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.

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

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.