“Distant Voices” is a maddeningly painstaking episode to watch. Good, compelling moments seem to hover just beyond the edge of consciousness and, all the while, there’s a kind mental detachment between the story and the characters that populate the story. This isn’t a terrible installment of DS9, however, it’s far too uneven and unmistakably contrived to be either a compelling mystery or valuable character analysis. And that’s not to say that there’s no mystery or no character work being done. It’s just that DS9 has experienced much greater success in both areas in previous episodes than it does in this one.

The focus of the episode is Dr. Bashir who is bemoaning his imminent thirtieth birthday. And, early on, we can expect that events will, somehow, be contrived so that the good doctor will learn to appreciate his relative youth. Which, of course, happens by way of Plot Device A – aka an alien with the power to zap your brain and trap you into a coma. And actually, the revelation that Bashir is, in fact, trapped within his own mind, is the central mystery to the beginning half of the episode (after that, the mystery is in figuring out how to extricate himself from his mind).

Along the way, Bashir encounters DS9 crew members who are meant to represent different elements of his personality. This is the most interesting element to the episode – watching O’Brien be the voice of hesitation and fear, Odo that of paranoia, Dax of bold action and so forth. The problem, however, is that the performances are just too awkward to be taken seriously. Of course, the performances are supposed to be off-beat, so as to represent the different personality elements. But this is a case of the idea being better than the execution.

Part of the problem is that the episode didn’t just focus on the personality elements. Had it done so, perhaps they could have been more fully and plausibly realized. Instead, the episode added in a rapid-aging element to Bashir’s experiences in his mind – to signify the diminishing time he had available to wake himself up, or die. And while this angle certainly provided Siddig an opportunity to stretch his acting legs a bit (with some intriguing performances), the setup is just too obvious and shallow to be accorded the amount of time it’s given – simply to make the good doctor feel young at heart again once the episode ends.

Because, of course, Bashir finally figures everything out, wakes himself up and, obviously, feels better about his thirtieth birthday after spending much of the episode with a broken hip (which, somehow didn’t immobilize him beyond one scene).

“Distant Voices” is an example of an episode trying to do too many things all at once. A focus on Bashir’s personalities, his inner conflicts and regrets, would have been sufficient. But adding the rapid-aging, fountain-of-youth angle diluted the most valuable explorations of the episode. And, too, the executions here never really hit their broken-hip-hindered stride.

Filed under: Deep Space Nine