First of all, I know it’s obvious, but COME ON.

Hilarious. Star Trek is 100% subtle in trying to show the future as maybe a little more open about gender-notions, is it not? THE FUTURE: CRAZY AND DIFFERENT!

Anyway, on to the episode itself.

So there is this dude, Kosinski (thank you, Memory Alpha, without you I’d misspell many a name), a “propulsion specialist.” He’s here to tune some shit and really pimp Picard’s ride. Oh, and he’s got an assistant with some Standard Issue Star Trek face ridges and a silvery jumpsuit. Fashion of the future always seems to favor the jumpsuit! At least Wesley Crusher gets to wear something as normal as a variety of unattractive sweaters. Mr. Assistant also comes with Science Fiction Trope #708, “My name is impossible for your species to pronounce.” So he’ll be Mr. Assistant for the rest of this post, eh? Or, if you’re Wesley Crusher, you can call him “My frieeeeeeeeennnnd.”

Sensibly, if you have an empath in your crew, you might take her down to check these people out, and Riker does so. But so far Troi has had basically two reactions to characters thus far: “Augh, the pain, I’m so overwhelmed” and “I can’t sense a thing from them!” Mr. Assistant is the latter.

So Kosinski is a dick, but he has a point on some matters, mainly, “What is a child doing hanging around Engineering on a Federation starship? Seriously?” Then again, there have been younger children running around the command decks, so this ship has already show itself to be all kinds of professional.

Mr. Assistant, he sees that Wesley is special and wants to be his special friend. It’d probably all be a little less creepy with out the chiming music, but the creepiness would probably not be reduced as much as I think. He’s cool with letting Wesley sit in at his station.

Anyway, there’s something going on with algorithms and… warp… yeah, I didn’t really pay attention to that. It’s completely unsurprising when it all goes completely and horribly wrong. Plus the only one who’s actually doing the work, Mr. Assistant, is phasing in and out. Wesley is the only one who notices this, and the whole ship enters that scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey with the flashing lights and colors, and the whole ship is flung two million light years from home. How they hell they’re able to chart their position and know this is beyond me. Also, this distant galaxy is much prettier and much shinier than their own, for no good reason.

NOTE: I started writing this like three months ago, and I’m not going to watch the episode again, so this will be a… less thorough commentary.

Somehow, despite the fact that no one has ever traveled this far, they can still plot their position (HOW? How the HELL do you know how far from the Alpha Quadrant you are?) and oh noes, they are two million light years from home, which means a good 300 years’ slog back to Earth. This still does not explain in any way why this part of the galaxy is full of swirling rainbows and such. It will take 50 years to get a message to Star Fleet, and Mr. Assistant is… not doing well.

Whatshisname, Kosinski, is pleased with himself, which just makes him a giant dick. And I’m going to paste a bit from my original notes:

This is kind of an old trope, the true master masquerading as the assistant, even masquerading from the one he assists. Not a bad one, but an old one. I dunno, I just feel a little like they’re going to find Wesley’s molested corpse in a Jefferies tube.

Don’t tell me if I spelled Jefferies tube incorrectly.  I’m not nerd enough to care.

There’s some deep and basically terrible conversation between the Assistant and Wesley.  I guess Space and Time and Thought are like, connected, man.

Then we’ve got the good old “everyone starts hallucinating, which reveals things about their character or gives us glimpses into the lives of background characters” except that the hallucinations are real?  And I guess we can’t miss an opportunity to bring up Tasha Yar’s Rape Gangs.  I’m what, like four episodes in?  I get it, she’s tough and troubled.  There’s also a kind of cool Turbolift to nowhere.

The Assistant tells everyone he’s a galactic tourist, and he’s powered by thought or something.  He’s basically Tinkerbell, and to get back to their own galaxy, everyone pretty much has to clap their hands and belieeeeeeeve.  He also makes a point of telling Picard how super special Wesley is, and to take good care of him.

And then they get home, the guy disappears, and oh, they give Wesley a position on the bridge.  Christ!  Oh, whatever.  It’s a starship full of families and children, which still makes no goddamn sense to me anyway.

I am putting the DS9 blog on hiatus for a while, because of life things that make it hard to find the time and drive to write about Star Trek.  Sorry, guys!  I’ll be back eventually because I’m not going to let myself watch any episodes of DS9 without blogging them.

I have realized that as long as I am as busy as I am, blog schedules are for suckers.  Besides, we live in the era of RSS!  Nobody checks websites anymore except for boring old-fashioned fossils like me.

==================================================

The Nagus at Memory Alpha

• In an era where technology has advanced as far as the tricorder, Jake Sisko should absolutely not need more than one book-sized computer in his school bag.
• The Grand Nagus’ laugh is creepy and weird and I don’t like it.
• I am so glad Miles is back!
• Colm Meaney has spent a good 20% of the season so far under the same maintenance panel at ops.
• I’m not sure why the Grand Nagus of the Ferengi has a huge alien servant, but since the Ferengi are so tiny, it’s kind of hilarious.

In the teaser before the main title sequence, we learn three things. One thing we learn is that Jake is a way obnoxious kid who would rather hang out on the station and maaaybe see a new model of anti-gravity tractor than go to some place called the Fire Caves. I mean, on. The Fire Caves. That is awesome.

Another thing we learn is that the most important Ferengi ever is the Grand Nagus. The third thing we learn is that the Nagus is all pervy.

After the main titles, we learn another important fact: Miles teaches class for Keiko sometimes, like now. Keiko is apparently still on vacation, but Chief O’Brien had important duties to attend to back on the station.

The titular Nagus is in town to hold a conference at Quark’s on extremely short notice, regarding the future of Ferengi business interests in the Gamma Quadrant. And to name Quark as his successor to Nagusdom or whatever you call it.

In a way-too-feel-goody subplot, Jake’s Ferengi friend Nog is banned from attending the O’Briens’ school. Friends despite their differences! Their fathers don’t want them to be friends. Is it too much to hope that the two adults will find common ground in their distaste for their sons’ friendship?

The Nagus also apparently came to DS9 to kick the bucket. This is convenient, because he doesn’t have to listen to Quark whine at him about the attempt that someone else makes on Quark’s life.

It also saves him from having to see Quark get all obnoxiously mad with power. I’m still not clear on what position, exactly, the Nagus occupies in Ferengi society, but he appears to be somewhere between a CEO and a financial advisor.

It turns out that the Jake/Rom subplot is even worse than I thought. Jake is secretly teaching Nog how to read. My teeth are starting to hurt. Seriously, it’s totally gross.

The culprits behind Quark’s attempted murder were apparently the son of the former Nagus and Quark’s own brother Rom. They plan to throw Quark out of an airlock. Not the most original plan.

Luckily (maybe?), Odo stops it, and the old Nagus reveals himself to be STILL! ALIVE! He was in a sleep trance he had learned from his enormous alien servant and was just testing his son’s abilities in the areas of treachery and cunning. At first, before he explained about the sleep trance, I suspected that maybe he had cloned himself and then killed his own clone, but that was incorrect. He may be devious and greedy, but he is not a murderer. So Quark is unNagus’d and things go back to normal, except that Rom gets a promotion in reward for his devious treachery in the name of profit.

Dabo!

Move Along Home at Memory Alpha

• Parents still have “the talk” with their kids in the future, apparently.
• Dabo is a franchise operation?
• Games where you have to learn the rules as you go will definitely still be complete garbage in the future. Anyone who’s ever played Mao will know what I’m talking about

First contact with the Wadi from the Gamma Quadrant turns into a gambling binge at Quark’s as the gambling-obsessed aliens get their Dabo on. Miles O’Brien is, once again, nowhere in sight.

When Quark gets caught cheating, the Wadi demand that he play a different game (an honest game!) with them to try to win back their Dabo wager, which they now consider forfiet. Quark, who is greedy and totally wants thems gems, agrees to it.

The command crew (minus O’Brien) wake up in a complex that shares many stylistic similarities to the game and immediately begin overacting, then split up.

Jake asks Odo to find his father. Odo heads to Quark’s, where they instantly realize that the crew are trapped in the game. I have a real problem with Quark instantly connecting the dots between four missing persons and his four game tokens. What kind of wacky Ferengi logic is that? Unless the Ferengi do this crap all the time.

Anyway, the crew rush through a pair of astonishingly (possibly insultingly) easy puzzles that stymie them before Odo heads over to investigate the ship. The aliens keep a deus ex machina trap on their ship, though, which simply sends Odo back to Quark’s.

Turns out that when everybody in the game is killed, they just end up back at Quark’s and Quark loses. Game over. Hooray.

I get the impression that this episode was written and filmed inside the span of about three hours, even though the presence of complex sets and special effects shots means it couldn’t have been. It’s just silly plot and overacting all day long.

This kind of “weird aliens with a completely illogical society that puts the crew in danger” plot was always my least favorite in TNG. Some of them were pretty alright, but mostly they were kind of bad. This episode seems to be following suit.

The fact that it’s kind of rushed doesn’t help.

Still, it’s got pretty sets. That’s something.

Can you tell that the O’Brien family vacation is getting me down?

First of all, sorry for the lack of updates. Most of the blame falls on a trip I took to British Columbia earlier this month.

Over the course of the last three episodes, we’ve heard a couple of mentions of the fierce and terrifying Ferengi. Um, yeah. Now we finally get to meet them! The episode opens on the giant space ship equivalent of a car chase, except less exciting. The Ferengi have apparently stolen some kind of power converter from a colony and the Enterprise gave chase. Always looking on the bright side, Picard notes that this might be an opportunity to finally make some kind of contact with the mysterious Ferengi.

So, in the space equivalent of blowing a tire, the Ferengi have some kind of energy surge and coast to a stop near a planet in an unexplored system. The Enterprise slows down as well to take a look. Long story short, some shots are fired, Lt. Yar wants to fire on the bastards, and suddenly all the energy starts being sucked out of the ship.

Wacky miscommunication ensues, where the Enterprise makes a vaguely worded offer to surrender and the Ferengi are all, “Look, dude, we can’t surrender 100%, but we’ll kill all our second officers, okay?” In a move that’s either prudent or kind of dumb, Picard runs with it while trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Troi helpfully points out that they’re parked by a Mystery Planet that they’ve so far completely ignored. Hey, maybe that’s the problem.

There’s a token attempt to make it feel more like a military ship with Riker going around barking orders and being kind of a hardass to some stirring, militaristic music, but then there are children running around in the briefing room. WTF. You’d think they’d keep them away from the command sections of the ship, no? And for comic relief, we get to learn that Data’s internal library doesn’t include “Chinese finger trap” or enough common sense to release himself from one without assistance. And he’s an officer?

The Ferengi catch on and realize that the Enterprise is just as trapped as they are, and after a little persuading, Picard convinces them to team up and explore the planet, which used to belong to the Tkon Empire, long dead from a supernova.
Now, there’s hardly any power left in the ship, but five bridge officers and no redshirts risk beaming down (with Data helpfully noting that they’re not likely to be able to beam back up). Come on, guys, transporter accidents happen! Remember Evil Kirk and the spiky dog thing that got duplicated in TOS? They’re lucky they just all beamed down in random places (and, in Geordi’s case, upside down) and that they didn’t get turned inside out like that pig thing in Galaxy Quest. Meanwhile, the Ferengi have also beamed down and start laying waste with their electric whips.

The Ferengi are apparently all Gollum, except with less specific avarice. They hunch and shuffle and are generally parodies of themselves. Either that, or they’re all rehearsing for a bad, amateur production of Richard III. Scuffles ensue and Yar and Worf show convenient timing.

But then! From out of the darkness and giant glowing crystals appears the Wizard of Oz! Er, I mean, a giant glowing face. He’s one of the Tkon border guards, and one of Star Trek’s many Mind Reading Advanced Beings. There’s some craven accusations from the Ferengi, but Riker passes the Portal Guardian’s little test, and the Guardian is all “Hey, let’s get beers and talk about this Sun Tzu guy.” Riker has the presence of mind to ask for power to be restored to the ship, where all the civilians they’ve been recklessly dragging into danger for the last three episodes are currently freezing to death. And, because the Federation is nothing if not magnanimous, he asks that the Ferengi have everything restored, too, because maybe someday their society will grow. Has anyone met Federation standards of “civilization” so far this season? At the moment, it feels like we’re 0 for 2.

The last move is to beam over a box of Chinese finger traps to the Ferengi, which makes so much sense. The writers are still pillaging TOS and its Trouble With Tribbles, but not very well.

Since I missed out on updating at all last week, here is a special Tuesday Bonus Update, or TBU as I like to call them.

==================================================

The Passenger at Memory Alpha

• Dr. Bashir, space pimp, has gone from gawky to cocky way too quickly for me to be happy about it. I like cocky well enough, but gawky was so fun!
• There was a yellow shirt in the bar, but it wasn’t O’Brien. False alarm.
• Quark has crushes on Dax! So adorable.
• This episode marks one of the first times (if not the first) that I’ve seen a DS9 duder make a technical statement and then have another character explain it with a metaphor.
• I’ve often wondered how the computers know where everyone is except when they’re wearing a comm badge, in which case they only know where the comm badge is.
• I can’t believe I’ve had to watch another whole episode without my Miles. I’m so sad about this!

The alien cop, Ty Kajada

The alien prisoner, Roa Vantika

We start by witnessing an exciting rescue! Or half-rescue. It’s really more of a 1/3 rescue. In fact, scratch the part about it being exciting. Kira and Bashir rescue an alien cop, Ty Kajada, but (apparently) not her pilot or prisoner. She is so determined to be sure he’s dead that she stabs his body in sick bay, which gives Bashir a bit of pause.

Later, we hear about a deridium shipment that might be coming in. We hear it from Odo, who is dropping hints about it to Quark. The Federation security officer, Liutenant Primmin who just happens to be on board doesn’t like the way Odo does business, but Sisko’s got his boy’s back and puts this Lieutenant in his place.

This deridium is necessary for a dying species to survive. Conveniently for the makeup department, it’s the Kobliad, the species that got rescued at the beginning of the episode. While going over security for the shipment, the Starfleet copper and Odo find out that the database has been wiped. In fact, the whole system is basically toast. Alien cop thinks it was her (apparently dead) prisoner, Rao Vantika, and expert in faking his own death.

Siskso doesn’t really buy the idea that one of the two dead dudes in the morgue is running around causing trouble on DS9, but Kajada is pretty positive that they are looking at some Zombie Crime. In spaaaace.

The apparent zombie Vantika shows up at Quark’s after hours to holler at Quark about not hiring mercenaries for him just because of a little thing like Vantika being dead.

My suspicion is, at this point, that he is all brain jumping. And that he’s landed in Kajada, who claims to have had trouble sleeping. Dax thinks this, too, though, and it’s a little early in the episode to have found the Real Answer, so I’m not certain.

Bashir and Odo share my suspicion, those biters, and Kajada is locked out of the security system.

Other things she is locked out of include: Quark’s second-floor mezzanine, apparently while she is trying to spy on Quark’s hasty meeting with some mercenaries. Either she was locked out and the system booted her, or she just fell or something. But I choose the exciting Matrix-y option, even in the face of overwhelming evidence against it. The rest of this series is clearly a computer simulation that has shown itself by glitching. And that goes for all the other Star Treks, too. Woah.

How Matrixy? Totally Matrixy. Agent Smith Vantika has jumped into Dr. Bashir to handle his dealmaking with Quark and the mercenaries, which involves handing off a shuttlecraft. If somebody doesn’t dodge a phaser in slow motion during this episode I will be legitimately surprised. And all this six years before The Matrix even came out. Those Wachowskis. Such frauds.

Primmin earns his keep just before shipment arrives by finding a trap Vantika had left in the system, but Agent Bashika has already headed off in a runabout with his mercenaries to hijack the freighter. Luckily, the station is undisabled enough to lock onto it with a tractor beam and initiate Standoff Mode.

Vantika makes Sisko a really stupid offer. Either Sisko lets him finish killing the crew of the freighter and scurry off, or he’ll destroy the freighter (and the doctor with it) by trying to go to warp. He also says this right in front of one of his goons, who also happens to be on the frieghter.

Luckily, Dax quickly invents a brain beam that will let the doctor take over his brain, which will probably save Dr. Vantika the trouble of getting shot by his own goons.

Instead, he gets beamed to DS9 and shot by Sisko, because Sisko believes in tough love.

Dax puts the zombie space agent criminal in a jar, space cop shows she ain’t care shit about jars by zapping it, and that’s it! Another episode wraps up without a single Important DS9 Lesson and without any O’Brien at all.

Cue Rage Against the Machine’s Wake Up.

This week is a travel week like last week, but unlike last week I didn’t make a buffer of posts for myself the week before. Because I was traveling. Very smart. So: There wasn’t a Wednesday update and there may not be a Saturday update either this week.

Regular O’Brien Update and Important DS9 Life Lesson posts should resume by Wednesday at the latest. Try not to kill any of your own clones while I’m gone, ok?

CBS.com offers full length episodes of TOS online.  It has commercials, though.

Dax at Memory Alpha

No O’Brien? I hardly even want to watch this episode. It’s Keiko’s mother’s 100th birthday so he’s back on Earth with his adorable family for the duration of the episode.

Here’s a picture of him anyway. Flower. Units.

Some very bad people are after Dax, and despite her best efforts (and the best efforts of Dr. Bashir), they nab her in a corridor on her way back to her quarters from dinner.

I’m glad that Dr. Bashir is pretty much worthless in a fight. He seems to hurt himself about as much as his adversary with his first strike, and then proceeds to get beaten up by a girl.

They almost get away in their bitchin’ ship, but some quick technobabble from Sisko and Kira gets the station tractor beams working and catch them. But there’s a twist in the offing! These folks are cops!

Look how bitchin’ that ship is.

Dax stands accused of treason and murder on some planet somewhere from way back when she was Curzon Dax. I don’t know how you can commit treason on someone else’s home planet, but I guess treason technology has advanced a bit by this point in the future. It wasn’t her own clone she murdered, by the way. It was boss cop’s father.

So the kidnapping was an extradition. Cop aliens say it’s lawful based on their treaty with the Federation, Sisko and Kira say it’s not because the station is technically Bajoran.

Dax seems oddly cool on being cleared, but Sisko is pretty hot about it. Again we are reminded that Sisko is not Picard - he sends his officers to investigate the case with the assumption that Dax is totally innocent.

Odo’s been sent off to investigate. The late alien’s wife, Enina, is pretty certain that Dax didn’t kill her husband, even though her son is pretty nuts about it.

The argument is as follows: A Trill who changes hosts may be a different person who is not qualified to stand trial for crimes committed by a previous host. If the host influences the symbiont as much as the symbiont influences the host, the personality of each incarnation would a bit different. Alien cop says no, Sisko says yes.

Odo’s investigation turns up the possibility that the late alien’s wife (who I keep thinking of as Data’s mom because it’s the same actress) and Curzon Dax were having a bit of an affair.

So what we turn out to have is one of those Long Black Veil situations where Dax doesn’t want to say anything because the part of her that is shared between Curzon and Jadzia doesn’t want to impugn Enina’s reputation. She walks these hills…

Curzon couldn’t have sent the treasonous transmission in question because they were gettin’ it on all over the place at the time. That Curzon. What a stud. How just telling someone where another person is can make you a murderer is never explained. I’d think you’d be an accessory at best, but then maybe murder responsibility technology has advanced a bit by this point in the future.

No bullets this week. The joy has gone out of me today because there was no O’Brien.

Q-Less at Memory Alpha

• VASH! (I know the episode has “Q” in the title, but I didn’t expect to see Vash).
• Q! (Ok, that one was a gimme)
• It’s cute that out of a crew of over 1,000 on the Enterprise, Miles would expect that Vash would remember him.
• Q’s going grey around the temples. I don’t know why that is, but it endears him to me somewhat.
• My compulsion to punctuate myself with “Dabo!” is becoming overwhelming.

So we have our first Q episode of DS9! That didn’t take long!

At the start of the episode, Bashir is absolutely bragging to the lady from that Planters commercial where all the dudes go crazy for the terrible looking lady because she smells like a cashew.

Seriously.

Dax and nameless crewperson pick up Vash in the Gamma quadrant, where she’s been for two years. Q is secretly tagging along, of course. They return to the station in a way-trashed Runabout and have to be rescued by Heroic Engineer Miles O’Brien.

Dr. Bashir, Space Pimp, is totally into Vash. Vash may or may not be into him, but she at least acts like it.

I’ve always felt like Vash was supposed to be the Indiana Jones of Star Trek, only mean, but she’s really more like the Lara Croft of Star Trek, only slightly less violent. It’s a fine distinction, but there is a difference.

While she’s ditching her loot in the DS9 station safe deposit depot, she shows off a glowy softball-sized crystal that is clearly going to be important to the episode.

The shuttle, meanwhile, is proving to be a mystery. O’Brien can’t figure out why it’s lost power, since power seems to be the only thing that’s missing. He expects everything will work fine once power is restored to the ship, but he has no idea why it stopped working in the first place.

The lights flicker! The station is in danger! Or at least the station is inexplicably losing power the same way the runabout was. Could Q be behind this? Probably not, but at least he’s started appearing unexpectedly to talk to Vash, who apparently hates him now.

She doesn’t hate Quark, but she does take advantage of him to get a good partnership for some black marketry. She doesn’t hate Dr. Bashir, Space Pimp, either! They make a date. And I’m getting the idea at this point that Q is kind of into our lady Vash. That probably explains why Q is making the good doctor just soooo sleeeepy so he can hog all the Vash time.

Who recognizes Q? Only MILES O’BRIEN.

That dude is basically the best. He’s absolutely… Oh, sorry. Here’s me getting all flower units about Miles when I should be writing about Q’s boxing match with Commander Sisko. Q, uh, boxes. With Commander Sisko. Sisko drops him like a bad habit.

“Picard never hit me.”

“I’m not Picard.”

The fashion of the future: Necklace earrings.

Also I’m putting a bet now. Four bars of gold-pressed latinum says that the mysterious power failures are being caused by the glowing softball Vash brought on board at the beginning of the show. Dabo!

The station has begun moving (inexplicably) towards the wormhole, much to the dismay of its crew. I’m guessing Glowy McSoftball wants to go home, but it’ll be pretty embarassing if I’m wrong.

Ha! Yes! Who was right? This guy! Glowy McSoftball, once transported off the station, turns into a sort of butterfly/manta ray hybrid and flies off into the wormhole, allowing the station to return to its old position. I don’t even know what you’d call it. Space rayterfly? It’s kind of abruptly there and gone.

I expect the “I’m not Picard” moment was the main point of this episode, aside from establishing that Q could be expected to show up in DS9 as well, but I’m ok with that. I like Sisko. He’s not eloquent and charming like Picard or dashing and bold like Kirk. He’s tense and quiet and angry, the kind of man who would be the bad (or at least wrong and misguided) officer in an episode of TNG.

This episode was a lot of fun.  I know I’m only a handful of episodes in, so calling something the most fun episode I’ve seen doesn’t mean much, but it was.  Kind of lightweight fun, but still fun.  Q is kind of the trickster figure of the Star Trek pantheon, and Q episodes are usually at least a little goofy.  I like goofy sometimes.

I’ll be traveling this weekend, so my Saturday entry may or may not post late, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Hi. My name is Trevor; I’m the fellow who is going to be writing about the Original Series.

Ah, I think Ellen already said something along these lines, but I was never a big Star Trek fan. By the time I was old enough to understand the basic necessary concepts - exploration, diplomacy, warfare, interpersonal relationships that don’t revolve around who has the coolest video game systems - DS9 and Voyager were the only Star Treks still on. DS9 was hard for me to get into; it had already been on for a few years by the time I was able to sit through an episode and be able to retain the major plot points. I was intimidated by the fairly large cast of central characters, who had already established a web of relationships. I watched a handful of Voyager episodes, but I was more of a gamer nerd at heart and ultimately lacked the dedication to drag my ass in front of the TV every week… Even if it meant the possibility of seeing Jeri Ryan’s cybernetic implants pop out. By the time Enterprise came on I was more concerned with real-life human girls and… I don’t know, whatever paths a body coursing with hormones and bad ideas takes you down.

Since I only have limited knowledge of the Star Trek Universe to begin with, I will now use my magic powers to expel those few memories of Star Trek I do retain. Ker-Plow. Ok, I now pledge to blog about Star Trek (the original series) as though I had never heard about the series before. I will pretend that it is the 1960s. There is a war on in Viet Nam, dudes in San Fransisco are taking LSD on a regular basis, and the Beatles are bigger than Jesus. More importantly, space exploration has become a reality and there are dudes from the USSR and USA going up into space on a regular basis. It seems reasonable to assume that if I go to university, I could be hired by the government to be one of those dudes one day. And now a show has come on that is about a crew of space explorers in who have spread to the far reaches of the galaxy to fight for good and, if we’re lucky, fuck hot alien gals and dudes? Heck yes, I am down for that!

I’ll post a blog about the first episode ever aired, “The Man Trap”, shortly.

• If you’re a Dabo Girl, you get a Reputation. The first Important DS9 Lesson of the episode is delivered right in the second line.
• An implied Important Lesson is that you should always read a contract before you sign it, but unless it’s stated explicitly (ideally by Odo) then I don’t think it should count.
• Tosk the alien is a close talker, but isn’t touchy. I suppose that’s a blessing. Close talkers are pretty bad, but touchy talkers are so much worse.
• Another important lesson: Quark is not a “barkeep.” It’s not the kind of lesson you’d necessarily want to capitalize, but you also wouldn’t want to forget it.
• He’ll still listen to your problems if you want, because for some reason he has a bee in his bonnet about doing that in this episode.
• They way Tosk looks around at everything is kind of delightful.

The episode opens with a Dabo girl complaining about her contract with Sisko. We never find out exactly what the problem is, but apparently Quark can’t keep his “Ferengi knuckles” off of her. Dabo!

Next, we meet an alien in a damaged ship who comes in through the Wormhole. He won’t be beamed out of his ship, but after some argument, he agrees to be towed in. Since he seems nervous, they decide to skip the usual first contact procedure (Starfleet gives Commanders a helluva lot of leeway regarding diplomatic procedures, apparently) and send O’Brien down alone to try to help out. He goes alone because they don’t want to make the alien more nervous than he already is.

Finding his ship apparently abandoned, Miles assumes their guest is just hiding like a scaredy-cat and sets to work trying to get the ship into the appropriate shape. There’s a joke in that last sentence, if you’d care to look for it.

This says a lot about Miles, I think. Here’s an individual they know nothing about from a species and culture they’ve never encountered before. This lizard-headed guy could be some horrible unauthorized-crew-quarters-accessing clone-murdering monster with all the wrong ideas about Dabo girls and he is completely hidden when Miles shows up, but instead of realizing that this is obvoiusly a trap and getting the hell out of the USS Dodge, Chief O’Brien just sets to work while he talks to the invisible alien. Talk about a class act.

As it turns out, the alien actually is invisible. When he appears, Miles is startled and hits his head in accordance with the ancient television rule that it is always funny to have someone get startled and hit their head. They don’t make much of this invisibility and it never actually keeps him hidden from danger during the episode, so I guess I think it’s a lot neater than the writers did. For the record, I think it’s super neat to be able to turn invisible.

Tosk, the alien, doesn’t want to leave his ship, but Miles’ Irish charms and winning ways eventually coax him out into the station itself.

Our new alien friend has no explanation for who or what he is other than “I am Tosk.” Needing only a few minutes sleep each day and no food, it is surprising that he doesn’t have much in the way of social graces. What would an alien like that do other than chat with other aliens all day?

The answer, apparently, is steal weapons. And fail to get jokes.

Odo, the master detective, somehow knows in advance that Tosk is going for the weapons cache and turns into the most obtrusive painting I’ve ever seen on Star Trek which, considering I’ve seen Data’s artistic endeavours on TNG, is saying something. How Odo knows this is going on is left to the imagination of the viewer. I like to think he sits around in his office for hours every day, just waiting for someone to ask the computer where the weapons are kept or where the main plasma conduit is or something similar so he can go on down to whatever it is, turn into something, and get his surveil on.

Tosk tries to invisibly flee, but runs hilariously into the security fields Odo set up. Several times. This is physical comedy at its finest.

Caught and imprisioned, he merely requests to be able to die with honor, the only explanation being that he is Tosk, which we are expected to have figured out is more than just a name by now.

The secret is revealed when a ship similar to Tosk’s, only cooler and with more awesome spoilers and decals and stuff, appears through the wormhole, instantly disables the station’s shields, and beams a trio of helmeted and apparently basically invincible warriors aboard. These amazingly 90s-looking space goons seek out Tosk and, failing to destroy him, are forced to explain that Tosk are prey, bred to be hunted by this similar-looking but hairier race with their fancy transporters and their snappy red space suits and their off-brand Wookiee bowcasters.

The twist here is that the Tosk wants to be hunted. He also wants to be killed in the hunt, because capture is dishonorable, but capture is more honorable than being granted asylum. This puts Miles in a bit of a moral quandry, because he has grown to be pretty flower units about Tosk. On the one hand, he doesn’t want Tosk killed. On the other, he doesn’t want Tosk to be disappointed about not being killed. And then there’s the whole Prime Directive thing that says he shouldn’t be messing with this Cultural Event at all, since he wasn’t invited to do so. Like most (but not all!) Prime Directive-related dilemmas, this one is resolved by the character doing what they want and just hoping like hell it was the right thing to do.

So O’Brien helps him escape. Commander Sisko chews him out for it, O’Brien obliquely hints that he couldn’t have actually pulled it off if the Commander had tried to stop him, and we go back to the way things were. This makes me kind of sad. They tell you (without being so crass as to actually say it directly of course) early on that we’ll never see these aliens again. The unstoppability of their weaponry would be too much for the series - even the Borg could be held briefly at bay. That’s a shame, because the Tosk turns out to be a powerful fighter who is more than a match for his high-tech pursuers. They even go further and let O’Brien floor one of the pursuers (who had taken off hsi awesome helmet) with a punch, commenting that they wear those suits to protect their glass jaws. That kind of match-up (animal cunning and strength against superior technology) is a sci-fi staple that I’ve never yet gotten tired of.

I’ll hopefully see you next Wednesday!

Dabo!

Babel at Memory Alpha

• O’Brien is harassed and overworked, which is exactly how a fictional engineer should be. He reminds me of Chief Engineer Sarah MacDougal from TNG.
• People being trapped in an airlock would be terrifying in real life, but it’s funny in Star Trek because it’s just one more pain in the ass for Miles O’Brien.
• The name of the episode is a big clue to the plot, but despite it being a little predictable Colm Meany pulls off losing his language faculties admirably.
• I know it’s evidence of a disease, but I’d really like it if we could start saying that people who are quite fond of something are “flower units” about it instead.

• I’m sorry that my DS9 blog is turning into a Colm Meany love-fest. I guess I’m just flower units about the dude.
• Odo’s Lesson Corner: Unauthorized access to crew quarters is a crime. It’s probably not as bad as killing your own clone, though, because that would be murder.
• Communicable aphasia is probably the first legitimately scary thing I’ve seen in a Star Trek. Losing (in a matter of seconds!) the ability to communicate would be pretty amazingly terrible.

Just as I predicted, I have run into an episode about which I have very little to say. Called it!

The premise of this episode, that there is a virus running amok on the station that can destroy a victim’s ability to process language, is pretty scary. It also provides a nice not-totally-played take on the plague episode that seems to be laid out pretty early in the Big Book of Sci-Fi TV Episodes. The point of the plague trope is to give your script a rapidly dwindling cast and a who’s-next? sense of urgency (the Alien effect) without necessarily killing them off forever.

The nice thing about the plague trope, in this case, is that since almost nothing in the episode involves the world outside the station, most of the special effects budget for the episode looks like it went into one fantastic shot of a damaged spacecraft being torn from its moorings and shooting away from the station before exploding. A++ would watch and clap at again.

I’ll have a more lengthy entry up Saturday, if not before. While I make no promises, I’ll be trying for Wednesdays and Saturdays every week from here on out. Wish me luck!

I have to admit that I’ve taken some time to mull over what exactly I want to write about Code of Honor. I don’t know if you were around or culturally aware in the late eighties and early nineties. I was pretty young, and am pretty much the whitest white girl imaginable, but my family is mixed race and my siblings were pretty caught up in the general cultural interest in Africa. What I’m saying is that my sister made me watch Coming To America a lot. Getting back to those roots was something of a fad, and I suspect that this episode was trying hard to capitalize on that.

So here’s the thing: I don’t know if this episode would have been a problem at that time, but it gives me a hell of a case of liberal guilt. The Ligonians (right? I don’t quite remember, and I’m feeling too lazy to go to Memory Alpha) are aliens described as “remarkably close to humans.” Remarkable indeed. We haven’t seen any awesome aliens yet, actually. Visually awesome, I mean, and not counting the what, one appearance Worf has made so far? Anyway, “remarkably close to humans” means “pseudo tribal African and a hell of a lot of Jeri Curl on Yareena.” Actually, Yareena isn’t bad, it’s Lutan that seems to be this played up Noble Savage who thinks he’s so clever, but meanwhile, here he is leering at Lt. Yar and making kind of childish and arrogant power plays. I know the civilization is supposed to be behind Starfleet and this gives the Prime Directive a chance to stretch its legs and all, but there’s this implied “black people are simple and arrogant” that just does not sit well with me. Sure, they’re not technically human (which is funny - they couldn’t be an independent colony like the ones that were so often visited by Olde Trek? They had to be some example of parallel evolution?) but they’re too close to human and too close to an existing Terran culture for comfort.

It is, of course, perfectly likely that I’m reading way, way too much into this whole thing. This, however, is a blog of my impressions of the episode, and my main impression was “Whoa, this seems kind of racist!”

So yeah, this isn’t a comedy Star Trek entry.

Some bits from the notes I took while watching:

• Again we see that ugly metallic prints are a galactic fashion craze.
• I almost immediately predicted that Yar would have “to do some Thunderdome shit.” Go me.
• I guess if a catfight is hot, a catfight to the death is even hotter.
• Okay, so there’s this scene with Data and Geordi, and it feels badly wedged in, even though it is used later so that Picard can bitterly remark that the whole situation is a joke. Still, feels clumsy.
• Speaking of Picard, I actually really liked that he caught himself halfway and said, “I’m sorry, this is becoming a speech,” instead of launching into a monologue.
• How many times in the history of Star Trek have Starfleet crewpeople been forced into gladiatorial combat of some type? It seems like a lot to me.
• What the hell is with the weapons? Those look like the least graceful weapon I’ve ever seen, clumsy and difficult to use. It seems like it’d be easy to accidentally nick yourself, and as the Ligonian equivalent of a red-shirt showed us, you are straight screwed if that happens.

This is a really unfunny entry, but this one didn’t lend itself to humor. Let’s hope the next few episodes lend themselves to comedic commentary better.

UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me by an astute reader that it might look like I’m talking about Ellen here (Spoilers!: Ellen was the astute reader). I’m not. I’m talking about me. You know, that guy who wrote the really boring summaries to the first two episodes of DS9? Yeah, that guy.

==================================================

Looking back on my first two posts, I’ve realized that 1) writing plot summaries is as boring as reading them and throwing plot information in that isn’t relevant to what I want to talk about it a pointless waste of everybody’s time 2) the feeling that I am not writing enough about each episode of a television show that has approximately 90 jillion episodes is madness and 3) I have to force myself to admit that sometimes an episode is going to be boring.

I was feeling like I had to write a lot because the page looked so empty, which is silly. Of course it did - we just started! So I need to relax a bit.

I’m also not going to try to write and watch at the same time. I’ll collect bullet points as I go, and then if I want to write anything more or expand on any of them, I’ll do so afterwards. Unless there is something I want to comment on because I am a NO RULES REBEL and this is my DS9 blog and I do what I want.

Last entry, I said I didn’t think the show would be picked up anywhere today and left it at that, but I wanted to explain that the Bajoran terrorism aspect wasn’t the only reason. It’s just not ’00s television. For example, here we are, three episodes in already and nobody has had any sex at all yet. We’ve seen a marriage destroyed by war, but that’s the closest we’ve gotten to romance. There’s been hardly any violence, either. Nobody has violently interrogated anyone yet, hardly any shooting has occurred, and if my math is right, nobody died at all in the first two episodes (excepting only those who died in flashbacks). I guess what I am saying is that I’m sad about how television sucks now, but I think there are enough blogs on the internet about how much television sucks now (and probably about as many about how it’s awesome because personal opinions are complicated things) so I think I’m going to leave that particular point alone from here on out.

And lastly, before I start this episode, I want to note that this is the last episode on the first disc and that makes it the last episode that I have seen recently. I have to admit that I was not coming into these three episodes fresh, because I had gotten it early (I use Netflix for watching TV series, and the first disc of DS9 showed up sometime during the second season of TNG through some weird hiccup that has never been repeated) and watched it long before I had the idea to write about each one.

==================================================

A Man Alone at Memory Alpha.

• The DS9 theme music reminds me of Fanfare for the Common Man.
• I don’t know if it says more about me or Trek, but I find the O’Brien family to be one of the more believable relationships in Trek
• One of the others is the love/hate friendship/rivalry between Quark and Odo.
• If I had some sort of itchy color-changing prank substance, I don’t think I’d ever actually use it. I’d be too embarrassed to pull a prank that stupid.
• Our first murder! A mystery!
• People have to push buttons to open doors on DS9. That is awesome.

Another thing, in addition to whimsy and intrigue, that Star Trek has traditionally been pretty terrible at: games. The “brain teaser” that Dax is working at is just about the worst idea for a game since that supposedly super-addictive put-the-thing-in-a-tube game in TNG. We’re talking silly to a degree that science has difficulty measuring because silly computing technology hasn’t advanced to the level of these game ideas yet, and may never do so in our lifetimes. I’m glad we never got to see Parrises Squares played, because at least we can still pretend that’s awesome.

The murder mystery is a sci-fi locked room puzzle. This is so much better a puzzle than the brain teaser that it should probably be embarrassed to be in the same episode. The victim, a particularly ridgy (and therefore clearly eeevil) Bajoran criminal named Ibudan, was murdered in the holosuite. The door was opened only twice, and nobody but the victim went in or out. The victim was staying alone BUT! SUSPICIOUSLY! he was staying in double quarters. The only DNA that was found in the holosuite was that of the victim and the investigators. So the only person who could have done it is a shapeshifter, and the only one around is Odo, but the viewers all saw the actor’s name in the opening credits so even though the victim’s personal itinerary showed a meeting with Odo scheduled for the time of his murder, we know that since he’s played by René Auberjonois he cannot possibly be guilty.

This is the kind of plot that couldn’t find real resolution outside of science fiction, despite the lack of space ships and legitimately alien aliens. Star Trek is often classified as “hard” sci-fi, even though it’s more of a space opera, but when it does try to kick it old school it tends to do very well. The episode where Dr. Crusher is the only on on the Enterprise to notice that other people keep disappearing is another example of a good sci-fi story that couldn’t really be another kind of story. I really enjoy these episodes, and I’m hoping that the stationary nature of the setting will deliver a lot more of them.

The solution turns out to be that Ibudan, the victim, was actually the murderer, and killed his own clone. But as Odo so helpfully points out, killing your own clone is still murder. This is an important lesson, so I’ll repeat it: Killing your own clone is still murder. Are you listening, science? This is important.

This entry is about as long as the other two, but that’s ok because it was mostly navel-gazing instead of episode summary. Navel-gazing is what blogs are for. I’m not sure I’ll be able to update at all next week, but starting as soon as I can I’m going to try for two updates per week. That way I won’t have to be at this for another three and a half years.

If I sign off with “peace and long life” every time, would that be too lame? Or would it be just lame enough?

Don’t get me wrong. I love the TOS episode The Naked Time immensely. It’s delightful, it’s ridiculous, and you can almost see slash fanfiction being born when Spock gets all weepy about human emotions.

This is a remake of that episode. It is not an improvement on that episode.

Anyway, the general plot is that there is a research vessel sending odd messages… or their communications have been crossed with one of those commercials you see on late night TV for chat lines. Hot, single researchers are waiting to talk to you, baby. The Enterprise goes out to investigate and finds everyone dead. The bridge crew has been blown out an open hatch into space (someone explain to me why there even is a hatch leading to open space on the bridge in the first place) and just about everyone else has frozen to death, and most of them are naked (ooh, shock, titillation) except for one woman in the shower with all her clothes on.

This, of course, is the key for Riker. Why search databanks for history of crewpeople “suddenly acting out of character” or “going buck wild and having a ship-wide orgy” when you can search for records of “showering with clothes on.”

Anyway, Geordi starts to sweat and goes around infecting people, and Wesley acts really pathetically desperate for the Captain’s attention. Yar and Wesley are both infected by Geordi with intoxihol water, which apparently is self-replicating as well as (hello techonobabble!) a simple form of water that has been altered by powerful gravitational forces to pull carbon from the host and act as an intoxicant. Oh yes, that all makes sense.

So anyway, back to Riker (and Data) searching for Riker’s hunch. It isn’t enough to reference back to TOS by making the episode a transparent rewrite of the old script, but we also have to reference the original Enterprise and even have Picard mention Kirk by name. Hooray, we have a cure!  Except that we don’t have a cure at all, because then the episode would be way too short.  Also, there has to be some kind of race against the clock, which is, in this case, a collapsing star.

So Lt. Yar’s intoxication exhibits itself by having her turn into an unattractive sex-beast. Fashion in the future is apparently heavily reliant on hideous, eye-bleeding print fabrics. Lucky for her, the corridors are full of extras stumbling around all hot and bothered.

Meanwhile, Wesley has become this episode’s Kevin Riley, but where Riley took over Engineering on the Enterprise and declared himself Captain, Wesley… takes over Engineering and declares himself Captain. Huh. Of course, Riley made all kinds of crazy pronouncements, like women wearing their hair down and Wesley…. makes all kinds of crazy pronouncements, like dessert before and after every meal. What the fuck, writers, are you even trying? I’m surprised Wesley isn’t singing weepy Irish ballads over the comm.

But back to Lt. Yar! She’s changed clothes now and is a bit giggly, but really? Her hair looks awful and her outfit is hardly revealing when you consider what half the non-crew women in Olde Trek wore. Jeannie (as in I Dream Of) wore sexier outfits and she was barred from showing her bellybutton on TV. Also? Talking about rape gangs? Probably not great for the mood.

This is what I typed for the rest of this scene as I was watching: Why is Data fully functional? Also, ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew.

I’m not sure how much of it is just me (like Roast Beef, I suffer from a case of the Dignities) but I really disliked the fact that the intoxication took the form of everyone being all hot hot hot for each other. Yes. I get it. You can totally show more scandalous things on TV in the late eighties than you could in the late sixties. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Troi gets infected, and as a half human, she’s kind of the anti-Spock, but they both have their moments of omg I feel so huuuuuuuumaaaaan, though hers is far less overwrought. And less interesting.

In the end, Wesley Crusher, Boy Genius, saves the day. Jeez. Never mind that your takeover of a vital section of the ship and letting whatshisname take out the isolinear chips in the first place is what almost got everyone killed, you were able to kind of save the day (by suggesting that Data save the day then reprogramming the tractor beam while simultaneously being a smarmy little brat to the chief engineer), handshakes all around.

I have to keep reminding myself that TNG is pretty new and at this point, trying fairly hard to assure fans that this is the Trek they knew and loved, though at this point, I think they’re still being way, way too heavy handed about it. The show hasn’t had time to develop it’s own character yet, and if one ignores all the overblown sexuality in this episode, it is doing a fairly decent job of being something different than the oft grandiloquent TOS. The sooner it moves out of this phase of “Remember Star Trek!?!?!? Remember how much you loved it?!?!?!” the better.

The first Garak episode! So soon!

Here’s a detailed summary for any interested parties.

When TNG tries to do certain things, like whimsy or intrigue, it invariably fails. Fortunately, instead of failing in the “contempt for one’s audience” way that it easily could, it nearly always fails in the “(probably) unintentional comedy” way. This, if you have to fail, is a pretty good way to fail.

DS9, on the other hand, manages intrigue pretty well (although how it fares at whimsy, or if it even attempts it, remains to be seen).

We open with Enthusiastic Frontier Doctor Bashir meeting Plain Simple Garak, Cardassian clothier and rumored (gasp!) spy at the replimat

Bashir’s trip to ops to gossip about meeting Garak segues us into the meat of the episode. The station rescues a Bajoran terrorist from Cardassian pursuit, and now they have to decide what to do with him.

This is further complicated by a blast from the past - Lursa and B’Etor of the house of Duras - who also arrive in this episode. The background here is that they tried to overthrow the Klingon High Council in an arc from TNG, but failed and are now criminals on the run. I think they’re also hilariously ridiculous.

The Cardassians are pursuing him for terrorist acts* committed against Cardassians in Cardassian space, while the commander considers offering him asylum on the station, considering he was rescued while being attacked in Bajoran space.

I am comfortable saying that DS9 blurs the lines between good and evil better than most Trek with which I am familiar, but I can’t say that it is legitimately subtle television. The Cardassian military wear mean, angular uniforms and look like small-eyed, scowling reptile people. Garak’s eyes are softer and more expressive, his makeup leaves his mouth more mobile, and he wears brightly-colored clothes so that the viewer is not confused. The Bajorans, meanwhile, are all European-looking and human as the day is long with the exception of a few easy-to-overlook nose ridges and a weird taste for excessive ear jewelry. You can generally tell the good Bajorans from the bad ones by how pronounced their nose ridges are.

Still, it’s a slight upgrade from the previous shows, who would have the good-seeming bad guy reveal himself right from jump by making exaggerated expressions around the oblivious Starfleet crew or by simply doing something evil where only the audience could see.

So the playing field is laid out thusly: On one side, we have a Bajoran terrorist who is requesting political asylum. Kira supports this, because she believes that the provisional Bajoran government needs to reintegrate splinter groups like his in order to strengthen and stabilize and who, we will learn, is being played by the terrorist, who needs a small, warp-capable ship for an as-yet undisclosed reason. On the other side, we have the Cardassians, who have an apparently-legitimate claim on a criminal who has committed violent crimes in Cardassian territory and a pair of Klingon criminals who want to double-cross the Bajoran so they can paid by both the Bajoran criminal and the Cardassians. In the middle, we have Ben “Not Picard” Sisko, who has to decide whether to give the Bajoran criminal up to a probably very terrible fate with the Cardassians, or offer him asylum and risk an interstellar incident.

We get a little bitty taste of intercrew conflict in this episode, as Kira goes over Sisko’s head by reporting the issue directly to the Starfleet admiral in charge of that sector.

We get hints that Garak may be more than a simple clothier, as he hints to Bashir that the Duras women are worth watching. Later, he apparently bargains with them in his shop over the price the Cardassians would pay for the Bajoran, were the Duras women to deliver him to the Cardassians. I say, “apparently,” because he later invites Bashir to spy on his further negotiations.

As all the pieces come together, we learn that the Bajoran wants to build a bomb and needs parts from the Klingons, who want to deliver him to the Cardassians, but only after the Bajoran pays them for the parts he needs for the bomb which, incidentally, he wants to use to destroy the magic economy-boosting device wormhole.

The multiple factions playing off each other and multiple shifting alliances makes for more a more complex story than most TNG episodes. This doesn’t necessarily make DS9 a better show, but it does serve to make it a very different show. Without the exploration and discovery aspect of TNG, the stories have to be more character-focused and driven by interaction. With limited geography in which to resolve all the plots, the only interesting places to go are deeper into each character. It’s not Shakespeare, but it is Good Television.

The good guys win in the end, by the way, in case you didn’t want to read the summary but were still wondering.

More of those bullets I love so much:

• I’m pretty sure that they make the sickbay props out of whatever they have just lying around.
• There is a rat in a cargo bay. It turns out to be Odo, but he wouldn’t be disguised as a rat if it would be conspicuous, so we know there are sometimes rats on DS9 - another reminder that DS9 is kind of a hole. I don’t know how long this kind of thing will keep up, but I like it.
• Moreso than Emissary, this episode identifies Odo as DS9’s insider from outside. Like Spock and Data, he is not like the rest of the crew, and doesn’t fully understand them. The way he tries to imitate humanoids makes him more like Data than Spock, but he is filling the same role: look at our weird human ways (because, let’s face it, most of the pretty aliens are basically humans) from the perspective of someone who doesn’t share them.
• Bashir, nervous and stammering in any situation that doesn’t involve his considerable medical expertise, might be the only doctor in all of Trek that isn’t a towering rock of stony self-confidence, and it’s kind of adorable, really.

==================================================

* I watched DS9 on the local Fox channel, if I’m remembering correctly. The use of terrorism without a capital T and without a constant reminder that it is Unamerican and Wrong and probably, God forbid, even Liberal is clear evidence that DS9 was Fox programming from the pre-9/11 era. I don’t even know where a show like this would be broadcast today. Maybe Sci-Fi? I don’t think any of the major networks would pick it up today, which is a shame. If the reader would like, at this time, to pretend that I have linked to a long lament about the state of modern television, they may feel free to do so.

First things first: DUDES IN MINISKIRT UNIFORMS, WTF.

So, in Encounter at Farpoint, you’ve got the Enterprise, partially staffed and full of civilians (which I will get to later) heading out to jolly well explore new and exciting bits of space, but first they’ve got to stop by this new, suspiciously quickly built outpost and pick up the new first officer.

Oh, yeah, and they’ll have to prove humanity isn’t terribly barbaric and bloodthirsty to Q. But hey, no problem for an intrepid starship crew, right?

One of the major things I noticed here were the really obvious attempts to hearken back to TOS. The most obvious is DeForest Kelley popping up for no plot-advancing reason, with his cheerful anti-Vulcan bigotry expanded to include androids as well. Troi’s uniform with the minidress and high boots are also something of a throwback to TOS, though seeing the same uniform on about three male extras is a bit… different. (Paging Zapp Branagan…) Then there’s the design of Farpoint, both inside and out, which still does seem to conform to the sixties ideal of the future, at least in terms of architecture. Everything’s white with multicolored accents (usually pink, purple or red) and the fabrics lean heavily toward the spangled and shiny. I find it interested compared to Voyager, which seemed to favor the dark and industrial. The whole situation is actually very Olde Trek. Inexplicably powerful adversary who happens to be playful, bordering on malicious? Where could we have seen that before? Giant Space Jellyfish are also something I would not be surprised to see in a TOS episode. Hell, the TOS crew went up against such terrifying foes as a giant spinning cube! In space! And stock footage of tigers! Maybe I should stop name-dropping favorite TOS episodes and get on with it!

The next thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is the difference in design aesthetics. I know I’m placing everything in opposition to TOS and VOY, but you’ll have to bear with me, since those are my frames of reference. The original Enterprise’s bridge was full of primary colors and actually looked like it could be the bridge of a battleship in some ways - the amount of light, the gunmetal-greyness of everything that wasn’t yellow or red or black, and the angled overhead screens. From what I recall, Voyager’s bridge was almost always dark and dramatically lit and done up in a variety of shades of serviceable grey. The Enterprise-D’s bridge is bright and beige and… terribly, terribly bland. Like Picard is piloting a giant Holiday Inn. It probably seemed nice from the design standpoint of the late eighties.

Third thing that I want to discuss: I think I dislike all of the female characters who have been introduced so far. Troi and her feeeeeeeeeeeeeeelings are overplayed in this episode, plus there’s the moment of OMG SEXUAL TENSION when Riker and Troi first see each other. Eugh. Lt. Yar is, at least so far, mostly just angry and trigger happy without anything redeeming or, really, interesting about her. Dr. Crusher’s okay. It’s still early and given that this is a pilot and not much chance for character development has been given, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

I think the rest of it can be in bullet points, here, because I think I hit upon all of the things I wanted to go into any depth on.

• I really did not know that Q was right there in the first episode, so my reaction was sort of “Wait, what, already?”
• Data’s Otherness is kind of pronounced, especially in his dialogue. “Inquiry: Snoop?” That, and “I’d love to be human, ever so much!” and lifting Wesley out of the holodeck stream one-handed. HAY GUYS, I THINK THERE’S SOMETHING UNUSUAL ABOUT THIS CHARACTER!
• I know how we’ll prove that we’re not a barbaric and needlessly aggressive race! We’ll break through this barrier and then fire torpedoes at the pursuing ship!
• While starships aren’t really designed for atmospheric flight, saucer-separation still seems like a bad idea from the idea of structural integrity. Of course, it wouldn’t be necessary if there weren’t inexplicably a fuckton of civilians on a Federation ship on what seems to be a potentially dangerous exploratory mission, but hey, whatever.
• It amuses me that there are scenes obviously meant to show the audience that the technology is NEW and EXCITING. Just ask the ship’s computer where someone is and follow the blinky lights to the amazing HOLODECK! And look, there’s that scamp, Wesley Crusher.
• I guess I felt like a certain amount of stuff was needlessly spelled out for the audience, and one of those things were the GIANT SPACE JELLYFISH. I think we could have figured out that they were happy from their tentacle high five without Troi having to tell us.

‘Til next time, internet. I’m out.

Hi, I’m Ellen, one of the other bloggingstartrek.net writers. If you’re unfamiliar with what we’re doing here, I recommend reading Drew’s first post. Me, I’m taking on The Next Generation.

I haven’t started yet, but I wanted to place myself within the larger framework of Trek as a whole first. I love the Original Series very much; it brings my dual loves of mid-century science fiction and 1960s television together in a glorious and absurd singularity. I haven’t watched the entire series, but I have watched large swaths of it, and I’d be watching it twice a week in syndication if I weren’t at work when it’s on.

I’ve seen an episode or two of TNG here and there, and the only movie that I sat down and deliberately watched was The Wrath of Khan. I’ve also seen parts of The One With The Whales. So, I can see where the TOS mission was to explore the edges of space, visiting colonies and unexplored planets. And I can see how Voyager stumbled into all their wacky adventures in the Delta Quadrant (yes I watched and enjoyed all of Voyager shut up) while trying to get home, but I actually have no idea what the TNG crew’s underlying mission is. For someone involved in a Star Trek-related blog, I am perhaps shockingly ignorant. My impressions, then, will be extremely fresh.

I’m looking forward to starting this whole endeavor, which I will be doing quite soon!

Hello, Internet! My name is Drew. This is bloggingstartrek.net, which is a blog about Star Trek. The premise is that several of us will be watching Star Trek series with which we are mostly or entirely unfamiliar and blogging about them, episode by episode, in order, right here. I’ll be blogging Deep Space Nine.

I remember watching DS9 when it started and thinking it was just amazing. I was around 11 when Emissary was broadcast for the first time, and I thought TNG was just the coolest show ever, so I stayed up and watched the premier of its new buddy (I didn’t know it was meant to be a successor, because I didn’t expect TNG to end). I liked it a lot, but it was on late at night and the rebroadcast conflicted with my Youth Sport Activity (the swim team, of all things), so I only saw a few episodes here and there during its initial run. It wasn’t until I was almost 20 that I started seeing it again on television which, coupled with the discovery that no nerd is alone on the internet, rekindled my interest in Star Trek.

Since I have a job that involves a good amount of solo downtime, I signed up for NetFlix and started watching TNG. Midway through, I found myself wanting to write about some of the episodes, and did so on my personal blog. Since I enjoyed it, I considered starting out right then to blog my way through the rest of the series, but ultimately decided to wait until I’d finished it and then start fresh with a new series. I also decided to ask some of my friends if they were interested in taking on some of the other series. Surprisingly enough, they were!

There’s no real official format, other than that we blog about each episode in order. Whether it’s strictly Trek or whether Trek is a jumping-off point is up to each blogger, and it might vary from episode to episode.

So here goes:

Today I’m watching Emissary, the first episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

The start is kind of inauspicious: Flat scrolling text reminds us of the basic plotline of the TNG two-parter The Best of Both Worlds.

Fortunately, it almost immediately jumps to a new perspective on Wolf 359 - the bridge of one of the Federation destroyed by the Borg in the battle. I have to say, this does a far better job of making the Borg scary than TNG ever did. It also establishes right from the jump that DS9 is grittier and far less utopian than TNG - the ship is on fire, people are dirty and crying, uniforms are torn, and nobody is really staying calm. I think this is what appealed to me most, originally. It seemed more real.

Most of the episode is spent in set-up, and I think it would be cheap as hell to try to pad out my first post with plot summary, but I do invite you, gentle reader, to look at the helpful links to your left. One of them is to Memory Alpha, a huge Star Trek wiki just waiting for you to plunge whole hours into its various plot summaries, character bios, technical descriptions, and so on and so forth. I have been too scared of what goes on behind the scenes there to ever click one of the discussion pages, but the content that ends up getting published is pretty exhaustive. In fact, you know what? Here’s the episode summary.

Oh, incidentally, I am trying to watch the episode and blog about it at the same time, pausing as little as possible. This is an experiment that I am not sure will be successful, but I’m trying it all the same.

(Another thing I liked about this series: Miles O’Smiles O’Brien is a major character in this show.)

I find myself wondering whether Kai Opaka will become the Guinan of DS9, and whether that would be a terrible thing. I always thought Guinan was kind of a fun character.

Another thing I’m wondering is how Avery Brooks is so good at being Sisko in the present (ok, in the deep imaginary future, but we’re going to call it the present so that things don’t get all complicated) and so bad at being Sisko in his own memories with his dead wife. I’m not sure if it’s his halting delivery or the fact that he looks completely absurd in his beach clothes. It could be both - perhaps the latter caused the former.

The discussion of linear life vs. nonlinear life reminds me of a video a friend posted on a messageboard recently. It’s the philosophical flipside of the description of how a notional 4th-dimensional entity (given that the 4th dimension is time) would see one of us 3-dimensioners. I quite like it, actually, especially the part where the aliens don’t understand the point of baseball, although I think I like that part more when it’s out of context.

The basic premise is that the aliens they discover during the episode (inside a stable wormhole that will become a major plot point for the rest of their series) aren’t limited to linear time, and have no concept of a past or future. It’s fun to see Star Trek try its hand at Big Ideas, and this episode is no exception. They always do it at least pretty well, from a dramatic perspective, at least in my opinion. Things might get a little cheesy, but if you suspend enough disbelief, things can get pretty touching. This episode doesn’t get me as much as some TNG episodes (Family, Lessons), but I’m also not as invested in these characters as I was in the TNG characters. Yet.

An odd thing about how watching a show for a long time can get to you: I haven’t even finished TNG yet, but seeing the Enterprise arrive at DS9 when she returns at the end of the episode gave me a wave of nostalgia. It’s strange, because it’s been perhaps four days since I last watched an episode of TNG (I started DS9 early to kick the blog off). I also got a smile out of the group of wedge-shaped ships with the vaguely X-shaped wings that arrive at the very end of the episode. They’re science vessels this time, but during the run of TNG, that design has been all manner of things. I don’t know if that was a nod to Trek fans in general, or just a conveniently available model. Either way, I’m ok with it.

A few excuses to use WordPress’ bullet point feature:

• They drop the religious overtones in your path very early on, almost as soon as Sisko is on the station.
• Avery Brooks has enormous hands
• A lot of time is spent reminding the fans that Sisko is not just like Picard: he is hands-on, gets angry, has hair, etc.
• Dax isn’t into the contractions so much. I don’t know if that continues through the series, but it makes me feel like they’re trying to make sure I don’t miss Data too much.
• “Never trust ale from a god fearing people” is a bad bit of advice, considering how Catholic the Irish are reputed to be and how delicious their beers are. Granted, the most famous is a stout, but I still tend to doubt Quark’s idiom.
• It seems like some scenes were shown out of order - Miles’ disembarkation is shown halfway through Emissary, but I suspect it was meant to be shown earlier. Otherwise, he decided to change his uniform just to go back to the Enterprise and say goodbye before leaving for the second time (it is established earlier that he’d been settled in already by the time Sisko arrived).
• Gul Dukat is a pretty fantastic villain. I am excited about learning to love to hate him all again.

I’m still working out how I want this blog to go, so if anyone (including any other bloggingstartrek.net writers) have any ideas or suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments! I’m looking forward to this project partly as an excuse to catch up on DS9, but also as a way to practice writing and keeping up with a regular schedule, so I’m open to input from basically anybody at this point.

Ok!