SCORE:
After spending several hours at Quark’s with DS9’s latest pilot fresh from the Academy, Ezri is shocked to find the next morning that he’s been murdered. Curiously, he’s been shot not by a particle weapon, but with an old-fashioned gun with a bullet. They determine the bullet only traveled a few inches before hitting him, yet he has no powder burn marks one would expect from being shot at such close range. The fact that he was just a kid and that she’d left his quarters ten minutes before he was murdered has rattled Ezri, who starts having nightmares of her sixth host, Joran, the serial killer.
When a second victim shows up, a science officer with no connection to the other victim other than they are both Starfleet officers, Ezri gets assigned to build a profile of the serial killer. O'Brien gets an idea for how the shooter has been killing his victims at close range without showing signs of ingress or egress from their quarters or leaving powder burns when Bashir is talking about how Davy Crockett would use a series of frying pans to do trick shots. Using the model of rifle the shooter is using, O'Brien outfits it with a transporter attached to the muzzle. Using a targeting reticle, he’s able to aim and shoot at a test melon from outside the room, with the transporter sending the bullet closer to the target while preserving its momentum. With this setup, the shooter could be literally anywhere on the station to do it.
Ezri knows that her nightmares of Joran are telling her to bring his personality to the fore as she can get inside the mind of a killer to track another one, but she is hesitant. Worf convinces her that she should do it because she is Dax, and Dax always gets the job done. So she performs the Rite of Emergence to bring Joran to the fore as a hallucination that Ezri can interact with. Joran encourages her to get a feel for the weapon of choice, even attempting to goad her to fire on a random target as she looks through different quarters. She refuses, and Joran points out the gun was unloaded, that he just wanted her to know the sensation that the killer must get.
At Quark’s, Ezri sees security chasing a Starfleet officer and she tackles him. Joran goads her into grabbing a knife which she almost stabs the suspect with before Odo stops her. As it turns out, the suspect had accessed the rifle replicator pattern but he’s a weapons collector and has an alibi for the first murder. Recognizing the violent influence Joran is having on her, she decides to reverse the ritual, but is interrupted when a third victim is found, a Bolian. Examining his quarters, she finds something that he has in common with the first two victims. They all have pictures in their quarters of them laughing with friends or loved ones.
From this, Ezri deduces that the killer is a Vulcan, one who has suffered a sufficient trauma to want to lash out at what he perceives as a frozen display of emotion. There are a lot of Vulcans on the station, however, so she’ll need to narrow down the list. As happenstance would have it, she gets on a turbolift with a Vulcan who Joran immediately believes to be the killer. She looks into his service record and finds he’s one of 6 survivors of his crew of 1250. That’s certainly a traumatic experience. She uses the targetting reticle to look into his quarters, where she finds him reading up on her own service record, and then grabbing his rifle. He begins to aim it toward her, so she shoots first, his shot missing and hitting the wall behind her.
He’s not dead but he is bleeding and crawling on the floor, while Ezri gets to his quarters and stops him from grabbing the rifle again. Joran urges her to finish him off, but she of course doesn’t do that, and calls Bashir for medical assistance. Having solved the case, the time to put Joran back where he belongs has come. But Joran points out that by bringing him so close to the fore, Ezri will never be able to bury him as deep as Jadzia or Curzon had. She’ll have to live with him in her mind forever. She’s solved the murder mystery, but at a cost.
NITPICKS- If you’re going to stick a transporter onto the end of a gun, couldn’t you skip a step entirely and just use the transporter to, like, beam away their brainstem?
- Sisko: Then the killer must have fired at point blank range.
Odo: I don’t think so. There are no powder burns on the body.
Bashir: What are powder burns?
Odo: At close range, chemically propelled weapons leave residual combustion products on the skin and clothing of the victims.
Sisko: How did you know that?
Odo: I read twentieth century crime novels. Raymond Chandler, Mike Hammer, that sort of thing. - O'Brien: The killer. He set up an alternate bullet trajectory, one that didn’t require a direct line of sight between him and the victim. Julian, you’re a genius.
Bashir: Don’t thank me, thank Davy Crockett. - Joran: You won’t be able to forget me or bury me as deeply as Curzon or Jadzia did.
Ezri: I know.
Joran: I’m part of you now. As much as Audrid, Torias, any of them.