6x25 The Sound of Her Voice

[5.8/10] I can’t say it’s impossible to craft a character who becomes vitally important to your main players in forty-four minutes. It is, after all, the lifeblood of Star Trek. Some guest character arrives, forges connections with our heroes, only to inevitably have to depart for some reason, imparting some key meaning or lesson before they do. It’s hard to imagine the franchise without that particular story shape.

But it’s also hard! Characters need time to develop, to form connections, to see their relationships evolve. That takes time, and even in the more serialized later seasons of Deep Space Nine, time is a luxury that isn’t always available.

So I admire all-star writer Ronald D. Moore swinging for the fences with “The Sound of Her Voice”, an episode about Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien each forging a deep, personal connection with Lisa Cusak, a Starfleet captain stranded on a faraway planet whom the Defiant crew must race against time to rescue. The wrinkle is that they bond with Captain Cusak entirely “over the phone”, without being able to see or interact with her otherwise.

It’s a cool concept. Particularly in an age where many people have strong friendships with individuals they mainly (or exclusively) know online, there’s something prescient about trying to depict those types of connections forming without people being able to meet face to face. The choice never to show Cusak conversing on screen necessarily brings the writing to the fore and puts the audience and the regular characters behind the same veil with respect to Lisa. This is a challenge, and a unique high-concept sort of story, both the sorts of things I like to see this series tackle.

The problem is that the conversations we here are never convincing enough to make up for the fact that, between a B-story and final act with a race-to-the-finish and a series of eulogies, we only get maybe half an episode’s worth of back-and-forths between Captain Cusak and our heroes. The dialogue would have to be downright extraordinary to make up for that fact, and it gives me no pleasure to say that it’s middling at best.

Lisa talks to Sisko about his relationship with Kassidy Yates. She talks to Bashir about his haughtiness and ignoring others when consumed with his work. She talks to O’Brien about his sense of distance from his friends due to the constant precariousness of war.

These are all worthy topics! Benjamin’s relationship with Kassidy has, frankly, been underserved since they got back together, so examining what it means to him could be really rewarding. How Julian relates to his colleagues now that his out as a genetically enhanced augment has likewise received scant exploration outside of a couple of episodes, so it’s nice to see that brought to the fore as well. And working through what a return to war means to a veteran like O’Brien could be poignant and revealing.

What all these topics have in common, however, is that they have too much depth to try to explore in seven minutes or so a piece.

Even then, the rush job might work if it felt like Captain Cusak had some unique insight or real rapport with this trio of officers. Instead, she mostly offers trite truisms and banal cliches. Some of her answers were so stock, so hollow, that I thought she might have just been manipulating Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien with empty bromides that told them what they wanted to hear.

You knew there was going to be some twist when they found her, and I was 50/50 on whether it would turn out that she was dead by the time they could reach her (tragic!) or that she would turn out to be a Founder who staged this whole thing to manipulate/capture the Defiant crew (devious!). I suppose they already pulled off the latter trick with Odo and “Kira” in the cave, but the fact that these supposed deep conversations that result in fast-forming bonds could plausibly double as a secret agent deceiving our heroes with cheap platitudes doesn’t speak well of the conversations.

Speaking of cliches, the B-story sees Quark wrapped up in a hacky, sitcom-level plot involving Odo. The Constable is still persnickety with his enforcement of Quark’s minor infractions, so the resident bartender hatches a plan to distract Odo with considerations of his one month anniversary with Kira in order to be able to conduct his “business” undisturbed.

It is the most tepid comic setup, with Quark’s protestations about Odo needing to recognize the milestone, and the inevitable conflict when Odo moves his date night to a different day than the one Quark was planning to make his criminal exchange, both coming off broad and hackneyed. Jake is a useless appendage in the story, becoming little more than a prop for Quark to deliver exposition to. This could have been a real waste in an episode already pressed for time.

But somehow, against all odds, its ending becomes the best thing in the whole episode. Quark’s lament that he supported Odo through his rough patch when pining for Kira, and still gets the business from the local security chief, is sympathetic. Quark really was there for Odo during the worst of things with Kira, and he’s not wrong to resent the way he’s treated like a criminal rather than an ally.

And the fact that Odo surreptitiously hears Quark’s complaints while hiding in preparation to bust him, and takes it to heart, is even better. The script signposts his thought process a bit too much, but it’s still downright sweet that Odo chooses to reschedule his date to not only keep Quark away from his own prying eyes, but give the Ferengi the sense of having finally gotten one over on the Changeling. My read on the pair is that Odo and Quark are, unbeknownst to themselves, the best of friends, and Odo making an active choice to support his friend, against his duties and his most deeply held law and order principles, reveals the depth of their friendship in a touching way.

If only the A-story ended up that touching! They try. Moore and company have the good sense to at least feature Benjamin, Julian, and Miles having vulnerable, personal conversations with Cusak, to communicate that the three of them have let their guard down. The actual dialogue isn’t great, and sometimes they even seem out of character, but the intentions are good.

I’m particularly a fan of her conversation with Chief O’Brien. His confession about thinking war wouldn’t be so bad this time, only to still feel the precariousness of his situation, in a way that leads him to isolate from those closest to him, is heartbreaking. I don’t love his discussion of not wanting to talk to ship’s counselors and thinking you should be able to just talk to friends, but it (a.) reflects real life feelings from folks like Miles, so his sentiments have the ring of truth and (b.) Cusak validates his feelings but wraps him back around to counselors being his best option if he’s going to close himself off for others.

And I’ll say this much -- if there’s one thing that almost makes this all-but-doomed endeavor work, it’s the vocal performance from guest star Debra Wilson as Captain Cusak. She knows how to bring the character to life through performance alone -- teasing Julian, nudging Miles, relating to Sisko -- in a way that helps balance out the inevitable shorthand that comes from trying to tell such an expansive character story in such a compressed time frame.

The twist is that when they actually find her, she’s already been dead for three years, and their conversation was only able to happen due to some time dilation from the latest funky energy field. The reveal is pretty weak. There’s only a slight difference between her dying from regular old hypoxia in real time, so it feels like a pointless attempt to add a sci-fi element that doesn’t strongly affect the thrust of the story. In theory, there’s some poetry in the fact that not only was the Defiant too late, but it was always destined to be too late, which doesn’t diminish Lisa’s connection with the crew. But it’s pretty thin gruel.

Still, it’s better than the elaborate toasts the main trio of people she spoke with gives at their post facto funeral for her. Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien all give loving tributes to Cusak, that fail on two fronts. For one, the speeches are on-the-nose with the character-specific epiphanies and takeaways to the point of artlessness, which saps them of their emotional power. For another, the fleeting interactions the audience has seen don’t support the glowing, loving terms in which the three men eulogize their fallen comrade. Try as it might, “The Sound of Her Voice” simply doesn’t earn that.

It’s a hard thing to earn in less than an hour! Building a single deep bond among a pair of characters in the usual Star Trek runtime is a challenge. Building three in the same stretch is a herculean task, if not something outright impossible. The notion of a stranger who becomes a close confidante through conversation alone is a compelling one, but despite a noble attempt, “The Sound of Her Voice” ultimately falls on deaf ears.