21 Days of Spooky: Empok Nor (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, 1997)

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21 Days of Spooky is not about pop culture that sets out to fright you with brain-eating, viscerae-hanging, slash-killing scenes, but with thoughts that linger and persist on your life long after you've watched them. Or are just downright creepy. Tonight's spooky: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's "Empok Nor". Some spoilers ahead.

What's it about?: Starfleet officers Miles O'Brien and Nog set out with friendly spy-tailor Garak and some expendable soldiers to the abandoned space station Empok Nor in search for spare parts for DS9. Little do they know Empok Nor isn't really abandoned...

It's never fun to be stuck in an enclosed space with a very angry person, imagine it's much less nicer to be trapped in a dark space station with a pair of genetically-enhanced Cardassian soldiers ready to kill whatever gets in their way. That's the predicament our friendly Starfleet officers find themselves in when they search Empok Nor for a spare conduit. As the space station is identical to Deep Space Nine (formerly Terok Nor), they figure out that not only they can salvage a conduit, but also other pieces of tech which could come in handy in the future. Of course, they'll lose some officers in the process.

As family-friendly as the Star Trek saga is, this episode still plays out a whole lot like Alien, except that the enemy is not a strange creature in this case, but the actual enemy. And it's not even the regular hyper-patriotic and sarcastic kind of cardassian either, but two roided-out killing machines who will murder anything that's non-cardassian, so this means all the Starfleet officers are royally fucked. But not Garak (Andrew Robinson), as he is cardassian after all, and the roided soldiers don't know he's an outcast hated by his own people.

So the screenplay, co-written by Bryan Fuller, sets our characters in this cat-and-mouse chase down dark corridors, tech that activates itself and gives you the jump-scare of a lifetime, and the obviously expendable officers that for some reason have lines of dialogue until they are cardassian'd off existence. The roided-out soldiers are given no identity, and apparently are part of an experiment gone wrong during the occupation of Bajor, which ultimately ends up making sense of why was Empok Nor abandoned and no one ever thought of turning it into another Deep Space Nine, because DANGER.

Funniest, and possibly spookiest part of the episode, is that everybody's so focused on the evil soldiers drug-rampaging through the abandoned station, that everyone fails to notice how the friendly Garak is getting more and more aggressive by the minute, highly unlike himself... until he kills the remaining expendable officer and sets out to chase our two main characters in the long, dark corridors. How did Garak get afflicted by the roid-out drug? Fuller and Hans Beimler's screenplay never bothers to explain it, we can only assume it was when he got into the broken pod of a dead roided-out soldier, or any other time.

So, you see, the threat is no longer a stranger, as our roided-out soldiers are long dead by now, only Garak remains. And he's a part of the family. He knows how the crew thinks, he knows Miles (Colm Meaney) is a former soldier and can fight him as equals, and happens to be a really intelligent man who once was a spy with a deep knowledge of cardassian stations. They are all isolated, as their ship was blown out earlier in the episode, and can't really appeal to Garak's peaceful side as he's pretty much on hardcore bath salts. How can you save yourself from someone who's smarter, more skilled, and deadlier than you?

Miles, also, refuses to hurt Garak, as he knows that it's the drug that it's affecting him and he's nothing but a friendly tailor-spy, but the cardassian doesn't have the slightest guilt about killing everyone, and is actively riling up Miles so that he can kill the irishman in a battle. It's a ruthless and frightening situation, as you're fearing for the officers' lives, but also for Garak's, who you know it's an innocent man. But if said innocent man becomes an unstoppable threat, isn't it the right course of action to stop him, no matter the cost? It's a horrible situation that the viewer is set with.

As you can imagine, I won't reveal the end of the episode, but I will share that Empok Nor later returns in a season 7 episode, reborn as a fully functional space, so hopefully someone there remembered to vent the shit outta the place before bringing cardassians along.

Tomorrow: Creepy spiders and psychological issues, courtesy of Matthew Holness' Possum.