A Simple Investigation #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 17) Odo falls for a femme fatale

Rewatching ST:DS9

A duo of knobby-faced macguffin-hunters, bantering like the crooks from Home Alone, rough up a bumpy-foreheaded alien, then vaporize him.

In Quark’s, Bashir is happily casting his friends Dax and O’Brien in his next unnamed-for-copyright-reasons British superspy holodeck adventure, Operation Nudge-Wink. Odo declines, looking uncomfortable.

I had never seen this episode before. What with bantering goons, an emotionally distant detective, and a femme fatale with lines like “Where have you been all my life?” it’s tropes all the way down.

Consider this exchange:

Arissa: I didn’t realize I tripped an alarm.
Odo: You didn’t…. You’re good.
Arissa: I still got caught.
Odo: I’ve been following you.
Arissa: I didn’t know.
Odo: I’m good, too. So, did you find anything in Tauvid’s locker?
Arissa: Would you believe me if I said no?
Odo: Actually, I’d have you strip-searched.
Arissa: That might be fun, but in the interest of saving time… [produces macguffin]

Because the script calls for it, as Arissa keeps changing her story, Odo falls hard and harder for her. After some encouragement from Bashir, Odo takes the risk. And there is smooching, a fade-out, and a morning-after scene. Odo is so private, I felt like I was intruding. 

Just in time to torque the stakes, another alien who looks like the victim from the teaser shows up with some macguffin-related backstory plot ligature. There’s a clandestine meeting, a doublecross, a rescue, a revelation, and a “Will I ever see you again?”

I recently read Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, so I appreciated the genre silliness, but this episode earns a facepalm for doing an episode about Odo’s first fleshly entanglement after he is no longer trapped in a solid body (a sentence his people passed on him in s4e26 “Broken Link“). 

Yeah, it was well done and all… but what were they thinking?