A team of engineers, lead by Miles O'Brien and including Cadet Nog, take a runabout to the abandoned Cardassian space station Empok Nor to salvage equipment to replace worn out plasma manifolds on DS9.
They get through the series of booby traps with the help of Garak. The station recognizes his Cardassian DNA and he's able to disable the booby trap before the entrance to the station.
While the team works on salvaging the equipment, Garak and one of the engineers finds a biochemical substance on a stairway and Garak gets some on his hand. They also discover some stasis tubes containing dead Cardassians and two empty. Apparently, they were triggered to be opened when the crew entered the station.
What follows is a game of hunter and prey as three hapless crew members are bumped off by the two roaming Cardassian soldiers that left their tubes. To pour salt on that wound is Garak, affected by the biochemical compound on his skin, becomes like one of the Cardassian soldiers---highly agitated, paranoid, and out for blood. After hunting and killing the rogue Cardassians, he kills a fourth crew member, who was guarding one of the engineers, by stabbing him in the chest with a flux coupler.
He then kidnaps Nog and lures Chief O'Brien to the spot. O'Brien insists he's no longer a soldier, just an engineer and proves it by improvising an explosive that renders Garak unconscious.
This was one of the scariest and most intense episodes thus far. We are with the crew members as they are on a mission to merely take unused equipment back to DS9 for maintenance, only to be hunted down one by one by biologically engineered soldiers embedded with severe xenophobia and survival skills---kill or be killed.
One highlight of the episode is when the drug is taking effect on Garak, O'Brien notices the change and remarks to Garak that he looks different. Garak responds, after having killed one of the Cardassian soldiers, that for the moment, he's no longer just a tailor.
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