By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
If you’re a fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, then you know the show had a rocky first season, but the episode “Duet” highlighted the show’s full potential. This was an episode where we learned more about the atrocities of the Cardassians against the Bajorans and more about how Kira has navigated her transition from freedom fighter to military official. What most Deep Space Nine fans don’t know about this episode, though, is that it was directly inspired by The Man in the Glass Booth, a famous play by Robert Shaw.
The Man In The Glass Booth
If you’ve never seen the 1967 play, The Man in the Glass Booth is about a Jewish man who gets arrested by Israeli authorities for being a Nazi war criminal. The trial against him seems to be going well until the surprise reveal that he deliberately altered medical records to impersonate his old Nazi tormentor. In the Deep Space Nine episode “Duet,” we get a similarly shocking reveal when a Cardassian posing as a major war criminal is revealed to be a minor government functionary who altered his own records in hopes that his prosecution would shed light on the brutalities that Cardassians inflicted on the Bajorans.
Originally, the story was pitched to Deep Space Nine showrunner Michael Piller by two of his interns, and they had a very different idea of what “Duet” should be like. They conceived of an episode in which the Cardassian really was a war criminal and that Kira would be put in the unenviable position of defending him. There was obvious dramatic potential in such a premise, but Piller didn’t love the initial idea because he thought it was too much like Judgment at Nuremberg, a 1961 film that just happened to star future Star Trek icon William Shatner.
According to Piller, it was Deep Space Nine producer and future showrunner Ira Steven Behr who “gave us the twist that gave it The Man in the Glass Booth kind of feeling, where the guy isn’t who he says he is but is doing it for more noble reasons.” This twist made the episode’s premise feel fresh because we rarely got to see any Cardassians who seemed remorseful about their war crimes against the Bajorans. We also got to see Kira’s own perceptions evolve as she stopped seeing the accused man as just another enemy and started seeing him as someone with surprising amounts of compassionate depth.
While The Man in the Glass Booth is a classic play that was adapted into an equally classic film, you could argue that Deep Space Nine improves upon its formula with “Duet.” Somewhat frustratingly, the earlier story never explains exactly why its Jewish protagonist would go out of his way to be caught and tried as his Nazi tormentor. In “Duet,” we know that the Cardassian impersonating a war criminal has a righteous cause…namely, to spread galactic awareness of his people’s evil actions even as he helped bring closure to the Bajoran people.
We’re big believers that Deep Space Nine is Star Trek’s best show, and “Duet” remains one of its most stunning episodes. It’s meaty, filled with monologues, and fleshes out the franchise’s world while giving us a look into the inner depths of Kira, one of the show’s most compelling characters. Looking back, though,it’s quite sobering to realize that without Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth, DS9’s earliest masterpiece may have never made it to the air at all.
