"Necessary Evil" (season two, episode eight; 15 November 1993): Wikipedia-link.
Commentary: "Necessary Evil" is a film noir episode, beginning with a scene between Quark & a Bajoran femme fatale. We see flashbacks to five years earlier (2365, concurrent with the second season of The Next Generation), our first glimpse of the Cardassian occupation; the storylines of the past & the present are perfectly intertwined. Aside from the fascinating plot, it is also interesting to see that Gul Dukat is responsible for Odo's vocation as an investigator & that there is an element of truth a Dukat's later, situationally self-serving claims that he tried to ameliorate the Cardassian occupation of Bajor while serving as prefect of Terok Nor (the original Cardassian designation for Deep Space 9): in the past, Dukat coerced Odo into finding the murderer of a Bajoran shopkeeper-cum-collaborator, as an alternate to the Central Command's preferred response of executing ten random Bajorans. Yes, Dukat was also distancing himself from the murder of a collaborator so as not to draw attention to the rest of his network of collaborators, but avoiding the execution of ten innocents is an unadulterated good.
"Necessary Evil" is also the debut of the fully-formed Rom. He had been seen since the series premiere, "Emissary" (there credited as "Ferengi Pit Boss"), but his characterization was inconsistent up to this point. Here Rom's mechanical aptitude & relative lack of greed are cemented. Huzzah!
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