profit and loss

[Kai Winn]

i like the episode for presenting one of those alien-love missmatches, just imagine quark's sharp teeth on the lips of professor lang, and her bony rigdes scrapping his sensitive ears. the pain... not as bad as worf the brute, and troi the bore, though. still couldn't figure out when they split up, anyhow. don't recall worf ever gave her a telephone call when he was assigned to ds9.
anyway, garak vaporised at the end of the episode the bad guy, a certain gul toran, and had a casual chat with quark afterwards. i'm confused here. no alarm going off in ops or security that a phaser has been fired, and at the same moment, the number of residents on ds9 dropped by one? no cardassian government asking what happened to their gul toran, last sighted on ds9 and missing ever since? no debriefing of garak with sisko or odo?

 

[Timo]

Well, the setting of that particular killing was Garak's doing. He knew where the fugitives would meet, he guided Toran to that place, and he perfectly well knew Toran would betray the tailor he so despised. Indeed, we seem to be given every reason to think that he arranged that meeting solely for the purpose of killing Toran, and always intended to help the fugitives escape.

Doesn't stretch credibility much, then, that Garak would have taken care to turn off the alarms in the cargo bay in advance. He's right at home with the security systems of the station, and probably knows them better than Odo.

Arranging it so that nobody would miss the Gul afterwards would take more doing. But it seems likely that Toran's story about the Central Command accepting and undersigning the assassination order for the dissidents was made out of fuller cloth than any of Garak's suits. Toran was probably operating solo or undercover in his quest to get the prisoner exchange sabotaged; if anybody missed him, they would be too embarrassed to say so.

(That, and you can't have a Casablanca remake without a few glaring plot holes in it. But I don't think these are real plot holes - not for the world in which Garak lives and operates.)

Timo Saloniemi