It should be obvious, from the date stamps if nothing else, that I haven’t updated my Star Trek blog in a very long time. This blog is kind of about Star Trek, but it’s mainly about our relationship with Star Trek and how we react to each episode (even the bad ones) as viewers more than it’s about the individual episodes themselves. Otherwise, we could just have a blank entry with a link to the Memory Alpha summary for every episode, and the project would be complete in no time. If we didn’t enjoy Star Trek, warts and all, we wouldn’t be doing this.

Star Trek is, even when things are going badly, a basically optimistic series, in my experience. Maybe Deep Space 9 will be a little less so than the original series and Next Generation, but the core idea is still that there is this huge, voluntary body devoted to fostering peace and exploring the galaxy available to anybody who wants to be a part of it, and that’s something that almost any nerdy kid, or adult who used to be a nerdy kid, can get behind.

Not to get too bloggy here (on, um, my blog), but I have not been feeling too terribly optimistic myself lately. I’ve been out of work and have had some upsets in my family, and for the last several months I have just not felt like I could get into Star Trek. Things have turned around a bit lately, or maybe I’m just looking at them differently, but either way, I am going to be slowly getting back to it. So here’s some Trekbloggin’, about a pretty middle-of-the-road episode of DS9.

Oh, and by the way, though it took about the same amount of time to complete, I would say this is about the fastest entry on the entire site, having an average speed of 75-ish miles per hour - it was written entirely on Route 95 North in North Carolina and Virginia, with only some minor edits and formatting done while stationary at home.

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Invasive Procedures at Memory Alpha

The opening log entry tells us that a “plasma disturbance” has necessitated a partial evacuation of DS9, leaving only the main cast on the station. Quark’s presence seems a little forced - “not enough room on the shuttle,” we are told. Despite plasa storms being relatively rare, this evacuation is played off as a rather routine event, the kind of thing Starfleet knows how to deal with, so no big deal. Plus, it saves a packet on extras, costumes, makeup, craft services, etc.

I’m not sure if it’s a trick of memory or if there’ve just been some major advances since season 1, but the special effects are looking particularly crispy this episode. Or maybe, since it’s such a talky episode, they just had a bit of extra money in the budget for this one.

The title refers to a crew of space pirate-types invading the station while it is conveniently understaffed, using the old fake distress call routine, and with help from Quark, who they betray almost immediately.

The most hilarious thing that will happen in this episode occurs really early on, when the raiders force Odo into a sort of jar situation and shove him in the freezer. This is exactly what I would do first if I were invading DS9, because a clever writer can use Odo to solve pretty much any problem with enemy personnel all by himself. Which, of course, he will in this very episode, after Quark redeems himself for betraying the crew by helping Bashir get Odo out of the fridge.

The pirates work for this sad-sack mumblybum trill who wants to steal Dax’s symbiont, Dax. I guess I should say Jadzia’s symbiont? They always call her Dax, though, like maybe Dax is really the one in charge? I kind of wish they got into this a little more in the episode.

They prove that they’re serious by shooting Miles, so I hate the hell out of them pretty much from jump, but it’s not so much because of the raider characters themselves as it is because I am so flower units for dear Miles.

Odo and Sisko do the hero thing and put Dax back where he (she?) belongs, but we never really get any followup with the whole Quark-compromising-station-security thing.

One of the reasons I like Sisko so much is that he can be such a bastard sometimes, like when he shoots Weepy McTrillpants, even though it could hurt Dax, and that he makes a slightly pithy comment before doing so. It reminds me of Kirk’s more cowboyish antics, only played less as brash posturing and more as an assurance that, no matter what, Sisko will Get the Job Done.

* Sisko asks Dax if she knows the trill in the pirate crew. Is this some sort of space racism? How would he feel if Dax was always asking him if he knew every human they ran across? Honestly.
* The nervious, stammering bad guy is tough to pull off, and it doesn’t exactly work here.
* Jadzia’s fake stomach looks just super fake.
* Holy crap, so does Dax itself. Like a stress ball covered in latex vomit.
* Avery Brooks gets all smirky with the alien pirate lady, even though Ben Sisko is supposed to be all mad at her. Does somebody have a cruuuush?
* Sisko’s main weapon is friendship, both his own and others’. And a potent weapon it is!
* Quark is a hacker.

Just a quick update:

There is a real life Miles O’Brien, and he is a reporter who writes about space.  Fantastic!

All-around excellent artist Brandon Bird’s The Death of Jennifer Sisko and the Destruction of U.S.S. Saratoga at Wolf 359 is now how I will always remember that moment.

We’ve (I’ve, sorry) given it long enough, let’s finish this epic three-part story arc!

The Siege at Memory Alpha

Instead of getting the hell out of dodge, Sisko is explaining to his crew that he’s going to pack up and evacuate as slowly as possible in order to buy them some time to show the bajorans that all the bad Circle business is a cardassian ploy.  We may be in for a standoff!

Jake Sisko and Nog have become great friends in the background, while we weren’t watching.   It seemed to me they were just a couple of no-good hoodlums, always getting up to trouble. Now it seems, though, that they are also tight homies, so obviously it is super sad that they have to split up during the evacuation.

A plan is hatched to send Kira and Dax to one of Bajor’s moons to snag an old ship to bring Li Nalas’ evidence to the surface, so that they can explain the cardassians-manipulating-Jaro’s-terrorists thing to the Provisional Government.  A signal won’t get through, so they have to go in person in a ship, and the runabouts are tied up with the evacuation.

Apparently, we won’t get an exciting space standoff - the bajorans go all BOARDING ACTION right away.  There’s nobody there to meet them, though, so they end up looking kind of silly running around and pointing their guns at nothing.

The remaining Starfleet crew on the station have decided to throw out the rules of war, ditch their uniforms, and go all guerrilla on the bajorans with sabotage and ambushes.  I’m not sure this kind of thing was covered in the Starfleet Station Operations Manual.  It’s a dark picture, there, but I assure you that the handsome gentleman on the left is none other than Miles O’Brien.

The guerrilla campaign makes for interesting television (Odo as a tripwire, a running gag about combat rations, a holosuite used as a trap) , but it’s all dark and it makes it hard to take screenshots that look like anything other than a bunch of shadows with maybe a phaser blast in them.  Come on, Star Trek, think about me!  Think about my needs!

Dax and Kira have made it to Bajor in their sub-impulse raider.  Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.  They’ve crashed on Bajor.  The picture’s actually of another ship crashing on Bajor, but I’m sure Dax and Kira’s looked much the same on its way in.  Luckily, they crashed within walking distance of Liam Bareil’s monastery.  He helps them disguise themselves as members of his order, which involves giving Dax fake nose ridges.

In a colossal anticlimax, the evidence is presented without incident to the bajoran provisional government and control of the station is returned to Starfleet.  Li Nalas is killed by a Bajoran officer after finding out that the Circle had been exposed as an unwitting tool of the cardassians.  I guess the news made him go crazy?  It’s not really clear.

What about Minister Jaro?  Nobody knows!  But we’ve returned to status quo just in time for the credits to roll on the last episode of the longest continuous arc so far in a Star Trek TV series.

Dabo!

• Minister Jaro is played by (an uncredited) Frank Langella, who I know best from Cutthroat Island.  I feel like I should send Frank Langella an apology letter for knowing him best from Cutthroat Island.
• Rom evacuating with a Dabo girl instead of Quark is probably the best thing he’s ever done.
• Giant Bajoran spider-dog thingies on the moon?  Great!  Having Dax be scared of them?  Great!  Having her open up a service panel on the ship she and Kira are supposed to be fixing up and not having one of the spider-dog thingies jump out at her?  Opportunity: missed!
• The smoke grenades of the future are far less advanced than the smoke grenades of, oh, say, 1960.  I wonder what the story there is.
• Odo as a tripwire is a goofy gimmick that I’m happy to see.
• The old “it’s easy to die for a cause, but would you be willing to live for one?” chestnut finally gets trotted out.  It took a while, though!  This is the last of a three-part arc, after all.  And in the end, Li Nalas dies for his cause anyway.  There’s a lesson in there somewhere, maybe.  No, seriously.  There is.  What, you don’t see it?  Come on!

When we last left our hero (me!), he was still in shock, having been so startled to find a three-part episode (Trek’s first!) so soon in DS9 that he was rendered speechless for eight straight days.  We rejoin him now as he tackles the next chapter in this three-part adventure, The Circle (The Circle is the next chapter, not the three-part adventure).

The Circle at Memory Alpha

Kira getting replaced turns out to be Kira getting promoted!  On her own merits?  Not really.  Bajor wants Li Nalas away from Bajor and away from The Circle, where he’ll be safe.  This sets us up, almost immediately, for a reminder that DS9 has a Circle problem of its own - sprayTERROR paint on the Siskos’ door!

Odo finds Kira packing up to go and calls her a quitter, reminding her of whom exactly it is that never wins.  Dax comes in, ostensibly to return a bottle of lotion, Dr. Bashir, space friend, comes in to offer his warmest regards, sweet Miles comes in to do the same, Quark comes in hoping for some alone time with Kira, but decides a party is just as good, and then Vedek Bareil-Neeson shows everybody how it is done by inviting Kira out to his monastery for some meditation and relaxation, bow chicka wow-ow.

At ops, we learn that Li Nalas does not want the job, and Sisko aims to get Kira back on the crew, but for now, she has to head down to Bareil’s monastery and arrange stones in a river (poorly).

Finding her stone-arranging skills are not up to par, Vedek Bareil decides it would be more productive to show her a glowy space orb.  Well, he calls it an orb, but it’s more of a low-fi hourglass shape.  Anyway, it gives Kira a Trek-style dream which amounts to the naked-in-front-of-the-whole-school dream, only somehow more meaningful (seriously), and later, Bareil-style nakeouts.  I have to wonder of the good Vedek was tweaking the orb somehow.  I mean, really.

Quark has discovered an exciting secret!  Some space florists are secretly supplying weapons to The Circle on Bajor.  Space florists!  I wonder if it is a front for the space mob.  Odo quickly blackmail-deputizes Quark to learn more.

In further Bajor adventures, Vedek Winn is at the same monastery as Bareil and Kira, and is still grasping desperately at the Most Passive-Aggressive Trek Character award.  What a wonderfully horrible character!

There is a lot going on at this point:  Kira is kidnapped by the circle, which turns out to be run by Minister Jaro, Odo stows away aboard a space florist ship and finds out that The Circle’s weapons are coming from the Cardassians, and Sisko, acting on new intelligence from Quark, is leading a rescue party to Bajor after Kira.

As it turns out, The Circle doesn’t know that the Cardassians are supplying them.  The Cardassians just want The Circle to drive out the Federation, so the Cardassians can move back in and take over Bajor again.  Li Nalas wants to turn public opinion against Jaro and his Circle, but the station cannot communicate with Bajor, so it is looking like he has to go down there in person.

Down on the surface, Jaro is trying to win Winn (hee hee hee) over to his side with all the diplomacy and tact of a thirteen-year-old boy asking his crush out on a date.

As we leave off with another TO BE CONTINUED, Bajoran assault ships are demanding that the Federation evacuate DS9 and Sisko is hitting a Prime Directive wall with Starfleet command.  He decides to follow the order to evacuate, but decides to take everything Federation-y with him, which Miles says could take days, which is far longer than the seven hours that the Bajorans have given them.  I smell an exciting standoff coming, but it’ll have to wait for next time!

• It’s funny how the ops turbolifts are either fast or slow, depending on whether the scene calls for a dramatic slow descent or a curt quick one.

• Odo disguises himself as a rat again.  It’s still great that rats are acceptable disguises, even in space.

• The Prime Directive is one of Star Trek’s main plot devices, but the  more times it gets violated, the more it telegraphs exactly what the characters faced with it will do (ie violate it)

Welcome back to the DS9 blog!  We had a brief inter-seasonal break (and also a brief disc break, which is a joke about how the post office broke the current disc the first time it was sent to me), but now we are back with Season 2, shiny and new!

Since TNG is the only other series I have watched all the way through, I don’t know what to expect from season changes.  With TNG, there is the whole mysterious “lost year” between seasons one and two, where the galaxy decided to be way less boring and Starfleet issued a wide-reaching “stop sucking so much” order to all personnel, and I’m wondering if I will see the same thing with DS9.  DS9 didn’t really stumble off the blocks the same way as TNG, though, and the people behind the show were also largely the people involved in TNG, so they already knew how to run a series.  We’ll see what happens.

The Homecoming at Memory Alpha

We start our WHOLE NEW SEASON with Odo chewing out Quark for giving him a good tip.   This seems to me like a rather counter-intuitive policing strategy.  Quark’s charming idiot brother Rom is also confused, but Quark is just following the 76th Rule of Acquisition.  Following this delightful exchange, Quark is accosted by David Bowie’s Klingonesque cousin, who asks him to sort out a Bajoran earring she was supposed to deliver to Bajor from a Cardassian.  She says any Bajoran would know what do to with it.

Quark brings the earring to Kira, who just takes it and storms off.  Women!  Put a piece of jewelry in their hands and they just go crazy, am I right fellas?

Speaking of women, Jake has a date with a pretty bajoran girl!  The commander thinks his son’s too young to take her to a holosuite and Ben won’t let him take her back to their quarters, but before the conversation can really get going, Kira is all up Ben’s face about jewelry.  Women!

Kira wants to take a runabout to Cardassia 4 to rescue the owner of the earring, who is supposed to be a great Bajoran war hero, Li Nalas.  Bajor doesn’t want to help, so she’s come to Sisko.

And, more trouble, there is a Bajoran group called The Circle who don’t want any non-bajorans on or around Bajor and they are spray painting their tag on the walls of the station, probably while wearing rollerblades or riding skateboards with their pants cut too big and their music turned up too loud, those damn kids.

After deciding that the return of Li Nalas could help the volatile political situation in Bajor, Sisko decides to let Kira take the runabout, but Chief O’Brien is part of the package.  Kira puts up some token resistance, as if anybody would not want to spend all the time ever with Miles, but that doesn’t last long.

On their way, they bluff themselves past a Cardassian scanning post, but it is way less hilarious than the Enterprise bluffing their way past the Klingon scanning post by leafing desperately through Klingon phrasebooks and just hoping for the best.  And what do they find?  A populated labor camp!  Bajoran prisoners!  CARDASSIANS BEING VERY BAD!

They can’t beam everyone out since the runabout transporters can only handle two at a time and there’s no way to know which bajoran is which, so they have to land and try to sneak in.  Their ruse?  Miles the pimp!  When a Cardassian tries to examine the “merchandise” (Kira), she punches him in the head and then the shooting starts.  This is a longer battle, ground or space, than any I recall happening before in the show!  This is the excitement of a new season.

I’m noticing that Star Trek seems to be of two minds about what makes for awesome shooting action.  In TNG, just about everybody’s weapons shot crazy beams that were where they needed to be instantly, but here the Cardassians are shooting bolts of energy that move slow enough to see (but fast enough to be exciting).  You’d think that kind of, you know, dodgeable weapons technology would have fallen by the wayside in the days when even the relatively low-tech Klingons have insta-beam weapons at their disposal.  But I digress.

Aside from four bajorans who stay behind to fight off the pursuing Cardassians and a handful who get excitingly shot, they manage to get away.  The fallout?  So far it seems like things went pretty well.  Mean ole Gul Dukat even calls to say he’s sorry!

But all isn’t well in DS9-town.  Despite the jubilation over Li Nalas’ return, a pack of Circle members jump Quark and brand their sigil into his head.  It’s kind of hilarious, but also pretty cruel.  Luckily, Dr. Bashir, space dermatologist, can make the scar disappear with his FUTURE SPACE TECHNOLOGY.

The Circle’s brand of anti-non-bajoran racism hits home - cute bajoran girl’s dad won’t let her go out with Jake because he’s not bajoran!  It’s hard to be a human on a largely bajoran space station, even though your government basically runs the place and your dad is their warrior-philosopher god-emperor.

And the bad news keeps coming!  Li Nalas doesn’t want to deal with the problems on Bajor, so he’s trying to stow away on a ship bound for the GQ (please don’t call it that).  Poor guy is overwhelmed by his heroic reputation, even though his deeds were exaggerated.  I smell a lesson about not running away from your problems coming up.  Oh, and here’s that lesson!  Right on time.

Sisko gives him a pep talk that is so successful that he not only gets himself promoted to a WHOLE NEW RANK that the bajorans make up just for him, but he is also getting thrust into Kira’s job!  This was one “TO BE CONTINUED…” that I absolutely did not see coming, no sarcasm - it didn’t say “Part 1″ in the title or anything!  WELL PLAYED, STAR TREK.  Tune in next time for the exciting continuation of this exciting episode/blog post!

• It’s season 2 and this is the first time I can recall that we really get to see the replimat in action

• We now know that Rom makes exactly 1/6 what Quark makes.  How depressing!  Poor Rom.

• Memory Alpha tells me this is the chapter in Star Trek’s first-ever three-part episode!  How crazy is that?  The better part of Trek fans’ whole month was taken up finding out what was going to happen next when this first aired.

• The only real change between the first and second season seems to be in the show’s ambition - the cast is still right where we left them, the uniforms are the same, the interior sets are largely the same (although I think there’s more than a few new pieces), but here we are in a three-part episode, right off the bat!

In the Hands of the Prophets at Memory Alpha

A strange be-robed Bajoran lady is totally pushing her Bajoran religious claptrap in Keiko O’Brien’s classroom and Keiko is not having it.  Is this the new Kai?  Because if she is, she is terrible.  Also she looks more like a person in makeup than any Bajoran so far - come on, makeup department!  This is why Babylon 5 won your Emmy in ‘93.

Elsewhere on the station, Miles is working with his new Bajoran assistant who apparently knows her business.  She is his prize pupil!  But his security tool is missing, so he can’t show her how to use it.

Keiko’s taken her beef with the Bajoran church all the way to Siskotown.  Turns out this lady, Vedek Winn, is not the Kai, but she wants to be.  She doesn’t have a lot of support on Bajor, but Kira’s in her camp. It doesn’t seem characteristically Kiratastic to have her come down on the side of orthodoxy, but I guess that is the role she is playing this episode.

I don’t remember there being a big kerfluffle about creationism in schools in the early 90s, but the Prophets vs. verteron particles debate is a transparent allegory.  Sisko just wants everybody to get along, but the Bajoran is dropping thinly-veiled threats about what might happen if Keiko doesn’t stop teaching wormhole science instead of Bajoran Prophetic Celestial Templeism.

Meanwhile, Miles and his assistant have found his missing security tool all melted up in a plasma conduit with a little bit of the previously-missing Ensign Aquino mixed up inside.  A tragic mystery! While he’s telling his wife about it, a Bajoran refuses to sell him a candy stick - a grave insult! - because Miles’ lady wife won’t capitulate to Vedek Winn’s demands.  Good thing Odo was around, or that vendor might have gotten a surprise visit from Knuckles O’Brien who, after Captive Pursuit, has developed a taste for alien chins.  Dabo!

The Kai wanna-be is throwing down about her religion to Mrs. O’Brien’s students right out on the promenade.  Why the other races’ children even give enough of a rat’s ass to be at this little throwdown is uncertain, but I guess it’ll save us having to see a scene later where the five non-Bajoran kids show up to a mostly-empty classroom.  The Kai stomps off with all the Bajoran kids, which leaves Keiko only a handful of students.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am right there on the same side as Mrs. O’Brien, who feels that religion has no place in the classroom.  This kind of religion-encroaching-on-secular-institutions thing happens in the US pretty regularly.  Every year, it seems, some group or other throws up the smokescreen of “Intelligent Design” “theory” to try to sneak religious beliefs into the classroom.

Sisko has a little father-son chat with Jake and sets a conciliatory tone, namely that just because Jake doesn’t believe a thing doesn’t make it dumb (which I agree with), and that in this specific case, it isn’t that ridiculous to interpret aliens who can see all points in time simultaneously as prophets.  He also says that just because you disagree with something doesn’t make it wrong, which I agree with… somewhat less.

On the face of it, it’s true - we can’t make something not be so simply by saying it isn’t.  But we also cannot make something so just by saying that it is (although when Captain Picard tells us to make it so, we are at least obligated to try), and when you have observable, verifiable facts and data on one side and unsubstantiated superstition on the other, it would be silly to teach the latter in a science lesson.

Sisko and the writers are giving us Star Trek’s can’t-we-all-just-get-along, wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-everyone-was-nice take on the debate, which I would be right behind if this were about nothing more than peaceful coexistence in a community or about freedom of conscience.

But it isn’t a matter of whether people should be allowed to believe what they wish.  Believe up is down, for all I care.  Believe the sky is green, it doesn’t affect me at all.  Believe a talking snake got a dude in so much trouble with a god that he had to go father a fiercely inbred family in a desert, you’re welcome to it.  This is about what to teach in what amounts to a public school - it’s not really pushing your worldview on someone if that “worldview” is literally a view of the world.  If the Bajorans get to have their religious beliefs inserted into the curriculum as an alternative to science, why don’t the Klingons or Ferengi get to object to what is being taught as ethics?  Why don’t the Cardassians get a say in what is being taught in a Bajoran history lesson?

After dispensing his fatherly lesson to poor older-than-his-classmates Jake, Sisko goes down to speak to a Bajoran spiritual leader, Vedek Bareil, to try find a way to work out the problems at the station.  Bareil, who looks a little like Liam Neeson, seems to sympathize, but he will not help.

Back at Ops, Sisko runs up against a Bajoran plague of not wanting to go to work.  He also runs up against DNA evidence that the missing ensign who got all melty in the plasma conduit was actually killed by a phaser.  How that shows up in an analysis of Ensign Aquino’s DNA is unclear, but Dr. Bashir has FUTURE SPACE TECHNOLOGY at his disposal, so we’ll just go with him on this.

Miles has problems of his own - namely the concern that his assistant might be a little flower units for our dear chief!  Get in line, sister!

And his day only gets worse - while he is discussing some new evidence in the slagged ensign’s murder investigation with Odo, the school blows up!  Luckily, nobody was there, but, following an inspiring speech by Sisko, Miles’ apprentice and Vedek Winn share an ominous glance.

She continues looking suspicious while Miles explains the current murder plot theory to Miles.  While she’s doing that, a message from Vedek Bareil comes in - looks like he’ll be coming to the station just in time to probably get murdered!

I mean, that’s how it sounds, anyway, from the little chitty-chat about sacrifice (and the possibility of getting executed) that the Bajoran Apprentice has with Vedek Winn immediately after Bareil’s message.  But her tracks were not covered well enough - Miles finds a suspicious file in the computer and hacks into it with Dax.  It’s an escape route!  The computer can’t find anything super unusual at the escape route’s start, but Miles goes to investigate anyway since it found some sort of subspace phlebotinum.

And what does he find out about this phlebotinum?  It’s integrated into the weapon-detecting technobabble thingy he and his assistant fixed just the other day, when he discovered his missing security tool thing!  SUSPENSE!  He warns Sisko, who spots the assistant moving through the crowd right before everything gets all slow-motion-y.  Mood-building or spacetime anomaly?  They never say.  She sloooowly pulls a gun and sloooowly tries to assassinate Vedek Bareil.

Sisko foils the plot with the most graceless tackle I’ve ever seen on Star Trek, which is saying something.

• Keiko faking suspicion of infidelity just to screw with her husband is one of the things that makes her rad

• Jake is easily 5 years older than any of the other kids in his class

• Miles O’Brien does not misplace his tools

• I’m going to call this type of O’Brien-intensive episde a “high-Milesage” episode, and this is my blog so nobody can stop me.

• Favorite exchange of the episode:

Miles: What was he doing in a runabout at four in the morning?

Odo: Apparently, he was getting murdered.

• Those spiritual types love those Dabo girls.

Duet at Memory Alpha

DS9 has a special visitor today!  A sick person, with a disease called Kalla-Nohra Syndrome, which Kira remembers from her time as a laborer in Cardassian mining camps.  Suspecting it’s one of her filthy fellow travelers, she makes a sojourn to sickbay only to learn the horrible truth:  It’s a Cardassian!  Who could change the channel after a teaser like that?  BUM BA DA BUMMM…  DAAA DA DA DAAA…

Kira says he’s a war criminal, although Aamin Marritza is not on any list of war criminals that Odo has seen and he has seen them all.  Her evidence?  The only way he could have gotten his exciting disease was by working at a horrible prison camp where horrible things were done to Bajorans (who may or may not have been horrible themselves, but that’s no justification either way).

The Cardassian claims he has Pottrik Syndrome, which has similar symptoms to Kalla-Nohra Syndrome and is treated the same way, but is somehow different.  Dr. Bashir, however, won’t back that up.

The Bajoran Minister of State wants the Cardassian, but Sisko is not so sure it is a good idea to give him up.  He gives Odo the investigation and has a lovely little “I’m taking you off the case” conversation with Kira.  I wish Sisko would take this opportunity to call her a loose cannon, but no dice.  In fact, he goes so far as to let Kira appeal to his better half and puts her back charge of the investigation.  Did not see that one coming, actually.  Usually, it seems like asking Sisko to do something is the surest way to get him not to do it.

Under interrogation, the Cardassian admits to being a file clerk at the camp in question.  In fact, if he’s telling the truth, he’s the best filing clerk to ever clerk files.  He even got a special prize from Gul Darhe’el, the Cardassian in charge of the camp, for being such an excellent clerk.  And further, he claims that all the horrible things that happened at the camp were rumors started by Cardassians in order to scare the bejezus out of the Bajorans.

Chief O’Brien is recalibrating something or other.  It’s not important, but I can’t let what might be his only appearance in the episode slide right by.  Here’s where we get to see Star Trek go all “isolate and magnify” on a still photograph and then enhance it.  I’m not willing to buy it on CSI, but I’ll buy it on Star Trek.  In fact, I’ll buy that they can zoom in past someone in the foreground and look at someone behind them because of FUTURE SPACE TECHNOLOGY.

What do they learn?  Their prisoner is (may be) Gul Darhe’el himself!  The butcher of Gallitep (gasp!)  - and he admits it (double gasp!) - and brags about it (rarely-seen triple-gasp!)!  He also belittles Kira’s resistance cell.  Either he’s got some game he’s playing at or he’s just trying to make Kira as miserable as possible.  Or both.  Either way, he’s succeeded at the latter.  Kira’s down in the dumps, drinking blue… liquid and having a little heart-to-heart with Odo.

It’s a good talk, though, because it comes out that there’s no way the prisoner could have known that Kira fought in the resistance.  Even mean ole Gul Dukat, bad guy extraordinaire, doesn’t seem to know what the story is, but it seems the prisoner is not Gul Darhe’el.  In fact, with Bashir’s new evidence from his medical records, it seems like he could be the clerk he says he is, but who for some reason is masquerading around as Gul Darhe’el.

As it turns out, it is Marritza.  He’s pretending to be Gul Darhe’el to force the Cardassians to admit to Darhe’el’s crimes following his inevitable trial and execution on Bajor, but the Major will have none of that dishonest racket.  Unfortunately, while she’s letting him go, he gets stabbed by his crazy Bajoran former fellow prisoner.

Did I mention that?  There was a Bajoran locked up with him for a while early on.  And he’s crazy.  So he kills Marritza with a knife.  Seems like a ploy for cheap tragedy - the story had a tidy ending already.  I guess it’s meant to illustrate lingering Bajoran hatred for Cardassians, but it seems tacked-on to me.  Who’s to say?

• The prisoner wants yamok sauce for his stew.  Where are Jake and Nog when you need them?  I hear they have an inside hookup on that stuff.

• Oh, Gul Dukat.  You’re so rad.

Dramatis Personae at Memory Alpha

Kira doesn’t want to let a Valerian transport dock at DS9 because they used to run weapons-grade Dolemite to the Cardassians when they were occupying Bajor.  I would submit that any Dolemite is weapons-grade.  Kira agrees - she wants that ship outta here in twenty-four hours, an’ twenty-three of ‘em are already gone.

Oh wait, it’s “dolamide.” Way to let me down, Dramatis Personae. Did they want to call it “Dolemite” and run up against licensing issues, I wonder? “Dolamide” sounds like a copout (which is something Dolemite would never do, by the way).

Anyway, since dolamide has a bunch of other uses (though cleaning up the streets with an army of kung-fu prostitutes is, unfortunately, not one of them), Sisko won’t let Kira search the ship without evidence.

Kira’s got Odo looking for evidence of gun-running with the Valerians, Dr. Bashir at Ops for some reason, perhaps to flirt with Dax, and dear sweet Miles is glad he’s not on a boring grain-silo-viewing field trip with his wife and her students.  Am I missing anyone?  Quark is probably at work.  We haven’t heard from Garak in a while, now that I think of it.  I miss that dude.

Our real adventure begins with a Klingon ship returning from the Gamma quadrant way ahead of schedule, and then exploding. It’s together just long enough to beam one lonely Klingon to DS9, who survives long enough to say “Victory!”  Typical Klingon.  I always wonder how they expect me to believe that a species so eager to be dead could have survived so long, but then I guess Klingons are probably full of surprises.

It is quickly established that the dead Klingon (well the one that made it as far as DS9) was the Klingon ship’s first officer, and that the Klingons were on a routine bio-survey.  Routine missions are just about the most dangerous things in all of Trek, so that it exploded is no surprise. Also, something’s got Dax giggly about going to search for the Klingons’ black box and I suspect that it may be the plot.

Odo hits up Quark for some information about the Klingons.  Turns out they were going to bring home something that would make the enemies of the Klingon empire tremble.  Odo is so surprised by this news that he has a shapeshifter freakout and falls down.  Or, again, the plot might involve people acting a little weird.  Also, despite his loss of consciousness, he does not lose his shape.  Nobody comments on this, but I’m relatively certain that we, the viewers, are supposed to notice.  On the other side, maybe the special effects budget ran a little shy and we weren’t supposed to notice.  Time will tell!

Everyone’s talking about the Kira/Sisko friction and siding off.  Could what the Klingons found be something that turns people against each other?  Time will tell!

It might also just make people wacky.  Dax is all giggly and telling boring stories that nobody wants to hear.  Odo and Quark seem mostly unchanged - pehaps it’s similar to the aphasia virus incident where Quark and Odo’s brains (or, anyway, Quark’s brain and Odo’s… thinking jam I guess) are immune to some of the weird though-twisting things that happen in Star Trek.

So Kira’s trying to recruit everyone to her side against Sisko and Miles in the Valerian debate, Dax is circling sanity in a comfortable low orbit, Bashir is practicing politics, the Chief is fanatically protecting Sisko, and Sisko is just totally laid back.  Just chillin’ old school. Drawing weird clocks.

Odo learns from the Klingon logs that they found some telepathic spheres that had a record of a power struggle that destroyed an ancient race.  The Klingons, obviously, don’t care.  Joke’s on them!  Or on the tiny little pieces of them that are floating gently through space right now, anyway.

Sisko is apparently not so laid back as all that now that he’s actually BUILDING his clock.  He’d be happy to, if necessary, fight off as many of his enemies as possible by himself and it takes all of Miles’ considerable persuasive skills to talk him down.

There’s been a bit too much crazy time and not nearly enough resolution time.  It seems like they came out to do this episode and got all the way to the studio before they realized that they hadn’t packed enough script.

Odo convinces Bashir that it’d be a good idea to help stop everybody’s brains from going crazy, but the fight that breaks out at Ops (which I keep thinking of as the bridge, even though the station isn’t a ship at all) makes it look like it might be too late!  But more clever maneuvering by Odo gets everybody trapped in Carbo Bay 4 just in time for Bashir’s technobabble field to knock the crazy out of the crew so Odo can flush it into space.

This is the second time in Star Trek that I’ve seen someone intentionally decompress a cargo bay to be a hero (the first was in TNG, to put out a plasma fire), and it seems like just as bad an idea now as it did then.

Apparently Quark was fine because he was never exposed in the first place, since the crazytimes infection took place when the Klingon beamed in at Ops.

The only lingering questions from this episode are these:

Why didn’t Odo get all goopy when he passed out?

And who sends Klingons on a science mission?

Final thoughts:

• I’m happy Sisko was napping at his desk early in the episode, even if it was because of a telepathic space disease.

• The Valerians are flying the same pointy-nosed ship as every other minor race in the galaxy.  It is the gold 90s Toyota Camry of Space.

• I wonder if we’ll see more of Sisko’s clock in future episodes - will it be like Picard’s flute?

When I started this blog, I thought it would be similar to the way I used to make little entries about episodes of TNG on my personal blog while I was watching that, but it’s a bit different.  With TNG, I had seen most of the episodes already.  It used to be on every night at 6 or 7 when I was a kid, and I used to try to watch it as often as I could.  I saw the last episode the first time it was broadcast in ‘94 and I remember being totally crushed that there would be no more TV adventures with the NCC-1701-D.

DS9 was different - new episodes were on late at night, 10pm on Sundays, I think, and the rebroadcast the following Saturday interfered with whatever youth sport I was being roped into at the time, usually swimming.  I saw episodes here and there, but I didn’t even find out the show was over until well after its final episode had aired.

I caught a few episodes when I briefly had cable from 2002-2003, but other than Emissary, everything I’ve seen up to now has been unfamiliar.

In fact, this is the first episode where I actually remember what is going to happen in each storyline.

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The Forsaken at Memory Alpha

• Poor Bashir.  Dude gets stuck with the bad jobs just because he’s an extremely junior officer.

• Considering this is an episode where the main plot involves computer trouble and one of the secondary plots involves Lwaxana trying to get into Odo’s pants (which, grossly enough, are part of his actual body), this episode could have been called HEY LOOK, IT’S MAJEL BARRETT.  I really don’t think anybody would have complained.

• Constable Odo does not have time for romantic interludes.

• In Odo’s humble opinion, most of us humanoids spend far too much time on our… respective mating rituals.

• ODO’S IMPORTANT DS9 LIFE LESSON: Procreation does not involve changing how you smell or writing bad poetry or sacrificing various plants to serve as tokens of affection.  This is good news and it will save us a lot of time!

• A bi-polar torch has its good days and its bad days, you know how it is.

• BONUS LIFE LESSON from Lwaxana: When it comes to picnics, the only thing that really matters is the company.

Federation ambassadors on DS9!  Obnoxious ones!  They’re here to go on a fact-finding mission to the wormhole.  Totally sensible!  Look how well that turned out for Count Opakula.  One of them is Lwaxana Troi, too, so sending them to the Gamma Quadrant might be considered an act of war.

Here’s a Star Trek character being uptight about sex.  Apparently it’s only some races that are comfortable with the idea of ugly-bumping.  Others consider it an extremely impolite topic of conversation!  The trick is guessing which ones are which.  The ones that think it’s a big deal are usually the ones who have been hidebound and uptight the whole episode, or, if it’s still early in the episode, it’s a sure sign that they will be. In this case, it is the lady ambassador who isn’t a proscribed weapon in the war between the sexes, i.e. not Lwaxana.  Dr. Bashir suggests they visit a holosuite (not intending anything sexual, although the holosuites on DS9 usually get put to naughty use) and she gives him a look like he just suggested she kill her own clone.

When Lwaxana’s fancy comb is stolen at Quarks, Odo finds it for her. Ambassador Troi immediately develops a crush on our dear constable.

Speaking of crushes, Miles is having trouble with the computer on the bridge - Cardassians apparently operate like Microsoft in the protecting-users-from-themselves (whether they like it or not) department.

Lwaxana Troi’s crush on Odo is completely delightful.  When I was a kid, I used to hate the crap out of Lwaxana Troi, but as an adult I find her to be more fun than a barrel of extremely fun monkeys.  I’ve heard that the set was always a party when Majel Barrett was around, and I can believe it.

The other ambassadors, meanwhile, are making a nuisance of themselves at Ops when an unexplained alien probe comes through the wormhole (like there could be another kind of probe coming through the wormhole, come on).  Uncharacteristically for a Starfleet officer, Sisko does not want to bring it immediately on board and rub his face all over it.  His caution won’t do him any good, but it’s nice to see.

Troi and Odo get stuck in a turbolift at the start of a series of system failures (system failure number two: transporters).  There seems to be no explanation for the system failures, but since the Cardassians run technobabble through their other technobabble, Odo can’t even escape by shapeshifting.

I think the turbolift breakdown plot is just a way to isolate Majel Barret from the rest of the cast (except the sacrificial shapeshifter) to allow her to happily and charmingly devour as much scenery as she would like without derailing the rest of the show.

Back at Ops, O’Brien can’t figure out the problem, but he is starting to realize that the computer doesn’t want him to leave it alone.  Computer, I know how you feel!  Miles thinks downloading data from that probe that just showed up might have something to do with it.

Trying to get rid of the data proves problematic, too.  The comms and the lights are the next victims of this attention-hungry invasive program.

Meanwhile, several hours later, Troi has finally finished talking about her and would like to hear about an oddly damp-looking Odo - damp because he’s running up against the outer edge of his 16-hour being-solid cycle.  He doesn’t want to change because, as he says, it is a personal matter.  Odo is a man’s man and does not want to display weakness in front of a known lady.

Attempting to distract the computer causes it to sound like GLaDOS from Portal and then to try to blow up part of the habitat ring where the ambassadors and doctor happen to be.  Fortunately, having compared it to a puppy, Miles is able to “build a doghouse” for it.  Most technical problems in Star Trek only exist until you find a metaphor for them that, when extended, provides a metaphor for a solution (the solution itself does not necessarily need to be found, just the metaphor).

In the turbolift, Odo and Lwaxana share a touching moment of friendship before he becomes a puddle in her dress.  That sounds a lot dirtier than it actually is.

The ambassadors, having been hidden away in a Jeffries tube (or the Cardassian equivalent) by Dr. Bashir, got sooty but were not harmed by the explosion, and have all gained a new-found respect for Julian.  Whether any of them learned a lesson or not is unclear, however.

Nobody ends up going through the wormhole and Miles, in the end, gets to keep the puppy.

If Wishes Were Horses at Memory Alpha

• Constable Odo has no time for fantasies.

• Today’s Important Lesson might have come from Quark this time, in conversation with Odo rather than from Odo himself: A true entrepeneur knows how to sniff the wind!

• Dr. Bashir, space troubador, is not skilled in the arts of romancing Jadzia Dax.

• Dr. Bashir sleeps with his uniform on. What a professional

• The more times people say “Rumpelstiltskin” around Rumpelstiltskin, the happier I become.

• Seeing Sisko plexing during a stressful scene made me do the smiles

• Wouldn’t “visual scanners” just be cameras?

Oh, DS9. Opening up with a few innocuous slices of life. Who would ever suspect that they would become important during the episode proper? The secret answer is “everyone who has ever watched Star Trek, ever,” but it’s still cute anyway.

We open with Dr. Bashir flirting with Dax, Jake going to play holo-baseball, and sweet Miles telling little Molly the story of Rumpelstiltskin. Shortly after, we find Rumplestiltskin in Molly’s room, a famous baseball player following Jake home from the holosuite, and fake Dax waking Dr. Bashir up with kisses.

The fake Dax, the baseball player (Harmon Bokai), and Rumpelstiltskin all appear, to Dr. Bashir’s instruments, to be totally real.

Real Jadzia takes imaginary characters coming to life with aplomb, and as soon as Bashir gets serious about the problem, his imaginary Dax disappears. Meanwhile, snow falls on the Promenade. Snow gives way to a large flightless bird, which gives way to some serious winning streaks at Quark’s dabo table. Odo’s response is to order everyone to stop using their imaginations. This seems like a typical cop move. Oddly, when Quark gets distracted from his fantasy babes by his patrons’ dabo successes (oh yeah, Quark has fantasy babes), they fail to disappear. Maybe Bashir is better at ignoring his fantasies than Quark?

Oh, but fake Dax is back. Why? To trade insults with real Dax!

It seems like some sort of space anomaly (of course!) is causing people’s imaginations to come to life. While that’s being investigated, the figments hold a little figment parliament to figure out of their experiment (doubtless one to learn more about these strange creatures aboard the station) is going well.

The figments somewhat complicate the evacuation of critical areas, which is done to prepare for the crazy plan to take out the space anomaly. With rays? Special pulses? Some sort of field? Nope! Torpedos! Leave it to those peacenick starship crews to direct a subspace pulse through the main deflector or that crap, station crews just blow shit up.

This occasionally causes problems, such as the thing you are shooting torpedos at exploding and your station getting caught in the blast. Of course, if the subspace anomaly itself is imaginary, then none of that matters! Neat and tidy.

Oh, and the figments? Totally space explorers who have never seen anything like this strange emotion you humans call “love” the capacity for imagination before. Dabo!

Progress at Memory Alpha

• When a lobe tingles, it means only one thing: Opportunity! Or frostbite.

• The captain of the trading ship Nog is trying to sell all the Yamok sauce to is surprisingly one of the more believable characters in the show so far. I am totally sold on that guy being an alien space captain.

• What’s the opposite of a luddite? Like the kind of person who is to luddites what luddites are to technology? Because Star Trek is that.

• Today’s Important Life Lesson might be that there is a real distinction between stem bolts and self-sealing stem bolts.

• On the other hand, self-stealing stem bolts can’t be that important if even Miles doesn’t know what they are.

• I know he’s still just a commander, but I grow more and more certain that Sisko is my favorite captain. (Don’t tell Jean-Luc!)

• I’m not clear on how much money 5 bars of gold-pressed latinum is. Is it a lot?

Today’s adventure* concerns a power transfer from one of Bajor’s moons to Bajor. Why? Because in the SPACE FUTURE, it is much easier to get energy from millions of miles away than it is to get it from where you are. Of course, that energy, which is going to heat up a bunch of bajoran homes this winter, comes from a place where other bajorans are living. Dax and Kira fly by to check it out and find some people still living there, so Kira goes down to have a chat with them.

Up on the station, Nog has the idea that getting 5,000 wrappages of Cardassian yamok sauce will make them wealthy. Hoping to sell them for 5 bars of latinum, they are disappointed to find that the only captain on station that does business with the Cardassians is not carrying any latinum. But they trade their sauce wrappages for 100 gross of self-stealing stem bolts. I am excited about these nonsense objects!

The family of bajoran farmers that Kira is supposed to evict is fighting back hard. Their primary weapon? Supper! I wish people who disagreed with me would do so by offering me suppers. Life in the future is so much better than now! The old man in charge, in between talking about how long it will take roots to soften, explains that he has no interest in leaving his farm because he is a typical stubborn Star Trek rustic archetype.

Wondering what self-sealing stem bolts are? So is everyone else.

Kira, back on DS9, is trying to convince the bajoran minister in charge of the energy grabbing operation to use “phased energy” something something to get the energy so the locals can stick around, but frankly I am way less interested in the stubborn rustic main plot than I am in the Nog and Jake’s Big Business subplot. When that fails, she goes down with a couple of goons to convince them to leave, which is obviously a great idea that could not possibly result in any old men getting totally shot. OH WAIT!

Meanwhile, Nog and Jake have traded their 100 gross of self-sealing stembolts for 7 tessipates of land.

The upside to the Kira/rustic plot is that, when she decides to stay on the planet and take care of the old got-shot guy, we get to see Sisko throw his weight around in a very Siskoish fashion. When he explains to Bashir that he told the minister that Kira would be remaining on the moon for a couple of days at Bashir’s request, Bashir responds that that is not true. Sisko simply tells him to “make it true,” and then waits quietly for Bashir to tell him what he wants to hear. Sisko gets shit done! I love that about the guy: He gets that he is in charge of DS9 and that Starfleet Command is far away. That done, he goes down to the moon himself for a third-act game-winning heart-to-heart with big K. He leaves Kira to think about it, but we all know he has totally won this one. Dabo!

Back upstairs with the Nog and Jake, we learn that the Bajoran government wants to build a reclamation center on a certain piece of land. GUESS WHICH ONE! While Quark is trying to find out who owns the land, Nog drops the “we’ll sell it for 5 bars of gold-pressed latinum” bomb on him. A victory for team precocious youngsters? Looks that way!

Incidentally, Kira convinces her old man buddy to leave his moon by burning his house down.

* Or what would have been today’s adventure if today was May 9, 1993.

The Storyteller at Memory Alpha

• Despite his having taken Kai Opaka on her first and last trip away from home, the Bajorans still want Sisko to help them with their problems.  Or maybe they just want him to accidentally get all their problems killed.

• Nobody has anything to say about the tetrarch of the Paqu being a high-school sophmore except for Quark, Nog, and Jake.  Sisko, for example, doesn’t even bat an eye for the first three quarters of the episode.

• In between maintaining law and order on DS9 and dispensing Important Life Lessons, Odo makes damn sure those damn kids keep off his lawn from dangling their damn legs over those damn railings on the damn promenade.

• Bajoran chicks totally have a thing for mystical, prophet-sent messianic figures.  Or Irishmen.  It’s one of the two.  Good thing Miles is such a loyal husband!

• Replicator oatmeal looks almost exactly like wet papier-mâché.  Gross!

• Baby bajorans have tiny baby nose ridges that are pretty much completely adorable.

Sisko is asked by two bajoran factions to do some informal diplomatting.  Meanwhile, he sends Miles and Dr. Bashir down to Bajor to solve some medical emergency or other that will only require the skills of a single Starfleet doctor who treats a fractured spine with CPR.  This tells me that it is not a very serious emergency. Miles tries to beg off.  I am getting the idea that it is maybe because he does not want to hang out with Dr. Bashir, space conversationalist, but it’s not really clear.

The shuttle ride down to bajor does more to imply that O’Brien does not want to deal with Bashir, but it’s in a sort of ambiguous way that leads me to believe that it’s something else.  Oh, and the medical emergency is one old dude who is sick.  Bashir will probably try to kill him with chest compressions or something.

The groups Sisko is to be diplomatting at are the Navot and the Paqu, represented by a tacky fat guy and a 15-year-old girl, respectively.  A 15-year-old girl who does not want a glass of bubble juice (?) and is furious that Quark would imply that she is a little lady.  Their despute is over thier border, which is listed in their treaty as being a river.  The river has shifted course, and now they are tussling over who gets the land in between its old position and its new position.  They’ve had enough time to have stupid, arcane land disputes in just the last few years since the Cardassian occupation, apparently.  Also, Nog be crushin’ on Little Miss Paqu Tetrarch.

Down on the planet, Sick Old Man McSickoldman declares that O’Brien was sent by the prophets.  Outside his house, Mayor McMayor tells the Starfleeters that only Sicks (the Sirah) is strong enough to defeat the mythical monster, the Dal’Rok that comes to their villiage for five days.  I am still not clear on how they’ve already got this long-held tradition going on.  Weren’t the Cardassians in control of Bajor like, 20 minutes ago?  Did this Dal’Rok show up right after they left and just sort of explain the rules to the village?  Or maybe this was an ancient tradition that just had to take a break while the Cardassians were working the Bajorans to death in the mines?  So many questions.

The Dal’Rok, incidentally, looks like a color-shifted blot of ink in water and does not show up on tricorders even a little bit, which means it is important.  It also opens up with CLOUD LASERS and starts trashing the town after the sirah has a really, really short-term bout of heart failure.  Fortunately, he has time to stand up and teach Miles O’Saviors O’Brien the magic words to help focus the villagers’ magic mind beams and drive it away.

The awkward competitive courtship that Nog and Jake are both trying to engage in with the Paqu tetrarch is making me think less of Star Trek and more of a one-act play put on by a reasonably talented and very enthusiastic high school drama club.

Down on the planet, we have a FORBODING MOMENT with one of the sirah’s old staff that quickly escalates to an ATTEMPTED MURDERODING MOMENT.  Jealousy is an ugly thing!  The old sirah’s apprentice claims that he, not dear Miles, is the true sirah, despite what the old sirah said.  Then we learn that the magical monster and the magical monster-fighting-abilities are both technological illusions controlled by a magic bracelet.  The old sirah’s apprentice wants the job, which seems like it would be an out for Miles, except that the mayor will have none of this not-being-saved-by-Miles-O’Brien business.

Of course, Miles sucks at telling stories (poor Molly!).  Luckily, the formerly-murderous apprentice sirah is totally there to pickup the slack.  Back on the station, the Paqu tetrarch has had a heart-to-heart with Sisko and come up with a reasonable compromise to her land dispute that she is confident enough to present to her fat Navot opponent who we haven’t seen since he was introduced.  Good resolution!  Hooray!

Except we still don’t know for sure wheter Miles does not like Julian or whether he really did just have something else on his mind.

I admit to the worst kind of infidelity:  I have been putting off watching any DS9 (and hence putting off updating the DS9 blog) so that I could watch some Babylon 5.  But come on, Bruce Boxleitner - in SPACE!

Sometimes a man has gotta change up his sci-fi TV shows about the lives of the crew and political activities that occur on and around a space station.

There will be several DS9 updates over the coming days, though.  BE PREPARED.

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Battle Lines at Memory Alpha

• Miles right off the bat! I already feel back at  home.

• The Kai has a gift for Miles’ daughter, which shows us that the Kai is an old sweetiepie who can tell when someone has a child just by looking at them.  Wait, did I say sweetiepie?  I meant vaguelycreepypie.

• Dr. Bashir (space… um… doctor) treats a broken spine with… CPR?  Man, heck, what kind of low-ass standards do they have at Starfleet medical?

• Kira drops some negativity about death on Kai formerly-slightly-dead Opaka without realizing it.  What a vitalist pig!

• Miles names gadgets BEFORE he invents them.  That is how confident he is that they will do what he intends and do it well.

• I still think it’s just so great that the DS9 uniforms are designed in such a way that they look better when someone rolls up their sleeves.

• Why they didn’t call this episode WAR ZOMBIES (IN SPACE!!!) instead of lame old “Battle Lines” is beyond me.

The Commander, Dax, and sweet Miles have discovered some of the old Cardassian station commander’s files.  Kira’s file is somewhat less impressive than she would have liked.

But today is a specail day!  Kai Opaka, everyone’s favorite short, late-middle-aged, slightly doughy Bajoran spiritual leader is visiting the station.  And what better way to celebrate than a trip through the wormhole?  Taking a civilian dignitary who has never left her home planet through a rupture in spacetime that you don’t fully understand: What could possibly go wrong?

Whilst crusing the Gamma Quadrant (if you say “the GQ” they all say, “Please, don’t call it that”*), they pick up a signal containing a bunch of “statistical data” that the Kai asks them to investigate. So obviously, they get shot down.  The sattelites that were sending each other the data apparently don’t love people listening in on their conversations and can be real jerks about it.

So we have a split cast.  On DS9: Odo, Dax, and O’Brien.  On this week’s peculiar planet out beyond the wormhole we have Sisko, Bashir, Kira, and dead-ass Kai Opaka who died either from the crash or from Dr. Bashir’s ridiculous-ass medical attention.  It will split again when Dax and dear delightful Miles go looking for the Commander.

The GQ** Crew end up getting captured almost immediately by some of the planet’s crazy army-type denizens.  Said denizens (and our heroes) are set upon by another group of folk from the planet.  After some dashing heroics, the Kai approaches!  A zombie?  A vampire?  Or just the regular old Kai with some extensive but extremely vague physiological changes?  Come on, guys, it’s Star Trek.  She’s probably a vampire.

Oh, ha ha, no, wait.  It’s the regular old Kai.  Neither side of this planet’s very Trek-y unending war over a forgotten cause has any skill at all when it comes to staying dead, and apparently it rubs off on anyone else who comes by to visit, such as the little round Kai.

The crew, of course, see this as a breakthrough despite all the obvious disadvantages of immortality, many of which are spelled out explicitly by the local immortals.

The crew try to mediate a peace, but their peace talks turn into a good ol’ fashioned bloody melee right around which time the Doctor conveniently discovers that if you are resurrected on that planet, you pretty much have to stay there.  As a WAR ZOMBIE.  In SPACE.  So Count Opakula is stuck there whether she likes it or not although the show dodges this handily by having Opaka decide to stay there on her own, before being told.

And then Miles saves the day.  Because he is awesome.

* I mean I assume this is what happens.
** Please, don’t call it that

I’m back! Sort of! I am not going to lie about regular schedules, but I have started watching DS9 and blogging about it again. Ok!

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Vortex at Memory Alpha

• The idea of Odo disguising himself as a glass that someone might actually drink out of (with their mouth) is pretty much totally gross.

• The Ferengi build their phasers in the same shape as their ships. Could it be a species-wide copout, or are Ferengi just the worst designers in the galaxy? Their clothes imply that the latter could be the case, but then again, everybody in the future dresses bad.

• I don’t remember yellow highlights on the station before - did they doll it up because they are planning to enter it in illegal space station racing?

• The constant blip-blipping of Star Trek computers would make my brain kill my ears if I had to work with them regularly.

• I had missed Miles.

• The Miradorn apparently fly the same super-advanced warship that the pirates/paleo-bandits who were after the Tox Uthat had, only these days it’s not seen as being quite as super-advanced as it was a short couple of years ago. Or: the company is reusing an expensive model. Either way.

• That Odo can get knocked out (particularly by falling rocks) is just silly. He’s basically jam.

A new arrival from the mysterious Gamma quadrant seems to be tied up with some Miradorn twins, and a fancy-pants-y egg-shaped object they apparently stole. In a backroom deal at Quark’s, this new guy (Croden), kills one of the twins before Odo arrests everyone.

So now the other twin wants to kill Croden (obviously).

Croden’s got a little story about knowing changelings in the Gamma quadrant. At first, I thought this was an early lead-in to the whole Dominion arc. I mean, the episode is young, it might still be, but based on the stories Croden is telling, I suspect that it is not.

DS9’s longer arcs are what made it memorable when it was on TV, but I never really got to follow one all the way through, so I’m pretty eager to see one started.

Miles is on hand to help plan a way to extradite Croden to his homeworld without the Miradorns simply blowing him up.

Turns out Croden’s Changelingbury Tales were just a dodge so he could get to the stasis pod where he keeps his kid. Why he keeps his daughter in a stasis pod instead of in his company is not entirely clear.

Croden never stands trial for any of his crimes, because Odo is a sentimental goofball. Instead, he’s transported to a Vulcan science ship that has no idea that Croden is a murdering thief. Oh, Star Trek! Today’s lesson is that murder is ok, as long as you’re cuddly (whether this applies to your own clone or not is a grey area that this blogger is not prepared to discuss at this time).

The above shot is the runabout and the Miradorn ship inside a gas cloud. It’s not especially important, I just think it’s pretty.

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.

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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?

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.

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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, an 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?

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.

Captive Pursuit at Memory Alpha

• 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 his 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!

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.

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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.

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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?