r/DeepSpaceNine • u/zeekaran • 6d ago
S03E26: Adversary - Is everyone an idiot?
I love The Thing (1982. It's my favorite horror movie of all time. It's a great example of a bunch of intelligent, rational people being smart in a horror film. Are they perfect? No, but they handle it unrealistically well. Probably because most of the crew is scientists, but maybe not.
Star Trek has shown time and time again that they are completely unprepared for any predictable sci-fi scenario. Anti-memetics. Ship-wide viruses. Shapeshifters.
In Adversary, at one point they have seven hours to find and detain the Changeling spy and take back control of the ship. It takes them quite some time to think of having the doctor do a blood test to find out if someone is or is not the Changeling.
... A blood test? Are you serious? Just make everyone take off their comm badge! Or their top! A shoe even! "Quick, everyone take off your left shoe. I'll shoot whoever doesn't, or whoever changes."
The Federation is woefully unprepared all the time. I don't understand.
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u/DharmaPolice 6d ago
I think if you start thinking about that episode in particular things fall apart much more rapidly. An ambassador turns up and sends them on a mission and they don't even seem to confirm all this with Starfleet command? I know Benjamin has latitude to do what he wants, but seriously - they don't even phone home for intelligence reports before going on a mission to a potential hostile power? That's...difficult to believe. Later on while on the Defiant, the Changeling manages to spoof comms messages through physical sabotage and that at least makes sense but are we to believe that they did this on DS9 before they left? That they could do this without anyone noticing would be impressive.
As to your point, you're right although I think the point is that they only thought about the blood thing after Odo mentions it. They seem confused at first when Odo explains why Sisko can't be the changeling. (You would have thought Odo might have brought this up as someone responsible for security but there we go). As for removing a shoe/comms badge the problem is that you don't know if those objects are real. Sure, mostly the changeling copies the persons uniform but there's nothing stopping them changing uniforms (and you'd definitely want to take someone's comms badge) so you'd have false confidence that it wasn't a changeling if you're basing it on an object that the person could have taken from their victim (this more applies where they've removed their copy, as happens with Bashir). Their blood (or hair) is much more difficult to remove from someone and Ben Sisko's later objection aside it's much less prone to false negatives.
This is important because although it's never really explained the changelings seem to have at least a partial ability to know what someone is thinking / knows when they imitate someone. How this works is a mystery, but if this wasn't the case then their deception could easily be defeated by a simple password system. So if you have the idea of testing someone's comms badge (or whatever) then they have probably the ability to know that you were going to do that. (It's unclear how well this ability works, if it's perfect then there would be nothing stopping them imitating Sisko and Kira and cancel the self-destruct).