In the eighteenth episode of the second season of Deep Space Nine, Sisko must decide whether or not to help one of Quark’s old lovers, who are on the run from the Cardassians. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
Trigger Warning: For discussion of misogyny, stalking.
Oh, this is such a good episode, but it’s got one of the most unbelievable and insulting plot twists I’ve ever seen. I want to love it! I want to shout and yell and dance because GARAK CONTINUES TO BE SO ENTERTAINING AND FASCINATING and when is he just gonna kiss Julian Bashir. Julian’s right there, just waiting for it. Once again, we get another episode that further builds the world of the Cardassians, and it’s completely engaging. Political dissent! Spies! A tense cat-and-mouse game between Sisko and the Cardassians! YES YES YES YES YES.
And then the episode utterly fails Natima, and it’s so disappointing. It’s always weird to get to an experience like this in a book or a show or a movie because the badness of one part of the story is always exaggerated when it’s surrounded by goodness, you know? It feels that much more glaring. Yet I want to talk about this because I think it’s a great example of terrible writing for one character amidst fantastic writing. Often, we each experience the challenge of dealing with shows we love and enjoy doing things that are… I don’t know. Awful? Confusing? Bewildering? I’d like to think that the entire Mark Does Stuff universe exists to CONTINUALLY PRESENT EXAMPLES OF THIS. Even for shows I would commit felonies for – I LOVE YOU, VERONICA MARS AND THE X-FILES – I can see faults. I can find cracks in the facade. Some of them are more obvious than others, but we all create fiction within the context of the world we live in.
You can still see that in “Profit and Loss” in a positive way, too! This is not just a negative component of the Star Trek universe. Much of what Roddenberry did was a response to the real world, and both shows that followed The Original Series were reactionary in incredibly thrilling ways. The writing staff for Deep Space Nine did not invent the concept of political refugees, and there are countless real-life analogies that can be made to what we witness here. Thus, the political nightmare that Sisko, Quark, and the rest of the crew deals with can resonate with us because we recognize its connection to the greater world. For some people, it is a very real story. It carries weight.
Unfortunately, that means some tropes or story elements carry a weight, too. For the first half of this episode, I recognized that Quark was, in every sense, a stalker. I have had more stalkers than I would care to recount; in fact, for a long period in my 20s, I was literally known in my friend group as the guy who would attract stalkers on a bi-annual basis. Part of that is due to my inability to just turn people away and cut them out of my life, which isn’t to say that I deserved to be stalked. I am just able to recognize in hindsight that I had a hard time saying “No” when I needed to. But I knew far too many people – most of whom I hadn’t even had a romantic relationship with – who behaved as Quark does here. They followed me around. They ignored me when I did tell them no, or expressed disinterest, or when I rejected them. They viewed my rejections as challenges: if they were more persistent, more charming, and more present, then eventually, I’d say yes, right?
This trope appears in fiction in practically every medium, and frequently, the behavior is rewarding. The person who is pursued is worn down, says yes, and nothing within the narrative tells us, “HEY. DON’T DO THIS. KNOCK IT OFF.” And that’s exactly what I saw here. Quark’s pursuit of Natima is relentless, rude, condescending, and horrifying. There is no way that Natima could have made it clearer that she had no interest in Quark, that she just wanted to get off DS9, and that nothing Quark could do would repair their relationship. He violated her trust, and he just assumes that showering her with unwanted attention will fix that. So what does the show do?
Natima is goaded into a terrible situation because Quark leverages her students’ safety for her. It’s appalling and gross and honestly one of the more despicable things I’ve seen from a character on this show. It gets so bad that Natima shoots Quark with her phaser because he wants her to stay behind with him, despite that this is a HUGE RISK TO HER PERSONAL SAFETY. She shoots him and then immediately professes her love for him with no reluctance or second thoughts.
Y’all, it makes no sense at all. I’m not saying she can’t want to be in a relationship with him again. But her switch from disinterested and angry to loving and obsessive is so tonally jarring that I honestly thought she was faking it in order to obtain the cloaking device and escape. That would have made sense. Where did all her anger go? What about her concerns for Quark’s inability to be honest and fair with her? How do you take all that history and character development and chuck it out the window so quickly? It honestly feels like there are two characters here: the Natima in the first half, and the Natima in the second. It’s like two different writers wrote half the script, and then just shoved it together.
It’s especially frustrating because this same script features a massive plot twist at the end that MAKES THIS CONCEPT WORK. Throughout “Profit and Loss,” it seemed super obvious that Garak was a spy interested in protecting the Cardassian state. Technically, that’s still true, but now I understand why Garak had that conversation with Julian at the start of the show. Garak does work with the best interests of Cardassia at heart, but the means to achieve that? The kind of state he desires? That’s what is complicated here. He kills Gul Toran because HE BELIEVES IN WHAT NATIMA AND HOGUE AND REKELEN ARE DOING. Unlike Natima’s change of heart, his is realistic. It changes our perception of Garak, but it doesn’t fundamentally change him as a character. Natima? Not so much, and that’s mainly why I was so bothered by her transformation.
The video for “Profit and Loss” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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