SDS9 – S5E14-15: "In Purgatory's Shadow" and "By Inferno's Light" (Patreon)

This episode was recorded on April 27, 2025.

We recap "In Purgatory's Shadow" and "By Inferno's Light" and discuss a Changeling long con.

SDS9 seasons 1, 2, 3, and 4 can be found wherever you stream Southpaw. Season 5 is only available to paid subscribers.

You can also listen to this episode directly from your favorite podcast player by following these instructions: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/212055866-Subscribe-to-your-Audio-RSS-link-on-the-Patreon-app

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Transcript

[Note: Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors.]

This is Southpaw Deep Space Nine Season 5. We are your hosts, Scott and Sam. On this start date, April 27, 2025, we are discussing In Purgatory's Shadow. The first of a two-parter. Scott, can you tell us about this episode?

Odo is getting gifts from Kira. See, now that Odo is a changeling again, no more beds, no more romantic books that he's been reading. He's just been trying to acclimate to being a goo guy again. Odo wonders about love. Kira is tender and says maybe there's love in the future. Jadzia calls them to the station.

A Gamma Quadrant listening post picks up Cardassian's secret memos. Odo can't figure it out, so suggests our favorite Taylor Tinker soldier spy, Garak. Take a look. Later, we see Garak tells Tora Zial and Dr. Bashir that it is simply a survey and nothing more, a Cardassian census fleet, if you will. Bashir,

curious that Garak is pretending to care and that there might be survivors of the lost Cardassian-Romulan fleet, but Garak says that he has given up hope. Zael, who we are... really seeing that she is smitten with Garrick, believes that this is odd. Later, Garrick sneaks into the USS Rubicon and tries to get on.

But then there's Bashir, with phasers getting ready to go. Bashir explains he was understandably dubious of the alibi and that Garrick would never let his people die. Garrick is surprised that Bashir has a new, unbeforeseen distrust. The message actually is there are lost Cardassians there in danger, and one of them is Enerbrentain, Garrick's mentor,

who we saw kind of die. He was in the Obsidian Order, the Cardassian secret police. Garak asks for some ships for a rescue mission, that there might be other survivors of Dominion attacks that are, you know, in prisons with Tane, including possible Federation citizens.

Ben is like, you can't go by yourself, you can't go with Bashir, you have to go with Worf. Worf and Jadzia have a lover's quarrel about this, and It's ineffective. Jadzia grabs Worf's Klingon operas and offers that Worf better come home soon, because she has a penchant to lose things, and they have a nice kiss.

Ziel begs Garak not to go, and suggests that there is more there. Remember, there is a gigantic age and power gap. Garak dismisses this as puppy love, and that they are simply just Cardassians, in a place where there are no Cardassians, and Garak is lonely. They hold hands.

This also plays into some interesting things about identity and phenotypical representation, but we'll go there later. Dukat comes by and is very upset with Garrick. They have a blood feud and says ZL should not be hanging out with him. And Garrick is like, well, the only thing that she got good from her was from her mama.

ZL and dad talk and have moments. And yeah, Dukat hates Garrick. A lot of people do. Ben asks Worf, you know, to do the right thing that if Garrick goes rogue, that he has to do what he's got to do. We're unsure if this is a joke or not. On the way to the Gamma Quad,

Garrick asks Worf to sponsor him for Starfleet for a clean slate redemption. Worf doesn't believe him. And Garrick doesn't believe him either. He turns out it was a joke. He practices lying to keep his lying weapon sharp. He just does it. On Deep Space Nine, Dukat goes to meet Kira. As remember, Kira...

essentially saves Yael because Dukat was originally going to kill her because he is his illegitimate daughter, the product of an inappropriate relationship with another Bajoran woman, and this is looked down upon in Cardassia, and he was going to do some really not cool stuff, and Kira brought her to Deep Space Nine to protect her. And again,

Dukat is incensed that Ziel is in love with Garak, a heartless, cold-blooded killer, like all Cardassians, Kira says. Dukat was at least okay with Ziel learning her Bajoran heritage, but this is something else. He feels betrayed and makes some threats, and Kira says that this is a pretty boring threat. And Dukat says, well...

Our Cardassian threats used to mean something to you guys. And we go back to the Mercy mission. Worf halts the ship, deciding that the signal is too deep in Dominion space, and they are obviously running high risk for Jem'Hadar action. But Garak, using his silver tongue, he presses on. He does his words.

He suggests they maybe go through the nebulous slip. Stay hidden. But as they try to do the stay hidden thing, they are not hidden. A Dominion fleet shows up. Garak worries he makes a mistake. Made a mistake. Worf tries to get through the armada to avoid a fight with the Jamadar.

because they figure they may have something important in this gigantic thing. The Jem'Hadar get in the ship, knock out Garak and Morph. Kira and Jazzy are having a talk about Miles and Keiko's new baby, and Kira feels that the baby is connected to her and that they have a connection. I mean, she did birth her, of course.

Kira and Jedzia talk about Miles. Oh, just said that. They're getting to learn from Ben. Uh-oh. The Dominion might be planning on an attack on the Federation Alpha Quadrant through the wormhole. Ben sends his troops to try to find his peeps. Garrick and Worf land in a labor camp without due process because...

Why would someone be sent to a labor camp without due process? They're told only death is the release. Deep Space Nine is waiting on the visit, and the Defiant comes through the wormhole, which doesn't make sense. Dukat and Ziel meet.

Dominion fleets are coming to Deep Space Nine, and he asks Ziel to pack to go back to Cardassia. On Which is interesting. On the prison, there's no escape. In the barracks, Martok, what? Who is taken over by a changeling that we learned about earlier, is there. And he takes them to Tain.

Tane is not appreciative and states that this is a failure and everyone will be doomed. Ben invites Dukat and Kira to talk about how bad a hot war would be with the Dominion and how everyone would get wrecked and that they really are not ready for this. They don't know what to do.

But they do have a countermeasure that they could possibly shoot some stuff into the wormhole that would stop the travel. It wouldn't kill the Celestials, but it would be a band-aid for this situation, because mad Dominion ships coming through considerable firepower. The Warlorn depleted Alpha Quadrant areas, they would totally get messed up.

Martok and his squad are trying to wait for another friend to show up. And it is none other than Julian Bashir. Which means the Julian Bashir we've been seeing, we don't know for how long, is Changeling Julian Bashir. They explain how they were doing science and hunting and were captured some time ago.

We get little answers into how this happened. Back in Deep Space Nine, Changeling Bashir is just up and about, offering sandwiches for the team, being whatever. No one totally catches on just yet. Ziel meets Dukat to take her to Cardassia, but again, she doesn't want to go.

she's not really interested in what's going to happen of being half Cardassian and, you know, half Cardassian children have been doing a lot better on Bajor than half Cardassian, half Bajoran children have been doing on Cardassian. Interesting, isn't it? So she doesn't want that. She doesn't think that she's going to have a good life.

And Dukat intimates that things are about to change and that to stay because of Garrick is not cool. But Ciel chooses Garrick over family. The family has beef, this upsets Dukat, and she's dead. On the prison, Garrick is incest and remorseful and resentful and meets a dying and a burntain. Dane asks, Tane asks about his enemies.

Garrick says, they're all pretty much dead, unless you consider me an enemy. Tane asks that Garrick live to get revenge over his death. Garrick says, I will only do this favor if you ask me a favor as a father to a son. What? Henniburn Tane is Garrick's dad. What in the Star Wars?

Father and son reunite in death. The skeleton crew decide to escape. Deep Space Nine is readying the ship to attack the wormhole, but there was a sabotage. Listen, all y'all, this is sabotage. Many ships come out the wormhole. War's on the horizon. To be continued.

So it makes sense why this is a two-parter, because By itself, it's not going to make a lot of sense. And like setup episodes, it's messy and confusing because you only have half the story. And you need the second part to sort it all out. So then can a setup episode be entertaining by itself?

This episode did have some funny lines and fun scenes, and it explains why Bashir was the one who figured out what Garrick was up to. So that means that Dominion wanted Garak to go on this rescue mission and find out Bashir, the one on the station, is an imposter. But why? But also perfectly staged there, there's Dukat.

Why? Why? It was sort of an episode where I felt like I had to just chug through to get to the meat of the arc. And, you know, these kind of set up episodes are hard. So that's why they have to have a cliffhanger because a lot of it is more like, man,

I need to know what happens next. Yeah. Though I did like how this episode, whether knowingly or unknowingly, kept up with the theme of fucked up parents. Without fully comprehending or understanding everything, a lot of revelations, but you don't know what it means. A lot of stuff happening, but it's all messy right now.

And it's not very organized because it's not coming together because we don't know what any of this means. It's scattered. Scott, how did you feel watching just part one? And what were your thoughts?

I was like, oh, great. Exposition.

Yeah.

I wasn't that into it. I was just like, this just feels like so on your nose, on the nose expository.

Yes. Yes. It felt like we got to tell you all this information to get you somewhere. Kind of like an addendum or something. So how important is this episode and how do you rate it by itself?

It's a three-star episode. It's important. because of what's about to happen, even though not that like, yeah, it's important. It's very important. It's very significant. But as a good, as an episode, I think it's just fine.

And I was thinking about that. Just because something is important for canon does not necessarily make a good episode. And sometimes an episode that isn't even that important for canon, it can be really good. So we have to differentiate canon from good storytelling. So with that said, now let's jump right into By Inferno's Light.

The conclusion of this two-parter. Scott, can you tell us about part two?

The Dominion ships are coming. The Deep Space Nine crew are sending ships awaiting instruction on the attack. No response to the hailing ships, and they make a beeline to Cardassia. Dukat reveals that this is all part of a plan. For months, Cardassia has agreed to be a part of the Dominion,

They've been playing the game, and now they are doing what they are known to do. In the asteroid prison, Martok and Worf and Bashir and Garak, they team up to try to find the comms so they can get the information of what's going on, that there's a spy, that all this stuff is happening.

The guards then show up and explain that Cardassia is now part of the Dominion, and all Cardassians will be released, except Garak, because the new leader of Cardassia hates Garak, who's Dukat, who we will now refer to as Gol Dukat. On space TV,

Dukat promises to kill any Klingons in their space and any enemies that will get in the way of their Cardassian colonialist project, and those will face ire and violence and death. Like Beanie Siegel said in the seminal film State Property, get down or lay down. The senior staff start hashing it out. The wormhole did not get sealed.

In fact, it got reinforced to be so strong that not even trilithium could blow it up. A Bajoran engineer gets disappeared and fake Bashir is showing up. Ben gives him the green light to start the blood tests to see who is a changeling, which is pretty convenient for the changeling to be in control of the blood tests.

On the prison, Worf is doing trial by combat, just being like, I'm going to fight every Jem'Hadar. What are you going to do? Let's do this. And he's like, that's all you got. He's just like, fight me! On Deep Space Nine, Kira talks to Ziel, who is worried sick, and watches space, hoping for Garak to return.

Ziel's hero worship of Dukat is waning, and Kira offers that we should judge people based off of character of their actions and not their words. Uh... A beat-up Klingon fleet rolls up, Deep Space Nine. The funny, angry-looking guy, Gowron, the Klingon leader, he's there. He's mad. He's mad as hell that the Dominion backed the Cardassians,

flipped the war, and not really happy about fighting the ruthless war criminals that are the Cardassians. We know what the Cardassians are willing to do, and They basically sided with... the Quadrant's biggest threat just for their own protection. This is what they do. So Ben is like, yo, let's do a Dragon Ball Z fusion. Let's hook up.

Let's get this thing going. And maybe we can get the Katoma Accords, which created the peace between Klingons and the Federation. So they can squad up. And Gowron's like, Cool. Meanwhile, Fig Bashir slides into one of the ships and starts messing with some stuff.

In the prison, Garak is trying to go through these little air shafts to get the work done. He doesn't want to disappoint ZL. He doesn't want to disappoint anyone. Worf keeps beating up Mad Jemadar. It's like his job right now is fighting the Jemadar. And he ain't about to get laid off anytime soon.

And on Deep Space Nine, unsurprisingly, the weapons and the ships have been sabotaged. Gul Dukat calls Ben. Ben calls him Dukat. He's like, I'm not going to call you that name. And Gul Dukat's like, all right, I'll remember that. But I'm going to offer you this. You've saved my life a bunch of times.

So in return the favor, I have an idea. Why doesn't the Federation team up with the Dominion? But Ben is not having it. Dukat says, look, I am going to take back everything that is Cardassia's. And you know, That ship you're on, Deep Space Nine, that was Terok Nor during the occupation.

So hand it over or catch these hands. Ben smiles and tells him to pull up. We're about to fight. Garrick wakes up from his delirium. He needs to get this done. He doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to end up in one of Martok's songs about people that died or be the Cardassian that folded under pressure.

He slides back into his little area. And Worf and Martok have to accept that that's kind of respectful. And, you know, because, you know, it turns out that Garrick, he's just, he just willed his way through claustrophobia, which is wild, which is very Garrick coded. Over in the infirmary, fake Bashir and O'Brien are talking. Sure.

O'Brien is sort of like, why is Bashir geeking over deridium darts like it's game night? But he still hasn't clocked what's going on. Meanwhile, Worf is ready for his next fight, but they just have the first person on the team, like the captain, Ikatika, pull up. He's like, You've beaten up a bunch of my dudes.

This is personal now. In the crawl space, Garrick is just doing his thing. The Jem'Hadar busts into the cell. They find the tool he left behind and start looking. Ben gets Kira and Jadzia locked and loaded. They're on the Defiant. They're sending the runabouts. On the other ship, fake Bashir taps into the ops with a woman's voice.

You can see that he's knocked out the real crew. And he's large and in charge doing his thing. O'Brien notices that the Tachyon particles are spiking. Romulan ships start decloaking. They hit up Ben. They ask if they can get in on this. Ben is surprised. But he's like, yeah, let's do this. Kira checks in from the Defiant.

The Cardassian Dominion squad is about to get through. Bashir tries to play it cool. Makes some jokes. Sham'Hadar not buying it they vaporize a Romulan prisoner to make their point about to smoke Bashir but another guard figures out the tools real youth back in the

prison and in the pit Worf is actually getting beaten up Martok shouts for him to yield but Ikatika is like no Worf's kind of won because I can't finish him off so what are we going to do uh, Garrick's about to get caught. A Breen prisoner grabs, uh, grabs a guard's gun, drops to Jamadar, gets iced.

Bashir and the Romulan kill the rest, grab some weapons, and tell Garrick, for plot, you gotta get done with this quick. Worf, Worf is just, yeah. Ikatika expresses his provenance, and, um, Deos orders Worf's death, Ikatika just doesn't do it, and they're both ordered to be executed. But as the guards are about to do it,

Garak cracks the comms, the runabout beams the crew out, Ikatika catches the plasma bolt, and Worf barely escapes. On board, Garak pushes it for the escape. Martok and Bashir carry Worf before crashing. Worf tells Garak, you did good, kid. Garak says, you did good, kid, too. They peel out, go max warp to Deep Space Nine.

Deep Space Nine, everybody is confused. No enemy fleet shows. Suddenly, real Bashir calls from Gamma Quadrant. Ben figures it out. Fake Bashir was a changeling. Orders Kira to smoke the Yukon. No questions asked. Kira and Jadzia scan. Yukon is packed with trilithium, tachycite, protomatter. If it hits the Bajaran sun, boom. Everyone is a goner.

So the Defiant sprints in, yanks Yukon away from the sun. Ship blows in open space. And changeling and the crew. Well, they're gone. And then they see that the enemy fleets are starting to vanish. This was a trap. They wanted to just nuke Bajor, get the Alpha powers in one shot,

and basically take control of that whole area. Armageddon's going to have to wait for another day. Quarks, Garak, and Zeal reunite. They have a nice little thing. I told you I'd be back. I never doubted you. That's so great. We're just lonely people in space. Worf and Jadzia reconnect. Bashir and O'Brien are having a little banter.

The Changeling version of was a better friend. That's not very nice. On the promenade, Gowron signs a new treaty. Klingons are now going to permanently be on Deep Space Nine. It's sort of like, you know, a National Guard. And Ben picks Martok to be the Deep Space Nine liaison to the Klingons.

And Martok is all about that action. Dukat hits up Ben to gloat. But Ben ain't playing. He reminds Dukat, Ziel would have died too. Dukat, showing his colors, shrugs, says that she made her choice. He has no daughter. And tries to flex about tomorrow, and Ben cuts him off. Yeah, we'll see about that.

So, Dukat, in his speech through that space television... sounded like a politician running for U.S. president. And I don't just mean a Republican candidate. Both parties are captured into an ideology of being more nationalist, more imperialist, and more anti-communist than the other. So that speech was very poignant and hits hard.

And with some of the crew trapped at an internment camp. And with the use of internment camps, concentration camps by the West, like the US, Israel, the show's writing was doing a callback to the West's past, which now in present time is the West's current. The West has just been consistent. It hits different today. Now,

with the Jem'Hadar, something I found interesting was how since they were engineered to be the perfect warrior for the Dominion, over time, they established their own warrior culture with its own honor system, which is how the Jem'Hadar commander did the honorable thing and surrendered to Worf knowing he would probably be executed. Which is to say,

even if you try to control everything, life and humanity still find ways to break through the chains. So I like that. And it's three-dimensional. It's not flat. It's not just paper flat bad guys. Even our political enemies, they're not paper flat. The Jemadar were like this ultimate cold-blooded mercenary killers. But at the same time,

they somehow came up with their own system of let's do the right thing that wasn't engineered. So yeah, that was interesting. I don't know how much thought they put into that, but it did make me think about warrior culture, honor culture, even like these gross cringe memes that Chuds and Reactionary posts sometimes.

underneath there is some kind of thing you could have worked with. There's some kind of code, right? Some kind of code to try to do something good. It's just that it's been maladapted and mutated and messed up. But there was something there, right? Because there is some want to survive and thrive, I guess.

And that is part of humanity too. And that's messy to know that we all, not all of us maybe, but it's not exclusive to just the people we like. Now, at the end, the political prisoners escaped the camp and warned the station about the changeling Bashir to stop his plan, and they stop it.

Which makes me now wonder, because it wasn't addressed in this story arc, but it makes me now wonder, then why did that Bashir send Garak and Worf off on their mission into the Gamma Quadrant and let the Federation in on that signal and what it was all about? It seemed like they knew Tane sent a signal.

So I hope all this gets answered in some future episode or episodes. And it's not all just stuff that writers put in there that they forget about later. Because I hate that. You know, when shows get really complicated and there's so many movie pieces, you could tell there's some stuff that writers forgot about.

So I hope it doesn't become one of those things.

This episode is incredibly important.

So these things will be touched upon.

pretty much everything. None of this gets dropped. This is kind of where, where, where, where stuff gets really real. And, um, I mean, you've already noticed it since the beginning of the season that there's been a change, but also by everyone's going to be wearing the new outfits by the next episode. And, um,

We're gearing towards a war. So this is going to be the kind of social commentary that people really love about this.

So, so far, we've also been introduced to some recurring characters already, right? Like Xiao. Now, did this introduce another recurring character with the Klingon representative being put on the station?

Yeah, I mean, Martok is important.

Okay, so he's going to keep coming back. So things are changing that just with foreshadowing and things falling into place as far as tying up the previous foreshadows and building the story, but also now the cast and the actors, that's going to expand. The ensemble is expanding as well. Yes, and yeah.

Speaking about how the show has expanded and how the ensemble cast has expanded, even the introduction of Worf, it's just been steadily growing. There's more moving pieces and more players involved in this multi-quadrant game. So now that the story arc is over, let's not rate the final episode.

How would you just rate this arc overall now that it's over?

I'm going to give it a four and a half stars. Again, because of its significance. if it was written better, it would have been five. Cause I don't think it was like, I don't think like the acting was amazing. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't like, you know, there, there are Trek episodes.

I mean, the, the McKee episode we just finished, like that was acting.

Yeah.

That was, that was a inspired, And I think I gave that a 4.5. I don't remember. But I gave it a high rating. If the acting here was that level, it would have gotten a 5.

I mean, what you said previously about the expository, it felt like they were rushing. They just had to cram so much into this story arc to get the rest of the show where it needed to go. So maybe, you know, there just wasn't enough flexibility for people to even like percolate with the acting,

kind of cook with it, kind of sit with it. They just had to boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Let's get it along. Let's move it. We need to get from here to here fast. We got a lot to pack in.

And I will have a lot more to say about Praxis and other things about this as it opens up more. But these ones I didn't immediately go to places just yet. Except politics of passing and racism and how ZL is... phenotypically looks a lot closer to Cardassian but not enough to be respected in

Cardassia it's just interesting and like passing and phenotypes and are some things that I've been reading about and talking about and presents itself in a popular movie that just came out. But that's not what we're doing right now.

When there are things like that, right? In an episode that is so expository, that is just cramming so much in... those kind of little moments, we can't really talk about it because the story didn't give us enough meat for us to talk about because they had just too many other things.

But on those episodes where there isn't a lot happening, they meander in those moments a little bit longer, which gives us a little bit more meat, a little bit more to actually talk about because we don't have to just make stuff up. There was just some stuff that happened that we could talk about.

So I think that is a challenge where when the episode is so canon, There isn't much to talk about other than the canon.

For real.

Man, writing's hard. Yeah. Somebody just left a comment on one of our older episodes about how something you said made them realize how good the writing for that episode was. And I think it was home front. It was the two-parter. But it was about like Odo and Cisco going back to Earth because of changelings doing stuff there.

Oh, yeah.

One of the things you said is like the changelings, the dominion just constantly likes to mess with you, right? Just to constantly kind of keep you a little bit unstable, just like kind of a little bit off. Right. Yeah. And the commentator mentioned how like that whole episode started off with Jadzia moving everything slightly in Odo's room.

And so it kind of like was interesting how that person spotted based on what you said, how like actually the writers put that into the beginning of the foreshadowing of how, Odo, right, who is a changeling, Desia just messed with him a little bit and that was enough to just kind of unbalance him. So yeah,

I didn't even notice that during, I don't know, maybe you noticed it during, but like, yeah, little writing things like that. It's, you know, sometimes writing is hard and then sometimes you do good writing and it's hard to notice all the good stuff. So can you tell us about the next episode?

A little lore dump for Dr. Bashir.

Until then...