2x14 Whispers

[7.5/10] I’m a sucker for a good 1970s horror-filled paranoid thriller. “Whispers” takes its cues from those sorts of films. Chief O’Brien’s sense that somebody’s done something to all of his comrades aboard the station gives it the atmosphere of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which features Star Trek luminary Leonard Nimoy in a key role). His concern that something’s off, that everyone’s surreptitiously working against him, gives it the destabilizing vibe of Rosemary’s Baby. And while quite a bit before those seventies classics, the film Gaslighting is, of course, apropos here as well.

So when Chief O’Brien comes back for a security visit to the warring Parada civilization, and everything seems off, he starts to get suspicious. His wife and daughter are cold to him. His subordinate unexpectedly goes over his head. His doctor demands he have a physical. His commander seems to insist he spend his time on makework that shouldn’t need fixing. He’s locked out of key systems that he normally should have access to.

It’s a nice little constellation of suspicious changes. None of them, on their own, are enough to be cause for alarm. You can write off any one of them as coincidence or the usual vagaries of human interaction. But taking them all together rightly makes Miles feel like something is wrong, like his friends don’t really know him, like there’s a conspiracy he’s not privy to that it’s up to him to solve.

Which is part of what makes the twist in this one so impressive. I’ll confess that this episode swindled me. I thought this was another one where the answer was pretty obvious. I assumed the Parada, or the rebels, or someone involved had messed with O’Brien and/or the crew in order to gain an advantage in peace negotiations. My working theory was that this was all actually some kind of simulation secretly run by the Parada to test Miles’ ability to handle security threats after they’d enlisted the Federation to help them.

I didn’t mind it, though, because it puts the audience in the same position as Chief O’Brien. We know something’s off just like Miles does, and we have good reason to given the context. But like him, we can’t exactly prove it, and so have to go along for the ride while our perspective character tries to generate the evidence he needs while evading detection from the would-be allies he can no longer trust.

That’s what makes the twist here so grand. It turns out that this Miles is a copy meant to disrupt the peace talks in some way after the bad Parada kidnapped the real one. The DS9 crew figured out this O’Brien was a fake, but wanted to string him along to learn more while trying to prevent him from doing any major damage.

That answer plays fair. People were acting strangely. There was a conspiracy against him. They did get to everyone who interacted with him, right down to otherwise uninvolved folks like Odo and Jake. But not for the reasons he (or I) thought.

I don’t just like the reveal because it suckered me in. I like it because it effectively confirms all of Miles’ suspicions while also recontextualizing them. There’s an elegance to that, and it makes for one of the most shocking, and satisfying sci-fi twists Star Trek’s offered yet.

My only complaint is that some of the delivery is clunky in places. For a paranoid thriller episode, the pacing and vibe here is surprisingly languid. Much of that comes down to the fact that Chief O’Brien is a pretty steady guy. Even when he thinks his wife is trying to poison him, or his colleagues are working against him, he takes an even-keeled, methodical approach to solving the problem. There’s not the sense of panic and terror felt by the likes of Matthew Bennell or Rosemary Woodhouse. As a result, for all the questionable stuff going down on DS9, there’s never a sense of crisis or even urgency, just a sure-footed officer methodically working his way through even the most distressing of problems.

At the same time, the voiceover doesn’t really add much to the proceedings. My guess is that the writers included it to put us in O’Brien’s head. Normally, you explicate a character’s thoughts through dialogue, but that’s obviously difficult in a story where your protagonist worries he can’t trust anyone. It lets us inside the mind of the O’Brien duplicate and confirms that he thinks he’s the real deal, completely oblivious to his true nature, earning a measure of sympathy in his sad, final moments.

But in practice, his lines are tepid and don’t tell the audience much it doesn’t already know. It’s a device, and the writing never quite integrates it seamlessly into the rest of the proceedings. Likewise, there’s several steps taken in the endgame, like O’Brien taking a runabout to Parada, where the goal and the thought behind his tactics isn’t clear, and the intermediate steps even feel tedious. There’s plenty of good notes here, but at times “Whispers” repeats too many of them and fills in the thinner spots with dead air.

Still, there’s something so perfect about the way this one finishes, to unmoor both your main character and the viewer at the same time. “Whispers” puts us in Miles' shoes, measuring the strangeness of how Sisko and Julian and especially Keiko treat him. We know these characters too, so we feel their same detachment from him. We share Miles’ suspicions when everyone seems to keep asking him what he can tell them about the Parada.

Knowing why makes it all add up, but in a clockwork fashion that puts who’s suspicious and who’s trustworthy on its head. It’s rare to be able to pull off something like that and not make it feel like a cheat. The motives and the reactions here all add up, just not in a way the audience can foresee. For all their glory, I don’t know if any of those brilliant 1970s flicks ever pulled off that it’s not the world or your friends who are messed up; it’s just you. It’s exciting to see Deep Space Nine use its science fiction bona fides to pull off a reveal few other stories could, while making us feel for Miles, both Miles-es, in the process.