Sick Bay. Phlox reports to Trip that their Eskan patient will get over his wounds with a few more hours rest, and asks what attacked him. "They call it a Drayjin. Looks like a big, nasty pig. Kinda tastes like one, too," Trip tells him. I wonder if that makes Trip a cannibal? Phlox says, "I found cellular residue in the wound. It clearly doesn't belong to this gentleman, I assume it must've come from the animal that mauled him." He leads Trip over to his microscope. Trip asks what he's looking at. "The cells are in a state of chromosomal flux. They're mutating. It's as if they're trying to change into something but can't quite figure out what," Phlox explains, adding, "That must've been a most unusual 'pig,'" and looking over at his patient. "Shape-shifter, pan-fried by your bile, Holtz is hunting you in style all day. He's a heart-staker, you big faker, wherever you run to, he'll be on his way," Mathra croons to the tune of "Moon River."

Quantum goes to The Rocks Of Gaseous Purges to find his Blue Banshee again. He calls out a few times, and finally she appears to catch him by the elbow as he stumbles and almost falls. Good thing she was there; he might have skinned his knee. Quantum dithers about her being real flesh and blood and not just a hallucination. "You're real," he tells her. She shows off her alienimity by repeating, "Real...yes," as all aliens must do to demonstrate that English is not their first language. They establish that she's not human and that she is only one of many in a race of shape-shifters on Dakala. "We can become whatever you see -- a tree, an animal, water, whatever you see, " Blue Banshee says. So, she's both Zan and Jayna? Quantum doofs that he sees a beautiful woman in front of him. "Because you want to see a beautiful woman," Blue Banshee tells him. Quantum wants to know how she knows what he wants. Apparently, she can get into his head and sift through the clutter there. Can she get into the writers' heads and shape-shift into a good storyline? Quantum wants to know why he feels he knows her, and she tells him it's because he does know her. Of course, she doesn't explain why. He wants to know why she chose him for her hauntings; naturally, her reply has to be obnoxiously enigmatic: "You're different," Blue Banshee tells him, and runs off at the mouth about how he's "different" from the hunters or, as she puts it, "those only ones who have ever come here before you." You know what really gets up my nose? Aliens who always feel obliged to speak in metaphor, simile, or other literary devices. Can't she just say "those that want to kill my kind?" or, if she's such a mind-reading whiz kid, "the Eskas"? Nooo, it's always gotta be "those that your forefathers oft dreamed of but knew not what they thought when they put forth the curse'd idea ere long." I mean, it's like they live in a perpetual state of Spenserian stanza. Blue Banshee informs Quantum that the Eska come to the dark planet to hunt her kind specifically, because they prize them "above all else." Quantum pulls Furrowed Brow No. 4 off the shelf and slaps it on, showing us that he's in A Moral Muddle.