S4E5, “Indiscretion” (story: Toni Marberry & Jack Treviño)

In which two relationships are further explored:

1. Kira and Dukat

Relationship type: Adversarial

Status: Irritated

Situation: They team up for a quest to find a crashed freighter bearing people from their pasts.

Kira: Looking for a man important to her past, Lorit Akrem.

Dukat: Nothing. No one. Stop asking him.

Lorit Akrem: Dead. Sorry, Kira.

A bracelet found in a shallow grave near the wreckage: Dukat gets very emotional about it. OK fine, he was in love with someone on the ship. Yep, a Bajoran. Also, uh, he has a daughter. Doing the math, she’s a Bajoran-Cardassian hybrid. Isn’t life tough for a Bajoran-Cardassian? Oh, yes, very much so. That’s why Dukat is going to kill her. Kira says she’ll kill him if he tries. But in the end, he can’t do it.

Resolution: Every time we see Dukat, he’s less and less the Stalinesque monster suggested by his reputation, and more and more filled with regrets and complexities. We’ll see about him.

2. Sisko and Kasidy

Relationship type: The smooching kind.

Status: Things are going great until…

Situation: Sisko displays somewhat less enthusiasm than one should about your partner potentially moving into your neighborhood.

The Doghouse: A metaphorical term for temporary exile for someone in a relationship who has done messed up.

Currently occupied by: Sisko.

Resolution: Luckily Jake has his head on straight and properly advises his father on how not to wreck up a really good thing.

Overall: A good one for its place in the series, if not a terribly interesting pair of stories by itself. But it’s important for both relationships. I complain about the lack of relationship development a lot in this show (see: the next episode) so it’s good to see it done well here. Dukat reveals even more of his personal life (recall he’s also been sad about missing his son’s birthday) and Sisko is bound to get some cold feet at some point. Without these developments, neither character would feel as complete. So, solid. 3 out of 5.

S4E6, “Rejoined” (story: Ronald D. Moore and René Echevarria)

Are we ever going to get a developed Dax love interest? Not today we aren’t. At least in comparison to the tree climber from “Meridian”, this one has a backstory. Dax’s spouse from a previous host, Kahn, comes to DS9 to work on an artificial wormhole experiment. Unlike most species—humans for example—who are eventually relieved of the potential for awkward social encounters by the sweet release of death, Trills have numerous lifetimes to run into their exes. They do not tell you about that part during the Trill selection process.

Further, the breakup wasn’t caused by an amicable divorce, but rather by Torias Dax’s death in a shuttlecraft accident. We learn he was being characteristically (for Torias) risky in testing the shuttle’s engine, and got himself killed. People in relationships inherit some responsibility not to take unnecessary deadly risks because their deaths would adversely affect others, but at least, if we are going to dig around for a bright side here, if you die as a human at least you can’t get in additional trouble. But Trills can! The symbionts can be recovered, introduced into a new host, and live another lifetime or two before bumping into the previous spouse and getting a deserved earful for dying.

Perhaps in part to alleviate these ridiculous contingencies, Trill society has developed a taboo against re-establishing love relationships from previous lives, what they call “reassociation.” Doing so will get you exiled, which for Trills means mortality. So not only shouldn’t Dax and Kahn (Jadzia and Lenora, in this instantiation) see each other for socially awkward reasons, they’d also face pretty serious consequences if anything happened. Naturally, it does. After a couple afternoons diagnosing artificial wormhole data, and a super boring dinner, they find themselves unsurprisingly drawn to each other. There is some smooching and a whole lot of discussing the main question posed by the episode, which is whether letting reassociation happen would be worth it.

I though “Rejoined” served up some outstanding social sci-fi within a very strong social sc-fi series. Again Dax gets totally lost in a relationship in the span of just a couple days, which is a bit silly, but is somewhat easier to accept this time, and can be ignored for the larger themes it opens up. The show has been consistent about this idea that Trill gender is fluid and an essentially random host characteristic unimportant to the symbiont, and this delves deeper into some outcomes from that. Kahn continues to be hosted by a woman, but now Dax is as well, though that aspect goes totally unmentioned, which I thought was a really great story choice. They ultimately don’t stay together mostly because of the social taboo, and maybe also that lovestruck Dax isn’t seeing what the big deal is about erasing your life for someone after like three dates.

“Rejoined” also reminded me of the TNG episode “The Outcast“. That’s the one where they deal with a mostly androgynous race, and one person becomes well, an outcast, because they lean too strongly female. Riker falls in love with her (again in like two working days, but I guess I need to get over the time frames of these things). But I felt like that show didn’t work great because we were supposed to find it curious Riker would love an androgyne. But she was played by a woman and identified strongly female, so it was ironically too believable, and not dramatic. I theorized the episode would’ve been stronger with a truly androgynous love interest  “Rejoined” rectifies that problem, by very effectively portraying what is essentially a gender-free relationship.

Overall: Like any relationship, it’s complicated. 5 out of 5.

S4E7, “Starship Down” (story: David Mack and John J. Ordover)

“I know she wasn’t built for it, but I think the ship can handle it.”

—Benjamin Sisko, making a bloody huge mistake and endangering his entire crew.

The more I’ve thought about this episode the more I dislike it. It’s written by a couple of non-regulars and I’m afraid it shows, repeatedly. But that’s what producers are for? It must have been everyone’s week off. Because right from the teaser, nothing works:

1. The DS9ers hold a vital trade meeting, but they do it in the Gamma Quadrant aboard the Defiant, with no additional security measures. There is no reason at all not to have super important, dangerous meetings anywhere other than DS9. Everyone stop trying to invade, or even just hang out, in the Gamma Quadrant please. Bring a buddy. Bring a fleet of buddies. I mean, seriously, stop being idiots, damn.
2. Dax offers Kira a big plate of food, then learns that it’s a Bajoran holiday, so Kira is fasting. I said to Kristen: “Way to be culturally insensitive, Dax.” Kristen (smarter than me) said: “That’s a writing mistake. Dax wouldn’t be ignorant of that.” Hey, yeah! They work for Bajorans on DS9, they’re going to be aware of the holidays. Especially Dax, who absolutely has experience both doling out, and being a victim of, cultural insensitivities. Over several lifetimes.

If it was just these things, eh, what are you going to do. But it is not. This whole episode was just…off. They just somehow forget how the DS9 universe works and who any of the characters are. All in the name of, I guess, ripping off decades-old submarine movie tropes. Ugh.

I guess I’ll keep going anyway. As the meetings progress, some Jem’Hadar show up and attack, because that’s what Jem’Hadar do. (I refer the reader to point #1 above.) Because you further want to have politically dangerous meetings in the most dangerous place possible, they are orbiting a violent gas giant, and the battle leads everyone into its unfathomably dangerous atmosphere. That’s when Sisko drops the money quote above. Kira, Dax, and O’Brien all do double-takes when he says this. So like, it’s even written into the show that this is dumb as hell. He’s straight up inventing technical specifications. Maybe he felt forced by the situation and is putting on his bravest, boldest Kirk face.

Well, that’s the best I got, so let’s roll with it. Maybe he knows what he’s doing… Nope, actually everything turns out terribly. The Jem’Hadar immediately strike and destroy the bridge. Sisko gets concussed and nearly dies. A bunch of bridge extras do die. Dax gets a facefull of fluorine and is coughing. I bet you are, says Julian. Haha, it’s highly corrosive! Then another Jem’Hadar torpedo hits the Defiant dead on. Welp, that’ll finish them—er, no, wait, it seems that the torpedo somehow didn’t explode and instead lodges right into the ship’s hull, neither exploding nor causing a very inconvenient hull breach, in the most extraordinary turn of luck since Spock accidentally invented time travel. Not only is a bloody torpedo lodged in the hull, it happened to hit Quark’s conference room. So Quark and Hanok work to defuse it, something they are able to approach with any degree of competence because Hanok saw some specs on a torpedo once. (I actually did like the gag that Hanok sold them the torpedoes, so he owes them a refund. Also actually sort of liked Quark’s 50/50 shot at disarming the torpedo and how it loosens up Hanok to Quark’s way of doing business.)

Meanwhile Worf is riding the engineering team too hard and O’Brien has to lecture him. So for the fourth or fifth time, the show has forgotten how one of its characters acts. Worf has worked with humans for years. And he just forgot how to talk to them? MOVING ON. So the engineering team does some space stuff and manages to outwit the Jem’Hadar and get out of it. Shrug. This episode was silly and stupid and of course none of the suspense elements worked because no regulars were going to die. Just a bunch of the extras, so no worries.

Morn watch: We learn he has 17 siblings. Also they try a gag that implies Morn is so boring to talk to Julian has to rely on a ruse to get away from him. WHICH ALSO DOESN’T JIVE WITH THE ESTABLISHED MORN NARRATIVE THAT HE IS VERY POPULAR. Seriously, this episode.

Random thing: Everyone kept fretting over the atmosphere, naturally, since the Defiant had no business being within one. But leaving that behind, I kept thinking about this delightfully droll old Discovery Channel commercial.

Overall: 1 out of 5. See me after class, DS9.

S4E8, “Little Green Men” (story: Toni Marberry & Jack Treviño)

(Speaking of inventing time travel.)

So hear me out on this one:

1. Per the above, it is my stated opinion that “Starship Down” is one of the weakest episodes of the series thus far.
2. This could be construed as opinion as well, but I think it would be shared very widely: “Little Green Men” might be the most ridiculously silly and improbable episode of the series thus far.
3. “Starship Down” stinks.
4. “Little Green Men” was great.

I know, right. If A=B and B=C, A should equal C. But this time, it doesn’t. Why not?

Well, mainly, it was delightful. It’s filled with excellent gags, but also makes for some perfect ’50s sci-fi B-movie satire. This kind of send-up actually feels like it’s become its own genre. It’s not terribly different than the Futurama episode “Roswell That Ends Well” even with similar laffs (e.g., useless injections of sodium pentathol on Quark vs. Zoidberg participating in his own exploratory surgery).

It was also ridiculous. I would go so far as to call it “zany” even. But that’s just the universe it inhabits. A universe where antics and nonsense are the principle drivers. Quark offers to shuttle Nog to Earth, and since he quite uncharacteristically has indicating that he would like to provide someone help, comes under immediate suspicion by Odo. Who is naturally correct: Quark is smuggling some kemocite to Earth. But when their ship is found to be sabotaged, thoroughly out of nowhere Rom conjures up some obscure physics and knows that applying kemocite to the engines will stop the runaway reaction. But it turns out to also be another way to accidentally travel through time. I mean sure, that kind of thing happens here. (Of all the whaaaa? the thing that somehow managed to bother me the most was that they could—on command, from the bridge—just flood the cargo hold with plasma to get it to react with the kemocite. They built this functionality into the ship? So like: What else can you flood with plasma? What else can you flood the cargo hold with? Radiation? Marbles? Meatballs?)

Their landing on Earth is basically a platform for additional antics, with some satire tossed in. Also Odo is there, in German Shepherd form. He’s stowed away on the Orion to catch Quark in the act of smuggling and is forced to shapeshift to remain undetected. I guess all the humans were like, “Oh hey we have a cool dog now!” and they conveniently leave it around whenever.

The show does attempt to demonstrate some limitations of the universal translator, but on the whole the technology remains tantalizingly mysterious. Somehow it works both for the speaker and listener, no matter who’s wearing the thing, which like, come on, no it can’t. Probably it must stay deliberately opaque, and also we should probably not ask more questions about it. Although one takeaway is that it’s now understood the alien races aboard DS9, including the Ferengi, are never speaking English. We just hear it that way.

Eventually they manage their escape, which is just as preposterous. They do some more of the plasma-kemocite thing and arrive precisely back to the present day, naturally. Listen, just roll with it this time around. It’s fun, it’s funny, and I enjoyed it tremendously.

Favorite bit: While studying Earth history, Nog comes across a picture of Gabriel Bell—historically replaced with Sisko—but before he can question it too much all hell breaks loose on the Orion and he forgets all about it.

Odo’s biology corner: His forehead ridges have been thankfully minimized. Kristen observed that while he can become a flawless German Shepherd, he’s still struggling with his humanoid face. Good thing German Shepherds don’t have forehead ridges.

Morn watch: Quark places Morn in charge of the bar while he’s away. Odo speculates that Morn might drink all the profits. I’m maybe starting to feel bad about Morn’s high-functioning alcoholism as a source of comedy.

Overall: Stupidly fantastic. 5 out of 5.