Ezri Dax is lamenting the arrival of a shipment of ''[[ForeignQueasine gagh]]'' that Jadzia placed months ago. Now sickened by the stuff, she can't bear to give it to Martok as intended because he'd insist that she share it with him. Bashir, meanwhile, is looking forward to the return of O'Brien, but he's gone missing on New Sydney looking for [[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS06E15HonorAmongThieves Bilby's wife]] without Sisko's knowledge. The captain convinces Ezri to contact her family on New Sydney for help. Somewhat estranged from her family, Ezri reluctantly complies. Her [[MyBelovedSmother overbearing mother]] Yanas refuses to help unless Ezri comes to visit for the first time in three years.

Ezri reunites with her brothers Norvo, the troubled aspiring artist, and Janel, TheDutifulSon. They're both employed in their mother's mining operation. Yanas arrives, welcomes Ezri, and talks business with the boys about firing an incompetent worker named Lorkin. After everyone leaves, the brothers discuss recent mining difficulties and suspect that it's Orion Syndicate sabotage. Janel says he'll deal with the local syndicate member, Bokar.

At dinner, Ezri talks about her growing comfort with her symbiosis, but Yanas continues to pressure her to return home for good so that her family can help her. For their part, the brothers aren't doing great. In private, Norvo laments that he was rejected by the Andorian Academy and has decided that he's a hack. The next morning, Ezri discovers that he's vandalized his own art during an all-night bender. But family drama takes a backseat when the local police arrive with O'Brien, bruised after a beating from Nausicans. He has, however, discovered that Bilby's wife, Morica, has been murdered.

Yanas sets O'Brien up in her home but asks him to look at some faulty mining equipment in return. Ezri talks with Norvo, who is still in a funk, about joining her on Deep Space Nine at least for a little while to take a vacation, but Norvo feels too much pressure to help the family to just abandon them. Meanwhile, O'Brien and Janel check the mining equipment and discover signs of sabotage. Bokar arrives and confirms to Janel that the sabotage is in retaliation for the firing of Lorkin. He also informs Janel that O'Brien is looking for Morica Bilby, which surprises Janel. Bokar warns the Trill that O'Brien should leave quickly before something happens to him.

Janel tries to convince O'Brien to leave, but he's at the whim of Ezri, his superior officer. O'Brien tells Ezri that her family is probably under pressure from the syndicate. He checks the family's records and discovers that Morica was an employee of the business. Together they track how her pay was steadily increased until just before her death. They confront the family with the evidence. Janel admits that he turned to the syndicate to save the company, and in return, they demanded the family give Morica a sinecure. Janel tapped Norvo to falsify the payment records, though he never did. In spite of steadily increasing her payments, Morica was never happy with the amount she received.

Yanas is outraged at all of this, but Janel insists that she always taught them to value the business over everything. Ezri realizes that Norvo knows something more. He confesses that he went to Morica to reason with her, but she refused. He decided to prove everyone wrong who thought he was too weak to be useful to the family, so he killed her. After this shocking confession, Norvo gets arrested. Ezri advises Janel to leave the company after Norvo's trial, and he promises to have a happier life. Yanas begs Ezri to tell her that all of this is not her fault, but Ezri walks away without a word.

Back on the station, Ezri talks to O'Brien about what great potential Norvo once had. He tells her that it's not her fault, but Ezri states that she [[ItsAllMyFault feels it is]]. She was too focused on her own career to see what damage her mother was doing to her brothers. Everything might have been prevented if she had returned home earlier.
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!This episode contains examples of:

* AccidentalMisnaming: Yanas calls her daughter Ezri Tigan. Possibly MaliciousMisnaming, given Yanas's attitude and the fact that Ezri had already told her that she is Ezri Dax.
* AffectionateNickname: Ezri's brothers call her "Zee".
* AssholeVictim: While O'Brien's sympathies may have lain with Morica, due to his past history with her family, when it comes down to it, she was a mob widow who got a sinecure position thanks to her contacts, and then proceeded to make increasingly unreasonable demands of the people she was essentially shaking down for money until one of them finally snapped and killed her.
* BigSisterInstinct: Ezri expresses great concern and love for her younger brother when she hears that he's being put down by their mother. She inverts this trope with her older brother when she encourages him to leave home and make a new life for himself.
* BlackmailBackfire: Morica Bilby's demands became so outrageous that Norvo killed her to put an end to them.
* CallBack: The Tigans' mine extracts pergium, which was first mentioned in the Original Series episode [[Recap/StarTrekS1E25TheDevilInTheDark "The Devil in the Dark"]].
* ContrivedCoincidence: When O'Brien goes missing, Sisko decides to turn to the one crew member who has a connection with the planet he disappeared on, figuring her family's influence can help find him. However, it turns out that not only are they directly involved in the case, but one of them murdered the woman O'Brien was looking for.
* DisappearedDad: [[http://www.st-minutiae.com/resources/scripts/561.txt According to the script]] but edited out of the episode Mr. Tigan stays away from home to avoid his wife. Either way, he is nowhere to be seen in this episode.
* DownerEnding: No one is happy about anything at the end. It even makes the ending of "Honor Among Thieves" more of a bummer after the fact by revealing that Bilby's noble sacrifice for his family only bought his wife about a year of unhappy life.
* TheDutifulSon: Janel works hand-in-glove with his mother on the family mining business. He's resentful that Ezri has abandoned the family business and Norvo is only trivially involved.
* DysfunctionalFamily: The Tigans in spades - Ezri spent her childhood dreaming of ways to get away from her mother and hasn't been home in several years, Yanas is a domineering and cold matriarch, Janel is the older brother who resents his siblings and feels the pressure when the business struggles, and Norvo is the flighty "artisan" that seems to be TheUnfavorite who can't measure up to Janel in Yanas' eyes and ends up committing murder. Mr. Tigan doesn't ever show up in the episode, but according to the script he's estranged from Yanas.
* ForeignQueasine: Ezri nearly loses her lunch when a shipment of ''Gagh'' Jadzia ordered arrives on the station. The fondness apparently didn't migrate over from her.
* {{Foreshadowing}}: The policeman who brings O'Brien in to the Tigans objects to the idea that Morica Bilby was killed by the Orion Syndicate, citing their code meaning they have to do what they can to look after their operatives and their families. This is played off as the words of a cop who is either corrupt or scared of the Orion Syndicate during the scene. [[spoiler: Turns out he's right. Norvo went to Morica to try to reason with her and when that didn't work, he killed her and dumped her in the river.]]
* IDidWhatIHadToDo: Janel offers this reason for getting in bed with the Orion Syndicate.
* ItsAllMyFault: In spite of nonverbally blaming her mother for everything, Ezri actually blames herself for not being there to stop her mother.
* MeaningfulLook: Ezri does this right before she walks out after Yanas asks if she was the cause of Norvo killing Morica Bilby.
* MyBelovedSmother: Yanas wants all of her children to be at home, under her control.
* MyGreatestFailure: Yanas takes TheReveal of Norvo's homicide pretty hard.
-->'''Yanas:''' This isn't my fault, is it Ezri? I didn't do this, did I???
-->''[Ezri looks at her, and walks away]''
* PoliceBrutality: Subverted - The New Sydney Police bring in a battered and bloodied O'Brien, and when Ezri protests they point out he only got punched once by them when he resisted. The rest of the beating was courtesy of the Orion Syndicate.
* SequelEpisode: To "[[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS06E15HonorAmongThieves Honor Among Thieves]]."
* ShameIfSomethingHappened: A post-hoc example is when Bokar says that the Tigans wouldn't be having their current problems if Lorkin hadn't been fired.
* ThatsAnOrder: When O'Brien finds evidence that the Tigan family is connected to the Orion Syndicate, Ezri orders him not to talk to the New Sydney police until she has a chance to sort things out.
* UngratefulBitch: Morica Bilby, who despite being cared for by the Tigan family, blamed them as much as the Syndicate, demanding more and more money.