S6E1, “A Time to Stand” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

If I didn’t already accidentally put stuff from this episode into the last writeup, I may well put it into the next episode, or vice versa. I’m not used to serial Trek, but thus far I’m into it. Our gang left S5 having ceded control of DS9 to Dukat and the Dominion and as we head into S6, it’s refreshing to not be entirely certain what it’ll even be about. The best recent show I’ve seen where they successfully pulled off season-to-season premise flips was Fringe. Generally Trek doesn’t need radical rule changes to keep it going—literally every episode they can be introduced to an entirely new culture. But the DS9 writing has been so strong I’m eager to see what they can do with it.

So we’re popping back in three months later. Much like the finale of S5, S6E1 spends a lot of its time establishing what will be next. Basically things are going bad for the Dominion, and very bad for the Federation. Sisko et. al. are battered. His father is yelling at him to get Jake back. Julian, who has decided not to bother hiding his genetic superiority anymore, and which apparently consists largely of being good with probabilistic thinking, says they have a 32.7% chance of winning the war. Kira and Odo have evidently spent three months brooding, and it only just now occurs to them to leverage Weyoun’s worship of Odo to do stuff they want. My wife wondered why they weren’t doing this pretty much right away, but unfortunately for Kira and Odo, and fortunately for me she is not stranded on Terek Nor helping them strategize.

Sisko’s mission to wipe out a ketrecel-white facility serves to move along the Federation side of things. It also serves to leave us with another serial cliffhanger when their warp drive is damaged in the fracas. Space is big and we take the warp drive for granted. Julian informs everyone that its wreckage means they can’t get back for 17 years. I’m not sure it’s ever clear how fast impulse speed is, but I’d submit Julian’s math is likely off by at least a factor of 100.

As minimal consolation, at least Dukat isn’t exactly living the dream. Super interesting how this has developed. Dukat didn’t just get powerful again out of nowhere because he’s the badass-est, which is what would happen in like every American movie. He’s had to sell out, trading long-term positioning for short-term gains. This arises partially out of circumstance: Cardassia was left in such dismal shape after fighting the Klingons that he was forced to do some negotiating. It was his stupid choice to do this with the Dominion, but he ain’t a good guy and he was desperate. And it’s left him in a weak enough situation that Kira and Odo get to stay aboard, keeping their vital jobs and clearly conspiring from within, ostensibly just because they are Bajoran citizens and Odo has some influence on Weyoun. So the situation is: Odo does what Kira says, Weyoun does what Odo says, and Dukat has to do what Weyoun says. So weirdly Kira is actually running things, even though she hasn’t really figured out how to do anything with that foundational power. Dukat knows all of this so his only recourse is to continue harassing Kira to try to get to the top of the pile again. Who is using whom is a good question, and it’s a strength of the writing here that it all hangs together.

Overall: 4 out of 5. Two episodes in to the Trek serial experiment, I think we’re in good hands.

S6E2, “Rocks and Shoals” (Ronald D. Moore)

I had just been wondering why Trek doesn’t borrow more from classic SF literature. There’s such a wealth of otherwise forgotten short stories. Though I also wondered about whether getting rights to them was worth the headache, even if they did find one that was clearly adaptable. Then this episode happens along, with a clever core story and Memory Alpha tells me it’s largely borrowed from an old war movie, None but the Brave. Not sure how much of the conflict is straight from that, only with phasers and ketrecel-white, but it makes it seem like if you want to borrow an old story, well, just do it. Perhaps they tweaked this and that, or maybe there haven’t been any original stories since Shakespeare. Or Homer. I dunno. Anyway, this was good! Lots going on here but everything clicks. The Federation and DS9 stories both move ahead and there’s some interesting synergy between the two.

The Sisko gang’s story is the bit lifted from the old Sinatra war picture. It also continues the slow burn of learning about Jem’Hadar culture. Initially they were just near-animal monsters bred only to kill, but we’ve now seen a handful of stories about them where they’re basically unemotional Klingons, with their own similar, but subtly different codes of honor. Vorta, however, are the Slytherin of the Trek Universe. They are cunning as hell. Keevan the Vorta’s power play of tricking his gang into a suicide mission was brilliantly nasty. But…we get it. And it’s the only solution. Even if it’s icky to literally everyone involved.

Back on the station Kira’s work alarm goes off and she has to look herself in the mirror every day, then trudge to her day job running Terek Nor for Cardassian jerks. (Except the guy that makes her coffee. Maybe he’s a good one.) Like Sisko et. al. she is similarly stuck in an icky situation. She feels like there’s gotta be a better way, but the more she thinks about it, this is where she can do the most good, and taking crazy rash action isn’t going to solve anything. I know the larger setting here is a war, but if this ain’t an analogy for employment I don’t know what is. For the 99% of us who don’t burst out of our warm beds with joy just going to our jobs every day, I’m still not about to walk away from it when there’s a rough patch. Even if you’re fortunate like me to feel like your job matters and it’s generally a good thing personally and for the world, it’s still hard some days to see the ultimate goal. If nothing really matters (other than being excellent to each other), why am I really doing this? I’m only going to be alive so long, and day after day I make myself do this thing that isn’t 100% the thing I want to be doing. Some days it’s not even close. What if I die before I get to retire? But then…I probably won’t die before I retire. I will definitely not want to be immediately impoverished when I do, either. Or homeless now, for that matter. Work is a drag but it sure beats not working.

Overall: I loved this one. Both stories are clever and detailed and moved the arc forward. One of the best episodes in the series. 5 out of 5.

S6E3, “Sons and Daughters” (Bradley Thompson & David Weddle)

When Worf came on the show I was excited because I always liked TNG Worf episodes. His ready-made ongoing cultural assimilation struggles made for good Trek fodder. Assimilating into humanity is an old theme for Trek, dating back to Spock’s vague disgust with McCoy’s proclivity for emotional outbursts. They found new ways to tackle this kind of story with Data and Worf in TNG, but I felt like it found another gear with Alexander. A lot of children of Baby Boomers (like me) have immigrant great-grandparents. But I only sorta know where my great-grandparents (and further back) came from as my family has been thoroughly diluted into the melting pot. With an immigrant parent whose life spanned both cultures, Alexander is the second generation that never experienced the old one, and he was a little kid who didn’t care about what wasn’t right in front of him. Worf has matured since he tried to keep Alexander with him, and he still falls into badgering Dax about what a true Klingon woman should do sometimes. The kid never had a chance.

It seems the Klingons are getting thin enough in their reserves that new batches of recruits have grey hair, or have barely ever picked up a bat’leth. The latter turns out to be Alexander, now a young man who is pretty angsty about the old man. Deservedly so. From his perspective, Worf just gave up on him, and it’s a fair criticism. He did. And he shouldn’t have. Worf’s idea of being a father was forcing a kid to do Klingon stuff, and when it didn’t work, he sent him off to be raised by his human adoptive parents. Naturally as he grew up Alexander felt abandoned, and he might’ve ended up just doing human stuff, but instead he got it in his head to try becoming a Klingon warrior, but oh does he suck at it.

I thought the setup was interesting here, glad to see Alexander back, and Worf needs an opportunity to have him in his life again, but I never really got my head around what a terrible soldier Alexander was. He’s wormy and anxious and can’t even do some basic bat’leth stuff without dropping the thing. Maybe he’s more of an intellectual? Well, no…they put him at a key battle station on the bridge and he immediately screws everything up. Are the Klingons this desperate? There’s a chance for him to go to a cargo ship and I know it’s important to their relationship that they work through all of this, but he should totally go work on the cargo ship. But he doesn’t, and Worf agrees he should not have given up on their relationship. So that’s settled then? OK, sure.

I will say that despite this rather clownish re-introduction to Alexander, there’s some truth to the resolution. Family issues have a way of festering sometimes and it can take some kind of external event to prompt a change in conditions. But Alexander, seriously: cargo ship. They need to fight the other ships to win this war, but someone’s gotta handle cargo too. Worf got those Klingon cultists to help with planting by convincing them they were battling “time.” He can find a way to justify getting Alexander a job where he’s not locking himself in engineering.

Meanwhile on the erstwhile DS9, Dukat continues to creepily be creepy by playing off Kira’s motherly feelings towards Ziyal. Again there are some ways this works as a relatable story. Divorced couples often have to find a way to stay on good enough terms that they can cooperate in supporting their kids, and this has that feel. Of course Dukat immediately makes it icky by sending her a dress to wear to Ziyal’s art exhibit. Which forces Kira to relinquish a bit of her relationship with Ziyal, since staying close to her means dealing with Dukat. No one can blame her. I guess the point of the Kira thread is to establish that nothing is ever, ever going to happen to make Kira like Dukat even a little again. As much as she cares for Ziyal, she’s willing to give it up to stay away from him. Seems safe to bet that if she has a chance to zap Dukat, she may take it even though it means something terrible for Ziyal. We’ll see.

Random bit: I liked Sisko and Martok’s bet over who will set foot on DS9 first. I give Martok about 100-1 odds on winning though.

Overall: It has its good points but the main Alexander/Worf thread only sort of worked for me. Let’s go 3 out of 5.

S6E4, “Behind the Lines” (René Echevarria)

As with “Sons and Daughters” it feels like we’re getting everything into place to wrap up this story arc sooner rather than later.

• The shaky foundation Dukat erected to make victory possible is showing cracks everywhere. Notably with Damar, the Cardassian who prepares Kira’s raktajino every morning and I probably wrongly judged to be OK, is developing both an attitude and a drinking problem. I’m not sure what to make of this guy. Other than, he’s a Cardassian and is probably in it for himself, whatever “it” turns out to be.
• Sisko gets promoted to do Admiral stuff, which means he’s no longer doing Captain stuff. This leads to him staring out the window watching the Defiant go on an important mission rather than being on the ship making overconfident decisions about its capabilities. This parallels the TOS movies where poor Kirk lamented over getting old and becoming a bureaucrat. But mostly getting old, which is not Sisko’s problem yet. I think it’s safe to assume he will find a way to get back to where he was as this arc resolves itself.
  • I feel like this kind of story has gotten more relatable to me as I myself have gotten older and been a professional human for a while now. My last few jobs have all been on small teams, which means that inevitably there will be an open position on the team, and someone’s gotta cover it. In a larger organization things can get spread around more, but on a smaller team it means triage and a crazy month or two. Pro tip: it turns out that open work doesn’t get covered further up the organizational chain, it goes either sideways or down. So when my boss left last month, I got the bag. A lot of people at my age and experience level have transitioned from doing stuff to managing stuff and it takes some getting used to. We feel you, Sisko and old Kirk.
• The female changeling shows up on DS9 to try to leverage some influence on Odo. He’s still mad at her but she gets back on his good side. What she does exactly can only really be understood as the changeling version of seduction. She talks him into linking with her a few times and by the end he blows a sabotage operation because he’s in the throes of linking and incommunicado.
  • Back when I saw “Broken Link” I got a little huffy about the female changeling not having a name. They finally get around to explaining this today, that names don’t really mean anything to changelings. Well, OK, whatever. I guess that’s where they have to go when they don’t bother naming a female character for five seasons.
  • Kira is furious, and she should be. Poor Rom gets thrown in jail to take the fall for someone else for the second time in the series. This time it’s the Cardassians rather than Odo and Sisko asking the questions though, so I’m pretty mad at Odo myself.
• Even Quark is done with the Cardassians. Mostly because their Jem’Hadar buddies are lousy customers. But still, we can probably count on him whenever things start going down.

Overall: Something of a return to form after the mild whiff of “Sons and Daughters.” 4 out of 5.