S4E22, “For the Cause” (story: Mark Gehred-O’Connell)

Our cat Bea is a born TV companion. She spends 23 hours a day on or near the couch and gets excited when we watch TV so she can sit with us. Naturally we joke that she enjoys TV specifically, to the point of caring about shows, characters, plots, etc., and not just the familial companionship. Specifically we maintain some running jokes about her favorite characters. The gag here is that we have decided she will latch on to the worst possible choice. Not, like, the antagonist or an extra or something, but the most boring regular, which is the funnier choice. When we were watching The X-Files we decided her favorite character was neither Mulder nor Scully. Some contrarians probably go for Smoking Man or the Lone Gunmen. Bea went with Assistant Director Skinner. Literally no one would ever choose Skinner. Skinner is clearly the dumbest, funniest choice. So “Who is Bea’s favorite?” is really just a proxy for asking what would be the worst choice for a favorite character. Which brings us around to DS9, and my nominee: Eddington. I had recently suggested him as Bea’s favorite, and we were starting to believe the fiction. Little did we know that “For the Cause” was going to be Eddington’s traitor episode.

I believed in you, Eddington, and his betrayal was a jarring surprise. But it’s a good choice for a character to turn Maquis. He’s been hanging around for a while without really having any distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, so I think it was time for him to evolve or die. He manages to outwit the whole crew, steal some valuable cargo, accurately compare Federation imperialists to the villainous Borg, and give Sisko a revenge motive. I’ll be curious to see if he comes around again.

It was not a good day for Sisko at all, as it turns out. Kasidy Yates is discovered to be smuggling goods to the Maquis. So we’ve been obsessing over the Klingon resurgence and the Jem’Hadar and Changelings and Cardassians but also the Maquis are a big problem that we forgot about. So let’s have ’em turn two minor characters in one episode. Man. Sometimes I miss TNG’s relative utopia. The real-world DS9 universe sucks. I regularly get depressed over the shitty state of politics and the history of people being shitty to each other, and the wider universe just has MORE PEOPLE. Ugh, if you need me I’ll be in the Holosuite until October or so.

Well anyway I don’t really know what’s going to come from all this. With our spare Jennifer killed off, and now Kasidy arrested and our beloved Eddington out of the way, it feels like we’re settling all family business, clearing the decks of minor characters they’ve run out of enthusiasm for, in preparation for some season ending big story. We’ll see.

Overall: It’s kind of a bummer in the end, but this is a tight, solid episode that’s going to reverberate for a while. 5 out of 5.

S4E23, “To the Death” (story: Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe)

The early portrayal of the Jem’Hadar was that they were remorseless, unstoppable killing machines. Bred for war and fighting, it was all they ever would or could know. Welp, now we’ve got another episode (after “Hippocratic Oath“) where they are given some extra dimension. It turns out that if a group of them isn’t precisely the right sort of remorseless, unstoppable killing machines, others will hunt them down and remorselessly kill them. This stems from some rudimentary culture they’ve managed to develop while doing all the killing. It’s similar to Klingon battle-focused culture, but different, and “To the Death” is about how it’s different.

It’s worth watching to get all the specifics here, and I’m trying to cover five episodes in this post so I won’t get into everything, but I thought it was well done. Klingons come across as very formal and honorable. If they’re going to fight you, they’ll have a reason. Humans are pretty wimpy, but we already knew that (other than whenever they have to actually fight Klingons they do absurdly well). Jem’Hadar are just sharks. Kill everything. Their battle cry is, “I am First Omet’iklan, and I am dead. As of this moment, we are all dead. We go into battle to reclaim our lives. This we do gladly, for we are Jem’Hadar. Remember, victory is life.” Only a few exceptional individuals that manage to make it to 20 and seem so exhausted they pretty much seem like they wish they were dead. Many other terrifying JH rules of life are covered here too. Maybe humans ain’t so bad, by comparison.

The time not devoted to brief discussions of the incredibly violent and bleak Jem’Hadar way of life is reserved exclusively for melees. Lots of murders here, but don’t worry, only JH and some redshirts. Enjoy!

Some notes:

• Worf’s drink of choice is an extra large prune juice.
• I greatly enjoyed Worf’s threatening stare at Julian, who had taken his favorite seat.
• Shout out to Jeffrey Combs, who has now played at least three different characters on the series. He’ll be back as Brunt in just two episodes. Once in a while they go back to the well on certain performers. For example, the woman who flirts with Odo in the upcoming “Broken Link” was in a TNG episode. I would never remember this without the internet exhaustively cataloging all of this. So why shouldn’t they bring people back? Lots of episodes, lots of guest stars. With Jeffrey Combs it’s almost like a point of pride that they can have him play tons of roles in near-adjacent episodes. I guess they just have him on retainer or something.
• It’s weird to even mention the absurdity of high ranking officers going on dangerous away missions at this point, but I have to reiterate how dumb it is for O’Brien to be walking into a Jem’Hadar brawl. He is way too specialized as an engineer to be put into a position where he has to write sad “just in case I die” messages to his family before he beams out. He’s older than me and pudgy. Let the poor guy stay on the ship. That’s why we bloody have redshirts.

Overall: A bleak and violent one, though it does cover a lot of ground for the Jem’Hadar. 3 out of 5.

S4E24, “The Quickening” (story: Naren Shankar)

Other than maybe “Everything about the universal translator,” perhaps Trek’s Most Ludicrous Presupposition is “Nearly all races are humanoid and can interbreed.” A corollary might be “Human doctors have a prayer of curing alien diseases.” If every race is ultimately sort of the same, rules for medicine would apply universally. I guess that gives Bashir some reason to get all depressed that he can’t cure a wildly complex alien disease (1) in a few days, (2) with no other medical personnel, (3) using whatever he happened to pack in his away kit.

But really this episode is about hubris. It also further trashes the established Trek utopia where everything works and the Federation has the answers. This is ultimately a sad story where there’s a lot of failure before a final conciliatory victory. It pushes Bashir in an interesting direction: he’s started as a hotshot young doctor, then matured into a competent and respected crewmember. Along the way he gained some great friends and a prestigious medical award nomination. He needs to be tamped back down once in a while or he’d risk becoming a comic book character, and this does the trick.

n.b. It’s just a quick couple of gags at the beginning, but I enjoyed Quark’s tampering with the replicators for advertising. Compared with where the story actually went, it feels all the more crass.

Overall: A sad one, but effective. [Pours a bit of scotch into his Quark tumbler as consolation.] 4 out of 5.

S4E25, “Body Parts” (story: Louis P. DeSantis & Robert J. Bolivar)

We were due for a good ridiculous Ferengi story. Quark is diagnosed with a rare disease and thinks he has six days to live. Where humans would use such a crisis to tell family and friends they love them, rush to visit somewhere special, absolutely go to town on cake and liquor etc., Ferengi spend their precious remaining days settling business affairs. Basically it’s time to cash out—pay off debts, sell possessions, set up family. Quark has a ridiculous amount of debt and his only way out is to sell parcels of his desiccated corpse on the Ferengi Futures Exchange. (I seem to remember some reference to Ferengi collecting bits of famous dead people in this way. Wasn’t there a minor gag about Quark selling fraudulent chunks of someone who turned out not to be dead?)

“Body Parts” serves as a platform for Quark to wail about his sorry position in Ferengi society. Not unlike Worf, he has found a role among the Federation, and is no longer viewed as a “true” member of his native race. He may be respected (-ish) on DS9 but other Ferengi think of him as something of a joke, unable to succeed back home. He’s grouchy and arrogant as a rule but his usual braggadocio is stripped away here and we learn that he’s really pretty depressed about his position. I sorta did feel sorry for him, but for the most part it’s easier to appreciate Rom’s attitude. Rom could care less what Ferengi think of him if he’s doing what he loves.

Well anyway, Quark is relieved of his concerns when an angel investor bids a fortune for his future corpse. Then two twists: first, Quark learns he was mis-diagnosed and won’t be dying after all. But: his angel investor is the über-Ferengi Brunt, who intends to collect his goods regardless. You’d think Ferengi contracts about selling dead guys would stipulate that the guys are actually dead first, but I guess not because Quark can’t get out of it without breaking his contract—perhaps the most egregious Ferengi sin. Doing so would ostracize Quark from Ferengi culture completely. The remainder of the story concerns Quark going back and forth on whether he should fulfill the contract—a delighted Garak is more than willing to assassinate him—or live, as a pariah.

In the end this was a really fun one, with lots of solid Ferengi laffs. The scene where Garak appears to snap his neck, but it turns out to be just a test in the holosuit so Quark can decide if that’s how he wants to go, is brilliant. And in the end, a twisted It’s a Wonderful Life-style ending with his DS9 pals coming through to help him re-stock his depleted bar with ugly furnishings and terrible liquor. Aw.

Oh, also now Kira is carrying Keiko and Miles’ baby because their runabout got hit by an asteroid and Keiko was injured. Well, it’s a pretty creative way to integrate Nana Visitor’s pregnancy into the show without drastically altering Kira’s situation. In some ways SF show writers have things easy.

Morn watch: Morn’s jaw drops at Quark’s death announcement, but this amounts to it being open about an inch and a half, accompanied by his usual vacant stare.

Overall: A turning point in Quark’s life? TBD. 5 out of 5.

S4E26, “Broken Link” (story: George Brozak)

Mostly this is a full episode of Odo’s Biology Corner. Changelings don’t sneeze, barf, or get itchy like a human, they rather sort of melt. It is inconvenient, and gross. By extension, it’s somewhat embarrassing and a guy doesn’t really want his friends popping around to watch him ooze. Just let him ooze in peace. Well the oozing is so bad that it’s a threat to Odo’s life. His only choice is to locate the Founders and hope they can help him. So they spin up the Defiant and go poking around the Gamma Quadrant hoping to be noticed. Naturally they do, and the Female Changeling is right there waiting.

Let me pause to say that the Female Changeling really needs a name. In the context of the show it doesn’t matter (other than, like, showrunner dudes, name your female characters), we know who she is. But in writing about her is really awkward. I’m bequeathing her Nineve, which a random internet site just told me is a Scottish name for “lady of the lake.” She kinda is a lake, so going with that.

Anyway so Nineve says they made Odo sick (I don’t think they said how? I guess they have their ways—actually I just saw on Memory Alpha that they apparently did it through the Jem’Hadar in “To the Death”) as a ruse to get him to report home for judgement. He was the first Changeling to kill another, and it turns out they do not forgive….SNIFFFF….OR FORGET. He’s to throw himself into the great liquid Changeling orgy to get what’s coming to him. Which is: they make him fully a human. Now he can enjoy our sneezing and barfing. Also he’s hairy. He has to buy actual clothes. But they make him keep his Odo face as a reminder. IF ONLY Odo had ever figured out how to form his face.

Well, this’ll be interesting. Our blob is finally a real boy. An interesting twist, if a bit improbable/magical. Can some Changelings really nail all the organs, cellular structures, and evolutionary quirks of a human? Since when can they force it on others? Permanently? I have not forgotten that the whole thing is fiction, but I’m not sure it adds up even within this universe’s rules.

There’s another twist, too, which is that while Odo is in the lake he overhears some intel: our bug-eyed psychopath Gowron is [gasp] also a Changeling! This will also be interesting, and similarly, I felt like it came across as improbable and random. If the Changelings have gone to all this trouble to impersonate Gowron and stir up this scale of trouble, maybe they’d have done some due diligence to not let Odo overhear them? I do like that it answers the question of why Gowron suddenly lost his damn mind this season.

I also liked the bit here where Garak tries to launch a massive strike against the Changelings while everyone is distracted by all the shenanigans and goings-on. Worf sniffs it out and puts an end to it after a surprisingly spirited fistfight. But Garak had a point, wouldn’t have been the worst idea.

Overall: I like them giving us some plot twists to wrap up the season rather than the usual stretching out an episode into an unnecessary second hour just to have a cliffhanger. This changes some rules for season five and I’m looking forward to seeing where they go. But the execution and logic didn’t quite hang together for me. 4 out of 5.