161. Prodigal Daughter

Summary

When the Chief does not return from a secret trip to New Sydney to locate Marika Bilby, the widow of a Syndicate operative he befriended while undercover (see Honor Among Thieves), Sisko asks if Ezri's family can help...they run a mining operation in the same system. Ezri's mother, Yanas Tigan, agrees to help if Ezri will come home for a visit. When she arrives she finds her artistic, sensitive brother Norvo smothering under their mother's domineering hand and a mountain of bookkeeping and her more practical brother Janel preoccupied and worried about frequent mine breakdowns and mysterious accidents. When the New Sydney authorities find the Chief, he tells Ezri that he found Marika Bilby dead and thrown into the river. Janel asks the Chief's help with an engineering problem. As they work on it, a man named Bokar (clearly with the Orion Syndicate) arrives and makes some veiled threats. Miles and Ezri do some checking and discover that Marika was on the company's payroll for some time though she did no actual work. Ezri assures him she knew nothing of this, and Miles' suspicion that the Tigans are being pressured by the Syndicate deepens. When Ezri confronts her family about this, Yanas is shocked and angry that they could have had anything to do with the Syndicate and accuses Janel of dealing with them. He confirms that the Syndicate helped them out of a difficult financial period without Yanas' knowledge, and in return they asked that Marika be given a paycheck. She soon began to demand more money. While Yanas demands to know if Janel had anything to do with her death, Ezri sees the look on Norvo's face and soon he admits that he killed Marika after his efforts to convince her to curtail her demands failed. Browbeaten for years and feeling perpetually inadequate, Norvo had finally seen a way that he could deal with a problem that no one else could have solved. He is arrested and gets 30 years in prison for his crime.

Analysis

Weeeeellll...this is in many ways a typical Weddle & Thompson script. Not bad, but not particularly inspired or affecting. The central premise stretches the bounds of coincidence. It's a very, very large universe and it's amazing to the point of stupefication that the people responsible for the support and ultimately the death of a woman connected to the Chief through a mission that took place over a year ago just happen to be the family of his co-worker. This plot contrivance aside, the episode has two parts: Ezri's family angst and the Chief's detective work about Marika Bilby. Neither are particularly satisfying. The cookie-cutter family angst is no different than that we've seen hundreds of times before on endless family dramas. The overbearing mother, the older "responsible" son carrying the weight of Mommy's expectations and the younger tortured son who's always been told he should be more like his brother. Then you have Ezri, the escapist, who disconnects herself from her family dysfunction and runs away to Starfleet. Yawn. And Yanas is too overbearing even for this angsty scenario...anyone who would blackmail her daughter into visiting, especially when another man's life is involved, can't be that sympathetic from the outset. That said, the episode rather concisely establishes these dynamics without too much insult to our intelligence: just from the way each of them greets her and her reactions to them, we know about 90% of her dynamic with her two brothers. It would have been more interesting to explore her family relationships with respect to her joining, but it seemed things were just the same as they would have been if she were still Ezri Tigan barring a few throwaway lines. The Chief's search for Marika is a very good piece of continuity from last season and a half-decent character development for Miles, but on its own merits it's a standard gangster plot. Organization takes care of operative's widow but she's killed by her caretakers. I'm also unclear why the Syndicate was pressuring the Tigan family. Was it a general "you're cutting in on our business" racket, which would have little if anything to do with Marika, or was it more that due to her death they still felt the Tigans owed them? The whole thing doesn't quite hang together, but it has a few nice moments. I love the look on Miles' face when he discovers Marika's connection with the Tigans...he stares at Ezri and you can see in his mind the questions forming. Did she know about this? Did I just step in it big time? And the last time Ezri goes to see her mother, when she walks in the door her face is so Dax-like in its expression of thoughtful maturity.

Not bad. Not great. Some nice art direction and I liked the look of the Tigan's mine operation. Very Bladerunner. And the episode gets my automatic 0.5 ratings point hike for being a Worf-Free Episode (TM) (the second such ratings bonus in as many weeks). And yet another Alamo reference!

One note: Mikael Salazar, the actor who played Ezri's older brother Janel (the responsible one), wrote to me a few months ago right after he finished shooting. He had such a good experience that he wanted to find out more about the show and found the Bistro; he wrote to say how much he liked the site. By his letter he's quite jolly and good-natured, not much like Janel. And what a cutie. :-) I just thought that was pretty cool.

Rating: 6.0

Memorable Quote:

"There are times when the computer asks me to identify myself and I have to think about what to say! Or worse yet, there's days when I wake up and I don't even know if I'm a man or a woman until I pull back the covers." --Ezri

Classic Scene:

I rather enjoyed the dinner scene, in which Ezri does manage to share some thoughts about being joined with her family, though her mother soon steers the conversation to other matters. It was an effective encapsulation of the family pecking order.

Sexually Slanted Line 'O the Episode:

"It's the one with Captain Sisko's boot-prints all over it." --Julian. Oh, things sound funny taken out of context.

The O/K Status Report

Negative. Special Alerts

1