30 Years Later, This Deep Space Nine Season Finale Remains A Brilliant Gut Punch
Once upon a time, Odo became a real boy.
When Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuted in 2022, it was sold as a delightful throwback to the days when one week’s adventure had little bearing on what happened next. Once the standard method of storytelling for most television, the streaming era’s move to shorter seasons and the binge-watching model has made serialized stories the norm. Most dramas are essentially miniseries now, making it difficult to imagine For All Mankind halting its ongoing story for a game of Martian baseball, or the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters crew blowing off steam with a tropical island getaway full of farcical romantic complications.
Some shows did experiment with this approach in the days when Netflix was only known for its red envelopes — good luck following Battlestar Galactica if you went into Season 4 blind. Going back further, Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tinkered with serialization in the ‘90s, albeit in a looser way that still allowed for one-off adventures and didn’t completely baffle anyone who wasn’t able to record missed episodes on VHS. And 30 years ago, DS9’s Season 4 finale was a big step forward for Trek’s changing brand of storytelling.
In this week’s episode, Odo gets even goopier than usual.
An Odo-focused episode, “Broken Link,” builds on storylines with both galactic and personal stakes. The station’s shapeshifting security officer had been yearning to find and return to his people since DS9’s pilot, but we’d known since the start of Season 3 that those people are the arrogant Founders of the authoritarian Dominion, who see all “solids” as treacherous insects. We also knew the series was building up to a conflict between the Federation and its mirror-image nemesis, though no one knew how massive it would become.
An iteration on the outside observer of humanity that Star Trek has required since Spock uttered his first “fascinating,” Odo is alienated twice over. Often misunderstood by the solids who are his friends and colleagues, and completely incapable of expressing his romantic interest in one solid in particular, his rigid sense of justice also keeps him from rejoining his people, who want nothing more than to bring him home even as he decries the ruthless empire they’ve built.
That a bunch of liquid space fascists considers Rene Auberjonois their prodigal son is one of DS9’s most interesting storylines, as the craving on both sides is evident yet utterly unbridgeable. By “Broken Link,” though, the Founders’ patience had run out. Season 3 ended with Odo slaying a fellow changeling to stop the Dominion’s latest plot, and in “Broken Link,” he’s punished with a debilitating disease. He must travel to the changeling home-world he’s longed for yet rejected to be cured… and punished.
Odo has to take a quick dip in his people.
The whole crew comes along, and Garak tries to end the brewing struggle before it can even begin with a quick bit of suicidal genocide. He’s stopped, of course, ensuring that DS9 can continue for several more seasons, but it’s one of the most interesting actions by one of Star Trek’s most interesting characters. Andrew Robinson’s ruthless spy has long been an outlier in Gene Roddenberry’s upbeat universe, but his total belief in the righteousness of his would-be mass murderer makes him, in his own pitch-dark way, as much of an idealist as any Federation officer.
Garak and Odo have a history that carries over from Season 3, when Odo rescued Garak from an attempted decapitation strike on the Founders that ended in a crushing defeat for Garak’s beloved Cardassia. DS9 following up on it in “Broken Link” is an early example of how its big storytelling swings would reverberate throughout future seasons, and in juggling all of this, “Broken Link” represented Deep Space Nine at its best — it set up big pieces for future seasons, but it still put human (and alien) drama first.
Odo’s punishment, the worst punishment the Founders could conceive, was to live as a “solid,” a fate that would lead to angst and amusement over the coming episodes as Odo learned to deal with the mundane realities of eating and sleeping. The irony of Odo is that he’s both a jaded curmudgeon and, essentially, an angsty teenager, and “Broken Link” took that dichotomy to the next level.
What’s a little attempted genocide between friends?
But Odo would also return from his people with a warning: the very heart of the Klingon Empire had been compromised by a changeling. That cliffhanger and its fallout would inform much of Season 5, before the Dominion conflict finally kicked off in earnest at year’s end. And while that conflict was the focus of Seasons 6 and 7, hefty episode counts still allowed digressions into a parallel universe, a Vulcan serial murderer, Donnie Brasco in space, and a holographic casino heist, among other wackiness.
With the idea of an hour-long drama getting a 26-episode season now equivalent to suggesting that a unicorn be portrayed onscreen without any special effects, DS9’s mixed approach to storytelling feels like an antiquity. Enterprise was the last major Trek show to enjoy the luxury of such a strategy, with Discovery and Picard opting for heavy serialization while Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy leaned towards the adventure-of-the-week format. Both can work, but “Broken Link” is a reminder that even an episode with galaxy-changing repercussions still needs to leave room for one man to explore the finer points of using a knife and fork.
Deep Space Nine is streaming on Paramount+.
