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.
