Prodigal Daughter

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.

...says Ezri's (or should I say "Zee's") mom and roughly summarizes this episode. Ezri is just a boring teenage boy that stumbled into becoming a Trill host as well as into becoming Lt. JG without being qualified for any of them. Even Vic Fontaine, a hologram, is a better counselor than Ezri.

This episode has absolutely zero to do with space, sci-fi or adventure and exploration. It is a constructed family drama combined with an uninteresting murder mystery. And somehow O'Brien is involved as well, because he still feels that he owns mobster boss Bilby a favor for being a nice guy with a fluffy cat - when he wasn't busy killing, blackmailing or threatening any enemy of the Orion syndicate.

If you want to meet Ezri's forgettable brothers, especially Mr "I am a third grade wannabe artist and still live at home with mommy", then you might enjoy a few minutes of this episode. Orher than that such an episode in the last season is just a big waste of episode air time.

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.

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.