Star Trek – Deep Space Nine, Episode 9: The Passenger

Bashir and Kira are on the Rio Grande and respond to a distress call. A Kobliad ship is losing life support and the ship’s occupants are in danger. Instead of beaming the passengers to the Rio Grande, these two idiots beam themselves (leaving the Rio Grande unmanned) over to a smoke-filled ship without breathing gear. They find the pilot dead, a security officer injured and her prisoner near death. Despite her pleas to let the prisoner die, trapped in his cell, Julian rushes to the rescue, knowing nothing about the species or their capabilities. Dr. Bashir has to be one of the stupidest “geniuses” in Star Trek lore. All Star Trek doctors have a flair for the dramatic – jumping through fire to save a single-cell creature if need-be, but we continue to put up with them because only a Starfleet doctor can discover a never-before-seen virus and develop a cure for it before the end of the episode.

Bashir sees the prisoner, Rao Vantika, is dying quickly – life signs are fading. As he scans him, the prisoner puts a death-vice grip on Bashir’s neck for several seconds before he gives his death rattle.

Ty Kajada, the Kobliad security officer, has spent her entire adult life persuing Rao Vantika – more than just a murderer – a sick fiend who has committed countless crimes on their world – a scientist that kidnapped innocents and used prisoners in experiments to extend his own life. Kajada is convinced that Vanntika is still alive and the crew just rolls their eyes. This is not the first time (nor the last – we see this same re-hashed story on Voyager, too) this same theme of “he’s dead, Jim” turns out to be wrong. This story has been re-hashed into several episodes over the years and you just have to roll your eyes and cross your fingers that you will somehow be mildly entertained.

When things start going wrong on the station, Kajada tells Sisko, “I told you so” over and over until they finally pull their collective heads out of their butts and listen to her. Dax investigates as she is always the backup when Julian is out of pocket – and he appears to be missing. She discovers that among Vantika’s belongings, he had maps of the humanoid brain and what portions of another’s brain it would be safe to “hide.” He clearly planned on transferring his consciousness to another person – but how? As a prisoner, he would have been scanned for any devices and Dax knows he would have had to penetrate the skin of whoever he was going to “infect” with his consciousness. She searches under his fingernails and finds a microscopic “nano” generator that contained glial cells of his consciousness. I honestly don’t know how the actors keep a straight face with these kinds of stories.

Even though Vantika’s body is clearly and most certainly long dead, his consciousness is somewhere in DS9 – but where? In whom? Quark is dealing with dark figures in his bar, in an attempt to steal a valuable Deuridium shipment, which were the last known plans of Vantika.

To even the casual viewer, it is abundantly obvious from the first few minutes of the show that Julian is the one carrying Vantika around in his head, but the crew must run around like ants trying to pick up the bread crumbs. Bashir’s pompous character was one of the most annoying of any Trek series, in my opinion – and the most expendable. Siddig El Fadil’s wooden acting is rarely believable unless he’s laughing in the bar or throwing a tantrum – as a villain, he is about as believable as my dog.

Dax figures out a genius way to excise the bad mojo out of Julian and wrap up everything in a little bow before the last commercial. The story is so predictable from beginning to end and there are so many idiotic holes to make the story even plausible – I wonder if there was a writer’s strike that week, or what. Definitely one of the episodes that could be flushed without any damage to Trek lore whatsoever.
Rating: 2 / 5