A group of vedeks are having a religious ceremony when suddenly one of them is killed by a booby-trapped candle. On board Deep Space Nine, Odo informs Kira that her old resistance pal, Latha Mabrin, was assassinated. She's even more stunned when she returns to her quarters and receives the mysterious message of a picture of Latha coupled with a distorted voice saying, "That's one." It seems as though the Shakaar resistance cell, of which Kira was a member, is under attack by an unknown assassin.
Kira reports her suspicions and wants to take a more active role in the investigation, but she's got the O'Briens' unborn child in her womb to think about. When she receives a message from another resistance member, Trentin Fala, Kira invites Trentin to find sanctuary on the station. When Trentin tries to transport onto the Defiant, however, her signal gets jammed, and she arrives as a smoldering corpse. Soon afterwards, Kira hears a familiar distorted voice saying, "That's two," emanating from a PADD that Quark pilfered. When a third message arrives at Odo's security desk of yet another Shakaar resistance member, Odo tries to find the man, but he's missing, and Odo expects that he's already dead.
Kira gets put under guard for her protection, but her security is quickly overwhelmed by unknown attackers who turn out to be Lupaza and Furel, her former compatriots. They're here to work with Kira on tracking down their attacker. She invites them to stay with her while the O'Briens are off the station. They also gift her some makara herbs, which she's been taking to ease her pregnancy. Finding the herbs disgusting, Kira is less than enthusiastic.
Meanwhile, Odo notes that the assassin uses professional tactics but clearly has a personal vendetta given his mocking messages. He recruits Nog to analyze the messages with his superior lobes, and he helps identify the voice as Kira herself. The assassin is using the major's own voice against her. As they make this revelation, however, the O'Brien's quarters explode, breaching the hull and killing both Lupaza and Furel instantly. Kira fights her way past security personnel to try to help, but collapses at her doorway. After awakening, she snags Odo's list of suspects and commandeers a runabout to hunt down the killer. When she gets to the fourth suspect, a Cardassian named Prin, however, he gets the drop on her and stuns her.
Kira awakens in Prin's lair restrained. Hiding in the shadows and ranting about darkness and light, Prin reveals that he was once a simple servant of an important gul during the Cardassian occupation when a bomb detonated by the Shakaar resistance cell killed the gul, the gul's entire family, and a few dozen other Cardassians as well as scarred Prin badly. He accuses Kira of being "the darkness," a bloodthirsty terrorist who killed indiscriminately, while he is "the light," delivering justice through carefully targeted assassinations that leave no innocents harmed. Kira counters that Prin's master was a brutal warlord, the Cardassian occupation killed millions of Bajorans, and all Cardassians who supported it were justifiable targets no matter how insignificant their jobs were.
Unimpressed by Kira's arguments, Prin resolves to kill her, but first he will remove the unborn child from her womb so it will not be harmed, holding true to his ethos. Kira begs to be anesthetized, and Prin assents, knocking her out with a sedative. But after the forcefield holding Kira is turned off, she springs back to life. In the ensuing fight, Kira grabs a phaser and kills Prin. Once Kira's rescue arrives, Bashir explains that the herbs she is taking made her resistant to the sedatives. Heavily conflicted about the recent events, Kira mulls Prin's words, concluding that "the light only shines in the darkness" and asserting, "Innocence is often just an excuse for the guilty."
Tropes
- Aesop Amnesia: In Season 1's "Duet", Kira seemed to move past her racism toward Cardassians and come to believe that not all Cardassians, even one that worked in the Occupation, deserve to die. Here, however, she argues that it was moral during the resistance to kill any Cardassian supporting the occupation. It is possible, however, that she does not see these stances as contradictory. Just because someone does not deserve to die doesn't mean that they are not a justifiable military target.
- Back for the Dead: Furel and Lupaza, from Season 3's "Shakaar", show up on DS9 intent on hunting down the killer targeting their old comrades, but are themselves killed before they get the chance.
- Bittersweet Ending: Kira survives, but most of her comrades are dead, and her confidence in her actions during the resistance has been shaken.
- Body Horror: Fala is killed in a manufactured transporter accident. The results are not pretty.
- Chekhov's Gun: The herbs that Kira is taking for her pregnancy. They render sedatives ineffective, which allows Kira to surprise and kill Silaran.
- Children Are Innocent: Kira manages to save her bacon by exploiting Silaran's belief in protecting the innocent, i.e. the baby.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Flambé'd by transporter is not a pleasant or quick way to go. As Fala unluckily finds out.
- Eagle-Eye Detection: Or possibly Sherlock Scan, but Odo twigs immediately to the fact that his office has been intruded while he was gone due to the fact that Kira had rotated his chair to view the information she was after.
- Gray-and-Gray Morality: The killer claims, persuasively, that Kira killed innocent people, whereas he never did. Kira retorts that every Cardassian on Bajor shouldn't have been there and was a legitimate target. Neither side is shown to be completely right or wrong, and in the end, Kira admits that both sides were laying claim to the mantle of "innocence" to ease their conscience.
- Gotta Kill 'Em All: Prin has made a point of targeting and killing only the members of the Shakaar cell who were part of the terrorist bombing that disfigured him: Fala helped the Resistance circumvent Gul Pirak's defenses, Latha built the bomb, and Lupaza and Furel kept watch while Kira, herself, planted the bomb.
- Hand Wave: Dax points out that the transporter used should have identified the jamming device immediately, but Silarin Prin managed to overcome this "somehow".
- Hidden Depths: Dax is surprised that Worf can quote Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. The Klingon grumbles, "I am a Starfleet officer. I know many things."
- Hustling the Mark: Worf's description of the tongo game at the starbase suggests Jadzia suffered this. He notes she allowed Captain Ramirez (her opponent) to raise the stakes, only for that guy to summarily crush her.
- I Did What I Had to Do: Deconstructed. Kira tries to use this justification, but Prin immediately calls her out on it, whether or not he is in the right about it. She didn't have to use indiscriminate killing to fight the occupation, she just didn't care enough about the lives that would be lost.
- Imperiled in Pregnancy: A very pregnant Kira is lured to the Serial Killer's hideout, he stuns her, and then attempts to cut Kirayoshi out of her (the intent was to save the innocent baby and take revenge on Kira). She manages to turn the tables and shoot him.
- It Tastes Like Feet: Apparently the Makara herbs Kira has to take for her pregnancy taste like "something that crawled out of Quark's ear".
- No Sympathy: Jadzia got cleaned out in a tongo game by Captain Ramirez. Worf has no sympathy for her, pointing out she was so confident in her own abilities that she mocked the guy to his face and never once considered he was highly skilled at the game he wanted to raise the stakes for. Worf also bluntly refuses to loan her the latinum she now owes to Ramirez.
- Not So Above It All: Jadzia got taken in a tongo game, after mocking her opponent. The normally stoic and reserved Worf spends the entire runabout ride home smirking about it.Worf: I do not smirk... but if I did, this would be a good opportunity.
- Pregnant Badass: Just cause she's knocked up doesn't mean Kira can't still kick some ass. Just ask those poor security members who get in her way.
- Sanity Slippage: Randy Oglesby gives an impassioned performance to show that surviving the bomb pretty much destroyed Prin's mind.
- Tele-Frag: Prin plants a "remat detonator" on one of his targets. When Dax and Worf try to beam her up, the device kills her by scrambling her transporter pattern.
- Title Drop
- Two-Faced: Half of Prin's face is a mask of scars, thanks to a plasma charge set by Kira's resistance cell.
- Tragic Keepsake: Kira's Bajoran earring ends up being this. After Furel and Lupaza's deaths, Kira describes to Odo how they helped her to join the Resistance, and after she destroyed a Cardassian skimmer during her first mission, Lupaza used metal from it to make her the earring.
- War Is Hell: Because Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters, no side can really claim to have absolute moral superiority once people start killing other people.
- Would Not Shoot a Civilian: Defied. During the Resistance, Kira had no qualms about killing any Cardassian regardless of whether they were a soldier or a noncombatant. Enforced by Silaran, who makes a point of assassinating only the Shakaar resistance members who played a part in the bombing that left him scarred.
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The basis for this episode is that Cardassians who suffered as a result of Bajoran resistance attacks would not see them as heroic freedom fighters but rather as brutal terrorists.
