"Die With Honor, O'Brien" (DS9 1-6 "Captive Pursuit")

He's living prey.  He's a Starfleet engineer.  Can they avoid getting shot?

January 31, 1993

(Synopsis on Memory Alpha)

With "Captive Pursuit" we get the first episode devoted to a character who's been around for ages but has only been "Chief Miles O'Brien" for a relatively short amount of time. Colm Meany appeared in the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Encounter at Farpoint," as the guy running Ops on the Battle Bridge. Starting with season 2 of TNG, he was the Transporter Chief. Over time, he grew in importance, and things were added to him. He went from Transporter Chief to Chief O'Brien to Chief Miles O'Brien. He even got married to one of the Enterprise's botanists, Keiko, and together they had a daughter named Molly, who Worf helped birth in the otherwise forgettable TNG episode "Disaster." (Come to think of it, that episode was pretty forgettable even including the "tough guy is challenged by having to be a midwife" plot, but never mind that.)

O'Brien was, in short, the most important character on TNG who wasn't in the main cast. Therefore, it was pretty reasonable that he'd end up as one of the main cast of Deep Space Nine, especially since they'd shown in the TNG episode "The Wounded" that O'Brien had a history with the Cardassians.

Throughout The Next Generation, O'Brien had been shown to be loyal, hard-working, and dependable. Here in O'Brien's first episode as the focus character, we see that he's loyal, hard-working, dependable, and badly overworked. So things haven't changed all that much for O'Brien, except for his workload.

Invoking British Redcoats and big game hunters much?

This episode challenges O'Brien with the station's first visitor from the Gamma Quadrant, a being named Tosk. Tosk, as we discover halfway through the episode, is raised and trained to be living prey for the Hunters. Needless to say there's something of an ethical dilemma involved for our Starfleet crew in this practice. On one hand there's the obvious fact that it's wrong to hunt sentient creatures. Especially to the point of death, as they do here. On the other hand, Tosk is happy to be hunted, and has in fact trained his whole life to be hunted. He knows it will end inevitably in his death, but being hunted is the ultimate expression of skill in his culture. To be a Tosk is to fight to extend your life just one more day in the face of incredible odds. Everyone in his culture, Hunter and Tosk both, look up to the Tosks, and they are heroes in death.

We'll touch on the themes of sentient beings manufactured for a single purpose by the end of season two when the Jem'Hadar make their debut. It is a debate that I see in reference to AI a lot too. If we are ever able to create true artificial intelligence will the constraints that are placed on them by their builders make them slaves?  Heady stuff, and worthy of some interesting debate.

Alas, that's not really what we get in this episode.  Because another of Star Trek's quirks pops up instead, the Prime Directive.  Confusing, inconsistently used, and more known for its breakage than its correct application, the Prime Directive is supposed to keep Starfleet from screwing around with other cultures.  In theory, it represents hard lessons about what happens when you give advanced technology to primitive cultures.  A long-held fan theory that was eventually disproved by Enterprise was that the original disaster was Starfleet giving the Klingons warp technology leading to generations of bloody conflict with a society that wasn't ready to hit the stars.  So making sure that not only does Starfleet tech stay out of primitive hands make sense, extending the directive to ban any kind of interference with other cultures seems like a great idea.

That's the theory.  In practice, though, the writers of Star Trek shows are pretty loose on what constitutes "interference."  From series to series, and sometimes even from season to season of the same show, the Prime Directive fluctuates wildly in what it means the crew of a starship can or can't do.  Sometimes it is explicitly stated to only apply to pre-warp cultures.  But other times, and as it is applied here in "Captive Pursuit," it means not messing around with another culture, even when that culture involves shooting up your space station!

And that's the problem with the Prime Directive.  Like technobabble, it has become a crutch for bad writing. Need to insert some quick drama to your morality play?  Wave around the Prime Directive.  Need to keep the characters from using the obvious and rational solution to a problem?  Prime Directive says you can't.  So sorry.  Does it matter that last season we used the Prime Directive in a way that completely contradicts what we're doing here?  No, no it does not.

Fortunately, Deep Space Nine's station-bound format limits the show's opportunities to trot out the Prime Directive.  Compared to the original Star Trek, The Next Generation, or Voyager the Prime Directive rarely comes up.  For the most part, the crew of DS9 aren't going out looking for trouble, and as such, the Prime Directive simply doesn't come into play.  Which is for the best, I'd say.

Overall, I find "Captive Pursuit" to be much like the Prime Directive itself.  It contains potentially interesting ideas that are marred by poor execution.  While Colm Meany's performance as O'Brien is solid as usual, I never connected to Tosk.  He never seemed as dangerous as the show was making him out to be, and I never felt much sympathy for his plight.  Some of that was script and direction, and some of it the acting.  Either way, I never really bought Tosk as a character, and since he was half of a two man play, the whole structure of the episode collapsed for me.  But hey, they can't all be winners.

Over on the B5 front, JMS had nothing whatsoever to say about this episode.  But he did say this:

"What the hell am I doing up at 4:15 a.m. my time? Watching B5 for the ten zillionth time. Picking it apart. Making notes. This is nuts. I'm going to bed. See you all in the afternoon....."

Which is pretty amusing in that twenty years later I found myself staying up to 4 am picking apart Deep Space Nine and will soon be doing the same to Babylon 5.  Some things never change, I suppose.

Next time, a pair of TNG characters stop by DS9 for a visit.  Which ones?  Well, I'll bet you can guess at least one of them when I tell you the episode is titled "Q-Less."  I'll see you there.