S6E13, “Far Beyond the Stars” (Marc Scott Zicree/Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

I grouse a lot about holodeck episodes, or episodes that take place on such a weird planet they may as well be holodeck episodes. I’ll do some of this for “Honor Among Thieves” in just a minute, in fact. But it’s not that they are all bad. I just think they generally exist as a way to get to try out a well-worn genre. Maybe it’s a dumb complaint when I expect a SF TV show, which is itself a well-worn genre, not to do a noir detective show or a spy show or whatever. I think it’s mostly just that they tend not to actually have a great story that justifies the remix. If they come up with a good plot that lends itself better to Julian becoming a knock-off James Bond and O’Brien wearing an eyepatch, well then sure. But I think it generally ends up being reverse engineering, like, we wanted to do a spy show, so we spun up a story within that framework. Which naturally means it’s a standard retread of that kind of story. And Boring. “Far Beyond the Stars,” though, might not only be the best out-of-character/genre show ever (though it’s nominally still SF I guess), but it’s probably one of the best of the whole series.

It’s not really a clever idea or plot that makes this one work as much as having excellent production from top to bottom. All the performances are terrific, notably Avery Brooks’ Benny Russell. Avery also directs, and the look of the sets and costumes are amazing, giving the whole thing a warm, rich feel. Rather than the holodeck approach of something like normal pale, weird-looking Data wearing his uniform but with, like, a smoking jacket or whatever, all the regulars are there but different characters, in period costume. The premise is fairly simple: Russell is a writer trying to make a living churning out stories for a typical 1950s SF magazine. But he has to hide his identity, since many readers wouldn’t want to read a black author. He gets enamored with a picture from the art department that depicts DS9, and conjures up a whole series from it (well, the whole series, since he conjures DS9), which includes a black commander. Everyone agrees the stories are winners but the editor says he can’t push for it to be published it unless the commander is changed to a white guy. The injustice is palpable, and the cold truth from the editor is infuriating. He isn’t in a position to fight for its publication (or maybe he doesn’t care). Meanwhile Russell deals with all the other ordinary everyday racist bullshit in his life, including ceaseless harassment from local cops, who eventually shoot and kill his friend Jimmy in the street and beat up Russell for interfering.

I wish this episode was just a dated history, but it obviously isn’t. Life is grossly unfair and stupid as hell, and it still is in lots of ways in 2019. I suppose we can take some solace that we made it from a time when a short story author in a second-tier SF rag wasn’t permitted to be black up to a time when DS9 exists, which does indeed have a black commander, and most of society is perfectly good with that. But it can still be a crime to be driving while black, and our racist garbage president still inexplicably has his job, but the demographics aren’t in his party’s favor anymore. There’s a real path to this episode being irrelevant to the present day in maybe another 20 years. All I can do is hope that’ll be the case.

Ahem. To be less sullen, there’s a lot of fun stuff in this episode too. I loved all the regulars in their human suits. I loved the sunny cafe Cassie worked in, how everyone wore suits and hats or dresses and looked good. I loved that no one had a cell phone and books and magazines and yesterday’s baseball game mattered. There are a million little gags, too. I do have to say that there is no way that Michael Dorn’s hulking Willie Hawkins wouldn’t have been a better baseball player than this guy.

So “Maybe it was all a dream?” is well-documented as the weakest cop-out in human literature, but I somehow felt OK with it this time. It was ambiguous enough, maybe. Or the fact that we’ve established the Prophets will give Sisko these kinds of visions from time to time. Or similar to my general feelings against holodeck stuff, the quality made up for it.

Overall: A great one. 5 out of 5.

S6E14, “One Little Ship” (Bradley Thompson & David Weddle)

This one was silly enough to watch, it’s even sillier to explain it. So they’re studying a “subspace compression anomaly” which shrinks objects as they get closer. Don’t worry! If you go in reverse you’ll go back to normal. OK, sure. But this raises so many questions. What if you beam in close to it, then go out. Do you get huge? What if you travel orthogonally to the compression field? Do only the parts of you that are closer get smaller? What if, as it happens, while you are in the anomaly in a shuttle, and your ship gets taken over by Jem’Hadar, and then you get blown out of the field, so you have to take your mini-shuttle into the ship to help your captive crewmates?

There’s a whole lot of setup here to get us this far, then a whole lot of the Jem’Hadar making them fix the Defiant, but only observing them selectively enough to let them eventually fight off the intruders. Meanwhile the tiny ship is finding its way around the Defiant and I think it’s supposed to be funny. I maybe chuckled politely. In the end they waste an awful lot of time hashing out the intricate rules of how the crew can fix things not too fast to actually help the Jem’Hadar pirates but not so slowly as to arouse suspicion, and shot after shot of the tiny ship punching lift buttons and hiding behind ship infrastructure. They don’t have much left for a resolution (a quick brawl in engineering) or restoring the ship (happens offscreen, take our word for it things went fine).

I did find the internal scuffling between the different Jem’Hadar factions pretty interesting. Now that a number of them have been born in the Alpha Quadrant, a separate culture has emerged. The rift between young and old is now also a rift between Gamma-born and Alpha-born. Could be a future thing of interest. Or I don’t know, confined to Jem’Hadar time-wasting websites. (“Want to feel old? Your First is an Alpha” “Only true Gammas will remember these ways we served the Founders” “9 ways Alphas are killing the ketracel-white Industry” etc.)

Overall: I think you need to find the tiny ship adorable to like this one and not think too much about the anomaly. Nah. 2 out of 5.

S6E15, “Honor Among Thieves” (René Echevarria)

I internally groaned at first because it checked a few lesser-episode boxes for me:

• Flimsy pretense to wedge in a story generally unsuited to Trek (what did I just say, “Honor Among Thieves”?)
  • Not that I demand pure SF at all times. Quite the opposite! See literally two episodes ago. DS9 does all kinds of good character stuff, farce, etc. But sometimes, especially in TOS, it uses the vastness of space as good-enough justification for literally any kind of story. Gladiators, cowboys, 20th century regular Janes & Joes, whatever.
• Specifically, gangsters
  • And to boot, this felt way to much like “A Piece of the Action“. When I saw “Trials and Tribble-ations” last season I read that they considered that one as their TOS homage but didn’t use it. I guess they didn’t quite get it out of their systems.
• O’Brien Must Suffer

It wasn’t really clear why it had to be O’Brien anyway, other than their hook into the underworld was that O’Brien could slide into Bilby’s life as a handyman. Evidently, still, as always, there is only one fully competent engineer on DS9 that can fix anything. In his absence, every system on the ship starts to decay. They test out some blah excuse that only O’Brien can handle both Federation and Cardassian systems. No, come on. Sisko, please hire some more engineers or start authorizing some refits to swap out the crap Cardassian raktajino makers.

Anyway, my attitude probably didn’t help, but I wasn’t really feeling this one for the first half or so. It was slow and riddled with crime story clichés. Then, gradually, and unexpectedly, it got sad. Poor Bilby drags O’Brien back to his dismal bachelor pad every night to dote on his cat Chester, sigh about his distant family, and bemoan being an old gangster. By the time he gets lured into a high-risk assassination attempt job, O’Brien has built up a cache of sympathy for him so sincere that he turns on his Federation handler and warns Bilby it’s a trap.

I felt like this turn of events was a tough sell. We really don’t know anything about Bilby other than that he has a life of regret. Which, yeah, that’s sad, but the setup here is that he’s a career criminal. He can lovingly feed his Chester every night, but he also injures then kills a guy who cheats him on the Klingon disruptors. The Federation guy reminds O’Brien that Bilby has killed others too, so he shouldn’t be sympathizing with him, and it struck me that our lack of knowledge about Bilby’s past wrecks up the episode’s goals. Assuming he’s got an extensive criminal past, then no, we really shouldn’t be valuing his safety too much. Maybe Bilby has softened up (the guy he killed was another crook, after all?) so jail, rather than death, is the right punishment. But, we don’t really know. It is clear that the Federation takes it too far, which is probably what saves the story in the end. The stated goal of the whole operation is to ferret out a Federation spy, which is accomplished, so they should arrest him at that point. But ick, paperwork, so the icy Federation guy just decides to let the assassination attempt go down, which will neatly dispose of Bilby. (Unlike Bilby’s scant backstory, we do have a whole lot of evidence that Federation bureaucrats are always willing to make a cold decision.) Anyway it ends up not mattering. Bilby is so entrenched in the Orion Syndicate that it’s safer for his family if he just walks into the trap rather than tries to flee. He only asks that O’Brien sees to it that his cat Chester is looked after.

K and I are cat people so I can tell you that this part of the story was unfairly effective on us. I did at one point speculate that Chester was an undercover Changeling keeping an eye on Bilby. But we did see him eat cat food and weren’t sure if Changelings could do that. Which remains unresolved, but anyway, nope, just a cat. O’Brien ends up taking him home, to respect Bilby’s final wishes.

Overall: It ends up being fairly emotional but it’s confusing since we aren’t being told some important backstory. Could they have fleshed that out more, and let Bilby defend himself? Maybe instead of the awkward space prostitute scene? 3 out of 5.

S6E9, “Statistical Probabilities” (René Echevarria)

Now that we’re clear of the war arc we can do some housekeeping on other storylines, including that reveal of Julian being a genetically modified illegal supergenius. Naturally there are other human GMOs out there, and it turns out they didn’t always end up being prodigies like Julian. Many ended up in the psych ward because brains are complicated. Not that this crew of Cuckoo’s Nest extras aren’t smart, they’re probably too smart really, which is of course no state to be in if you want to be a part of human society.

I wasn’t sure about this one at first. The group of modified people are all tropes of mad geniuses and social misfits. Jack’s hyperactivity got old before we were even through the teaser, and I was dreading an episode full of it. There’s a good argument that was done purposefully to make the audience uncomfortable around them. As the show progresses they have something to do other than complain they’re a lot more likeable. It ends up being pretty fascinating to see their overclocked intuition play out when they watched Damar’s speech. It’s a neat dramatic trick—we know various things about Damar and the general situation that this crew wouldn’t, then they fill us in on the details and it’s oddly satisfying.

With this initial success they are given access to more information and start predicting all kinds of stuff. It gets complicated when they take it all the way to a possible conclusion, that the Dominion is so likely to win the war that the Federation should just surrender now. This broad predictive arc is straight out of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, one of my all-time favorites. Here I was wondering why they didn’t use more classic SF stories for these shows, and lately they’ve been making a habit of it. The big idea in Foundation is the concept of “psychohistory” where one can calculate the future of large populations. A person is unpredictable, but groups people behave in predictable ways. The more people you’re accounting for, the more predictable your system is. In the books a scientist named Hari Seldon determines that the galactic empire is on the brink of collapse and 30,000 years of barbarism are on the horizon. But he can take action to trim that down to just 1,000 years.

Unlike Seldon’s remedy, which he implements on his own, alongside the naturally-playing-out empire collapse, “Statistical Probabilities” presents more of a choice. Incredible amounts of people will die, or surrender and reduce casualties. It turns out people don’t intuitively like bad news presented as probabilities. They also don’t like surrendering. But this is still fascinating, and raises so many great questions. Both the Foundation series and “Statistical Probabilities” expose the flaw in the science, so can you really ever have something like psychohistory? Isn’t society too complicated to ever be factored into a series of equations? Even if it could, to some sufficiently high degree of probability, and it says you should surrender, should you? I guess if somehow we could be certain of the math, well, it ain’t the hero’s answer but I’m not going to say one shouldn’t give up when the odds are brutal. Should I try to cross Antarctica on foot, just because it would be an amazing accomplishment, despite having no arctic training or experience or equipment? Hell no, I should absolutely not do that and should give up immediately. I don’t see how a war is any different. Should I invade North Korea, right now, with the clothes on my back and the nearest weapon (uh…I got a sharpened pencil) because I disagree with their policies and human rights abuses? I mean, my heart would be in the right place but it would be the most hilarious war ever. Sure, it’s better to die fighting than live in subjugation…probably. I mean, in the U.S. we’re already largely subject to the whims of the rich and powerful, but we still have personal freedom (compromised if you’re not white or if you don’t care too much about privacy), and laws still (sorta) work, which is why we’re not (yet) marching in the streets (all the time, at least in this country). Obviously this whole idea could merit a whole lot more time and thought, always a hallmark of a good episode.

Interesting additional note. By coincidence I currently happen to be reading another Asimov book, Nemesis. (Not that it’s the craziest coincidence, from a guy whose favorite SF series is by Asimov, and is at this moment writing a blog post about Deep Space Nine…….Good grief. I do plenty of other non-SF stuff in my life but this isn’t a great look.) Well anyway in this book there’s a character with a preternatural ability to read people’s emotions. She has a hypersensitivity to body language and tone that allows her to ferret out any dishonesty or underlying emotions. She basically acts just like Jack et. al.

Overall: A fantastic episode for big SF, but also for Julian, who is still learning to deal with being openly modified. I hope we’ll see more of these guest characters, too. Plus a bonus as the most Asimov-y episode. 5 out of 5.

S6E10, “The Magnificent Ferengi” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

Starts out as The Magnificent Seven, morphs into It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and eventually devolves into Weekend at Bernie’s. This could be good or bad. I’ll say mostly good. It’s an excuse to get our gang of known Ferengi together for the promise of a reward, to kick out a few Ferengi laffs, and riff on some more famous stories. Also to involve guest star Iggy Pop.

Most of this worked well. I kind of love that they conceive the mission as a commando-style raid and steel themselves up for the daunting challenge of rescuing Moogie, only to be derailed by sheer ineptitude. There is ostensibly one single Ferengi alive who enjoys a good brawl (loosely the James Coburn equivalent), and Nog has Federation training, but the rest of this crew is hopeless. Realizing they are far more likely to kill themselves or each other than any Cardassians or Jem’Hadar, they’ve given up by the second act break. This can only have been played for comedy, since it doesn’t really make sense that this is finally the point when it would occur to Quark that he’d be better off negotiating a deal.

Yet much like a certain current U.S. president who claims to be a master of deal making, but has in reality made his living from milking an inheritance and tweeting incomprehensibly about cable news, Quark’s reputation for negotiating prowess derives more from idle boasting than demonstrable results. Still, he manages to wring enough concessions out of his Vorta counterpart Iggy Pop, to get his Moogie back without anyone getting killed aside from poor Keevan.

I felt bad for Keevan in this one. I really liked this character from Rocks and Shoals and thought he had some potential for some additional stories. Maybe he accepts life in the Federation and becomes some kind of military advisor or opens a rival clothing shop on the promenade. But instead he’s reduced to a woeful prisoner, gets accidentally shot, and his re-animated corpse is left to bump around the anonymous hallways of duplicate DS9 until I guess his batteries run out.

I also felt like Iggy was underutilized. His character gets outwitted rather trivially and we don’t really learn anything about him. Not that we have to get a backstory about every one-off guest star but it’s bloody Iggy Pop and there’s no acknowledgement of it at all. Perhaps at this stage of his career he didn’t want special treatment. He just wanted to hit the pavement, go to auditions, and build up his acting CV as an average Iggy Pop.

Overall: Minor quibbles aside, this is a fun one. Doesn’t quite click as well as some other Ferengi comedies but I liked it. 4 out of 5.

S6E11, “Waltz” (Ronald D. Moore)

For a show based around a space station DS9 really enjoys stranding characters together who need some extended scenes to work out their relationship. Here we need to check back in with Sisko and now-psychologically-broken Dukat, so they are this week’s stranded pair with some time to kill.

This one was a slow burn and fairly effective, if something of a riff on Misery. Dukat appears to be more or less handling himself at first but bit by bit we learn the screws are still pretty loose. I liked the slow reveal of his instability, how he’s talking to Sisko, then actually not Sisko at all but his personal phantoms. Sisko discovers Dukat hasn’t even activated the distress beacon to afford them time to hash things out, which to Dukat amounts to coercing Sisko into admitting that they are friends. Unfortunately any crazy ranting in Star Trek seems like a TOS thing, so it’s always a hard sell, but Dukat remains fascinating, and I think they were incredibly lucky to have Marc Alaimo just knocking it out of the park every time. Dukat usually insists he was benevolent towards the Bajorans and could have been so much worse, and it often sounds like a guy who is trying to justify his war crimes and is chock full o’ guilt. But nah, he’s just a bad guy who wishes he’d been more icily remorseless. They were good war crimes! I maybe don’t like this “Dukat really is just evil” revelation, I liked him more complex, but I think there’s still room for doubt.

The related B-story about the Defiant crew having to meet an arbitrarily-included deadline before they give up the search also felt familiar, because it was a go-to tactic in TNG to create some artificial tension. It isn’t fresher with age any more than crazy TOS ranting, but without as much character interest, so I felt like it was kind of a dud thread that didn’t add much.

The end is also a bit of a convenience. Oh well, we didn’t have time to track down Dukat, but we got Sisko back so we are fully reset for next episode. And now crazy Dukat is roaming free in a shuttle, so he’s got that going for him.

Overall: Struggles to find much original or clever to do. It’s worth it for the continued excellent Sisko/Dukat Socratic dialogue but not much else. 3 out of 5.

S6E12, “Who Mourns for Morn?” (Mark Gehred-O’Connell)

My fears they would actually kill off Morn subsided quickly. Something about the tone didn’t quite click and I knew that somehow he’d be back by the end. This proved to be true, but the journey was worth it. The plot fulfills its quota of twists and turns and I enjoyed it. Everyone is clearly lying about everything, which isn’t an easy thing to make work. I wouldn’t say it’s as funny as the best comedy shows DS9 has done. This is more of an off-the-rack model that could be in any show or heist movie.

I’ve been doing Morn Watch during these write-ups because I am fully invested in the ongoing gag that is Morn. Trek has never really committed to recurring jokes before aside from some character interplay, like McCoy & Spock’s barbs, or a very occasional thing like Picard going into hiding whenever Lwaxana Troi came around. This is more the domain of sitcoms. But I’ve felt like they have had just the right touch with Morn, not going to the well too much, and never making more of him than they ought to. He’s a convenient plot device when we need someone to rush to Quark’s, or if we need to have a character overreacting to circumstances and it wouldn’t suit the primary cast. Halfway through season six we get an episode about Morn fully, although it turns out to not really be about him much at all, and more about Quark and the seedy underbelly of interstellar scam artistry. Although in the end we learn some important things about Morn’s disgusting alien biology.

Some stray observations:

• My favorite bit was Morn’s ridiculous hoard of smelly beets. For some reason any large quantity of something stupid in the station’s no-doubt-valuable cargo hold ends up being funny.
• I like the conceit that gold is valueless in this society, excepting some “primitive cultures.” They ride this gag almost as hard as Morn’s always-offscreen blabbermouth. For some reason they encase the actually valuable latinum within worthless gold, mostly just as a way to joke that it’s just the container.
• Memory Alpha tells me the extra Quark pulls out of the crowd at Morn’s wake to keep his chair warm is actually the guy who plays Morn in his usual human suit. Nice.

Overall: A fun one that plays well. You’d think it’d be right up my alley but maybe it’s a little on the [whatever Morn has instead of a nose]. Very good, not quite a classic. 4 out of 5.