4x21 The Muse

[6.2/10] A friend of mine complained that television and movies spend too much time on romantic love and not enough time on other types. Romantic love is important, but familial love, the love between friends, and other intimate connections are just as valid and for many folks, a bigger part of their lives.

What I like about “The Muse” is that it’s about the other shades of our connections to others that fall short of that vaunted true love -- namely the bond between Odo and Lwaxana Troi. Lwaxana is pregnant. Her husband is from a culture where men and women are raised separately, and he wants to take her baby boy away from her once he’s born. So who better for her to turn to for protection but Odo?

There’s something beautifully soft and sweet about their interactions here. In the first two of Lwaxana’s DS9 episodes, she’s essentially playing her usually love-crazed Auntie Mame role for much of the proceedings. As usual, she eventually softens into a more caring and humanized version of the character, but there’s always a sort of comical, Pepe LePew-style pursuit that precedes it.

Here, though, there’s very little along those lines. Instead, it’s two people who have to step away from relationships that hurt them and find comfort in one another’s friendship. Lwaxana feels betrayed by her husband who once seemed to love her but now only seems to value her as property. And Odo loved Kira but has closed off that part of his heart after the events of “Crossfire”. These are two people yearning for connection, for company, for care, who find it in one another.

One of the sweetest moments in all of Star Trek comes when Lwaxan falls asleep nestled against Odo’s chest, and the otherwise emotionally restrained Changeling manifests a blanket to wrap her up in. Before all this, Odo gently offers to take Lwaxana for a walk to spare her getting kicked out of Quarks. In the lead-up, Lwaxana feigns a broken replicator so she can continue their little date a moment longer. They smile and bask in the psychic emanations of contentment from a betazoid baby, and more importantly, from one another. These two people may have lost something they thought they wanted, but they find incredible grace and kindness in one another. It is warm, and heartening, and moving.

And for some reason it’s intermixed with one of the most garbage B-stories Deep Space Nine has ever come up with. I have no idea what the writers were thinking with the titular muse who spurs Jake into a divine frenzy of writing so that she can suck his creative marrow dry. Nothing about it works. Jake has no arc. The Muse is a big silly waste. And the story itself seems entirely pointless.

Candidly, I remembered this B-story from when I was a kid (but not the A-story for some reason), but even if I hadn't, there’s zero tension in this one because Onaya is obviously a succubus from the first moment Jake interacts with her. “Obviously evil person does blatantly evil thing” isn’t an interesting story. Jake seems like an idiot for buying it, and even if you can write it off as him being young, naive, and otherwise mesmerized by a beautiful woman trying to seduce him, him being a dope who gets suckered into an obvious trap doesn’t make for good television.

Maybe you could save some of it if the performances were good, but the guest actress who plays Onaya gives this breathy, overly mannered performance that makes her seem like the villain in a DTV children’s movie. (The witch from Ewoks: The Battle for Endor comes to mind.)

And what is the point? If you squint, you can see something about artists rending themselves toward self-destruction in the name of making great art and achieving immortality, but it’s thin gruel. DS9 has rarely, if ever, known what to do with Jake, and saddling him with this silly literary spin on various evil witch stories is, sadly, another instance of the character being misused.

Thankfully, the A-story lifts this one up a bit. When Lwaxana’s husband, Jeyal shows up, Odo steps in to defend her. (Jeyal is played by Michael Ansara, who played Kang the Klingon in Star Trek and none other than Mr. Freeze in the seminal Batman: The Animated Series, a character he resembles in live action here.) He finds a loophole in the laws of Jeyal’s people, where Jeyal will lose his claim to the baby if Lwaxana remarries. So Odo does the chivalrous thing and offers to marry Lwaxana to free her from the obligation and spare her the pain of having her child taken away.

It leads to one of my favorite tropes -- a character making a sham declaration that, when pressed, slowly transforms into them speaking a truth they themselves might not even have realized. The traditional alien ceremony requires Odo to convincingly profess his love. At first, he gives the standard spiel, which fails to satisfy Jeyal. But when challenged, he speaks from the heart.

He may not love Lwaxana the way he loves Kira. But he speaks honestly, that she was the first person to see and accept him for what he is, to see him at his most vulnerable and want more, to make him feel something other than alone aboard this station. In some way, Lwaxana is a big part of what opened up Odo, made the kind of attachment he feels to Kira possible. She nurtured him, cared for him, and that makes him want her in his life, even if it’s not in the way she’d intended when she was pursuing the same way she pursued stuffy old Jean-Luc.

There’s something beautiful in that. Odo realizes that against all odds, he cares for Lwaxana. They fill a space for one another, and they matter to one another, in ways he didn’t expect but are no less valuable.

Only, it’s not to be. I’m a sucker for a good bittersweet ending. And while it’s sudden, there’s a truth in Lwaxana choosing to leave the station because she, with far more wisdom and experience in matters of the heart, realizes this arrangement, sweet though it may be, would never fully satisfy both of them.

Lwaxana would always want more, and Odo’s heart couldn't give it. And Odo might satisfy himself with their shared company, but close himself off from finding that vaunted true love he’s steadily opened himself up to the possibility of, only to be so stung in the immediacy of its loss. Lwaxana wants more, for herself and for him, and as wonderful as their friendship is, she knows that in the end, it wouldn’t be enough for either of them.

That's a particular kind of love, one that is fractured but worthy, heartening but sad. You rarely see stories about those kinds of relationships, between people who, to use a cliche, love each other but aren’t in love with one another. The continued opening of Odo’s heart, the possibility of caring for someone in ways you can't expect, and the wisdom to know whether or not it would fulfill you, make for a fine swan song for Lwaxana Troi and Majel Barrett in Star Trek, if only she didn’t have to share it with a woebegotten muse far less worthy of the designation than her.