Today's random episode recommendation is one of my favorite Star Trek episodes:
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 1 Episode 19 "Duet"
A little context for those who have never seen Star Trek, then I will recommend you watch the episode and finally I will give some of my thoughts on this great piece of fiction.
This series takes place on a space station and it follows the adventures of the crew. Many consider it the best Trek series, myself included. Sure it’s from the 90s and some episodes look it, especially the first 2-3 seasons, but it’s my favorite due to its great characters and great storytelling, mostly filled with thought-provoking stories and moral dilemmas, as well as compelling story arcs and epic space battles.
We have Major Kira Nerys from the planet Bajor. Her people just recently endured the past 50 years of oppression, slavery and deaths by another alien race, the Cardassians. The occupation from this oppressive race recently ended by the time the series begins.
A certain man arrives on the station and it turns out that this person is a war criminal, someone that led a particularly infamous labor camp where many Bajorans were killed. The story is an allegory for what happened in the Holocaust, if that helps to understand what is happening. The identity of this person, though, remains a mystery until the very end. In the meantime, we are taken through many twists and turns along the way.
It's not an action-centered episode, but the performances are great, enough to make you feel angry, powerless and just hits you right in the feels.
So go watch it. Go on, I’ll wait.
Wow, this episode gets me every time. Here we have Kira, someone that lived during the occupation, did what she had to do to survive and help her people. Even helped liberate this labor camp in question, Gallitep. When she finds out that the man who arrives at the station is not a surviving victim of this labor camp but a Cardassian, she immediately calls for Red Alert. But by the end of the episode her view has changed and saw how all Cardassians are not the same.
This reminds me of the movie Valkyrie (2008) where Tom Cruise stars as a Nazi and he is part of a group that is trying to assassinate Adolf Hitler and by doing so, is trying to show the world that not all the Nazis were not like him. And in this story, Aamin Marritza was one of those men who showed us that not all Cardassians are the same.
Here we have Aamin Marritza, who was a simple filing clerk, who tries to pass as Gul Darhe’el, the ruthless leader of the labor camp, the Butcher of Gallitep, only to be executed. Why? He wanted to force his people to admit their mistakes and own up to the atrocities committed. And he was willing to give up his life for this. After all the arrogance he displayed, it must've broken him up inside, knowing, convinced that he really did not feel this way. He only needed to be convincing to the outside world until he could sacrifice his life for the greater good of his people.
I remember when I first saw this. I was feeling angry at him. I felt powerless, just as Kira felt. You could see it in her eyes. Especially in the scene where she tells him that he'll be sentenced to death and he just had to say was to go ahead and that doing so will change nothing. "The dead will still be dead." Wow, I was so ticked off.
But when the truth was discovered, Kira entered the jail with a different attitude. Sympathetic to what this man was trying to do. And when he switched roles from the Butcher to simple Marritza with the sobbing, wow, that got me. How he was traumatized by the screams. Just writing this is getting me tear-eyed.
Then, after his plan did not work and undoubtedly planning to return to Cardassia, maybe even doing good some another way, that drunk Bajoran comes up behind him and stabs him. This Bajoran shows how dangerous prejudice can be. Kira was like him in the beginning. Just the fact that this was a Cardassian with that disease, she just wanted him to pay. But she then realized that not all Cardassians were evil.
"Why?! He wasn't Darhe'el! Why?!" The Bajoran man, without any hint of remorse, responds, "He's a Cardassian! That's reason enough." Kira looks at him with so much sadness in her eyes, and with sadness in her voice says, "No!... It's not.".
Until next time.
| random quote: "We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler's Germany." - Henning von Tresckow, Valkyrie (2008) |