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Star Trek DS9 - Season 7 - Episode 23

Star Trek DS9 - 7x23 - Extreme Measures

Originally Aired: 1999-5-19

Synopsis:
Bashir gets inside the mind of Section 31's Sloan in an attempt to find a cure for the Founder's disease. [DVD]

My Rating - 6

Fan Rating Average - 3.39

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# Votes: 102 3 1 4 5 6 18 13 18 13 14

Filler Quotient: 0, not filler, do not skip this episode.
- Numerous major long term plot threads are serviced here.

Problems
None

Factoids
- Garak's 36th episode.

Remarkable Scenes
- Julian and O'Brien telling Sisko of their plan for a cure.
- Bashir capturing Sloan.
- Sloan telling Bashir a garbled sequence for the cure.
- The scene of friendship and camaraderie after Bashir and O'Brien got shot in Sloan's mind.
- Sloan enticing Julian at the end.
- Bashir, regarding the bottle of the "good stuff": "This is older than I am!" O'Brien: "What? I'm drinking with a child!"

My Review
Another illusions plot and the first bit of real filler in a while. The whole Section 31 attempting to commit genocide on the founders thing is the best use of Section 31 ever done though, and the plot of this episode, while a bit slow, is enticing. We get great character development for Bashir and O'Brien and the way Sloan met his death is just the kind of thing we've come to expect from Section 31. Bashir manages to cure Odo, but if it weren't for O'Brien, Bashir would have fallen for Sloan's trap and died with him. So in the end, it's O'Brien's friendship with Julian that saves his life and in a way this entire episode celebrates their friendship over the course of DS9's run. So ultimately, it's hard to rate and review this episode. It lacks the expected Dominion war plot, aside from the necessary curing of Odo, but as a substitute it offers something very touching.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Benjamin Baxter on 2008-07-16 at 1:43am:
    Problem: Julian's comment that the lock to Quark's isn't that complex, contradicting a scene from an earlier episode that involves a very complex lock created by Rom. Ironically, that's a lock that Julian and O'Brien tried to pick in that episode, if my memory serves.
  • From MJ on 2011-01-29 at 8:56am:
    On it's own, I like this episode a lot. But the way this whole thing gets swept under the rug is a bit too much for me to give it a full 10. Bashir lures a member of Section 31 to the station, kidnaps the guy, tries to use an illegal device to scan his memory, keeps him alive for the sole purpose of scanning his memories, and then eventually the guy dies in what could only be considered murder...or at the very least, manslaughter. And not only does nothing ever happen to Bashir, but it isn't even mentioned. Ever again.

    At first I thought it might be because Section 31 is secretive and also frowned on by the Federation. But secret or not, it seems to hard to believe they wouldn't send their own people after Bashir having so closely guarded the cure to the changeling virus for so long. And as we find out in the next episode (spoiler alert), the Federation Council apparently approved the changeling virus anyway, so clearly Section 31 has plenty of sympathizers that they could use to help stop Bashir.

    That aside, I like the episode. The Odo scenes are nicely done, and it was good to see Bashir and O'Brien have one last adventure together before the series ended.
  • From Gaius Gracchus on 2021-12-25 at 2:41pm:
    This is a nice episode - a light comedic break in this final nine-episode arc. Has heart, giving us some more of that bromance between O'Brien/Bashir, and doesn't take itself too seriously - the writing as the two are about to enter Sloan's mind is just so deadpan about a very silly premise. Simultaneously, it builds towards the conclusion, curing the morphogenic virus and tying up that loose end of Section 31. Not a great standalone episode, but at this place in the story it is most welcome.

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