Prodigal Daughter

Miles O'Brien has taken it up himself to find the widow of the syndicate guy he got killed in a previous episode. When he finally locates her, she is floating in a river. Sisko, who is furious that Miles is off on his own, sends Ezri Dax to get her mother to use her pull to find Miles. Finding him is not difficult, but we are let in on a sort of Dynasty family with a mother who has pretty much messed up her sons. Ezri escaped long ago, but the boys are stuck running her empire. The problem is the empire is under the thumb of the syndicate and the boys are trapped. One, played by Kevin Rahm, now of Madame Secretary, is an artist who has absolutely no self image. The mother uses her power with little regard for their humanity. Miles senses what is going on and the results are very harsh.

Ezri is sent on a mission home to find the missing Chief O'Brien.

I think it is harsh to describe it a bad or uneventful episode as it includes plenty of drama and criminal activities, but for me the storytelling is unremarkable.

The set up feels like a reasonably exciting mission for Ezri, but the writers deliver mostly family melodrama. This is fine, as there are some strong interactions between various central characters. All the scenes involving Leigh Taylor-Young as the matriarch are my favourite as she brings a necessary edge to the dialogue. Some of the dynamics are very recognisable, such as the domineering parent and contrasting attitudes of the siblings.

When the A and B plots (naturally) link in the latter part of the episode, it is the right direction for the story to go, but the predictability (including to certain lines of dialogue) is distracting. Plus the key scene involves a character simply telling you what happened, which is usually an anticlimax on screen.

TV shows have a rule, and that rule is to consistently deliver on their premise. It might sound a little restrictive, but this episode shows why you don't break it. A bad dysfunctional family drama, with fake psychological problems our hero does a bad job solving, then meets a murder mystery that isn't interesting.

Star Trek is about adventures in space. Maybe you get stuck on a desert planet and have to figure out a problem, but that's the overall premise. You leave that, and you get this, and this was poor.

David Weddle & Bradley Thompson have written a multi-arc story that give Colm Meaney & Nicole de Boer a chance to express their characters. I think the other reviewers underestimate how family dynamics can be destructive. My feelings are that Science Fiction is only interesting when it involves personal stories.

Nicole de Boer did a Outer Limits episode, 'Quality of Mercy', with Robert Patrick that is a tour de force of wrenching personal story at the level of William Shatner's airplane monster episode. An actor takes a risk when being involved in an uncomfortable episode because it may seem 'ugly'. I think it is episodes like this that make the Star Trek universe interesting.

This was awful. A Murder She Wrote episode based on the family of a character no one asked for. The entire episode made me miss Jadzia even more. Ezri is so unlikeable. The only high point of the episode is who turns out to be the murderer.