315. Necessary EvilFORMULA: The Big Goodbye + Past Prologue
WHY WE LIKE IT: The film noir flashbacks. The ambiguous ending.
WHY WE DON'T: Rom's high-pitched screaming.
REVIEW: Structured like a film noir piece, Necessary Evil goes where no Star Trek has gone before by giving us 8-year-old flashbacks without some kind of time travel plot. Using Odo's sarcastic first log as the requisite voice-over, the episode goes on to tell the story of how Odo became a security officer and met Kira, Quark and Dukat, and does so with a moody atmosphere and moral ambiguity. It would have been great just to see the dark and dreary station as it was under Cardassian rule (and it doesn't disappoint, it looks completely different), but the story itself a real standout.
An 8-year-old murder case is reopened when Quark gets shot for a list of names, leading to some dark comedy in the present day (the Sisko/Odo good cop/bad cop routine, Rom - quickly becoming Quark's comic foil - saving the brother he wants dead). But while that's done well, it's the past that interests us most, and I must commend the transitions that us there. The opening door that reveals a younger Odo is shocking and immerses you into this other world. There's also a more subtle one with children running on the Promenade, and later others clinging to a chain-link fence. Odo gets to be Sherlock Holmes, Mike Hammer and Columbo all rolled into one, and is supremely effective.
Necessary Evil is the episode that makes a collaborator out of Odo and a murderer out of Kira, and as such, makes few compromises. Both these characters have been rather garded about what they've had to do, and how they can justify it. Here, those choices are exposed to the audience and to each other. Can Odo ever trust Kira the same way again? We don't get an answer. This ending is even harsher than what other Kira episodes have made us used to. No easy answers.
LESSON: Yes! You can play with narrative structure in Star Trek and the universe won't implode.
REWATCHABILITY - High: Written and directed with flair, this unflinching look at our characters in more desperate times remains one of the best episodes of the show.
Comments
Of course, that will be pretty much reversed in its entirety by the middle of next season in what I thought was the series' second stupidest move (the first being the addition of Worf to the cast).
A great episode that I generally think of as an Odo episode but actually tells us a good bit about Kira's character as well. I just wish they'd dealt with the impact of this revelation a bit more, especially given the direction the Odo / Kira relationship later went.