Ties of Blood and Water #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 19) Kira re-evaluates a Cardassian father figure

Rewatching ST:DS9

Kira is excited to welcome Tekeny Ghemor, the sympathetic Cardassian who was tricked into believing a surgically-altered Kira was his daughter (s3e5 “Second Skin”). Now that Dukat and the Dominion have displaced the legitimate government on Cardassia, Kira has high hopes that Ghemor will inspire a resistance, but before the opening credits roll, Ghemor informs her that he is dying.

Bashir confirms that the guest star’s Plot Contrivance Syndrome is advanced, so we know where this story is going.

Dukat makes a videocall, oligenously “requesting” the extradition of Ghemor.

Ghemor, holding the baby that Kira carried to term for the O’Briens, is far more interested in Kira’s personal life than in her plans for having him lead a dissident movement on Cardassia. He has no family left, and wants KIra to stand in for his daughter as he passes along family secrets as part of a death ritual.

We see a brief memory of Kira’s time with her resistance cell (again with the caves), as she recognizes a badly injured man as her father.

In the main timeline, a Jem’Hadar battleship shows up, with Dukat and a clone of Weyoun (the faux-sincere diplomat whose clones will keep turning up through the rest of the series). He tells Ghemor that his daughter is alive, and although Ghemor is moved, he doesn’t take the bait.

Kira continues to record Ghemor’s secrets, in a montage that emphasizes not the secrets themselves but the emotional toll the ritual is taking on Kira.

The plot requires the overworked, anti-social Kira to stop by Quarks so that Dukat can hand her a PADD containing Ghemor’s official military record.

Ghemor doesn’t deny he partiipated in a raid on a monastery, just as Kira doesn’t deny that the monastery was hiding weapons. He reminds her it was war, and admits “You weren’t the monsters, we were,” but Kira is not interested in his contrition.

Odo wisely observes that if Ghemor’s war reord were really important to Kira, she would have looked it up long ago.

A continuation of the flashback shows us what’s already pretty obvious: Kira feels guilty because when her gentle, rational father was severely injured in a Cardassian attack, she was more interested in payback than in staying with her dying father.

This episode does a good job establishing how far Kira has come, and the Dukat/Weyoun scenes offer some satisfying world-building (something that was still experimental in the episodic TV landscape of the 1990s). The episode never quite rises to the heights of s1e18 “Duet.” Usually I find that DS9 treats its audience as intelligent, but I don’t think the denouement was served by Kira’s monologue to Bashir about what she learned. The flashbacks had already established the emotional context, so we really didn’t need Kira say things like “He reminded me so much of my father” or “I owed it to my father to get it right this time.”

TV is a visual medium, so even though actor Nana Visitor did a great job with Kira’s monologue, structurally the speeches that TELL add nothing that we can’t get from what the dramatic final scene SHOWS — that Kira has buried Ghemor next to her father.