We join the Enterprise, already in progress toward a terrible mining disaster that…. has very little to do with the rest of the episode, really, except to give a sense of urgency and futility while dealing with Q.

Q wants to offer a dream come true.  But he doesn’t really want to offer it to Picard, maybe because Picard gives Q a hell of a scolding.  So he offers a deadly game to Riker on the Planet of Kind of Half-Assed Set Dressing.  Picard is left in time out on an empty bridge while Q whisks Yar, Worf, Data, Geordi and Riker down to play Napoleon.  (That seems actually kind of apt for him.)

The Q think it’s pretty awesome that humans are adaptable.  Riker seems to be enjoying the mental joust, which is an interesting comparison to Picard’s apparent exasperation with Q.  You’d think that Q could maybe come up with something interesting, but the game is basically “try not to die.”  Yar is immediately stuck in a “penalty box,” and if anyone else gets sent there, she’ll be destroyed.  Yar’s penalty box is the bridge, apparently, so she can boo hoo hoo to the captain about how she’ll be destroyed and how she hates being controlled.  Points for not mentioning rape gangs, I guess.  (I’m sorry.  I can’t stand her.)

Picard isn’t chosen, Q reveals, because he’s too bound by rules.  The gift of the Q is the power of the Q imbued into Riker, and the games are meant to display human character by the process rather than the ends.  I mean, it’s a while before the episode gets to that.  There’s Geico Cavemen in French uniforms from the Napoleonic War and laser muskets to deal with, first.

Picard pisses off Q by musing on the potential of humanity, which is plot important.  See, Q is giving his gift so that he can take Riker-Q back the the Continuum to inject a little… creativity and innovation into the stagnating Q Continuum.

And here it finally starts to get good.  It becomes the kind of morality play that Star Trek is probably best known for.  The ship is released (why does Q even bother with a big flashy forcefield?  Can’t he merely freeze the ship in space?  I guess Q is big on flash and sparkle.)  Riker has to keep from letting the powers of the Q from going to his head.  Q forces him to use them by letting the French Cavemen kill Worf and Wesley (who, like an idiot, runs right into the troops shouting “Woooooooorf, noooooooo,” and is quickly bayonetted.  Dumbass.)  Picard orders him to leave the powers untouched, so of course, the mining disaster has to come back into play and tempt Riker to save a little girl who died.  He resists (NO THANKS TO DATA), but he’s all bitter about it.  And then kind of an asshole about it, all calling the captain by his first name and ordering meetings of the bridge crew.

Once he gives in, he decides he’ll be a benevolent god and that he’ll give everyone their hearts’ desires, prompted by Q.  They’re all embarrassing, awful, presumptuous gifts, too.  Crusher tries to take Wesley away, but Riker ages him by 10 years.  Data outright refuses with a nice little speech.  Geordi gets regular sight and tells Yar that she’s more beautiful than he could have imagined, but the price is too high for his tastes and he doesn’t like the source of the gift.  Yeah, suck on that, Riker.  The worst is probably Worf’s Klingon bride that he can’t relate to (fancy fishnets, I don’t see Klingons as the unitard and fishnets type) and Geordi is all horrified that this is Worf’s idea of sex.  Judgmental much, Geordi?  Wesley also refuses his gift, and Riker finally, FINALLY realizes that it was a stupid thing to do.

Q is taken by his own people for his failure to tempt Riker, which now that I write it that way feels a little Biblical.

So, overall I have to give this episode credit for not being a rewrite of The Squire of Gothos.  The show is stumbling less.  Q’s dramatics are incredibly entertaining.  There’s a point where Picard looks at Riker, laughs, and basically says, “you seriously want to join this bullshit artist?” that is fantastic.  The Morality Play aspect of it is a little on the heavy handed side, however, and Wesley seems to be wedged in at the end unnecessarily.  I bet some people are satisfied to see him with a bayonet sticking out his stomach, but seriously?  Monsters with guns just killed your friend and you run into the center of them?  Idiot.

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!