Kira/Dukat and “Wrongs Darker than Death or Night”

Ok, so I know a lot of people don’t like “Wrongs Darker,” and I don’t blame them.  For a little back story, the writers wanted Kira and Dukat to have an affair. Nana Visitor (bravely) protested and said Kira could never view Dukat romantically, and so the writers — as a way to needle both Kira and Nana Visitor — decided instead to make Dukat have an affair with her mother.

It’s not a promising start. It’s a little fanfic-y.  But I’m going to be honest, it’s one of my favorite episodes. And part of what I love about it is that it completely turns everything that’s happened between Kira and Dukat on its head. You canNOT watch anything that happens before or after without this knowledge in mind.

What do I mean? The episode itself shows that Meru deciding to become Dukat’s mistress has direct benefit on Nerys and her brothers — Taban’s message to Meru mentions that they are no longer at the refugee center, but back home, and that the children have gained weight. One can assume from there that Basso’s line “Your families will receive extra food and medical supplies” is actually carried out. In other words, Dukat is perhaps directly responsible for Nerys surviving childhood, being healthy and able enough to join the resistance, and helping to bring down the Cardassian occupation.

On top of that, one could speculate (it’s not improbable) that Dukat had been watching Nerys since early childhood, even up to and possibly after Meru’s death. He would have known from the moment he met her who she was and what his role had been in her life. It possibly shapes every interaction that we see with her, and certainly casts a new light on his line “Ohhhhh, we already do” (in response to Kira’s “Do you think we’re going to have some sort of intimate relationship?” in A Time to Stand.)

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To me, Dukat knowing from the beginning who Kira is and his role in her (and her mother’s) life would in no way keep him from seeing her in a sexual or romantic light. If anything, it would probably make him MORE attracted to her, almost as if she were some perverse form of a protege that he had taken part in shaping and creating, just as much the Bajoran Resistance. Several people have mentioned Dukat seeing himself in Kira and being attracted to her because of that narcissistic element, and in my opinion, having this connection with her would only cement in — in some very basic ways, he DID shape her development, and he knows it, and he LOVES it.

It also makes their relationship a weird never-ending cycle: he was lovers with Kira’s mother, was in some ways responsible for her upbringing, wanted to be lovers with Kira, and then allows Kira to be a mother-figure for his daughter Ziyal by ANOTHER Bajoran mistress.

But this affects Kira too. She said more than once through DS9 that the Bajorans succeeded DESPITE the Cardassians, not because of them (she said this to Dukat in Return to Grace), but in her case, just how successful she would have been without her mother being Dukat’s mistress can never be known. She at least has to face the possibility that she would not have been alive to fight the good fight unless her mother had been a “collaborator.”

Which brings me to the last point — for Kira the Bajoran resistance had always been black and white. Finding out about her mother not only has to make her ask some uncomfortable questions about what makes someone a collaborator — did her mother really have any choice? Why was she a willing mistress? Did she in some way “sacrifice” herself for her children? Who knows? — but also as to how it affects her. Again, as said with Dukat, she now has to contend with the idea that she may only have been as successful as she was in the resistance BECAUSE she had the advantages of being the daughter of a collaborator. OUCH.

Finally, although this doesn’t have much to do with Kira and Dukat’s relationship, I must commend Nana Visitor for allowing Kira to feel ambiguous towards her mother at the end. Memory-Alpha says the original ending had Kira unequivocally forgiving her mother - kudos to Nana for standing up and saying, “It’s not that simple.”

tl;dr: This one episode affects every other interaction Kira and Dukat have, and it literally casts an entirely new light on how both of their lives ultimately played out, AND I LOVE THAT.