Trek-a-Week #27: Duet

Trek-a-Week
Jul 25, 2017 · 8 min read

Ben:

While last week’s episode, Captive Pursuit, was a solid action-adventure introduction to Deep Space Nine — with a some trademark Star Trek ethical quandaries thrown in for good measure — Duet drops most of the SF action, piles on the moral/psychological fare, and hits you like a ton of bricks. In this respect, the episode reminds me a lot of TNG’s The Measure of a Man; it’s the first episode of the series to really demonstrate what can be done when the characters and series setup are used to their fullest.

Duet opens with a brilliantly-executed reveal. We hear about a person arriving at DS9 with an ailment that obviously places them at the Gallitep labor camp and we see Kira enthusiastically rush off to meet what she assumes will be a Bajoran hero, “a symbol… of strength and courage.” But of course in the final scene, we see that the new arrival is in fact Cardassian. This isn’t someone who survived the labor camp; it’s someone who’s complicit in its operation. (The way this is structured reminds me of “flip” — a term those of us who make comics use to refer to the deliberate act of placing plot reveals on left-facing pages so that they’re revealed to the reader only once the previous right-facing page is flipped.)

The main plot of Duet (there really is no B-story) is essentially a procedural, with Kira and Sisko trying to figure out exactly who this Cardassian arrival is. The brilliance of course is how the episodes toys with our expectations as information about Marritza/Gul Darhe’el is gradually revealed, and what seems like a fairly conventional plot (proving that the prisoner is actual a war criminal in disguise) becomes decidedly more complex.

Again, so much of this is jarringly darker than any previous Trek that’s come before. Kira describing conditions at Gallitep:

First came the humiliation, mothers raped in front of their children, husbands beaten till their wives couldn’t recognize them, old people buried alive because they couldn’t work anymore.

Horrifically, not an out of place description of war-time labor camps, but it’s hard to imagine this line coming from anyone in any Trek permutation previous to this. And yet this is a necessary result of DS9’s willingness to delve obviously and directly into more troubling subject matter — the cruel and brutal nature of armed conflict, conquest, colonialism.

There’s long-running speculation in Trek circles as to which particular real-life event the Bajor/Cardassia relationship is an allegorical stand-in for: Palestine/Israel, or Nazi Germany/occupied European states, or any number of other historical situations in which one nation occupies another. It doesn’t matter. Sadly, the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger is a universal truth. And with the Bajor/Cardassia setup, DS9 can raise interesting questions that — as per usual in Trek — are ostensibly about aliens, space opera, etc., but are actually about us.

For example: Kira’s assertion that, “ As far as I’m concerned, if he was at Gallitep, he is guilty.” Does Marritza’s mere presence at the prison camp make him a war criminal? In order to not be a war criminal, would he have been obligated to actively refuse orders? What if that refusal would have immediately and unequivocally cost him his life? In the Nuremberg Trials, it was decided that “defense of superior orders” was not a legitimate defense against war crimes:

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Was a moral choice in fact possible to Marritza?

What makes Duet so interesting, though, is that Marritza is not, in fact, trying to argue this — or any other — defense. He feels he — and Cardassia — are clearly guilty of horrific war crimes. I also, thought, get the sense that he harbors some guilt for being a “bad Cardassian” — for being unable to embrace and relish role as a patriotic Cardassian performing his (horrific) duty at Gallitep.

This complex and conflicting emotional set-up pays off amazingly as Marritza vacillates between claiming he’s a menial file clerk, denying he’s the infamous “butcher of Gallitep,” embracing his feigned role as Gul Darhe’el, and then eventually breaking down completely as his farce is undone. His bellowing, “What you call genocide, I call a day’s work!” is as startling as his near-immediate transition to weeping, “ You have no idea what it’s like to be a coward, to see these horrors and do nothing.” (And what a performance by actor Harris Yulin by the way!)

And yet all of what’s set up here gets nearly derailed in the final act of the story. It turns out Marritza’s impersonation of Gul Darhe’el wasn’t so much a manifestation of a conflicted psyche as a (nonsensical) scheme to impersonate Gul Darhe’el in an attempt to be tried as him for war crimes, and thus force Cardassia to “acknowledge its guilt.” This plan is already fairly tenuous — then add to this that Gul Darhe’el is apparently long-dead and known to be so publicly on Cardassia.

Furthermore, Kira’s immediate forgiveness of Marritza, marching him out of his cell and proclaiming, “ You didn’t commit those crimes, and you couldn’t stop them. You were only one man” inexplicably flies in the face of her earlier sentiments — it’s a change of heart without a believable basis in story.

And the final bit of dialog in Duet, after Marritza is stabbed, is so ham-handed that it’d be out of place in an After-School Special:

KIRA: Why? He wasn’t Darhe’el! Why?
KAINON: He’s a Cardassian. That’s reason enough.
KIRA: No! It’s not.

These minor last-minute blemishes aside, though, Duet is gripping, thought-provoking Trek that stands with the best of any of the series that have come before it. I’d forgotten how good it is.

Addenda:

  • Is this the very first appearance of Yamok sauce?!
  • “ This Bajoran obsession with alleged Cardassian improprieties!” This dismissal of legitimate concern about criminal acts as a weird “obsession” rings sadly familiar today. <cough cough>Russia<cough cough>
  • With the possible exception of Blade Runner, “image enhancement” sequences in SF are ALWAYS DUMB. Case-in-point: this episode.
  • The one Quark scene in this episode is again horrible. I remember really liking Quark as a character in DS9, but re-watching these episodes so far, I’m mystified as to why.

Katherine:

Our first DS9 episode was basically a veiled story about slavery — how do you respect foreign cultures when you morally disagree with their practices — and the next episode, Duet, is a not-so-veiled story referencing the genocide of Jews by the Third Reich. Yes, we have aliens in showy make-up standing in for humans of different ethnic backgrounds. But these tales address issues of ethics, not so much science fiction, and so far I’m a bit underwhelmed. Maybe this is why I didn’t really watch DS9 when it aired?

Let me try to focus first on things I liked about Duet. The story unfolds as a ship arrives at the space station carrying a sick patient. When the name of his condition is communicated to Sisko, Kira, the captain’s second in command and a former officer of the Bajoran militia, asks leave to meet the incoming visitor as the disease is one only contracted by residents of a labor camp — during Cardassian occupation — resulting from a mining accident. Kira assumes the patient was a Bajoran inmate at the camp which she herself helped to liberate.

She arrives in sickbay to find that the patient is not Bajoran but Cardassian and immediately has him arrested as a war criminal. He denies that he was at the labor camp, then it is determined by his medical condition that he was. Then he says he was merely a filing clerk who knew nothing of the murders that happened at the camp. Yet then, a photograph identifies him, not as a clerk, but as Gul Darhe’el, the Cardassian leader of the prison camp and initiator of the atrocities that occurred there.

All the while, we are on a see-saw of emotion as Kira is enraged at the presence of a Cardassian who worked at the labor camp, then she wills herself to be a fair interrogator, then is floored again to find that he is the “Butcher of Gallitep” himself. If you thought Shatner won the prize for scene chewing, you haven’t watched the melodramatic yelling match between Kira and Marritza. “I think I’ve heard enough of your lies!” “I did what had to be done!” “Tell that to the tribunal [smirk].”

The real kicker is when further investigation uncovers the fact that the Cardassian has undergone facial reconstruction — yes, to look like the labor camp general — but is, actually, just the filing clerk who, in a fit of stress-induced trauma, tried to metamorphose into Gul Darhe’el and deliberately be captured in order to suffer the punishment that he believes he deserves for witnessing, and not preventing, the atrocities against the Bajorans. Kira knows she must release him since he is not guilty of anything. But she also tries to offer him some absolution, “You didn’t commit those crimes, and you couldn’t stop them.”

Duet does a nice job of parceling out the information as the identity of the Cardassian changes and the characters come to acknowledge their prejudices. The pacing of the story is good even if the acting is a bit over-the-top. Sadly, as Kira escorts Marritza out, a zealous Bajoran stabs him from behind, simply because he is Cardassian. Kira cradles him as he dies and… end scene.

It isn’t a bad episode, necessarily, it just doesn’t provide anything that hasn’t been done or said before. There are no space ship battles, no interesting futuristic scientific principles, no victory of good over evil. Just, meh. Kira’s outfit is pretty entertaining, a skin-tight bodysuit with bolero jacket and wide belt at the hips. And I adore the monitor screens that show the old-school logo for the United Federation of Planets whenever a transmission is received from another officer or head of state.

The only scene that really caught my attention, and possibly the shortest one, is a conversation between Kira and Dax. Kira says that she wants Marritza to be guilty. And Dax counsels her that if she ends up punishing him without reason, it won’t mean anything. This is a thoughtful exchange where Kira is able to admit to her feelings of hatred and Dax is able to offer psychological advice. What was most jarring to me is that this is the first real conversation between two women that I can recall in any of the Star Treks that we’ve watched so far (no, I am not counting the blather between Crusher and Alyssa about her boyfriend). Not to get all feminist here but it did make me a little sad to think that this is the first meaningful dialogue between two female characters in 27 episodes. Maybe I’m just forgetting something? Or maybe Ben unconsciously selected episodes with lots of guy talk. Something to check for next week…

Next week: The House of Quark

Trek-a-Week

Written by

Ben and Katherine are watching an episode of Star Trek each week in 2017 and writing about it.

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