“His father’s sword, he has girded on, and his wild harp slung behind him.”
This fairly unassuming episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s fourth season has gone on, in the years since, to become one of the major feats of worldbuilding for the whole franchise. At first, its novelty was simply that it was an episode centered on Chief O’Brien, which was charming enough; O’Brien started out as a walk-on character and became a fan-favourite. Also, at the time the episode’s story about a decades-old (and just-ended) war with a race called the Cardassians seemed to be as much of a contrived invention of a new, annoyingly unheard-of villain race as the Talarians had been in “Suddenly Human.”
Little did we know at the time that “The Wounded” would cement Miles O’Brien as one of the key players in Star Trek – leading to his starring role on Deep Space Nine – and that the crab-like Cardassians would become the modern era’s second-largest contribution to Star Trek’s rogues’ gallery, right behind the Borg. Marc Alaimo is featured in a fantastic guest turn as Gul Macet, laying the groundwork for the entire Cardassian race with the weird prescience that Armin Shimmerman brought to his prototype role as a Ferengi in “The Last Outpost;” both men would go on to define their respective species in high-water-mark performances as the Cardassian Gul Dukat and the Ferengi Quark, respectively, on Deep Space Nine. In fact, for all intents and purposes, Deep Space Nine begins here – and because DS9 is, in its way, the best Star Trek series of all time, that’s pretty significant.
But we’ll leave the DS9 poetics for “Blogging Terok Nor.” “The Wounded” is a tense, fascinating episode, which supplies Chief O’Brien with a backstory and some key character points outside the transporter room (having just been married in the previous episode). We learn of the massacre at Setlik III, a tragedy that would haunt the character for years; O’Brien’s speech to Glin Daro (played quite wonderfully by a man with an equally wonderful name, Time Winters) about having never killed anything before he killed a Cardassian is one of the series’ great monologues. The scene is only outdone by the episode’s climax, where O’Brien boards the Phoenix to talk Captain Maxwell off the ledge, which he does – by singing with him.
Next Generation-era starship design is on display in top form in this episode, too – the Nebula-class U.S.S. Phoenix, which looks like the travel luggage version of the Enterprise, and the scarab beetle shaped Cardassian warship, a keen example of how much the decisions made in the ship design stage can go on to create an entire design aesthetic – and historical aesthetic, and philosophical aesthetic – for a made-up race.
There’s a great battle scene that takes place entirely as an overlapping series of dots on the Enterprise main viewer, as our heroes race towards the Phoenix to stop a conflict, and are too late. Bob Gunton’s performance as Captain Maxwell is a lot more one-note than I remembered, but it doesn’t dent the episode much; Alaimo’s prototype performance as Macet more than carries the balance. And there’s something fine and troubling about the fact that both Maxwell and O’Brien, ultimately, are right: you don’t turn your back on the Cardassians. A long, rich saga that would support the next ten years of Star Trek has been kindled.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Four is in stores now.