Trivia / Star Trek: Deep Space Nine S03 E05 "Second Skin"

• Acting for Two: Nana Visitor plays the real Iliana Ghemor in her brief appearance in the recording.
• Enforced Method Acting: Nana Visitor's very, very real discomfort with the Cardassian makeup helped her get into the mindset of someone who literally wakes up wearing a strange face and is repeatedly gaslit into believing her entire life is a lie.
• Recycled Script: The episode reuses elements from two separate TNG episodes- "The Defector" (high-ranking member of a militaristic enemy government is secretly tested by his superiors to expose his disloyalty) and "Face of the Enemy" (female member of the regular cast is kidnapped and wakes up surgically altered to look like a member of an enemy species). Ironically, both of those were Romulan episodes.
• Troubled Production: Specifically, for Nana Visitor, who is claustrophobic and was not at all comfortable with wearing all that Cardassian makeup. After 12 hours of shooting, she'd finally had enough, had it out with the director, tore off her makeup and fled the set. While it was her hardest episode to film, she later admitted that it gave her a whole new respect for the regulars and guest stars who had to wear all those prosthetics at all times (most notably Andrew Robinson, who played Garak, and also suffers from claustrophobia, though his is the more well-known 'hates being in confined spaces' type).
• What Could Have Been:
  • Robert Hewitt Wolfe planned to end the episode on an Ambiguous Clone Ending, with Bashir unable to determine whether Kira is actually a Cardassian. This left open the possibility that Kira was unknowingly a Cardassian agent all along, and that the Obsidian Order had been telling the truth.
  • Early in the development of the "secret Cardassian sleeper agent" premise, Wolfe wanted to pin it on O'Brien. He abandoned it after realizing O'Brien's fully-human daughter Molly would raise too many questions, for both viewers and characters. Fortunately, he took a shot at doing it with Kira, who ended up fitting the premise better than O'Brien.
  • The producers liked Gregory Sierra’s performance as Entek, and wanted to keep the character, but felt it was more important to keep/give Garak’s hard edge, so Garak shot him. This is is why Garak quips "A pity. I rather liked him".

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