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.

S7E5, “Chrysalis” (René Echevarria)

We’re probably at the point in DS9 where we can look back and recognize what this show has done well, which is most everything. All the principal characters, and a solid handful of regular guests, have had deep and rewarding developmental arcs. DS9 has done this far better than its predecessors. Trek always has good characters but they hadn’t previously done much growth. In TOS if you started out as “the Russian guy” you ended the series as “the Russian guy.” In TNG you might learn a little about the character’s larger lives, mostly in the form of introducing new family members-slash-supplemental characters. But largely if you started out as “the robot” you ended the series as “the robot with a pet cat.” Perhaps this just reflects larger TV trends. DS9 had to be better, because TV was better.

Our boy Bashir has maybe had the most dramatic arc, from juvenile playboy to sensitive doctor to worthy soldier & best pal. But as we clear 150 episodes of this series I think maybe they’ve run out of ideas for him. He’s just the smart, lonely, sorta sad guy now. He’s run out of ideas for himself, anyway, as he pesters everyone to hang out with him but they all have their own lives. But his does have his own crew of genetically-enhanced pals, and they show up to relieve him of his boredom.

I liked this bunch when we met them back in “Statistical Probabilities” and I was happy to see them again. We also get a good SF story out of it as Julian figures out how to get Sarina’s brain back in sync with the rest of the world so she can actually speak and interact with it. Like all introverts, she finds that getting out into the world sounds great until you actually do it. It’s fun for a while but eventually everything seems too loud and no one will shut up. Julian also can’t help coming on way too strong, by their third date he’s planning week-long getaways. Poor guy isn’t used to being in a relationship for more than a few days and he just steamrolls her. I can’t say I’ve driven any past girlfriends to retreat into deep mental dormancy to get away from me, but I’ve never lived on a space station either, so they always had the option to just leave. In his defense, he understands it’s too much for her and arranges for her to do the same.

I’d say we’re two-for-two on stories about this group now. It turns out that Sarina is the one who gets some resolution first, but I’d like to learn more about all of them. I don’t suppose we’re going to have time though. There’s a bit of trivia in Memory Alpha that they had another story in mind for Jack but it resolved with him becoming “normal” and they didn’t like that. I think that’s the right call, I generally like their handling of these characters. They aren’t trying to make them different, as though that’s better. Sarina was ripe for another story because she had some potential for getting help. As for Julian, I feel bad for him. Maybe things will eventually work out with Sarina, or he could always still take up the superspy invitation offered to him in “Inquisition.”

Overall: Very solid follow-up to the great “Statistical Probabilities.” This group is a rich vein of SF stories, I’m into it. 5 out of 5.

S7E6, “Treachery, Faith and the Great River” (Philip Kim/David Weddle & Bradley Thompson)

Somewhere in the canon of a long-running show is a fine line between inside info and trope, and there’s an art to landing on the proper side of it. At some point you go to the well one-too-many times and it becomes a trope. Then you can either leave it behind or just settle in and own it. Perhaps a sign a show has begun to show some age is when it starts making meta-jokes about its own tropes. DS9 isn’t really feeling stale to me, but this episode might be a signal that the showrunners are getting punchy.

After O’Brien informs Sisko it’ll take three weeks to get a graviton stabilizer, Sisko does his usual bit of waving off the engineer’s knowledgeable estimate with the absurd demand that it be done in three days. Which is so silly it actually makes O’Brien mad. He says his parts supplier can’t even get him the thing for three weeks, but Sisko is having none of it. As viewers we were laughing at this. Like a GOP government contract awarded to a crony megacorp, the numbers are so outlandish they don’t even have meaning anymore. If I told my boss it would take me three weeks to complete a project and he said I had three days, I would just laugh. That’s not cutting corners, it’s cutting everything but the corners. Yet O’Brien acts on the premise that this is a serious threat. When it looks like he won’t be able to make other arrangements, he says, “I’m doomed.” I mean, come on. No one is doomed. What’s Sisko going to do though, fire him? The station already needs like a dozen more engineers instead of its current staff of…O’Brien, ostensibly the only engineer able to deal with Cardassian tech in the entirety of Starfleet. Well anyway, it does set off an enjoyable Nog scheme and introduces us to the concept of the Great Material Continuum. It’s a natural outgrowth of the Ferengi obsession with capitalism, evolved to a sort of supply-and-demand-based religion.

So I didn’t love the setup to this, which felt like it leaned a little too much on the crutch of Sisko’s absurd timeline demands, but the payoff made up for it. At this point we’re also well aware of the motivations of the Ferengi, but we learn about a deeper philosophy behind them, which is both fun and entertaining. Wish we’d have thought of it sooner. The greater takeaway, though: Nog got the job done. There’s actually a pretty decent management lesson in here. Nog’s resourcefulness is admirable, even if his communication skills were lacking. (E.g., one is not advised to borrow against a Klingon’s blood wine stash without explicit approval.)

The other episode thread concerns Weyoun’s defection, the impending death of the Founders, and collapse of the Dominion. Kinda buried the lede on this one.

But I’m also not sure we can say as much about it. The premise is quite interesting—how can Odo possibly trust Weyoun, even if he passes his initial test and immediately tells Odo all about a secret ketracel-white facility. Not that the episode elected to be about that at all, as it turned out, signaled immediately by Odo allowing Weyoun to hang out at the runabout’s console, where he’d have ready access to the entirety of Federation knowledge, rather than locking him up in quarters. Actually it is more about the drawbacks of putting readily-replicated, fully-knowledgeable clones at key administrative positions during wartime. If I remember right I think we knew that the Weyouns are all clones, but it hasn’t been brought up in long enough that it didn’t occur to me. Or Odo. This is a nice clone though, and it’s actually a bit sad when he dies. The unwillingness of Vorta or Jem’Hadar to kill Changelings continues to be an interesting constraint that frustrates the Cardassians. I think we can assume it’s going to continue to be a hassle for Damar when it comes to anything involving Odo. (BTW, we really need a Damar episode. His character is incredibly weak compared to Dukat. All Damar does is empty boasts and vague threats while downing kanar.)

We also see/hear that the Founders are dying of some disease. Odo is upset about this, but I’m not sure that’s the right reaction for him. Well, he’d have decidedly mixed feelings anyway. Easy to guess we’re going to delve into this as the season progresses.

Overall: Maybe a bit trope-heavy but very entertaining, and pushes things in some interesting directions. 5 out of 5.

S7E7, “Once More Unto the Breach” (Ronald D. Moore)

I’ve thought a lot about Postmodern Klingonism (like here and here) throughout my DS9 watch and we can file this away as well, especially since it’s about our old frenemy Kor. Kor absolutely has the most interesting non-Worf Klingon arc in the Trek universe. These days he’s enduring forced retirement, out of favor with the Empire, too old to get a regular Klingon gig, and too proud to accept a lesser one like Martok’s grumbly assistant Darok. So he shows up at Worf’s door trying to cash in whatever favors he can get.

Minor detour to note that everything in the DS9 realm seems to touch the top tier of leadership across all cultures. Sisko is regularly charged with developing the most vital battle plans for the Federation. Kira knows, or has scrapped with, or has slept with, every major Bajoran figure. Every time they deal with the Cardassians, they deal with Damar or Weyoun (and Dukat before them). The Founders, they get the Female Changeling. The Ferengi, Zek or Brunt. I understand our gang is important, but it’s beyond absurd if you think about it. All these people should be ensconced in deeply stratified layers of administration (for both practical and security/safety reasons). Or they have just really done a good job getting rid of bureaucratic cruft in the future. Well, this is a pointless observation really, it’s just a further ramification of the standard Trek skewed reality. In actual life the captains and CEOs get the most money, dress the best, and are sequestered away to shiny, offensively lavish offices where they give general directions about what they want their organization to do, and someone somewhere else actually figures out how to do it. In Trek, the uppermost leadership actually does all the stuff while everyone else, I dunno, works nights I guess.

Anyway, so, Kor is deeply old and it takes him all of half a scene to lose his mind and start thinking he’s re-living a battle from 50 years ago. This, after Worf’s ongoing haranguing of Martok to give the old guy a break, and us learning that Martok hates the guy for an old grudge (which brings up some Klingon class issues that we could use more on at some point). He accedes to Worf’s request only to give in, then watch as the crew drools over Kor’s presence. So his immediate meltdown is pretty embarrassing for everyone. Subsequently Martok tries to kill Kor but Worf stops him. After which there’s a truly uncomfortable scene of Martok & crew humiliating depressed soup-eating Kor that I really hated. There’s nothing in Martok’s history to suggest he’d pull this kind of petty Draco Malfoy-esque weak ragging on a defenseless target. Martok is a great, honorable Klingon warrior. I’d say it’s more in line for him to rectify his failed attempt to kill Kor, or at least throw him in the brig. Klingon brigs must be both abundant and fiendishly uncomfortable.

In the end Kor salvages his reputation by sacrificing himself in a brilliant maneuver to occupy a group of Jem’Hadar ships long enough for the rest of them to get away. It’s a great ending, the way any respectable Klingon wants to go out. I didn’t get why they would initially let Worf be the one to try it, I mean, using the old guy desperate for a glorious ending was a no-brainer. (This is essentially the premise of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, in fact.) I thought Darok would join him, actually, especially after their old guy pep talk.

There’s a minor B-story tucked in here while Worf is almost dying about his sorta former wife Ezri stating categorically that she is no longer interested in Worf in that sense. Quark takes an interest in this information. One assumes this will be relevant in the future, hence, I am including it here for the record. However, all I really have to say about it at this time is that we got a good laugh out of Jake’s goofy grin while overhearing the two of them talking.

Overall: Put me down for any Ronald D. Moore Klingon episode. 4 out of 5 and only the one off because of the lousy taunting scene.

S7E8, “The Siege of AR-558” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

Oof, this a grim one about wartime life. I’m not sure how to address it using my trademark sly yet gentle humor so I’ll probably keep it short. Once in a while we need to acknowledge there is a serious war going on, instead of watching the gang, say, prep for an intramural baseball game. People are dying and the names scroll by on DS9 monitors and Sisko’s a mess about it but life goes on.

Generally this is a very effective episode about life on the front, which is to say, it’s not all that pleasant to watch. The soldiers are at end of their emotional tethers and we’ll get to know lots of them so we’ll get upset when they inevitably die. Mostly this one’s about atmosphere so I’ll say it’s successful in that regard, but in execution, it’s a bit contrived. I don’t like the trick of giving a guest character a name and just enough of a backstory to make it sad, but they go to the well a few times here.

Memory Alpha tells me they explicitly wanted to focus on characters who weren’t used to combat situations, which I wasn’t really conscious of as it was happening. But now that I think about it, it’s an interesting approach. Ezri, Bashir, and Nog all have decent stories mixed in. But Quark is included for no good reason. Perhaps they started out thinking he could occasionally lighten the mood but that never felt right so mostly he ends up being panicked and whiny. He gets to stand up for Nog and get pointlessly angry at Sisko when Nog is injured, but I don’t think it contributes much.

I’ll be curious what happens to Nog now that he’s lost a leg. Interesting, if grisly, thing to do to one’s character. The natural arc is a Lt. Dan-style descent into guilt, depression, and anger, then redemption, but DS9 usually finds new angles, so, we’ll see.

Overall: Some things didn’t really work but largely a gritty and necessary one. 4 out of 5.

S7E1/2, “Image in the Sand”/”Shadows and Symbols” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

One reason I have trouble treating the Bajoran religion with the proper gravitas is the orbs. First off, “orbs” as a concept are inherently much more funny than mystical. (We even bought this wood orb at Target probably 50% because it looks interesting and 50% because we are just liking the word “orb” (which is clearly labeled “WOOD ORB” on the actual orb, but they’ve disappointingly shifted terminology to “decorative ball” on the website)). Plus it seems like there are a whole lot of orbs for seemingly any faith niche, not unlike Christian patron saints or Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. Even if they didn’t have the orbs I wouldn’t say that Sisko’s visions have been very interesting. They come and go, and weird symbolic cast members say Twin Peaks stuff. I don’t really like stories that hinge on dreams either, and these visions have the same feel. Whenever you need to whip up some motivation for your character, just give ’em a really compelling dream or vision or something.

So anyway Sisko has a vision and that whips up some motivation for him to finally move on from the minimum-wage gig at his dad’s restaurant. He knows he has to find some orb on the planet Tyree, and he also sees a woman’s face. After he re-creates the face in a PADD sketch program, Dad pulls a classic “I don’t know anything about that! Just forget it! Leave me alone!” kind of thing that on TV absolutely means that he knows everything and will subsequently require scene after scene of goading before he spills it. Sigh. It turns out to be Benjamin’s real mother, who managed to leave behind a weird Bajoran artifact, and also Sisko gets jumped by a cultist. Seems like it’s time to pack up the baseball, and that’s before New Dax even shows up.

Back on the station, Worf is trashing holosuites to express his concern that he doesn’t think Jadzia is going to make it to Sto-vo-kor on account of being murdered, which hardly seems fair. You’d think the Klingon gods would consider her body of work over her final moment getting ambushed by a lunatic. Newly promoted Colonel Kira is dealing with cultists and the astonishingly predictable deterioration of their alliance with the Romulans. Is that enough setup for part 2? Everyone’s packed, armed, angry, or recently introduced.

Well, like a lot of these DS9 two-parters, I feel like half is good and half is just OK. Sometimes the setup is too stretched out and the payoff doesn’t make it worth it, or, as in this case, the setup is interesting but the payoff just sorta checks all the boxes and resets everything.

• I do like this reluctant host idea that Ezri wasn’t prepared to be the new Dax at all, that she was conscripted in a Trill-mergency and now that’s who she is. We haven’t had a good new Trill idea for a while and this is an interesting one, beyond the definitely-going-to-be awkward eventual meeting of Worf that it lines up. Trills may find themselves inheriting radically different lives sometimes, which sounds like the cross-sectional space between DS9 and Quantum Leap.
• I also liked the tie-in to “Far Beyond the Stars” and the interesting doubt-seeding about which universe is the real one.
• Though I didn’t like the pointless tagging along of Grandpa Sisko through Ben’s desert quest, which amounted to mostly him being overheated and exhausted and falling behind. Which is what I would do if I had to traipse through the desert too, but it doesn’t make for compelling TV. One supposes they might have thought to build up a Grandpa emergency at some point, but then it would have come off as either too contrived or too mean so they just had to roll with it. Everyone likes Grandpa Sisko and there’s no great need to make this whole thing even more cruel for Ben.
• This was the episode for pointless tag-alongs I guess because Quark on the bridge of a Klingon warship is even more absurd than dragging your elderly father through the desert on your vision quest. And there’s a whole lot more complaining.
• But the general Worf et. al. mission to destroy some shipyards in Jadzia’s honor, thereby granting her admission to Sto-vo-kor, is pretty good. The weird Klingon rules can get a bit too fungible to matter sometimes, but if it satisfies Worf, I’m good with it.
• The Romulan story wasn’t hugely rewarding to me, it just wasn’t going to ever go any way than it did. But it does remind us that Kira is a Boss.

Overall: A pretty good two-parter (three if you could the end of last season). Great execution if a little flimsy on motivations. 4 out of 5.

S7E3, “Afterimage” (René Echevarria)

With that arc settled, it’s time to meet the new girl. Only she’s not really “new” she’s kinda recycled, and only like 15% new. Actually that raises a question. Have we established how long a symbiont really lives? It’s been something like seven Trill lifetimes now for Dax. So if a symbiont is part of everyone who’s every existed before, each new host makes up a smaller percentage of the whole. If they were weighted evenly then eventually the new host wouldn’t even register in proportion to all previous ones. Even for Dax it’s getting pretty small. But they aren’t weighted evenly, and based on six seasons of Jadzia, I’d say any given Dax is like 50% current host, with varying shades of the rest. Seems like stronger personalities win out, plus a recency bias.

Leaving behind Trill math, other than Sisko, everyone is varying degrees of skeezed out by Ezri Dax, including Ezri. This episode is about the skeezing. Actually there’s some skeezing and some welcoming and really everything in between. Sisko still wants to call her “Old Man,” which Jadzia dug but weirds out Ezri. Quark sees the situation as a second chance with Dax. Bashir sees her as a different person, but then Ezri messes him up by saying he woulda had a shot with Jadzia if not for Worf, and Worf senses this too I guess because Julian is the one on a receiving end of a Worf choke hold, not Quark. Ezri still hasn’t really figured out how thoroughly her life has been messed up, but she tries to work through it by helping Garak get over his guilt for decoding Cardassian messages.

Not really feeling any strong opinions about the whole Garak thread, despite that being the crux of this ep’s story. I think we can all grok that he’s feeling guilty about being so directly involved in the ultimate destruction of his people. Ezri’s role in helping him figure this out isn’t as interesting as her other relationships though.

Anyway the portrayal of changes in those relationships makes for a very strong episode. This is the kind of thing DS9 does well: it’s some kind of weird SF situation but the story encompasses all of the major characters and they all have a logical and/or natural reaction to it. Worf is probably the hardest to pin down and the show doesn’t try to guess his feelings, because we can’t exactly tap into the human experience of how you should react when your spouse dies, but their symbiont is restored into a new person, and that person becomes your co-worker. It seems about right that he would want to avoid her, yet get jealous of anyone who didn’t do the same.

Overall: 4 out of 5. A necessary housekeeping episode but it gets the job done.

S7E4, “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” (Ronald D. Moore)

Not for the first time, the episode summary and Netflix still looked so silly that we briefly thought it might be a skip. But then it was good! (Just to clarify this before moving on, I don’t think we’d really skip an episode. Especially considering that the two times we thought about it, they turned out to be good, with multiple bad episodes sneaking up on us in between. We are bad at Trek speculating.) And in fact, one of the more entertaining episodes of the series, even if its execution is a little clunky.

So a Vulcan crew stops over at DS9, spurring a few seemingly unlikely coincidences: they are into baseball and want to challenge Sisko’s crew to a game. But it turns out their captain is an old school rival of Sisko’s, whom he insists on challenging through sports despite Vulcans being smarter and way stronger. In this case, they also have a vastly superior baseball team by dint of…knowing how to play baseball. Sisko recruits his staff to challenge them, putting together a rag-tag team that will shock the arrogant favorites with a victory based on heart and desire, not logic.

Hahaha, no, this isn’t what happens at all. Their garbage rookie team gets mauled by the sharply efficient Vulcan team. But that’s what makes this episode great. I say a lot that DS9 doesn’t do the normal thing with a lot of these clichéd setups, and here’s another example. Because a win here wasn’t going to happen. When I was in grad school we had an intramural softball team. It was a lot of fun and I couldn’t tell you how many we won or lost. Probably every team was .500 just by expected randomness. That was our first season, anyway. Our second season we somehow missed a registration deadline and didn’t get to play in the same grad student league, we got tossed into the leftover pile. Mostly it ended up being undergrad fraternity/sorority teams and our team of scrawny library school students got destroyed every time. We usually got mercy-rule’d so at least we didn’t have to suffer for the full six innings every game. So honestly if “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” would’ve gone down any other way I wouldn’t have been a fan. Instead it morphed into a story about Rom’s redemption, Sisko’s ego, and finding joy in unexpected places. The haughty Vulcan jerk can call it “manufactured triumph” (saving that one for a future fantasy baseball team name, btw) all he wants but no one cares.

We wondered a bit if Vulcans would really like baseball. It’s established that they might like good logical games like chess. I could also see them liking games and sports more generally. Anything where there’s a sense of rule and order, where you can refine mental or physical skills. But I can’t imagine they have any kind of professional sports. I’m a dumb human who spends a lot of time watching and thinking about pro sports so I absolutely know how illogical and stupid those are. But I’ll buy that Vulcans like them for their personal enjoyment. Baseball maybe is a stretch since even this era’s humans don’t know a thing about it (but apparently all other ship business can be put on hold for a few weeks for a crash course).

So many good bits from this one that I liked:

• Most players: “Hey batter batter batter Hey batter.” Worf: “Death to the opposition!”
• Their absurd practice jerseys of all colors, shades, materials, etc. It was like they asked the costume designers themselves were from the 24th century and told what baseball uniforms sorta looked like, and they went from there. Although their actual team jerseys were pretty sharp.
• So many good Memory Alpha trivia bits. I learned that Cirroc Lofton is the nephew of Kenny Lofton, actual very good human baseball player. I guess it didn’t rub off because every time Jake pitches they did an obvious quick cut to a stand-in. MA also says Max Grodénchik had been a semi-pro player but he’s playing the laughably bad Rom, so they made him bat lefty and wear his glove on the wrong hand to approximate the proper sort of ineptitude.
  • There’s plenty more in there but I don’t need to relate them all just to relate them. This episode might have the best trivia section of any show of the series.

Overall: 5 out of 5. All-in on “manufactured triumph.”

S6E24, “Time’s Orphan” (Joe Menosky/Bradley Thompson & David Weddle)

This is a little SF ditty about having a wild teenager, except not the kind that dates college guys and stays out all night and can’t be controlled, I mean the kind that got lost for a decade and has gone feral.

It’s one of those “only in SF” concepts that a show like this can take on, and it’s decently handled. But it’s also a story about frustration, and stories about frustration can be frustrating to watch. Trying to think of a good story about a frustrating situation. I dunno, Apollo 13 maybe. But they skip all the aggravating heads banging against walls in favor of the parts where the CO2 filters work, where the delicate rotation is successful. In these five minutes of thinking about it (in which mostly I DuckDuckGo’d “From the Earth to the Moon,” an HBO miniseries about the Apollo program that I remembered doing an outstanding job portraying all the engineering challenges and solutions—seems like it’s hard to find at the moment, however, as it’s trapped in non-streaming, out-of-print physical media purgatory) I will hypothesize that you need to include some measure of successes in with all the annoyances. But the Molly-taming isn’t really done right. All the progress seems to happen off screen and we only see the backsliding. Mostly we just feel tremendously sorry for the O’Briens. Basically they lost their daughter and this isn’t really going to bring her back even if they succeed.

While the O’Briens are trying to assimilate teenage feral Molly, Dax and Worf take on babysitting chores, which mostly fall to Worf since Dax has some time-sensitive work to attend to and we need an excuse to have Worf taking care of a baby as our B story. Humbling the mightiest man via infant care is rather trite as a concept for sure, but in execution I actually quite enjoyed it. (Signed, a sucker for Worf stories.) First there’s this fantastic line:

“I am a Klingon warrior and a Starfleet officer. I have piloted starships through Dominion minefields. I have stood in battle against Kelvans twice my size. I courted and won the heart of the magnificent Jadzia Dax. If I can do these things, I can make this child go to sleep.”

Then there’s the cute bit where the kid picks up a little thing Worf was entertaining him with. But mostly it’s how Worf is again revealed to be principally motivated by impressing his wife, and it’s charming as hell.

Anyway, wrapping up the main story was unfortunately pretty clumsy. I don’t know that we really generate the right level of sadness from Miles and Keiko. They’re just kinda, “Well, our daughter is now this wild human, let’s roll with it.” Eventually they realize she has to go back to her old life, she’s not really their daughter in any emotional sense any more, but the S part of the SF gets real loose here. O’Brien seems to have pinpoint accuracy with the time portal when he needs it but can miss by ten years if the plot would be more interesting that way. But whatever, they get lil Molly back and all is fine, except for vaporizing adult feral Molly. This sorta revisits the ethical dilemma of “Children of Time” where offshoot people who emerge from time travel mistakes are still valid people. But, like, what can you do?

Overall: 2 out of 5. Some of it works, some is rushed and just OK. Sometimes more than others I’m curious what the broader opinion of the episode is, and this was definitely one of those cases, but the only notes Memory Alpha has about it are some quotes from the guest actress who played adult Molly about how she liked filming green screen stuff with the time portal. I feel like you’re dodging my question here, Memory Alpha.

S6E25, “The Sound of Her Voice” (Pam Pietroforte/Ronald D. Moore)

They don’t have a ship counselor on DS9, ostensibly deciding mental health isn’t that important on an understaffed spaceport at the bleeding edge of Federation territory within a war zone. So there’s no Troi here, and yet this series frequently has episodes about interpersonal squabbles or emotional issues. TNG had Troi, and very few similar episodes. Bloody out of touch Federation leadership not connecting the dots, as usual. So “The Sound of Her Voice” installs a temporary counselor, in the form of a disembodied voice that just needs someone to talk to, and it turns out everyone needs to share some feelings.

The talking parts of this one are solid, and subtly written and effective as usual for the recent Ronald Moore scripts. We get sort of a general catch-up on several people, as each of them rotates through talking to Lisa, and for each of them it grows from tedious chore to something they look forward to. The plot parts aren’t nearly as good. Lisa’s situation grows increasingly dire as the Defiant hurtles to save her, but it’s some classic contrived Trek timing to keep things moving at just the right pace to suit the story. Problems are raised and forgotten, like a tense debate about diverting power from defenses to boost the engines—Worf, naturally, doesn’t approve of this leaving them vulnerable—but it never comes up again. (Honestly just by bringing it up they can’t win. Either they walk into the clichéd irony of ditching the thing they end up needing the most, or it goes nowhere and the scene is a waste.) Lisa’s CO2 situation gets worse as they get closer, naturally, to make things increasingly desperate. Then in the end they can’t even save her because she’s actually been dead for months, and the whole conversation was time-shifted or whatever. Actually I sorta like that ending provided I don’t think about the physics details of a time-shifted conversation too much.

Meanwhile, there is a decent B-story padding out things. Odo gets dating tips from Quark and Jake gets insider crime tips from Quark. It culminates in a tit-for-tat where Odo lets a laughably obvious Quark smuggling scheme slide in exchange for useful dating advice. Eh, what’s some minor crime compared to love. I did have to chuckle at Odo’s “Finally my chance to get Quark” nonsense, as if anyone still buys this. We’re through six season of dirty deeds done dirt cheap, we get it. Quark can do some occasional safecracking or hacking or serving as an informant, and the occasional enforcement laxity regarding minor petty crimes is what that service costs. Odo compensates by harassing Quark about barstool regulations or whatever just to keep the boot on Quark’s neck but Quark can live with that as long as the bigger scores get to come through. The economics of frontier justice can be complex.

In the end everyone makes a special point about letting each other know how much they all care about one another, so, hopefully no one will ironically die in the very next episode. But also that having a counselor was a pretty good thing, maybe they should think about something like that. We can only speculate as to where these two seemingly unrelated conclusions will lead.

Overall: The flaws are pretty standard issue Trek and don’t really get in the way of a generally solid episode. This one ends up being a big hearty serving of late-period DS9, something we’ve all earned through just about six full seasons now. 4 out of 5.

S6E26, “Tears of the Prophets” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

OK so yeah, I can do more than speculate since I fell behind in my show write-ups and am actually well into season 7 at this writing. But I knew what was coming in this episode anyway because the BIG SPOILER coming in this episode was hard to avoid while reading about various other tangents in Memory Alpha. My wife reports that she was surprised by Jadzia’s death, so the foreshadowing was subtle enough to not give anything away, but still be meaningful if you know what’s coming.

But they sure do lay it on thick. Jadzia can’t wait for her and Worf’s definitely long life together. Bashir informs her that she and Worf can indeed have children (which we’re told required some science, but it’s not surprising because like what races can’t produce children together in the Trek universe, and also I guess there are no recorded relationships between Trill and Klingons ever). So they sure are happy and can think about everything they’ll do together one day. But in reality, Becker had come calling and Terry Farrell didn’t get along with Rick Berman (I didn’t do much research here but her side of the story makes him sound pretty obnoxious), so Jadzia had to die. [Worf howl.]

The episode itself is effective, though not that interesting as a story. It has a lot to get done and felt a bit like it was completing a checklist rather than moving in a compelling natural direction. They knew where they wanted to go and whatever needs to happen to get them there is fair game. Jadzia has to die. The prophets need their penance. And we need a reset on Sisko’s confused split between Emissary and Captain. We have a big space battle, but resolved with some standard issue polarity reversal thing. More of a problem is that I’ve felt like this prophet penance storyline has been a bit aimless and confused and it hasn’t resonated with me that well. I’m finding I need to read the episode summaries pretty closely to remember what happened. If they need the wormhole to do something, they make up something about the prophets and it happens. Dukat gets to be the agent in this because why not. He’s the most interesting bad guy anyway.

So we’re left with a confused Sisko, who isn’t sure how or why or if he should reconcile his twin roles, scrubbing oysters back on Earth at his dad’s restaurant. He brought his baseball, implying that he doesn’t know if he’s coming back. I like how the baseball has evolved into a fairly useful metaphor for Sisko’s current status, which at this point is certainly “it’s complicated.”

Overall: A typically gloomy Trek season-closer. I wish I felt more interested in the wormhole aliens/prophets thing but I do care about Sisko and am sad for Worf. 4 out of 5.

S6E20, “His Way” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

Affliction: Monotonousness of Episodes in the Holodeck or “MEH” Syndrome.

Symptoms: Misgivings regarding upcoming Star Trek episodes revolving around the holodeck and/or holosuites. General lack of enthusiasm. Drowsiness.

Causes: Syndicated television programs attempting to tell stories in genres outside their areas of expertise. Delusions of grandeur and/or boredom amongst writing or production staffs, resulting in wasting 45 minutes capturing the look, but not the feel, of these genres.

Treatment: Scathing takedowns on pointless blogs in the farthest reaches of the internet’s long tail. Skipping to the next episode.

K and I saw this one coming in the Netflix queue, with Odo dressed in a tux and a vague description about Bashir’s “new character” and we honestly floated the idea of just skipping it. But we braced ourselves and dove in, and, well, it certainly did not go the direction I had been conditioned to expect. Rather than yet another holodeck episode, it’s The One Where Odo and Kira Finally Get Together.

Some quick reading about the episode tells me that DS9 fans are rather split on whether or not this should have ever happened. I guess I have to say I’m firmly in the camp of “I’m good either way.” I’m happy for them finally clicking though. Sexual tension gets agonizing after a while and this has been going on for, what, like three seasons? It’s not a main theme or anything but I guess they had to make something happen one way or another. I have a feeling it won’t actually last that long and will be forgotten by the end, but that’s just a vague prediction. Not unlike a couple who are friends for a very long time and then test out more serious waters, sometimes it’s like, hey wow we could have been having sex this whole time, that was dumb, and sometimes it just gets inexplicably weird. We’ll see. Memory Alpha tells me neither Rene Auberjonois nor Nana Visitor thought the two should ever get together. I wonder if that will cost them some chemistry points if neither really believes in it. Again, we’ll see.

Anyway, as to the episode itself, it had its good and bad. Like a lot of holodeck episodes, it’s riddled with clichés. This time, Trek does Vegas jazz clubs. But it does do some interesting new things. Somehow Julian’s creation of Vic Fontaine has become self-aware to the point of understanding he’s a hologram and is qualified to readily dispense love advice to our hopeless blob. He can even tap into the ship’s communication network and bust in on other holosuites when he feels like it. But luckily it’s not to cause mayhem, he’s just persistent. The Vic Fontaine character is charming, but the acting is a little mailed in, as if even James Darren realizes he’s just a pale Sinatra imitation.

Overall: Let’s go 4 out of 5. Mostly, it all comes together in the end for a fun one and I liked Vic Fontaine more than I thought I would.

S6E21, “The Reckoning” (Harry Werksman & Gabrielle G. Stanton/David Weddle & Bradley Thompson)

“The Reckoning” leans on a few Trek tropes that don’t do much for me:

• Prophetic mumbo-jumbo: I know the Bajoran prophecy ones are important to the whole arc of the series, and Sisko in particular, but they all sort of blend together. We’ll see some hokey Bajoran religious stuff and Kai Winn patronizing people and “Twin Peaks”-style visions. This one even gets a bit self-referential as Dax reminds Sisko he used to call the prophets “wormhole aliens.” We never really established they were any kind of prophets, remember. But either Sisko has come to think of them that way, or it just rolls off the tongue better than “wormhole aliens.” Either way they’re a classic case of “sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.”
  • Anyway whatever the prophets turn out to be, this is probably not going to go well for Sisko because of his deal with the Prophets back in “Sacrifice of Angels” wherein they agreed to delete the Dominion invaders in exchange for some future penance.
• Technical mumbo-jumbo: Well we see your made-up religious stuff and raise you some made-up science stuff. We understand that they could just flood the promenade with chroniton particles that could just flush out the alien invaders. But there’s the unpleasant matter of the bill: Sisko knows that they need to let whatever goofy prophet thing happen to pay his penance.
• An alien technology that is deciphered at precisely the pace that works for the episode: In this case, a weird stone slab. Sisko feels compelled to smash it, so he does, even though it’s a priceless artifact.
• Guest characters wandering back into everyone’s lives in order to make the ultimate sacrifice: Jake’s name is still in the credits but I had really started wondering if he was even still on the show. We see Nog, Garak, and Dukat more than him. Hell, we see Weyoun and Damar more than him. They’ve had more Morn episodes this season than Jake episodes. I guess they just ran out of stories about his leisured writer lifestyle. Well anyway he’s back today, and probably going to almost get killed to put Benjamin into some kinda compromising position…yep, there it is.

So things are set up for Jake to be the penance, which would be spectacularly cruel. But again, DS9 is a good show, and doesn’t usually do what’s expected. As it turns out it’s Kai Winn who pushes the chroniton button (sure, she knows how to do that?) to stop the battle and punt to another day. So everyone is safe, for now.

Here is where I should say why or why not this was interesting but I’m choosing (C) I’m confused. I was pretty sleepy by the end of this one but even re-reading the summary I’m not sure it entirely clicks. Something something Kira is super faithful, something something Sisko has a prophet hotline. And Winn doesn’t like any of that so her reasons for stopping the battle were pure selfishness, something to the effect that Sisko letting Jake get vaporized by a prophet means that Sisko is the most faithful, so she won’t let him have the satisfaction.

Overall: 2 out of 5. Just not enough really making sense here. And we still need someone to do some penance so more of this is probably coming.

S6E22, “Valiant” (Ronald D. Moore)

Back in the clumsy and absurd “Starship Down” the “I think the ship can handle it!” DS9 trope emerged where a vessel is pushed way beyond its design based only on the gut feeling of its commander. Of course this happened all the time in previous series, especially TOS, but in DS9 these actions tend to have consequences. Sometimes, sorta, I mean, plenty of extras died in “Starship Down” but all the named characters pulled through, so, all good. When the tactic has been employed other times it usually gets similarly mixed results: missions succeed but messily. “Valiant” shows us what probably should happen, i.e., complete failure.

I kinda liked the premise here, that the mysterious Top Guns of Red Squad are actively engaging the Dominion behind enemy lines, and doing so both successfully and in total secrecy, to the point where they’ve begun to believe their own hype. They’ve all given themselves cute little titles and pretend they count. When they rescue Jake and Nog after a Jem’Hadar cruiser wings them, Nog is immediately conscripted as Chief Engineer because he knows some stuff about warp cores. (Valiant having made it this far, one supposes, with the other cadets leaning heavily on desperate google searches like “warp core how to fix”.) But the post immediately goes to his head, leaving Jake as the lone naysayer. When Valiant has an opportunity to launch a surprise attack on a massive Jem’Hadar battleship, and the crew is exhausted and underprepared and would still get carded at Quark’s (just making an observation on their youth, of course; obviously no one gets carded at Quark’s), their greenie-popping captain weighed the odds that they’d succeed versus the odds that they were doing something incredibly stupid, and went ahead and did it anyway. Jake says, “My father would never try to pull off something like this.” Oh, sweet, naïve Jake.

So like this doomed mission, I’m not sure what this episode hoped to achieve. Maybe make some point that the DS9ers are so special they can overcome self-inflicted bad odds, because here’s an example of what happens when you don’t have Kira/O’Brien/Dax/Worf/etc. covering up your mistakes. The youthful crew can’t really pull off their reputations, the performances here just really aren’t that good, but the characters themselves don’t have a lot of depth. Everyone looks the other way at Captain Greenies, the first officer is all bluster, and everyone else is kids who are ready to go home. There’s some weak resistance about not defying one’s captain, supposedly a “great man” but even Jake doesn’t fall for that. Mostly there’s an effective meta-lesson about Fancy Title /= Actual Experience.

Overall: I think it’s a memorable one for its premise, and has some good takeaways, but gets a little silly in details and execution. Come on, Jake and Nog are literally the only survivors? 3 out of 5.

S6E23, “Profit and Lace” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

Ferengi episodes may be graphed on Silly vs Gross axes, where the optimal episodes have a measure of both. It’s still OK if they are just silly (“Little Green Men” comes to mind) but not so much if they are purely gross, unless the grossness can be effectively conveyed into humor. “Profit and Lace” walks a real fine line here, but mostly can’t get out of its own way.

Ferengenar is being dragged by the lobes into a progressive future of female equality, if only because somehow it never occurred to anyone that it would instantly double both consumers and the labor force. Zek and Rom may believe in the principle, and Quark, grudgingly, when it’s in his interest, but it’ll be the economics that drive real change. Or maybe not, as Brunt has leveraged Zek’s insistence on female equality into ousting him as Nagus. But Quark et al have a scheme to earn the political will, in the form of soda baron Nilva, who is open to the ideas if it’ll help business. Ishka ought to be able to convince him, but Quark yells and her so violently she has a heart attack, and he agrees to help out of guilt, agreeing to a temporary sex change and planning to sway Nilva. Only he unexpectedly falls lobes over [whatever disgusting Ferengi equivalent to heels] for her. So, just another day on DS9.

Some of the humor plays well: Zek is always great, the farcical elements of Quark’s scheme (think Tootsie) generally work, and I liked bits like Brunt’s rival Tiny Ron or increasingly stomach-churning descriptions of the vile Sluggo Cola. But most of it either falls flat or is genuinely uncomfortable. As much as we enjoy Quark’s comeuppance at being pursued by Nilva, it doesn’t really tip the scales. In the opening scene we are reminded of Quark’s propensity for genuine creepiness as he tells Aluura, his model employee of a dabo girl, that despite her excellent professional performance her job’s in jeopardy anyway if she doesn’t learn oo-mox. Haha, it’s not sexual harassment because it sounds like a silly Ferengi thing! I think a more fitting sentence for Quark is to get sued or something, rather than Nilva chasing him around like Pepe Le Pew.

Memory Alpha has a bunch of quotes from Armin Shimerman who raises probably the most important reason this all falls flat: Quark doesn’t learn anything. At the end, to put an extra icky stamp on it, we find out that Aluura has decided she’s into oo-mox. That actually makes it worse. Go ahead fellas, try this with your women employees. You never know!

Overall: Closer to a video you have to watch for HR compliance than a comedy. In the running for worst episode of the series. Do better, DS9. 0 out of 5.