Star Trek 305: Dramatis Personae

305. Dramatis Personae

FORMULA: Masks + The Game + Power Play

WHY WE LIKE IT: An edgy political thriller.

WHY WE DON'T: It doesn't really star our characters.

REVIEW: The majority of the cast is gets infected with a "telepathic matrix" and must reenact an ancient power struggles. On TNG, you'd immediately know something was up. On DS9, the struggle is based on very real conflict, so it keeps you wondering longer. And while the roles they must take aren't too divorced from their actual personalities, they're still playing someone else, and that makes the episode a little inconsequential.

Odo is the key. Unaffected because he doesn't have a proper brain, we see the story through his detective eyes. And it's quite wonderful how he manipulates the various characters to resolve the situation (Bashir especially). Poor Quark isn't affected either, but he gets thrown about and insulted for his trouble. And though he's not himself at the time, we do get to see Sisko's martial arts for the first time. They'll be useful for fighting Klingons and Jem'Hadar later.

But while Dramatis Personae is perfectly good political thriller, the framing of it leaves something to be desired. There are plot holes you can fly a shuttle through, which could have been dealt with very easily, by leaving the telepathic balls responsible in the Klingon cruiser's wreckage. Instead we have this nonsense of a telepathic infection that is sometimes visible, sometimes not, that can be sucked out into space, that can be transmitted to multiple people by a single man, and that isn't communicated to others after that. That, and we spend way too much time on scrambled Klingon tapes. My mind tended to wander during those shots.

The ending is likewise flawed, with Kira's ridiculous apology and Sisko's creepy look at the clock, as if he was still under control...

LESSON: "I was taken over by an alien entity" isn't an excuse.

REWATCHABILITY - Medium: A perfectly watchable "the crew aren't themselves" episode - the actors clearly have fun with it - marred by poor editing choices and a science fantasy premise.