"Someday We'll Know" (DS9 1-12 "Vortex")

Odo plays "bad cop-bad cop".

April 18, 1993

(Synopsis on Memory Alpha)

I have complained in the past about the one-and-done nature of most of the early Deep Space Nine episodes.  But that's not completely fair since, as we've noted, one-and-done was how almost all Star Trek had been done before.  Indeed, most episodic television, barring soap operas, tended to be designed around leaving the status quo intact by the end of any given episode because one could never be certain that the audience would be able to watch the episodes in the order they were produced or broadcast.  Indeed, the idea of a continuing story in a TV show is significantly more popular now than it ever was back in the '90s. One need only looks as far as Game of Thrones, Battlestar Galactica, or Lost to see the more complex form of storytelling in play.  But that doesn't mean the old one-and-done style is extinct.  Most of your police drama shows like CSI have no particular storylines beyond the one in the episode you're watching.  Oh, occasionally you'll get a Miniature Killer plotline that goes the length of a season or so, but as with The Next Generation, one can watch CSI in pretty much any order and never know it except for when members of the cast change.

So on one hand, criticizing Deep Space Nine for so many one-shot episodes is rather unfair.  Following a successful path blazed by the previous Trek shows only makes sense.  And yet, as we'll see once B5 gets going in '94, ongoing stories could be done on science fiction television in the mid-90's, and done well.

The upshot of this as far as "Vortex" goes is that it does manage to leave a breadcrumb toward future storylines.  The rest of the episode is disposable, but there is that one clue that Odo's people probably hail from the Gamma Quadrant and that there are legends of the "Changelings" being hunted and persecuted by those who fear their shapeshifting abilities.  Nothing else from this episode carries forward, not the Miradorn race, not Croden and his daughter, not the Rakhari species and their tyrannical government.  In that respect "Vortex"" ends up being a lot like most Babylon 5 episodes where a tiny step forward is made.  The difference, of course, is that where-as most B5 episodes will be like "Vortex", "Vortex" itself is an outlier among the early episodes of Deep Space Nine.

Indeed, if we examine the episodes thus far, how many have any future impact on the rest of the show?  Pretty much all of "The Emissary", clearly.  Garak in "Past Prologue".  The parts of "A Man Alone" where Keiko sets up the school.  "The Nagus" introduces us to Grand Nagus Zek who will be back.  We learn that Odo's probably from the Gamma Quadrant here in "Vortex".  Only five of eleven episodes (counting both parts of "The Emissary" as one episode here) have any future impact on the rest of the show at all, and even then the impact is often in minor ways that can be easily explained without having seen the original episode.

"Who's that?"  "That's Zek, he's the leader of the Ferengi."  Job done, you don't need "The Nagus" for that.

At least we're going to re-use the key, right?  No?  Huh.

Mind you, much of Babylon 5's continuity works in exactly the same way.  Do you need to have watched "The Quality of Mercy" to know that the crew have an alien healing machine that takes life from one person and gives it to another when they use it to save Garibaldi in "Revelations"?  No more than you needed to have seen "The Nagus" to find out who Zek was.  In both cases the original episode gives more context, but they aren't truly necessary.

Here's what our old buddy J. Michael Straczynski had to say on the "Quality of Mercy" machine, and on leaving clues in advance in general:

"You will see the healing machine from "Quality" once more. Part of the reason for that story was to set up something within the B5 universe that will come in handy a long time later (but I'm *not* going to have it lying around indefinitely; it would cause lots of long-term complications).

(Some TV shows foreshadow/set-up stuff an act or two ahead of time; we do setups a full *year* ahead....)"
                                                    -J. Michael Straczynski, The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5

As it happened, we would see the machine twice more after "Quality of Mercy".

All of which is a long way to say that the thing I found most memorable about "Vortex" was the clues they distributed bout Odo's origin.  As for the rest?  It was fine, I suppose.  The curiously laid-back performance by Cliff DeYoung as Croden was pretty interesting if occasionally off putting.  Rene Auberjonois did his usual fine work as Odo, and we get to see that Odo is willing to abandon a chance to find out where he's from in order to stay on his job.  Duty over all other concerns is the way Odo plays it at this early stage.  We'll see if that can stand up to the trials to come.

Quark gets a little more to do early on, as we seem him trying to pull a heist on a couple of pirates.  No consequences seem to fall upon him for criminal activities any more than it did for his cheating in "Move Along Home".  There isn't much else to say about it.  It was an episode that neither excites nor annoys.  They can't all be great or terrible enough to have a lot to say about them, after all.

Next an episode with major consequences for the rest of the show, what JMS would later call a "wham" episode.  See us here next time for "Battle Lines".