This episode was recorded on August 3, 2025.
We recap "Empok Nor" and discuss a forgettable episode with a memorable racial slur.
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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 Stardate, August 3rd, 2025, we are discussing Ampok Noor. Scott, can you tell us about this episode?
Yeah, I think so. Jadzia and Worf and Kira show up to an empty Quark's. There's construction being done, which is loud, so customers are going elsewhere. Which is to tell you, there are restaurants and other bars in Deep Space Nine, but they're not as interesting as Quark's. Nog grabs a root beer.
Nog has been helping Miles fix the conduit. As you can see, as Nog becomes a cadet for Starfleet, he's really growing into himself. And while he pushes a little too hard and is a little too polite, It comes from a really good place and is learning engineering, and Miles is really impressed.
But the leak keeps on messing up, and the repairs are just bad. Miles realizes that he needs a new plasma manifold thingamabob, but there's an issue. This is Cardassian tech, and it can't really be replicated because of some beta matrix compositor. So they realized that they should go to MPOC North.
Now, if you remember, Deep Space Nine during the occupation was called Terok North. But there are other space stations that are around the Bishorn area. You know, they're not being used anymore. So that is empire. So they hope that if they go to a Cardassian station, they can learn how to fix the array. However, again,
it's not unlike Cardassians to sort of place landmines and booby traps and other sort of enemy tech places. in places that they leave because they don't want anyone to find anything. So they sort of get Garak to come in exchange for more Taylor stuff. As they're going there, Nog and Garak are playing Quatra,
which is like a Cardassian game or more an intrigue. And Garak is very annoyed with the way that Nog is playing. Nog is playing defensive where Garak says you should be offensive. And he's starting to talk to Miles about an event that happened where he killed Cardassians and is like, do you enjoy being a soldier?
And why are you, if you don't want to be a soldier, why are you always playing war games in the holodeck with Bashir? And Miles is dismissive. And then one of the, so then four, Starfleet people besides the main characters come, and he's really excited.
There's a character, Machete, who's really excited to pick up Ephemera from the base. En route to Empognoir, the teams realize that they shouldn't beam on because they're worried again about booby traps, and Garak is like They can detect Cardassians, so he goes in to try to get in, even though it's out of commission.
Garak is able to turn the station on, but then you see that there's Cardassians in stasis filled with the blue substance. The team is able to get the oxygen going, and the blue giant biogenesis compound is coming from the stasis chambers. In one chamber is a Cardassian skeleton that is about one year dead that was recently activated,
and Miles and Nog are working on some stuff. Nog forgets a wrench and then goes to see the runabout, and we see the runabout explodes. The other states as Cardassians wake up as a security protocol. They decide to use a deflector grid to send a series of covariant pulses as a Morse
code to tell people to come get them. They need to separate. Derek believes that there's something bigger at play. Nog does notice that there's a Cardassian following him. The other team gets antsy and ready to shoot. This weird stuff keeps on going on. But then they get killed, redshirted. Alas, the mission continues.
Miles has to finish Pacchetti's work and pushes the team to go find more things. And Garak goes to kill the officers and note that the team seems to have Cardassian bloodlust to kill Cardassians. This is a thing that Garak talks about a lot in this episode. And as Garak tries to fix the computers at deny access,
Garak just blasts one of the Cardassians. And then continues to talk about set with three, set with three, whatever, a battle that Miles killed Cardassians in. And it turns out that the soldiers were pumped full of a psychotropic drug. Garrick thinks that it was a botched attempt to crank up Cardassian xenophobia, turning...
security guards that were like fanatics and made them brutal and tells Miles. But Miles thinks that Garrick is starting to act weird and not acting like a tailor. And Garrick goes off to hunt the other Cardassian. But as Garrick is getting charged up, Two other members get redshirted and Garrick kills the other asset.
And then Garrick stabs the other member of the team with a flux coupler. And it seems that he's been compromised by the drug. Miles and Nog come across the stabbed staff member who says it was Garrick and then dies from the wound. Miles figures out the bloodless psychotropic drug on Garrick, and Miles vows to get Garrick,
even if it means death. Garrick calls Miles and finds a core abort and relates the game as a metaphor. Garrick traps Noggin, threatens to hurt him, and again continues to signal Miles. As Miles tries to find Garak, he is taunted again of war.
And can you talk of the continued talk of the Setwick Three and says they are both violent killers and Miles enjoys watching the life drain from others? Miles suggests a duel to the death with fists, and Garrick bites happily. Miles is accosted and sees hanging bodies of the crew.
Miles shows up and drops his weapons, and they fist fight. However, Garrick is doing great. You don't have to be an MMA commentary show to know that. Miles gets the upper hand and uses a tricoder and is able to knock Garrick out. Somehow they get back to the U.S.A. sign. The drugs are out of Garrick's system.
He is seemingly feeling a lot of guilt and asks Miles to apologize to the family of the people that he killed. And Miles agrees and says that there will be an inquest, but they know that Garrick wasn't in control of himself.
This was a horror or slasher genre episode with Garrick as the main scare villain. I feel like this episode did a lot for the character of Nog. Yeah. Further differentiating him from the Ferengi stereotype. He's virtuous, which is huge character growth from how he was in season one.
He's often selfless, even to people who don't treat him well. He wants to do the right thing.
And without giving away too much. we're going to see the development of Nog as a character in a really interesting way.
Oh, because he's already come so far.
Yeah. Without giving much away, you can sense that there's war afoot, correct?
Yes.
And it's fair to say, it's a fair assumption that the Dominion are Chekhov's gun. And Chekhov's gun is a theory that Chekhov said that if you show a gun, it has to be used. This is not a postmodern show. So we can guess from the rules of induction and deduction that there might be a war growing.
And that war changes people. That's all I'm going to say for now.
I mean, even without giving anything away, I feel like there's already a war going on now. It's just not, let's say, a hot war.
It's a cold war. Actually, in my notes for the next episode, I do use the term hot war. So yes, it is a cold war. The question is, will there be a hot war?
Got it.
And again, from being smart consumers of media, I think you can make an assumption that a hot war is probably coming. And that's not me spoiling anything. That's like me being a media person. But please continue. Before I start talking about MKUltra.
So I also like that this episode focused on lower rank members of Starfleet, which you sort of have to for this type of genre because you need to kill people off. Once you saw a bunch of characters you didn't know, if it's Trek, assume they will get killed.
that's why i said red shirt red shirt is a is a concept in star trek where often on the more exploratory shows it happens less on ds9 because they don't do as much exploration but but on the exploratory exploratory shows people in red shirts that
went on away missions often would die yes which i didn't really see on ds9 until recently like Maybe all of it happened this season or maybe the last season and this season. So things are a brewing just from that.
That's all I'm saying. Yeah.
But because you have these guest actors coming on who aren't going to appear again, I get to see some character actors I hadn't seen in a while since I was a kid. And one person is the actor who played Pachetti, Tom Hodges. who was in a lot of stuff in the 80s and 90s.
I had heard every character actor you ever liked in the 80s and 90s eventually ends up on Star Trek, and I guess there's truth to that. Other than that, I felt like this episode was pretty paint-by-numbers and formulaic. Nothing really stood out for me, not even Garrick or O'Brien. One thing that did stand out, though,
was a racial slur used by a Federation officer for Cardassians. Yep. which was spoonhead, which to me sounds very much like a racial slur used against Koreans and then subsequently made more famous for Vietnamese by U.S. soldiers. So I didn't like that. If you don't know what I'm talking about,
you could just look up some slur that has the word head in it. There's a couple that this could fit into that describes shapes of people's heads or what their heads look like. So yeah, I didn't like that.
Yeah, but it comes to eugenics, and yeah, I didn't like it. I think it's accurate that if you were some person where xenophobia towards Cardassians and Perengues and some Klingons are sort of accepted, You might use that sort of terminology as you're going into war to sort of
differentiate yourself because that's what they've been doing since the papal decree. I think in the 1400s or 1500s, it basically said it's okay to enslave people if you're not Christian. So by othering people, you feel less bad about killing them. And they're just like not enjoying the Cardassians right now.
Yeah. And if it was like Bajoran saying something, right, which I think maybe that's where it came from. Right. Then from that context, like if you're insulting the colonizer, that's different than the colonizer insulting the colonized. So that I get is just the terms they use, I think, unconsciously pull from real life. Yes. Western racism.
So that's the part I didn't like is more of the context of how it simulates and sounds a lot like real life stuff, like pretty close. So I didn't like that. But if we're just looking at it from in world, it does make sense, especially I think the origins were Bajoran. Yes. For that term. Now,
on this episode, Garrett also killed again, which I really didn't know what the point of that was. Murdering has weight, especially when it's done by one of the main characters. Yet, it seems needless for an episode that seemed like an episode of the week. Why? Why?
have an act happen for one of the main characters that has such weight, especially if it's not going to be brought up again. This episode wasn't bad, but it didn't do so much for me either. So I leave it to you, Scott. What are your feelings about this episode?
Well, I think this episode's like bad. It's the worst episode of season five.
I don't like it. Let me ask you this, because I want to interrogate why you don't like it. Do you not like it because you don't like horror genres or thriller genres or scare genres? Or is it because, no, you do like those genres, just that this didn't do it that well?
So horror is probably my least favorite genre of American film. That is true. If I had to think about genres, it's probably my least favorite. It's not a genre that I have the biggest blind spot to. I think Westerns I have the biggest blind spot to. or pre-1950s cinema, I haven't watched a ton of.
But I don't particularly care for horror, except for certain stuff that tends to be what some people call highbrow horror. I like stuff... There's a subgenre called grief horror. I may have made that term up, but like the Babadook or... A Dark Song, you know, the first movie by Ari Aster.
For some reason, I'm drawing a perfect blank. But no, I don't know. It's a movie with the kid that goes... So listeners will know what I'm talking about. But I like that sort of stuff. I just... It just wasn't interesting to me. So we're trudging along to a crescendo of the season.
And we're just given an episode where the conceit is like, you have to go to an enemy base because you can't figure out how to fix something. It's just not good. The one thing that I thought was good is... The notion that the Cardassians would create a psychotropic drug that would take
someone's anger and xenophobia and up it to the 10th degree. Because I, again, I mentioned MK Alter earlier. I think conspiracies are often a distraction, and the real world is scarier than fiction. If you just look up what the U.S. has done on the books to stop governments... That's stranger than some conspiracies. However,
we do know MKUltra exists, and we know that that sort of other programs have existed in other countries where you use psychedelic drugs or other types of drugs to brainwash people and ramp them up to become assets of the government. and allegedly people think that like charles manson was possibly a member of mk
ultra allegedly you know and things of that nature that you can use drugs to brainwash people to either do things that they wouldn't do or amp up things that they want to do but necessarily don't have the idea to do so since the Cardassians are written as these war hawks who are willing to sacrifice their
humanity for the end goal. That is interesting. That is the only interesting thing in the episode. And then four people just died for one. So I give it 2.5 stars. I hate this episode. And that's what I have to say. Sorry, I hate it strong because I didn't care for it.
Yeah, just very paint by numbers. For me, it was just more of the character growth of Nog was cool to see. And like you said, even bad horror movies, they sometimes get their ideas from real stuff. So this one being an example of that. Scott, can you tell us about the next episode?
Jake, Nog, baseball cards, Kai win.
Until then...