Timothy Lynch's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Episode Reviews

Season 3 - "The Die is Cast"

Review Date: 4/29/95

WARNING:  This article contains spoilers for DS9's "The Die is 
Cast".  Once past this point, spoilers are inevitable:  cross not this 
Rubicon without awareness.

In brief:  Not quite as good as the lead-in, but nearly so.

======
Brief summary:  Garak, assisting in a Romulan/Cardassian attack on 
the Founders, is forced to torture Odo in an interrogation.  
Meanwhile, Sisko and company mount a rescue operation to locate 
and retrieve Odo, even in the face of a potential Dominion invasion.
======

"The Die Is Cast" is a story about betrayal -- from many people, of 
many people, and on many levels.  As such, it's a relief to be able to 
start out by saying that I *didn't* feel betrayed by the way the show 
played itself out.  Last week's "Improbable Cause" provided such a 
well-thought-out, well-built crisis that "The Die Is Cast" was in 
serious danger of not being able to live up to it -- and given Trek's 
past history of messing up resolutions to two-part stories ("The Siege" 
and "The Search" for DS9, not to mention "Birthright", 
"Redemption", "Time's Arrow", "Descent", and probably others for 
TNG), I was more than a little nervous as the show began, and 
breathed sighs of relief every time a bullet was dodged.  "The Die Is 
Cast" could have goofed in dozens of different ways -- fortunately, 
though, it managed to construct a plausible and well-executed 
resolution to "Improbable Cause" that didn't feel like a cop-out.

The biggest question lingering at the end of the first half of this story 
was how the Romulan/Cardassian attack would be dealt with.  Two 
options -- either a sudden pulling-back from war, or a prolonged war 
-- seemed either unlikely or grossly unsatisfying, so something else 
had to be found.  While the option taken, namely making the plot a 
trap laid by the Founders almost from the start , will undoubtedly 
prompt grumbling from those who wanted a full-fledged war, I think 
this route managed to resolve the story well, and also finally did 
something that DS9 hadn't done to me yet this season:  make the 
Founders a convincingly dangerous adversary.  Anyone capable of 
steering a plot against them into a turnabout of fortunes the way they 
did is someone against whom it will be difficult to plot against in the 
future -- and anyone difficult to plot against is the worst kind of foe.  
For the first time, I see at least some small value in making the 
Founders a race of Changelings, and that's not something easily done.

The one area that proved something of a disappointment, though not a 
huge one, was some of the character interplay on the Romulan ship 
between Garak, Odo, and Tain.  While all the plotting revolving 
around the battle with the Founders was extremely well done, the 
Garak/Odo torture sequences somehow felt a little "detached" from the 
rest of the show, at least where I was concerned.  They worked just 
fine on an intellectual level, in that I had no real difficulty 
understanding why Garak was behaving as he was (usually; more on 
that later); but for some reason, they didn't quite connect with me 
emotionally the way last week's Garak/Odo scenes did, for instance.  
This may just be because I was preoccupied with the plot and not the 
characters (a fairly rare circumstance); I'm not sure.  (This also isn't to 
say that the main torture scene itself didn't work for me; it did, thanks 
mostly to Rene Auberjonois proving absolutely riveting.)

The only scene that made little sense to me was Garak's initial 
conversation with Odo, after he's first been assigned to interrogate 
Odo.  Garak's early phrases there were so totally at odds with 
everything we know to be true (and with everything Odo and Garak 
know to be true) that I assumed Garak was somehow trying to let Odo 
know all was not well.  Given that Garak did what he felt he had to do 
for Tain from that moment on, however, I'm at something of a loss to 
explain exactly what was going on then.  

The Garak/Odo issue does, however, fit in nicely with the main theme 
of the show -- betrayal.  I said last week that I expected some 
Caesar/Brutus parallels with Garak and Tain, given Garak's 
conversation with Bashir about "Julius Caesar" at the start of the 
show.  Things didn't get quite that specific, in my opinion, but there 
were betrayals of everyone and everything almost anywhere one could 
care to look.  There was talk of Garak having betrayed Tain in the past 
(though whether that's true is still uncertain, and likely always will 
be), of course; but there's quite a list of betrayals occurring in the 
course of the show, also.  Garak betrays Odo by torturing him; he 
then betrays Tain by not conveying what information he *does* get; 
Sisko betrays Admiral Toddman by disobeying direct orders and 
heading for the Gamma Quadrant; Eddington betrays Sisko by 
sabotaging the cloaking device; Eddington betrays Toddman by not 
going any further; and Lovok proves an informant who destroys 
Tain's entire plan.  (One might even start stretching things a bit and 
say that Kira betrays her trust in O'Brien by trying to go find him 
during the repairs, or that O'Brien betrays Bashir by not living up to 
Garak's level of riveting lunchtime conversation, but I don't think 
taking it that far is really necessary.)  Of course there are no clear 
Caesar/Brutus parallels; everyone's too busy betraying everyone else 
to find the time!

I had some initially bad reactions to Eddington's role during the 
episode.  Not his betrayal of Sisko on Toddman's orders -- that made 
sense.  No, the area I had a problem with at first was his presence on 
board the Defiant at all.  Given that his initial appearance was due to a 
lack of trust in Odo, and given that he was very clearly acting on 
Admiral Toddman's behalf, I tend to question the wisdom of Sisko's 
willingness to bring him along.  I'm more or less willing to overlook 
that; since Sisko called the mission a volunteer one, perhaps he 
presumed that anyone willing to come believed in what he was doing.  
I'm also impressed by the forthright way in which it was handled -- 
once the betrayal was done, Eddington made his part in it clear very 
quickly and honestly, and offered to help in any way unrelated to his 
actual orders from Toddman.  I do, however, thinks it smacks of 
being just slightly artificial.

The other character who got a major workout was, of course, our 
friend Garak, and it was here that the torture sequences _were_ 
effective.  Not to show the lengths to which Garak was willing to go, 
I think -- those weren't surprising, given his avid interest in making it 
back home.  Their effectiveness was in showing how much Garak had 
actually changed since his exile began, in that he was truly upset at 
what he had to do in order to carry out his mission.  In fact, that scene 
proved almost *too* effective in demonstrating that point, in that I 
began to wonder at times how good an interrogator Garak _used_ to 
be in "the old days".  (To anyone else wondering the same thing, 
though, I'd point out that Garak has never been fond of the direct 
approach to *anything*, and that I could still easily envision even the 
current Garak carrying out the sort of torture Tain referred to with "his 
eyes, his eyes...")

There were a few other intriguing issues swirling around Garak as 
well.  The first was his friendship with Tain, which crumbled before 
Garak's eyes in the face of the Founders' onslaught.  (And Paul 
Dooley was *good* in that scene; it was extremely painful to realize 
that there was no point in rescuing Tain, as he was already gone.)  
The second, somewhat hinted at in his final scene with Odo, concerns 
his future.  At the moment, Garak is back in the tailor shop, much to 
his chagrin (even if, as he glumly notes, he's "really a very GOOD 
tailor") -- but the way ahead can go in almost any direction now.  
Since last season's "The Wire", much of Garak's past with the 
Obsidian Order has been impacting on his present.  Those days, I'll 
wager, are now close to done; Tain is dead, along with many of his 
and Garak's associates.  Aside from his lingering dislike of Dukat, 
Garak's life is now open to question -- and I'll be interested to see 
where it goes from this point on. 

Lastly, a note on the visual presentation of the show.  Last week, I 
noted that "Improbable Cause" was written by the writer of "The 
Mind's Eye", Rene Echevarria.  Well, this half was directed by "The 
Mind's Eye"'s *director*, David Livingston, and had much of the 
same flair to it.  I don't know if there were quite as many moments 
this week that stood out the way Odo's meeting with his source did 
last week, but there were several, most particularly the moment where 
Odo realizes he can't change form and the closing moments between 
Garak and Tain.  And finally, the final battle sequence was simply one 
of Trek's best battle moments on the small screen -- so much so, in 
fact, that it appeared the Defiant had been kidnapped and replaced by 
the Millennium Falcon.  :-)  (Of course, a friend of mine said it's 
simply because they had a real *pilot* flying the thing for a change...)

That should about do it.  "The Die is Cast" wasn't quite the 
masterpiece that "Improbable Cause" was -- but when handed a setup 
this good, it's no small success just to avoid blowing it, and "The Die 
is Cast" went well beyond that.  I'm convinced once more that DS9 
can do an excellent job when it plays to its strengths; in the words of 
Sisko, "Don't make me change that policy."  

So, some short takes:

-- Excellent work on the teaser.  We're given no indication of 
precisely what's happened to Odo and Garak; all we know is that 
there's been no word, and then suddenly, *whoosh*, off goes an 
entire fleet waving back at DS9 on its way to the Founders.  To say it 
managed to keep the interest level up would be a substantial 
understatement.

-- I find it amusing that Admiral Toddman was played by Leon 
Russom; Russom, if memory serves, also played the head of Starfleet 
Command in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country".  Do we 
have an entire dynasty of admirals over a century of time, or what?  :-)

-- Although I doubt we'll ever hear what Garak allegedly did to betray 
Tain years ago, I do think we may someday find out what's between 
him and Gul Dukat, and I'd very much like to.  Tain alluded to "the 
business with the arms merchants", and from his tone I doubt it was 
as recent as the Bajoran near-coup last season.  What *did* happen 
between them?

-- One wonders how much of a force the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian 
Order will be within their respective empires at this point.  I doubt 
they're entirely out of the picture, but I can't imagine they'd be the 
force they once were, either -- and if not, that suggests that we might 
see something of a loosening of restrictions within both Romulus and 
Cardassia.  Interesting...

-- Similarly, I wonder if there are any copies of or records of the 
"quantum stasis" projector Garak used to torture Odo.  If so, that 
could prove a significant weapon against the Founders at some future 
point.

That should do it.  So, to end:

Writing:  Excellent work keeping all the balls in the air properly in 
	terms of plot; nearly as strong in terms of character.
Directing:  No complaints, much praise.
Acting:  Solid all around, as before.

OVERALL:  A 9.5.  I'm game for more.

NEXT WEEK:

Sisko turns solar sailor?

Tim Lynch (Harvard-Westlake School, Science Dept.)
tlynch@alumni.caltech.edu
"You know what the sad part is, Constable?  I'm really a very GOOD
tailor."
			-- Garak
--
Copyright 1995, Timothy W. Lynch.  All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...
This article is explicitly prohibited from being used in any off-net
compilation without due attribution and *express written consent of the
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