https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp186
M'Pella is one of the Bajoran dabo girls who works for many years in Quark's Bar aboard DS9. Her first appearance comes in the late Season 5 episode Call to Arms, in which the Federation abandons the station when the Cardassians and Dominion take over. Thus, she comes on the scene just when the Dominion War begins to fire up, AKA the most interesting long story stretch of this show.
As one of the typical characters milling about the bar, she is often seen in the company of Morn, the most prolific recurring character of this series. Indeed, she is present to comfort Quark and others during Morn's memorial when the crew erroneously thinks he has died in the episode Who Mourns for Morn?
She's also no stranger to the typical violence that can occur in the wild west of gaming tables on the edge of the frontier. She has to defend off strong advances from a drunk Grathon Tolar in the episode In The Pale Moonlight, and she also witnesses Molly O'Brien stab a Markellian with a broken bottle in the episode Time's Orphan. Quark would probably call that just part of the job, even though it runs essentially close to modern themes like sexual assaults for similar jobs and workers.
M'pella shows up in 23 episodes, which does not sound like a ton but it was about half of the episodes in the final two seasons where she shows up. As a result of so many appearances, the show writers finally gave her some dialogue in the episode The Dogs of War, which was also her final appearance:
M'Pella- "Let's do it...at this point, I don't care if he fires me"
M'Pella- "I hope you're not going to be lonely in that great, big, Nagal residence"
M'Pella is one of those characters which likely could spin off plenty of interesting stories of her own, if she were made a more regular character than some of the Ferengi of DS9. Nevertheless, we will have to leave those stories to our imagination, unless the new TV show writers think one season of an anthology series should focus on Dabo Girls: Behind the Scenes. That would indeed be an interesting alternative to your normal Star Trek.
Cathy DeBuono played M'Pella when she was not acting as a stand-in or body double for Terry Ferrell, AKA Jadzia Dax. Her most recent work came in 2014 in a short called Jen Foster She and a movie entitled Crazy B-words. She has also been active in radio and can be followed on Twitter @cathydebuono.
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