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.
