Move Along Home at Memory Alpha

• Parents still have “the talk” with their kids in the future, apparently.

• Dabo is a franchise operation?

• Games where you have to learn the rules as you go will definitely still be complete garbage in the future. Anyone who’s ever played Mao will know what I’m talking about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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?

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

Dax at Memory Alpha

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

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

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

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

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

Look how bitchin’ that ship is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q-Less at Memory Alpha

• VASH! (I know the episode has “Q” in the title, but I didn’t expect to see Vash).

• Q! (Ok, that one was a gimme)

• It’s cute that out of a crew of over 1,000 on the Enterprise, Miles would expect that Vash would remember him.

• Q’s going grey around the temples. I don’t know why that is, but it endears him to me somewhat.

• My compulsion to punctuate myself with “Dabo!” is becoming overwhelming.

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

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

Seriously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who recognizes Q? Only MILES O’BRIEN.

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

“Picard never hit me.”

“I’m not Picard.”

The fashion of the future: Necklace earrings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

Some bits from the notes I took while watching:

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

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