“The Homecoming” (season 2, episode 1; originally aired 9/26/1993)
In which Kira and O’Brien rescue a hero who longs to be forgotten
There’s something comforting about “To Be Continued.” It’s a way of saying that the game isn’t over yet; nothing’s permanent, no decisions are final; no matter how bad it looks for the heroes, there will be another episode next week for everyone to come out okay. “To Be Continued” is exiting, too. It usually comes right after a cliffhanger, and even if most cliffhangers are more satisfying in the set-up than in the resolution, they’re still a lot of fun. Plus, a two (or in this case, three) part storyline is a break from the norm. It’s special, and it carries a certain weight, no matter how silly it might be in execution. But there’s something frustrating about this as well. When I was a kid, they used to show Batman reruns on Sundays, which was great. Even better, they aired two in a row. Since every Batman was part of a two-parter, it should’ve been a perfect fit, except the local affiliate which showed the reruns didn’t really give a crap, and the episodes never aired in sequence. So every Sunday, I’d see Batman escape from death traps and wander into other death traps, without any continuity between the two. It was disconcerting. Nothing ever felt complete or fully resolved. I was always walking in on a story too early to see the end, or too late to know how it all got started.
These days, with internet streaming and DVRs, it’s a lot easier to watch things in order, which I find comforting. But there’s an essential incompleteness to a “To Be Continued” structure, one that pervades even when watching part two is as easy as clicking on the next entry in my Netflix queue. Of the two episodes we cover this week, “The Homecoming” comes the closest to being a full story in its own right. We’re given a clear plot hook, a goal, and, once that goal is accomplished, a decent exploration of the consequences. If it weren’t for the last scene, when Kira loses her job on the station to the Bajoran resistance leader she rescued from a Cardassian labor camp, this wouldn’t even need more than a single episode to play out. And in a way, that promise of continuation does this episode a disservice. Kira getting kicked out so early in the season is a surprise, and while it’s reasonable to assume she’d be back eventually, keeping a certain ambiguity would’ve been a strong choice for the show. Instead, that “To Be Continued…” pops up, and we know she’ll be back in a week or two. In its first season, Deep Space Nine embraced a loose serialization that worked fairly well, throwing out occasionally information but never straining too hard to make sure every episode was directly connected to what came before. At the start of the second season, they’re taking the more direct approach, for good and for ill.
“The Homecoming” doesn’t waste any time catching up. The cold open has Quark and Odo squabbling; Quark gets an earring from an alien hottie who wants him to deliver the item to Bajor; then Quark gives the earring to Kira (without asking for anything in exchange, which has to violate half a dozen Rules of Acquisition), and we’re off to the races. Once again, Kira is confronted by some evidence of her past, in this case, proof of life of a resistance leader named Li Nalas (Richard Beymer, the West Side Story and Twin Peaks alum who isn’t Russ Tamblyn). But while Kira is important to the episode (and even more important to the middle entry of this three-parter), this isn’t really about her struggling to come to terms with the difference between the Bajor that was and the Bajor that is. This is more about Sisko struggling with the conflicts which came to light at the end of the last season. The Bajor that is, is a mess. Many Bajorans still struggle against the Federation presence, and while this is foolish on their part, it makes a certain kind of sense. This is a people who’ve spent decades under the cruel oppression of an outside force. It stands to reason they’re going to be suspicious of any new force that takes the oppressor’s place, regardless of the fact that the Federation is non-interfering and the only thing keeping the Cardassians at bay.
To represent the part of the population that wants Sisko and the others gone, we have the Alliance For Global Unity, otherwise known as the Circle. The Circle doesn’t make an official appaerance until part two, but they make their presence known early on when O’Brien finds the group’s symbol spray painted on a wall in the station. It’s a smart way to let the audience know that despite the general warm fuzziness at the end of “Prophets,” Sisko’s job remains as complicated as ever. This even creeps into his personal life; Jake scores a date with a Bajoran girl, only to have her cancel when her father decides he doesn’t want his daughter making time with Federation folks. This is all fairly heavy-handed, but it’s effective. Again, we see the difference between DS9 and a show like Star Trek: The Next Generation. On TNG, Picard would’ve given a speech (much like Sisko did), and then the Enterprise would have left, leaving us to assume that everything worked out okay after that for whatever planet of the week had gotten into trouble. Everyone on DS9, no one gets to just walk away. It’s a terrific metaphor for the difference between a standalone show and a serialized one. The former has the advantage of freedom and variety; the latter benefits from the sense that every action reverberates, and that no answer is ever going to be as simple as we’d like it to be. (As Doc Manhattan once said, “Nothing ever ends.”)
All of this is mostly background information in “The Homecoming.” The story here is focused on Nalas. Kira and O’Brien spearhead the rescue mission, and while it doesn’t take up a whole lot of time, it’s good TV. I don’t think Kira and O’Brien have spent much time together before, and they play off each other well, largely because of O’Brien’s level-headed refusal to be much upset about anything. With Sisko’s approval, they take a runabout to Cardassia Four and attempt what can charitably be described as a low-fi guerrilla assault, if you can call something with a space-ship and laser guns “low-fi.” Kira pretends she’s a prostitute and O’Brien is her pimp, which is fun (and I hadn’t realized how skinny Nana Visitor was), but the most important part to take away from this sequence is how devoted everyone is to Nalas. One of his fellow prisoners is responsible for smuggling Nalas’s earring off planet, in hopes someone would see it and recognize it; that same prisoner, along with several others, volunteers to give his life to buy time for Nalas to escape. We’ve already heard Kira wax rhapsodic over Nalas’s importance, but now we’ve seen the effect he has on other people first hand.
It’s an effect that Sisko hopes he can use to help strengthen the provisional government, and ease tensions between the Federation and Bajor. Except Li doesn’t act all that eager to jump into a position of command. He appears more tired than anything else, and while it’s not hard to understand why (labor camps don’t look like fun places to hang out), it’s hard to reconcile this man with the fervent devotion his words have inspired. He’s not a bad public speaker, he has a level of gravitas and sincerity, and yet he lacks Kira’s passion, or any apparent desire to re-invest himself in planetary politics. It’s tempting to think his spirit has been broken, but as we learn in a late episode scene between Li and Sisko, it’s more complicated than that. He never really had a spirit to begin with. He got the role of Supreme Rebel Bad-Ass almost entirely by accident, and now that he’s back, he wants nothing to do with authority or leadership or inspiration.
Li’s speech about shooting a Cardassian in his underwear is effective, and Beymer delivers it well. It’s curiously unsurprising to find that yet another one of Kira’s heroes has feet of clay, and while I can understand the idea—the rebellion needed symbols as much, if not more, than it needed actual brilliant leadership—it’s a little too thematically neat all the same. It makes the Bajorans look a bit like the idiots in Life Of Brian, so desperate for a messiah they’ll latch onto anyone, and while I appreciate the cynicism of that, it would’ve been nice if Nalas had been a little more competent. Then again, he doesn’t make any major mistakes between this episode and next, so it could be he’s trying to dodge responsibility by exaggerating his pointlessness; maybe all a leader needs to be really great is some patience, and the ability to say “Yes” to the right people.
“The Homecoming” is solid, if unspectacular. The performances are good, and the episode never feels overly padded, in the way that multi-part Trek episodes so often do. If I had a complaint, it’s that DS9 has proven itself capable of greater complexity last season, and this episode, while rife with difficult situations, never really puts us in the position of having to make difficult choices. The Circle is obviously bad news, and while they aren’t an easy threat to shrug off, there’s no question that Sisko and the others won’t find some way of dealing with them, a way that won’t cost them much in the way of sleepless nights. There’s good drama in this episode, and the sudden appearance of Frank Langella in the last ten minutes, playing the presumably (future self: definitely) malevolent Minister Jaro, is a welcome and completely unexpected surprise. But there’s something missing, some final push of energy to go from “decent” to “Holy #$^.” I think it’s connected with that “To Be Continued.” At the end of the hour, Kira has been replaced by Nalas, and while Li doesn’t appear to be up to anything, Jaro, clearly, has designs. But in case anyone was going to get uncomfortable or nervous or tense, the show reassures us, all of this will be resolved shortly. The eels do not eat the princess at this time.