The Abandoned

Quick Review:

Story line #1 - Quark pays an interesting looking alien lady 3 bars of pressed latinum for the wreckage of a ship she found in the Gamma Quadrant. He normally looks through stuff before buying it but because she licks his ear, he buys it sight unseen. Inside the wreckage - a Jem'Hadar baby!

The baby, a boy, grows up faster than anything does normally.

Odo convinces Sisko to let him mentor the Jem'Hadar guy. The guy is pre-programmed to be addicted to a substance and pre-programmed to want to fight and kill and hate everyone but the Founder-guy Odo - whom he respects in a worshipful way - at least at first.

Story line #2 - Sisko invites Jake's 20-year-old Dabo girlfriend, Mardah, over for dinner. Jake is 16. She is a very well endowed (ahem) and mature - like all the Dabo girls who work for Quark.

Sisko wants them broken up.

It's too bad she is only in this episode - she is a compelling character. I'm not sure why the writers decided against having Mardah be a semi-regular.

Also: Odo announces to Kira (who brought him a housewarming gift for his new quarters) he doesn't need his bucket to regenerate any longer. Since hanging out with his own kind he just returns to his gelatinous self and lays around his quarters. To hear him describe it to Kira is hilarious. Kira's giddiness while being with Odo is so over the top it is disconcerting.

Odo's make-up is weirdly different in this episode. Maybe in relation to him returning from the Founders???

Avery Brooks apparently said the story of the Jem'Hadar boy is a metaphor for young men of color growing up in the inner cities of America. Addicted, hateful and purposeless in a society they don't feel a part of. As you watch this episode ask yourself if Brooks is right.

A young Jem'Hadar finds himself on DS9 and Odo tries to civilise him.

This is a solid episode that explores the mentality of Jem'Hadar and has some good character moments.

The plot is DS9's answer to 'I Borg' but with a quite different twist in its tale. I think the story is good, and reading that Avery Brooks' wanted to capture the mentality of youth gang culture with this episode, it works well for that theme.

Rene Auberjonois is on great form and his performance is one of the strongest aspects of it, along with how it firmly establishes the Jem'Hadar as a credible threat.

There is a subplot involving Jake and Dabo girlfriend that has some quite good banter that works for developing his character. I also like the scene with Chief O'Brien that relates to this.

For me it's a 7.5/10 but I round upwards.

Jake is dating a 20 year-old Dabo girl with extremely large...well, you can guess. Naturally, his father is not thrilled by this but instead of telling Jake no, he invites the lady for dinner.

The main plot, however, is a lot less mundane and creepy. A baby is discovered among the wreckage of a ship that Quark has bought. The child grows VERY quickly...and soon he grows into a Jem'Hadar killing machine. Not surprisingly, the crew isn't thrilled but Odo decides to take the young killing machine under his wing. But try as he might to learn about the deeper person buried within, this Jem'Hadar seems even more one dimensional than Nancy Grace. With this unnamed Jem'Hadar, it's kill, kill, kill. In fact, he makes the Klingons seem like deep thinkers and pacifists! What's next?

While the episode is mildly interesting, there's really not much more to it than this.

Quark purchases a destroyed ship for a pittance. Unfortunately, on board, in a kind stasis pod, is a baby. When brought on board, it grows at an alarming rate. It turns out it is a biologically developed Jem'Hadar, a killing machine. Odo, knowing what it is like to be an outcast, does what he can to teach the young monster. Unfortunately, he has been programmed to do what he wants. We are getting more and more examples of what these awful beings are like, that they can genetically produce their own kind with predisposed abilities.