S7E23, “Extreme Measures” (David Weddle & Bradley Thompson)

I had a theory for a while that Bashir would end up joining Section 31 when the show wrapped. Gave him a good resolution and possible but unlikely spinoff. But that theory has lost momentum as Section 31 has become increasingly shady. It’s clear Julian really hates them, actually, rather than considering them some kind of supercool spy outfit. It doesn’t help that their new thing is creating ultra-rare diseases that are killing one of his friends, and making him waste hours in bureaucratic hell as a way of passively-aggressively denying him any information. So he and O’Brien concoct some trickery, presuming any communications will be intercepted by Section 31. They send a false report that they found the cure, which they think will get Sloan to show up. They have a cunning plan to capture him, then, uh, somehow everything will work out fine.

Pretty much all of “Extreme Measures” is devoted to Bashir and O’Brien lurking around Sloan’s mind thanks to some kind of Romulan mind-probing technology designed to make mind-probing theatrically interesting. Certainly it beats the TOS approach of having sweaty guys yell out scrambled but pertinent information, or carefully arranging a bedsheet around Spock’s skull while McCoy swaps in some new wetware.

I thought this was a nice little SF mind twister, if a little arbitrarily dreamy in the way that any SF taking place in someone’s brain can be. I liked some of the bits, like Sloan’s ability to engage some sort of auto-suicide process, and the mini-twist when Bashir and O’Brien first think they’re out of the woods. It’s satisfying when they get to the end, prying the cure out of Sloan’s mind, even though we know they’re going to get there one way or another. Come on, they’re not killing off Odo, even three episodes from the series end.

This also gives me a chance to bring up the very retro-future idea that as late as 1999, it was thought that storing X units of information would necessitate X PADDs. They just couldn’t quite shake the analogy that PADDs were more like books than like computer disks, even though computer disks (and even rudimentary PDAs) already existed.

Anyway the episode mostly lets us enjoy one more run of the Bashir-O’Brien friendship. I like how the pairing has developed over the course of the series. Suddenly we’re at the end and it’s like, wait, these guys must be tremendous friends by now. Big crushing bear hugs all around, with lots of hearty slaps on the back.

Perfectly good Trek, a bit thinner than other stuff we’ve seen lately, but a solid 3 out of 5.

S7E24, “The Dogs of War” (Peter Allan Fields/René Echevarria & Ronald D. Moore)

A classic DS9 dead-serious A story paired with ludicrous B story frivolity.

Team Damar makes halting progress in their little rebellion game. This just spurs the Dominion to kill a whole lot more Cardassians in retribution. But they overplay their hand, and the streets rally behind Damar, bolstering them for a final push. This thread comes together really well. The cruelty of the Dominion is maybe a little absurd, and we certainly don’t have time in the penultimate episode to build out any stories about it to let it truly feel real, but the point comes across. The Dominion is jerks, is what it is. Feels like the right way for them to go down.

Meanwhile, Zek’s unfathomable oldness has finally prompted him to retire, and he’s on his way to DS9 to name a successor. Fittingly his message gets garbled by some laughably contrived static, of all things, but we’ve rolled with Ferengi nonsense for 171 episodes, what’s one more. Quark thinks he’s going to be Nagus, but of course, it’s Rom, who has embraced his mother’s progressive values, so Zek considers him more fit to take over. Quark doesn’t even want the gig because the Nagus’ reforms to liberate Fenergi society from its backward economic brutality have offended him so much. It’s inarguably better, just not what he’s used to, and he’d rather consider everyone else wrong than accept that it might just be him. So Rom’s ascension is completely agreeable conclusion, I think goes without saying.

Quark was my first favorite character in the series. I wrote something to the effect that he was having fun while everyone else was being a grownup. Naturally I have matured as a DS9 viewer. Well honestly Quark probably lost the Most Favored Character title to Odo as early as Season 2, so as it turned out, my interest in Quark was just a youthful fling. He’s been mostly a scoundrel and hard to really like. As the series ends, he might actually be my least favorite.

A satisfying one where everyone gets what’s coming to them, including Sisko, who gets a new Defiant. 4 out of 5.

S7E25/6, “What You Leave Behind” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

I happen to have hit the end of a bunch of things lately. Finished a Harry Potter re-read, Liu Cixin’s “A Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, a pretty big work project’s end. And now DS9, after two years! I feel comfortable saying that all of those things are great, and this has the best ending of any of them. It also has the best ending of any Trek series I’ve watched. TOS doesn’t really “end” so much as stop being produced. TNG has a very good ending but per my write up (which I’ll have to go on because I certainly don’t remember) it avoided much emotional stuff. DS9’s finale is a similarly fantastic episode but also generated a few genuine sniffles. Fitting, as it’s certainly the best Trek series. All I can really do is gush about its last chapter.

Our ongoing threads all coalesce. The war gets real and Damar/Kira/Garak’s guerilla campaign has both triumphs and setbacks. This could have all been just a lot of both land- and space-based laser battles in lesser hands, but it’s all so well-developed that the victories feel real. Fittingly the Dominion’s downfall comes about when they yet another evil short-term fix over long-term strategy. This has been coming for a while really. Things weren’t looking good, then Dukat got the Cardassians involved in a very shaky alliance. It was getting dicey again, so they brought on the Breen. That de-stabilized things, along with the brutally punitive reaction to the Cardassian rebellion, ultimately turning the Cardassians back against them and costing them the war. Some really good moments, like Martok basking in the piles of bodies and wreckage while Sisko and Ross suddenly aren’t in the mood to party.

The only odd fit to me was the Winn/Dukat thing. They kinda got stuck on the pacing of this, having to portray Dukat and Winn’s trek to the fire caves over approximately the same time frame as the entire war’s conclusion and treaty signings, including Sisko’s turning up at the end to settle things. I also was sorta glad not to have to bother seeing Dukat’s offscreen redemption in the streets, although I wonder how he managed to wander back into Winn’s office with ostensibly no guards or reception staff at all. (Again with Winn’s lousy administration skills!) But whatever, that’s finicky. I appreciated that it wasn’t a boilerplate story of Winn helping Dukat just long enough for him to murder her and run off armed with pah-wraiths. I still don’t get how the pah-wraiths are just in some caves, and the only way to get them out is in a book, and no one thought to just get rid of the bloody thing over the last 700 years. But again, it all serves the story. This was really the best way to finally kill of Dukat, and I liked the ambiguous Sisko victory.

The final sequence of our principals fondly remembering the last seven years of their lives (but somehow not Jadzia) absolutely had potential to get schmaltzy, but to the continued credit of the show, wasn’t that at all. We love all of these dorks and will miss them, too. (Even Jake, whom we discover was still on the show.) They really pressed on the O’Brien-Bashir friendship lately to the point where it seems like the saddest thing, even rivaling Sisko’s ending or Odo and Kira’s.

And oh how I loved the final scene between Odo and Quark. Quark just wants Odo to say he’ll miss him so badly, and Odo just won’t give him the pleasure. It’s so right that he ends it with his smarmy “Ha!” and trundles into the runabout. Nailed it. An easy 5 out of 5.

PS Probably I’ll do a wrap-up post on the show to summarize favorite episodes and compare to other series.

S7E20, “The Changing Face of Evil” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

Ezri and Worf arrive back at the station safely, greeted by Bashir, O’Brien, and Sisko. This scene was weird. None of them even look at Worf or acknowledge him. They are totally focused on Ezri’s return. I think this is not a slight or has deeper meaning to the characters at all. I kinda just think it’s sloppy direction. Maybe the pace of recent episodes is overtaxing the showrunners and budget or something. They still get a lot done, and this isn’t a disaster or anything, but it’s kind of a clunky episode right from the start that forces its way to where it needs to be since there’s a lot of moving stuff around to be done.

Worth noting that Memory Alpha at this point is a bunch of trivia about the writing team bickering with each other trying to figure out how to shift all the threads around to slot into equally-timed episodes. This is while many of them are still being developed. The tidbits are all some flavor of “Ira changed this in his episode and it screwed up Ron’s story, but then they worked it out.” The details are a bit like hearing a far-too-detailed description of someone else’s workday, but the larger process is interesting. They certainly had certain end goals, and nine episodes to get there, and what happened in between got worked out in real time. Sounds like a fun job (but in reality probably is like a normal job).

A lot of this one is spent with Kai Winn forcing poor Solbor to fetch illicit reading from the Bajoran archives while Dukat smirks in the background. I think we just have to roll with this because I don’t see how Winn could just get locked away with some new guy and Solbor as her only contact with the outside world. The books she wants are supremely sensitive forbidden objects that Solbor says haven’t been opened in 700 years. (The librarian in me cringed when she unwraps it and opens it up, like it wouldn’t crumble into nothing. Paper is better in the future I guess.) It seems like this should set off a few alarms around the Kai compound, but, oh well. Eventually Solbor gets wise, and gets dead. Life comes at you fast. I forget if we knew this thing about the pah-wraiths living in some fire caves somewhere. I might’ve zoned out during one of Dukat’s interminable speeches back in “Covenant“. Weren’t they floating around when pah-wraithy Dukat tried to kill everyone before? Or was that just one of them? I’m sure a smarter reader will remember all these details, but I don’t. Maybe it’s on me as viewer. But this is so weird to me. Horrendous evil holy phantoms (a) exist in the material world and (b) are just trapped in some cave? And this ancient text says how to get them out? So like, is there any reason at all to keep this book? There is literally no good reason to mess with something that dangerous and evil. Solbor really could’ve showed some initiative and put a premature end to all of this. Instead he just keeps lugging in evil literature until it dawns on him what’s going on. He even digs into Dukat’s alias and figures out it’s a fake. But rather than alert anyone he just starts ranting about it, trapped in the room by himself with Dukat and Winn, and it doesn’t go well for him. It’s a good thing for Dukat’s increasingly dubious schemes that there are so many Bajoran dopes around. I didn’t really like any of this.

That’s the biggest development. Other stuff:

• Sisko tries out restricting Kasidy from doing her job for safety. He gets what’s coming to him. Kasidy is a boss and I like her. (Kasidy for President.) Though she’s a lousy cook. Sisko can be brilliant but he’s also prone to incredibly stupid decisions. It’s kinda why I like him. He’s not in the great Kirk vs. Picard debate, but I think that’s only because DS9 never became a cultural touchstone. Really, he’s a bit of both. He’s got Picard’s wisdom and a little Kirk swagger.
• The Federation launches an offensive that gets rapidly crushed by advanced Breen technology, and the Defiant is destroyed. We wondered if Sisko would make some sort of final nutty declaration about the ship’s abilities, but even he has to give up. Fortunately the Dominion lets all the escape pods go, thinking the fearful tales the survivors will tell outweighs knocking off a few more individuals. I dunno, maybe that makes sense? Awfully convenient for our principle cast, though.
• Damar is in way over his head trying to dig out of this crappy hole the Cardassians find themselves in. Damar, making a late-season run at most redemptive arc. I actually feel sorry for him. Dukat was the one who forged this crappy alliance.
• Worf says he’s satisfied with the friendly state of his relationship with Ezri, but he spends the whole episode ragging on Julian. Worf, come on, you have more class than that.

I am really digging this final arc in a general sense but this one could’ve used another couple rounds of polish. A lot of it felt rather awkward and underdeveloped to me, given all the interesting stories going down. 3 out of 5.

S7E21, “When It Rains..” (René Echevarria & Spike Steingasser)

Since Kristen knows a lot about TV, I asked her whether she thought Winn was going to redeem herself in the end by turning on Dukat, and therefore be the key to his ultimate downfall. She thought yes, but we agreed there’s a pretty good chance Dukat will be expecting that and he’ll dispose of her before she has the chance. Now I’m not so sure, or at least, they are setting it up to not play out either way. But it’s becoming a case of: what do I think the showrunners think, and what do they think we think that they think, etc. tending towards madness. Anyway, being blinded when trying to sneak a peek at the forbidden book, then cast out into the streets by Winn, is something of a setback for Dukat. It’s 100% safe to say he has not run out of tricks, and will find his way back to Winn both sighted and grouchy. In the meantime I did enjoy seeing such immediate ironic justice for him. Winn is still a sack of garbage even if she has turned on her fellow sack, dispassionately lying about poor Solbor’s disappearance, and not exactly rushing to return the evil books.

Meanwhile Julian is trying to learn enough about Odo’s regenerative powers to grow replacement human organs, but instead learns that Odo is also infected with the Changeling plague. Really fascinated by this part, as he slowly pieces together when and where and how this happened, and which certain secret Section of Federation operatives just happens to be responsible. O’Brien is hanging around so that we don’t have to watch Julian talking to himself for the whole episode as he watches little animated cells squirm around and figures everything out.

Kira sent to team up with the Cardassians because of Kira’s expertise in resistance warfare and because Sisko enjoys dark ironic humor. Garak is still considered to be the most devious spy amongst all Cardassians I guess because he goes too. Odo can probably be useful, toss him in. The Cardassians are predictably awful to work with and are also lousy tacticians, so it’s a swell assignment for Kira. It’s sort of just mean at this point to make her do this. Actually the real failure here is in workforce development. Kira has failed to train anyone to be as similarly cunning, Garak hasn’t shared any of his secrets. So they keep having to do this stuff themselves. When she trashes the storage room in frustration, she’s probably as mad at herself as anyone. Anyway there is a real payoff here for working through seven seasons of Kira’s development. She’s outdistanced the field as the most complex character in the series. I just hope Julian can cure Odo’s disease so she can end up living happily ever after with her blob. Also now we like Damar? He just really hated working with Weyoun. I don’t blame him.

Finally, Gowron shows up and uses his position to usurp Martok’s strategic command and hog all the glory for himself. Then he promptly devises an overaggressive and transparently idiotic plan. This was by far the weakest development in “When It Rains…” There’s really no reason for Gowron to do this other than to throw unnecessary roadblocks into the arc. I don’t think he can be both politically devious and this stupid at the same time, he has to know Martok can strategize circles around him. Shouldn’t he just worm his way into a ceremonial title but make Martok do all the actual work, and take credit? Well it’s not a great thread but I don’t mind getting to hate on creepy Gowron a bit more before the series ends.

This one ended very abruptly. Maybe I was just really in the flow of the story, but when the credits rolled I was confused. There have at least been sorta cliffhangers or mini-thread wrap-ups in the previous episodes of the arc, but they just ran out of time on this one and didn’t bother with anything like that. Oh well. Mostly still fantastic continuation of the final arc other than the annoying Gowron stuff. 5 out of 5.

S7E22, “Tacking Into the Wind” (Ronald D. Moore)

Daaang this one was good. Ronald Moore was on fire with some of these scenes. Fewer threads and a little more depth on each, probably just the right balance here.

Kira and the Cardassians: When Damar learns the Dominion has tracked down and murdered his family, and is shocked by the brutality, Kira can’t help get in a dig on the Cardassians’ recent history. Damar has been on the fast track to redemption lately, though, and it feels like a hell of a bad time to prove a point. Even Kira feels like she screwed up. But Garak insists it was tough love, and he’ll make a stronger, more sympathetic ally for it. Of course he’s right because he’s a supergenius when circumstances require it. It pays off later when Rusot makes his move to kill Kira, but Damar blasts him instead. We are all-in on Team Damar now.

Worf and the Klingons: Ronald Moore Klingon stories are always good. Here, Martok is getting played like a very honorable cheap violin. It’s become pretty clear to everyone that Gowron is just sending him on one suicide mission after another in order to get him killed. Only Martok won’t violate the Klingon patriarchal order to refuse. Basically if you call a Klingon a coward you can get them to do anything, which is a dirty trick, but we would expect nothing better from Gowron. Worf ends up being the one to stand up to him, basically because Ezri talks him into it (also, sorta by calling him a coward, in a more meta-cultural way). As Klingons, this results in a bat’leth duel, which we had a good laugh at considering Worf is like 20 years younger and a foot taller, although Gowron gets in a few good licks and hurls him through a glass display before Worf closes the deal. I guess the only thing stopping Klingon society from disintegrating into a bloodbath is their code of honor, so it’s probably a good thing they have it.

The two main threads parallel each other quite effectively. The old empires of the Klingons and Cardassians are both dying, but only the Klingons really know it.

Odo’s Biology Corner: Odo is looking extremely shabby, but he’s doing his best to hide it from Kira, who obviously is onto him. This is a fantastic Kira episode too, we see all sides of her: badass tactical genius, friend, and soft touch.

More 5 out of 5 stuff as we near the end.

S7E17, “Penumbra” (René Echevarria)

All right final arc time. DS9 home stretch.

Per the title metaphor, this is mostly an episode of setup and foreshadowing. Worf has gone missing, and it turns out, Ezri especially misses him. She even uses her security clearance to barge into his quarters, where she sees his bat’leth, and reminisces about all their great bat’leth sparring dates. She decides to go out after him against Sisko’s orders, in what I am sure will be a straightforward rescue mission that goes off without a hitch.

…Of course it doesn’t. She does find him in like twenty minutes, which raises the question of just how incompetent the Federation Search Team must have been. But they get stranded on a planet and are captured by the Breen, too, so it’s not like they can call the mission a total success. Also they are immediately sniping at each other. As lifelong viewers of TV and movies, we know this will culminate with them sleeping together. But I like how they have handled the Ezri/Worf situation this season. It’s obviously super weird, and they’re going to have lingering feelings for each other, but also the chemistry’s off. As usual with DS9, they manage to find an interesting new angle. It’s maybe the thing I appreciate the most about this show.

Meanwhile Sisko and Kasidy are the picture of domestic bliss. Ben has bought a parcel of Barjoran land in a pre-emptive warning shot towards his retirement. I don’t know if I’ve expressed my love of Kasidy’s character. In short, she rules. (Now that we never see Keiko anymore, I am changing my mantra to “Kasidy for President.”) She’s a perfect, no-nonsense independent freighter captain who does the exact opposite of every dreamy TOS woman who immediately abandons their career once they fall in love. Anyway everything seems great with them, so they’ve decided to get married. This spurs an exceedingly rare Jake Season 7 appearance to accept Best Man duties and start planning the bachelor party. Everything seems like it will fall into place.

…Of course it doesn’t. Party-pooping comes in the form of another Sisko vision. This one of his mother, who promises a Great Trial ahead. Gosh thanks Mom. I still don’t really care for the prophet stuff. It’s too random and contrived. And I know we’re going to get a lot of it in this final arc. Hopefully it will be well-grounded in thoughtful plotting, but the showrunners have earned my trust and I think they’ll handle it right.

Finally, Dukat resurfaces with cosmetic surgery to make him appear Bajoran, and tells Damar he has a cunning plan. Dukat has maybe earned “Ugh, it’s him” status, reserved for characters for whom an appearance merits an: “Ugh, it’s him” from me, the viewer. We’re bound to have a few of them over the course of a long series like this. Bareil and Winn come immediately to mind. We just know they are going to do something to annoy us (or in the case of Bareil, bore us). Dukat has become that in his recent turn as born-again pah-wraith follower. I sorta can’t believe he’s still on the show?

Mostly just setup here but intriguing enough for a 4 out of 5. But I’m very excited for this final arc. Been watching the show for about two years and ready for the finale.

S7E18, “‘Til Death Do Us Part” (David Weddle & Bradley Thompson)

Sisko has come to believe it when the prophets tell him stuff. It’s not like it’s all pure faith. They simply erased a whole Dominion fleet to bail him out a couple seasons ago, so probably he’s gotta take them seriously. Plus Prophet Mom doubles down on the Great Trial bit, saying that getting married will cause him great sorrow. Well, it would be the lamest breakup excuse ever, so they go ahead. This feels similar to when they introduce some bright young ensign and tell us just enough of his background that we know he’s getting killed in the next thirty minutes or less. That is, it’s kind of exploiting our emotions. But also, the Prophet/Wormhole Alien mysticism has been an underlying driver of the whole series, so it’s earned here. Still, casts a grey pall over whatever’s coming.

Most of the episode, however, is two threads:

One, Winn (“ugh, it’s him her”) shows up to further dampen the mood. She has a vision for the first time ever, only it’s from the pah-wraiths, and that’s enough to drive her into a full-blown crisis of faith after a lifetime of servitude towards the prophets. Gad, she’s the worst. Naturally our boy Dukat is quite ready to take advantage of this, in the worst possible character pairing. I will say I liked the ambiguity of who’s controlling who here. The pah-wraiths seem to be manipulating them both, or at least, they have such a perfect vehicle in Dukat that they can really make some progress. Either way Kai Winn is so hopeless it’s bound to work. Interestingly this is also a bit exploitative and could go wrong, but I don’t think it will. DS9 has earned all of this: we’ve seen years of Dukat having the worst kind of greasy charisma and Winn being a weasel.

And two, Ezri and Worf sorting out their feelings while in Breen captivity. I’m still finding this interesting, even though we’re just rehashing the established particulars. There’s part of each that loves the other, and part of each that doesn’t. What worked for Jadzia/Worf doesn’t automatically work for Ezri/Worf. Naturally, as it’s not the same Dax. As it happens, this Dax prefers Julian.

Part Two of our arc ends with the reveal that the Breen have joined the Dominion. Which feels spooky I guess because they’ve done such a good job making the Breen terrifying. We really haven’t seen much of them in this series so there’s not much to go on. But their ships are creepy and asymmetrical?

I think another 4 out of 5 until we see things come together a bit more. Like everyone else in this episode, we’re taking a lot on faith.

S7E19, “Strange Bedfellows” (Ronald D. Moore)

I remember a bit from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics where he drew a series of faces ranging from very detailed to basically a plain smiley face. He explains that readers will identify most with the latter, seeing Mr. Smiley as Mx. Everyperson, while the highly detailed face is seen as another person, not us. Part of Trek storytelling is leveraging various levels of this, naturally all the main characters are humans, or very comfortably human-like aliens. They can introduce some really weird-looking aliens if they want us to feel more neutral, like the silicon-based creates from TOS, which seemed basically like big rocks. Or it can induce negative feelings too. Over many years of indoctrination, Klingons have seemed less and less gross, but once in a while they still go into a little too much detail about their food and we’re back to revulsion. The Cardassians have seemed like the most foreign regulars in DS9: utterly cold and brutal personalities, neck scales, pallid grey skin, wearing thorny militaristic clothing. The Jem’Hadar’s pure viciousness makes them comparably icky.

That was, until we met the Breen. Now anything seems relatively human if it has eyes, isn’t covered in armor, and produces natural speech rather than metallic shrieking. Damar is skeezed out by them, and that’s before they waste half a million Cardassians in service of the Dominion. Basically Damar has had it with everyone at this point. He gets a good laugh ragging on Weyoun for totally getting his neck snapped, but they just make more, so it’s a hollow victory. We could definitely see his flip coming in one form or another, and it’s further credit to the show’s overall writing strength that we believe it. It doesn’t happen in a day, Weyoun has been the worse co-worker ever for years now: overruling him all the time, tut-tutting him at any signs of flagging loyalty to the Dominion. Slowly he (and we) have realized that he has no power at all. The Cardassians have essentially become cannon fodder.

We have a few threads going now besides this. In no particular order:

• Kristen wants me to use the phrase “Dukat is playing Winn like a cheap violin.” I can’t think of a better way to describe it. All of Winn’s flaws are just sitting out there for exploitation by someone as cunning as Dukat. Though frankly, Winn has never been a very interesting character (“ugh, it’s her”). She’s the most transparent kind of cheap religious huckster to me. She’ll use her faith to justify whatever she basically just wants to do. Here’s she’s outed as a totally spineless fraud, bailing on her life’s mission and succumbing to the temptation of the pah-wraiths. All it took was a couple of visions and a few smooches from Dukat.
• Ezri and Worf continue to use their imprisonment productively, working out their relationship issues and settling on being friends. This will avoid the sticky problem of them committing what I seem to remember was the most serious crime possible amongst the Trills—rekindling a past-life relationship. Damar also busts them out of prison. So, cool! Everything’s good news today on the Ezri/Worf front.
• Kasidy is getting sucked into Emissary Wife stuff but she is not into it. She needs her freighter time. Anyway I wouldn’t agree with Martok calling marriage a lifelong battle, much less Sisko taking to the metaphor. He must realize that Klingons see literally everything in terms of warfare. We’ve also met Martok’s wife, and can understand where he’s coming from. And that that’s precisely what he wants in his marriage.

Things are starting to click together. Suddenly DS9 is unlocking its potential as a modern, multi-threaded show. 5 out of 5.