"Traitor" (DS9 1-3 "Past Prologue")

(Synopsis of "Past Prologue" on Memory Alpha)

Commander to Major Heart-to-Heart

January 10, 1993 

"Past Prologue" is Major Kira's episode the way "Emissary" was Sisko's. Though other characters do things, and an important recurring character is introduced, the focus of the action is on Kira Nerys, and thus this chapter of Two Houses focuses mostly on her.

The first thing to know about Major Kira is that she wasn't supposed to be on the show at all. The decision to make Bajor the location for Deep Space Nine was not only to tie into using the Cardassians as enemies, but also because of Ensign Ro Laren, a Bajoran Starfleet officer played by Michelle Forbes on The Next Generation. By bringing both Ro and O'Brien over from the Enterprise crew, the idea was to provide a certain continuity between the shows without breaking up TNG's main crew. Sounds great, except there was one problem: Michelle Forbes didn't want the gig.

This is one of those problems in television and film that is pretty much unique to those mediums. After all, an author never has a character opt out of his next book. Actors are changed in plays all the time, but the character and his lines remains the same. That's not how it usually goes in television, as Babylon 5's revolving telepath game goes to show.

Mind you, losing a major actress wasn't a new thing for Star Trek. They'd gone through it before when Kirstie Alley declined to return to the role of Saavik for Star Trek III, leading to Robin Curtis replacing Alley in the role. That hadn't worked out very well, and indeed, when they were unable to convince Alley to come back for Star Trek VI, they opted to replace Saavik with Valeris rather than use Curtis or a third actress for the character.

Likewise, rather than recast Ro, the producers turned to a new character, Major Kira Nerys. (Bajorans use the Japanese family name first naming convention.) Nana Visitor plays Kira, and she does it loudly. That is, she yells a lot. This will be toned down in later episodes, but it's pretty noticeable early on. What makes things unusual for a Star Trek show is that she mostly yells at the other main characters.

Let's pause for a moment and talk about one of the disadvantages of being a Star Trek show, which is that you're tied to some of the stupid things that Trek has come up with over the years. One of them, this one from Gene Roddenberry himself, was the idea of having civilian families on board military vessels. The idea, of course, was that having your family on board was meant to show that Starfleet wasn't a military organization, but the idea is still ridiculous. Especially, as shown in "Emissary," when a ship is going into a dangerous combat situation.

I'll go ahead and put this chapter's J. Michael Straczynski quote here, as it's relevant to the current discussion. From January 10, 1993, the day "Past Prologue" aired:

"I have no problem with married couples, none whatsoever, serving the EA. And, as I've said before, there is no problem having a kid in the background, as one of a family passing through, for instance, but I do not wish to center a whole *story* around one. Someone said "But they can do it on TNG and DS9," which is one more reason for NOT doing it here, to keep the identities separate and distinct."

If I can perhaps extrapolate, you can have your family on a space station where lots of other people live, but bringing them onto a warship? We won't be doing that, because, well, it's kind of ridiculous.  Ridiculous or not, though, the idea stems from the utopian nature of Star Trek. Star Trek, as envisioned by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, wanted to show that by the time humanity had moved into space, we'd gotten better. We'd set aside war except in self-defense. We are explorers and diplomats, not conquerors. Heck, in Star Trek we've given up money!

One of the golden rules about Star Trek, and one that was followed pretty religiously on The Next Generation, was that there should be no conflict among Starfleet officers, particularly among the main cast. And if there was any, it should be because of outside influences or because individuals have psychological problems. Thus you see mind control space bugs in "Conspiracy," or Starfleet officers having breakdowns in "The Wounded" or "The Drumhead." The show even went out of its way to make the thieving time traveler from "A Matter of Time" be from the past and therefore less enlightened than the present members of Starfleet. Individuals can fail, but Starfleet, and by extension humanity as a whole, have grown better than that according to Star Trek.

This in a stark contrast to Babylon 5, where humans run the gamut from heroes to madmen and every point in between. Star Trek says humans will evolve into something better by the time we get out into space. Babylon 5 says that humans will pretty much be the same, just with bigger guns.

However, by the time Deep Space Nine hit the airwaves, Roddenberry had been in his grave for more than a year. From the outset, the DS9 production crew was maneuvering away from the conflict-free zone that Roddenberry preferred for Star Trek. Odo vs. Quark and Kira vs. Sisko in particular were set up to give conflict within the cast in a way that was foreign to the "we're all in it together" Enterprise crew from The Next Generation.

By the end of the show, Deep Space Nine will have strayed much farther from its Roddenberry roots, but that's for later. For now it is enough to note that Deep Space Nine is the first Star Trek show not worked on by Gene Roddenberry at all, and the first to consciously move away from his legacy. Kira yells at Sisko, goes behind his back to his superiors, and is generally a pain in the ass to the rest of the crew, and that is definitely new behavior for Star Trek.

Babylon 5, as it tends to, will take this to even greater extremes in the first episode of the series by having one main character try to assassinate another. But we'll get to "Midnight on the Firing Line" in its own time as well.

No, let's return to Kira Nerys, ex-guerrilla, ex-terrorist, now liaison between the Bajoran Provisional Government and the Federation. In "Past Prologue" her past comes back to haunt her in the person of Tahna Los, a current guerrilla and terrorist, who hasn't given up his war with the Cardassians and isn't too happy about the Federation presence over Bajor either. The episode deals with Kira's conflicted loyalties between the fighter that she was and the diplomat (more or less) that she's become. In the end, the latter wins out, and she sides with the Federation and the Government over her old comrade, and in doing so preserves the wormhole for Bajor.

The decision comes hard, and the lovely scene between Kira and Odo where she makes it is the highlight of the episode. I like, too, that at the end when Tahna's in custody they don't let Kira off the hook. Tahna's bitter "traitor" clearly has an impact on her, and lets her know where she stands with her former friend, and by extension the whole of the Kohn-Ma. She's sided with the government and the Federation, and that is all her former comrades need to know.

That said, the plan they used to arrest Tahna was pretty dumb. The fact that he came as close as he did to blowing up the wormhole means that they didn't plan it very well. Why not sabotage the runabout to make sure it couldn't escape? If Tahna had done the smart thing and just shot Kira when he'd had the chance and then flown the runabout himself to the wormhole, Sisko and company would have been pretty screwed. Bad writers, no cookie for you.

The ironic thing is that, in the end, Tahna Los is right about the danger the wormhole poses to Bajor. Though he had no way to know it, had Tahna succeeded in sealing the wormhole, billions of people, many of them Cardassians, would have been spared death in the fires of the Dominion War. Arguably, by failing, he killed far more Cardassians than he could have dreamed of any other way.

He's also right that Bajor's involvement with the Federation does lead to Bajor surrendering its sovereignty. By joining the Federation by the end of the series it ensures that Bajor's complete independence lasts only seven years. Though in the Star Trek universe it is clearly better to be a part of the Federation than it is to be dominated by the Cardassians (or the Dominion for that matter) the fact of the matter is that the independent Bajor that both Kira and Tahna fought for never returns.

Plain, Simple Garak

This is matched by what eventually happens to Cardassia itself, as viewed by a man who fought for it, Elim Garak. While the story belongs to Major Kira, the breakout hit of the episode was Andrew J. Robinson's Garak. The ex-spy turned tailor is a great character, one who manages to be both slimy and amusing all at the same time. You never quite know what's going on with Garak, and that's the way we like it. Garak was meant to be a one shot character, but proved to be so popular that he would return another thirty six times before Deep Space Nine ran its course. Indeed, by the second season, Garak is getting his own episodes. So we'll reserve our time for discussion of my favorite character on DS9 until Season Two's "The Wire" and merely note that this was Garak's first appearance, and it was a performance that kept Andrew J. Robinson employed for the next few years.

So that was "Past Prologue." At the end of it we've learned a lot about Major Kira, been introduced to Garak, and saved the wormhole. Where do we go from here? How about a look at our mysterious shapeshifting constable? That sounds about right. So we've got "A Man Alone" on tap. I hope to see you there.