163. Field of Fire

Summary

The crew is celebrating the stellar piloting of new officer Ensign Alurio, and after much celebrating Ezri escorts the inebriated ensign home...but when she awakes the next morning she's astonished to find him dead. He's been murdered with a bullet, but Odo is puzzled as to how it was fired at such close range without powder burns. When another Starfleet officer, unconnected to Alurio, is murdered in the same way the mystery deepens. Sisko asks Ezri to apply behavioral science methods to help find the killer, a concept that disturbs her due to the presence of violence in her own past, courtesy of Joran, her host before Curzon. The Chief discovers that the killer used a rifle with a microtransmitter attached, enabling him to scan through the bulkheads, fire a bullet, and beam it a few centimeters away from the target, thus committing the murder at a distance. Ezri decides to perform a recalling ritual that would enable Joran to help her. They track the killer to a Vulcan officer for whom emotion is repugnant...he was provoked by pictures of laughing people in the victims' quarters.

Analysis

Hmm. I'm noticing a direct correlation between the length of my summaries and the quality of the episodes. The less complex an episode, the more stuff I can leave out when I summarize it to you. Take, for example, this episode. It is...how shall I say this. Dreck. Oops, did I say that?

Where to begin. Well, first of all, the fact that this episode is just the latest in EzriFest '99 doesn't help matters. I truly do like Ezri, but why the sudden focus? This is the fourth episode *in a row* to either focus on or feature her prominently. It's not so bad if there's a good reason to focus on her, when the story requires it, but here we find her...investigating a murder. Whose territory would that kind of storyline usually be? And it's not the first time she's usurped another character's turf, so to speak. Is it so difficult to find her turf of her own? How about her unsuitability for joining and her difficult assimiliating her symbiont? That really hasn't been well explored.

Then, there's the problem that the episode makes little literal or narrative sense. Was it supposed to be some sort of "Silence of the Lambs" knockoff? Since when does criminal investigation require the assistance of an actual criminal? The idea that Joran could help solve a murder just because he's committed one is patently ridiculous. The initial scenes, with Ezri's flashbacks and disturbing visions, were implying heavily that she herself was committing the murders in some sort of fugue state. Then the plot seems to forget that entire thread completely in favor of this Ghosts of Hosts Past claptrap. There's a completely gratuitous Worf scene shoehorned into this mess which is prefaced by some lame things-that-go-bump-on-the-Promenade.

And while I'm on the subject, since when did Vulcans become the designated assholes of the Trek universe? This same week, Tuvok on "Voyager" was portrayed as all but mentally ill because of his Vulcan emotional control. Now we have a Vulcan serial killer who kills why? Because he can't stand the emotion he sees in photographs! Excuse me while I give a hollow laugh.

But. It's not a total loss. One thing I did appreciate was the attention given to realistic reactions of the crew to the sudden death of one of their comrades...and I did find Ezri's inner turmoil as she recalls Joran's homicidal tendencies interesting. If only they'd stayed with that instead of calling him forth like a visitor from beyond to play Hannibal Lecter. I had a hard time believing that this was a Robert Hewitt Wolfe script. He is one of DS9's finest writers, too long absent from the writing staff, and *this* is what he comes up with out of the dugout? Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty because it's not remotely up to his standards. Mysteries are difficult to write, I know what I'm talking about. But they only work when the solution comes out of clues and circumstances coming out of the actual crime...this one is solved through contrived leaps of nonexistent insight that leave one feeling profoundly unsatisfied.

Rating: 3.0

Memorable Quote:

"Maybe I'll start calling my tricorder 'Sally.'" --Chief O'Brien

Classic Scene:

For all its faults, this ep did come up with a rather ingenious way to kill someone. The rifle with its microtransporder and one-eyed sighting device was grimly creepy, and the scene which finds Ezri and the Vulcan killer stalking each other from across the station has a certain Manchurian Candidate spookiness.

Sexually Slanted Line 'O the Episode:

"Nice melon." --Odo. Isn't it usually melons, plural?

The O/K Status Report

Odo has quite a few scenes but Kira only one, and none together. Special Alerts

1