🚀 go-pugleaf

WARNING:   Quick!  Turn away unless you want to fall victim to 
spoilers for DS9's "The Quickening"!

In brief:  Decent.  Not the most interesting plague story I've ever seen, 
but decent -- and with a good ending.

======
Written by:  Naren Shankar
Directed by:  Rene Auberjonois

Brief summary:  Bashir and Dax answer a distress call only to find a 
world ravaged by a Dominion-given "blight" -- one which Bashir 
attempts to cure.
======

It's tough to write a plague story these days, I've got to say.  Virtually 
every series where it would be possible to do one has done it at least 
once (from all the Treks to "Babylon 5" to "ER", and I've no doubt 
that "Friends" will do it eventually, leading every *other* show on 
television to do it after that :-) ); that, along with all the real plagues 
that have been hitting headlines over the last few years, means that it's 
getting harder to do one that doesn't feel like a rehash.  I'm not sure 
"The Quickening" quite managed that, but it came close -- and faced 
with what I viewed as a choice between two endings, it managed to 
come up with a third that seemed to satisfy somewhat.  That's not 
such a bad thing, really.

I'll admit to being quite worried about the show until midway through 
act two, however.  In rapid succession, we had:  the token 
Odo/Quark/Worf/O'Brien scene with Quark being punished for doing 
something venal and stupid -- yay; Bashir acting totally giddy and 
annoying -- joy; the initial scene with Trevean, which made me fear 
that we were going to be in for *yet another* Trek episode dealing 
with euthanasia and the right to die; and Bashir acting totally arrogant 
as if he expects to solve a 200-year-old medical problem in a week.  I 
hoped that the last was setting him up for a fall (which it was, 
fortunately), but those four items put together really made me wonder 
if this was going to be one of DS9's rare total duds this season.

Fortunately, it wasn't.  Trevean's presence did *not* indicate yet 
another right-to-die debate, I'm glad to say -- Bashir and Dax certainly 
weren't thrilled with him, but neither did they stand in his way of 
doing what this culture had come to find acceptable and worthy.  The 
first two scenes were aberrations, and Bashir's initial arrogance 
*was* setting him up for a fall (the details of which I question a bit, 
but that's a different story).  

There were only a couple of substantial problems I had with "The 
Quickening" once it got through its first 10-15 minutes.  One was 
perhaps to be expected in a Trek medical drama:  the biology was 
absurd.  The blight itself seemed fine, but the "EM fields are causing 
the virus to mutate at a very fast rate" was just goofy (even if the 
current speculation that EM fields from power lines are dangerous is 
true, which I'm not certain I believe).  The actual mechanics of 
Bashir's "vaccine" also felt questionable to me -- given that the kids 
are born with the blight, they're presumably infected very quickly 
after conception, so giving this elixir to a seven-month-pregnant 
woman shouldn't do a thing to help prevent the kid's infection.  They 
didn't hurt all *that* much, mostly because Trek medicine is so 
magical anyway (and partly because things like VOY's "Threshold" 
and TNG's "Genesis" have raised the bar so far that run-of-the-mill 
biology problems barely cause me a twitch these days) -- but they did 
hurt.

(By the way, the "EM fields" thing also just struck me as a pointless 
thing to do.  Bashir should beat himself over the head enough simply 
for failing -- to say that his technology went even further and caused 
harm is to add insult to injury.  About the only useful thing it did was 
to cause everyone to have serious pain at the same time, and there was 
no need for that; Trevean's mere presence at the death of one of the 
people in the room might have caused the others to ask for him.)

The other problem I had with "The Quickening" was mostly that it felt 
a bit flat.  The story felt generally solid, but lines like "It's more than 
that -- we've come to worship death" rang out about as dully as a 
laundry list.  I'm not sure whether that's the fault of the dialogue or of 
the actress (in this case I'm inclined to blame the latter, as Ekoria 
never quite grabbed me), but much of the show felt a little slow and 
flat.  (Things like Dax's "translating" for Bashir's medical jargon 
didn't particularly help, as Bashir rarely seems that bad.)

That was outweighed, though, by much of what we *did* get from 
"The Quickening".  In particular, the scene between Bashir and Dax 
after Bashir's patients have died was absolute bliss.  What worked 
best was that Bashir's "doctor as god" belief really *hadn't* changed:  
as Dax pointed out, his change from "oh, I can cure this in a week" to 
"I couldn't cure it in a week, thus there is no cure" isn't really a 
humbling at all.  It was only after she pointed that out that Bashir 
*really* realized where he'd been prideful, and that realization just 
came off beautifully.  (His self-lashing "I was looking *forward* to 
tomorrow" also came off well.)

As for the ending ... well, I've already said that the biological aspects 
of it were silly, but from an emotional standpoint it worked.  The two 
obvious ways for the show to go were for Bashir to totally succeed, 
or for Bashir to totally fail.  The former would have set off my "Trek 
can do anything" alarms something fierce, and the latter didn't really 
have any oomph to it, so I didn't expect it.  (Given the way the blight 
operated, it wasn't killing off the entire race at once, so an ending 
where everyone dies wasn't possible unless Bashir really screwed up 
-- and I didn't really think that would happen.)  What was done -- 
Bashir finding a "delayed cure" of sorts -- still feels like a little bit of a 
stretch, but feels much better to me:  given the lack of regard for life 
the Dominion seems to have, they may not have considered the 
possibility of a cure such as this one, and Bashir *did* still get 
emotionally hurt over this.  I think this ending is about the best one 
that Naren Shankar could have been reasonably expected to use ... 
and that certainly works for me.

That's actually about it.  "The Quickening" generally worked, but it 
was a simple enough story that there's not that much else to say about 
it.  So, a few shorter points:

-- I wasn't enchanted with the "token Quark" scene, but I did like the 
"free refills" mug complete with jingle that Worf ended up with.  :-)

-- I also liked Bashir's teddy-bear story, though I kept waiting for him 
to admit that he *actually* still sleeps with it at night.  (What?  You 
think he doesn't?)

And, a wrap-up:

Writing:  Not always riveting, but scientific plausibility aside it hung 
	together fairly well.
Directing:  Flat in spots (though that may have been the actors); nice 
	work with lighting ideas.
Acting:  I'm not sure that Ellen Wheeler (Ekoria) really worked for 
	me; the rest did, Alexander Siddig and Michael Sarrazin 
	(Trevean) in particular.

OVERALL:  7.  Not stellar, but certainly not bad.

NEXT WEEK:  I get a vacation.  :-)  So does Quark -- unfortunately, 
it's about 400 years earlier than he planned.  "Little Green Men" 
reruns.  [By the way, my review of "Body Parts" will be almost a week
late, as I'll be out of town.]

Tim Lynch (Harvard-Westlake School, Science Dept.)
tly...@alumni.caltech.edu	<*>
"And I was so arrogant I thought I could find one in a *week*."
"Maybe it was arrogant to think that -- but it's even more arrogant to
think there is no cure just because *you* couldn't find it."
			-- Bashir and Dax
--
Copyright 1996, 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
author*.  Walnut Creek and other CD-ROM distributors, take note.