2x12 The Alternate

[8.5/10] Dr. Mora may be my favorite guest character on Deep Space Nine for one simple reason -- he occupies a remarkable gray area. He is Odo’s captor, his experimenter, the disapproving elder who scolds him and considers him ungrateful. But he also has a genuine, fatherly love for Odo, a pride in his accomplishment, a desire to still be in his life. There’s nothing easy about Dr. Mora. He is both reprehensible and understandable, and that’s the space in which great characters are made.

It also makes him the perfect stand-in for complicated parental relationships writ large. Odo’s feelings about his surrogate dad are messy, full of both the bitter resentments and the undeniable attachments that come from a difficult childhood. The backstory here, which Odo explained to Lwaxana Troi in “The Forsaken”, is fantastical -- an unknown sentient lifeform “raised” by an inquisitive scientist. But the contours of it, a child brought up by a parent who didn’t fully understand or appreciate them, who wanted them to fit into certain boxes and remain under their control “for their own safety”, are relatable in ways that stretch beyond the sci-fi setup.

It also gives us a deeper look into Odo’s psyche and his continued hang-ups over his upbringing. The Constable is a famously guarded person, something “The Alternate” plays on. But he has his vulnerabilities, and the trauma he experienced as a living party trick, confined to a lab by a caretaker who didn’t think he was ready to be independent, is certainly one of them. It’s striking how the typically unflappable Chief Security Officer is suddenly so ruffled and even flummoxed in the presence of someone who’s seen him at his most vulnerable, and who brings a lifetime of anxieties flooding back.

That emotional unraveling connects to the plot machinery of the episode. A visit to a Gamma Quadrant planet with peculiar readings hints that Dr. Mora may be able to find more beings like Odo. When they find a metamorphic lifeform (albeit one not exactly like Odo) and bring it back to the station, mysterious attacks start happening. It’s especially tricky when all the scientists who went on the expedition and have respiratory systems (read: not Odo) are temporarily incapacitated by volanic gas that spurted out when they tried to remove an artifact. Now it’s up to Odo and company to figure out what’s happening and how to stop it.

In truth, the plot point writing isn’t nearly as good as the character writing in this one. For one thing, the crewmen and scientists all seem like dopes. I’m willing to make some allowances for shorthand, but it seems bonkers archeologically that Starfleet officers would just beam an obelisk off the spot where they found it after looking at it for ten seconds. The mystery of what is attacking the station and why is muddled quickly. And the solution, to trap the “antagonist” via forcefield and then magically remove the volcanic gasses which spurred him, seems awfully convenient.

And yet, even if the mechanics of the main plot don’t really work for me, the character dynamics which support it certainly do. This is basically a werewolf story, or a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sort of tale. The attacker, of course, is Odo, who seemed unaffected by the gasses on the planet, but which turned him into an aggressive manifestation of unresolved anger while he slept, leaving him with no memory of the incidents he caused.

Those incidents have a pattern though. He frees the metamorphic lifeform that’s otherwise trapped in a scientific containment field. He slips into the infirmary while Dr. Mora is still incapacitated, and only Dr. Bashir’s laser scalpel stops him from causing harm. Dr. Mora himself is the bait that lures Odo, in his atavistic form, into the trap. Whether you want to attribute it to volcanic gasses (an easy way to make this a one-episode problem) or a reflection of Odo’s subconscious, or both, this figure is righting the wrongs done to Odo himself. He frees another changeling-like creature kept in a lab and goes after the man who had him kept in much the same way.

This is where I tell you I’m lucky. My childhood had its difficulties, but I always knew my parents loved me. I always knew they were trying their best. Too many children aren’t nearly as lucky. I have seen, in friends and confidantes, the sort of trauma that fuels Odo here. Thankfully, none of them were trapped as he was, but there’s a similar, palpable sense of wanting to stop any further wrongs from repeating themselves and to force faltering and sometimes abusive parents to reckon with their misdeeds.

I’m not qualified to say whether Dr. Mora’s treatment of Odo qualifies as abuse, or whether that was the intention of the writers. But Odo’s reaction, his hesitation and unease around Dr. Mora, speaks to how many people in the real world respond when forced to be in the presence of people who cause them that sort of harm. Dr. Mora rarely seems malevolent here. He cuts the image of a normal, respected professional (and one who fits Odo’s description of the man he tried to imitate with his visage, a nice touch in terms of aesthetics). That, however, just makes the distance between how Odo sees him and the rest of the world seems to so notable.

Their interactions are fascinating, to use a favorite Star Trek buzzword. At times, Dr. Mora talks to and about Odo with genuine pride, impressed at what his erstwhile son has accomplished beyond his expectation, taken with how he’s been able to integrate socially and apply the scientific method to police work. At others, he’s patronizing, reacting to Odo’s achievements not as a fellow soul achieving their potential, but like a dog who can play the piano.

He speaks fondly and jokingly about events that are still tender for Odo. He chides and corrects his erstwhile offspring, in a way that’s recognizable in many parent-child relationships. There’s an unspoken sense in which what Odo’s accomplished isn’t plain “good” in Dr. Mora’s eyes, but merely “good for a being who started in such a stunted place.”

He’s still underestimating Odo, still limiting him, if only in his mind, now that he no longer has power over our favorite changeling.

It leads to the most powerful scene in the episode. Dr. Mora confronts Odo about the fact that the Constable is, unwittingly, investigating crimes that he himself committed. He implores Odo to return with him to the Bajoran Science Center, a location and a condition Odo would never submit to willingly given the psychological scars he still bears from his scars there. He gaslights Odo, manipulates him, tells him that none of his new friends will understand this and that Dr. Mora’s the only person he can depend on, a form of emotional abuse. He blasts Odo as ungrateful, implicitly denying the hardships Odo clearly experienced there and was desperate to escape from, declaring that he “gave his life” to Odo, centering himself in all of this.

These are not the words of a loving father. They’re more in the vein of the emotional bombs dropped by the likes of Livia Soprano. And the effect of Odo is destabilizing, literally and physically. His flustered demeanor and an extraordinary performance from the always excellent Rene Auberjonois sell how much Dr. Mora’s tirade is bringing Odo’s deepest fears to the surface, how it’s opening old wounds and bringing him back to a place he thought he’d escaped. The outstanding makeup work from Michael Westmore’s team sells the disturbing physical effect such psychological barbs impose on the changeling.

So then the endgame happens. Odo turns into his shapeshifter equivalent of a werewolf. Dr. Mora shares his theory with Starfleet who comes up with a plan to trap Odo. Sisko orders them to kill him if necessary. (Sidenote: it feels pretty extreme and arguably out of character for Sisko, and I’d expect Kira to put up much more resistance than she does, but I guess neither of them is the focus of the episode, so some allowances for shorthand have to be made.) They corner Odo into a forcefield with Dr. Mora as the bait, and a few aspirational but unconvincing special effects later, and werewolf Odo’s been neutralized.

A funny thing happens in the midst of all this plot jiggery-pokery though. Dr. Mora says, “Oh, Odo, I’ve trapped you again.” When the Constable’s recovering in the infirmary, Dr. Mora seems to recognize that it’s not his place to try to get Odo to come back, but he wants to stay a part of his life, to know about what’s important to him. And Odo accepts him, even if he doesn’t forgive him, disclaiming any knowledge of his actions in his gas-addled form and even putting hand on hand in their mutually beleaguered state.

You can take that in one of two ways. One is that Dr. Mora is the same guy he’s always been. He clearly cares about Odo, but also subscribes to a certain narrow view of him, who he is, what he’s capable of, and most importantly, what’s best for him. He’s not a monster, or at least, not a monolithic one. The man who raised Odo has genuine affection and attachment to his ward, even if he wasn’t the best father and it doesn’t erase the harm he’s caused. There’s something true to life about that read.

But there’s also a more optimistic version. Maybe seeing how Odo responded to his recriminations provoked an epiphany in Dr. Mora. Maybe seeing the effect, both physical and psychological, his words had on his son allowed him to appreciate, in ways he never had before, what those years together were like for Odo. He seems genuinely remorseful when he sees the boy he raised confined once more. Abusers are not above remorse. Maybe, though, there’s a hopeful interpretation of that scene, where Dr. Mora finally comprehends the damage he’s done and wants to try to repair it, while giving Odo the space to be the person he wants to be.

The fact that I can’t say for sure is a feature, not a bug. Human interactions are messy. Relationships between parents and children are especially so. People can genuinely love their kids and also have profoundly messed them up in ways even they don’t fully understand. Playing in that space, deepening the psychological makeup for Odo, and providing the complex missing piece to his upbringing in harrowing but nuanced terms, is the sort of thing Deep Space Nine does better than any other Star Trek show. It acknowledges those gray areas, and the way they direct our lives, in the grand and operating, and for episodes like “The Alternate”, in the personal and human.