1x19 Duet

Category: drama

This is hands down the best episode in season one. It's probably one of the best Star Trek episodes ever.

Like in the earlier episode Progress, this is another standout episode for Kira. It's a deeply personal story that tells you a lot about both Kira and the Cardassian-Bajoran conflict. It's also great acting by Nana Visitor. At this point she has become the strongest female character ever in Star Trek. And all of this is achieved by simple dialogue - no action needed. The story is about war crimes, mass murder, genocide, labor camps, history, politics, blind hate, vengeance, justice and forgiveness. It's very dark indeed. No wonder people call it "Dark Star Trek". The story has multiple turns and twists and until the end you can't really see where this is going. And like every important story, it ends in a tragedy.

It's still relevant. It will always be relevant as long as humans will wage war. You can draw countless parallels to our own 20th and 21th century history. As a German, I'm pretty much reminded of my country's own monsters. Many of them pretended to be someone else or to be humble filing clerks.

Nothing else in season 1 quite prepares you for this. An absolute tour-de-force of writing and acting produces not only the best episode of the season, not only one of the best episodes of DS9, but one of the best of the entire Star Trek franchise. Screw it, it's among the best hours of television ever made.

The atrocities of the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor are brought into the light and we get our first real understanding of what went on. The fierce and judgemental nature of Kira makes a lot more sense after seeing this, and the first season of the show turns out to be very much about shaping her character going forward. She's full of hate, and as the season has progressed we've seen her discover more and more that it's something she needs to let go of. It also goes a long way towards finally humanising (for lack of a better word) Cardassians.

It plays to the strengths of the show at this point in time: it's a small scale story completely focused on character. The various dialogues between Major Kira and her Cardassian prisoner are the high points in that they overshadow everything else. Fortunately, there's no B-story here in the background to take away from it. Nana Visitor pulls out a very strong and nuanced performance, but it's really guest star Harris Yulin as Marritza/Dar'heel who grabs your attention. He manages to give us something that we just can't take our eyes away from, and his voice is mesmerising. There are lines here which have been stuck rattling around in my head for 20 years.

Surprisingly, this is the first appearance of Gul Dukat since the pilot episode. I'd forgotten how little he appears early on. But his part in this is great as ever, and his reminiscence of playing games with Odo is quite fun.

The ending might be a bit groan-inducing but that somehow doesn't take away from it's power at all, and I particularly like the surprise on Kira's own face when she says, "no, it's not." An essential piece of viewing and a clear indication of how powerful this show is going to become..

[9.7/10] Justice is a slippery concept. Everyone has an intuitive idea of what it means. Something about fairness and folks getting what they deserve, good or bad. But the bigger the crime, the more people involved, the more victims created, the harder it becomes to figure out what a grand idea like “justice” means in that situation.

It’s a notion Jews have been wrestling with for a long time in the shadow of the Holocaust. “Duet” has particular resonance for me as a Jewish man, one who lost relatives to that atrocity. The episode reckons with how survivors of state-sanctioned, abominable actions feel, how we treat those who were complicit but not active perpetrators, and how those who weren’t directly harmed, but who nonetheless share their people’s righteous indignation, should respond to those who benefited from such suffering.

Those are still live issues now, with no shortage of horrid acts perpetrated across the globe, and were ever more salient then, when the direct analogues “Duet” is referencing were still fresh in the popular consciousness. The heart wrenching tale starts when Deep Space Nine receives a visitor with a rare disease, one suffered only by people at an infamous Cardassian “labor camp.” Kira goes to see this passerby, since the liberation of the camp and the suffering of its prisoners became a moral rallying point for the Bajoran resistance. But she’s aghast when she sees he’s a Cardassian, not a Bajoran, marking him as one of the operators of the camp, not one of its victims.

With that setup, you can basically divide “Duet” into three phases. The first is how do you treat a person who was a small cog in a terrible machine? The second is what do you do with a notorious war criminal? And the third is how do you respond to a former enemy trying desperately to atone?

There’s intrigue and depth in each of them. I’ll confess that I think phase one asks the most interesting question of the three. At first, it seems like Kira has merely tracked down one Aamin Marritza, a dedicated but unremarkable file clerk who worked at the notorious labor camp. His presence aboard the station, the Bajorans’ enthusiasm for extracting him and stringing him up, and Sisko’s insistence on getting to the bottom of the situation before proceeding all establish a thought-provoking dilemma.

It comes down to motivated reasoning. Kira wants vengeance and so do her people. The first section of the episode suggests that, despite her protests to the contrary, this leads her to see Marritza as more than he really is. There were undoubtedly horrors committed at the labor camp, but he seems unlikely to have committed any of them. Kira’s gut-level certainty that he did, that his lies about not having been there mean he’s deep in the shit, compromise the investigation and its ability to achieve justice.

So too does the sense that Kira, the Bajoran minister she alerts, and the station’s equivalent of a town drunk all just want an outlet for their (righteous) anger, someone to hold to account for such grievous crimes committed against their compatriots, whether this particular individual’s specific actions rise to the level of those crimes or not. The episode lays it on a little thick in places, but in short, Kira and her allies want vengeance more than they want justice, and they’ll take it from a file clerk even if they can’t take it from the true butchers they’re after.

And it’s complicated by the question of how much should we hold a complicit file clerk accountable for participating in such a craven venture? How do you punish someone who was a tiny but active part of a genocide? What do you do when someone committed no acts that we would traditionally think of as crimes, but whose work nonetheless supported something generationally awful? Taken in his initial guise, Marritza feels like he deserves to be held responsible to some degree, in some proportion, to what his duties contributed to, but parsing out the how and the what, in the face of a people hungry for moral recompense, while still being just, is nigh-impossible.

I get it. I get the urge to want to nail anyone you can because so many of those responsible slipped through the cracks or escaped being brought to justice through other means. I get the sense of a grievous, epochal wrong having been committed against you and your people, and wanting everyone tainted by participating in it to be given no quarter. Kira’s anger is resonant. Her willingness to elide the usual processes in the face of something so unique and freighted with communal loss is understandable. And the episode’s questions of whether that might also taint the sort of justice that can be achieved is just as palpable.

But the episode takes a turn when, thanks to some CSI-like questionable image enhancement, it’s revealed that the man in Odo’s cells is not, in fact, a humble file clerk, but rather Gul Darhe’el, the man in charge of Gallitep, the forced labor camp that was a site of torture, cruelty, and extermination.

Here is where the questions of how to process a minor figure in a major atrocity go out the window, and the question instead becomes how do you reckon with the chance to come face-to-face with a monster, to finally make someone reprehensible pay for their unfathomable crimes? Here is the science fiction of the capture of Adolf Eichman, one of the architects of the Holocaust, and Kira must reconcile herself to the man’s undaunted reveling in his “accomplishments.”

The twist might not work so well without the virtuoso performance by guest actor Harris Yulin. The sterling script, penned by key series writer Peter Allan Fields, puts a lot on Yulin’s shoulders. The Cardassian prisoner du jour not only has these long, Hannibal-esque monologues peppered into his taunting banter with Kira, but he has to believably capture and convey every different mode of this man. He must be a simple man caught up in something horrible, a gloating villain whose joy in his deeds is as chilling as it is plausible, and a man desperately seeking his own sort of justice.

He succeeds in all three. Part of what makes the central mystery of the episode work -- Who is this guy really? -- is how convincingly Yulin hits all of those marks. He sells each turn, each reveal, each moment when Marritza is supposed to be bragging whilst on top of the world despite his fate, and when his facade is slowly crumbling. The words he offers of his deeds, of how Gul Darhe’el viewed his life’s work, are frightening in how they align with the self-justifications of real life Nazis, and in how Yulin matches the words on the page with an intensity and maximalist delight that nonetheless comes across as distrubingly real.

Not for nothing, this is Nana Visitor’s best episode so far as well. She plays well with Yulin as a scene partner, and gives a layered performance as Kira confronting so many complicated issues from her past and her people’s unfortunate history. The way she is steadfast in her beliefs and in her anger, while also horrified and vulnerable at finally being able to deliver justice to her people while also forcing herself to verify this man’s abominable deeds, comes through with affecting clarity. The emotions, the questions, the mood of this whole episode is big and intense, but with performers like these, the moments never stop feeling grounded and poignant.

“Duet”, however, has one last trick up its sleeve. After a little more digging (and some cajoling of none other than his former employer, Gul Dukat), Odo uncovers that the man in the brig is not, in fact Gul Darhe’el, but rather actually is Marritza, who had cosmetic surgery to make himself look like the infamous butcher of Bajorans. What’s more, he wanted to get caught, wanted to turn himself over to Kira specifically, rather than getting trapped by chance.

It’s the only part of the story that strains credulity, just a little. Dramatic cosmetic surgery is nothing new in Star Trek. But his ability to pull this ploy off, his behavior in some of the earlier interactions, requires more than a few things to go just his way in order for this series of events to play out the way he wants them to. There’s a touch of noticeable contrivance here in the name of a good series of twists, and it’s worth noting, even if I’m apt to forgive it.

I’m willing to forgive it because apart from the logistics, these extraordinary actions feel right and true based on what we see and are told about Marritza. He is not merely some civil servant with the misfortune to risk being turned into a poster boy for genocide, nor the evil man who bears a substantial responsibility for the war crimes committed. He is a human being (so to speak) tortured by what he was complicit in, desperate for some measure of absolution and communal salvation, willing to go to incredible, arguably unhinged lengths to gain and grant it.

He breaks down and, in a roundabout way, admits that while he was, in fact, a file clerk, he was not one oblivious to the horrors that took place at Gallitep. He was someone who heard the screams of those abused and tortured, who covered his ears to try not to hear such terrible acts lest his mind be torn in twain. He is someone still haunted by what he saw and heard and did, or more accurately, didn’t do to stop any of it.

So he chose to act now. One of the hardest pills to swallow about the whole interlude is that while you (or at least, I) uncover a new sympathy for this man, it puts his past boasts in a different light. Maybe he was exaggerating a tad to goad the Bajorans into processing him for Gul Darhe’el’s crimes. But I read it as Marritza imitating the attitudes and comments of his superior officers, his parroting of their self-justiciations and philosophies so they can be inscribed in the record, rather than fabricating them. Marritza revealing his lie is, in a sideways fashion, an unfortunate method of confirming it’s all true.
Marritza isn’t here to dissemble. He isn’t even here to die. He’s here to atone, to pay back the Bajoran people in some small way, and to save his own people in another. He wants to cleanse his soul of those screams, use his complicitness for good, or at least, allow something good to come out of it. He wants to give the Bajorans the justice they deserve, if only symbolically, by throwing himself at their feet to be tied in the deceased Gul Darhe’el’s place. And he believes that only through this truth and accounting, can his people be likewise cleansed of the great sin his countrymen perpetuated, only then can they move forward as a people and not eternally carry the stain of Gallitep and similar travesties.

It’s a little insane, but my god, what a piercing, poetic gesture, delivered in the way only fiction can. Yulin again delivers the pathos of this wounded soul and his futile bid to salvage equitable recompense and karmic realignment from such an unlikely source. And the impact of it is not lost on Kira.

If she’d followed her instincts, if she’d allowed her justified anger to overtake her, she would have signed this file clerk’s death warrant, or championed him as the Butcher of Gallitep, and never known the truth. She would never have seen that for all the understandable but nevertheless kneejerk hatred she bears for the Cardassian, here is someone to make her rethink her perspective, to realize that they are no more a monolith than her people are. Hers is a chance to realize that some want to recognize the wounds caused in the war and try to heal them, to uncover true justice unclouded by the urge for base retribution.

And yet, it comes anyway. The bitter Bajoran drunk stabbing Marritza in the back is, in some ways, an easy out. It means Deep Space Nine never has to address how the Bajorans or the Cardassians or the Federation deal with the can of worms Marritza’s existence and scheme opens. But again, it has a poetry to it, an irony to it, where the death of a man whose end Kira once hungered for in the beginning of the episode, leads her not only to mourn him, but to recognize the brutal death he receives simply for being Cardassian as an injustice herself. There’s poingance in that as well, which covers up any convenience.

It makes for a powerful, jaw-dropping episodes from beginning to end, and a sign of the thorny moral questions of war and loss and civilization that DS9 would tackle with aplomb as the show matured and evolved. The meaning “Duet” extracts from each of those phases, the tour de force performances from Yulin and Visitor that power it, the intricate script from Fields that deftly wrestles with big issues that are nonetheless deftly captured in forty-four minutes, is all truly extraordinary.

It comes down to that tricky notion of justice, a concept that initially puts Kira and Marritza on opposite battle lines but ultimately unites them. I don’t have the moral authority to decide who deserves damnation and who deserves absolution in the wake of the Holocaust. Good men did terrible things; bad men did worse things, and even more stood by and did nothing. The ethical calculus of parsing out those actions and bringing them to account is beyond me, maybe beyond anyone.

But I also don’t believe in collective guilt. I don’t believe in holding a people responsible for the actions of their ancestors. And I believe in accepting those souls, be they individuals or governments, who seek to make restitution, make up somehow for the harms they’ve perpetuated. If you asked Kira about these ideas at the beginning of “Duet”, I don’t think she’d agree. But if you asked her in the wake of these events, she might sing a different tune, or at least think hard about them. When trying to discern what counts as justice in a fog of horrid acts and fallible human beings, that’s all we can ask.