The next morning, Ezri emerges from her quarters to a commotion in the corridor, which she follows back to Ilario's quarters. The young man lies dead on the floor with a gaping hole in his chest. It appears someone shot him with a tritanium bullet. It's from close range, but Odo notes a curious lack of powder burns. Sisko recalls that there is one Federation rifle that uses old-fashioned kinetic slugs, the TR-116, created for environments where phasers would be unreliable. It never made it past the prototype stage, but a Starfleet officer could still replicate one if they wanted to.
The whole affair is disturbing to everyone, but particularly Ezri, who knows what it feels like to be a violent sociopath. Joran Dax, whose memories she and Jadzia worked so hard to suppress, starts to intrude into her dreams. He can help her, he says. She doesn't know the mind of a killer, but he does. When a second murder with an identical MO occurs, she feels even more under pressure to solve the murders.
Meanwhile, O'Brien has had a "Eureka!" Moment about the method of the killings. He arranges a demonstration for Ezri and Odo where he shoots a melon through a solid wall by attaching a micro-transporter to the bullet. As soon as the rifle fires, the bullet is beamed directly in front of the target with its momentum still intact. With the right kind of scanner, the gun could be fired from anywhere on the station. It explains everything: the close-range impact, the lack of powder burns, and the lack of signs of entry into the victims' quarters.
Well, everything except the killer's inscrutable motive, which still has Ezri stumped. As distasteful as it is, she performs the Rite of Emergence, which brings Joran's memories into her own consciousness. She can now see and talk to him as a walking hallucination. Joran has her practice getting into the mind of the killer by aiming the rifle through the station's bulkheads at people. She decides that the killer is dispassionate and clinical, possibly a scientist or doctor.
Joran's efforts to get her thinking like a killer start influencing Ezri. While subduing a fleeing suspect, she has to be restrained before she can stab him with a table knife. He's got an airtight alibi, and Ezri decides that she's had enough of Joran, but then a third victim is discovered. Finally, Ezri has a "Eureka!" Moment of her own: All three victims have pictures in their quarters of friends and family laughing. Someone who hates emotion? A Vulcan!
There are 48 Vulcans stationed on DS9, and Joran quickly spots one he's certain is the killer: a dead-eyed scientist named Chu'lak who was one of only a few survivors of a ship explosion. Ezri needs proof, so she grabs the TR-116 and finds Chu'lak through the scanner. He's in his quarters, reading her service record. Then he brings out a TR-116. The time for suspicion is over. It's life or death now. Ezri loads her rifle, takes aim, and watches as Chu'lak zeroes her with his own rifle. For the briefest moment, their eyes meet, then Ezri pulls the trigger.
Chu'lak goes down, his own bullet missing Ezri's head by centimeters. She rushes to his quarters where he lies wounded, grasping for his rifle. She takes it from him. She asks why he did it, and he says only, "Logic demanded it." Joran implores Ezri to finish the job, but she resists the temptation, calling for a medical team instead. Her job done, it's time to put Joran's memories to rest again. She returns to her quarters to perform the ritual. In parting, Joran reminds her that he'll still be with her, no longer banished to the depths of the symbiont as he was before. He is as much a part of Dax now as the rest of the hosts.
Tropes in this episode:
- Abnormal Ammo: Inverted. In the 24th century, with phasers and disruptors the weapons of choice, bullets are now the abnormal ammo!
- Bat Deduction: How Ezri concludes that the killer is a Vulcan, just by discovering that all victims have photos of themselves smiling in their quarters.
- Bizarre and Improbable Ballistics: The murders are done with a gun that teleports the bullets past walls.
- Boring, but Practical: The TR-116 as it was originally designed - tritanium bullets can't be affected by dampening fields or natural phenomena that render energy weapons useless. It's the micro-transporter and exographic targeting scanner add-ons that turn it into a cool gun.
- The Bus Came Back: Joran Dax 'returns' for the first time since Season Three's "Equilibrium". On a Meta level, this episode also marked the (brief) return of DS9 writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe after having left the series at the end of Season Five.
- Catapult Nightmare: Ezri in her nightdress.
- Characterization Marches On: Beyond being a murderer, Joran never has the same characterization twice. In "Equilibrium," he was an unstable, conflicted, and anguished artist who killed by necessity to achieve his lifelong dream. In "Facets," he's an unhinged, whispering psychopath who wants to kill everyone around him. Here, he's a stable and pragmatic man who simply believes Murder Is the Best Solution.
- Chekhov's Gun: Ilario's photo of himself laughing with friends. Not only does he make a point of showing it to Ezri, but later, when she and Joran are inspecting his quarters for clues, it's the first thing the camera shows, and then Joran notes its presence and comments on it. Turns out its significance goes beyond the obvious — it's actually the reason he was killed.
- Cold Sniper: They don't get much colder than a dispassionate Vulcan.
- Consulting a Convicted Killer: An odd variation in that the killer is inside Ezri.
- Contrived Coincidence: The killer happens to step into the same turbolift as Ezri, shortly after she narrowed the potential suspects to a list of 28 Vulcans.
- Deconstruction: Of the "emotionless, pure logic" of Vulcans. Vulcans do have emotions, and they are much more powerful and destructive than human emotions. This episode explores what would happen to a Vulcan with severe PTSD when they decide to take extreme measures to contain their emotions. In this case, Chu'lak was experiencing emotion when seeing pictures of people laughing, so "logic demanded" that he destroy the source of them.
- Enemy Mine: The situation forces Ezri to seek the assistance of Joran.
- "Eureka!" Moment:
- O'Brien figuring out how the killer enhanced the rifle to kill from across the station.
- Ezri realizing that all three victims had pictures of smiling faces in their quarters, and another one when she deduces that the killer is a Vulcan.
- Exotic Extended Marriage: The Bolian victim has a wife and "co-husband," whatever that means.
- Fantastic Firearms: The TR-116 is just a big-bore semiautomatic rifle, explored by Starfleet for situations where phasers couldn't be used, but Miles figures out that the Serial Killer modified it with a miniature transporter to let it beam a fired bullet to its target, letting them shoot through walls. Miles builds a working copy that Ezri uses in a Sniper Duel with the killer from the other side of the station.
- Fatal Family Photo: Ilario's is actually of friends rather than family, but him smiling over it is one of many warning signs that he's about to die, and the other victims have similar happy pictures near their deaths. An unusual case of the victims being targeted for death because of the photo.
- Flawed Prototype: The TR-116 was field tested, but the development of a "regenerative" phaser reduced it to an interesting curiosity.
- Foreshadowing: This episode plays with Star Trek's popular Creator In-Joke of using the number 47 in random places. When Dax is looking for suspects among the station's Vulcan population, she finds that there are 48 serving aboard, which may be a subtle hint that one of them is not like the others.
- Genre Savvy: Odo recognizes an important clue based on his appreciation for 20th Century detective novels.
- Gun Accessories: The exographic targeting sensor and micro-transporter.
- Gut Feeling: It only takes a brief first impression of Chu'lak to convince Joran that he's the killer.
- Helpful Hallucination: Invoked by Ezri as part of a Trill ritual so that she can interact with Joran.
- I Call It "Vera": When O'Brien hears about old frontiersmen giving names to their rifles, he jokes about calling his tricorder "Sally."
- If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: Ezri is faced with this once she comes face-to-face with the killer. She chooses not to.
- Improbable Weapon User: The killer seems to be using a transporter-assisted sniper rifle, which is like someone today putting a silencer on a musket.
- In Vino Veritas: A relatively mild example — Ilario tells Ezri how beautiful she is while he's drunk.Ilario: You know something, Lieutenant? You're very beautiful.
Ezri: And you're very drunk.
Ilario: True enough. But in the morning, I'll be sober, and you'll still be beautiful. - Journey to the Center of the Mind: The Joran/nightmare scenes.
- Locked Room Mystery: Lieutenant Junior Grade Ilario, victim number one, was in his quarters with the door locked when he was shot, and the station computer recorded no entry other than him. When you've got a bullet-teleporting sniper rifle, you can do that kind of thing.
- Noodle Incident: Whatever happened at that bar on Bolarus involving a younger Sisko.
- Offscreen Inertia: Ezri speculates that the killer is disturbed by pictures of people laughing, because they suggest that the laughter will never stop.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Ilario's combat piloting (the reason he's being toasted) occurred before the episode starts.
- Oh, Crap!: Ezri gasps when she sees Chu'lak studying her service record, realizing that he knows that she suspects him and now considers her a threat.
- Parting-Words Regret: When Lieutenant Ilario asks to join Bashir and O'Brien in the Alamo program, they tell him he can't. After he's found dead, they regret not letting him play with them.
- Red Herring: Ensign Bertram accessed the replicator pattern for the TR-116 rifle, and when we see him, he's being chased by security. Turns out he just collects weapons as a hobby and was on Bajor when the murders occurred.
- Red Shirt: None of the murder victims were cast members, even though the second victim was a lieutenant commander of the station.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Chu'lak was one of only six survivors of the U.S.S. Grissom when it was destroyed. The episode explores what a Vulcan suffering from severe PTSD is like.
- Shout-Out:
- Chu'lak shares his name with Teal'c's planet of origin in Stargate SG-1.
- Ilario and Ezri quote a famous exchange said to have taken place between Winston Churchill and Bessie Braddock, in which he called her ugly, she called him drunk, and he declared that while tomorrow he will be sober, she will still be ugly. In this case, however, Ilario is calling Ezri beautiful.
- Series Continuity Error:
- Joran states that Curzon and Jadzia intentionally "buried" his memories to avoid thinking about him, but "Equilibrium" established that his memories were artificially blocked by the Symbiosis Commission until the blocks degraded during Jadzia's time, so Curzon would not have known about him.
- Ezri refers to the first victim, Hector Ilario as "not the first drunken ensign I've escorted home," but all other evidence indicates that he was a second lieutenant.
- Sniper Duel: The episode culminates with one between Ezri and the murderer.
- Straw Vulcan: Deconstructed; Vulcan logic turning to straw is what happens when they lose their minds.
- Weapon Stomp: Ezri does this to Chu'lak's rifle after shooting him.
- Weaponized Teleportation: The murder weapon is a prototype rifle with a micro-transporter that can teleport bullets in mid-flight, allowing the user to kill their target from virtually anywhere.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Sisko gives Ezri one when she almost stabs the guy whom she thinks is the murderer.
- Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: After Ezri shoots Chu'lak, Joran tells her he's proud of her. Ezri just looks disgusted.
