SDS9 – S5E17: "A Simple Investigation" (Patreon)

This episode was recorded on May 18, 2025.

We recap "A Simple Investigation" and Odo's bedroom eyes.

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

(Note: Many phone plans come with Paramount+ for free. It can also come with your cable package, credit card, or in a bundle, so make sure to double-check. There are also other ways to watch DS9 that we're sure you internet space explorers can figure out. Otherwise, since Scott does such an excellent job with the play-by-play, you don't have to watch the episodes to enjoy our breakdowns.)

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, May 18, 2025, we are discussing a simple investigation, which is probably not that simple. Scott, can you tell us about this episode?

Yes, I can. Or as, you know, when tribal requests say, can I kick it? Yes, you can. So I'm gone. An Adenian is in his quarters, anxious about something. He's visited by two unfriendly Finians. They want something. The Adenian states they don't know what they're looking for, and then gets disintegrated by the Finians,

and they wait for a woman to find it. What is it? Quarks on the second level of the bar, Jadzia, Bashir, Odo, O'Brien, talk about a new role-playing holo program from Felix, which has finally arrived, where Bashir gets to play his secret agent character that we've seen before. They make the rules of the LARP,

and Odo decides he doesn't want to play, and he goes somewhere to ruminate. A woman, Arisa, tells Quark to chill out and points out how all the gamers are gaming him. Odo and Arisa have a little flirt. She says she gives him bedroom eyes. She is waiting for someone. There's some flirting, and we see the Finnings watching.

Odo is looking for some shipping stuff and is doing a sad boy and is confused about the bedroomized comet. Kira says, this woman is perceptive and maybe you should go talk to her. and remember that Odo does have unrequited love for Kira at this point.

At Odo's office, he sees that Arisa is trying to find out what happened to her. She is using a data port from a mind computer thing that can talk to computers and talk to interfaces and do all types of cool stuff, and asks Odo to chill out.

She's trying to find her daughter that she gave up for adoption and wants to meet. The dude, Talvid. However, he is vaporized on the floor. And they look at it. It is Talvid's genetic data. Odo thinks there may be issues with the daughter. Odo drops the charges for hacking into his files.

Arisa goes hacking again and comes to court. Odo isn't following her. She has an encrypted file. Odo doesn't believe she has a daughter. She's been duplicitous about all of this, but her desire about him. She works for Drain, part of the Orion, which is a syndicate, and they do a lot of blackmail.

And she does hacking for him. And her friend said he had intel to get her out of the game. Yeah, there's no daughter. The crystal has something, and Odo places her in protective custody. The Finians sharing, Pasparat knows she's talking to Odo. They regret it, but they decide she has to die to keep this data safe.

Odo secretly takes her to his quarters as he knows them fools are going to try to play. She figures that there is a log and has been using triangulation and tricky moves to try to find the people, and she cannot ID anyone who's trying to kill her.

Arisa reveals that she used her brain port as a form of almost sex work, but without the crystal she will die. Odo asks her to press charges. Odo sees something in her and compliments both her inner and outer beauty. Odo comes to Bashir's hollow game to ask questions about intimacy and worries again

that he is in an unrequited situation. Odo comes back to his quarters. They will work on the crystal in the morning. They kiss. In bedroom, post-intimacy, Odo has essentially lost his virginity, and they talk about each other's bodies. And it's very... And Odo says that the only thing he can consider of having sex before was

connecting with changelings in the Great Link. And this is his first experience in humanoid sexuality. Odo is curious as to why they are so connected. Odo doesn't want to end their tryst, but they must get to work. In Ops, the girly pops, Jedzia and Kieran Worf are gossiping about Odo having the sex.

He arrives late with a glow, and they make fun of that glow. Drane makes a deal. Arisa hands over the crystal. And she's walking free. But she won't. They're going to kill her anyway. Meanwhile, Odo meets another Adani in responding to his report. The man reveals Arisa is an undercover agent. The crystal holds her erased memories.

He asks to see her and Odo agrees. At the lab, they find Miles and the guard unconscious. Arisa's gone, crystal in hand. Luckily, the Adanian can track it. In a cargo bay, Arisa meets the Finians. One waits in the shadows, phaser ready. Arisa gives the crystal to the Finian, and now they are going to kill her.

Odo shows up and kicks their butts. She was an undercover intelligent agent, and will use the crystal to take down the criminals in the Syndicate. Arisa is one with who she was before. Arisa meets him in the quarters. She's married and has a husband, and we actually don't know her name.

This Arisa explains that two things are true and that Arisa loves him a bit still, but whether they run into each other again, they will forever remember this moment.

So this was another episode that I thought was going to be light, but ended up kind of being dark. This was also a very cyberpunk episode, which was a nice departure in sci-fi styles. But I also noticed Odo episodes tend to be film noir detective styles and borrows a lot from that genre,

especially things like femme fatales or just women interested in Odo often for no reason. which is unfortunately true for the genre. This is a deep cover vice cop episode, but with a twist where your memory has actually been erased and replaced with another. So unlike the previous episode with Julian Bashir, where you're messing with DNA,

here you're messing with memory and identities. Except this time it was consensual, which was nice. But this was more of a straight detective investigation. themes of amnesia or mistaken identity. A lot of old movies have done this where you get brainwashed, you think you're somebody else, you're caught in a web.

And it hit all the usual beats you expect in that genre without tackling all the complexities or moral questions like the previous episode with Dr. Bashir did. Like I said, it was consensual and it wraps up nicely, which I'll get into. There were a bunch of things I almost wanted to say about this episode,

but there wasn't enough in the text for me to flesh anything out. I feel like a lot of the questions I had were tied up at the end through dialogue, especially when Arisa explains we are all multitudes and all those identities are valid. It brought up questions and just answered it all. And because it was ultimately consensual,

It's kind of like, okay, it's all nicely wrapped up with a bow on it.

Yeah, it was ecstatic and consensual. And, you know, yeah, that little moment where she was like, no, that was real. And this was real. And that was nice.

This episode also felt like a reveal into a side of the Trek universe that you don't normally see. Kind of to say, just because we don't show you that stuff doesn't mean it's not there. We see the world of the haves, but there's also a world of the have-nots, which Marissa keeps talking about.

But it was just a glimpse. And as much as you can see in 90s primetime TV shows for Trek fans.

And also remember, this is a deeper part of the Alpha Quadrant. So things are going to be happening a little different. So there are going to be places that don't have the post-scarcity mindset.

It's going to be much more like the real world. Yes. Like we talked about in the last episode about the haves and have nots and the gaps, the income gaps, the quality of life gaps, just the gaps between the rich and the poor. So this episode, I don't know.

I mean, I don't have much to say about it. Scott, what did you think of this episode? And how important is it for canon? How did you rate it?

I rated a three. One of the more meh episodes. I found the sexual chemistry to be actually very hot. And I like that. And... That was the only thing that was really interesting to me. There's not a lot of lore developed except perhaps Odo now being a sexual being and not...

what we assumed to be maybe asexual or aromantic or graysexual, we really didn't know. And we still don't totally know. And again, the biology of the changelings is so different. So how they experience sexuality and gender, we might really not have the language for it. But we're seeing Odo, who self-identifies as he,

exploring his sexual side and I think that may have made people who relate to that part of Odo feel hopeful because there's a lot of archetypes in the Deep Space Nine characters that a lot of people relate to in figuring out that they had ADHD or that they might be autistic or they might be asexual or

The more complex characters like Jadzia Dax and Trill and Quark in this particular show where a lot of people realized that they were on the spectrum from watching Data the first few seasons. They were like, I've never related more to a person ever before. And again, these are archetypes. These aren't perfect representations.

And oftentimes, they were not on purpose. Creating data, they weren't being like, let's create what was called Asperger's at the time. Asperger's awareness by having this character. They were just like, we're going to have this cool robot character. A lot of times, fiction gives us gifts that are not necessarily created by the creator, but are super valid.

And I think that's why Deep Space Nine resonates so much with the lefties and all the, and I say this with all love, all the weirdos that I love in this world that connect to this Trek differently than other Treks. Except for also Discovery.

A lot of people connect to the first two seasons of Discovery because they handled characters like that well. As you would assume, in a post-scarcity, peaceful setting, there's going to be more acceptance of others. And again, with Odo, there's positionality. You feel for Odo's longing. You feel for Odo's loss.

you feel for odo being what again these are these are not like terms that i would use loosely but are important to the context to the changelings he is a race traitor and to a lot of the people on stark fleet they believe that he is a class traitor

By being a constable, the word cop is shorthand for constable on patrol. And we understand where policehood happened in America, how it started. But we'll get there. I promise you, we'll figure out a way to get there in one of these episodes. But in case people gloss over this episode, because it's not the most exciting one,

I'll save there. But I just think it was really smart. especially later in life, realizing giving a character like Odo multidimensional facets, including sexuality and wish for intimacy, that I think is accidentally really smart writing. But don't get me wrong. The... For me, the best Trek writers ended up on Deep Space Nine towards the end.

So it's not by accident. It's just that some of the things that resonate socially, I do not think were on purpose.

Yes, yes.

I think. I don't know. That's just my premonition.

I guess in thinking about why I didn't have much to say about this episode, I realized what made DS9 DS9. And it's that in thinking about this episode, it didn't have the complexities I've come to expect from DS9. And then I realized, oh, well, that's what DS9 is about.

It's about episodes, whether sometimes they're clunky or not, they have a lot of complexities.

And my friend, what's really exciting about a show that gets to go to the fifth season is you start getting standalone episodes of characters that you never thought you would. You start getting to know characters in a way that you never thought you would. We pretty much... We're like two-thirds in,

and it's now just going to be mostly bangers, a lot of mythology, and many of the characters that haven't gotten a lot of shine get some shine.

Actually, I guess that's something that this generation and future generations aren't going to get, right? Because nowadays it's normal to have seasons that are like 10 or 8 episodes. So because you're not getting these 22, 24 episodes, you don't get these solo episodes about one character, you know, characters you wouldn't normally hear about,

and just give them a lot of flesh and flesh them out and make them three-dimensional. So that's something... that's kind of disappeared in TV writing and show writing. So yeah, that's kind of sad. And we got to kind of go to the past if we want to see that.

So that's kind of a interesting thing that in thinking about just episode numbers that comes up and what you just talked about when shows go for that many seasons, right? Right. Five seasons, 22, 24 episodes. There's just things that you can explore that you just can't otherwise. Yeah. Scott, can you tell us about the next episode?

Money.

Until then...