Star Trek DS9 - Season 6 - Episode 25
Star Trek DS9 - 6x25 - The Sound of Her Voice
Originally Aired: 1998-6-10
Synopsis:
The Defiant unknowingly picks up a time-displaced distress call. [DVD]
Filler Quotient:
2, filler, but an enjoyable episode nevertheless. You can skip this one, but you'd miss out on some fun.
- There is foreshadowing about what will take place in the next episode here, but it is not actually necessary to move onto the next episode.
Problems
None
Factoids
None
Remarkable Scenes
- Odo badgering Quark about station regulations and his sudden mood change as soon Kira walked in.
- Cusak playing a practical joke on Bashir.
- Odo eavesdropping on Quark's conversation wtih Jake.
- Quark believing he beat Odo.
- Odo and Kira letting Quark win for once.
- Seeing the Defiant's shuttlepod!
- Sisko discovering the long dead corpse of Cusak.
- Rules of Acquisition; 285. No good deed ever goes unpunished.
- Morn Appearances; 1. First scene. 2. In Quark's the second time Odo walks in. 3. Is present the third time Odo walks into Quark's bar to show the gift he picked out for Kira to Quark. 4. Is present in the bar when Odo takes Kira to the holosuite.
My Review
A moody episode on the Defiant, a fun episode on DS9. The point about how DS9 could lose a crewmember to the war at any time is well made and the foreshadowing is effective and moving. It was also awesome to see the Defiant's shuttlepod. But the real fun in this episode was the story that developed between Quark and Odo. This episode is all about respect, and in a quirky way, Odo has a deep respect for Quark and visa versa. I've talked about their half adversarial half friendship relationship before, and this episode exemplifies it. I almost couldn't believe it; Odo let Quark get away with smuggling out of a sense of guilt. He felt he owed Quark something. I also found it rather amusing that Odo didn't let Quark know he was letting him get away with it; rather he let Quark think he won. He did this because Quark told Jake in confidence that he respects Odo and he tries to be his friend when he can. The circle of respect is complete.
The following are comments submitted by my readers.
Just a minor detail. Surely when Captain Cusack tells the crew when her ship left to go exploring deep space eight years ago, they would have looked it up and realised that the time differential much earlier than they did. Doesn't spoil what was a great episode, however. Just a niggle.
I agree with the previous comment about the lack of record of the vessel, but the writers might have been making fun of their own plot hole with all the complaints about how the federation keeps such precise records on everything. Perhaps they are so full of records and logs that sometimes things get lost. Maybe the vessel that crashed had a typo on one of its records. It does seem to be quite a big plot hole though.
Just a little nitpicky thing: one month isn't an anniversary. You could call it a "one-twelfth year anniversary," I suppose ...
One of the most amusing things to me about DS9 is all the subtle digs that O'Brien makes at his time aboard the Enterprise. In a previous episode he mentioned how bored he was as a transporter chief there, and I think when Sisko was promoted, O'Brien hailed him as the finest captain in Starfleet :) In this episode, he takes a swat at ship's counselors. It's hard to ignore the possibility that the writers, or simply the O'Brien character, had Troi in mind during that whole segment perhaps hinting at the character's uselessness in many cases. Or maybe it's just my imagination. Either way, it was funny to me.
This one turned out to be better than I thought it would be at the start. Some depth given to all the characters in this episode, both on the Defiant and back on DS9 with the Quark/Odo relationship.
My wife found Captain Cusack's neediness really annoying and couldn’t stand her. I didn't think she was quite that bad but still had little interest or empathy for her and didn't really care much about the plot. The resolution was clever but, as other commentators have pointed out, it didn't make any sense they wouldn't have already figured that out.
The plot with Odo and Quark felt odd and made me realize how little we understand the stakes of the “game” that Odo and Quark had been playing during the show. This episode seems to say that we should feel good that Odo decided to be kind and allow Quark to break the law with impunity, implying the laws Quark is breaking are basically meaningless. Is that really true? What laws are these anyways? Is the Federation in the habit of making things illegal just because they're a bunch of controlling killjoys? Are these regulations Bajoran tariffs and Odo is basically giving Quark a free gift from the Bajoran treasury? Is he smuggling dangerous goods and some random person we know nothing about is going to get blown up in order to make Quark happy? It just seemed odd that a lawman would not only let Quark off the hook, but would intentionally let the crime be committed. For the morality of this show to make sense you have to assume that the laws Quark is breaking are mostly petty bureaucratic nonsense, but it would be less disquieting if they would actually come out and say so.