User Reviews

Leigh J. McCloskey, formerly of "Dallas," guest stars as one of Ezri's (Nicole de Boer) former hosts, a psychopathic killer with an equally killer wit about him. When mysterious and unsolvable murders hit the space station, Ezri must call on Joran to use his vile background to determine the perpetrators of the heinous acts.

Many fans of the series did not warm up to de Boer because she replaced the departed Terry Farrell. However, in this installment, de Boer makes the character her own, playing off well with the more experienced McCloskey.

McCloskey has one of the best lines as he views a family portrait, showing one of the murdered victims in happier times: "How can they smile with such ugly children!" The line is priceless!

The kid gets shot down three time in a row: First by Bashier and Obrien, then Ezri, and then by a murderer. Wish we got to know him as well as the rest of the crew does. Turns out its an Ezri episode.

Spin off idea. Tales of a Symbiont -

Step 1) Write an episode for each of the previous Dax hosts

Step 2)

Step 3) Profit

Oopsies, another murder. Turns out the killer is using a transporter riffle. Not sure why Ezri is the lynch pin of this investigation but even Worf confirms that its HER investigation. Ezri invokes the memories of Juran and we've got a foil for the plucky young counselor. He does his best to turn her into a murderer.

Spin off idea - Mind Hunter in Space

Step 1) A variation on Mind Hunter set in the Star Trek universe

Step 2)

Step 3) Profit

Exographic scanners are amazing and I want one. Not for anything perverted. Actually its for a friend.

A weapons collector becomes a suspect of the real investigators, Ezri nearly kills him, but then Sisko gives her his blessing to continue HER investigation.

After a third murder Ezri realizes that the murder is targeting happy people, people that are laughing. Turns out its a Vulcan she's after. Conveniently, she ends up in the elevator with a Vulcan, THE Vulcan. So she shoots him before he can shoot her. All's well that ends well I suppose.

Spin off idea: Gate Trek

Step 1) Rename all secondary characters from Star Trek planets from Stargate (two years on I have no idea what I'm referencing here. Also my grammar is atrocious).

Step 2)

Step 3) Profit

Verdict: Illogical but Watchable.

All the stuff with Ezri performing the right of emergence to bring about an image of Joran (a previous host who was a murderer) so she could get into the killer's head is cliche and boring but that's not what brings my score to a lowly three stars. This episode has a bad case of amazing-tech-itis. There are plenty of episodes across many sci-fi shows where they get their hands on some amazing tech or knowledge and then conveniently forget about it for the rest of the series. This is one of those episodes.

A micro-transporter on the barrel of a gun that fires titanium bullets is already a hard swallow but okay. We do have other evidence of precision transporting in Trek such as when they beam a baby out of the womb in Voyager or when they beam a tiny spy device into a bulkhead in an earlier DS9 episode, etc. But we can't stop there because how is our killer going to see what he's shooting at? I know! Magic X-ray googles!

Not only can these magic goggles see through solid matter like bulkheads or people, but they can be zoomed so they DON'T see through objects at a certain distance. If they saw through all matter then surely you'd be looking through the entirety of the station into the blackness of space. So of course we need to be able to zoom the goggles. Is someone standing in front of a monitor you need to look at? Just zoom in through their body and there you go! Now you somehow have a magic invisible floating camera between that person in your way and the monitor in front of them.

It's just ridiculous and thankfully they ignore this tech exists in every other part of Trek. If it did exist they'd be as common as phasers and would be used CONSTANTLY. How many plots would be foiled by just one pair of these goggles? What if a ship had this technology on a larger scale and could just peer inside Starfleet Headquarters when they suspect alien corruption and immediately see the nefarious things unfolding there? This plot device tech is just plain horrendous and they should not have thought it was okay to casually introduce it with a bit of technobabble.

This stand alone episode finds the crew of DS9 searching for a killer who is using a rifle to kill people in their own rooms. There are many questions that need answering; why is he rifle when evidence suggests the victims were shot at point blank range? Why are there no powder burns? and why is he using a conventional rifle when everybody else uses phasers in the 24th century. While Odo and Chief O'Brien are investigating the technical aspects of the crime Captain Sisko asks ship's counsellor Ezri Dax to provide a profile of the sort of person who might commit such a crime. This causes her some difficulties as it forces her to confront the memories of Dax's former host Joran, a man who had murdered three people in cold blood. As she interacts with Joran she gradually gets into the mindset of the killer, while this enables her to close in on the killer it also brings out more dangerous feeling which she must control.

I enjoyed this episode and found it to be one of the more memorable episodes of the series. I thought that Nicole de Boer did a great job as Ezri, the leading character in the episode. She is ably supported by Leigh McCloskey who guest starred as Joran.

The premise of this episode is Silence of the Lambs in space. Which really wouldn't be a problem, if Ezri was actually helping Odo who normally has a handle on these sort of things. But let's put new/young Dax unto Silence of the Lambs. So she can get inside the head of a serial killer. With tech never seen before and never used later.

The problem with the premise was the Joran host, while a murderer, he wasn't a serial killer. We learned in an earlier episode when Jadzeea was having issues and went back to krill. She found out there was a host they kinda made Dax symbiote forget about. Turns out the Joran host was a very good musician.

Now, Sisko and Bashir find out that Joran also had issues "acting out", or keeping his emotions in check. When he was taken out of the host program he forced doctors to put the Dax symbiote in him and he killed 3 people out of passion.

Apparently season 7 writers were not around for that episode and just used a Dax cheat sheet to come up with a Trill plot for Ezri. Too bad all they did was ruin continuity. And like with most of Season 7, made the big war an after thought, in what they could of slowly brought to a nice simmer and a multi episode battle to wrap things up.

There are two tried-and-true methods to construct a good Who-dunit:

1) Introduce a group of characters in the first act, one of them a killer. The killer proceeds to eliminate other characters until his/her identity is revealed in the final act -- hopefully the last person the audience expects. Example: Agatha Christie, especially "The Mirror Crack'd".

2) The killer is revealed in the first act, and the protagonists must establish his/her guilt by the denoument. This approach is more procedural in nature, but can still work very well. Example: the 1999 Millennium episode "Nostalgia".

The one thing a script CANNOT do is introduce a previously unknown killer in the final act. This is a violation of trust, and an audience cheat of the first order. "Field Of Fire" sets up a space station who-dunit, then introduces a character we've never seen before (with motives we care nothing about) in the last ten minutes, and pins the entire scheme on him. Eye-rolling, amateurish screenwriting.

The lone aspect that somewhat redeems "Field Of Fire" from the trash heap is Leigh McCloskey's smarmy and entertaining performance as Joran. Otherwise, another standalone disappointment from Season 7.

This is the sort of story I'd have expected on "Voyager". It's utterly stale, inane, pointless (BY THE WAY, DID YOU REMEMBER THERE'S A CATACLYSMIC WAR GOING ON BETWEEN THE DOMINION AND THE FEDERATION-ROMULAN ALLIANCE?!) story with a payoff about as satisfying as being punched in the head after being told you have a surprise waiting.

So a 22 year old Federation fighter pilot ends up dead on Deep Space Nine with a bullet hole through the heart and no powder residue on him. I'm only guessing this now because this was supposed to an important clue, and yet is never fully clarified until the very end.

This leads to Ezri Dax on the case, out to prove how utterly incompetent Starfleet is...

...except the case is pretty much broken through and the mystery eliminated and left to merely room-searching the 900+ residents of DS9, which would be a whole lot less if the security did their detective work (which to their credit, they did do some of later on), when Bashir and O'Brian discover that the crime was essentially committed using a Federation projectile rifle prototype with a technobabble device that beams the bullet to the location desired of shooting it.

Add to that a headset device that essentially acts as the FarSight XR-20 rifle in "Perfect Dark" in being able to see through walls perfectly and zoom in even right through people.

So Ezri Dax goes through this tedious process of bringing out Joran, one of Dax's previous hosts, and goes through this incredibly boring pale-imitation-ripoff of a Hannibal Lecter-type lecturing of Joran trying to get Ezri inside the mind of a killer.

All of which pretty much amounts to absolutely nothing as the final damning clue is established pretty much out of detective skills that would make Robert Goran of Law and Order CI and Sherlock Holmes combined look like child's play, or the Mary Sue inclinations obvious in a bad script---All the victims had pictures in their quarters of themselves and/or family, with people smiling or laughing.

Therefore, the killer must be a Vulcan, they establish.

Long before you can even begin to put together the logic (HURDURR) behind this assessment, LO AND BEHOLD, A VULCAN ENTERS THE SAME ELEVATOR EZRI AND HER HALLUCINATED-JORAN IS ON! And long before you can laugh it off as a stupid cliché' that MAYBE will be lampshaded, JORAN SAYS HE IS DEFINITELY THE KILLER! So rather than confront him, or get security to search his quarters for his gun, she goes to her own quarters, and uses the FarSight XR-20 to spy on him, catch him looking up her service record, and get HIS OWN FarSight XR-20 to put on. In a scene so blatantly obvious in coming, it has no shock value attached to it at all, they both spot each other pointing the guns at one another, and Ezri's shot hits while his misses her.

In order to close the ultimately pointless plot line involving Joran, she confronts his wounded form in his quarters, seemingly about to kill him while Joran urges her on. Instead, she asks why he did it, and he says...

"Because logic demanded it" Any random assortment of words could have been put there that would have made more sense than that. Is this implying that this Vulcan is stupid enough to think of the concept of "logic" as some sort of deity, or a universal force like Chi or the Force? Or was there a whole subplot involved about his motivations seeming logical that was completely cut out of the episode that no one cared enough about to fix this loose end? It doesn't even matter anyway. The whole thing was as pointless as an average episode of "Voyager"

There are plenty of DS9 episodes that make me angry because of how characters act: Odo acting a selfish fool being manipulated by the female Changling while his friends await execution, Major Kira sneaking off to hunt a killer while almost to full term with the O'Brien's baby, nearly getting herself and the child murdered, and so on.

However, this episode made me angry because of its sheer stupidity, lazy writing and thoroughly insulting the viewers intelligence.

A nice new Starfleet officer is murdered. It's done with a projectile weapon, not pulse, yet there is no gunpowder residue anywhere on the victim. Then there's another murder, and another, all in the same manner. The episode starts off pretty interesting in the first eight minutes.

And then it goes completely off the rails and downhill.

Captain Sisko assigns Ezri Dax the task of profiling the killer, to help Odo and the security team. Makes sense as she's the stations counselor. Unfortunately in Dax's mind, this means she's now lead investigator.

To assist her "investigation" she uses the Trill ceremony to bring back the spirit of Joran, one of her previous hosts who also happens to be a murderer. This is done in order to put Ezri "in the mind of the killer." Good grief...

So Joran is back, but only Ezri can see him, so she's wondering the station talking to herself, or so it would seem, and comes upon Odo and Security chasing a suspect. So Ezri jumps on him and almost stabs him to death because reasons.

Somehow Sisko doesn't fire her or order hern for her very own psych session, but sends her on her merry way to continue investigatin'.

Ezri (and Joran) visit the first victim's quarters where Ezri determines the motive for the murders. Every victim had a picture of them and family smiling. Therefore the killer must be a Vulcan because, again, reasons.

I feel stupid just typing this.

At any rate, more deus ex machina happens to gruel the plot along to its inevitable end, and Ezri catches the killer, ditches Joran and everyone lives happily ever after.

I guess the writers wanted to give Ezri Dax her own episode to introduce her to fans. I also guess the writers really didn't want fans to like her. This is the stupidest episode in the Star Trek Universe.

At least in my opinion.

Deep Space Nine is classic Star Trek, and I am thoroughly enjoying the series until Season 7 filler episodes which are leaving a lot to be desired.

The sad part is that the premise of the episode is actually an excellent one, but then the writers seemed to have painted themselves into a corner and had no clue how to get out of it. So, they end up using some ridiculous plot devices to bail themselves out.

A young Starfleet officer is murdered on DS9. For some reason, Ezri Dax attempts to conduct her own investigation because she has some connection with former host, Joran, who was a serial killer. Oh, yes. Odo is also investigating, but the writers decides to focus on Ezri.

Chief O'Brien finds out that a projectile weapons is not only being used, but that the bullets are being "transported" just in front of their targets. Obviously, this makes finding the killer especially difficult.

Joran tries to get Ezri to think like the killer (I guess this is a sorry attempt at FBI behavioral sciences profiling).

Now, the plot is actually working, until Ezri comes up with some incredible leaps and, frankly, dumb luck to discover the killer. Somehow, she is able to glean from three photographs that the killer is a Vulcan simply because the victims are smiling. Yeah...suddenly Ezri Dax is smarter than Sherlock frickin' Holmes! There are over 40 Vulcans on the station. A random Vulcan just happens to get onto the elevator with her. Joran says, "That's him!" Ezri Dax also has the luck of the gods on her side. Never mind that Sisko somehow doesn't know a thing about these weapons, their capabilities, and why they're even on the station.

Aside from the most ludicrous explanation for a motive that I've ever heard, Nicole De Boer is just not a good actress at all. I'd hoped after the first few episodes of the season, she would really settle in and start to carve out her character. She navigates Ezri Dax like a high school girl who's just a bundle of emotions: timid, insecure, perky, upbeat, confused, immature, and dedicated, to name a few. She's nothing more than an obnoxious whirlwind that brings nothing to the cast.

Anyway, this is an episode that isn't as bad as "Spock's Brain" but it's one that I won't ever be watching again.

So obviously Star Trek is about space, aliens, crazy sh**. Ezri is new to the show so a full episode is less enjoyable than others. No reason to dismiss of course. Going from mouse to shooter is not within her character. Even with Joran around.

I actually like Ezri quite a bit ---- she's like flounder from Bambi --- in way over her head and trying to make it work. With that said --- This episode has some problems.

We have established in a previous episode that Ezri and Bashir have something going on ---- why not have bashir play some role in a Ezri based episode to further establish that relationship?

The 'super gun'. Man, this gun is really scary. I don't think I could live on a space station or anywhere really with the knowledge that insane people have access to this level of technology. Imagine the damage that spy's could do with this thing! This story could have been told without the super gun --- Maybe have the Vulcan turn the pictures down? Break them?

Wait, Ezri is a counselor. Could this Vulcan not have been one of her patients (forced perhaps?). We explored the character of Joran in previous Dax episodes and we even achieved a moment of closure and acceptance from Jadzia over the whole thing.

I am personally a big fan of the 'clue' approach to murder mystery --- where we know the murderer.

I find the idea of Vulcan serial killer to be pretty scary though. I am going to put a call into starfleet to step up the PTSD testing --- alas, I think this is put on the backburner during war time.