677. [DS9] Field of Fire
SCORE: 
(4/5 stars)
After spending several hours at Quark’s with DS9’s latest pilot fresh from the Academy, Ezri is shocked to find the next morning that he’s been murdered. Curiously, he’s been shot not by a particle weapon, but with an old-fashioned gun with a bullet. They determine the bullet only traveled a few inches before hitting him, yet he has no powder burn marks one would expect from being shot at such close range. The fact that he was just a kid and that she’d left his quarters ten minutes before he was murdered has rattled Ezri, who starts having nightmares of her sixth host, Joran, the serial killer.
When a second victim shows up, a science officer with no connection to the other victim other than they are both Starfleet officers, Ezri gets assigned to build a profile of the serial killer. O'Brien gets an idea for how the shooter has been killing his victims at close range without showing signs of ingress or egress from their quarters or leaving powder burns when Bashir is talking about how Davy Crockett would use a series of frying pans to do trick shots. Using the model of rifle the shooter is using, O'Brien outfits it with a transporter attached to the muzzle. Using a targeting reticle, he’s able to aim and shoot at a test melon from outside the room, with the transporter sending the bullet closer to the target while preserving its momentum. With this setup, the shooter could be literally anywhere on the station to do it.
Ezri knows that her nightmares of Joran are telling her to bring his personality to the fore as she can get inside the mind of a killer to track another one, but she is hesitant. Worf convinces her that she should do it because she is Dax, and Dax always gets the job done. So she performs the Rite of Emergence to bring Joran to the fore as a hallucination that Ezri can interact with. Joran encourages her to get a feel for the weapon of choice, even attempting to goad her to fire on a random target as she looks through different quarters. She refuses, and Joran points out the gun was unloaded, that he just wanted her to know the sensation that the killer must get.
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