Star Trek: 10 Best Cardassian Episodes

Horrifying and heart-breaking in equal measure, Duet is an example of using the minimum available resources to achieve the absolute maximum effect. Ranked as one of the best episodes ever produced of the entire franchise, Duet is a painful character study into inhumanity, guilt and grief.

Major Kira is told that someone suffering Kalla-Nohra is coming onboard the station. Kira knows that this disease only appeared in a single labour camp and that the conditions there were harsh. Any Bajoran who survived it is someone that she should honour. When she goes to meet this survivor, she finds a Cardassian man, Aamin Marritza.

Incensed and ready to blame him for war-crimes, she has Marritza arrested, but finds that he is not a recorded war-criminal. He insists that he was just a file clerk. When Kira digs deeper, she finds an image or Marritza at that particular camp, but the picture does not identify him as a file clerk, it identifies him as Gul Darhe'el, the Butcher of Gallitep.

Marritza proudly boasts that he is Darhe'el, but Gul Dukat, that ever-present snake, says that this can't be so. He attended Darhe'el's funeral a few years prior. This man Marritza has undergone cosmetic surgery to resemble his former master, then to throw himself on the mercy of the Bajorans so that they would have someone to tear down, someone to vent their anger and hatred at. Marritza was just a file clerk but he knew what was being done at Gallitep and filled him with fear and disgust.

As Major Kira is in the process of letting him go, a random Bajoran man murders him in the street, saying that Marritza being a Cardassian is reason enough. Kira realises that it wasn't, that such hatred will never get anyone anywhere.

Marritza was just a man doing a task but felt a great weight of remorse at what had been done by his state. While he certainly succumbed to the Cardassian pastime of speaking eloquently at great length, he was by no means evil. He felt the evil that his people had done seep into his skin, however and felt he might never be free of it.

The Cardassians had it rough to start with, Gul Madred talked of how harsh and unforgiving their world is, even though Garak longed to return to it. Their passion as a people is for control and order, but one that was also their downfall.