3.5 — “Second Skin”

3.5 — “Second Skin”

Plot: Major Kira is confronted with a record indicating she was a prisoner in a Cardassian war camp for seven days, which she does not remember. When she goes to Bajor to investigate this record she is abducted, and wakes up looking like a Cardassian. Have cats turned into dogs? Has the polarity of gravity been reversed? And is Kira unwittingly a Cardassian mole?

Thoughts: This is like the episode you make to terrorize your actors. “Look how easy it would be to get rid of you! This is what being written off feels like!” Something similar to this happened to a prominent character on Babylon 5 after the actor asked for a pay raise.

I like Cardassian episodes, but this one doesn’t really work for me. It’s clever, but plastic surgery isn’t as easy as putting on and removing makeup. Brains are not rewritable like a page on a word processor. The Romulans might conceivably go through these lengths to deceive someone, but not for such a weak payoff as offered in this premise.

Who looks at a member of an alien species and says, that looks just like my daughter? That’s like me saying an aardvark looks like my sister. Even if they could do the plastic surgery (all fully healed!), Kira’s voice is so distinctive, there’d be no way to fool a father that he was talking to his daughter, assuming they had previously met.

I feel like I will never not love watching Garak (knock wood), but this episode overplays him. What is his source of information about Kira’s kidnaping? Why would he intervene? We learn Garak still has considerable power over the Cardassian military, and ties at the Homeworld sufficient to at least temporarily stymie and defeat the Obsidian order, whose agent Entek recognizes Garak and calls him by name. I feel like this is just the writers painting themselves into a corner for future Garak stories without necessarily having a plan to get out of it. Garak also gets a James Bond style quip after shooting the villain, “A pity. I rather liked him.” I like him more as a George Smiley enigmatic tailor than as the reincarnation of Roger Moore (RIP Roger Moore).

I also want to know how Cardassia can just snatch people (soliders!) off the surface of Bajor undetected. This is the kind of detail that gets glossed over in an hour-long television drama because it would bog down the plot, but thing about the implications.

The last scene between Kira and her putative Cardassian “father” rubs me the wrong way. Kira discovering that the Cardassian Legate is a decent man is a big step for her. Having her break down in tears doesn’t come off as if she is a professional and a soldier, more like the character has emotional problems and responds to Ghemor as a father figure, not as a Cardassian dissident and political leader. There’s nothing wrong with showing emotion, but this seems miscalibrated.

I know what they were shooting for. The theme of identity being malleable and ultimately unknowable is gold in the hands of Phillip K. Dick. You already have an immaculate VR simulator in the form of the Holodeck. So as you develop this story, it’s easy to tell yourself you’re making visionary, cutting edge science fiction. And Nana Visitor looks lovely in the Cardassian makeup. The producers are used to seeing ordinary people transform into creatures and characters based on their scripts, why not Major Kira Nerys? But while still enjoyable as a pot boiler, I think this idea should have been left on the shelf.

Rating: 3 out of 5 bone carvings. Given what I wrote, I feel I should revise this rating downwards. But I feel it’s still a fun hour of television, and not at the 2 level compared to the weaker episodes of TNG.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Second_Skin