S7E1/2, “Image in the Sand”/”Shadows and Symbols” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

One reason I have trouble treating the Bajoran religion with the proper gravitas is the orbs. First off, “orbs” as a concept are inherently much more funny than mystical. (We even bought this wood orb at Target probably 50% because it looks interesting and 50% because we are just liking the word “orb” (which is clearly labeled “WOOD ORB” on the actual orb, but they’ve disappointingly shifted terminology to “decorative ball” on the website)). Plus it seems like there are a whole lot of orbs for seemingly any faith niche, not unlike Christian patron saints or Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. Even if they didn’t have the orbs I wouldn’t say that Sisko’s visions have been very interesting. They come and go, and weird symbolic cast members say Twin Peaks stuff. I don’t really like stories that hinge on dreams either, and these visions have the same feel. Whenever you need to whip up some motivation for your character, just give ’em a really compelling dream or vision or something.

So anyway Sisko has a vision and that whips up some motivation for him to finally move on from the minimum-wage gig at his dad’s restaurant. He knows he has to find some orb on the planet Tyree, and he also sees a woman’s face. After he re-creates the face in a PADD sketch program, Dad pulls a classic “I don’t know anything about that! Just forget it! Leave me alone!” kind of thing that on TV absolutely means that he knows everything and will subsequently require scene after scene of goading before he spills it. Sigh. It turns out to be Benjamin’s real mother, who managed to leave behind a weird Bajoran artifact, and also Sisko gets jumped by a cultist. Seems like it’s time to pack up the baseball, and that’s before New Dax even shows up.

Back on the station, Worf is trashing holosuites to express his concern that he doesn’t think Jadzia is going to make it to Sto-vo-kor on account of being murdered, which hardly seems fair. You’d think the Klingon gods would consider her body of work over her final moment getting ambushed by a lunatic. Newly promoted Colonel Kira is dealing with cultists and the astonishingly predictable deterioration of their alliance with the Romulans. Is that enough setup for part 2? Everyone’s packed, armed, angry, or recently introduced.

Well, like a lot of these DS9 two-parters, I feel like half is good and half is just OK. Sometimes the setup is too stretched out and the payoff doesn’t make it worth it, or, as in this case, the setup is interesting but the payoff just sorta checks all the boxes and resets everything.

• I do like this reluctant host idea that Ezri wasn’t prepared to be the new Dax at all, that she was conscripted in a Trill-mergency and now that’s who she is. We haven’t had a good new Trill idea for a while and this is an interesting one, beyond the definitely-going-to-be awkward eventual meeting of Worf that it lines up. Trills may find themselves inheriting radically different lives sometimes, which sounds like the cross-sectional space between DS9 and Quantum Leap.
• I also liked the tie-in to “Far Beyond the Stars” and the interesting doubt-seeding about which universe is the real one.
• Though I didn’t like the pointless tagging along of Grandpa Sisko through Ben’s desert quest, which amounted to mostly him being overheated and exhausted and falling behind. Which is what I would do if I had to traipse through the desert too, but it doesn’t make for compelling TV. One supposes they might have thought to build up a Grandpa emergency at some point, but then it would have come off as either too contrived or too mean so they just had to roll with it. Everyone likes Grandpa Sisko and there’s no great need to make this whole thing even more cruel for Ben.
• This was the episode for pointless tag-alongs I guess because Quark on the bridge of a Klingon warship is even more absurd than dragging your elderly father through the desert on your vision quest. And there’s a whole lot more complaining.
• But the general Worf et. al. mission to destroy some shipyards in Jadzia’s honor, thereby granting her admission to Sto-vo-kor, is pretty good. The weird Klingon rules can get a bit too fungible to matter sometimes, but if it satisfies Worf, I’m good with it.
• The Romulan story wasn’t hugely rewarding to me, it just wasn’t going to ever go any way than it did. But it does remind us that Kira is a Boss.

Overall: A pretty good two-parter (three if you could the end of last season). Great execution if a little flimsy on motivations. 4 out of 5.

S7E3, “Afterimage” (René Echevarria)

With that arc settled, it’s time to meet the new girl. Only she’s not really “new” she’s kinda recycled, and only like 15% new. Actually that raises a question. Have we established how long a symbiont really lives? It’s been something like seven Trill lifetimes now for Dax. So if a symbiont is part of everyone who’s every existed before, each new host makes up a smaller percentage of the whole. If they were weighted evenly then eventually the new host wouldn’t even register in proportion to all previous ones. Even for Dax it’s getting pretty small. But they aren’t weighted evenly, and based on six seasons of Jadzia, I’d say any given Dax is like 50% current host, with varying shades of the rest. Seems like stronger personalities win out, plus a recency bias.

Leaving behind Trill math, other than Sisko, everyone is varying degrees of skeezed out by Ezri Dax, including Ezri. This episode is about the skeezing. Actually there’s some skeezing and some welcoming and really everything in between. Sisko still wants to call her “Old Man,” which Jadzia dug but weirds out Ezri. Quark sees the situation as a second chance with Dax. Bashir sees her as a different person, but then Ezri messes him up by saying he woulda had a shot with Jadzia if not for Worf, and Worf senses this too I guess because Julian is the one on a receiving end of a Worf choke hold, not Quark. Ezri still hasn’t really figured out how thoroughly her life has been messed up, but she tries to work through it by helping Garak get over his guilt for decoding Cardassian messages.

Not really feeling any strong opinions about the whole Garak thread, despite that being the crux of this ep’s story. I think we can all grok that he’s feeling guilty about being so directly involved in the ultimate destruction of his people. Ezri’s role in helping him figure this out isn’t as interesting as her other relationships though.

Anyway the portrayal of changes in those relationships makes for a very strong episode. This is the kind of thing DS9 does well: it’s some kind of weird SF situation but the story encompasses all of the major characters and they all have a logical and/or natural reaction to it. Worf is probably the hardest to pin down and the show doesn’t try to guess his feelings, because we can’t exactly tap into the human experience of how you should react when your spouse dies, but their symbiont is restored into a new person, and that person becomes your co-worker. It seems about right that he would want to avoid her, yet get jealous of anyone who didn’t do the same.

Overall: 4 out of 5. A necessary housekeeping episode but it gets the job done.

S7E4, “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” (Ronald D. Moore)

Not for the first time, the episode summary and Netflix still looked so silly that we briefly thought it might be a skip. But then it was good! (Just to clarify this before moving on, I don’t think we’d really skip an episode. Especially considering that the two times we thought about it, they turned out to be good, with multiple bad episodes sneaking up on us in between. We are bad at Trek speculating.) And in fact, one of the more entertaining episodes of the series, even if its execution is a little clunky.

So a Vulcan crew stops over at DS9, spurring a few seemingly unlikely coincidences: they are into baseball and want to challenge Sisko’s crew to a game. But it turns out their captain is an old school rival of Sisko’s, whom he insists on challenging through sports despite Vulcans being smarter and way stronger. In this case, they also have a vastly superior baseball team by dint of…knowing how to play baseball. Sisko recruits his staff to challenge them, putting together a rag-tag team that will shock the arrogant favorites with a victory based on heart and desire, not logic.

Hahaha, no, this isn’t what happens at all. Their garbage rookie team gets mauled by the sharply efficient Vulcan team. But that’s what makes this episode great. I say a lot that DS9 doesn’t do the normal thing with a lot of these clichéd setups, and here’s another example. Because a win here wasn’t going to happen. When I was in grad school we had an intramural softball team. It was a lot of fun and I couldn’t tell you how many we won or lost. Probably every team was .500 just by expected randomness. That was our first season, anyway. Our second season we somehow missed a registration deadline and didn’t get to play in the same grad student league, we got tossed into the leftover pile. Mostly it ended up being undergrad fraternity/sorority teams and our team of scrawny library school students got destroyed every time. We usually got mercy-rule’d so at least we didn’t have to suffer for the full six innings every game. So honestly if “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” would’ve gone down any other way I wouldn’t have been a fan. Instead it morphed into a story about Rom’s redemption, Sisko’s ego, and finding joy in unexpected places. The haughty Vulcan jerk can call it “manufactured triumph” (saving that one for a future fantasy baseball team name, btw) all he wants but no one cares.

We wondered a bit if Vulcans would really like baseball. It’s established that they might like good logical games like chess. I could also see them liking games and sports more generally. Anything where there’s a sense of rule and order, where you can refine mental or physical skills. But I can’t imagine they have any kind of professional sports. I’m a dumb human who spends a lot of time watching and thinking about pro sports so I absolutely know how illogical and stupid those are. But I’ll buy that Vulcans like them for their personal enjoyment. Baseball maybe is a stretch since even this era’s humans don’t know a thing about it (but apparently all other ship business can be put on hold for a few weeks for a crash course).

So many good bits from this one that I liked:

• Most players: “Hey batter batter batter Hey batter.” Worf: “Death to the opposition!”
• Their absurd practice jerseys of all colors, shades, materials, etc. It was like they asked the costume designers themselves were from the 24th century and told what baseball uniforms sorta looked like, and they went from there. Although their actual team jerseys were pretty sharp.
• So many good Memory Alpha trivia bits. I learned that Cirroc Lofton is the nephew of Kenny Lofton, actual very good human baseball player. I guess it didn’t rub off because every time Jake pitches they did an obvious quick cut to a stand-in. MA also says Max Grodénchik had been a semi-pro player but he’s playing the laughably bad Rom, so they made him bat lefty and wear his glove on the wrong hand to approximate the proper sort of ineptitude.
  • There’s plenty more in there but I don’t need to relate them all just to relate them. This episode might have the best trivia section of any show of the series.

Overall: 5 out of 5. All-in on “manufactured triumph.”

S6E24, “Time’s Orphan” (Joe Menosky/Bradley Thompson & David Weddle)

This is a little SF ditty about having a wild teenager, except not the kind that dates college guys and stays out all night and can’t be controlled, I mean the kind that got lost for a decade and has gone feral.

It’s one of those “only in SF” concepts that a show like this can take on, and it’s decently handled. But it’s also a story about frustration, and stories about frustration can be frustrating to watch. Trying to think of a good story about a frustrating situation. I dunno, Apollo 13 maybe. But they skip all the aggravating heads banging against walls in favor of the parts where the CO2 filters work, where the delicate rotation is successful. In these five minutes of thinking about it (in which mostly I DuckDuckGo’d “From the Earth to the Moon,” an HBO miniseries about the Apollo program that I remembered doing an outstanding job portraying all the engineering challenges and solutions—seems like it’s hard to find at the moment, however, as it’s trapped in non-streaming, out-of-print physical media purgatory) I will hypothesize that you need to include some measure of successes in with all the annoyances. But the Molly-taming isn’t really done right. All the progress seems to happen off screen and we only see the backsliding. Mostly we just feel tremendously sorry for the O’Briens. Basically they lost their daughter and this isn’t really going to bring her back even if they succeed.

While the O’Briens are trying to assimilate teenage feral Molly, Dax and Worf take on babysitting chores, which mostly fall to Worf since Dax has some time-sensitive work to attend to and we need an excuse to have Worf taking care of a baby as our B story. Humbling the mightiest man via infant care is rather trite as a concept for sure, but in execution I actually quite enjoyed it. (Signed, a sucker for Worf stories.) First there’s this fantastic line:

“I am a Klingon warrior and a Starfleet officer. I have piloted starships through Dominion minefields. I have stood in battle against Kelvans twice my size. I courted and won the heart of the magnificent Jadzia Dax. If I can do these things, I can make this child go to sleep.”

Then there’s the cute bit where the kid picks up a little thing Worf was entertaining him with. But mostly it’s how Worf is again revealed to be principally motivated by impressing his wife, and it’s charming as hell.

Anyway, wrapping up the main story was unfortunately pretty clumsy. I don’t know that we really generate the right level of sadness from Miles and Keiko. They’re just kinda, “Well, our daughter is now this wild human, let’s roll with it.” Eventually they realize she has to go back to her old life, she’s not really their daughter in any emotional sense any more, but the S part of the SF gets real loose here. O’Brien seems to have pinpoint accuracy with the time portal when he needs it but can miss by ten years if the plot would be more interesting that way. But whatever, they get lil Molly back and all is fine, except for vaporizing adult feral Molly. This sorta revisits the ethical dilemma of “Children of Time” where offshoot people who emerge from time travel mistakes are still valid people. But, like, what can you do?

Overall: 2 out of 5. Some of it works, some is rushed and just OK. Sometimes more than others I’m curious what the broader opinion of the episode is, and this was definitely one of those cases, but the only notes Memory Alpha has about it are some quotes from the guest actress who played adult Molly about how she liked filming green screen stuff with the time portal. I feel like you’re dodging my question here, Memory Alpha.

S6E25, “The Sound of Her Voice” (Pam Pietroforte/Ronald D. Moore)

They don’t have a ship counselor on DS9, ostensibly deciding mental health isn’t that important on an understaffed spaceport at the bleeding edge of Federation territory within a war zone. So there’s no Troi here, and yet this series frequently has episodes about interpersonal squabbles or emotional issues. TNG had Troi, and very few similar episodes. Bloody out of touch Federation leadership not connecting the dots, as usual. So “The Sound of Her Voice” installs a temporary counselor, in the form of a disembodied voice that just needs someone to talk to, and it turns out everyone needs to share some feelings.

The talking parts of this one are solid, and subtly written and effective as usual for the recent Ronald Moore scripts. We get sort of a general catch-up on several people, as each of them rotates through talking to Lisa, and for each of them it grows from tedious chore to something they look forward to. The plot parts aren’t nearly as good. Lisa’s situation grows increasingly dire as the Defiant hurtles to save her, but it’s some classic contrived Trek timing to keep things moving at just the right pace to suit the story. Problems are raised and forgotten, like a tense debate about diverting power from defenses to boost the engines—Worf, naturally, doesn’t approve of this leaving them vulnerable—but it never comes up again. (Honestly just by bringing it up they can’t win. Either they walk into the clichéd irony of ditching the thing they end up needing the most, or it goes nowhere and the scene is a waste.) Lisa’s CO2 situation gets worse as they get closer, naturally, to make things increasingly desperate. Then in the end they can’t even save her because she’s actually been dead for months, and the whole conversation was time-shifted or whatever. Actually I sorta like that ending provided I don’t think about the physics details of a time-shifted conversation too much.

Meanwhile, there is a decent B-story padding out things. Odo gets dating tips from Quark and Jake gets insider crime tips from Quark. It culminates in a tit-for-tat where Odo lets a laughably obvious Quark smuggling scheme slide in exchange for useful dating advice. Eh, what’s some minor crime compared to love. I did have to chuckle at Odo’s “Finally my chance to get Quark” nonsense, as if anyone still buys this. We’re through six season of dirty deeds done dirt cheap, we get it. Quark can do some occasional safecracking or hacking or serving as an informant, and the occasional enforcement laxity regarding minor petty crimes is what that service costs. Odo compensates by harassing Quark about barstool regulations or whatever just to keep the boot on Quark’s neck but Quark can live with that as long as the bigger scores get to come through. The economics of frontier justice can be complex.

In the end everyone makes a special point about letting each other know how much they all care about one another, so, hopefully no one will ironically die in the very next episode. But also that having a counselor was a pretty good thing, maybe they should think about something like that. We can only speculate as to where these two seemingly unrelated conclusions will lead.

Overall: The flaws are pretty standard issue Trek and don’t really get in the way of a generally solid episode. This one ends up being a big hearty serving of late-period DS9, something we’ve all earned through just about six full seasons now. 4 out of 5.

S6E26, “Tears of the Prophets” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

OK so yeah, I can do more than speculate since I fell behind in my show write-ups and am actually well into season 7 at this writing. But I knew what was coming in this episode anyway because the BIG SPOILER coming in this episode was hard to avoid while reading about various other tangents in Memory Alpha. My wife reports that she was surprised by Jadzia’s death, so the foreshadowing was subtle enough to not give anything away, but still be meaningful if you know what’s coming.

But they sure do lay it on thick. Jadzia can’t wait for her and Worf’s definitely long life together. Bashir informs her that she and Worf can indeed have children (which we’re told required some science, but it’s not surprising because like what races can’t produce children together in the Trek universe, and also I guess there are no recorded relationships between Trill and Klingons ever). So they sure are happy and can think about everything they’ll do together one day. But in reality, Becker had come calling and Terry Farrell didn’t get along with Rick Berman (I didn’t do much research here but her side of the story makes him sound pretty obnoxious), so Jadzia had to die. [Worf howl.]

The episode itself is effective, though not that interesting as a story. It has a lot to get done and felt a bit like it was completing a checklist rather than moving in a compelling natural direction. They knew where they wanted to go and whatever needs to happen to get them there is fair game. Jadzia has to die. The prophets need their penance. And we need a reset on Sisko’s confused split between Emissary and Captain. We have a big space battle, but resolved with some standard issue polarity reversal thing. More of a problem is that I’ve felt like this prophet penance storyline has been a bit aimless and confused and it hasn’t resonated with me that well. I’m finding I need to read the episode summaries pretty closely to remember what happened. If they need the wormhole to do something, they make up something about the prophets and it happens. Dukat gets to be the agent in this because why not. He’s the most interesting bad guy anyway.

So we’re left with a confused Sisko, who isn’t sure how or why or if he should reconcile his twin roles, scrubbing oysters back on Earth at his dad’s restaurant. He brought his baseball, implying that he doesn’t know if he’s coming back. I like how the baseball has evolved into a fairly useful metaphor for Sisko’s current status, which at this point is certainly “it’s complicated.”

Overall: A typically gloomy Trek season-closer. I wish I felt more interested in the wormhole aliens/prophets thing but I do care about Sisko and am sad for Worf. 4 out of 5.