3x06 The Abandoned

[7.9/10] Odo offers what may be the best enunciation of Deep Space Nine’s core ethos in this episode. Who a person becomes, what they choose to do with their lives, the bonds they’re able to form, are not dictated or demanded by what race or clan or creed they hail from or who they used to be. Odo was a Founder. Kira was a terrorist. A young Jem’Hadar boy was programmed to fight and kill. But that doesn’t mean they can’t decide to become something different later in their lives, and choose a life that fits what they want, not what their people or others expect or demand from them.

But it takes the help of people who care for you and support you on that journey. “The Abandoned” is a cocktail of prior Star Trek stories. There’s a bit of Captain Kirk mentoring Charlie X and Captain Picard mentoring a young boy from a planet of war-driven aliens in Odo looking after this pugnacious child. There’s a little of Geordi and others recovering Hugh the Borg in the way the DS9 crew debates whether to nurture, analyze, or weaponize this young foot soldier of the enemy. And there’s a bit of Data and his daughter, Lal, in Odo’s insistence treating this Jem’Hadar like a person with rights to self-determination despite conflicting orders from Starfleet Command.

What those plots, and this one, all have in common is they’re parental stories. So much of who we become isn’t dictated just by our choices, but also by the people who raise and shape us. Given the forty five-minute nature of Star Trek, you can generally only tell those stories in miniature, give or take a Wesley Crusher or Naomi Wildman. But there is still meaning and profundity in seeing captains and officers taking on a parental role for people who need them, helping them grow and showing them there’s other paths they can take.

Of course, the biggest exception to this “single serving dad” brand of Star Trek story is Benjamin and Jake Sisko, and their tender, well-observed father-son bond. Their relationship comes to the fore here. Commander Sisko looks at the baby Jem’Hadar with affection and reminisces about the days when Jake himself was an infant who could be understood and have his problems solved simply. That's particularly salient now, when Benjamin invites his sixteen-year-old son’s twenty-year-old girlfriend, Marta, who just so happens to be a Dabo girl, to dinner over his son’s objections.

To the episode’s larger themes, I didn’t recognize how quietly revolutionary taking time to tell stories like these for a black father and son was when I watched DS9 as a kid. Even in a post-Cosby Show world, I was shaped by shows like this one to think of such emotions and devotion as unremarkable, as they should be, when in reality there were few depictions like this one on television at the time. Their story is smaller scale, but it ties into the theme of the episode, both in terms of understanding your child and in all of us having depths and possibilities for who we are, not just what we are.

So I like that despite Benjamin’s prejudices that this relationship is predatory (one the show invites the audience to share given how she manipulates a patron at Quark’s and seems poised to do the same to Jake in her form-fitting dress), he discovers there’s more to Marta than she thought. She’s a Bajoran orphan, one who had what are implied to be objections to the conservative religious mores of the neighbors who adopted her. She loves Jake’s poetry and his skills at cards and opens up facets of Jake his father never knew about. The gentle but pointed conversation about not judging someone by their job gets through to Benjamin, and the way he tacitly accepts a relationship he was primed to destroy, after learning more about her, and in the process his son, is softly touching.

Odo’s decision to mentor the young Jem’Hadar who ends up stranded aboard the station is equally as affecting in its way. There are all sorts of practical challenges to looking after this teenage warrior. I forget how much we don’t know about the species at this point, but “The Abandoned” gives us some disturbing insights. They are bred to grow rapidly so they can be quick-fire insta-soldiers. They are programmed to be deferential to the Founders and to have a psychological predilection for war and even a need for fighting. They’re genetically designed to be born with an addiction for to a substance only the Dominion possesses, giving them a physical need in addition to a psychological one. The cruelty, the dehumanization it takes to create such beings is the thing that most identifies the Dominion as the bad guys yet.

That's part of what motivates Odo to intervene. I’m not one for the notion of inherited sin, but it’s noble for him to want to use whatever programming makes the Jem’Hadar instinctively trust and obey changelings to help nurture and free the young man. There’s also something truly heartening about him wanting to break the cycle of what he himself experienced – being a curiosity and specimen who is well-treated but still a lab rat without the agency to decide for yourself. It’s not hard to understand how Odo seems much of himself in the Jem’Hadar boy, and wants to spare him the fate he suffered of feeling like his future and options were dictated to him. You can see it in how his first question to the young man at every turn is simple “What do you want?”

Seeing them interact is the highlight of the episode. The rest of the crew is understandably compassionate but resistant to the Jem’Hadar given not only his origins but how he acts once he’s off the leash. Kira in particular is skeptical that he can be anything other than a killing machine given where he comes from, something that tracks given her slowly-eroding but still firmly present prejudice toward Cardassians. But Odo is firm but patient with the boy, giving him relief, tending to his needs, and giving him the care and instruction he needs.

Frankly, my major complaint about the episode is that we don’t get enough of it. “The Abandoned” is the sort of episode that could really use another half hour or so to flesh out more of their relationship and hash out the moral questions of whether the boy is a person or a threat or a defensive opportunity. It’s easy to see why Odo quickly feels protective of the child, who never gets a name, but the episode rushes through their connection and its challenges, with Odo not even entering the picture until almost a third of the way through the proceedings.

Still, I appreciate where they go with this. Despite Odo’s noble ideals and progress with the young man, Starfleet wants him for study and, as Sisko puts it, “orders are orders.” And despite Odo’s efforts to show the Jem’Hadar child that he can choose whatever path he wants and isn’t bound by his heritage or others’ expectations, what the child wants is to return to his people and become the violent, obedient warrior he was bred to be. It is tragic, bittersweet at best, to see Odo try to save someone who was much like him, and find that he wants the sort of things Odo himself has worked so hard to reject, another tough lesson of parenthood.

Hell, the Jem’Hadar even argues that it’s Odo who’s been brainwashed by these other humanoids, taught values antithetical to his birth and proper place in the galaxy. True to form, DS9 asks complicated questions of whether instilling values in those in the care of the Federation or its allies is any less a case of “brainwashing” than their enemies’ methods, simply because we at home prefer those values.

It’s that gray area that remains one of the most laudable aspects of this series. Were Star Trek as purely aspirational as its reputation suggests, then it might end with the Jem’Hadar choosing to stay on DS9 with Odo, or even agree with Odo’s suggestion to find a path separate from the Federation/Dominion dichotomy the show is already setting up. Instead, he uses the agency Odo worked so hard to instill in him to do what his masters programmed him to, and Odo grimly tells Kira that she was right to doubt. Some people are too far gone to be saved.

That is a bitter pill to swallow, but one that comes with the realism that DS9 traffics in, where even the most noble of mentors, with the most creditable of principles, isn’t always enough to win the day over the machinations of larger forces and failings both personal and societal that stretch across peoples. There is something sad in that, a reminder that we all contain multitudes, we all have bonds that allow us to be more than what we are, but that sometimes, those bonds still fall short.