5x19 Ties of Blood and Water

[7.0/10] “Ties of Blood and Water” breaks all my rules for the types of Star Trek episodes, and television in general, that I really enjoy. I tend to prefer the more engrossing and emotional character stories over the world-shaking plot machinations. I tend to ask to get to see the big moments that move the characters and change their hearts rather than being told about them. And this episode turns all of that on its ear.

The core of this story focuses on Kira’s reaction to the death of two fathers: one, her biological dad, Taban, and the other, her surrogate father, Ghemor, the Cardassian who believed her to be his daughter back in season 3’s “Second Skin”, only to still show her a father’s kindness when he realized the whole thing was an Obsidian Order ruse. Ghemor dying from a terminal illness and wanting to share his secrets with Kira before he goes, a paternal Cardassian ritual, brings back memories of Kira’s Bajoran dad dying after a confrontation with the Cardassians.

Normally, it’s the kind of thing I’d love. Nerys having to reconcile her newly more complex views of the Cardassians with her lingering bitterness over how they treated her countrymen during the occupation? That’s catnip to me. Throw in the inevitable wounded humanity of processing the loss of one father and reprocessing the loss of another, and you have an episode, on paper, that is right up the alley of fans like me.

The problem is that I don’t really buy either key relationship. As with “The Darkness and the Light”, just a few episodes back, the writers do their best to make the character connections in the present more meaningful by using someone the audience already knows. Pulling Ghemor back from two seasons ago is a good call, because it means this episode doesn’t have to start from scratch.

The other side of the coin is that we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of him since then, nor even heard Kira mention him in the interim. So despite her warm reception for him when he arrives on the station, and the sound attempts to reestablish their bond by having him hold Kirayoshi and speak with a father’s love, it all comes off very sudden and unconvincing. The actors do good enough work together, but don’t quite have that shorthand or easy warmth that could sell the meaning in the relationship to both parties on an emotional level, despite the fact that we’ve barely seen them interact.

The same goes for the flashbacks to the death of Kira’s biological father, Taban. We haven't heard Kira mention him more than twice on the show, if I recall correctly, so it’s not like this is the long-awaited appearance of someone referenced lovingly but never seen until now. Thomas Kopache gives a vulnerable performance as Taban, and deserves credit for that, but both the writing and acting of he and Kira’s scenes together is overwrought, which diminishes the emotional impact of the grim farewell between father and daughter.

And while it’s far more superficial, putting Kira in a cheap wig and an outfit that looks like a leftover from Riker’s Irish main squeeze in “Up the Long Ladder” from TNG doesn’t help the audience buy the gravity of the moment. Everything about the presentation here, from the scripting, to the production work, to the emotional exposition, feel too blunt and signposted for the audience, to the point of losing the naturalism and ability to draw the viewer into the feeling of these crucial moments.

Despite that, the political tet-a-tet between Captain Sisko and Gul Dukat over whether to return Ghemor to Cardassia is the most engrossing thing “Ties of Blood and Water”. Dukat is such a compelling villain, especially when he thinks he’s cock of the walk again. Seeing he and Benjamin lob bombs both diplomatic and practical back and forth at one another is one of DS9’s consistent boons. And having Jeffrey Combs back as Weyoun (with the Vorta’s being revealed as clones for continuity), looking on the squabbles between them with detached bemusement is the icing on the cake.

It’s a reminder that the personal is also political in DS9. Kira is worried about her friend and digesting her emotions from her father’s killing. But in the midst of helping protect her, Sisko is trying to avoid greasing the Cardassian propaganda machine, fending off murder plots and other intimidation. And for his part, however untrustworthy he may be, Dukat knows how to give his political aims juice with the personal, enticing Ghemor with the prospect of reuniting him with his daughter, and trying to drive a wedge between him and Kira over Ghemor’s actions during the occupation. Seeing he and Sisko work their magic in opposition to one another, while Weyoung basically sits on the sidelines as a bon vivant Greek chorus, is the most consistently good part of the episode.

Despite Sisko’s efforts and Kira’s fury, Dukat’s methods work, after a fashion, or so it seems. There’s power in the idea that Kira would turn her back on Ghemor because he participated in a grim chapter of the occupation, even if their connection isn’t as well-forged or convincing as I might like. And I like that it’s Odo who recognizes there’s something else bothering Kira, that she’s using this as an excuse, subtly revealing the perceptiveness between them.

But that’s about all that’s subtle about this. Again, so much here is overblown and overdone: Kira’s coldness despite cajoling from Dr. Bashir in the present, her bolting to fight the Cardassians and urge for vengeance for her father’s death in the past, they all come with on-the-nose dialogue and performances that feel like too much. Hell, I think we even get some friggin’ Chakotay-style pan flute in the score, which is omnipresent to the point of being oppressive through most of this.

And yet, in the episode’s final act, the score drops off. The up-to-eleven flashbacks drop off. The overwritten exchanges drop off. Instead, there’s just Nana Visitor, a monologue, and a shattered human soul, trying to make sense of inevitable but unbearable loss.

Kira’s speech in the infirmary is one of those things I tend to hate -- a writerly monologue that lays out the emotional takeaways for the audience rather than letting us reach it on our own. But whether it’s the sparseness of it, or Visitor’s superlative performance, or the universal nature of our pull to both experience and protect ourselves from the end of our loved ones lives, the results are moving and, not for nothing, the most superlative thing in the episode.

Kira laments not being there to see her father die. She laments the hardship of being there with Ghemor while he slipped away. One doesn’t fix the other. Both come with mixed emotions. In an episode full of relationships that lack the force they should, one monologue about what both losses meant to Kira, and the mark they’ve left on her, are somehow enough to bring all the intended poignancy into focus. The simple images, of Kira draped across Ghemor’s death bed, and her burying him next to her flesh and blood father, do more to deliver the meaning of that moment than all the melodrama that precedes them.

Maybe I’m a sucker or a sap. Maybe the monologue is no better than anything else here. Two years ago, almost to the day, I sat at the bedside of a father figure of my own, and I held his hand while he left this world. Kira’s words eerily mirror my own experience. Maybe it has a special resonance for me that it wouldn’t for others that helps lift this one up.

But it’s still a nice reminder that DS9 can surprise me. It can pull my heartstrings by telling, rather than showing. It can make up for a disappointing emotional story with a crackling political story. And it can try my patience for forty minutes, and then blow me away in the last five.