunch. Without even pausing, Odo drops his harassment of Quark and leaves with the first officer. Quark sees Odo’s being so easily distracted as a great opportunity for him.
The Defiant has just finished escorting a supply run. Yates is on board as well, as she agreed to be supply liaison officer—but that was before she found out how much paperwork was involved. Bashir wanders into the mess hall and tersely agrees with Yates’s feelings on paperwork, prompting Yates to say she misses when Bashir was talkative; Sisko says that he likes him better this way, and Yates calls him on the fact that he isn’t joking and what he said was really mean.
They’re interrupted by a distress call from a Starfleet officer named Captain Lisa Cusak, CO of the U.S.S. Olympia, who survived a ship crash on a Class-L planet in the Rutharian Sector while heading home from an eight-year deep-space exploration mission. Sisko changes course immediately while O’Brien tries to establish a two-way comlink.
Quark reminds Odo that this upcoming Saturday is the one-month anniversary of his and Kira’s first date, and he should really buy a gift. Jake confirms to Odo that this is actually a thing, and after the constable goes off to buy a gift, Jake then asks Quark what he’s up to. Quark only agrees after Jake says that it’s not for journalistic purposes, but fictional ones: he needs character research for his in-progress crime novel.
O’Brien has been listening to Cusak’s rambling monologues, eventually establishing the link, wherein Cusak reports what happened to Sisko. The Olympia investigated a planet that was surrounded by some kind of barrier. But they got too close and an active sensor scan made the field go wonky and damage the ship, which crashed on the inhospitable world with no other survivors. Bashir walks Cusak through rationing her tri-ox injections until they can arrive. She also asks that someone talk to her until they get there (it’s a six-day trip), as she’s been alone for two days and it’s driving her crazy. Sisko says that can be arranged, and Cusak adds, “And order them to enjoy it!”
Sisko takes the first shift, filling her in on the war that broke out since she took the Olympia out of the Federation eight years ago. When Cusak gets sick of hearing about the war, she asks Sisko about his love life, and seeing that Sisko is feeling tense about his relationship with Yates, she distracts him with the tale of the Andorian she dated when she was a junior officer.
Odo has found what he thinks is a perfect gift for Kira, and Quark then talks him into a holosuite program for the date where he presents the present. (Ahem.) All is set for Quark’s deal to go down on Saturday night while Odo’s distracted in the holosuite. (Jake reminds Quark that Odo has deputies, but Quark scoffs that he can handle deputies.) But then Odo puts a spanner in the works by reserving the holosuite for Sunday. The first date ended badly, so he’d rather celebrate the anniversary of their first kiss. Unfortunately, Quark can’t reach his Nausicaan contact, who’s a wanted man, and changes his comm protocols to keep from being traced. But that means he’ll be tossed in a holding cell by Odo the microsecond he sets foot on the station.
Bashir and O’Brien each take their turns with Cusak, the former barely paying attention until Cusak upbraids him, the latter going on at great length about how much the war is affecting him. Unfortunately, one of her tri-ox vials was tainted, so she’s run out sooner than expected. They can make the ship go faster, but only if they use the phaser power to strengthen the structural integrity field—which means no phasers if they encounter a Dominion ship. Sisko thinks it’s worth the risk—she’ll die otherwise.
Sisko opens up to Cusak about how uncomfortable he is having Yates on the Defiant. She gets him to realize that she’s a distraction on the ship. It’s a mixing of his personal and professional life, and he’s not handling it well—it’s messing up his relationship and his command.
Quark is resigned to the fact that his deal won’t go through, and laments to Jake that after all he did to goose Odo along in his pursuit of Kira, Odo still treats him like a common criminal. When he leaves, we discover that Odo was a crate in the cargo bay the whole time and heard every word. So he re-sets the date to Saturday night, saying that Kira agrees with Quark that the date is what should be celebrated, not the kiss. Quark is thrilled, and Kira is impressed with Odo’s magnanimity in letting him get away with this particular smuggling job. Odo says he owes Quark one, and will get him next time.
The Defiant arrives at the planet just as Cusak loses consciousness, but there’s no way the transporter can get through the barrier that destroyed the Olympia, and neither can the ship itself. But a shuttle pod might make it through, and Sisko takes Bashir and O’Brien to do so. But when they arrive, they find the remains of a human who’s been dead for three years—it’s Cusak, but the barrier caused a time-delay in the subspace signal.
They bring her remains back to DS9 and hold an Irish wake. Sisko promises to talk to Yates about what a doofus he’s been, Bashir and O’Brien each memorialize her and take the lessons she taught them to heart, and they all toast her memory.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The barrier that destroyed the Olympia and time-displaced Cusak’s communications is an exogenic field made of subspace metreon radiation, which is just like regular metreon radiation only subspacier!
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko doesn’t like having Yates on the Defiant because he’s uncomfortable with the mix of personal and professional. He had no such problems having his wife on board the Saratoga, though Jennifer’s eventual fate on the Saratoga may have something to do with his feelings now. Would’ve been nice if that was mentioned, though…
There is no honor in being pummeled: Worf thinks it’s a spectacularly irresponsible idea to drain phasers of power because they might need them, apparently forgetting that the ship also has torpedoes. It restores Worf to his time-honored role of making a recommendation that is flat-out rejected by his commanding officers.
Worf also describes an Irish wake as being almost Klingon.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo shows that being in love with Kira isn’t even slowing him down in terms of making Quark’s life a living hell. But Quark has done enough for him—including suggesting he celebrate his and Kira’s one-month anniversary—that he lets his smuggling gig pass this once. What’s especially amusing is that Quark was right—Odo totally would’ve nailed his ass.
The slug in your belly: Dax doesn’t appear until the final scene, as the producers had given Terry Farrell—who had already decided not to return for the seventh season—the opportunity to audition for pilots. (She’d eventually wind up on a show called Becker with Ted Danson for its first four seasons.) After O’Brien mentions that one of them may die in the war and they should mourn together, the camera goes to Dax, who will, in fact, die in the next episode.
Rules of Acquisition: We get the 285th (and final) Rule: “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”
Tough little ship: The Defiant still has problems with being overpowered—when it goes above warp nine, the ship shakes itself apart. O’Brien can only prevent that by dumping phaser power into the structural integrity field.
What happens on the holosuite stays on the holosuite: Odo picks Paris in 1928 for his and Kira’s one-month anniversary date, with him in a tux and her in a flapper dress and appropriate hairstyle. (They both look fantastic, by the way.) Why two Bajorans (okay, a Bajoran and a pile of goo raised on Bajor) decide to go to an Earth city from 450 years earlier remains a mystery, though Quark does make an amusing comment about how Earth of the past is very romantic.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: When Sisko makes it obvious that he’s having issues with Yates, Cusak tells him about the time she dated an Andorian civilian when she was assigned to the embassy there. Meanwhile, Kira and Odo seem to be doing fine, having lunch dates at the Klingon restaurant and going on anniversary excursions to the holosuite.
Keep your ears open: “Contrary to public opinion, I am not the arrogant self-absorbed godlike doctor that I appear to be on occasion. Why don’t I hear anybody objecting to that statement?”
“Well, I will if you insist.”
“I insist.”
“Then I object!”
Bashir trying to be humble and failing, and O’Brien helping him along.
Welcome aboard: Debra Wilson was cast as Cusak solely on the basis of her voice—the producers only listened to audio auditions. Wilson, best known for her lengthy stint on MADtv, is a veteran voiceover actor as well. We also get Penny Johnson back as Yates.
Trivial matters: Director Winrich Kolbe deliberately kept Debra Wilson from meeting the rest of the cast until after filming was done to preserve the verisimilitude of the story.
Pam Pietroforte’s original story had Sisko communicating with someone from 1940 and developing a relationship with her over the gulf of time. I can see why they changed this—Sisko already had a relationship with Yates, plus this calls back a bit too much to both “Far Beyond the Stars” and TNG’s “Pen Pals.”
This episode takes place one month after “His Way,” as Odo and Quark reference the impending one-month anniversary of their first date (on the holosuite, with Odo thinking Kira was a hologram) and their first kiss (the next day on the Promenade at the end of the episode).
Sisko mentions failed attempts to retake Betazed, which fell to the Dominion in “In the Pale Moonlight.” Betazed will be retaken by the Federation in the novel The Battle of Betazed by Susan Kearny & Charlotte Douglas, which takes place between the sixth and seventh seasons of DS9.
Metreons were previously referenced in Voyager’s “Jetrel,” where the title character created a megaweapon called “the metreon cascade.” We’ll see metreons again as an all-purpose nasty thing in Star Trek Insurrection, Voyager’s “Think Tank,” and Enterprise’s “First Flight” and “E2.”
Walk with the Prophets: “Tell her her heroes are on the way.” There’s a lot to like about this episode. Cusak is a most engaging character, magnificently voiced by Debra Wilson and imbued both by Wilson and Ronald D. Moore’s script with verve and charm and wit. I could see how people would be willing to serve under her for an eight-year mission far from home. On the one hand, I can see why they limited her interactions to Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien, as it allowed for a greater focus, in particular her conversations building on each other, though I’m still disappointed we didn’t get to hear her talk to Yates, Dax, or Worf.
The B-plot also works rather nicely, showing how Odo has evolved, yet not really changed at all. He’s developed a sentimental streak—shown in the care with which he picks out Kira’s gift as well as how he lets Quark off the hook—but it’s not so strong that it interferes with his job in the slightest. It’s also a good use of Jake, as it gives him something to do that actually makes sense (research) and gives Quark someone to talk to.
Unfortunately, for all the episode’s charms—and they are considerable—it ultimately all falls apart at the end. The revelation that Cusak died three years ago makes the whole story completely absurd and nonsensical.
First of all, Starfleet keeps very meticulous records. In case we’ve forgotten how meticulous those records are, the teaser reminds us in a lengthy conversation among Sisko, Yates, and Bashir on the subject of the metric craptons of paperwork that Starfleet requires.
So how is it possible that Sisko and the others don’t know that the Olympia went missing three years earlier? True, they were far enough from Federation space that real-time communication wasn’t possible, but they still would be sending updates. If those updates stopped happening, the ship would’ve been declared missing, or at the very least been investigated. Even if they hadn’t found them, it was three years ago, which was before the Dominion War started, so you don’t even have that excuse for maybe why nobody was looking for them.
For that matter, it was an eight-year mission that they were coming to the end of. Did it never occur to anyone to check the service record of the Olympia and then see that it went out on its eight-year mission eleven years earlier?
Plus, they were talking to her constantly for six days. Didn’t anyone at any point mention the date? Didn’t Cusak ask Sisko or someone to look up her family (one of her siblings, say, whom she mentioned several times)? At which point, somebody might have noticed the discrepancy.
Basically, there’s absolutely no credible way, none, unless everyone involved was dumber than a box of hammers and forgot how to use the ship’s computer, that they could have gone the entire episode without knowing that Cusak had been dead—or at least missing—for three years.
What’s more, the episode would’ve been more poignant if they did realize it right away. Have someone look up the Olympia’s service record (which would’ve taken about half a second) and discover that they launched eleven years ago, and have Cusak realize that she’s talking from the past and Bashir be forced to tell everyone that it’s impossible for her to still be alive. But they go anyhow, to retrieve her remains if nothing else. That would’ve been a poignant story with emotional weight, as Cusak is talking to people who are alive after she’s long dead. Instead, they pull a sci-fi trick out of their asses at the last minute without giving any thought to what it actually means to the rest of the story.
Also O’Brien’s whole we’ve-grown-apart speech doesn’t really feel right. He just was reunited with his family in the previous episode (honestly, flipping this and “Time’s Orphan” would’ve worked beautifully, with O’Brien’s resolve to bring Keiko, Molly, and Yoshi back to the station growing out of his talks with Cusak), Odo and Kira are planning playdates in the holosuite in this episode, the whole gang was taking excursions to Vic’s Place on the holosuite only a month ago, and we saw O’Brien, Odo, and Worf hanging out in Quark’s like old buddies just three episodes ago. They haven’t been growing apart, the script just says they are, and I don’t buy it.
There’s a good story in here, and it’s honestly worth watching for Wilson’s voice-only performance alone, creating a superb character whom I wish we could’ve gotten to know better. But the story doesn’t actually work…
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido has a bunch of new things out, including the short stories “Time Keeps on Slippin’” (in the Stargate SG-1/Atlantis anthology Far Horizons), “Stone Cold Whodunit” (in the superhero anthology With Great Power), “Fish Out of Water” (in Out of Tune, a Jonathan Maberry-edited anthology of stories based on sea ballads), and “Undine the Boardwalk” (in the Bad-Ass Faeries anthology It’s Elemental); the essays “Embracing the Entire Universe: The WildStorm Era” (in New Life and New Civilizations, a history of Star Trek in comics form) and “Gaming the Novel” (in Kobold Guide to Combat); and the Sleepy Hollow novel Children of the Revolution (reviewed on this very site).
I think they should have just dropped the whole time shift thing and simply not had the ship arrive in time. That would have been a whole lot more poignant. Just introduce any small thing that delays them a few hours. Much better all around. Sometimes the cavalry doesn’t arrive in the nick of time, even if they are in the same time zone.
And what’s going on in that first picture? The face O’Brien is making is ridiculous.
I don’t even remember watching this episode
It’s ironic that this rewatch took place on the same week Interstellar opened.
Even though that movie takes plenty of dramatic liberties for storytelling’s sake, it manages to convey pretty well that feeling of isolation, plus the whole time displacement issue thanks in no small part to the NASA feeds of McConaughey’s family and the way 23 years without their father affected them.
The Sound of Her Voice could have worked a lot better had they dropped the twist ending. It really wasn’t necessary. It already worked well as a character piece for everyone involved.
Production-wise, I’m impressed how Winrich Kolbe jumped straight from this episode to directing a Voyager season finale. Needless to say, you gotta hand it to TV directors for having the will and energy to keep doing this without a break.
Or if the time dilation had been just 30 minutes or so. Just long enough that Cusak could be on the verge of passing out as Defiant went into orbit, then on arrival they find she has been dead just long enough that she can’t be resuscitated.
I really like KRAD’s suggestion that the crew knew from the beginning that Cusak was doomed. That would have been a powerful episode, as the crew tried to decide whether or not they should tell her about her ultimate fate. As the episode stands however, it is pretty ridiculous that no one on DS9 bothered to google the woman they were talking to.
Ugh. I’m a bit irritated with this write-up.
Yeah, the first thought I have at the beginning is “why don’t they look her up – you want to make sure it isn’t a Dominion trap” and at the end is “really?”, but the middle is charming enough to help me overcome and ignore those problems.
Now, with the issues put to paper and clearly enunciated, I can’t let them go. An episode I would have given a 7 has fallen. Well, in comparison with what we just went through, I’ll still give it to them, just because we’re grading on a curve now.
This episode takes place one month after “His Way,” as Odo and Quark reference the impending one-month anniversary of their first date.
Presumably a Bajoran month, though. Which may, or may not, be of similar length to an Earth month.
I absolutely agree that the ending was annoying. The first thing I thought was “did nobody think to check.” The truth is, of course, that it could have been included in the plot easily. Even if they knew there was a three year difference, they would not have been able to stop the rescue attempt. After all, how many times in ST history has someone slipped through some kind of temporal displacement field (it even happened the previous week). So they would have no way of knowing if they were talking to someone in the past, or someone from the past who was now in the present. In many ways that, too, would have added to the drama as they would be heading down to the planet not knowing which one it would turn out to be.
For some reason I had in my head that what happened is what krad proposes, that the Defiant knows already that there’s a time shift as they start talking to her, or that they find it out during the conversations and not after they arrive. Shows how poor my memory can be that I mentally closed those plot holes and somehow remember the improved version instead of the actual episode. And that could have been a powerful episode. Do you give her false hope, trying to make her final hours more bearable, or do you tell her right away that she’s already dead? Obviously the latter, so she has a chance to try and make adjustments to her communicator. But even then to have them still talking to her, knowing they can’t change her fate … what a much better episode that would have been. Even as it was, the wonderful voice acting really made this a good episode to watch. Krad is right that the ending ruins the story, but it doesn’t diminish how good it was up to that point. I’d give this one a 6 or 7.
Well, I don’t think I would have wanted the time dilation to be something like 30 minutes, or for them to be talking to her in real time and simply not get to her in time – as poignant as it would have been, and realistic, it would be a little too depressing. Sometimes I just want the heroes to save the damn day.
I also did think it was weird nobody looked her up, or knew that the Olympia had been missing, and also, why weren’t there people who actually knew her at her service? I suppose they would have a real one after returning her body to the Federation though.
Minority opinion – I found her voice rather grating, and I also found her personality a little pushy/intrusive at various points.
If they HAD realized they were hearing her in the past, should they have told her? Because that would be kind of harsh – they would know, and she would also know, that there was no chance of being rescued. It’s probably the right thing to do to let her know, but I can see how it would be kinder to just let her pass out thinking she’s going to be rescued…
I agree with you on the ‘we’ve grown apart’ thing, it just didn’t ring true. Although perhaps O’Brien is just doing a good job of hiding it but internally feels very depressed/isolated.
I very much enjoyed watching Quark and Odo one up each other, and the payoff that while at first it seems like Quark truly is distracting him, once Odo books the suite for Sunday you know he knew what he was doing all along. However, I thought it was really weird that Jake is basically an accomplice to all of this. If Odo HAD busted him in the end, wouldn’t Jake somehow be accountable since he knows it’s all going down?
I had the same thought about the whole 1920’s France thing, but I suppose it’s emotional shorthand in a way. On one hand, saying something like ’20th century Bajor’ gives a little more flavor to the universe (and makes more sense), but on the other hand it doesn’t have the same emotional resonance. And maybe that can be argued that it’s lazy writing/worldbuilding.
How would you have felt if instead of finding her three years dead they would have found a three year old crash but no her, then they go “Doy, two way communication, We must have figured out how to tie it through the transporter and beamed her out three years ago, now figure out how we did it and do it.”?
@9 – I think they’d HAVE to tell her, for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, to let her know she had called the wrong number, so to speak, and that she needed to try to connect to someone in her current time. Of course if she was successful doing that and survived, then that would introduce the whole paradox problem of wouldn’t they have known she was going to contact them from the past? (I hate time travel.)
But even so, lying to her would have been wrong. Sure they would have spared her the distress of knowing they couldn’t rescue her by not telling her, but that would be denying her the chance to pass on any last messages to her family and take care of any unfinished business she might have. Even more importantly, I think lying to someone about something this important (literally a life and death matter) would be incredibly presumptious. If it was a child maybe that would be different, but she would have deserved to know the truth, painful though it may be. I know that’s what I would want.
Oh yeah, me too. But some people might not, maybe. It would suck to break the news but I do think it’s the right thing to do.
I liked this episode a lot, but that’s because I hadn’t really thought about the logic problems you point out, which do knock it down quite a bit now that I think about it. Still, the idea of it, a story driven by conversations with a character we never actually see, is intriguing. Sometimes you can reveal more to a stranger than to the people you’re closest to. And I just liked it when they committed to doing an episode that was pure drama without needing to tack on a gratuitous action/danger subplot. Too bad the premise doesn’t really hold together.
“Odo was a crate in the cargo bay the whole time and heard every word.”
I initially read this as Odo was in a crate the whole time…
The time shift with Cusak reminds me (in a future, timey-wimey way) of Miss Evangelista from Doctor Who’s “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.” It seems it’s far more painful for the living to talk to the dead if they know they’re dead. Nobody was quite keen on soothing Miss Evangelista when she was in the little box – nobody knew how to handle talking to someone who doesn’t know they’re dead. I think it would have been far more interesting for the crew to have had to talk to Cusak this way, but given that she was the main feature of the episode, it would have been a terribly grim 45 minutes.
My problem with this episode, back when I first saw it, was the way it added up at the start:
1) They are in a race against time to save the sole survivor, plus
2) During the race against time, the sole survivor bonds with everyone who talks to her. They all befriend her and gain new insights into straightening out problems in their own lives, equals
Sole survivor dies in ironic/poignant way that drives home the importance of the brief interaction and the insights gained.
I love ya KRAD, but I gotta disagree very much so on this episode. Personally, this is a 7 or 8. I understand what you’re saying about the contrived nature of the time travelling transmissions, but at the same time, I feel that I get what the lesson of the episode is and it’s basically O’Brien’s speech summed up in the old lesson: “Yesterday is gone and tomorrow isn’t promised. All we have is right now.” And we should appreciate and love the people in our lives RIGHT NOW and make sure they know that. It reminds me also of how in ”The Inner Light” when Picard-as-Kamen tells Mariposa: “Seize the moment! Make NOW the most important time because NOW will never come again!”
@16 I’m also wondering if the writers were inspired by “Schrodinger’s Cat” in coming up with the idea of having the DS9 crew conversing with someone who was both “alive” and “dead” at the same time, whose actual status could not be known until they actually “opened the box.”
leandar: It’s not the “contrived nature” that I have an issue with, it’s that there’s no credible way, none, that they could not have realized that Cusak’s transmissions were three years old after talking to her constantly for several days. It’s just not possible unless all the characters in question are spectacularly stupid.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
For some reason I remembered this as being a Voyager episode.
I must admit, at times I found Cusak to be crossing the line from “interesting and engaging character” into “Mary Sue who’s amazing at solving everyone’s problems and everybody automatically loves her.”
Apart from the logic problems with the story that Keith notes, I also thought it was a cop-out to have her pass out right before they go down to the planet. I think it could have been interesting if they say, “We’re on our way down, see you in five minutes!,” then, 20 minutes later, “Hey, bad news…”
Or, similar to ChocolateRob’s suggestion in #10, after they found out, why didn’t they try to pass the transporter through the atmospheric timey-wimey refraction thingie to beam her from the past into the present? Tom Riker is evidence that transporters can do crazy things when passing through the right kind of crazy atmosphere.
-Andy
@20: Because then they wouldn’t have found her remains, and then they would never have tought to beam her back from the past, which would lead to them finding her remains again…and on and on the infinite loop goes.
In fairness to the writers, we’re looking at this from the perspective of 2014. Googling is ubiquitous, and a lot more information is at our fingertips than we had in 1998. If I want to know the history of the USS Jones, Wikipedia will be happy to tell me in absurd detail – after I specify which of ten different ships I’m referring to. Google wasn’t even incorporated until 3 months after this episode aired. (Also from Wikipedia, for both factoids.)
There are also communications-lag issues with distributed knowledge in spacefaring societies. I agree that a military ship probably should have had local information about other ships in the same military. However, storage media also have plummeted in price. In 1998, you’d pay 3 cents/MB. Prices are now 3 orders of magnitude cheaper, so the idea of local copies of Wikipedia (25 GB just for text) make a lot more sense now than back then.
I agree that this is a problem, and it’s correct to ding the writers for the plot hole. However, the militancy of the this-is-idiotic reaction is a bit extreme. For writers who were pre-Google/Wikipedia/smartphones, I can understand how this fell in their blind spot.
@22: But as Keith said, it’s not just about being able to consult Starfleet records of the mission, it’s about the fact that they’d been talking to her for three days straight and yet somehow never managed to mention any dates or any information that would reveal some discrepancy in their awareness of time.
Besides, science fiction has been depicting Google-like data-search capabilities for generations. The trope of the oracular computer that can put the combined knowledge of all humanity at a character’s fingertips has been around in fiction since at least the 1950s and was definitely an influence on TOS’s depiction of Spock’s library computer. We may not have been able to make it an everyday reality until the past decade or two, but that doesn’t mean nobody had ever thought of the possibility before.
EEEE: Yeah, that justification doesn’t work. We’ve seen characters on TOS, TNG, and DS9 regularly pull up information about other Starfleet ships, including ones going back centuries (viz. the Essex in “Power Play” or the Valiant in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I respectfully disagree with Krad on the why-didn’t-they-look-it-up thing. When I saw the episode – only twice, once relatively recently – I thought it was because Sisko, O’Brien and Bashir needed a new person to talk to. That it wasn’t about her but about them. That’s why Dax, Kira, Worf, the redshirt who polishes the handrails on the turbolifts, etc. etc. couldn’t talk to her because they would have done the logical thing and checked the ship out through the archives. I thought it made the whole thing more poignant because it was about our guys.
@25: It is about our guys, for the viewers – but in-universe, would they really spend all that energy going out there without checking it out? I can’t imagine the Defiant is cheap to run! I think that’s the objection I’m having – sure, we get a good story, but it’s not a realistic scenario. They should have looked her up on the way there.
The way I see it, such a plot hole can occur when you’re working on a breakneck pace.
This was the second-to-last episode of a 26 episode season, and it was DS9’s 6th year (17th year, if you count TNG and Voyager seasons as well). I can understand if Ron Moore and the writers missed it. By number 25, you’re burned out, trying to meet deadlines.
With this, plus Terry Farrell’s imminent exit messing up whatever they had planned for the finale, they were scrambling to get the season done, so they could focus on DS9’s top upcoming priorities: creating Ezri Dax and setting up the end to every story arc.
That actually brings up a point I was wondering about – at what point did they know the show would only have 7 seasons? Had that been planned from the start, or was it one of those things where they only knew when the season started, or somewhere in between?
@28: TNG had seven seasons, and I doubt the makers of DS9 or Voyager expected to do any more than that. It was pretty much the maximum feasible runtime for a series, since cast and crew salaries went up every season, and after the seventh year they would’ve gotten prohibitive. Usually the only shows you see that run longer than that are ones that have a lot of cast turnover, like Law & Order or Smallville, since new cast members don’t cost as much. The only exception I can think of is Supernatural, which has had the same two leads for ten seasons, but I suppose a two-person core cast is more affordable over the long haul than a nine-person one.
So I was actually a bit behind, and only finally rewatched this episode tonight. Now I don’t buy this even more, because O’Brien says “I never saw her face.”
What the hell, man?! You never even looked up a picture of the person you talked to for six days? The person who made you laugh and made you weep, you never even wondered what she looked like? Who even does that…*grumbles*
Such meh. Very snooze. Much blah.
Acknowledging the plot holes, I still really like this episode, if for nothing else but Debra Wilson’s voice-only performance and her interactions with Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien. It was nice seeing our heroes just talk openly.
I guess it holds a certain place in my mind because its the last episode before -whoops- Jadzia dies. The internet wasn’t as ubiquitous in 1998 as it is today, so I had no idea that Terry Farrell had simply decided to leave the series. If I had known that in ’98, I would have kept watching more actively during the seventh season. Now I just feel silly that this was the cut off point (well the next episode was), and I didn’t watch much of season seven in first run. So from here, much of next season will be new to me.
NCIS is on its 12th season, and 5 of the 8 opening-credits characters have been stable since Season 1. Impressive!
Then again, the lead actor is also the producer, and one of the other leads is the director’s nephew IRL, so that may have something to do with it. The series may not deal with standard payroll issues.
^ It’s also CBS’s top show. That can make up for a lot.
Also only 4 of the opening credits regulars have been there from jump: Mark Harmon, Michael Weatherly, Pauley Perette, and David McCallum. Sean Murray and Brian Dietzen started as recurring (and weren’t there from jump), Lauren Holly was replaced by Rocky Carroll, and of course there’s the revolving door of the desk opposite DiNozzo’s with Sasha Alexander, Cote de Pablo, and now Emily Wickersham.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Frasier had the same five main characters for its whole run, 11 seasons, as did How I Met Your Mother, which ran for 9. But I guess sitcoms are generally cheaper to make than hour-long dramatic shows?
Stargate SG-1 also ran for 10 seasons, though there were some significant cast changes in the latter seasons.
This episode is very good until the ending which is not only downbeat but suddenly pulls the rug under it’s whole plot! I would expect that within a minute or two from hearing the first transmission someone on the Defiant would’ve tapped a few times on a console and brought up all SF had on file for the ship and it’s captain.
I guess at the time the producers must’ve thought it was a very clever twist…
@36: Technically, Stargate SG-1 ran for five seasons twice — it debuted on Showtime, was cancelled after five seasons, then got picked up by Sci-Fi and ran for five more seasons there. So that sort of reset the clock, I think.
CLB,
Thanks for the info, didn’t know that. I’ll look at it differently now, trying to see if this looks to have had an effect on the story.
@34: Yes, but Sean Murray made the jump from recurring to regular very quickly. IIRC it was before the first season even concluded, hence my claim.
Actually, Murray was made an opening-credits regular on NCIS in season 2.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
So, having actually watched this one tonight (I don’t always watch before reading, and sometimes I play catch up or run ahead… I’ve seen them all multiple times anyway), I think the “twist” ending could have worked better had it only been a few months to a year time shift. Short enough that the ship wouldn’t have been notably missing coming back (I imagine that the long-range survey missions are given a few months of scheduling leeway to account for unexpected occurences), but long enough for her to have been dead before they received the signal.
And yes, it still would have made an even better story if they’d had to make the choice whether or not to tell her she was already dead. And while it wasn’t the focus of the episode, it would have been nice if they’d taken the time to at least include a line about recovering some of the Olympia’s logs… so that a whole ship’s crew’s lives hadn;t been lost for essentially nothing.
I think this episode speaks well to the crews arrogance. From the “Let her know her heroes are on their way” to the well tread trope that everything will be fixed by a magic particle cronoton accelerator thingie that Miles builds at the end of the episode, the crew succeeds far to often. It made me happy to see them fall short for once. The only real issue I had was at the wake, everyone was pretty damn cavalier about the whole thing.
Sisco’s angst never rang true, nor did Miles. But Debra Wilson was amazing. She came across as human and scared. I found her character to be acerbic and flawed which brought her to life so much more.
This episode made me think. So I am going to say it was a pretty big step up from the last few episodes.
Well Starfleet people due have a habit of not checking things when it helps the plot. For example the fact that the Ceti Alpha system was missing a planet and some of the others were in the wrong orbit.
The convoy mentioned at the very beginning is called PQ1. WW2 Artic convoys to Russia had the prefix PQ, nice little nod I thought.
That’s exactly how I felt. It was such a good episode up until this point. The explanation doesn’t even make sense. “Oh yeah, the signals just traveled back and forth through time and no one even noticed it!”
I mean, it really would have worked. Tell her that she is already dead in their time and there’s no possible way to get her out alive, but at least she won’t die alone and the very least they will do is to retrieve her remains to give her family peace.
waka: Yes, exactly.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Yeah, for me that’s the real problem with this episode. I think it could have ended with a bigger emotional punch if Cusak had died right before the Defiant crew could rescue her.
Lockdown Rewatch. I watched this originally the first time with my father, he was not a big watcher of the Next Generation timeline, he was a TOS man and would dip in and out of DS9 but about ten minutes from the end he said “I bet she’s been dead for years”.. I had not spotted that twist coming but kudos to the old man, he saw it.
By this time I knew that Terry Farrell was leaving so found O’Briens speech at the end about one of the group not being there one day a bit toe curling, like one of those daily soaps where a character gets a big emotional scene saying good bye as they leave to emigrate to Australia only to die in a crash on the way to the airport,
“Why two Bajorans (okay, a Bajoran and a pile of goo raised on Bajor) decide to go to an Earth city from 450 years earlier remains a mystery…”
Head-canoning that Odo picked it based on Vic’s suggestion.