Mark Watches ‘Deep Space Nine’: S04E24 – The Quickening

In the twenty-fourth episode of the fourth season of Deep Space Nine, Jadzia and Julian clash over whether or not to help a doomed society. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek. 

Trigger Warning: For discussion of genocide, chronic illness, assisted suicide/euthanasia. 

Well, damn, the Jem’Hadar are so awful. Coming off the last episode, it’s not hard to want them to get their comeuppance, despite that “To the Death” complicated them a bit more. But holy shit, what they did to the people on this planet is horrendous. It really is an act of genocide, since their sole goal is to doom this society to a fatal, non-curable disease that’s passed on to anyone who dares procreate. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that this society lost a significant number of their population over the last 200 years either, even though that’s not really stated outright.

So why do anything? That’s the central question in “The Quickening,” and it’s a great chance to explore Dr. Bashir’s dedication to medicine, even when it doesn’t result in a positive resolution. The writers create a foil in Trevean, the only thing that’s close enough to a “doctor” in this place, and he never even bothers to heal anyone or even make an attempt to find one. Instead, he treats the Quickening – the moment when the lesions on these people turn red and death soon follows – as a chance to give these people a quick death. It’s the only dignity that he can offer them.

But this story doesn’t really focus on that. I thought it was going to be an episode about assisted suicide, but it ends up following Julian Bashir and how the man deals with futility. His medical expertise might be well-suited for the task, but that doesn’t prepare a person for repeated failures. Julian’s resilient, of course, but what if that resilience doesn’t actually solve anything? What if the people he wants to treat have no desire to be treated? For what it’s worth, the script does a fine job of showing us why these people are so reluctant to trust anyone who promises to help them. Over the last couple centuries, plenty of people have tried to exploit their suffering. Trevean names a few of those examples, and I don’t blame anyone for thinking that Julian and Jadzia are just here to make money or gain something from trying to “help.”

Yet even when Julian overcomes this obstacle, he’s hit with a tragic complication: the very equipment he’s using to cure these people is killing them. And what do you do then? How can you keep trying to help people if the tools you normally trust aren’t working anymore? I enjoyed the idea of this conflict, but “The Quickening” felt like it fizzled out by the end. These are big questions for the show to ask, but the end result is shockingly bleak, despite that Julian discovers a “vaccine” for the Quickening. The current generation of people – including the children who are currently living – will all die, but any people inoculated with Julian’s vaccine can have children who will not carry the virus. Yes, I suppose that’s hopeful, but Ekoria’s death makes the whole thing bittersweet and cruel. Her child will grow up without parents. And how many other children will have a similar upbringing?

I suppose the whole purpose of this episode is to leave things in an unsatisfying place. Julian never finds a cure, despite working on it when he returns to  DS9, and his only consolation comes from the idea that there might be a generation who’ll survive the Quickening. But there’s no mention of the Jem’Hadar returning and discovering that there are now children without the disease, nor is there any true closure. I feel weird asking for it because that’s a major reason why I love Deep Space Nine. This show is constantly willing to twist my expectations and to tell the best story possible, even if it leaves me hanging. But “The Quickening” is an uneven narrative because of the way the tension lurches forward, settles down, and then fades away, even in terms of the character study of Julian. It’s not a terrible episode by any means, and I’m thankful to get another piece of the Jem’Hadar/Dominion puzzle.

The video for “The Quickening” can be downloaded here for $0.99.

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