I’m further behind than Morn in a foot race. Let’s get at it.

S2E11, “Rivals” (story: Jim Trombetta and Michael Piller)

Here is the summary from Memory Alpha: “Quark feels threatened when a con artist arrives on the station and opens up a competing bar. Meanwhile, Chief O’Brien is determined to beat Doctor Bashir at racquetball.” Now, that is a premise for a sci-fi show. Maybe not surprisingly, it’s kind of a silly distraction of an episode. But it is indeed fun, and the two threads come together in an interesting way.

The rivalry between Quark and Martus Mazur might have worked better as a smaller, more nagging thing over several episodes, where Quark and Mazur spar over customers with ever-more-elaborate less-dignified scheming (as referenced in this episode, Rule of Acquisition #109, “Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack”) but they paid for the guest star so they were going to wring everything they could out of him in one go. The foundation for Mazur’s place (the delightfully/ridiculously named “Club Martus”) is a weird little game of chance toy he takes off a dying cellmate in the brig, where he was staying after his previous scam. Intrigued by it, he has several large versions built for his bar, which are such a hit they drain clientele from Quark’s.

Meanwhile, the O’Brien/Bashir thread is another entry for the “O’Brien kinda hates Bashir” file. They discover their mutual love of racquetball (only, SPACE RACQUETBALL because the court is all weird angles). O’Brien is an old pro and thinks he can beat some young upstart, but it turns out Julian was Team Captain at the academy. More notably, Julian is a lot younger and in better shape, and trounces the oafish and increasingly sweaty O’Brien. This was easily the most relatable part of the episode to me, naturally, as an increasingly oafish and sweaty man myself. But: we are all O’Brien, remembering our youthful accomplishments with high precision, only to flail about miserably when tested years later. And yet: who among us is the absolute best or worst at anything? So: we are all also Bashir, way better at some stuff than others—maybe some game, maybe something at work—to the point that you have to make excuses to avoid the conflicts which you’ll inevitably win, just to avoid the social awkwardness of making someone else look bad.

Meanwhile, increasingly weird, inexplicable stuff is happening all over the station. It climaxes during the final racquetball grudge match (which Quark has managed to bill into some kind of major sporting event that people are actually watching and gambling on, and it must be boring as hell on DS9 sometimes) when suddenly O’Brien can’t miss a shot. Like, literally can’t miss a shot, even if he tries to avoid it, which is as oddly improbably as all the other phenomena. With something to trace, they are able to determine that the weirdness points back to Club Martus, and the gambling devices. I liked this as a general sci-fi idea, like you could have some sort of quantum generator that flipped the probabilities of everyday life. If you didn’t immediately die of the most quickly metastasizing cancer in medical history it could be a rich source of stories.

I enjoyed this episode more for its metaphorical lessons than in actual execution. The effect of the devices was fuzzily explained, with random, weird macro-level consequences—we are to believe that quantum mechanical mucking about can make the proximate middle-aged into racquetball supermen? The device itself was unsatisfyingly convenient, too. The dying prisoner’s entire life was ruined by it over years and years, from a life of success and luxury to croaking in a ratty cell on DS9. Then Martus picks it up and wins right away. It’s the stupidest game, too. You hold down a button and either win or lose, with no onstensible reason for the outcome. Though the one time I played Super Smash Brothers that seemed like how it worked, and people love it.

Last note: Keiko tries to be supportive of O’Brien when he comes back from the first match sweaty and depressed. [Keiko for president.] She basically just tells him, like, what did you expect, you’re 36. Which seemed a very optimistic age to peg for O’Brien’s character. I looked up Colm Meaney’s age and he would have been 40 when this aired, so it was indeed optimistic, but not as far off as I’d originally guessed. (Unlike me, Colm probably wasn’t still getting carded at 40.) Still, probably felt pretty natural to him to play a guy grappling with his initial physical decline. For his part, Julian still fits into his shiny academy racquetball outfit, which is accurate, as Siddig El Fadil was just 29.

Morn watch: He misses out on a free drink when he loses an game of chance at Quark’s. We can assume it was rigged, or Morn’s natural luck, rather than some quantum oddity, I think.

Overall: 3 out of 5. Some fun takeaways but sort of a silly one.

S2E12, “The Alternate” (story: Jim Trombetta and Bill Dial)

Mostly just DS9 doing a monster-of-the-week-style X-Files episode, and largely forgettable. At least by me, since I have largely forgotten it. But I never liked monster-of-the-week so could be just me. So anyway, I don’t have much to say about this one. There’s a creature. They chase it around and eventually figure out what it is. Some episodes like this are intriguing, but I felt like this one was a little flat. The most important question never even got answered: how does the monster’s presence affect O’Brien’s racquetball game??

Rather than the plot itself, which hints that it might explain something about Odo’s origin, but ultimately doesn’t (and how many times is that going to happen before we actually get there), the main takeaway here is an establishment of Odo’s early years with guest-of-the-week Dr. Mora. Mora is clearly an influence on proto-Odo, he was Odo’s first teacher, and Odo sports the same slicked-back hairstyle. (I certainly didn’t remember this detail, but Memory Alpha reminds me that Odo mentioned that he had his mentor’s hairstyle back in “The Forsaken” when he was talking with Lwaxana.) In fact, he seems more like a father. Odo denies that he views Mora that way, though that might be because they are a bit estranged. But by the end they agree to some future visits.

So this is best remembered as a character builder, mostly for Odo. There are some good moments between Bashir and Dax, too, as they try to figure out more about the monster. Late nights in the lab seem like a possible key to Dax’s heart, so Bashir might eventually look back on the monster’s rampage of terror as an important building block of their future relationship. (Dax: “Feel like getting a raktajino before we call it a night?” Bashir: “My replicator or yours?” Me: Nice.) We’ll see.

Odo medical notes: Odo has no respiratory system.

Morn watch: Among a group of suckers looking to buy a dubious Ferengi relic from Quark, which he claims are some remains from a famous Ferengi named Plegg. Odo happens by and shares the pertinent fact that Plegg isn’t actually dead. Unclear whether Morn bought it anyway.

Overall: 2 out of 5.

S2E13, “Armageddon Game” (story: Morgan Gendel)

The writer credit immediately caught my attention, as it did for his other DS9 credit, “The Passenger”. Seems like he’s evened out now that he’s got a great, a bad, and a good episode under is belt. This one is also good. Bashir and O’Brien are helping some aliens get rid of a stockpile of ultra-powerful bioweapons. But just as they are dealing with the last of it, some terrorists break into the lab and kill all the scientists. Bashir and O’Brien escape to a nearby planet where they hole up and wait for rescue, only they realize O’Brien got splattered with a little bioterror in the mayhem and he’s rapidly getting sick. Meanwhile, the aliens report back to DS9 and instead of reporting the terrorist incident, present a fake video of O’Brien and Bashir getting vaporized along with the rest of the scientists in a lab accident. This sets up a classic two-tracker: one plot-driven mystery on DS9 about the accident, and one character-building track about Bashir and O’Brien.

The Bashir/O’Brien thread is the meatier, and more important one for the series. They go back to the “O’Brien finds Julian irritating” well, seems their last adventure together and aborted racquetball rivalry hasn’t quite sold O’Brien. As an introverted, happily married guy, he’s a bit bewildered by Julian’s endless yammering and glorification of the bachelor lifestyle. It should be noted for all of Julian’s girl-craziness, in practice it seems like mostly idle boasting. There hasn’t exactly been a Kirk-level string of disheveled conquests awkwardly sneaking out of medical. Thought maybe that’s implied, and we should accept the lack of visual evidence as a limitation of the show, which despite being produced in the swinging ’90s, seems more PG than TNG, and certainly moreso than TOS. Anyway, their situation is a good setup to further get to understand each other. Bashir makes some good points about the difficulty of family life while serving in Starfleet, so he’s not necessarily such a selfish guy, but mostly his competent handling of both O’Brien’s health and the damaged communication console finally earns hims some genuine respect. Left for future episodes: How does this affect their racquetball rivalry??

The DS9 mystery thread is also neatly presented. It finds an interesting space to tell the story: we know the DS9 crew is being misled, but we are just as unaware as to how or why. At first they don’t even realize there is a mystery, there’s no reason for them to doubt the story, so it’s about them grieving about the loss of O’Brien and Bashir. Well, O’Brien, anyway. He’s got a family, so Keiko has to be informed, and generally everyone likes him anyway. Julian, well…we probably ought to get a new doctor. But things shift when Keiko notices a crucial detail in the video: O’Brien drinking coffee. She insists he never drinks coffee in the afternoon because the caffeine keeps him up at night.  Something is not right! [As always: Keiko for president.] This kicks off the deeper investigation that unravels the alien conspiracy, and eventually gets O’Brien and Bashir back home.

I loved that the key overlooked detail is truly as stupid as “O’Brien would never drink coffee in the afternoon.” (I nudged my wife to keep this in mind should she ever be watching a video of my vaporization, as I have the same caffeine issue.) I recently saw a Twitter gag about how the difference between American and British mysteries is that the American detective solves the crime by breaking all the rules, and the British detective solves the crime by noticing a specific type of umbrella. The coffee detail is only marginally less arbitrary. Moreover, I love the big twist at the end where actually O’Brien does drink coffee in the afternoon. But it just hard-closes after Keiko’s “You do?!” What a blown opportunity for some TOS-style endcap banter with a lighthearted music cue.

Note: Per Memory Alpha: “This episode was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Hairstyling for a Series.” There are some good hairstyles, as usual: Sharat, for one, and I also liked the E’Tyshra Vulcan-eared basket weave thing.

Overall: 4 out of 5. A very good episode. Maybe a little contrived, so I won’t go the full five, but it was certainly more memorable than the last one.

S2E14, “Whispers” (story: Paul Coyle)

I recently learned about the Simulation Hypothesis, which posits that since the universe is a big, old place, inevitably there must be some where or some time when aliens had/have/will have the capacity to simulate a universe. If they can do it once, they can do it any number of times, which implies that most universes are, in fact, simulations, which leads to the conclusion that any given universe—such as ours—is more likely to be a simulation.

It’s intriguing, but Cory Doctorow makes several good arguments against it at the link above. The most straightforward being: actually computers can never simulate the universe with any precision. The number of atoms you’d need to store sufficient information about even the smallest portion of the universe would rapidly exceed the number of atoms in the universe.

Anyway I like the style of the setup even if it’s flawed. It sort of does a reverse-logic statistical sleight of hand, implying that something statistical ought to be true because the opposite is false. Like how about: if essentially 100% of all humans who are alive or who have ever lived are not me, the math implies even I am not me. Doctorow brings up another similar example. It starts with the premise that the universe exists on an unfathomably long timescale by human standards, but yet, you are alive right now. That is an extremely unlikely occurrence given your pathetic human lifespan as a fraction of the universe’s existence, which is essentially zero. Unless you are immortal*.

*You’re not. It’s just observation bias. You weren’t around for the previous 14 billion years to notice you weren’t alive.

“Whispers” also leans on a few bits of fanciful, highly improbable sci-fi. One, that you could create a perfect replica of a person. So perfect that even their family and friends weren’t sure of the difference, and an elaborate interplanetary scheme would be required to ferret out the replica. (Couldn’t they just look for the guy with more atoms that the rest of the universe??) It also has a bit if the same reverse deductive essence—O’Brien thinks everyone is acting weird so there must be some external force at play, which he has somehow eluded, and must fight against. The actual truth just never occurs to him.

I really enjoyed this one and didn’t understand it at all while I was watching. But once the ending sunk in I appreciated all the little touches and everything fell into place. Keiko is great in the awkward position of having to pretend Replicant O’Brien is her husband, oh yeah hon it’s totally normal for me to go to work at 5:30am and also I’m bringing our daughter with me. Also liked that Quark almost inadvertently blew the scheme by telling him, “The odds are against you, O’Brien.” Which has several layers of meaning in this context, although most notable is that he’s just thinking about the next O’Brien/Bashir racquetball showdown. It always comes back to racquetball.

Overall: 5 out of 5. A mindbender with a great twist. Maybe a bit of a soft ending but super enjoyable throughout.

S2E7, “Rules of Acquisition” (writer: Hilary Bader)

On Ferengi:

Kira: “They’re greedy, misogynistic, untrustworthy little trolls, and I wouldn’t turn my back on one of them for a second.”
Dax: “Neither would I. But once you accept that, you’ll find they can be a lot of fun.”

Maybe ten minutes in, Kristen tagged this the zaniest episode in the series. It acquired some gravity along the way, but for the most part this was a straight-up Ferengi antics-fueled crowd-pleaser. Grand Nagus Zek returns with a profit scheme in the Gamma Quadrant for Quark to get in on. All Quark has to do to get a cut is perform all the work.

The scheme itself goes kinda nowhere, the Dosi people they are trying to deal with are ridiculous, and we only get a hint of the Dominion and where the real deals might come down the road. The real takeaway from this episode is a deeper look into Ferengi culture:

• Ferengi women: Early last season I was wondering about them–we’ve never seen a female but their bottom-rung social status within the staunchly patriarchal society has been inferred. The usual expectation is that they are homebound and naked, and it’s illegal for them to be involved in business affairs. Quark and the Nagus are so dang charismatic that their brutal sexism and casual harassment comes across as pretty funny actually, but objectively, what a couple of twerps.
• Pel: She becomes the first, but she’s undercover, dressing and acting like a male. She’s way more competent than the hapless Rom, though, and Quark takes her under his wing as an assistant. Eventually she can’t help falling for Quark, who evidently is pretty charming for a profiteering troll, although what constitutes “charming” among such a people is obviously unclear to me as a human. For his part, he does defend her talents once Zek gets wind of things, which is, in this context, as progressive as we’re going to get.
• Rules of Acquisition: Gosh, we learn a lot of them in this episode. This episode, entitled “Rules of Acquisition”, you understand. Memory Alpha says there were seven. My favorite was #59, “Free Advice is Seldom Cheap”.

Morn watch: Odo rouses him from sleeping one off on a bench in the promenade, and it’s implied this is far from the first time. He heads right back to the bar, but it’s been closed up for the night while the Ferengi play some tongo.

Overall: Largely ridiculous. I loved it. 5 out of 5.

S2E8, “Necessary Evil” (writer: Peter Allan Fields)

S2E9, “Second Sight” (writer: Mark Gehred-O’Connell)

I’ve been thinking about these two together. They’re a pair of character-building episodes, and both good ones. But their resolutions are total opposites. One succeeds in a fascinating, unusual way, and will have ramifications for the rest of the series. One doesn’t.

Kira and Odo have the most mysterious backgrounds among the regulars (not counting Morn), so from the beginning we could anticipate there would be episodes meting out bits and pieces throughout the series. “Necessary Evil” reveals more about how long they’ve been on the station, and their relationship prior to the DS9 (the show) era. But it’s also an episode about the backstory of DS9 (the station). It manages all this while also being one of the best-plotted episodes of the series so far, even threading in flashbacks.

I won’t recap the complex mystery that spans both present day and the past, but we learn that Odo began his constabulary career during Dukat’s reign over DS9, then known as the much more Cardassian-sounding Terek Nor. It was also more Cardassian-looking: grey, poorly lit, dismal. Dukat recruits Odo to investigate a murder, knowing he has a strong, neutral, fair reputation among the various factions around the station. It’s not his job at that point—actually I’m not sure what he’s even doing on the station. But turns out he’s a natural, and this is just the beginning of a notable career in law enforcement. Score one for Dukat’s HR prowess.

Turns out one of the prime suspects is Kira. She feeds Odo a story that explains her presence on the station, which is quickly ferreted out as a lie, only it’s a super ingenious multi-layered lie that Odo doesn’t entirely unravel until after most of the major details are sorted out and the Cardassians have closed the case.

What we’re left with is Odo knowing Kira lied to him, and a very ambiguous state of trust between them. It’s a difficult, memorable ending that you rarely get in serial TV. It shades Odo and Kira’s relationship and is bound to factor into future episodes. Justice is complicated, relationships are complicated.

What’s not complicated is the hapless Rom. I didn’t mention Quark either, who is involved mostly as a catalyst and dirty-deeds-done-dirt-cheap-doer. An illegal but highly delightful scheme goes awry and surfaces the larger mystery of the episode. Quark is nearly killed by an assassin, and Rom’s reaction is something like a 30-70 mix of concern for Quark and eager anticipation that he’ll end up owning the bar. When the assassin comes back to finish the job by smothering Quark in the infirmary with a pillow, Rom happens upon them and shrieks like a terrified possum. His futile attempt to deter the murder buys security time to get there. They save Quark, and Rom is cast as the reluctant hero, who has ironically saved his brother but lost possession of the bar. Resume shrieking.

“Necessary Evil” overall: Outstanding episode with a perfect ending. 5 out of 5.

Kirk and Picard both had their share of one-off fling episodes, and occasionally could be found brooding about someone that they especially liked, but could never make it work because of their adventuresome careers. These glimpses were always both fun and effective ways of showing the non-professional sides of the characters. Sisko’s backstory as a widower dad, on the other hand, doesn’t exactly set up these kinds of stories. It makes him sympathetic, but also hems his character in as much as his stalwart bureaucrat job does. How soon can you really try to hook him up with someone else? Plus it means they’ll need to work in an abundance of father-son time, which risks being clunky or underdeveloped in a skiffy-focused show.

Well, they couldn’t leave the poor guy grieving and filling out runabout paperwork forever, so now that we’re comfortably into the second season, the showrunners decided to take a shot. Sisko is feeling guilty that he nearly forgot about the anniversary of his wife’s death, so he’s having trouble sleeping. Rather than toss and turn he aimlessly wanders the promenade and meets a woman named Fenna. They chat quietly for a bit and things click. But then he turns his back and she disappears. If this was me, I’d be like, “Welp, it happened again” but it does seem a little odd in Sisko’s case. The next day he goes with the high school crush playbook and hangs around the same place, hoping she’ll wander by again. She does! And things pick up where they left off, they are definitely into each other and getting all cute and gross and the like, but then she pulls her Harvey the Rabbit and disappears just as suddenly as before.

Meanwhile, duty calls. Sisko attends a dinner hosted by a visiting scientist, Seyetik. The guy is brilliant genius but also an arrogant blowhard, and mostly the dinner is him talking about how great he is. Things take a turn for the weird when his much-mentioned but never-seen wife Nidell emerges, and in what was an extremely not surprising surprise, it’s Fenna. She seems to not recognize Sisko at all, and totally ignores him, like they never met. If this was me, I’d be like, “Welp, it happened again” but it does seem a little odd in Sisko’s case. After dinner, he gets a minute alone with her and is like, “Hey, uh, what the hell?” But she doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about. When he sees Fenna again later she can’t explain it either.

After a few similarly baffling scenes they figure out what’s going on, and like many things in life, it’s resolved when a guy hurls himself into a star. Fenna turns out to be a psychoprojection from Nidall, evidently so dispirited by her loveless marriage to Seyetik that she’s subconsciously living out her dream to be single again. This requires so much energy it might kill her. But she can’t just leave Seyetik because her species mates for life. He calmly explains that he’d have to die to free her, which he’s about to do, as he’s saying this from on board a ship he’s plunging into the sun as a new experiment. He says that all of his wives eventually tire of him anyway, which he’s starting to feel bad about and this experiment makes for a pretty great death anyway, so suicide it is!

I don’t think I appreciated how truly weird the final act was when I was watching it. The premise is a good mix of sci-fi mystery elements with some Sisko character stuff. Sisko and Fenna’s love story was a properly understated widower letting this happen rather than a Kirk-style bold conquest. The scenes with him and Jake were great. But the ending is a classic “Well, someone’s gotta die” thing that reeks of one of the producers demanding some extra stakes that weren’t really there to be had. Maybe they felt like they couldn’t do two ambiguous endings in a row after “Necessary Evil.” So they cram in an arbitrary imminent death, which can only be messily resolved with extra death. What about this: Fenna continues to exist, but Sisko tells Fenna this can’t happen, she’s just a dream, so she recedes, and it ends on a pensive note as Seyetik and Nidall leave the station, with Nidall and Sisko giving each other some doleful gazes. DS9 is good with characters, I think they could have made something more subtle work. See: literally the last episode.

“Second sight” overall: Intriguing story and something that needed to happen to break the ice on Sisko a bit, even if they couldn’t develop it that well in just an hour. But the ending, I dunno. 3 out of 5.

S2E10, “Sanctuary” (writer: Gabe Essoe and Kelley Miles)

A bunch of refugees called the Skrreans find their way through the wormhole and arrive at the station. They look distractingly weird, with gross flaky skin and super tall hair. It’s just one of a bunch of odd choices in “Sanctuary” that made it perhaps the least enjoyable entry in the series so far.

It starts off with an interesting idea that their language is so bizarre the universal translator doesn’t even work. Trek doesn’t talk about the universal translator enough, really. It’s implied that it instantly parses all alien languages so the crew (and us viewers) only hear Standard (AKA English, but “Standard” because THE FUTURE) and it works so well that it’s simply a fully integrated, forgettable part of life, like the Internet or Reebok Pump technology. I’m sure I’m forgetting others, but the only time I can remember language barriers being important before is “Darmok” from TNG, which was pretty darn good. But I guess overcoming alien language is an old skiffy problem we could just get bogged down in, like O’Brien’s endless polarity reversals or questions about Odo’s mass. Mostly we’ve moved on to more complex stuff. I guess that’s what happens here, in real time, because eventually the translator just starts working, and the whole sequence is forgotten about immediately and doesn’t matter at all in the end.

So the Skrreans get a temporary home on DS9 while Sisko and Bajoran authorities sort out what to do with them. This is an excuse for some cultural conflict. Surely this will be interesting. Nog and Jake are even involved! Well, this amounts to Nog playing a prank on one of them that we don’t see and has no resolution other than that the Skrrean kid is annoyed about it. Jake tries to make peace but the kid blows him off, or more accurately, is a war refugee and has his own problems and no amount of Jake Sisko charm is going to smooth over Nog dousing him with a stink spray. Or something. I feel like it was played as funny, but fell flat, but then Jake’s peace offering should bring them together, but that flubs too. Basically the whole sequence is undercooked and overplayed.

Finally Sisko finds a perfectly suitable planet for them. Space is great because there’s a lot of it. We got a whole mess of totally safe, habitable planets that no one lives on. But…the Skrreans reject it, in what I guess is a bold attempt by the show producers to make a bunch of refugees as unsympathetic as possible. Giving only a hint of reason about some kind of prophecy or something, they want to live on Bajor. Kira tells them that (1) Bajor is recovering from a war itself and can’t support millions of additional refugees, so you will probably just die, and (2) anyway the area they want to live is uninhabitable and like, why are we even talking about this, just go to the good planet. (I actually sort of wondered why Bajorans didn’t just go to the good planet themselves. Obviously it’s their home and origin, but if it’s so easy to just up and move to a new good planet, wouldn’t cultures do that all the time?) Well, this makes the Skrreans take a baffling turn to the snotty, they insist they are such awesome farmers that they’ll overcome and help Bajor, fulfilling their prophecy. There is some stupid haggling at this point (Kira: “Don’t go, you will die” Skrreans: “But we are FARMERS!”), but the solution comes down to: No, that is stupid, just go to the perfectly good planet please, because that is a way, way better idea you knuckleheads. So it ends on a downer when they leave in a huff, like, fine, we’ll go to this great planet and not just die out if that’s the way you want it. But we’re not friends anymore. Good day.

Morn watch: Huge news: Morn apparently has a girlfriend. The opening sequence takes place in Quark’s, where patrons are listening to a Bajoran musician. We see Morn at the bar, enthralled, with a woman hanging on his arm. Good for him. Maybe after the last time he woke up on the promenade and found he couldn’t get back into the bar, he trundled back to his quarters, looked in a mirror, and was just like, “Morn, you’ve got to get it together, man.”

Overall: I see what they were trying to get at here. There is no question that dealing with refugees is a major worldwide social problem today, and this episode attempts to address some of the issues. But what a mess. Every single part of this one is underdeveloped. 1 out of 5.

S2E4, “Invasive Procedures” (writer: John Whelpley)

Sisko was always going to be a shift in the role of the Trek Captain, whether that was the intention of the showrunners or not. The nature of the role means there would be no boldly going where no one has gone before, mostly you’ll be doing some boldly staying. (They don’t have any “boldly” preambles in this one at all, I just realized.) Plus you have to follow William Shatner and Patrick Stewart, so I mean, good luck. Kristen observed that Sisko is really more of a bureaucrat than the bold captain type anyway. His job is like 50% diplomacy and 50% administrivia like signing off on everyone’s ideas and letting people check out runabouts.

After the station is cleared down to a skeleton crew due to an impending plasma storm, a group of rogues manage to dock and take over the station. They are able to circumvent the usual security with an assist from Quark. He just hides during the evacuation and disables security screens, as he has been tricked into thinking this is all a ruse so he can sell the pirates some fenced liquid data chains. (I guess, data clouds don’t exist in interstellar space, so the “cloud” metaphor checks out.) Instead, the real ruse has nothing to do with him. The leader of the gang, Verad, is a Trill who is bent on hijacking Dax’s symbiant for himself. This episode balances three tracks:

1. Lots of insight into Trill society and psychology. Verad is sort of a meek weasel by nature, and bitter about not being bonded with a symbiant. We learn that this isn’t a thing that all Trills have, actually only 1 in 10 people make good matches. But this is determined by some Trill administrative process, and he didn’t match up. He was devastated, and specifically wants to bond with Dax. I think this episode has finally helped me internalize the identity of the Trill person, Jadzia, as a separate entity from the symbiant, Dax. The symbiant goes from host to host, and is known as “Jadzia Dax” or “Verad Dax” or “Lester Dax”, what have you. Also that the bonding experience makes a Trill feel like a more complete person, with sort of like a super partner, complete with multiple lifetimes of memories and experiences. Verad can’t get over missing out, and Jadzia tells him it’s totally normal, and plenty of Trill are fine without, even though it totally does rule to have one.
2. Really strong episode for both the character of Sisko, and the performance by Avery Brooks. Since he’s been friends with Dax through multiple incarnations, he knows how much things will change for Verad once he’s bonded. So he immediately starts working on Verad’s partner and girlfriend Mareel, knowing that helping Verad accomplish his goal is the same as helping him be a different person. Of course as soon as he becomes Verad Dax, he becomes an overconfident brash jerkbag [this is probably why the Trill didn’t give him a symbiant in the first place?]. Sisko picks up on it immediately and is back to work on Mareel, eventually making a compelling case for her to switch sides.
3. All the gross medical stuff. Symbiants are just big gross worms that are just as horrifyingly invasive as the ear slugs in Star Trek II, only these are nice slugs. Symbiant surgery looks pretty straightforward…disgustingly straightforward, frankly.

Endnotes:

• The gang is prepared for Odo, they have a nifty little security box to contain him. It was curious to me that once they got him in there they could just pick it up. So he weighs, like, next to nothing? I guess he’d have to, he also was able to pool into Lwaxana’s dress just a few episodes ago. I don’t want to go all Trek nerd and wonder how he could have this near-weightless property and also wail on bad guys or disturb a chair he sits on, etc., so I’m going to let this go now.
  • Wait, one thing. Maybe you could argue this containment box has some kind of antigrav technology otherwise it’d be sort of impractical. One could also argue Troi’s dress had the same, for fashion and flattery reasons. Let’s go with that.
• Quark is outed as a co-conspirator here and should absolutely be prosecuted, right? He does help straighten things out, including hacking Odo’s security box. But he’s only fixing a situation he created. Anyway I think he’s up to 2 or 3 legitimate on-screen crimes that are forgotten once the episode runs its course.

Morn watch: No appearance. Since the station has been cleared, presumably he’s left. But we never do see the bar, so we can’t rule out Morn isn’t just sitting in there wondering where everyone went.

Overall: An important episode for Trill stuff but maybe a little contrived in the setup and payoff, and some of the symbiant stuff was a bit hokey and convenient. They kept saying how dangerous it was to swap a symbiant or use a phaser on someone with one, but then whey went ahead and did it anyway. 3 out of 5.

S2E5, “Cardassians” (writers: Gene Wolande & John Wright)

I always really dug Worf episodes in TNG as a way to frame culture clashes, postwar reconciliation, or racism, and we’ve got a similar setup here. The Bajoran/Cardassian situation might still be a little raw to have an actual Cardassian crewmember aboard, but there is Garak, a Cardassian shopkeeper on the station, who apparently has continued to have coffee meetups with Bashir. This is presented like a regular thing but I couldn’t remember when he’d even shown up before (it was only once) and had to look it up. It was back in the third episode, when he got friendly with Julian, and helped the crew ferret out a Klingon/Bajoran plot (it was an early episode I waited to long to recap and skimmed some details). Bashir still vaguely suspects him of being a spy, without any reason other than that he’s a Cardassian, because I guess their coffee meetups are made more interesting with a hint of racial profiling. Garak seems to shrug it off because he seems to enjoy hiding whatever it is he’s hiding.

The story centers around a Cardassian war orphan that had been left behind on Bajor. He was adopted by Bajoran parents and has been raised to hate Cardassians. Understandably, the Cardassian kid is pretty messed up from a lifetime of hearing that Cardassians are evil criminals by nature. When Garak gives him a friendly greeting he’s rewarded with the kid up and biting a chunk out of his hand, the news of which spreads quickly and brings attention to the whole orphan abandonment issue at both Federation and Cardassian higher levels.

The episode forks in two directions, and like the best Trek, simultaneously covers both an intricate plot and more subtle cultural ground. An elaborate Cardassian scheme is unraveled by Bashir and Garak, but mostly Garak, whose detective instincts are so accurate one might suspect he knew exactly what he was looking for. Bashir can barely keep up and isn’t getting anywhere trying to figure out what Garak is really all about. The episode resolves itself but Garak’s role doesn’t. I suspect we are going to see more of him.

The victim in all this is the Cardassian boy. It’s hard to know what to make of him though. He hates Cardassians, but of course, he is one. He loves Bajor, but is spewing all this Bajoran spiritual rhetoric he’s been indoctrinated with. I mean, none of this can ultimately be good for his mental health. No matter how much his parents love him, they’ve also pretty much warped him. Keiko takes charge while he’s on the station, and one has to think he’d have a lot better off with a little more Keiko-style no-judgement authority in his life. [Keiko for president.] Sisko is set to arbitrate a hearing to determine whether it’d be better to keep him on Bajor or return him to Cardassia. Then — I was sort of shocked by this — we barely see any of the hearing. Instead the poor kid’s fate is glossed over with some Captain’s Log narration that amounts to: “Oh yeah we decided to send Rugal back to Cardassia.” That is some stone-cold resolution, Sisko. Maybe they just ran out of time in an otherwise busy show. Though I was kinda wondering if Keiko and O’Brien would somehow end up adopting him as a neutral third party. I’d have liked if they did. Pretty ripe for material and he could get in on some Jake & Nog schemes.

Endnotes:

• Enjoyably vile scene of Keiko preparing some Cardassian food, thinking it would be a nice gesture for Rugal. It looks like some sort of blue stew. O’Brien and the Bajoran-raised Rugal both hate it.
• Like Armin Shimerman for Ferengi, Marc Alaimo is totally owning the role of Gul Dukat, and has entrenched himself in my brain as the prototypical Cardassian. Now I have the same problem I do for poor Armin Shimerman in that I think Marc Alaimo just looks like a Cardassian. He does have an exceedingly long neck that they factor into his makeup and costume.

Overall: Felt like the resolution with Rugal was a bit cruel, but otherwise lots of good stuff here, with some rich plotting. I did get a bit confused by the rapidly shifting revelations, and it’s quite probably I didn’t even catch everything, as intriguingly hinted at by Garak. This might be one to re-watch later on. 4 out of 5.

S2E6, “Melora” (writer: Evan Carlos Somers)

Definitely not limited to Trek, there’s a standard TV trope where a character looks forward to an opportunity to meet someone they know only by reputation. Naturally they’ve built this person up into an amazing, brilliant, wonderful human whose work has demonstrated that, finally, this will be someone who GETS IT, who understands them, who represents all of their hopes. Then they meet…and their hero turns out to be a jerk.

We recently finished a watch-through of Frasier and they went to this particular well so many times I think you could build a whole season of that show solely out of episodes with this setup. As it happens, Bashir is a bit of a poor-person’s Frasier: he’s also a cultured doctor who views himself as a naturally charismatic ladies’ man, but in practice, his smarmy courtship persona ensures he will be forever trapped in a comedy-rich cycle of excruciating dating failures.

Bashir’s object of interest is the eponymous Melora Pazlar, who has been assigned some work at DS9, but is from a race that evolved on a low-gravity planet and as such, requires accommodations to work in standard Earth gravity. They have to retrofit DS9 with accessible ramps and build a wheelchair for her–apparently regular Earth accessibility needs have been completely solved with medicine or other technologies. In preparing for her arrival, Julian has become rather smitten with her through her work and ability to overcome handicaps, which brings us around to our trope & setup. The payoff pretty much follows the formula: her tough exterior is, of course, a cover for feeling vulnerable about being dependent on others, or ever being perceived as unfit for her work, but Julian sees through it and recognizes her for who she is, eventually eroding her defenses through persistence and charm.

Despite the familiar feel, as a whole, “Melora” is a success. It’s maybe the first real glimpse past Bashir’s oily surface to understand that he’s a genuinely caring and thoughtful person. Melora isn’t just a bland foil for him, either–she’s cultured, enjoying both pleasant Vulcan classical music and horrifying Klingon cuisine, and she’s complex, learning to understand how she can work and play well with others, even if that means recognizing she occasionally needs help. I really liked how they addressed the larger ambiguous question of whether or not she should accept medical treatment to improve her adaptation to Earth-strength gravity. There’s no right answer. Damned if you do, etc.

Also someone from Quark’s past is trying to revenge murder him. It’s probably unnecessary since like, that’s probably SOP for him. But it does serve as a good vehicle for some Odo editorials about Quark’s overall negative contribution to society, and it moves the plot along.

Endnotes:

• Greatly enjoyed the Klingon chef and musician. Klingon food and music is exactly as one would expect.
• Standard Trek ending to a romantic story: the guest character is reassigned and (probably) never seen again. Welp.

Overall: I think writing up a review made me appreciate this episode more. Watching it felt pretty familiar, I feel like I’ve seen a million stubbornly independent characters who eventually admit some variation of “no man is an island”, but it’s a quite well-crafted skiffy example with lots of good character stuff. 4 out of 5.