DS9: “Second Skin” and “The Abandoned”

Date: June 30, 2020

Season 3, Episodes 5 and 6

Musical Accompaniment: Cello covers today, I’m on a bit of a roll with different instruments I guess.

Interstellar News: Happy last day of Pride, my friends. I saw a beautiful rainbow during my evening walk and it was a wonderful thing.

Favorite Quote from “Second Skin”:

Kira: Anything worth doing in a holosuite can be done better in the real world.

Quark: You’ve obviously never been in the right holosuite program. But, if you’d like, I could…

Kira: You could, but you’d live to regret it.

Quark trying to talk Kira into some sexy fun time and Kira not taking the bait.

So what had happened in “Second Skin” was…: Kira gets a call about a week stay in a prison she was never at, so she heads to Bajor to investigate but is kidnapped on the way there. When she wakes up she’s on Cardassia and looks like a Cardassian, and a man named Entek tells her she’s been a long-term spy for the Obsidian Order and given the real Kira’s appearance and memories, but her real name is Illiana Ghemor and she is the daughter of a Legate. They’ve given her drugs to help her remember, but they aren’t working. Entek questions her about DS9, shows her Kira’s dead body, and has her play a recording of Illiana before she left for assignment.

Meanwhile the DS9 crew begins to look for Kira but it’s Garak that has some answers for them. Sisko, Odo, and Garak are headed to Cardassia for a rescue mission and O’Brien does some fancy engineering to make the ship appear as something else and they even have a holofilter in case they are found out. During a traffic stop Garak uses his connections to get them through security. On Cardassia Prime, Ghemor sees how much pain Kira is in and vows to help her get off planet as he’s actually a dissident, but Kira realizes that they’re after him and not her. The Order comes in but is stopped by Garak, Sisko, and Odo and they help both Kira and the Legate escape back to DS9. Kira really is Bajoran, Ghemor is going to take sanctuary on another planet, and Garak is still not to be trusted.

“This is extortion. Yes, it is.”: So this episode was a wild ride from start to finish. You know something is going to happen to Kira because the woman was following her around the station and onto the ship headed to Bajor, but I was NOT expecting her to appear as a Cardassian. Entek is very convincing and I firmly believe the Order is like Google and really does keep everything, it’s the only way to explain how they have the tools to do everything they do. I also love how fucking smart Kira is and how damn good at her job she is. She figures out that it was never her they were after and then she just rolls with her rescue – that literally no one batted an eye at her being Cardassian, except for Garak being a bit of a hound-dog. Even Sisko was super on point, blackmailing Garak and casually dropped Odo-as-a-bag so that they can get a drop on the Cardassians. I’m also really loving how many strong father figures there are in the DS9 universe, I mean take a look at Ghemor and his actions for a random Bajoran woman he didn’t know from Adam. He even calls her “Nerys” at the end and it was super sweet. The one thing that’s going to keep me up is how the hell did Entek know that story when Kira didn’t tell anyone else about it? 9 Hallmark moments for parents and children, especially today.

Favorite Quote from “The Abandoned”:

Sisko: Maybe you should inspect the merchandise before you make the deal. Or isn’t there a Rule of Acquisition for that?

Quark: There is and I do, usually.

Sisko being sassy and sarcastic but Quark being completely honest, for once.

So what had happened in “The Abandoned” was…: Jake and Mardah talk about having dinner with Sisko while Quark buys a busted up ship from Boslic who found it in the Gamma Quadrant. Quark finds all kinds of junk as well as a baby, so he takes the baby to Bashir and we see how adorable Sisko probably was when Jake was an infant. A few hours later, however, the baby is now a boy of about 9 years old and has absolutely been genetically engineered and needs an enzyme Bashir can’t seem to create. Sisko doesn’t want to like Mardah because she’s a Dabo girl and a few years older than Jake. Kira brings flowers to Odo’s new quarters and he has feelings!! He’s turned his place into a sanctuary for shape-shifting, but I’m sure there’s plenty of solitude still going on. The kid grows one more time and it’s clear he’s a Jem’Hadar and addicted to a compound O’Brien finds while exploring the wreckage some more. The kid takes a special liking to Odo likely because Odo’s race are the Founders who were responsible for his existence, and neither Odo nor Bashir want the kid to become a science experiment. Odo tries to bond with the kid and get him to explore more than his programming, but the only thing the kid wants to do is fight. When Sisko tells Odo that there’s a ship coming to take the kid away, Odo is taken hostage but later everyone agrees it would be best for Odo to drop the kid off in the GQ and come back.

“Tell me more about my poet-hustler son.”: It’s hard to go against your programming, especially when you’ve been programmed to have no free will. I love that we have the Jack issue with the rapid growth and then BOOM there’s a Jem’Hadar on the station. I also love that Odo and Bashir were both on the side of trying to help the kid figure out if he could become his own person instead of being subjected to being a science experiment. Sisko, too, eventually got on board despite his orders because he didn’t want to see any loss of life and that’s exactly what happened. Sisko got to be the good guy twice because he changed his mind and decided not to judge a woman by her job and allowed a lost boy to return to his people. Again, I’m really pleased with the strong parental figures. I liked finally meeting Mardah and seeing Jake be terrified his father would either embarrass him or give Mardah the 9th degree, but it turns out that Sisko got to learn more about himself and his son that night too. It was interesting to learn more about the Jem’Hadar and I’m completely fascinated by genetic engineering, so I really liked a lot of things here. I will say I didn’t like when they gave the kid the drug instead of seeing if they could detox him out of it, I mean Bashir just did rehab with Garak, right? Anyway, I give this episode 8 episodes of Smallville, for obvious reasons. They grow up so fast, don’t they.

TA Out!