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The Search Proves Both Fascinating and Fruitless?
For all the hype, I was really expecting a bit more out of DS9's third year
kickoff, more along the lines of the second season's excellent and criminally
underrated tales of political intrigue on Bajor and imminent confrontation with
a mysterious power from the Gamma Quadrant. Not that the two-part entry The
Search wasn't good - it was good, but almost in spite of itself at
times. The undeniable appeal of exploring Odo's origins and the nature of the
Dominion ensured that these two episodes would at least be interesting.
However, if there's any one thing from which The Search suffered, it
was the collection of pitfalls which have plagued Trek two-parters since The
Best of Both Worlds. If anything, that story is the one with which many
comparisons can be drawn; both were intended to bring about the return of a
major adversary which had been established earlier, and both were meant to do so
on an epic scale. While The Search was apparently invested with a budget
that the makers of the 1990 Borg adventure would've gladly assimilated the
Paramount studio execs for, it managed to do to the Dominion in the space of two
consecutive episodes what it took nearly two years to do to the Borg - that is,
it completely stripped the Dominion of its threat and its status as an imminent
and all-powerful threat to our heroes' security.
Granted, we aren't left with a kinder, gentler Dominion by the end of the
show, and of course there is some obligatory gnashing of teeth and a promise of
the return of the Jem'Hadar "when the time is right," but that could
mean anything. One thing it does mean is that the Dominion, relentlessly built
up in the second season as an all-conquering government with vastly superior
technology and little patience, has been put on the back burner. Like the Borg
did earlier, the Dominion simply proved too powerful for the show's
writers to handle without blowing the station and its crew to smithereens - thus
another grand side-stepping job. At least the last minute cop-out in Best of
Both Worlds had a sense of irony and poetic justice to it; here, the most
fascinating aspects of the second part of the story - Starfleet's sinister peace
talks with the Dominion, the Jem'Hadar overrunning the station, and Sisko and
friends' last-ditch maneuver to close the wormhole forever - were simply part of
the 1990s answer to the infamous Dallas "it was all a dream I had in the
shower" ploy - the entire crew was plugged into a virtual reality device to
see what their reactions to such an invasion of the Alpha Quadrant would be!
When Kira and Odo discover this, the scene was very reminiscent of the cloned
O'Brien's discovery of his real self in last year's Whispers. The
cheapness of this plot device - doing surprising, apocalyptic things and then
nearly circumnavigating them by explaining that it never happened - is a
big letdown after the many controversial and interesting no-easy-answers
storylines in the second season.
But let's not lambast the whole thing; there were many interesting
discoveries made in the course of The Search. Odo's home world and his
people - who surprisingly turned out to be the Founders themselves - were
fascinating to visit, with some great special effects to boot. The
shapeshifters' motivation for founding a body of power based on conquest is
understandable, as was the revelation that there are hundreds of other isolated
"orphan" shapeshifters out there just like Odo - a sure bet that we'll
run into at least a couple more Odo-like beings in the future.
Also interesting are the numerous changes brought about by Starfleet. The
new security officer is too slick and slippery to have just slipped through our
fingers in this storyline, never to be seen again (then again, the much more
personable and likeable Lt. Primmin from the first season seemed to ship out
after only two episodes, so anything's possible). The Romulan officer is even
more intriguing - her reluctant help with the Defiant's cloaking device begs the
question of whether or not she will withhold precisely the wrong bit of
information on some future mission.
All in all, it's a coin toss on whether or not I liked The Search. If
this story was indicative of the DS9 producers' search for a new direction for
the show, I'd advise them to look back at what they've already done - in many
ways, I found DS9's second year so much more enjoyable than Next Generation's
seventh. In their play for the affections of the legions of Next Generation
loyalists who have thus far avoided DS9, it's just possible that the writers and
producers have picked up some of their predecessors' worst storytelling
habits.
Earl Green
This article originally appeared in the October 1994
issue of LogBook: The Zine
© 1994, 2001
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