| Episode: | 27 | | | Writer: | Jane Maggs | | | Director: | Deborah Kampmeier | | | Air Date: | 06-Apr-2023 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching Dominion, which is an interesting word in Star Trek. There are ominous implications there.
It's the season season in a row to feature a Jane Maggs story as episode 7, though that's not much of a coincidence as she wrote almost a third of season 2. Arguably the worst third, but I'm blaming the season arc for that more than anything. I haven't seen director Deborah Kampmeier's name on any Picard episodes, but she did direct The Galactic Barrier for Discovery, which is an episode I didn't like all that much either. Damn, not a lot of reasons for optimism so far, but I'll see how it goes.
This is where the SPOILERS start, so quit reading here if you don't want the episode ruined.
RECAP
The crew discover that Captain Tuvok is a Changeling, cutting off another possibility of finding help. So they switch to a daring plan to capture Vadic on the Titan using forcefields. Jack and Sydney act as bait to lure her boarding party around but he has to telepathically take control of Sydney in order to help her fight one of the intruders.
Picard and Crusher interrogate Vadic in sickbay and she reveals that she was one of the Changelings experimented on by Starfleet. She killed her torturer, took her appearance and escaped with the others to form a rogue faction. Picard decides he has to put his ethics aside and murder her in captivity... but Lore's personality becomes dominant in the android's body and he disables the ship's forcefields, allowing the Changeling to escape. Vadic takes her troops up to the Titan's bridge and captures the bridge crew.
REVIEW
Deep Space Nine had a darkness and ambiguity to it, but Benjamin Sisko would be very disappointed at Picard and Crusher standing there with phasers, apparently ready to execute their prisoner. Even worse, the moral of the story seems to be that they should've executed her sooner! They hesitated, she got out, and now they've lost their ship.
Right now it seems like the Changelings need Picard's dead body to pass a genetic test, but there's clearly more going on with Jack's 'Irumodic Syndrome' so maybe there was more to Picard's condition as well? I don't want to start speculating, but I do like that Picard's death and rebirth is becoming a key part of the plot. It makes it feel like the events of season 1 meant something.
I'm glad that some real consequences have come from Section 31's actions, but it's really frustrating to me that the blame is being absorbed by our guys. It seemed like the show was giving me what I wanted to happen, Section 31 being recognised as a shitty organisation, but instead it ended up saying 'in some ways Starfleet is a shitty organisation', which is the opposite of what I wanted!
When Vadic accuses Starfleet officers of being the ones who tortured her, no one disagrees. There's no discussion about the difference between Section 31 and Starfleet, and no attempt by the characters to defend themselves. Once again, Sisko would be shaking his head.
But Vadic is definitely wrong about the cure being stolen by one of their own, because it was actually stolen by Bashir and O'Brien. They were the two Starfleet officers who discovered Section 31's genocide plot and ended it, saving the Dominion and adding another chapter to the legend of Miles O'Brien, the most important person in Starfleet history.
I wasn't a huge fan of the scene where Seven chats to Tuvok on the viewscreen, trying to figure out if he's a Changeling infiltrator. Maybe it's because the camera kept zooming into Seven whenever the scene cut back to her, over and over again, with one final dramatic zoom at the end when she got angry.
Maybe's it's because the clue that gives Fake Tuvok away is his willingness to meet at a planet where anti-kolinahr protests took place. I mean, they're trying to save the Federation, it's logical for him to go where he has to in order to achieve that goal regardless of his personal dislike of the place.
Or maybe it's because I could barely see it.
It was even harder to see the inner battle between Data and Lore, but that's just because there was nothing to see. The fight is so internal that we're basically given nothing other than character switching personality mid-conversation. LeVar Burton did some great acting, but it was definitely a 'character says heartfelt thing until other character snaps out of it' moment with very little else going on.
I mean I saw the process of how they achieved it. They sent Shaw up in the turbolift to distract Seven, then one squad came in through the briefing room while a second squad formed up from the turbolift floor. But why was everyone entirely distracted by Shaw instead of thinking to check the lift he came in from? And if the briefing room was an entry point why was no one guarding it? Okay, to be fair these are young officers that were never trained to fight Changelings and Seven was busy on Voyager the whole time the Dominion War was going on, but c'mon.
Anyway, that's what was going through my head during the ending, which is why the big moment with Vadic sitting down in the centre seat didn't work for me. It didn't feel earned.
RATING
To figure out what score I should give this I'm going to first compare it to the 7th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's 3rd season: The Enemy. Hey, that's the one where Geordi's stuck on a hostile planet with a Romulan, I love that episode! But did I love Dominion a little more? No, no I didn't.
Both episodes feature a main character basically fail a moral test due to their hatred of the enemy, with Worf refusing to volunteer to give a Romulan a blood transfusion in The Enemy, and Picard and Crusher deciding to betray their moral compass and execute a prisoner in this, but I could at least see where Worf was coming from! This just felt unnecessary.
We've seen captains like Janeway and Archer do some pretty dark things when they were pissed off, but even at their darkest they wouldn't threaten a prisoner's life without the possibility of getting some useful intel out of it!
I did enjoy a lot about this episode, there were some good conversations, but overall it had kind of a nasty tone to it that wasn't working for me. So I'm giving it:
6/10.
COMING SOON
Leave a comment if you've got any opinions about Dominion you want to share.
Another reason why "The Enemy" is better is that Worf is in it, and while it's been a while since I watched Picard series three, I think this is around the point that Worf stops being in it for inexplicable reasons.
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