In today’s episode, when Miles steals cable from Ops to keep Keiko entertained during a plasma storm, her armchair prognostications earn her a shot at the big-time. But when Dax starts tripping the light fantastic, it’s up to Keiko to find an exit ramp that will take them off the loop. Can Worf put the cat back in the bag? Was Miles born for the stage? And is Odo better at taking care of Molly than Miles is? All this and more in The Tempest, the book that’s probably Shakespeare?

The Tempest
Author: Susan Wright
Published: February 1997
Pages: 275
Timeline: Roughly a month after Worf’s arrival on DS9
Prerequisites: General knowledge of both Keiko’s internal arc and Worf’s relationship with the Klingons as he makes the transition to DS9

There’s a big storm a-brewin’ near DS9—a plasma storm, that is. On hand for the space-nor’easter is none other than Keiko O’Brien, brought back by a harsh winter in Bernice Province that’s temporarily forced her survey to a halt. As she picks Molly up from holosuite riding lessons, she reflects on her discontent with the station being “home”, and on why contentment continues to elude her when so many others seem to have found it here, and  so easily to boot. Meanwhile, as Sisko issues an emergency “dock or GTFO” order, Worf, still in his period of dissatisfaction with the way the station is run, makes feline foes in the Sattar when he withholds their clearance to go through the wormhole so he can make sure they didn’t have anything to do with an attack on another ship that came limping into port.

To help keep her from going batty, Miles leverages his clearance to have readings on the plasma storm piped directly into their quarters for Keiko to study. With no other filters turning anything interesting up, she runs it through a biometric scan and learns that the behavior of the storm is similar to that of a school of plankton. She shares her discovery with Dax, and the two get permission to go out in a runabout and gather more data. The nature of the storm makes that difficult to do, but eventually they find out that the storm has the potential to (a) permanently close the wormhole, (b) ionize everything between the wormhole and itself (meaning DS9 and Bajor), (c) create a self-sustaining gravity well that would power the storm for centuries, or (d) do all three. Not great, Bob!

Back on the station, the Sattar weasel their way into bunking with Worf and move forward with plans to blow the docking clamps on the Klingon ship that actually did carry out the attack and leave a trail that makes it look like he did it. When the Defiant retrieves the drifting yacht, the captain overloads the warp core and blows it up. Five of the six crewmen are successfully retrieved, but Bashir discovers the irradiation they underwent in the storm isn’t just breaking down their cells, it’s decomposing their whole molecular structure. Meanwhile, just as Dax and Keiko finally start to get some good data, the flashes in the storm start giving Dax blank-out seizures of steadily increasing duration. A sort of varying psychological impact depending on species gradually becomes apparent, but they won’t even have time to process that if they can’t shove this storm off in some other direction.

The Tempest is worth it for the Keiko stuff alone. Keiko O’Brien is, of course, a character who bears the misfortune of being on a show that, sadly and as outstanding as it is in most respects, does not really have the capacity or resources to give her character’s specific needs the attention they require or deserve. Her smaller-scale personal struggles are compelling on paper, and a more intimate setting would have the time and the means to deal with them, but Deep Space Nine has a lot of fish to fry, most of them bigger. As it grew from a waystation for visitors from an unexplored quadrant into the inflection point of the Federation’s next major war, a cry like “I’m not happy living here” began falling on increasingly deafer ears. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, indeed.

Luckily, however, one of the great things about the books is that they have the leg room to kick back and explore things like this that get tossed by the wayside, whether out of disinterest, a kind of hard necessity, or both. But it’s not only that that makes this book a winner. What Susan Wright remembers that TNG and DS9 proper so often forget is that Keiko is a respectable scientist in her own right. Quick! Without googling it! What kind of scientist is she? She’s a botanist, though you could hardly be faulted for not immediately remembering. You simply don’t see her doing science, much less very much outside the context of her husband. “In the Hands of the Prophets” is the only instance I can remember of a situation in her wheelhouse that didn’t really meaningfully connect to Miles in any way. Here, however, she’s shown to be every bit the scientific equal of a like Dax, with her own unique viewpoints and insights, and it’s really refreshing.

The Worf stuff isn’t quite as interesting, and I found it a little hard to keep up with how the Sattar’s social hierarchy worked,1If I understood it correctly, it’s a little bit Klingonesque, but not quite as cutthroat, and they use the term “deal” (noun) in a way that is kind of confusing, but seems to essentially mean “an opportunity to carry out a scheme.” but it isn’t bad, and eventually ends with a pretty cool mutual understanding between the two parties. If I have one non-negligible complaint about the book, it might be that it’s a little dense with technobabble for my taste. Keiko and Dax go back and forth bouncing a lot of ideas off of each other, and though it feels like it’s trying to be rooted in solid science, it sometimes goes on for several pages with no end in sight. But overall, this is a great treatment of her character, and certainly a more successful attempt than the last time someone tried.

MVP & LVP

• In case it wasn’t apparent from the body of the review, this week’s MVP is Keiko. This is her moment in the spotlight, and Wright is careful not to waste it.
• The LVP of this book is Quark. This simply isn’t a situation that calls for any of his talent or input, and so he barely appears in it.

Stray Bits

• Wright says The Tempest is based on the Shakespeare play of the same name, with Keiko as Miranda and Worf as Prospero. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about Shakespeare to be able to speak to that, so I’ll take her word for it.
• The Tempest marks the first literary appearances of both Leeta and Kasidy Yates. We’re getting to the good years!
• Amid the chaos, Miles begins to flounder when it comes to figuring out what to do with Molly, and in his desperation he leaves her with Odo, which comprises what I suppose can be said to be the book’s C-plot. This is a pretty great little thread, not gonna lie. Babysitter Odo is a lot of fun.
• Keiko is so inextricably intertwined with Miles that it’s nearly impossible to talk about the former without raising the longstanding question “Is Miles a bad husband?” (and really, the only reason I do so here is because I’m not sure it’s come up before on this website, except possibly in passing jibes). On this score, Wright is deftly cagey, never openly editorializing, though there are scattered tidbits that could potentially be construed as betraying a somewhat low opinion of Miles’s non-officer functions—e.g., on page 65, when she contemplates the prospect of Molly having a pet: “Miles certainly wouldn’t be much help. He could hardly keep a house plant alive. If she hadn’t put the bonsai on an automatic drip, it would be dead by now. She considered taking it back with her to Bajor, but she had grown the damn tree for Miles in the first place.”
• To that point, in yet another futile attempt to expose her husband to culture, Keiko tells Dax about trying to get Miles into Noh: “He tried, but he hated practicing the speeches and movement patterns. And the masks drove him crazy. Not that I was surprised. He isn’t fond of understatement or contemplation in any form.” (p. 200)
• I make it a point not to mention misspellings or typos unless they’re especially egregious, because these books have too many of them in general for every single one to be worth pointing out, but I think seeing Worf’s baby mama’s name spelled “Kay’lar” crosses the threshold for sure. Maybe those things were harder to look up then, but I can’t imagine Paramount didn’t have resources. (p. 214)

Final Assessment

Good. Keiko O’Brien is often tossed aside and forgotten by the show—not really out of any sort of malice toward the character, I don’t think, but simply because the show doesn’t have a lot of time to contend with her particular struggles amid everything else it has going on. But the books have the luxury of exploring the parts TV doesn’t or can’t at greater depth, and The Tempest restores her to a place of prominence as a scientist worthy of respect and able to go toe-to-toe, in terms of both intellect and action, with the higher-billed senior officers. For this alone, it’s worth your time, but it’s successful in enough other aspects as well to be considered good on the whole.

NEXT TIME: Voyager takes a stroll through The Garden