Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's "Duet" and What Justice Means in the Shadow of Atrocities
Star Trek asks about penance and forgiveness in a stunning Holocaust allegory.
CAUTION: This piece contains major spoilers for “Duet” from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Justice is a slippery concept. Everyone has an intuitive notion of what it means -- something about fairness and people getting what they deserve, for good or for ill. But the bigger the crime, the more people involved, the more victims left in its wake, the harder it becomes to figure out what a grand idea like “justice” means in any given moment.
It’s a notion Jews wrestled with for decades, and continue to grapple with, in the shadow of the Holocaust and all that's followed it. So an episode like “Duet”, from Deep Space Nine’s first season has particular resonance for me. as a Jew with relatives who died amid that horror. Through the lens of sci-fi abstraction, Star Trek reckons with how survivors of state-sanctioned slaughter feel. It explores how we should treat those who were complicit in such crimes but not active perpetrators. And it asks how those who lived through the worst, but who nonetheless share in their people’s righteous indignation, should respond to those who benefited from all that suffering.
Those are still live issues now, with no shortage of stomach-churning acts perpetrated across the globe. And they were all the more salient then, when the direct analogues “Duet” references were still plenty fresh in the popular consciousness.
As I discussed on the Trek/Marry/Kill Pod, those issues come to the fore when Deep Space Nine receives a visitor with a rare disease, one suffered only by people at an infamous Cardassian forced labor camp called Gallitep. Major Kira, the station’s first officer goes to see this passerby, since the liberation of the camp and the suffering of its Bajoran prisoners became a moral rallying point for her people’s resistance movement. But she’s aghast when she sees he’s a Cardassian, not a Bajoran, marking him as one of the camp’s operators, not one of its victims.
With that setup, you can basically divide “Duet” into three phases, each anchored by a key question. How do you treat someone who was a small cog in a terrible machine? What should you do with a notorious war criminal? And how do you respond to a onetime enemy trying desperately to atone?
There’s intrigue and depth in each section of the episode, though in many ways, the first is the most compelling. Initially, it seems like Kira has merely tracked down one Aamin Marritza, a dedicated but unremarkable file clerk, albeit one who worked at the notorious labor camp. His mere presence destabilizes the nascent peace aboard the station. The Bajorans’ enthusiasm at the idea of extraditing this humble functionary and stringing him up, and Sisko’s insistence on getting to the bottom of the situation before proceeding, establishes a classic Star Trek thought experiment.
It boils down to an exercise in motivated reasoning. Ultimately, Kira wants vengeance, and so do her people. The first section of the episode suggests that, despite Nerys’ protests to the contrary, her goal is a simple one -- to extract blood for blood.
That mission, acknowledge or not, leads Kira to mentally transform Marritza from a simple clerk into something much greater than he really was. There were undoubtedly horrors committed at the labor camp in question, but even before the truth spills out, he seems unlikely to have perpetrated any of them. Yet, Kira’s gut-level certainty that he must have done so, that his lies about not having been there mean he was deep in the worst of the atrocities, compromise her investigation and its ability to achieve true justice.
So too does the sense that Kira, the Bajoran minister she notifies, and the station’s equivalent of a town drunk, all just want an outlet for their (righteous) anger. They’re after someone to hold to account for such grievous crimes committed against their countrymen, whether this particular individual’s specific actions rise to that level or not. The episode lays it on a little thick in places, but there’s power in the idea that Kira and her allies want vengeance more than they want justice, and so they’ll take it from a file clerk, even if they can’t take it from the true butchers they’d rather bring to justice.
The morality and comprehensibility of that is complicated by the question of how much we should hold a complicit office worker accountable for his role in such a craven venture. How do you punish someone who was a tiny but active part of a genocide? What do you do when someone committed no acts that we would traditionally think of as criminal, but whose work nonetheless supported something historically grevious?
Taken in his initial guise, Marritza feels like he deserves to be held responsible to some degree, in some proportion, to what his duties contributed to. But parsing out the how and the what, in the face of a people hungry for moral recompense, while still being just, is nigh-impossible.
I get it though. I get the urge to want to nail anyone you can because so many of those truly responsible slipped through the cracks or evaded being brought to justice through other means. I get the sense of a grave, epochal wrong having been committed against you and your people, and wanting everyone tainted by their participation in it to be given no quarter.
Kira’s anger is resonant. Her willingness to elide the usual due processes in the face of something so unique and freighted with communal loss is understandable. And the episode’s questions of whether that might also taint the sort of justice that can ever be achieved through such actions is just as palpable.
But the episode takes a turn when, thanks to some CSI-esque questionable image enhancement, it’s revealed that the man in Odo’s cells is not, in fact, a humble file clerk, but rather Gul Darhe’el, the man in charge of Gallitep, and the director of its torture, cruelty, and most damningly, extermination.
Here is where the questions of how to process a minor figure in a major atrocity go out the window, and the question instead becomes how do you reckon with the chance to come face-to-face with a monster, to finally make someone reprehensible pay for their unfathomable crimes? Here is the science fiction version of the capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. And in that vein, Kira must reconcile herself to the man’s undaunted reveling in his “accomplishments.”
That twist might not work so well without the virtuoso performance by guest actor Harris Yulin. The sterling script, penned by one of the series’ key writers, Peter Allan Fields, puts a lot on Yulin’s shoulders. The Cardassian prisoner du jour not only has a bevy of long, Hannibal-esque monologues peppered with his taunting back-and-forth with Kira, but he also has to believably capture and convey every different mode of this man. He must be a simple man caught up in something horrible, a gloating villain whose joy in his deeds is as chilling as it is plausible, and a penitent man desperately seeking his own sort of justice.
He succeeds in all three. Part of what makes the central mystery of the episode work -- Who is this guy really? -- is how convincingly Yulin hits all of those marks. He sells each turn, each reveal, each moment when Marritza is supposed to be bragging whilst on top of the world despite his fate, and when his facade is slowly crumbling. The words he offers to recount his exploits, of how Gul Darhe’el viewed his life’s work, are frightening in how they align with the self-justifications of real life Nazis, and in how Yulin matches the words on the page with an intensity and maximalist zeal that nonetheless comes across as disturbingly real.
Not for nothing, this is also Nana Visitor’s best episode in the show’s early going. She plays well opposite Yulin and gives a layered performance as Kira confronts so many complicated issues from her past and her people’s unfortunate history. The way she is steadfast in her beliefs and in her anger, while also horrified and made vulnerable by finally being able to deliver justice to her people, and still forcing herself to verify this man’s abominable deeds, comes through with affecting clarity. The emotions, the questions, the mood of this whole episode is big and intense, but with performers like these, the moments never stop feeling grounded and poignant.
The result is something galling, not just for Kira, but for the audience. To hear a man take such delight in his “accomplishments”, to exalt in being the best at genocide, to only regret that he couldn’t go further, is bracing. The actor and the character convincingly play the role of a monster, whose bragging about unfathomable sins chills you to the bone.
“Duet”, however, has one last trick up its sleeve. After a little more digging (and some cajoling of none other than series villain Gul Dukat), Constable Odo uncovers that the man in the brig is not, in fact, Gul Darhe’el, but rather actually is Marritza. It turns out Marritza had cosmetic surgery to make himself look like the infamous butcher of Bajor. What’s more, Marritza wanted to get caught, to turn himself over to Kira specifically, rather than be trapped by chance.
This reveal is the only part of “Duet”’s story that strains credulity, just a little. Dramatic cosmetic surgery is nothing new in Star Trek. But Maritza’s ability to pull this ploy off, his behavior in some of the earlier interactions, requires more than a few things to go precisely his way in order for this series of events to play out the way he intended. There’s a touch of noticeable contrivance here in the name of a good set of twists. The convenience is worth noting, even if I’m apt to forgive it.
And I’m willing to forgive it because apart from the logistics, these extraordinary actions feel right and true based on what we see and hear about Marritza. He is not merely some civil servant with the misfortune to risk being turned into a poster boy for genocide, nor the evil man who bears a substantial responsibility for the war crimes committed. He is, instead, a human being (so to speak) still psychologically tortured by what he was a party to, desperate for some measure of absolution and communal salvation, willing to go to incredible, arguably unhinged lengths to gain and offer it.
In the throes of Kira’s questioning, Maritza breaks down and, in a roundabout way, admits that while he was, in fact, a file clerk, he was not oblivious to the horrors that took place at Gallitep. He was, instead, someone who heard the screams of those abused and tortured, who covered his ears to try not to hear such terrible acts lest his mind and his sanity be torn in twain. He is someone still haunted by what he saw and heard and did, or more accurately, didn’t do enough to stop any of it.
So he chooses to act now. One of the hardest pills to swallow about the whole interlude is that while the viewer may discover a new sympathy for Maritza, it puts his prior playacted boasts in a different light. Maybe he was exaggerating a tad in his descriptions of those deeds, in order to goad the Bajorans into charging him with Gul Darhe’el’s crimes. But my read is that Marritza was imitating the attitudes and comments of his superior officers, parroting their self-justiciations and philosophies so they can be inscribed in the record, rather than fabricating them. In revealing his lie, Maritza is, in a sideways fashion, confirming it was all true.
The man isn’t here to dissemble. He isn’t even here to die. He’s here to atone, to pay back the Bajoran people in some small way, and to save his own people in another. He wants to cleanse a soul broken and lost in the horror of those screams. He wants to use his past complicity for good, or at least, allow something good to come of it. He wants to give the Bajorans the justice they deserve, if only symbolically, by throwing himself at their feet to be tried in the deceased Gul Darhe’el’s place. And he believes that only through this truth and final accounting, can his people be likewise cleansed of the great sin his countrymen perpetuated, only then can they move forward as a people and not eternally carry the stain of Gallitep and similar travesties.
It’s a little insane, but my god, what a piercing, poetic gesture, delivered in the way only fiction can. Yulin again delivers the pathos of this wounded soul and his futile bid to salvage equitable recompense and karmic realignment from such an unlikely source. And the impact of his deranged but strangely noble gesture is not lost on Kira.
If she’d followed her instincts, if she’d allowed her justified anger to overtake her, she would have signed this file clerk’s death warrant, or championed him as the Butcher of Gallitep, and never known the truth. She would never have seen that for all the understandable but nevertheless kneejerk hatred she bears for the Cardassian, here is someone whose actions force her rethink her perspective, to realize that they are no more a monolith than her people. Hers is a chance to realize that some former enemies, maybe even many of them, want to recognize the wounds caused in the occupation, and try to heal them, to uncover some measure of true justice unclouded by the urge for base retribution.
And yet, retribution comes anyway. The bitter Bajoran drunk stabbing Marritza in the back is, in some ways, an easy out. It means Deep Space Nine never has to address how the Bajorans or the Cardassians or the Federation deal with the can of worms Marritza’s existence and scheme opens up. But again, there is a poetry to it, an irony to it, where the death of a man whose end Kira once hungered for, leads her not only to mourn for him, but to recognize the brutal death he receives simply for being Cardassian as an injustice. There’s poignance in that too, which covers for any convenience.
The totality of it makes for a powerful, jaw-dropping episode from beginning to end, and a sign of the thorny moral questions of war and loss and civilization that DS9 would tackle with alacrity and conviction as the show matured and evolved. The meaning “Duet” extracts from each of those three phases, the tour de force performances from Yulin and Visitor that power it, the intricate script from Fields that deftly wrestles with big issues that are nonetheless skilfully captured in a mere forty-four minutes, is all truly extraordinary.
The whole of it comes down to that tricky notion of justice, a concept that initially puts Kira and Marritza on opposite sides but ultimately unites them. I don’t have the moral authority to decide who deserves damnation and who deserves absolution in the wake of atrocities like the Holocaust. Good men did terrible things; bad men did worse, and even more stood by and did nothing. The ethical calculus of parsing out those actions and bringing them to account is beyond me, maybe beyond anyone.
But I also don’t believe in collective guilt. I don’t believe in holding a people responsible for the actions of their ancestors. And I do believe in accepting those souls, be they individuals or institutions, who seek to make restitution and make up somehow for the harms they’ve perpetuated. If you asked Kira about these ideas at the beginning of “Duet”, I don’t think she’d agree. But if you asked her in the wake of these events, she might sing a different tune, or at least think hard about the familiar melody. As we all try to figure out how to achieve something as elusive as justice, amid a tangle of horrific acts and fallible human beings, that might be the most we can ask for.
This episode was one of the most beautiful, yet heart wrenching pieces of media i have ever watched. It moves me to tears every time I see it. This was a very well written examination of the episode