Kira Was Never Ever In Love with Odo

Personally I'd rather they stayed as good friends.

 

Yeah, their personal stories especially the period settings during the occupation were a huge revelation of their characters and how they grew as people and made me understand how their past effected them and later made them closer. I never bought their love relationship, but their history, good and bad, bonded them.

 

I think Kira loved Odo but wasn't IN Love with Odo. I still think even after they get together she still see's him more as friend than lover but she settles because maybe she doesn't think she has a soulmate out their and she knows she already cares about Odo so she feels she would rather be with someone who will be nice instead of waiting for someone that really makes her feel heads over crazy in love. That's because she isn't really someone who is a romantic at heart. Takes a more grounded and pragmatic view when it comes to love.


Jason

 

Odo is a good detective but his observational skills get clouded by emotion, such as with Laas or Occupation Changeling. Or his first occupation duty flashback where he punished someone innocent.

The Heart of Stone episode it's remarkable how long he was fooled by Kira changeling.

 

Why is it remarkable? Odo is a good detective, but a crisis situation doesn't allow for a lot of potential for the fake to trip themselves up. The Founders are good at what they do, but it's extremely hard to pretend to be one half of a close relationship no matter how much research you do. Even so, if the Founder hadn't had such a specific agenda, (to "die" as Kira, leaving Odo running back to The Link) then she could probably have gotten away with it even longer.

And quite possibly, Odo learns from that mistake. He spots the Leyton Changeling very quickly in Homefront. (Odo says that he could somehow sense the Changeling's hostility, but we don't get more explanation than that, so it could also be Odo's intuition at work without him understanding how or why.)

As you say though, Odo definitely lets his emotions cloud his thinking. (Crossfire being a particularly clear example.)

 

Regarding the O'Briens marriage...

I think that was the best portrayal of a relationship in STAR TREK, especially a marriage. On VOYAGER, Tom and B'Elanna's marriage was pretty well done, too. But the O'Briens stand out because we got to see a LOT and in a great deal of time. Being a married man myself, I found it even more rooted in truth than when I was single. Keiko may come across as a shrew sometimes, but she really did love Miles and she always had heart in making him and the kids happy. The same with him, we obviously saw how much he loved her and would do anything to keep her happy. Every relationship has issues, none are perfect. The biggest reason why theirs was the best portrayal was that some of the issues STAYED for a long time with no real solution. Exactly like real life. I always liked how their marriage was portrayed, but I love it even more now, and I definitely understand it more now.


As for Kira...

I don't buy for a second it was a chess game of using Odo for the ultimate benefit of Bajor or herself. I only need to cite one scene as proof... in "CHIMERA", when she lets Laas go.

 

You seem to conveniently gloss over 2 very important scenes in the Odo / Kira relationship :

1) first - as other posters above me have already pointed out - the final scene in 'Chimera' (and all of Kira's actions and behaviour in that episode)

2) second, the opening scene of 'Extreme Measures' when Odo is lying in the infirmary and wants Kira to leave and return to her mission of helping Damar's rebels because he doesn't want the last thing he sees to be pain in her eyes. There is real emotion and real pain in Kira (and by extension Nana Visitor's) eyes when she speaks the line : "I don't care how you look." If you can't tell that's love then I guess you haven't experienced what it means for two people who love each other to face the pain of having to lose one another because of the iminent death of one of them.

As for Kira "letting go of Odo so easily at the end", one of the greatest acts (and proof) of love when you love someone is to let them go when you can clearly see that keeping them in a relationship with you is causing them pain (in the case of Odo that pain was cause by his longing to be with his people and we have seen just how serious and how much sway that longing had over Odo in "The Die Is Cast"; it was practically embedded in his genes by the founders who counted on that longing as a way for all those young changelings they initially sent to distant quadrants of space to learn and observe about other life forms, they needed those changelings to be constantly drawn to their home so they would eventually find their way back and enable the Great Link to gain knowledge from them.
Kira perfectly recognized that longing and made the ultimate sacrifice of letting the man (or being if you prefer) she loved go, back to his people to put an end to that longing that caused him so much pain. I never saw it as an easy decision or one made lightly.

And if any part of it felt rushed (like only dedicating a final farewell scene with Odo joining the Great Link while Kira stood on the shore) it was only because pretty much everything in the final episode was rushed - including the conclusion of the war. Unfortunately (though at the same time understandably necessary) the writers spent too many episodes on establishing the 2 new characters in season 7 (Ezri & Vic Fontaine) and had to rush everything else because of that.

Personally, I can see how some viewers might not like the romance or how Nana & Rene's initial reluctance to view their characters as lovers instead of friends might have lead to some inconsistent performances, but I can't see how one can claim that Kira didn't love Odo much less that she used his affections to get some advantage for Bajor or herself (especially if one takes into consideration the 2 scenes I mentioned above). I just can't see it that way.

 

In real life, Kira and Bashir's actors were doing it. It doesn't help that in acting, one has to make a lie look real without bringing in all sorts of neat earth emotions like jealousy. And potentially neat earth diseases like herpes simplex too.

Nana Visitor had it right. Not every character has to be in a relationship (aka "shipped", ugh) and paternal or familial relationships are A-OK too. And not all families are based on DNA but other things. She nailed Kira from the start so it's safe to say she knew how Kira would be. Scriptwriters are a rare breed but actors are what take the role in a new dimension.

Keiko and Miles were closest to the average-marriage trope. They had issues and worked through them in the ways they saw best. 80s/90s Trek really did try to cover multiple situations of single parents, married couples, couples trying to make something work even if they fall apart... it's not a replacement for actual therapy, but it's fun to watch. Usually. Or rarely, I prefer the sci-fi and conflict aspects over what is already so commonplace for and with no shortage of in so many other genres. But marriage is a form of conflict, of which some equate to war... let me think about this...

 

Yeah, maybe Miles and Keiko were the most realistic couple but, from judging both of the actors together in their scenes, i think Nana Visitor and Colm Meaney had a much better chemistry. So the best pairing may have been Kira and Miles. It could have become a really great romantic relationship, if the writers went another way in Season 5...

 

Kira was in love with Neelix.
Yup, you heard it here first, folks.
Keelix.
QED

 

It would have been a pretty different show, that's for sure. Miles and Keiko suing for divorce, fighting for custody, Molly feeling caught in the middle, Miles and Keiko's friends taking sides, Keiko and her friends mad at Kira...

 

Miles and Keiko's relationship was TNG luggage the writers had to transfer over, it ran its course there, and they had no clue how to translate it into anything intriguing. Keiko is an undeveloped character because I can hardly think of any transaction between her and the rest of the cast on her own unless it heavily involved Miles. The character is a grafted branch that didn't want to be there.

Miles was best with that Bajoran engineer turned assassin early on, so seeing him with Ro Laren might have been interesting, or that Cardassian Engineer later in that 3 serpents episode. I would have liked to have seen a closer Miles and Kira friendship beside that surrogate mother, as Kira had no one in that capacity fulltime, and they had quite a bit in common as warriors. It would have been more possibilities of storylines than that of Bashir and him, although that section 31 episode was payoff.

Then Bashir could have concentrated on Garak.

That's exactly what I found remarkable, that she fooled Odo for so long in close quarters. Forget research, just to be able to perfectly emulate the very beings she despises so much.

I think she would have been able to pull it off indefinitely but was there to test him so had to push things along. And she succeeded in finding out the exact information she wanted.

 

One of the reasons why the Founders were such a major threat... even when their plan fails, they still get a LOT of mileage out of it. Even Starfleet has trouble with that at times.

 

That wouldn't have needed to end like that. It's the 24th century and people are said to have evolved above such things

Maybe something like that would have been a way to show how different relationships and marriages have become at that time..

 

Or go with Roddenberry's idea of marriage contracts that go a certain number of years and expire automatically, and the parties just move on with no hard feelings. That would be different from what we're used to today. I feel that Trek missed out on showing human culture and society being truly different and challenging our sensibilities (and not necessarily in ways that we might agree with), despite Picard's repeated "evolved humanity" gobbledygook.

Kor

 

Heinlein advanced the idea of marriage contracts for a fixed term before Roddenberry, although I'm not sure if they were original with Heinlein or not. But typically contracts where children were involved lasted until the children were grown.

 

Worf would like the type that doesn't require waiting until they're grown.

Maybe everyone is so used to prenups by this period they just include them in the marriage contract discussions, including length of time, provision for child raising, automatic renewal closes, opt-out responsibilities, disposition of embarrassing holovids, etc.

 

Kira was damaged. She only ever knew for her entire formative years that anyone may simply be taken from you at any moment, in the blink of an eye.
She will never experience love. It's too frightening for her to release herself like that.
I think in her past she may have loved someone and he was suddenly killed.
A person might never be able to recover.
It possibly happened more than once.
When we meet her on the show, she is in her early 30's, who knows how many loves and great relationships she had had ripped from her?
She can still have a different type of love and deep caring, but no, she will never love, Romeo and Juliette style.

 

Nerys is 26 in Emissary.

I disagree that she is damaged beyond repair. That does seem to happen to some people, but we see seven years of her recovery on screen. She is clearly not in the same place at the end that she was at the beginning.