Vortex
At first glance, “Vortex” looks like an anomaly. With the exception of “Silent Enemy” (and we’ll get to that sinking, burning garbage scow on Sunday), every other episode in this slot involves the retelling of someone else’s story. Whether it be Dashiel Hammett, Jonathan Swift, the unknown author(s) of Beowulf, or Roddenberry himself, somebody was always finding themselves being rewritten.
Here, in contrast, there’s no obvious previous text being reworked. This appears to be no more than a story about Trek’s least flexible head of security learning to get along with a louche multiple-murderer.
Except it isn’t that simple. There is a text here that’s being altered. Croden ultimately admits that the story he’s spun about the Changelings isn’t true. The only reason he can do this, of course, is that Odo hadn’t been allowed access to the original tale. Odo’s own history is being rewritten, and he has no idea that this is the case.
While other episodes in this slot explore what can be done by rewriting our cultural artefacts, then, “Vortex” revolves around the hole left when someone has part of their own story taken
away from them.
Two Imaginary Boys
Let’s start with the storyteller himself. Not just because he’s central to the episode, but because guest-star Cliff DeYoung does such an excellent job with him. From the addled intro of his mugging attempt through to his understated confession of his killing spree, DeYoung constantly plays Croden off-kilter. It’s fascinating to watch, really – an extrovert Robert Smith with access to a firearm. That’s not the only person Croden reminds me of. There’s also Hashi Lebohwl from Stephen Donaldson’s Gap Series, a man impossible to read not because he can sell lies as truths, but because he has so little interest in what’s true in the first place, every sentence comes out as equally (un)believable.
This, combined with his seemingly bottomless reserve of easy-going charm, makes him the perfect foil for the ill-tempered, just-the-facts-ma’am Odo. And yet as diametrically opposed as they are in so many ways, they’re also, as Croden himself points out, tremendously similar. It’s not just that they’re both cut off from their own people, or that as a result, both are driven by a need to recover what they’ve lost. There’s the fact that Croden’s ability to dissemble, surprise and take sudden advantage of a situation has echoes of Odo’s own ability to change form. Croden’s character is as malleable as Odo’s body, which in turn reminds of what makes Odo easily one of the greatest characters Star Trek has ever produced – he’s a shapeshifter who is both metaphorically and literally incapable of being anybody but himself.
Odo’s body might be fluid, but his character and temperament are diamond-hard. Odo is Odo to the core. That’s part of what makes it so hard for him to deal with the parts of himself which are missing.
The Widening Gyres
These concerns regarding centrality – and for that matter revolving – keep recurring through the episode, through the repeated invocation of vortices. I’m not simply talking about the Chamra Vortex itself. That’s not to say it isn’t an impressive effect. It clearly is. Re-purposed from Wrath Of Khan it may have been, but it still looks breath-taking. The shot of Ah-Kel’s Marauder hanging above the USS Ganges like a hungry ocean predator, in particular, is simply beautiful.
As gorgeous as Croden’s bolt-hole is, though, I’m more interested here in vortex as phenomenon. A central, gaping absence, around which everything else resolves.
It’s clear that each of the three named characters who enter the Chamra Vortex has a hole inside them. Each suffers an absence so dense it pulls at every part of what remains. For Odo, it’s the lack of a home, and the dearth of not only a family, but any idea of what that
word means for the culture he came from. Croden’s absence stems from the loss of almost all his loved ones and his inability to return home without endangering his life. Finally, for Ah-Kel it’s the death of the brother that gave his life meaning. Three people, cut off from their families, denied a sense of belonging, searching for something to fill the hole inside a literal vortex.
It’s impossible for all three of them to succeed in filling the hole, of course; Ah-Kel and Croden have mutually incompatible goals. Ultimately, Croden regains his daughter, and Ah-Kel loses his life. One win, one loss.
So what’s the score for Odo?
Justice Theory
It would be tempting to suggest that Odo manages a no-score draw here, with his quest for background neither advanced nor further frustrated. He seems to be stood exactly where he was before meeting Croden, in fact, aside from him finding a distant cousin who doubles as an accessory (and says something about this episode’s quality that I don’t even particularly mind the coincidence that someone Odo arrests just so happens to own a stasis pod unlocked by a Changeling-designed key).
I don’t think this is quite right, though. Staying the same distance from your goal doesn’t imply nothing has changed at all. To see how far things have shifted we need only look at where the episode ends. The constable ends up letting go a man he witnessed commit first armed robbery and then second-degree murder. A man, mind you, who has also confessed to multiple murders of state agents back on his own homeworld. What we see here is the person who once declared “Laws change, but justice is justice” decide that there are some circumstances in which some murders shouldn’t result in prosecution. Odo has drifted in the vortex to the point where he’ll let someone with a brace of body-counts skip out of his runabout, and happily waltz off to Vulcan.
You can argue Odo does this from a sense of obligation, after Croden saved his life. That doesn’t entirely do the job, though. Even if Odo were the kind of person to believe saving a life cancels out taking three or more (and nothing we’ve seen of him so far suggests that’s the case), there’s the obvious fact Odo was only in danger in the first place because Croden shot down an unarmed man, and then lured Odo into a dangerous situation under false pretences.
Besides, we can come up with a more interesting alternative. Finding Yareth changes everything. Firstly, after everything recent events have done to remind Odo of the pain of growing up alone, he can’t bring himself to subject Yareth to a similar fate. Further, the mere fact of her existence lends enough weight to Croden’s explanation of how he came to be on the station in the first place. Which perhaps wouldn’t matter, except for Odo’s unexpected decision that the story’s truth implies justice can only be served by shielding Croden from his own legal system.
(One of these days we’re going to have to talk about the fact the Federation allows people to be extradited to their death. It’s one thing to refuse to force a society to stop murdering its own people. It’s another to run a shuttle bus to the gallows. Still, I guess “Captive Pursuit” demonstrated Starfleet can in theory grant asylum if it’s asked for, and presumably Croden didn’t/wouldn’t want to apply, since he can’t rescue his daughter while inside a Federation penal facility.)
This seems an odd choice from a man who once worked tirelessly to uphold Cardassian law. Cardassia, like Rakhar, practices the death penalty, and every trial they put on is a literal show trial – the individual mattering only to the extent that they can be used to demonstrate the infallibility of the state. Combine this with the obvious horrifying crime of the occupation itself, and Odo’s insistence on his devotion to justice reads like a purblind focus on what laws people have broken, rather than why they broke them, or how terrible are the things the law allows to be done to them in response. This is the most impersonal definition of “justice” possible. Terek Nor was a slave-labour facility run by a culture that taught even the individual Cardassian was irrelevant compared to the state, never mind the Bajoran slaves. The chances Odo never collared anyone for a crime that got them the death penalty can’t be all that high – it still makes no sense that Ibudan wasn’t executed for murdering a Cardassian, for instance.
(I wonder actually whether it’s occurred to Odo – consciously or otherwise – just how much he once had in common with the two people Croden killed on Rakhar. Agents of a brutal regime enforcing the laws of that regime? Odo would never obey an order to murder a criminal’s family – or anyone, really – but the parallel is still there.)
What I’m getting at is that Odo letting Croden go isn’t him generating a precedent through some entirely unfamiliar experience. It’s a fundamental change in outlook. He’s handed over criminals to unjust regimes before, and surely some of them will have had children. What makes this situation different is that Odo’s acceptance of Croden’s story combines with his homesickness and abandonment issues, allowing him to identify with Croden and Yareth at the same time. This allows him to vicariously gain from their freedom twice over – a freedom, by the way, achieved by getting them to the Federation, the same society Odo is slowly acclimatising to.
It all hits at just the right time, at just the right speed, in just the right amounts. A perfect storm. A perfect vortex.
Lost And Found
This is a moment of quiet revelation for Odo. I don’t know to what extent it stems from him meeting Croden and Yareth, and how much comes from spending time in the Bajoran Militia alongside Starfleet (and Major Kira), and thereby realising how appalling the Cardassian model of justice really was. Either way, this is clearly the start of something. It’s actually not that hard to belive, given how long he managed to stomach the occupation, that had the Dominion been encountered while Dukat still controlled Terek Nor, Odo might have dived into the Great Link without a second thought. In some ways, “Vortex” represents the moment in this still-young series in which Odo decides he can’t go home, even though he has no idea of that fact here. He has centred himself in the Chandra Vortex, not the Omarian Nebula.
There’s a lovely visual nod to this right at the start of the episode, as Odo listens in on the meeting between Quark, Rom, and the Kel twins [1]. Consider this: there is absolutely no need for Odo’s glass disguise to actually shatter when it hits the wall. That’s just showing off, and while it’s absolutely not true that Odo would never show off, I don’t think he’d do it in the midst of five criminals trying to kill each other.
Odo’s re-assembling – a literal reformation – isn’t in service to the plot, then. What it is instead is a visual metaphor. Odo is coming together. He’s assembling himself, piece by piece, into what he will become – the changeling who refused the entirety of the Great Link until it would engage with him on his own terms. It’s here that Odo begins to realise that it isn’t enough to just fill the hole in the centre of your vortex. You have to decide how you’re going to fill it.
Ultimately, Odo never does entirely fill his vortex, not even by the show’s finale. He gets close, though, by accepting two fundamental truths: friends are the family you choose, and sentimentality is not only no impediment to true justice, it is its bedrock. It’s questionable at best whether the Founders treat the worlds they conquer any worse than the Cardassians treated Bajor, but by the time Odo encounters his people, he’s too aware of how much their approach costs those living in or under the Dominion.
(Given that we’re seeing the beginnings of Odo’s realisation that you can’t cure homesickness through self-isolation, it’s rather nice that the second episode focussing on him takes us two for two in demonstrating Quark is already his friend, even if neither of them actually realise it yet. It’s rather touching to see Quark risking his own health (and possibly life) by pretending to Ah-Kel that he can’t locate Odo, and the contempt with which he greets Rom’s delight at the possibility of the constable’s death.)
I think that’s about all we can take from Odo’s journey into the vortex. Doubtless some of these themes will return when we get to the next episode which revolves around him (which replaces the infinite emptiness of the Chandra Vortex with the suffocating confines of a broken turbolift). For now, though, we must leave Odo in flux. It’s time to leave behind the myth of the Changelings, and dive into the epic poetry of Beowulf.
Ordering
2. Vortex
[1] Hitchcock nod aside, the choice of a glass for Odo’s disguise is also quite appropriate, given how utterly transparent Croden seems to find him. Plus, obviously, it’s hollow. Like the centre of a vortex. Like a man with no history.