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!