Timothy Lynch's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Episode Reviews

Season 1 - "Captive Pursuit"

Review Date: 1/30/93

WARNING:  Spoilers for "Captive Pursuit", DS9's latest offering, are entering 
your area at a rapid pace.  Those not wishing to be hunted by them should 
remain set apart from this.

Lose *one* small thing and you've got a great show on your hands.  With it, 
it's still a pretty nice one.

That one thing of course, is Tosk managing to find out about weapons storage 
so easily, particularly given Quark's *difficulty* in finding out about 
something far less dangerous (crew replicators) only last week in "Babel".  
That is a cheat that's a slap in the face to the professionalism of both 
DS9's writers and Odo's security system, and both should be offended.  :-)

Apart from that, I was for the most part quite impressed with "Captive 
Pursuit".  Like most of DS9's plotlines so far, the plot *itself* was 
something we'd probably all seen variants of in the past, but it was well 
pace and handled with a good eye for the key characters -- and that, after 
all, is usually what "makes" a show.

For starters, O'Brien had a key, meaty role in a show for the first time 
since, possibly, "The Wounded" -- and both the character and Colm Meaney were 
up to the job.  O'Brien was a good counterpoint to Tosk; Tosk was a very 
convincing alien (more on that in a moment), and O'Brien is rapidly turning 
into the most down-to-earth human being on the station.  (Truth be told, he's 
starting to remind me more and more of a cousin by marriage of mine who is, 
yes, an Irish cop.  :-) )  O'Brien's patter about how he couldn't rush things 
for fear of having a bad rep all over the Gamma Quadrant really *did* feel to 
me like it was second nature to him, which is a pleasant feeling to have 
about a character who's been a bit of a cipher in DS9 so far.  

O'Brien seems to me to be very quick and talkative, and always ready with a 
comment -- but in ways very unlike Odo, the other source of "commentary" on 
the show.  Odo makes acerbic comments to get his observations across or to 
let off steam; it looks to me like O'Brien's commentary is just part of his 
connection with the world, and is there almost to fill space, because *not* 
having a comment seems to be lacking somehow.  Having some of those 
tendencies myself, I can well understand that.

As I've mentioned, O'Brien made a nice counterpoint to Tosk, who was one of 
the most convincing aliens Trek has seen since "Darmok".  Although the 
problem of basic communication was not in evidence (a slight problem, since 
you'd think it would take a little while to have the translators figure out a 
new species), the differing mindsets very clearly were, and this was made 
clear in several ways.  Chief among them would be the way Tosk stepped right 
up to people and examined them from a few centimeters' distance, rather than 
the normal distance most people consider their personal space.  (Visually, of 
course, Tosk also worked well as an alien, but that's the least of the issues 
so far as I'm concerned.)

The idea of Tosk being bred specifically for the purposes of the hunt is an 
old one (one more amusing variant would be Douglas Adams' Dish of the Day 
:-) ), and worked primarily because of two bits of handling:  Tosk's oath of 
silence concerning his purpose, and the hunter's absolute lack of 
understanding the Federation's reaction.  In the hunter's point of view, 
declaring the wormhole out of bounds really *is* an ideal solution to all 
parties, and should satisfy even those who, due to "ignorance", oppose the 
very idea of the Tosk and the hunt.  This wasn't so much a problem with basic 
communication as it was a problem with both sides talking right past each 
other.

The final major element of the story would have to be that, for the first 
time in a *very* long while, we've seen conflict *between Starfleet members*. 
Up until now, even in the "grittier" DS9, all the personality conflicts have 
been between Starfleeters and non-Starfleeters:  Sisko/Kira, etc.  Here, we 
saw the beginnings of something more.  Sisko's harsh reaction to O'Brien at 
the show's close is an example, though merely a stronger version of what we 
saw in "Reunion" when Picard chastised Worf.  Another, subtler example, 
though, would be the way O'Brien essentially ignored and ran right over 
Bashir's suggestion about Tosk "talking to his doctor".  Now, the suggestion 
was naive enough that he may have been right to dismiss it, but O'Brien 
seemed distinctly annoyed by it.  We shall see, but it's an intriguing sight.

(And, of course, the point that Sisko upbraided O'Brien for his actions while 
allowing them to reach their conclusion unhindered is a time-honored 
tradition in Trek lore, I think -- and it worked.)

Some smaller points, then:

-- The opening scene in the teaser would have been very pedestrian were it 
not for one thing:  that Quark's sexual advances really *were* part of the 
contract.  Trust a Ferengi to use the legal niceties to his advantage.  :-)

-- Odo is slowly being revealed as quite the technophobe.  I've mentioned 
bits of it earlier, but here we saw two more points.  One, he doesn't use 
weapons himself, which probably explains why he doesn't allow them on the 
Promenade.  Second, however, he asks O'Brien to check on what Tosk did to the 
*security* grid, which is something I'd normally expect a security chief to 
know backwards and forwards.  There's a clear pattern developing here, and 
it's decidedly interesting.  I want an explanation for it sometime, though.  
(One that's been suggested to me -- sorry, I've forgotten who -- is that Odo 
has decided that since science hasn't been able to explain *him* or his 
origins, it's useless for his purposes.  I like this idea very much.)

-- This time, O'Brien had all the good one-liners.  I particularly liked 
"Glass jaw -- now I know why you wear a helmet."

-- A reminder for future episodes:  Based on O'Brien's actions here, I expect 
to see Odo *very* pissed off at O'Brien for a while.  I imagine he'll be 
professional about it, but next time there's a prisoner transfer Odo should 
probably object to keeping O'Brien anywhere near.

-- Another reminder of "Reunion", of course, was O'Brien neatly leaving his 
combadge behind.  Smoothly done -- and I almost got the feeling that he did 
it on instinct.

-- O'Brien's and Tosk's ease in communicating during the repair work made me 
realize that music isn't the universal language -- *technobabble* is.  :-)

That's about it.  Tosk's ease in finding the weapons was silly, but apart 
from that we're in very good shape here.  Keep up the good work!

So, the numbers:

Plot:  8.  A little unoriginality and one major gaffe, but solid.
Plot Handling:  10.  Well paced and smartly done.
Characterization:  10.  Flawless.

TOTAL:  9, up to 9.5 for some rare convincing alien makeup.  Good job.

NEXT WEEK:

Q won't have *nearly* as much fun without Picard to tweak...

Tim Lynch (Harvard-Westlake School, Science Dept.)
BITNET:  tlynch@citjulie
INTERNET:  tlynch@juliet.caltech.edu
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"Traffic was a bitch."
			-- "The Player"
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Copyright 1993, Timothy W. Lynch.  All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...
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