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Chief O’Brien has gone missing. He was looking for the widow of his old friend Bilby, the Orion Syndicate grunt that he met all the way back in “Honor Among Thieves“. Sisko is none too pleased to have lost his chief engineer, so he sends Ezri Dax on a mission to locate the Irishman. Ezri’s family has a business in the sector where O’Brien went missing, and it seems likely that they’d be able to help locate him. The “Prodigal Daughter” has returned.
There’s just one problem: Ezri and her family don’t get along and she hasn’t seen them since she became joined to the Dax symbiote.
Now Ezri must work to both soothe her relationship with her mother and brothers and work to locate O’Brien before it’s too late. Fortunately, the script for “Prodigal Daughter” doesn’t stick on one topic for too long, so O’Brien is quickly rescued and then it’s on to the next thing: stopping a crime syndicate!
“Prodigal Daughter” is a strong contender for the worst script that the series has ever produced. This is made doubly bad by the fact that it is a seventh season story when you would think that the writing staff would know better. It’s a mashed-up narrative that survived some behind-the-scenes drama but arrived without a focus or a point. The story shifts its focus every few minutes: is this a Dax story or is it an O’Brien story? Is it about the family drama of Ezri and her overbearing mother, or is it a murder mystery that O’Brien must solve? The episode itself is not sure of its direction and the end result is an astoundingly boring but narratively chaotic mess.
Wes and Clay get together to talk about an episode that features Ezri Dax but is both unwilling to examine the character and to provide a plot worth remembering. But even if this episode doesn’t tell you anything new about Ezri or the Trill, after watching this one you’ll be able to relate to what it feels like when you’ve lived multiple lifetimes.
Plus!
The guys discuss scripts that detail the mislabelling of equipment, the bland aesthetic of Trill decor, and vague confessions to murder!