Martus keeps playing the game and keeps winning. In every other respect, Martus has become a winner. Quark takes an interest in his game, offering him huge sums of money to buy it from him, but Martus sees through his eagerness and keeps it for himself. He meets another widow named Roana who is closing up her shop because she has no one left to run the business with. Martus convinces her to form a partnership, and the pair open up a casino right across the hall from Quark's, using jumbo-sized versions of his game like slot machines.
Meanwhile, O'Brien has taken to playing racquetball with Bashir. O'Brien is annoyed to be repeatedly trounced by the young, chipper doctor. He just won't let it go and demands rematch after rematch. Keiko tries to soothe O'Brien's raw nerves by insisting that it's just a natural part of life to slow down as he gets older, but O'Brien's pride won't let him back down. Meanwhile, Bashir complains to Dax that he's become a prisoner over O'Brien's one-sided rivalry and admits that he had to fake a medical emergency to get away last time.
Martus's new casino draws all of Quark's clientele away, and even Rom jumps ship to get a job at the new casino. Martus is riding high. Alsia reconnects with him and reveals that her investment scheme has hit a snag: She needs a large sum of money to clear up some red tape, but once that's accomplished, she could return the investment ten times over. Martus is impressed.
As time goes on, the bridge crew become increasingly aware that small accidents around the station have inexplicably escalated far more than usual. Even Kira accidentally takes a spill, but she brushes it off as simple bad luck.
Bashir tries to sandbag a game to appease O'Brien's ego, but the chief isn't fooled, and it only makes O'Brien angrier. He goes to Quark's to cool off. Quark is desperate for any customers and tries his hand at this listening thing that Martus is so good at. O'Brien's tale inspires Quark to set up a "champion versus champion" racquetball event between O'Brien and Bashir so he can earn profits off the gambling.
As if on cue, Martus's luck turns sour. All of his gambling machines hit the jackpot at once, nearly bankrupting him. Roanna catches him putting the moves on a dabo girl and severs their partnership. Needing a quick infusion of capital, Martus decides to give the remainder of his bankroll to Alsia so she can give him ten times back in return.
O'Brien and Bashir get guilted into agreeing to Quark's match due to the Ferengi's promise to spend half the profits on blankets for Bajoran orphans. As O'Brien prepares himself for war, Quark tries to fix the match by giving Bashir a spiked elixir, but the doctor sees through it. Quark then tries to persuade Bashir to throw the match so that there will be more profits for the orphans, but Bashir refuses. The match begins, and suddenly O'Brien seems to be unstoppable, while Bashir trips all over himself even without the effects of the elixir. In fact, the sudden shift in skill causes both to get suspicious. After some experimentation, they realize that the ball unerringly whizzes straight back to O'Brien no matter where it goes. How lucky can one guy be?
The crew realize that all of these fluctuations in luck are getting out of hand. Dax figures out a way to find the source of the anomaly by tracking the spin rates of neutrinos. The larger the percentage of neutrinos spinning in the same direction, the stronger the anomaly. The epicenter turns out to be Martus's casino. They destroy the machines, putting an end to the anomaly.
Odo emerges to arrest Martus, as his original victims have changed their minds and decided to press charges. In jail, Martus is shocked to watch Odo put Alsia in a cell, revealing that she was conning Martus the whole time, and he can expect no huge return on his investment. Quark visits Martus in jail, and Martus tries to convince him to lend him some money to get him off the station for good. The smug Ferengi considers the idea and says, "Go on. I'm listening!"
Tropes
- Always Someone Better: A variation — Martus steals away Quark's clientele for part of the episode, but it's firmly established by the end that Quark is the superior bartender and con man.
- Black Box: Martus got the original device from some unknown alien in Odo's cells and had the replicators scan it and made larger ones. He doesn't know how they work, or even how to turn them off, and it's never explained how they influence neutrinos and/or luck. In keeping with DS9's slightly unusual priorities (for Starfleet), the resolution sees the devices phasered into dust without any further investigation (or even much curiosity). To be fair, they almost certainly confiscated the original device.
- Competition Freak: The theme of the episode. Quark gains a rival club owner who steals away all his customers and his brother; O'Brien becomes highly motivated to beat Bashir at racquetball after the latter blithely lists off his semi-professional successes, as part of the series' ongoing arc of slowly forging Bashir and O'Brien into friends. The two threads tie back together when Quark decides to make their next match into a stationwide event, drawing his regulars back from Club Martus to bet on whether O'Brien or Bashir will take the final. O'Brien, unwittingly on the receiving end of the luck manipulation from the phlebotinum of the episode, can't lose, but when he realizes this, he stops the match — he doesn't want to win that way.
- The Con: Martus falls victim to a classic con sometimes known as "The Spanish prisoner" and the "Nigerian prince scam." Essentially the conman claims that a huge payout is being stalled by the need for a comparatively small up-front investment.
- Con Man: Martus is said to be this, and Odo initially arrests him for taking an elderly Pythron couple's money and investing it in a business, his business, which swiftly folded. Martus doesn't actually con anyone during the episode proper, however; the closest he comes is stealing the game from his dead cellmate and trying to marry Roana (before being caught with his nose in a dabo girl's cleavage). Instead, he's the one who gets conned — by Alsia, the elderly widow he was charming at the beginning of the episode.
- Continuity Nod:
- Quark references Sisko blackmailing him in the very first episode when he demands that Sisko get rid of Martus.
- Martus' people, the El-Aurians, are described as a race of "listeners", which was how TNG's Guinan described her race back in "Evolution"; Star Trek: Generations would subsequently confirm Guinan to be El-Aurian.
- Death Seeker: Martus' cell mate dies after breaking his losing streak with the machine. Since the machine affects luck.
- Deliberate Under-Performance: Bashir tries to let O'Brien win during their second set because he's worried O'Brien is going to have a heart attack, but O'Brien refuses to be patronized.O'Brien: Next time, you either play your best or you don't play.
- The Empath: Martus is an El-Aurian, like Guinan from TNG. The whole species have a form of limited empathic abilities, which makes them extremely good listeners.
- Fantastic Slurs: "Listener" is used to refer to Martus's species, the El-Aurians, in scoffing, disdainful tones.
- Fighting Irish: No actual punches are thrown, but Miles spends most of the episode in an extremely bad mood after Julian invites himself into the racquetball court Miles has just built, determined to wipe the smug smirk off Bashir's face even after the latter starts trying to make excuses to get out of it.
- Gold Digger: Martus uses his empathic listening abilities to work on old women with money to spare — the episode starts with Alsia baring her heart to him, telling him about her secret plan to buy an asteroid mining claim. Later he moves on to a Bajoran widow, a shopkeeper named Roana, whose storefront he uses for his club... only for her to pull the rug out from under him after catching him making time with a dabo girl, throwing him out as the lease is still in her name. Finally inverted — Martus invests in Alsia's venture, hoping to recoup his losses after his luck turns, but it turns out she was conning him and there was never any mining concern to begin with.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Turns out the lovely old widow Martus was trying to scam was a scam artist herself.
- I Need to Go Iron My Dog: During their first racquetball match, Bashir has his assistant call him away with a fake "emergency". Not because he's worried O'Brien will beat him — he's worried that the Chief is going to give himself a coronary.
- Martial Arts Headband: Before Miles' big rematch with Bashir, Keiko places a silk scarf scented with her perfume around his head and gives him a Motivational Kiss.
- Motivational Kiss: Keiko ties a Martial Arts Headband around O'Brien's forehead, kisses him, and whispers, "Kick his butt."
- Murphy's Bullet: Here's a nonlethal version. Bashir and O'Brien are playing a game of futuristic racquetball. The latter is established early in the episode as a spectacularly unlucky player due to the unrevealed Phlebotinum of the Week messing with probability. When the weird probability-altering device begins evening things out (reversing all the bad luck into good and vice versa), no matter where he or anyone else throws the ball it will always come back to his hand.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: O'Brien realizes something is off when he's playing better than he ever has in his life. Even throwing the ball in random directions causes it to always come back to his hand.
- Replacement Flat Character: Martus, played by Celebrity Star Chris Sarandon, is this to Quark — a one-off sleazy, womanizing, cheating Con Man who opens a club on the station and employs Rom there, treating him terribly. Not being a recurring character, this allows him to get a comeuppance Quark would usually avoid, losing everything and being forced to leave the station aboard a freighter.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Rom does this twice, first to Quark, going to work for Martus, and later to Martus, because if he's going to be cheated either way, at least Quark is family.
- Serious Business: O'Brien is very determined to beat Bashir in racquetball.
- Shout-Out: Dax's remark on how something is "not impossible, just extremely improbable."
- Techno Babble: The mysterious gambling machines somehow alter the laws of probability. This is explained in a sequence where Dax notices over 80% of the neutrinos aboard the station are spinning clockwise rather than counter-clockwise, when it should otherwise be a random but roughly even distribution of either. (The spinning of the neutrinos is stated to be a symptom of the influence of the devices, and the actual method by which the devices influence probability is never actually stated.) The bridge crew use the statistical anomaly to track the phenomenon to its source, finding an area (Martus's club) where nearly 100% of the neutrinos are spinning the same way (effectively impossible), and disintegrate the devices with their phasers.
- The Lady's Favour: A friendly racquetball rivalry between Chief O'Brien and Dr. Bashir results in a charity match between the two, with Bashir as the heavy favorite. As O'Brien prepares for the match, his wife Keiko, who had previously been mildly amused by her husband's obsessing over beating Bashir, stands behind him, assuming the attitude of a samurai's wife preparing her husband for battle. She then presents him with a silk scarf scented with her perfume, wraps the scarf around his head, kisses him, and whispers, "Kick his butt."
- Upper-Class Twit: Julian's incessant name-dropping and humblebragging continue to rub O'Brien the wrong way. At one point he does a Brief Accent Imitation to mock him in quarters with Keiko.
- Walk-In Chime-In:Martus: You can't possibly blame me for this, Commander.Sisko: Oh, I'd like to. Unfortunately, I don't have anything I can charge you with.Odo, entering: Fortunately, I do.
- Winds of Destiny, Change!: The toy somehow manipulates the laws of probability, granting some inhabitants odd streaks of luck which is seemingly siphoned from others, causing a string of mishaps and minor accidents. Apparently, luck is finite, as both the game's original owner and Martus discover that their luck eventually runs out. Martus's runs out in a matter of days, seemingly because he replicated and enlarged the device, and the effects end as soon as all the copies are destroyed.
