"Killing Your Own Clone is Still Murder" (DS9 1-4 "A Man Alone")

(Synopsis at Memory Alpha)

Murder, He Cloned

January 17, 1993

Structurally, Deep Space Nine takes the old Star Trek premise of "Wagon Train to the stars" even more literally than every other Star Trek show, though not a literally as the short lived and much beloved Firefly would in 2002.

As Deep Space Nine writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe would say:

"We had the country doctor, and we had the barkeeper, and we had the sheriff and we had the mayor, we had it all, it was all there. We had the common man, Miles O'Brien, the Native American, Kira."

Deep Space Nine was trying to portray a science fiction version of an Old West frontier town for the first couple of seasons. And if there was any one episode that proves it, "A Man Alone" was it. Between the mob violence A-Plot and Keiko O'Brien schoolmarm B-Plot, you can see some very familiar tropes at work in this episode. They even make light of the fact that you can't lynch a shapeshifter! Excepting that the murderer tries to frame Odo through aggressive cloning, you could pretty much pick this whole episode up and plunk it down on Bonanza with very little difficulty.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you. Consciously invoking the formulas of older genres is a way to remind the audience that you're doing something similar, just in a different setting. Want to show your audience that you're a spy show? Borrow from James Bond on Chuck or Burn Notice. Need your audience to recognize you're a new style forensics show? Borrow from CSI on Bones. Want people to know you're Wagon Train-ing to the stars? Borrow from westerns on Deep Space Nine.

We should also talk about A-Plot/B-Plot. This is a pretty familiar way to structure your television show, especially ones that have large casts like Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5. What you do is have part of your cast wrapped up in the main plot, while the rest shows up in a secondary plot. A-Plot is the primary and B-Plot is the secondary. Both of the previous Deep Space Nine episodes we've seen so far had A-Plots and B-Plots. The difference between those episodes and "A Man Alone" was that in both "Emissary" and "Past Prologue" the A- and B-Plots converged by the end of the episode. In "A Man Alone," they are distinct.

For example, in "Emissary" the A-Plot is Sisko becoming the Emissary and his time in the wormhole with the Prophets, while the B-Plot is moving the station to the wormhole and the trouble with the Cardassians. At the end of the episode, Sisko's resolution of the A-Plot solves the problem of the Cardassian ships in the B-Plot. Likewise, in "Past Prologue" Kira and Tahna and the plot to blow up the wormhole is the A-Plot, while Garak and Bashir make up the B-Plot. Once again, the two plots come together by the end of the episode where the information that Bashir gets through Garak in the B-Plot helps the resolution of the A-Plot.

"A Man Alone" does things differently. In this episode, the A-Plot of Odo being framed for murder and the B-Plot of Keiko establishing a school have nothing to do with one another. There isn't even a thematic link outside our previously mentioned "it makes things feel more like a western." It's more like "this stuff is happening over here while this other stuff is happening over there." In that it allows you to tell two stories in one episode, I can see the appeal, but every time you go from one story to the other the shift in tone is jarring. What's more, it's almost inevitable that one half of the episode will be more interesting to a viewer than the other. That leads any given audience member to be sitting around during half the show wishing they'd get back to the other half. Fortunately, most B-Plots take up much less time than their corresponding A-Plots, so as long as the A-Plot is more interesting to you, you'll be fine. That's the case here in "A Man Alone" where I can't think of many people who would find Keiko's plotline more interesting than Odo's.

At their best, A-Plots and B-Plots have some tonal similarities that give an episode a consistent feel regardless of the separation of the events within it. That isn't always true, though, on either show. Just wait until we get to Babylon 5's "TKO" if you want to see an episode where the tone shifts so fast you'll get whiplash. On the other hand, if you want to see one where the two plots never converge but the dissonance between the two is chillingly well done, then it's Babylon 5's "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place" that you should look at.

As promised, this is Odo's episode the way the previous two were Sisko's and Kira's. Want to see what your law enforcement character is made of? Strip him of his authority and make him a suspect in a case and see what he does. Babylon 5's Chief of Security Michael Garibaldi crawls into a bottle but eventually gets his act together and solves the case. Odo hides in his office and Doctor Bashir solves the case for him. Of the two the former is more heroic, but the latter still tells you something about Odo. To be precise, that at the beginning of the series, Odo has no way to interact with people outside of his job as Constable. He understands means, motive, and opportunity, but can't understand why people form couples. When pressed by the mob and unable to use his accustomed authority, he hides.

Since the man who ends up running the show through its later seasons, Ira Steven Behr, isn't fully in charge yet, it's hard to call the way the mob turns so quickly on Odo foreshadowing per say, but the fact is that they've set up in the third episode of the show that shapeshifters frighten people and that frightened people turn to violence easily. Behr will eventually use that point as the reason the Founders formed the Dominion, as a way to protect themselves from the fear of the "solids." Having Odo experience that fear and violence for himself makes the Founders' arguments to him more reasonable, and makes his choosing to stand in defiance of that fear that much more heroic.

Keiko O'Brien, Schoolmarm  

What is definitely foreshadowing, or at the very least least setup, is the B-Plot of Keiko's school. The school and what she should and shouldn't be teaching the children will become a major plot point in the season finale "In the Hands of the Prophets."  Here it unfortunately just distracts from Odo's murder mystery.

I do have some nitpicks. A lot of Deep Space Nine's extras are of dubious quality sometimes. I'm not certain if it's the direction or the actors themselves, but sometimes you get a line reading that's so stiff and unconvincing that it takes you right out of the episode. Some of the rioters in "A Man Alone" are terrible, and it hurts the episode to have to listen to them.

Over on Babylon 5, we find that by February of 1992, the idea of B5's own shapeshifter character had been shelved. Says Straczynski:

"And I dropped the idea, in my original screenplay, of a character who's an actual shape-changer because a) I found a better way of handling a particular plot point, and b) when Warner Bros. did the focus group study on B5, which at that point included the shape-changer, the UNIFORM reaction from the group -- especially now, after the Michael Jackson shape-changing, and that technology becoming SO commonplace -- was that it was a dumbness, and why would ANYONE want to do that since it's been done so much now, especially in TERMINATOR 2?"

"I agree. They're right. Why would any show want to include a shape-changer on a regular basis now that the technology has been SO over-exposed? Heh, heh...."

And thus Odo. A shapeshifter who doesn't know who his own people are, is isolated among his colleagues with his bitterest enemy the closest thing he has to a friend, but a man who's dedicated to justice, regardless of the letter of the law. Three episodes in, and we have a pretty good grasp of Sisko, Kira, and now Odo. Who's next, I wonder? Technically, it will be O'Brien, but before we get to his episode, we get a general episode where everyone is involved.

I'll see you here for our next chapter, "Babel."