It took the best part of a season, but Deep Space 9 now officially has an episode to rival the best of Next Generation.
The greatest strength of this episode is that it draws almost solely on the setting on Bajor, and outside of that is barely science fiction. It’s a bold, courageous approach to take, and could very easily have worked out very badly. It succeeds brilliantly, mainly thanks to the performances of Nana Visitor as Kira and Harris Yulin as Marritza.
Another important reason why the episode works so well is that the plot manages to avoid a lot of the cliches or recurrent plots around the ideas of captured war criminals – there’s a genuinely new approach here, and it makes for excellent viewing.
277 down, 460 to go.