HERE THERE BE SPOILERS
Coming after “Dax,” “The Passenger” already had an uphill battle to wage as far as quality goes, but “The Passenger” doesn’t even bother to try. None of the twists are terribly surprising, and there aren’t any particularly good performances to save this episode from its own mediocrity. If you’re doing a rewatch, give this one a pass.
Plot Ahoy!
In fair runabout-land where we lay our scene, Major Kira Nerys and Dr. Julian Bashir discuss a recent mission, and Bashir extols the virtues of his own genius. Kira snarks at him, but Bashir seemingly doesn’t notice. He does notice a distress call from an ailing Kobaliad ship, and they change course to intercept the ship. Once on board, they discover just how dire the situation for the ship and crew really is. They find the pilot dead, one female still living, and another male on the verge of death. Just before he expires, however, he grabs Dr. Bashir by the neck and demands that Bashir allow him to live. He dies immediately thereafter.
Back on DS9, Bashir revives the female Kobaliad whose name is Ty Kajada. She identifies herself as Kobaliad security and explains that she had been transporting the criminal, Rao Vantika, back to her home world to stand trial. Bashir identifies the man who died after grabbing his throat as Vantika, and he assures Kajada that the man is dead. Kajada disagrees, before explaining to Bashir that Vantika was obsessed with prolonging his own life. She has tracked him for twenty years, so Kajada will need very solid proof that the man is dead before she’ll accept it. Bashir does the Starfleet equivalent of rolling his eyes but agrees to an autopsy.
Bashir reports to Ops that he’s pretty sure that Vantika is dead, and based on Kajada’s information, Sisko and Dax conclude that Vantika headed toward DS9 to intercept a shipment of deuridium ore. The Kobliads require deuridium ore to stabilize their cell structures in order to prolong their lifespans and stave off extinction. However, the demand well outstrips the supply, even with the new deuridium deposits discovered in the gamma quadrant. Life-obsessed Vantika likely wanted to steal the shipment for himself.
Elsewhere, strange things start to go wrong on the station. Odo and Lieutenant Primmin, who have been fighting over who’s in charge of station security, discover that all of Odo’s security plans have been lost in a massive computer memory purge. Kajada insists that Vantika caused the sabotage and identifies a likely cause, which Odo and Primmin and confirm. Sisko orders everyone to assume that Vantika still lives until Starfleet reports back to Bashir, confirming the corpse’s identity. Odo asks Sisko for a word and tries to tender his resignation based on Primmin’s presence, which Sisko rejects. Sisko instead affirms that security remains Odo’s demesne and that Primmin will have to defer to Odo.
Down in Quark’s, a mysterious figure grabs Quark and demands to know where his hired muscle is. Quark explains that he did hire mercenaries but believed the man to be dead. The man instructs Quark that the plan should go forward. In the Infirmary, Bashir provides Kajada with Starfleet’s report indicating that the corpse in the morgue is actually Vantika, but she refuses to believe it. Dax, however, has found a map of the humanoid brain in Vantika’s possession, and she comms Bashir to her lab. Once he arrives, they start sharing theories. They theorize that Vantika could have transferred his consciousness into someone else’s brain and that the likeliest candidate is Kajada herself.
Having been locked out from Odo’s system, Kajada does some old-fashioned legwork and spies on Quark during his meeting with the mercenaries. However, something pushes her over the railing in the bar’s upper floor, leaving Kajada comatose. Down in the morgue, Dax takes samples from Vantika’s fingernails. Based on models of glial cells she found on Vantika’s storage drive, she theorizes that Vantika developed a method to use glial cells to transmit his brain patterns into the brain of another humanoid, thereby allowing him to take over a body. She finds a microscopic generator on his fingers and believes it to be the delivery method.
Quark takes the mercenaries to a docked runabout and discovers Dr. Bashir aboard. Bashir identifies himself as Vantika, and his merry band of thieves heads off to steal some deuridium. They beam aboard the cargo ship, but DS9 grabs the ship with a tractor beam, Odo having neutralized Vantika’s plan to disable the station. There are threats back and forth, but Dax finds a way to neutralize Vantika’s personality. Momentarily revived, Bashir lowers the shields, enabling DS9 to beam him aboard. Deducing that Vantika has regained control over the body, Sisko stuns him. They all head down to the Infirmary where Dax removes Vantika using a transporter to beam the foreign glial cells into a separate container. Kajada asks to take custody of what’s left of the prisoner, and Sisko complies. Kajada destroys the container and leaves.
Dr. Bashir awakens with a splitting headache, none the worse for wear.
Analysis
I fully understand and appreciate that not every Star Trek episode has to be a deep, thought-provoking discussion of the human condition. Some episodes are just fun romps throughout space, and that’s great. “The Passenger,” however, is neither the former nor the latter. The story frames the major mystery as being which character hosts Vantika. Sure, there’s a brief question as to how he’s still alive, but the episode resolves that issue with almost laughable ease. Once we know that, the episode tries to feint using Kajada, but really, doing so makes zero sense considering the amount of effort put into how Vantika grabs Bashir’s neck. You don’t spend quality camera focus like that on an unimportant moment, and even in the nineties, viewers were savvy enough to know that.
Having Kajada be Vantika’s carrier might have elevated the episode into something interesting, but the show opted to put Bashir on the spot. Unfortunately, Siddig El Fadil gives a truly abysmal performance, one that is no way good enough to support the rest of the episode. His Vantika either wheezes in the dark or nearly growls at Sisko, and none of it is convincing. Caitlin Brown’s Kajada isn’t much better. Her entire character centers around her obsession with Vantika, but Brown’s Kajada just feels tired of the whole business. You’d think she’d be a little more forceful in her insistence that Vantika still lives. Because she isn’t, Dax’s insistence that she and Vantika are deeply entangled seems, well, silly. Sisko’s theory that she might have committed suicide in the wake of Vantika’s “death” seems even sillier.
Odo provides a brief highlight in his grumpy squabbling with Primmin, but Primmin only lasts for two episodes. Plus, the show will use the same set-up to better effect with Eddington in later seasons, so there’s nothing much to miss there. Even Quark, usually the show’s other saving grace, just gets left in “Creepy Quark Mode,” harassing Jadzia Dax once again.
This episode is no “Code of Honor” or “Sub Rosa,” but it still isn’t worth your time.
Rating:
Barely Made it To First
Stray Thoughts From the Couch:
- I don’t know why Vantika still wants deuridium once he’s taken over Bashir’s body. Humans don’t suffer from the same issue that’s killing the Kobliads. He could just take Bashir’s meat suit and run, so going after the deuridium seems like a strange choice for a man as obviously clever as Vantika is.
- Mentioning that no one other than a Vulcan has managed to imprint a consciousness on another makes for a nice nod to Spock in Star Trek: II. We find out in Star Trek: III that Spock transferred his katra to Dr. McCoy, which is more or less the same thing Vantika does to Bashir.
- Caitlin Brown will appear as Vekor in TNG’s “The Gambit, parts I and II.”
- We are all Kira Nerys when she rolls her eyes at Bashir’s self-aggrandizement. I promise. He does get better; the show ill figure out what to do with his character. It’s just not going to happen in this season.