S5E9, “The Ascent” (story: Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe)

Maybe the least SF and the most DS9 episode yet. Very little plot, all talking, and pretty much just about few of the characters. And like other DS9s in this genre, really good.

By now we are just accepting the convenient fiction of Odo’s legal pursuit of Quark, understanding it will take whatever direction it requires to accommodate the plot. The series has managed to invent its own trope at this point, that Odo is attempting to build a lengthy case on Quark, but Quark is too clever to have anything pinned on him. But of course neither of those are true. Odo has cornered Quark on maybe a dozen unambiguous felonies, but never actually follows through on prosecuting him. Quark has had several chances to take Odo down or otherwise make his life extra miserable, and he always holds back. We have this thing with our cats where one of them will pick up a new habit that’s sort of annoying at first, but then becomes routine, and eventually sort of lovable. A lot of mornings Artie is waiting outside the bathroom door when I get out of the shower. Ultimately he’s there to get in some begging for his morning treats, but while he’s at it he’ll demand a bunch of petting and attention. He’ll bat at my hands, walk between my legs, wail pitifully. If I take a step toward the door he’ll rush in front of me to get down the hall first, only to realize I’m not done yet and come back for more harassment. Some days I can’t get away from him and it’s exasperating. But then other mornings he’s not at the bathroom door at all. And I’m like, “Well, where is he?”

Similarly, Odo and Quark need each other. Quark’s ongoing minor trade violations give Odo something to stake out when nothing more serious is happening, and Odo’s stiff omnipresence gives Quark someone to insult (especially since Rom got himself together). But they wouldn’t have it any other way. Sometimes Odo needs someone to do the dirty work, and Quark needs to be in a situation where he knows precisely what he can get away with.

I’m not certain this has been the case from day one, but Behr & Wolfe have become outstanding dialogue writers. This is a Quark & Odo showcase of loving hatred. There’s some sort of contrived plot here about Odo arresting Quark and very slowly transporting him to authorities, but it turns out that Odo’s just trying to bore Quark into a confession because he’s got no hard evidence. Just as that revelation surfaces, their ship goes down on the coldest warm-looking planet in the galaxy, and they get to suffer together a while because the ship is damaged in exactly such a way that necessitates a long survival trek. Huge shrug on all that, but some totally brilliant conversational writing throughout.

We need about ten minutes more show, so meanwhile back on DS9, Nog has been assigned back to the station for field studies. Jake seriously needs to not live with his dad anymore and Nog needs quarters, so they room together, and some low-level hijinks ensue. Nog has become a highly polished Starfleet cadet with a rigid schedule of exercise and chores. Jake is a slovenly artist living off his dad. He is supposed to be writing but is mostly idling his days away playing PADD games. They soon get mad at each other and decide it won’t work, but Sisko and Rom agree the boys need each other to balance out their worst tendencies and force them to stick it out. Then they resolve to not be mad at each other. Well then.

Overall: Probably both threads needed a little more going on, but both are entertaining and do something meaningful, so largely a successful episode. 4 out of 5.

S5E10, “Rapture” (story: LJ Strom)

New uniform time! Like my own closet, they are mostly grey and black with a little splash of color. They also look like they have thick, warm layers, which, as the cursed North Carolina summer has extended itself most discourteously into October, make me sweaty just looking at them.

While wearing these new uniforms, an episode takes place. It is about Sisko getting obsessed with a statue and some symbols. They turn out to point the way to a lost Bajoran city. Sisko keeps insisting he’s not the Emissary, but honestly he walks right into this stuff. It’s a busy one for him because his girlfriend also gets out of jail. She is welcomed home by Ben and Jake both. I guess they forgave her.

Her return sets up higher stakes for Sisko’s increasingly nasty Bajoran Orb migraines. The more visions he receives, the worse they get. Eventually Jake and Kasidy both are worried, and Julian wants to do some brain surgery. Brain surgery is healthy for brains but not for visions, as it will oh-so-ironically damage the receptors he needs for visions. Here’s the dramatic crux of the episode, as Sisko tries to balance his obsession with the visions (and loads of peer pressure from the always-gently-encouraging-others-to-kill-themselves Kai Winn) and not wanting his brain to melt. He slips into unconsciousness, so the decision falls to Jake. Well, there’s no decision between his Dad and the understated snottiness of Winn.

So my main qualm with this one is that the ultimate decision is no decision at all. The Bajorans want his visions, but they are killing him. Listen, they aren’t getting the visions either way, right? What am I missing? Either he gets brain surgery, and no visions. Or he dies, which also precludes visions. So that’s that. I think maybe they are going for yet another way that the prophets are tantalizingly almost proven to be something more than a spooky religion, but now, once again, we’ll never know. I’m pretty much over that thread of the show (e.g., “Destiny” and “Accession“), but I did like the Kasidy/Jake/Ben dynamics, and that probably saves this one from getting completely hokey.

Random note: Sisko yanks a data chain right out of the computer without ejecting it first.

Overall: 3 out of 5.

S5E11, “The Darkness and the Light” (story: Bryan Fuller)

I don’t think I liked this one especially much. I can concede it has some excellent scenes, and is generally a very good, dark, murder mystery episode that is well made and will appeal to a lot of viewers, especially genre fans. But I didn’t especially like watching it. I’m not interested in serial killer stories, which this emulates, or disturbing violence, which this contains. That is, without a larger lesson or additional themes, but this is a little weak on that front I think.

Beyond just not wanting to watch a bunch of people get murdered, I don’t think this story has much meaning until the last ten minutes, when we learn it’s all been Prin’s long-planned revenge plot. Who’s Prin? Exactly. We never heard of this guy. He was the innocent bystander victim of an wartime assassination bombing by Kira et. al. of Yet Another Horrible Cardassian Viceroy type. That guy deserved what he got but Prin lost his whole family and was disfigured. We are going to have sympathy for him on this. War sucks, and makes people do terrible things, for sure. This is something to dwell on—but we are up against the end of the show here and obviously he’s gone crazy in the interim years and now we just want Kira to escape. Oh good she did. Episode over!

The prior 40 minutes kind of want to be horror, kind of want to be a police procedural. But there are flaws: the suspect list comes out of nowhere, and I’m not sure why Kira has become Prin’s focus of torment anyway when he just knocks off all the other people more casually. They were all in the same cohort. I’m not sure there’s an explanation other than “because Kira is the DS9 character.” I don’t want to get picky really, just that there are so, so many murder stories like this in the world. They all need to be clever in their own way. If the lesson here is: be respectful of innocents during wartime, I don’t think they need to go on killing sprees later to get that across.

Overall: I think it’s a 3 out of 5 for me though YMMV.

S5E5, “The Assignment” (story: Robert Lederman & David R. Long)

The nice thing about running a sci-fi show is that it is a totally plausible thing that someone could get possessed by a mysterious alien (or have any sort of space madness really) and you’ve got yourself a plot. On the cheap! See: about 75% of TOS. In the hands of Fred Freiberger I think “The Assignment” could’ve gone off the rails but it works on DS9 terms. On the whole, I thought it was interesting, genuinely suspenseful, and more than a little creepy. I sometimes talk about the episodic TV problem of “We all know none of the regulars are going to die.” But Keiko…could she die? Seems unlikely, but tell that to Bareil fans.

So Keiko returns from a trip, only she’s not Keiko. It purports to be some alien in possession of Keiko, holding her hostage to get O’Brien to make a bunch of secret modifications to the station. It claims that it can kill Keiko instantly if O’Brien tries any funny business, like telling anyone anything, or not pretending to have a sufficiently good time at his birthday party.

I liked how this one was put together. I felt the pressure just in watching it. Not-Keiko torments poor O’Brien by putting him through all sorts of brilliantly trivial tortures. She makes him give her a kiss in the infirmary, and sleep in the bed next to her, and it’s not like he’d rather go back to his 20-year mental prison or anything, but in this context are pretty rotten things to do. Mostly the show is a bunch of close-ups of sweaty O’Brien trying and failing to find a way out of his mess, being constantly tempted to tell everyone but too scared of the vague but unknowable threat to his family, and ultimately finding himself utterly alone. Except for the formerly hapless Rom, who has gotten super into his new engineering gig. He still retains his intern-like enthusiasm for the work, and is interested in trying everything from the latest hyperspanner to the “O’Brien special” extra-greasy breakfast plate, specially designed to fuel the hungry engineer for a long day toiling in the Jeffries Tube. Rom’s eagerness dovetails nicely with O’Brien’s increasing desperation, and he’s more than willing to work overtime and take the fall once the rest of the crew gets wise to the weird stuff going on around the station.

I found the ending a smidge dissatisfying, maybe a little too cleanly unexplained considering O’Brien really had no idea what it was going to take to zap Keiko in such a way to kill the weird phantom possessor without harming his wife. But I liked how Rom got to be the hero, and that all he gets in return is a promotion, which is really all he even wanted. I’m not sure any character has had quite the triumphant arc that Rom has so far in the series. I mean, maybe Nog?

Random note: Memory Alpha reminds me there was a TNG episode where O’Brien was possessed by something or other, and was a threat to Keiko and Molly. I guess we can get ready for the episode where Molly gets possessed somewhere down the road.

Also: good thing Kira is on Bajor right now instead of milling around Chez O’Brien or this would’ve been some kind of mess.

Morn watch: Morn also enjoys his supremely disgusting breakfast at Quark’s.

Overall: Creepy and effective. And as always, O’Brien must suffer. 4 out of 5.

S5E6, “Trials and Tribble-ations” (story: the whole dang crew)

Some highly enjoyable fan-service for Trekkies, particularly for those especially familiar with the famous TOS episode, which all people watching season five of DS9 are probably a subset. I won’t go through all the details of this one’s production, which the reader can easily find elsewhere on the internet. It’s enough to say they did a terrific and thorough job, and totally pulled off the Back to the Future part 2-esque combining of the old and and new into a cohesive whole.

For now I’m more interested in chatting about watching this show in the context of a full DS9 viewing, versus when I watched it randomly some years ago whilst watching TOS, when I found out they had made a “Tribbles” sequel. Here’s what I wrote then:

[T]his gave me a taste of DS9 while being an homage to the recently watched Trouble With Tribbles.  Bottom line, mixed feelings. It’s a fairly fun episode and certainly well-done. Really seamless effects and integration into the old series. It’s clearly a labor of love here. But I couldn’t help but think the DS9 crew is a bunch of stiffs. Especially compared to the rollicking stories and characters in TOS. A lot of the humor was awkwardly done and didn’t really work. But then, I gather DS9 isn’t really that kind of show and this is well off-formula for them. Anyway, I’m glad they made the episode and it was worth the watch. It might be interesting to see if it’s more or less enjoyable once I get back to it during a full DS9 watch, around, I dunno, 2014 or something. Overall: 4 out of 5.

The “rollicking” comment is fair, given the relative infrequency of pub brawls in DS9 relative to its ancestor. But I can now say that DS9 is at least as funny, and way, way better paced. So I also take back the “bunch of stiffs” thing. I found it plenty funny this time through. I think you have to get into the groove of DS9 humor, for a start, but it really helps to know the characters and carry all the subtext with you into this episode. Knowing Sisko as an accomplished leader, seeing him sheepishly lurking up to Kirk for some yeoman’s work is pretty fun. Seeing these familiar characters in velvety ’60s space clothes and arguing about the uniform colors is also a lot more satisfying.

I only briefly commented on the look of the episode, but it really deserves a lot of praise. Being in the middle of TOS, it just looked like another TOS, I don’t think it stood out to me as much. But watching this time we were immediately impressed at the care they took in filming to capture the lighting, lower-resolution film, and general look. Generally when I summarize TOS for people wondering if they should watch it, I give them some variation on: “It’s a lot of fun, and has an amazing look, and you will absolutely enjoy the first few episodes you watch, and the 10-20 classic episodes any time. But—there are a lot of duds, too. After you get over the look and feel of the show and start thinking more about plot, you’ll find there’s a lot of cruft.” So “Trials and Tribble-ations” gets to take advantage of those TOS strengths just by dipping into the look and style of that series, while leveraging the single most entertaining story in the bunch. Memory Alpha tells me that they were also considering revisiting “A Piece of the Action” and wow, would that have been a terrible choice. I know I especially don’t like that one compared to the wider Trek fan crowd, I realize, but it always had to be “Tribbles,” didn’t it?

Also I was years off in my guess about when I’d watch DS9. What ended up happening was that my wife got to watching TNG and really liked it, so we thought we’d watch DS9 together at some point, but maybe not right after TNG, so it took a couple years to get around to it. We started watching it kind of on a whim, too, and found it to be good enough to continue. At this point in my viewing, I’m prepared to say it is easily the best Trek show. All three series I’ve watched have good characters, and TOS and TNG have their strengths, but neither of those can compare to DS9’s overall writing and production.

One more note here, about, you know, the actual episode. They take a first step in trying to explain why Klingons look different in TOS. The first step is always admitting the issue, which Worf does, if only to say Klingons don’t like to talk about it with outsiders. I’m not the kind of Trek nerd that really cares about canon stuff and will definitely neither remember details nor be interested in arguing about them even if I did. Even Gene Roddenberry wasn’t, apparently, because I read that he said he wasn’t interested in this problem. Basically when they got around to making the movies and had an actual budget for makeup, they decided to make the Klingons more interesting looking. It wasn’t any kind of decision that they were a different type of Klingon from what was in TOS. People were expected to imagine that’s what they were supposed to look like in TOS. I am totally good with that, personally, but others have tried to explain it anyway, and I understand there are some Star Trek: Enterprise episodes that dig into this. The graphic novel Klingons: Blood Will Tell also does, IIRC.

Overall: I’m a DS9 guy now, so am upping my original 4 to a full 5 out of 5. Excellent Trek nerdery.

S5E7, “Let He Who Is Without Sin…” (story: Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe)

Levels of ruining your visit to the pleasure planet with your partner:

Mild – Refusing to wear the gold lamé shorts you brought. I can’t really blame him.

Medium – Refusing to wear your poor swimsuit choice and instead going around in your work clothes. Certainly they have beach shops around to pick up some less embarrassing trunks, even if you’re limited to the usual selection of bald eagles or Bud Light logos or whatever on them.

Hot – Accusing your partner of having a side fling with her masseuse.

BURNING UP – Begging off plans with her to attend local political rallies.

Dude. Worf is one of my favorite characters in any Trek but he can be a serious wet blanket. Sometimes there aren’t enough PRUNE JUICE EXTRA LARGES in the world to loosen the guy up. But he meets his sourpuss match in the Essentialists. So this episode is one big watered down piña colada. The Essentialists raise some perfectly legitimate points about taking precautions in life, but ruining everyone’s vacation isn’t going to get anyone on your side. Guys, just put out a bid for some security.

If you dig around in here there are a few good Worf & Dax relationship nuggets to save this episode from being a total disaster. Dax’s growing injury record forces Sisko to awkwardly bring up her lifestyle choice of having sex with a Klingon. (She replies: “Interspecies romance isn’t without its danger. That’s what makes it fun.” !!) And she and Worf do manage to have a productive conversation about his tendencies to negatively compare her Klingon women.

Morn watch: Morn thoughtfully brings flowers to a woman. She kisses him and they wander off. Listen Worf, just do what Morn does.

Overall: Some laffs and Dax/Worf progress, but mostly a clunker. 2 out of 5.

S5E8, “Things Past” (story: Michael Taylor)

Since I’m using today to talk about the relative strengths of these Trek series, here’s a chance to mention that TNG was awfully good at the one-off SF mysteries. DS9 is a bigger show and each episode isn’t quite as self-contained. It’s definitely better overall, but if you’re just seeing one random episode of one random series, TNG is maybe the choice. The best TNGs pulled off the thing where 30 minutes in I’m thoroughly stumped and getting a bit desperate to find out what’s going on. “Things Past” manages a similar feat.

Odo, Sisko, Garak, and Dax wake up on the wrong side of the space time continuum, finding themselves loitering about Terek Nor (and by extension, some years in the past), as captive Bajorans. There are better historical circumstances to find oneself in. Odo seems to be taking it especially hard, and is uncharacteristically fidgety, as if he is overdoing it on the raktajino he is finally getting to drink for real. It turns out that he knows what’s going on and pulling an X-Files style withholding of information from everyone and hoping he can resolve things before they get somehow worse.

Narrator: He doesn’t.

They eventually just about escape only to suddenly they find themselves back in a holding cell, as though someone just accidentally reset their game before they could save their progress. Things get increasingly jumpy from there until Odo comes fully clean about a past legal indiscretion. It’s a bit of a mix of Quantum Leap (Odo has to right a past wrong, if only morally) and TNG (good mystery sorta explained by weird space stuff).

The final discussion between him and a super disappointed Kira is an especially strong scene for both of them. But it was also when I started to feel a lot like I’d seen this episode before. Memory Alpha reminds me it’s a parallel of “Necessary Evil” when Kira was the one admitting to wartime guilt. Reminding myself of that one, I felt like this one falls a bit short of its predecessor and doesn’t break as much new ground.

Overall: Still good, but familiar territory. 4 out of 5.

Mini-Trek hiatus between seasons while we watched the new season of Humans. Resuming transmission…

S5E1, “Apocalypse Rising” (story: Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe)

Conceptually a way to resolve Odo’s revelation from the end of season 4 that Gowron is a secret changeling agent, but in practice, an excuse to get some of the regulars into Klingon makeup. I am good with that.

We get a pretty fun setup: For a few brave souls temporarily Bashir’d into having a Klingon appearance, there will be an opportunity to get close to Gowron. They must deploy some polaron emitters or some space crap that will cause a changeling to spontaneously lose its form and go blobby. He’ll be protected by his personal guard, on a Klingon planet, and they can only fire the emitters a single time or risk dowsing everyone with radiation poisoning. Sounds like a plan.

How it is a really good episode: About a million funny Klingon gags. O’Brien and Odo are awful at being Klingons and it’s quite delightful. Sisko is loving it and it’s even better. Our kind, thoughtful Ben utterly enjoys randomly whaling on his temporary fellow Klingons to build camaraderie. I think my appreciation for Michael Dorn also leveled up. Seeing three actors unaccustomed to being Klingons, and one really comfortable with it, actually accomplishes the mental trick of making me think: “Everyone act like Worf! He’s a real Klingon and just follow his lead.” But of course, he isn’t, he is also an actor playing a Klingon, instead of an actor playing a human playing a Klingon.

How it isn’t so good: The whole polaron emitter thing is painfully contrived, and then on top of it just becomes a stupid red herring. It’s staged poorly on top of that. They have a brilliant chance to fire the bloody things and they don’t, because, I guess Gowron’s speech is so rousing or something. But really they don’t just to pad out things long enough to where they’ll get caught and seemingly blow the whole mission.

But: I did like the mini-twist ending where we learn there is indeed a changeling infiltrating the ranks of Klingon leadership. But it ain’t Gowron, it’s Martok (I forgot exactly where we’d seen him but it was back in “The Way of the Warrior“). Odo was misled by the changelings into thinking it was Gowron, because they hoped the Federation would get rid of him, and clear the way for Martok to take over. But Odo’s an experienced security chief who deals with Quark on a daily basis, so he knows lies when he hears them, and sniffs it out.

Overall: Quite a good one, a lot of fun and moves things forward by resolving the Klingon issue so we can concentrate on the Dominion. I mean, the universe is complicated enough. 4 out of 5.

S5E2, “The Ship” (story: Pam Wigginton & Rick Cason)

Really more of a TOS filler episode than a DS9:

1. Straightforward plot, with the captain alternating between tedious bartering with the alien antagonist and nagging at his crew to solve all the problems.
2. Very harsh conditions reminiscent of a war movie.
3. Chummy guest star whose imminent death is hopelessly telegraphed.

I’ve talked plenty about TOS episodes so I think I’ll keep this one short. It has its moments, but a lot of it isn’t super effective, and we don’t want Kiké to die, but we know the poor guy is going to, only after hanging on just long enough to fill out the 45 minutes. They do capture a Jem’Hadar ship, and actually make a point to honor their dead crewmembers for a change. And I liked the bit at the end where Worf sits with O’Brien as part of the Klingon ceremony to sit with the dead to protect them from predators during the journey to Sto-vo-kor.

Overall: 3 out of 5.

S5E3, “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places” (story: Ronald D. Moore)

Now this is some good Trek. A little Klingon/Ferengi relations, a little Cyrano de Bergerac. Great story, lots of excellent character and dialogue touches, and really funny. Actually it’s two layers deep on the Cyrano stuff. Worf is lovestruck by Grilka (Quark’s wife–briefly–from “House of Quark“), but when he’s told that she is not interested in him because of his family’s current reputation, he finds himself helping Quark, so he can at least woo her by proxy. But Dax, in turn, is helping Worf, because, as becomes obvious to everyone but Worf, she’s become similarly interested in him.

It all worked great. Really enjoyed how this one developed: Quark being not slimy, Worf actually being much better at impressing Klingon women than he thinks, and Dax, the lone voice of sanity, holding the whole scheme together. Fantastic ending when she declares her intentions towards Worf, and everyone compares their post-coital injuries in the infirmary.

There’s a B story here too, though I haven’t been discussing the ongoing Kira pregnancy thread much. The stories they’re trying to wring out of it have felt contrived and awkward to me. Memory Alpha tells me that Ronald D. Moore really liked the B-story here, about O’Brien and Kira becoming a little attracted to each other, but, I dunno. Not that I really understand how I would feel towards a woman who wound up carrying my offspring when my pregnant wife was injured in a spaceship accident, having not happened to have found myself in that particular situation, but I’m not sure where the lovey feelings come from. There’s been no hint of it at all. Odo kinda says it all when he wonders when Kira even started calling him “Miles.” As far as we know, he helped her out of the tub once and has given her foot massages. So we’re beyond the professional relationship at this point, anyway, but not sure if this was necessary.

Morn watch: With only a whispered “I will apologize for this at a later time,” Morn finds himself hurled out of his barstool by Worf when he tries to show off for Grilka. Worf later admits to having little idea how to court a Klingon woman, but one wonders how tossing poor Morn could be construed as impressive, other than the required physical strength necessary to dislodge him.

Overall: A perfect Trek episode, since I am ignoring the O’Brien/Kira story. 5 out of 5.

S5E4, “Nor the Battle to the Strong” (story: Bruce R. Parker)

OK, enough fun. War drama time.

I think this one works fine, but maybe not exactly how it’s envisioned. It’s supposed to be a story about Jake getting exposed to some of the Federation’s harsher realities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since aspiring writers probably ought to experience a bit more in their lives than loitering on the promenade. We catch up with him as he’s failing to get an article written about Julian, because mostly Julian just wants to talk about exciting new lab procedures, and Jake doesn’t have the interviewing chops to steer him onto any better stories. It’s so boring that he encourages Julian to heed a medical distress call to a nearby battle front, despite Julian’s understandable concerns about dragging his commanding officer’s son into a war zone.

The violent, messy situation they arrive at ultimately makes this episode memorable. Despite the constraints of making a gripping war drama out of a 45-minute PG sci-fi show, they more or less pull it off. Like Jake, us viewers spend all our time in the climate controlled environs of the station while horrible wars are being fought in any number of distant outposts, of which we are only occasionally reminded. It’s a shocking contrast to suddenly find ourselves in a field hospital tending to war wounded. I thought the exhausting plight of the doctors at the front was well done. Maybe they should have a whole TV series about that, seems like a bountiful premise.

Unfortunately I’m not sure Cirroc Lofton really has the range for this one, so a lot of his scenes feel rather flat or forced. It’s easy to understand a kid getting scared and screwing up when bombs are dropping all around him or people are dying in front of him, so I think the context and story worked well, as does Jake’s maturation as a person (and the always well-done Ben-Jake relationship), even if the principal performance is weaker.

That Guy! note: Enjoyed the blue alien doctor being played by Mark Holton, the That Guy! who you may know as Pee-wee’s nemesis in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, “It’s Enrico Pallazzo!” guy from The Naked Gun, or Chubb the fat basketball player from Teen Wolf. Extremely solid That Guy!

Overall: 4 out of 5. Wiiiiiiiin….in the end!