History Recap / StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS05E11TheDarknessAndTheLight

* BittersweetEnding: Kira survives, but most of her comrades are dead, and her confidence in her actions during the resistance have been shaken.

* BodyHorror: Falah killed in a manufactured transporter accident. The results are ''not'' pretty.

* CruelAndUnusualDeath: Flambé'd by transporter is ''not'' a pleasant or quick way to go. As Falah unluckily finds out.
* EagleEyeDetection: or possibly SherlockScan, but Odo twigs immediately to the fact that his office has been intruded while he was gone due to the fact that Kira had rotated his chair to view the information she was after.
* GrayAndGrayMorality: The killer claims, persuasively, that Kira killed innocent people, whereas he never did. Kira retorts that ''every'' Cardassian on Bajor shouldn't have been there and was a legitimate target. Neither side is shown to be completely right or wrong, and in the end, Kira is admits that both sides were laying claim to the mantle of "innocence" to ease their conscience.

* AdultFear: The climax where Silarin intends to induce labor on Kira. Imagine that you are the O'Briens. Your surrogate has run off to kill a man who has been killing her friends and she winds up getting captured. During her confrontation with this man, he intends to make her deliver your child. Your child could either die from premature birth or could be raised by a deranged man.

[[caption-width-right:350:Face to face with the [[Theatre/ThePhantomOfTheOpera Phantom]].]]

A group of vedeks are having a religious ceremony when suddenly one of them is killed by a booby-trapped candle. On board Deep Space Nine, Odo informs Kira that her old resistance pal, Latha Mabrin, was assassinated. She's even more stunned when she returns to her quarters and receives the mysterious message Latha coupled with a distorted voice saying, "That's one." It seems as though the Shakaar resistance cell, of which Kira was a member, is under attack by an unknown assassin.

Kira reports her suspicions and wants to take a more active role in the investigation, but she's got the O'Briens' unborn child in her womb to think about. When she receives a message from another resistance member, Trentin Fala, Kira invites Trentin to find sanctuary on the station. When Trentin tries to transport onto the ''Defiant'', however, her signal gets jammed, and she arrives as a smoldering corpse. Soon aftwards, Kira hears a familiar distorted voice saying, "That's two," eminating from a PADD that Quark pilfered. When a third message arrives at Odo's security desk of yet another Shakaar resistance member, Odo tries to find the man, but he's missing, and Odo expects that he's already dead.

Meanwhile, Odo notes that the assassin uses professional tactics but clearly has a personal vendetta given his mocking messages. He recruits Nog to analyze the messages with his superior lobes, and he helps identify the voice as Kira herself. The assassin is using the major's own voice against her. As they make this revelation, however, the O'Brien's quarters explode, breaching the hull and killing both Lupaza and Furel instantly. Kira fights her way past security personnel to try to help, but collapses at her doorway. After awakening, she snags Odo's list of suspects and commandeers a runabout hunt down the killer. When she gets to the fourth suspect, a Cardassian named Prin, however, he gets the drop on her and stuns her.

Kira awakens in Prin's lair restrained. Hiding in the shadows and ranting about darkness and light, Prin reveals that he was a simple servant of an important gul during the Cardassian occupation when a bomb detonated by the Shakaar resistance cell killed the gul, the gul's entire family, and a few dozen other Cardassians as well as scarred Prin badly. He accuses Kira of being "the darkness," a bloodthirsty terrorist who killed indiscriminately, while he is "the light," delivering justice through carefully targeted assassinations that leave no innocents harmed. Kira counters that Prin's master was a brutal warlord, the Cardassian occupation killed millions of Bajorans, and all Cardassians who supported it were justifiable targets no matter how insignificant their jobs were.

* HandWave: It seems inconceivable that ''anyone'' would build a transporter that couldn't detect remat devices. Indeed, Dax points out that the transporter used should have identified the device immediately. But Silarin Prin managed to overcome this "somehow".

* TwoFaced: [[http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20050705161355/memoryalpha/en/images/a/ac/Silaran_Prin_2373.jpg Silaran Prin]], thanks to a plasma charge set by Kira's resistance cell.

Unimpressed by Kira's arguments, Prin resolves to kill her, but first he will remove the unborn child from her womb so it will not be harmed, holding true to his ethos. Kira begs to be anesthetized, and Prin assents, knocking her out with a sedative. But after the forcefield holding Kira is turned off, she springs back to life. In the ensuing fight, Kira grabs a phaser and kills Prin. Once Kira's rescue arrives, Bashir explains that the herbs she is taking made her resistant to the sedatives. Heavily conflicted about the recent events, Kira mulls Prin's words, concluding that "the light only shines in the darkness" and admitting, "Innocence is often just an excuse for the guilty."

* AesopAmnesia: Season 1's "Duet", considered by many to be the episode where this series really came into its own, had Kira realizing that deep down, she was really no better than the people she'd hated for so long. This episode throws that out of the window and depicts her as being completely unapologetic about her terrorist past. You can maybe rationalize it as her attempting a ShutUpHannibal on Prin, but it's still jarring to see something so completely at odds with one of this show's (if not the entire franchise's) most iconic episodes.

* GrayAndGrayMorality: The killer claims, persuasively, that Kira killed innocent people whereas he never did, such as a bomb she set taking out not only a brutal Cardassian war criminal, but ''his entire family'' too, along with anyone in the immediate vicinity, whereas he goes out of his way only to target them, and even spare the life of the unborn child she's carrying. Kira retorts that ''every'' Cardassian on Bajor, even if they just ''folded shirts'' as a servant shouldn't have been there and were guilty legitimate targets. True, she's talking with a calculating, cold-blooded killer, but it drives home that, yes, Kira ''was'' a terrorist from his point of view, and, thus, also from his point of view he is the [[TitleDrop "light" to her "darkness"]]. On the other hand, Kira points out that all Cardassians, even civilians, were benefiting from the oppression and occupation of Bajor. By the end, Kira concludes that while she isn't innocent, neither were the civilians Silaran claimed to be getting justice for.
* GottaKillEmAll: Silaran has made a point of targeting and killing only the members of the Shakaar cell who were part of the terrorist bombing that disfigured him: Fala helped the Resistance circumvent Gul Pirak's defenses, Latha built the bomb, and Lupaza and Furel kept watch while Kira, herself, planted the bomb.

* IDidWhatIHadToDo: {{Deconstructed}}. Kira tries to use this justification but Prin immediately calls her out on it, whether or not he is in the right about it. She didn't ''have'' to use indiscriminate killing to fight the occupation, she just didn't ''care'' enough to find another way.

* ALighterShadeOfGrey: Silaran fancies himself as this, performing targeted assassinations against a handful of Shakaar insurgents while ensuring no one else was harmed in comparison to Kira and her compatriots performing terrorist bombings that killed countless civilians on top of their intended targets.

* SanitySlippage: Creator/RandyOglesby gives an impassioned performance to show that surviving the bomb pretty much destroyed Silaran's mind.

* YourTerroristsAreOurFreedomFighters: Part of the basis for this episode.

An anonymous assassin begins killing Kira's former Resistance comrades one by one.

* YourTerroristsAreOurFreedomFighters: part of the basis for this episode.

* SanitySlippage: Randy Oglesby gives an impassioned performance to show that surviving the bomb pretty much destroyed Silaran's mind.

* BackForTheDead: [[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS03E24Shakaar Furel and Lupaza]] return solely to die offscreen when Prin's charge goes off outside their room.

* AesopAmnesia: Season 1's "Duet", considered by many to be the episode where this series really came into its own, had Kira realizing that deep down, she was really no better than the people she'd hated for so long. This episode throws that out of the window and depicts her as being completely unapologetic about her terrorist past. You can maybe rationalize it as her attempting a ShutUpHannibal on Prin, but it's still jarring to see something so completely at odds with one of this show's (if not the entire franchise's) most iconic episodes.

* IDidWhatIHadToDo: Viciously {{deconstructed}}. Kira tries to use this justification and Prin immediately calls her out on it, whether or not he is in the right about it. She didn't ''have'' to use indiscriminate killing to fight the occupation, she just didn't ''care'' enough to find another way.