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.