Episode Spotlight DS9

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Season 6

Episode # 541

Episode Title: Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night

Story By: Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler

Director: Jonathan West

Original air date: 04.01.1998

 

 

The title of the episode portends deeply wrong acts, where the passage of time will not bring about enlightenment for those affected. These are acts whose wrongness will not be mitigated by the grave. The light of day always follows a dark night, and even in the darkness of the grave the dead no longer feel pain. But these are wrongs darker than death or night.

 

As the episode begins Major Kira Nerys is proudly, affectionately, remembering her long dead mother. It’s her mother’s birthday, and Kira has purchased Bajoran lilacs, her mother’s favorite flower, to honor her. Kira’s father had taught his children that their mother was the bravest woman he had ever known, and Kira reveres her.

 

But Gul Dukat, her longtime foe, wakes the sleeping Kira that very night to inform her that he and her mother, Kira Meru, had been lovers, smiling as he noted that her mother would have loved the lilacs. Kira is stunned. Could Dukat’s claims be true?

 

With the help of Emissary Sisko, Kira is allowed to investigate Dukat’s claims by consulting the Orb of Time.

 

The Orb transports her back in time to a Bajoran refugee center. The well-fed healthy Kira Nerys is just in time to stop would-be thieves from stealing soup from the starving Kira children, including three-year-old Nerys. This earns the gratitude and friendship of her family, especially her mother Meru, though they do not know who she really is.

 

 

But the meeting is cut short, when Nerys, Meru, and other Bajoran women from the refugee center, are taken by force to Terok Nor to serve as ‘comfort women’ for the Cardassians. Weakened from starvation the men offer no resistance. The women are told their families will be fed and taken care of, but they will never see their families again.

 

On Terok Nor, Nerys tries to discuss escape with Meru, but Meru is mesmerized by the unbelievable abundance of food. Meru, though she misses her family, finds herself responding to Dukat’s ‘kind’ welcome, his best wishes that their stay ‘is pleasant’, his healing of Meru’s facial scar, and other ‘kindnesses.’ She soon becomes Dukat’s lover.

 

 

The shocked Nerys accuses her mother of being a collaborator, of actually being in love with Dukat. The angry Nerys, outraged by Dukat’s slick manipulation of the situation as well as her mother’s ‘easy’ acquiescence, agrees to help the resistance kill Dukat by planting a bomb in the quarters shared by Meru and Dukat. But providence steps in, in the form of Meru’s tears, shed listening to a message of love and gratitude from her husband Toban. Suddenly aware that she is about to kill her own mother and Dukat, and change the time line, Kira instead warns them both out of the room before the bomb goes off, and is returned to her own time.

 

 

 

But Kira no longer reveres her mother, who she now sees as a collaborator. Dukat’s dark deed of destroying Kira’s regard for her mother was an act of cruelty for which there was no gain for him except the pleasure of inflicting pain. The even darker deed of robbing the long dead Meru of her honored place in her daughter’s heart was a last act of disrespect foisted upon a woman he had separated from her family, used for his physical pleasure, and brought to an early death. Wrongs darker than death or night.

 

Cast:

Michael Dorn as Lt. Commander Worf

Terrry Ferrell as Lt. Commander Jadzia Dax

Armin Shimmerman as Quark

Nana Visitor as Major Kira Nerys

Colm Meany as Miles O’Brien

Alexander Siddig as Dr. Julian Bashr

Rene Auberjonois as Odo

Avery Brooks as Captain Benjamin Sisko

 

Guest Cast:

Leslie Hope as Kira Meru

Marc Alaimo as Gul Dukat

David Bowe as Basso

Wayne Grace as Legate

Tim de Zarn as Halb

 

To discuss this episode visit the DS9 forum Here.

 

Questions for further discussion ( Discuss these in the DS9 forum)

 

1. As part of growing up, children eventually come to the knowledge that the parents they respect are not perfect. How is Kira’s situation different?

2. Why did Kira not respond with rage toward Basso, the Bajoran responsible for procuring ‘comfort women’ for the Cardassians?

3. In connection with the above, who was more of a collaborator, Meru or Basso?

4. Why did the Cardassians not select comfort women from the ‘less scrawny’, better fed women in the provinces on Bajor? Why from the refugee centers?

5. Will Kira ever change her new attitude toward her mother? Will she ever meditate on the conditions that led her mother to give in so readily, or does she have her answers? Why does she not see things as her father saw them?

6. Did Kira’s father Toban actually mean it when he told his children that Meru was the bravest woman he ever knew?

7. Why was Kira not angry with her father for his ‘deception’? Why did Toban never tell the adult Kira the ‘truth’?

8. Was the behavior of Meru and the other Bajoran ‘comfort women’ an example of the Stockholm syndrome?

9. How do you feel about Dukat now? Recall the recent death of his daughter, and bout with mental instability. Recall also his attempts to get closer to Major Kira. Was this a new truthful Dukat clearing the air, or the cynical, smiling prefect of Terok Nor?

10. Was Fate kind or cruel to Meru? Even though she did not know it, Meru was touching, talking with, and sharing moments with, the healthy, intelligent daughter she sacrificed herself for. Was Fate saying it was worth it, or was Fate laughing at Meru?