DS9’s quality remains high, and I’ve liked almost every episode this season, but it’s definitely weird that Vic Fontaine has had the most screen time behind only Ezri this season. Vic Fontaine! I’m sure they’re wishing they’d have thought of a more in-universe hologram character, because they seem genuinely inspired by the concept, only they accidentally struck gold in the form of a 1960s Vegas lounge singer. What are they going to do, have an episode about a casino heist on DS9? Where are our regulars? Sisko is just milling around his office being grouchy, waiting either for the war to end or for baseball season to start. Kira and Odo have disappeared into domestic bliss. Is Jake even on the show anymore? As a viewer I sort of feel like Bashir did a few episodes back when he was like, “Hey what are you guys doing tonight? I’m up for whatever!” and everyone blew him off on the way to their own lives.

I have my own life as well, which for better or worse is not entirely devoted to watching DS9. As such, I have fallen quite far behind in recapping the series. In my universe, baseball season has started, among other things. So I’m going to declare DS9 bankruptcy and do a Star Trek Speed Round to catch back up and clear the decks for the series’ final arc. I’m giving myself one hour to write all four of these, so they gotta be short and sweet. Here we go:

S7E13, “Field of Fire” (Robert Hewitt Wolfe)

We’re getting our money’s worth on Ezri in the short time we have left, now the featured or co-featured regular on four straight episodes. Also on Joran, Dax’s one evil personality, who gets one final go to corrupt the naive new host. Is this the first time we see Joran as Joran? I think the other times it’s been like Sisko or someone sorta getting inhabited by him. This guy hangs around as Ezri’s evil shadow and does some murders until she figures out how he’s pulling it off.

This was a pretty decent, if not super memorable, one-off mystery-style episode that TNG was better at, but DS9 manages. Joran is suitably creepy (although I don’t know that we necessarily needed another episode about him) and we meet a few extras and learn just enough about them to be sad when they are immediately murdered.

Randomly directed by Wally from Leave it to Beaver. Memory Alpha suggests most of the staff was tied up trying to figure out how to salvage “Prodigal Daughter” and prep for the next few episodes and the final arc, so this was just kind of a placeholder, but again, DS9 has enough good infrastructure to kick out something like this. 3 out of 5.

S7E14, “Chimera” (René Echevarria)

Odo hasn’t directly stated that he’s really washed his hands of the Founders and their disease-ridden Great Link, but his actions of completely not appearing to care whatsoever makes the point well enough. Yet if there were any doubts, the arrival of another rogue Changeling would probably stir up some feelings in him.

I liked this one a lot. The premise is super interesting, I wonder why Odo hadn’t thought to find more of his randomly-distributed brethren. (Not that I have any ideas for how he might go about it, especially these days when none of them are going to be that keen to be found.) Laas turns out to be sort of a proto-Odo, like what happens if a rogue Changeling never really gets adopted into any society and learns manners. So he comes across as rude and obnoxious, and not just because he thinks the solids are vastly inferior, but because he’s just sort of a jerk. Then again, he’s never really spent any time around other people. He’s basically a real-life (well, TV life) internet troll in the flesh (well, blobby stuff): he’s been sequestered away in his own realm, developing idiotic opinions of everyone else because there’s no one around to correct or disprove him. But: he’s also a solid, and Odo doesn’t know any of those that aren’t trying to kill him.

This one reminded me of a TNG episode (I can’t spare the time in my writing hour to look it up right now so I’ll be vague) where they encounter an extremely androgynous humanoid race, and Riker falls in love with one of them. The gist of the episode is that it was sort of culturally wrong to prefer to be one gender or the other. It was a strong gender-SF story but where it screwed up was that Riker’s interest clearly leaned female (mostly by being played by a human female), so it was hard to buy his interest in an androgyne. What they wanted to present as gender-challenging wasn’t that at all. Here they did it right. Laas is masculine like Odo. Previously the linking had seemed like a male-female thing highly likened to sex, so I thought they made the most interesting choice to have them both be male and rid us human viewers of our notions of Changeling genders.

Whoa, cool trivia. I just learned that Laas was played by JG Hertzler, i.e., Martok. He was credited as “Garman Hertzler” and had enough of a resemblance I thought it was JG’s son or brother or something. Well, I just really like this guy I guess. Nicely done, if aided by the makeup department.

Anyway, they find some interesting new Changeling stuff here. Laas is really good at it, he spends some time hanging out on the promenade as a fog but still can’t get the face right. Or doesn’t want to because solids are lame. But mostly this is an important one for Odo, and it’s been a while since we’ve had one of those. Our sappy blob really does love Kira, and he proves that he’ll give up anything for her. 5 out of 5.

S7E15, “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

And here’s our casino heist. And like every other Vic Fontaine episode to date, it seemed like a sure disaster, but I ended up kinda liking it. It’s silly and really has no place on DS9, but dang if it isn’t fun. It’s certainly not the disaster that TOS’s visit to gangland Chicago was, because at least it’s not boring at all. Even though the utterly unoriginal “OMG the holosuite is locked and we can’t do anything about it” setup and the cartoonish crime boss are groaners.

But like Sisko, even though I don’t think holosuite hijinks are for me, you can make up for a lot with a good scheme. (Even if that scheme has the detail of someone being given ipecac and running away “at warp speed!” (haha, that means fast!!)) We have to appreciate how DS9 can do something like “Chimera” then turn around and do this kind of farce, and the characters work for us in both. A grudgingly earned 4 out of 5.

S7E16, “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges” (Ronald Moore)

I really liked the first Section 31 episode and had been anticipating another. This is a worthy followup, but isn’t quite as clever or intriguing as its very successful predecessor.

Sloan again corners Julian into assisting him on a plot against the Romulans, spurring a multi-level game of spy vs spy as Bashir and Sloan try to outwit each other. Ultimately though, I think it just didn’t quite come together. Who is manipulating who gets rather convoluted, which maybe you could say makes it intriguing, but I felt mostly confused. The twists getting revealed just made things seem muddier rather than clearer. Sloan becomes some kind of squirrelly superhero, able to beam himself to safety in an instant to avoid a phaser shot and escape all detection all the time. I think I’ve written before that I find superheroes boring. They always win because they are the best, what’s interesting about that?

I’d say this one works better as a further elaboration of Section 31’s history and capabilities, and how the Federation bosses may or may not be directing them, than a self-contained story. Still pretty good, but a bit unsatisfying. 3 out of 5.

S7E9, “Covenant” (René Echevarria)

I’m going to cut a few of these reviews shorter over the next few batches, and here’s a wonderful place to start. This is a predictable splat of an episode about Dukat resurfacing as the leader of a Pah-wraith cult. Fictional cult stories follow a precise, boring, pattern. There will be a lot of religious-sounding hokum that, as viewers, we are asked to accept is compelling enough to suck in a bunch of dupes. But their charismatic leader will ultimately get exposed as a shady fraud. Kira tries yelling at the dupes for a while but the light doesn’t come on until a child born to a cultist Bajoran couple turns out to be half-Cardassian. Well, Mr. Charisma is the only Cardassian around, which is an obvious enough sign to start wising up even this particularly hapless bunch. (But it still takes them a couple more days of further screw-ups by Dukat.)

This one didn’t do much for me. It reminds us that Dukat is still a dangerous free radical and that he’s really into the Pah-wraith thing, but the episode itself is a dud. I did like that the use of the Batman TV show-style angled camera viewpoint for Empok Nor establishing shots. But other than that, 2 out of 5.

S7E10, “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (David Mack & John J. Ordover/Ronald D. Moore)

It’s not that I don’t like Vic Fontaine, one actually can’t help but like the guy. His continued appearances just emphasize a feeling that the show has gone off-mission. We keep learning new ’60s Vegas slang but meanwhile, there hasn’t been a good SF episode for a while really. Well it turns out we can have both.

Vic’s existence did start as a good SF concept. It raises a bunch of interesting questions about hologram programs. So he’s sad when they keep turning him off, and aware of it. Although we know he can “leave” the holosuites and tap into the station’s comms system to give people helpful advice when needed, even when “off”. So he’s never off? I don’t know that this is clear. Huh, actually this opens things up maybe a bit too much. What’s stopping him from just turning the holosuite back on? Or spying on everyone and spinning up an elaborate blackmail scheme? Well, if he was gonna go bad he’d have had his chances. He just accepts that when the humans are done with him, he has to just ping around the ship’s RAM until the next time someone wants to hear “Mack the Knife.”

“It’s Only a Paper Moon” takes a new step by establishing that he lives in a Groundhog Day-like universe. Every day starts around his nightly showtime, which he has to perform over and over again. In the movie we wondered what would happen if Phil just stayed awake forever, though I think he implies to Rita that at 6 a.m. everything starts over no matter what he does. But if you leave Vic’s program running, he gets to unpause his calendar, retiring to his bachelor pad and making it to future poker nights with his buddies that never would arrive in the usual scope of things.

The initiator of Vic’s restored life is Nog, indeed following the Lt. Dan post-injury trajectory of guilt & depression, until he does what we imagine most future people do, which is sequester themselves in the holosuites forever rather than face shitty reality. However, it follows that if holosuite life is accurate enough, it will also eventually tend towards shitty reality. You don’t get to just restart the program, you wake up with a hangover. To keep living the high life you gotta keep your books in order. As it happens, Ferengi love keeping books in order. Nog decides that’s a way to escape his recovery depression, but it becomes so tedious Vic would rather just be restarted. Or, well, he rather wouldn’t, but he values Nog’s happiness over this own. What a guy. (He’s most certainly programmed that way.)

Overall: 5 out of 5. Well this isn’t a big party, it’s Nog’s healing episode, but it works as both. The holosuite exploration is fascinating, but Nog’s story works really well, and it’s inspired for them to combine the two.

S7E11, “Prodigal Daughter” (Bradley Thompson & David Weddle)

It’s not that Ezri isn’t interesting either. All the other characters have made it to some kind of stable point, but Dax has done a general reset, so she’s the freshest billed character going. This is what I mean by the show still retaining its quality: they’re still squeezing out good stories, they are just running out of people to tell them about. Luckily they’ve avoided a Poochie-like cast addition that would doom the show’s final season. They’re also just kind of hovering around the war at this point, they need to wrap it up but presumably are waiting until a final series arc.

“Prodigal Daughter” is intricately plotted enough that I’m not going to try to untangle it. But it’s a clever story that somehow involves both O’Brien and Ted from Mad Men. (Norvo was driving me crazy during this episode. I just couldn’t place him until we looked him up later. We watched Mad Men during its run, but neither K nor I obsessed about it, and most of the cast has left our brains. K could not remember Ted at all. We subsequently spent some time reminding ourselves what the various “that guy”s were named and what their deal was.) It’s also an intro to Ezri’s rich industrialist family, with whom she’s on the outs, along with with Norvo.

It’s kind of an oddball show, with really only one principal other than a tacked-on O’Brien, but it’s some real solid, all-pro DS9. Good plotting, good characters, insight into Ezri. I was bummed for everyone at the end. Some nice production value about Ezri’s family’s home. Also, again, O’Brien is the only one who can fix stuff, even ore processors he has never seen before. I’d call this one a 4 out of 5.

Interesting Memory Alpha note about how the showrunners felt that DS9 was good for one weird dud episode that goes off the rails per season, and they felt that this one belonged in that conversation. I didn’t get that at all, strangely. I’ve agree with them on some counts, but not this one.

Worst episodes, per DS9 producers

Season	Episode	My Rating	My Worst
1	"Move Along Home"	2 -- Though that was probably generous	"If Wishes Were Horses"
2	"Rivals"	3 -- It was a silly one but I actually kinda liked it.	"Sanctuary"
3	"Meridian"	0 -- Yes, Zero.	Strongly agree. Definitely the worst episode of the series.
4	"The Muse"	3 -- The A story was pretty decent here, at least.	This one is confusing. "Starship Down" was WAY worse.
5	"Let He Who Is Without Sin..."	2 -- which was generous. It's bad. But not as bad as:	"Empok Nor"
6	"Profit and Lace"	0	I had this one at 1 originally but it deserves the full zero, too.
7	Prodigal Daughter	4 -- I don't really understand the hate here.	So far, going with "Convenant"

 

S7E12, “The Emperor’s New Cloak” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

For a guy shocked to learn his species is dying off (six episodes ago and counting), Odo is spending a lot of time hanging around the bar on the prowl for petty crime. One surmises this is how Odo relaxes. He also gets to taunt Quark about his love for Dax, which is probably equally rewarding. This time it sends Quark into an emotional tailspin that culminates in lengthy, expensive prayers to the Ferengi God of Business. (Interesting, no mention of Nog’s Great River. Quark evidently practices a more theistic economically-based Ferengi religion.)

Anyway the real story here turns out to be a cross between a Quark & Rom scheme episode and an alternate universe episode that mostly never works all that well as the comedy it’s intended to be, but serves as a perfectly adequate unit of Trek-based entertainment. We’ve seen better schemes and we’ve had more interesting parallel universe situations. This addition doesn’t really seem all that necessary. A lot of minutes are spent with Rom trying to parse how the alternate universe is opposite or not, and how to react based on whether it is or isn’t. For a guy who’s smart enough to insist installing a cloaking device is simple, but can surreptitiously sabotage a Klingon Bird of Prey while he’s at it, he shouldn’t be so dumb that no one can explain all of this to him. Perhaps in the Trek universe this is the difference between “book smart” and “street smart.” [Memory Alpha tells me they wanted Rom to stand in for all the show fans who insisted the parallel universe make some internal sense, when it clearly does not, and is mostly played for laffs when not contemplating borrowing replacement spouses for Sisko.]

We don’t learn a whole lot that’s new about the parallel universe. Though perhaps there was some sort of tricky conspiracy but I didn’t really get what was happening. Mostly I think this was an excuse to get in another parallel story and give our new pals Ezri and Vic a chance to be alternates. Ezri’s a leather-clad tough chick and Vic is a real guy instead of a hologram. Although I guess probably he was a real guy in our universe too, only dead for centuries. So the doubles can live in substantially different eras and/or states of matter. I know, I know, I shouldn’t try to figure it out. But: Does this imply it’s a fantastic coincidence that all the DS9ers are alive at the same time as their doubles? Anyway Parallel Vic gets laserblasted immediately so we’re not going to find out anything today.

I did like the gag of Quark & Rom sneaking around with a cloaked cloaking device until it went on for five minutes too long. I also got a chuckle out of Martok discovering they’d stolen his cloaking device. Why has Martok become so vulnerable to Dennis the Menace-style Ferengi antagonization?

Overall: I dunno, 3 out of 5. Wasn’t really all that funny and not much new or interesting, but it seemed like everyone had a good time, which maybe doesn’t happen all the time 160 episodes in, so I’m happy for them.