S6E1, “A Time to Stand” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

If I didn’t already accidentally put stuff from this episode into the last writeup, I may well put it into the next episode, or vice versa. I’m not used to serial Trek, but thus far I’m into it. Our gang left S5 having ceded control of DS9 to Dukat and the Dominion and as we head into S6, it’s refreshing to not be entirely certain what it’ll even be about. The best recent show I’ve seen where they successfully pulled off season-to-season premise flips was Fringe. Generally Trek doesn’t need radical rule changes to keep it going—literally every episode they can be introduced to an entirely new culture. But the DS9 writing has been so strong I’m eager to see what they can do with it.

So we’re popping back in three months later. Much like the finale of S5, S6E1 spends a lot of its time establishing what will be next. Basically things are going bad for the Dominion, and very bad for the Federation. Sisko et. al. are battered. His father is yelling at him to get Jake back. Julian, who has decided not to bother hiding his genetic superiority anymore, and which apparently consists largely of being good with probabilistic thinking, says they have a 32.7% chance of winning the war. Kira and Odo have evidently spent three months brooding, and it only just now occurs to them to leverage Weyoun’s worship of Odo to do stuff they want. My wife wondered why they weren’t doing this pretty much right away, but unfortunately for Kira and Odo, and fortunately for me she is not stranded on Terek Nor helping them strategize.

Sisko’s mission to wipe out a ketrecel-white facility serves to move along the Federation side of things. It also serves to leave us with another serial cliffhanger when their warp drive is damaged in the fracas. Space is big and we take the warp drive for granted. Julian informs everyone that its wreckage means they can’t get back for 17 years. I’m not sure it’s ever clear how fast impulse speed is, but I’d submit Julian’s math is likely off by at least a factor of 100.

As minimal consolation, at least Dukat isn’t exactly living the dream. Super interesting how this has developed. Dukat didn’t just get powerful again out of nowhere because he’s the badass-est, which is what would happen in like every American movie. He’s had to sell out, trading long-term positioning for short-term gains. This arises partially out of circumstance: Cardassia was left in such dismal shape after fighting the Klingons that he was forced to do some negotiating. It was his stupid choice to do this with the Dominion, but he ain’t a good guy and he was desperate. And it’s left him in a weak enough situation that Kira and Odo get to stay aboard, keeping their vital jobs and clearly conspiring from within, ostensibly just because they are Bajoran citizens and Odo has some influence on Weyoun. So the situation is: Odo does what Kira says, Weyoun does what Odo says, and Dukat has to do what Weyoun says. So weirdly Kira is actually running things, even though she hasn’t really figured out how to do anything with that foundational power. Dukat knows all of this so his only recourse is to continue harassing Kira to try to get to the top of the pile again. Who is using whom is a good question, and it’s a strength of the writing here that it all hangs together.

Overall: 4 out of 5. Two episodes in to the Trek serial experiment, I think we’re in good hands.

S6E2, “Rocks and Shoals” (Ronald D. Moore)

I had just been wondering why Trek doesn’t borrow more from classic SF literature. There’s such a wealth of otherwise forgotten short stories. Though I also wondered about whether getting rights to them was worth the headache, even if they did find one that was clearly adaptable. Then this episode happens along, with a clever core story and Memory Alpha tells me it’s largely borrowed from an old war movie, None but the Brave. Not sure how much of the conflict is straight from that, only with phasers and ketrecel-white, but it makes it seem like if you want to borrow an old story, well, just do it. Perhaps they tweaked this and that, or maybe there haven’t been any original stories since Shakespeare. Or Homer. I dunno. Anyway, this was good! Lots going on here but everything clicks. The Federation and DS9 stories both move ahead and there’s some interesting synergy between the two.

The Sisko gang’s story is the bit lifted from the old Sinatra war picture. It also continues the slow burn of learning about Jem’Hadar culture. Initially they were just near-animal monsters bred only to kill, but we’ve now seen a handful of stories about them where they’re basically unemotional Klingons, with their own similar, but subtly different codes of honor. Vorta, however, are the Slytherin of the Trek Universe. They are cunning as hell. Keevan the Vorta’s power play of tricking his gang into a suicide mission was brilliantly nasty. But…we get it. And it’s the only solution. Even if it’s icky to literally everyone involved.

Back on the station Kira’s work alarm goes off and she has to look herself in the mirror every day, then trudge to her day job running Terek Nor for Cardassian jerks. (Except the guy that makes her coffee. Maybe he’s a good one.) Like Sisko et. al. she is similarly stuck in an icky situation. She feels like there’s gotta be a better way, but the more she thinks about it, this is where she can do the most good, and taking crazy rash action isn’t going to solve anything. I know the larger setting here is a war, but if this ain’t an analogy for employment I don’t know what is. For the 99% of us who don’t burst out of our warm beds with joy just going to our jobs every day, I’m still not about to walk away from it when there’s a rough patch. Even if you’re fortunate like me to feel like your job matters and it’s generally a good thing personally and for the world, it’s still hard some days to see the ultimate goal. If nothing really matters (other than being excellent to each other), why am I really doing this? I’m only going to be alive so long, and day after day I make myself do this thing that isn’t 100% the thing I want to be doing. Some days it’s not even close. What if I die before I get to retire? But then…I probably won’t die before I retire. I will definitely not want to be immediately impoverished when I do, either. Or homeless now, for that matter. Work is a drag but it sure beats not working.

Overall: I loved this one. Both stories are clever and detailed and moved the arc forward. One of the best episodes in the series. 5 out of 5.

S6E3, “Sons and Daughters” (Bradley Thompson & David Weddle)

When Worf came on the show I was excited because I always liked TNG Worf episodes. His ready-made ongoing cultural assimilation struggles made for good Trek fodder. Assimilating into humanity is an old theme for Trek, dating back to Spock’s vague disgust with McCoy’s proclivity for emotional outbursts. They found new ways to tackle this kind of story with Data and Worf in TNG, but I felt like it found another gear with Alexander. A lot of children of Baby Boomers (like me) have immigrant great-grandparents. But I only sorta know where my great-grandparents (and further back) came from as my family has been thoroughly diluted into the melting pot. With an immigrant parent whose life spanned both cultures, Alexander is the second generation that never experienced the old one, and he was a little kid who didn’t care about what wasn’t right in front of him. Worf has matured since he tried to keep Alexander with him, and he still falls into badgering Dax about what a true Klingon woman should do sometimes. The kid never had a chance.

It seems the Klingons are getting thin enough in their reserves that new batches of recruits have grey hair, or have barely ever picked up a bat’leth. The latter turns out to be Alexander, now a young man who is pretty angsty about the old man. Deservedly so. From his perspective, Worf just gave up on him, and it’s a fair criticism. He did. And he shouldn’t have. Worf’s idea of being a father was forcing a kid to do Klingon stuff, and when it didn’t work, he sent him off to be raised by his human adoptive parents. Naturally as he grew up Alexander felt abandoned, and he might’ve ended up just doing human stuff, but instead he got it in his head to try becoming a Klingon warrior, but oh does he suck at it.

I thought the setup was interesting here, glad to see Alexander back, and Worf needs an opportunity to have him in his life again, but I never really got my head around what a terrible soldier Alexander was. He’s wormy and anxious and can’t even do some basic bat’leth stuff without dropping the thing. Maybe he’s more of an intellectual? Well, no…they put him at a key battle station on the bridge and he immediately screws everything up. Are the Klingons this desperate? There’s a chance for him to go to a cargo ship and I know it’s important to their relationship that they work through all of this, but he should totally go work on the cargo ship. But he doesn’t, and Worf agrees he should not have given up on their relationship. So that’s settled then? OK, sure.

I will say that despite this rather clownish re-introduction to Alexander, there’s some truth to the resolution. Family issues have a way of festering sometimes and it can take some kind of external event to prompt a change in conditions. But Alexander, seriously: cargo ship. They need to fight the other ships to win this war, but someone’s gotta handle cargo too. Worf got those Klingon cultists to help with planting by convincing them they were battling “time.” He can find a way to justify getting Alexander a job where he’s not locking himself in engineering.

Meanwhile on the erstwhile DS9, Dukat continues to creepily be creepy by playing off Kira’s motherly feelings towards Ziyal. Again there are some ways this works as a relatable story. Divorced couples often have to find a way to stay on good enough terms that they can cooperate in supporting their kids, and this has that feel. Of course Dukat immediately makes it icky by sending her a dress to wear to Ziyal’s art exhibit. Which forces Kira to relinquish a bit of her relationship with Ziyal, since staying close to her means dealing with Dukat. No one can blame her. I guess the point of the Kira thread is to establish that nothing is ever, ever going to happen to make Kira like Dukat even a little again. As much as she cares for Ziyal, she’s willing to give it up to stay away from him. Seems safe to bet that if she has a chance to zap Dukat, she may take it even though it means something terrible for Ziyal. We’ll see.

Random bit: I liked Sisko and Martok’s bet over who will set foot on DS9 first. I give Martok about 100-1 odds on winning though.

Overall: It has its good points but the main Alexander/Worf thread only sort of worked for me. Let’s go 3 out of 5.

S6E4, “Behind the Lines” (René Echevarria)

As with “Sons and Daughters” it feels like we’re getting everything into place to wrap up this story arc sooner rather than later.

• The shaky foundation Dukat erected to make victory possible is showing cracks everywhere. Notably with Damar, the Cardassian who prepares Kira’s raktajino every morning and I probably wrongly judged to be OK, is developing both an attitude and a drinking problem. I’m not sure what to make of this guy. Other than, he’s a Cardassian and is probably in it for himself, whatever “it” turns out to be.
• Sisko gets promoted to do Admiral stuff, which means he’s no longer doing Captain stuff. This leads to him staring out the window watching the Defiant go on an important mission rather than being on the ship making overconfident decisions about its capabilities. This parallels the TOS movies where poor Kirk lamented over getting old and becoming a bureaucrat. But mostly getting old, which is not Sisko’s problem yet. I think it’s safe to assume he will find a way to get back to where he was as this arc resolves itself.
  • I feel like this kind of story has gotten more relatable to me as I myself have gotten older and been a professional human for a while now. My last few jobs have all been on small teams, which means that inevitably there will be an open position on the team, and someone’s gotta cover it. In a larger organization things can get spread around more, but on a smaller team it means triage and a crazy month or two. Pro tip: it turns out that open work doesn’t get covered further up the organizational chain, it goes either sideways or down. So when my boss left last month, I got the bag. A lot of people at my age and experience level have transitioned from doing stuff to managing stuff and it takes some getting used to. We feel you, Sisko and old Kirk.
• The female changeling shows up on DS9 to try to leverage some influence on Odo. He’s still mad at her but she gets back on his good side. What she does exactly can only really be understood as the changeling version of seduction. She talks him into linking with her a few times and by the end he blows a sabotage operation because he’s in the throes of linking and incommunicado.
  • Back when I saw “Broken Link” I got a little huffy about the female changeling not having a name. They finally get around to explaining this today, that names don’t really mean anything to changelings. Well, OK, whatever. I guess that’s where they have to go when they don’t bother naming a female character for five seasons.
  • Kira is furious, and she should be. Poor Rom gets thrown in jail to take the fall for someone else for the second time in the series. This time it’s the Cardassians rather than Odo and Sisko asking the questions though, so I’m pretty mad at Odo myself.
• Even Quark is done with the Cardassians. Mostly because their Jem’Hadar buddies are lousy customers. But still, we can probably count on him whenever things start going down.

Overall: Something of a return to form after the mild whiff of “Sons and Daughters.” 4 out of 5.

S5E24, “Empok Nor” (Bryan Fuller/Hans Beimler)

Once in a while Trek gets it in its head to try making a full-on action show, ignoring its usual strengths of characterization, plotting, and worldbuilding for 45 minutes of everyone chasing each other around with phaser rifles. This never goes well. Sadly nothing different here, I don’t think this one really brings much of anything to the table. Some of its main problems:

1. First and foremost, it’s boring. K and I both missed bits and pieces in favor of dozing. Poor pacing, too much meandering around in the dark, too much technobabble.
2. They introduce a tantalizing backstory about O’Brien’s long ago days as an infantry man. Apparently he killed so many Cardassians in some battle that Garak considers him something of a legend. But it’s never fleshed out. I’m not sure it made sense for Garak anyway, he’s usually awfully reticent to discuss anything about the past. Although I did like how O’Brien kept insisting he’s not a soldier anymore, he’s an engineer, and that’s ultimately how he defeats Drug-crazed Garak.
3. The “someone accidentally touches a foreign goop that makes them insane” trope is the TOS-est thing we’ve seen in forever.
4. The plot setup is ridiculous. They can only use *one* kind of material to fix the issue on DS9? *One* type of material in the whole universe? And it only exists on a fortunately-existing duplicate station? And it’s unfathomably dangerous so let’s send two guards plus Nog as the full security complement.

Also: the teaser’s humor is a total whiff, the soundtrack is the blandest action movie derivative, both the highly-trained bodyguard types make ludicrous tactical mistakes and immediately die (taking their just-backstoried-enough-to-make-it-sad engineer protectorates with them).

Maybe the only interesting thing here is that reading up on the episode finally prompted me to see what else Andrew Robinson had done, and I learned that he was the psychotic bad guy from the original Dirty Harry. After that he constantly had to work against being typecast as crazy, so he didn’t like having to do that for this episode. I don’t blame him.

Overall: Discard into the same bin as TNG’s “Starship Mine” and below-30th-percentile TOS. 1 out of 5.

S5E25, “In the Cards” (Truly Barr Clark & Scott Neal/Ronald D. Moore)

You know you’ve got a good farce rolling when the protagonists—in this case, Jake and Nog—are confronted by an authority figure (Sisko) who has started to sniff out their scheming and threatens to derail everything, and when they try to calmly, rationally explain things to him, not one shred of it makes them sound like they haven’t lost their minds. There’s an art to delicately accumulating absurdity such that the audience keeps buying in until it gets to a point where they can simply review what’s happened so far for laughs.

“In the Cards” is as good a ridiculous Jake & Nog farce as we’ve had in the series, and definitive proof DS9 can do some good comedy. Some of this is from its brilliant script. Their primary quest to obtain a baseball card to cheer up Sisko snowballs into a series of hijinks and tedious chores as they negotiate with O’Brien, Worf, Kira, and Bashir to help them scrape together all the junk Giger needs for his cellular entertainment device. It’s spawned from a miserable dinner where everyone’s depressed because we’re nearing the end of the season and things are bound to get serious soon, and by the end they’ve not only snagged the card but boosted everyone’s spirits.

But the episode also succeeds in its little touches. I loved this exchange:

Giger: “Let me ask you both a simple question. Do you want to die?”

Nog: “No.”

Jake: “Not really.”

The words don’t exactly capture it. At this point we don’t know Giger any more than Jake and Nog. He’s just the mysterious figure who outbid them for the lot with their baseball card at the antiques auction. They find him squirreled away in his quarters surrounded by bizarre lab equipment. He’s intense and inscrutable and gets in their faces to ask his question, apparently in earnest. Nog’s “no” comes out sorta like he’s saying “Are you seriously asking me this?” but Jake’s is pure skeptical “I’m not telling this nut anything he might want to hear.” But Giger doesn’t really listen to their answers anyway, he runs right over Jake’s tepid “not really” with an “Of course you don’t!” and the further explanation he can’t wait to tell them. It’s early-Seinfeld level perfect comic timing. Maybe this comes from guest director Michael Dorn, who I always think has such good natural timing he even makes Worf funny.

Somewhere along the way Jake and Nog even manage to intersect with the much more serious B story about a probable Dominion invasion and the fate of poor Bajor. There’s actually not much accomplished there other than some establishment of Bajor’s tenuous position and the likelihood of war. Jake and Nog aren’t about to deal with that, but I loved the reversal of the usual DS9 structure of an important A story paired with a silly B story. Today we are all in on the farce. Emphasizing this, Memory Alpha tells me that an early version of the script had Giger motivated to cheat death (or even reverse it) after his wife had died. But they threw it out because it made him sympathetic. Exactly the right choice.

Morn watch: Morn buys a velvet painting.

Overall: Trek farce done perfectly. 5 out of 5.

S5E26, “Call to Arms” (Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe)

The war panic that pushed Morn into a frenzy has gripped the entire station, minus the nudity and bar stool assaults, so far as we are aware. Understandable, as DS9ers observe wave after wave of Jem’Hadar fleets pour through the wormhole, like unto a Zapp Brannigan strategy to defeat killbots. Much of this episode is something of a checklist of war prep to-dos. People are rushing to get engaged and flee, get married and flee, or sending their spouses and families fleeing. Quark has stashed crates and crates of Yamok sauce for the expecting Cardassian re-occupation. Tactics-wise I’m surprised no one brought up collapsing the wormhole, which has surfaced here and there as an option when it seems like there’s nothing else to be done. But they settle on developing an elaborate minefield that is somehow self-replicating (with what matter exactly, in the vacuum of space, my 21st century brain can only speculate about). It’s effective enough to prevent more troops or re-supplies and antagonize Dukat, which can always be considered at least a partial victory.

Most relevant is the Bajorans reaching a non-aggression pact with the Dominion, which will keep them out of the war entirely. Weyoun tells us repeatedly that the Dominion will never break it, which further antagonizes Dukat, who totally would’ve broken it. The pact enables much of the DS9 population to bail for the Bajor rather than stick around for the station’s re-occupation. But it also further compromises what Dukat really wants here, which is to use his newly-built alliance to wipe out all his enemies. Instead he must rely on a shaky coalition of previously starving and weak Cardassia and the Dominion, who are transparently running things, no matter how much Dukat gets to be the boasting face of victory.

I liked how a lot of this went down without feeling forced or contrived. We were bound to have a Dominion face-off at some point, and it naturally spurs movement from all the characters. Even Jake, who’s been playing the trust fund kid, milling around the station occasionally writing but mostly doing nothing, has to make a choice. Though maybe he makes the least sense to me, considering his blind panic last time he got anywhere near battle. For him to stay aboard DS9 as some sort of front line war reporter (and without telling his dad) doesn’t necessarily jive with what we’ve seen from him. But I guess if he goes back to Earth I’m not sure how he stays involved with the story, so: reckless obstinacy it is!

Others staying on DS9 are more or less mystifying, case by case. Quark, I dunno. Clearly he doesn’t care who his clientele is, provided he has one. He obviously doesn’t like the Cardassians, but it’s not like he’s got time to cash out when there’s a war brewing, either. Morn, I mean, who knows what his job is, or where he’d even go back to. I guess he goes where Quark’s goes. The question really is: how much is this like a war refugee situation? I think there’s some effort to give it that feel, but I didn’t buy it as totally analogous. People live on DS9, but it’s not like their home country with everything and everyone they’ve ever known. They aren’t trapped, and it seems they didn’t feel forced to leave in the face of genuine, immediate danger, even though Terek Nor used to literally be a slave ship run by the exact same guy. The general attitude is more like they’re going to have a new city council or something.

Very intriguing closing here, with the Defiant on the run and DS9 back under new management. Trek doesn’t really ever mess with outright premise changes. At least, not for more than a potential few minutes while someone important might be dead or leaving, until they resolve that and the credits roll. But we could be facing a very different season six, where the show called Deep Space Nine does not actually materially take place aboard the Deep Space Nine space station.

Overall: 4 out of 5. Not airtight but a fascinating way to close a season.