When I watched Deep Space Nine as a child, I liked Odo, but I thought of him as a cranky old man. It was only later that I realized that this was incorrect. Odo was young. Cranky, yes, but young.

If we get an exact estimate of his age in the show, I missed it, but I did notice than in the later seasons he mentioned his youth being “thirty years ago” or something close to it. So, at the beginning of the show he was the equivalent of a human in his twenties. And that means while he was on Terok Nor, he was basically a teenage who had been recruited to serve a fascist regime. He never spent any time as a child, he presumably started looking like a Bajoranoid adult as soon as he started looking like a person at all. It’s no wonder he’s grumpy.

I also began wondering on this watch if Odo’s inability to emulate other faces perfectly wasn’t a bit of a psychological thing rather than a skill issue. In his formative years, sure, that imperfect attempt to emulate a Bajoran appearance he couldn’t get it right, but in time that “imperfect” face became his face. Odo is someone who felt very comfortable within rigid rules and codes, so having a mental “rule” about his self-image surely felt like something he could not easily switch on and off. Pretending to be a serving tray, that Odo can do. Pretending to be a person other than Odo? That could lead him down lines of thought he didn’t want to deal with.

Naturally I can’t let a post go by without talking about aliens in Star Trek and Odo is, of course, one of very few main characters in the franchise who are not a member of a humanoid alien species. The fact he gets to look exactly like one surely helps this to have happened, but he’s really goo. It was always disappointing to me that when we saw other members of his species, they defaulted to a look that resembled his. I guess it was done for ease of the viewers (and makeup designers), so we’d mentally connect them to him. I dunno, maybe if they’d looked different it could have played into his distance from them. Would he have wanted to make himself look more like them? Would that have caused him self-image problems? I guess we’ll never know. (When we saw some other Changelings on Picard’s show, they defaulted to a different form, I admit, but Odo was long gone by then.)