S7E1/2, “Image in the Sand”/”Shadows and Symbols” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

One reason I have trouble treating the Bajoran religion with the proper gravitas is the orbs. First off, “orbs” as a concept are inherently much more funny than mystical. (We even bought this wood orb at Target probably 50% because it looks interesting and 50% because we are just liking the word “orb” (which is clearly labeled “WOOD ORB” on the actual orb, but they’ve disappointingly shifted terminology to “decorative ball” on the website)). Plus it seems like there are a whole lot of orbs for seemingly any faith niche, not unlike Christian patron saints or Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. Even if they didn’t have the orbs I wouldn’t say that Sisko’s visions have been very interesting. They come and go, and weird symbolic cast members say Twin Peaks stuff. I don’t really like stories that hinge on dreams either, and these visions have the same feel. Whenever you need to whip up some motivation for your character, just give ’em a really compelling dream or vision or something.

So anyway Sisko has a vision and that whips up some motivation for him to finally move on from the minimum-wage gig at his dad’s restaurant. He knows he has to find some orb on the planet Tyree, and he also sees a woman’s face. After he re-creates the face in a PADD sketch program, Dad pulls a classic “I don’t know anything about that! Just forget it! Leave me alone!” kind of thing that on TV absolutely means that he knows everything and will subsequently require scene after scene of goading before he spills it. Sigh. It turns out to be Benjamin’s real mother, who managed to leave behind a weird Bajoran artifact, and also Sisko gets jumped by a cultist. Seems like it’s time to pack up the baseball, and that’s before New Dax even shows up.

Back on the station, Worf is trashing holosuites to express his concern that he doesn’t think Jadzia is going to make it to Sto-vo-kor on account of being murdered, which hardly seems fair. You’d think the Klingon gods would consider her body of work over her final moment getting ambushed by a lunatic. Newly promoted Colonel Kira is dealing with cultists and the astonishingly predictable deterioration of their alliance with the Romulans. Is that enough setup for part 2? Everyone’s packed, armed, angry, or recently introduced.

Well, like a lot of these DS9 two-parters, I feel like half is good and half is just OK. Sometimes the setup is too stretched out and the payoff doesn’t make it worth it, or, as in this case, the setup is interesting but the payoff just sorta checks all the boxes and resets everything.

• I do like this reluctant host idea that Ezri wasn’t prepared to be the new Dax at all, that she was conscripted in a Trill-mergency and now that’s who she is. We haven’t had a good new Trill idea for a while and this is an interesting one, beyond the definitely-going-to-be awkward eventual meeting of Worf that it lines up. Trills may find themselves inheriting radically different lives sometimes, which sounds like the cross-sectional space between DS9 and Quantum Leap.
• I also liked the tie-in to “Far Beyond the Stars” and the interesting doubt-seeding about which universe is the real one.
• Though I didn’t like the pointless tagging along of Grandpa Sisko through Ben’s desert quest, which amounted to mostly him being overheated and exhausted and falling behind. Which is what I would do if I had to traipse through the desert too, but it doesn’t make for compelling TV. One supposes they might have thought to build up a Grandpa emergency at some point, but then it would have come off as either too contrived or too mean so they just had to roll with it. Everyone likes Grandpa Sisko and there’s no great need to make this whole thing even more cruel for Ben.
• This was the episode for pointless tag-alongs I guess because Quark on the bridge of a Klingon warship is even more absurd than dragging your elderly father through the desert on your vision quest. And there’s a whole lot more complaining.
• But the general Worf et. al. mission to destroy some shipyards in Jadzia’s honor, thereby granting her admission to Sto-vo-kor, is pretty good. The weird Klingon rules can get a bit too fungible to matter sometimes, but if it satisfies Worf, I’m good with it.
• The Romulan story wasn’t hugely rewarding to me, it just wasn’t going to ever go any way than it did. But it does remind us that Kira is a Boss.

Overall: A pretty good two-parter (three if you could the end of last season). Great execution if a little flimsy on motivations. 4 out of 5.

S7E3, “Afterimage” (René Echevarria)

With that arc settled, it’s time to meet the new girl. Only she’s not really “new” she’s kinda recycled, and only like 15% new. Actually that raises a question. Have we established how long a symbiont really lives? It’s been something like seven Trill lifetimes now for Dax. So if a symbiont is part of everyone who’s every existed before, each new host makes up a smaller percentage of the whole. If they were weighted evenly then eventually the new host wouldn’t even register in proportion to all previous ones. Even for Dax it’s getting pretty small. But they aren’t weighted evenly, and based on six seasons of Jadzia, I’d say any given Dax is like 50% current host, with varying shades of the rest. Seems like stronger personalities win out, plus a recency bias.

Leaving behind Trill math, other than Sisko, everyone is varying degrees of skeezed out by Ezri Dax, including Ezri. This episode is about the skeezing. Actually there’s some skeezing and some welcoming and really everything in between. Sisko still wants to call her “Old Man,” which Jadzia dug but weirds out Ezri. Quark sees the situation as a second chance with Dax. Bashir sees her as a different person, but then Ezri messes him up by saying he woulda had a shot with Jadzia if not for Worf, and Worf senses this too I guess because Julian is the one on a receiving end of a Worf choke hold, not Quark. Ezri still hasn’t really figured out how thoroughly her life has been messed up, but she tries to work through it by helping Garak get over his guilt for decoding Cardassian messages.

Not really feeling any strong opinions about the whole Garak thread, despite that being the crux of this ep’s story. I think we can all grok that he’s feeling guilty about being so directly involved in the ultimate destruction of his people. Ezri’s role in helping him figure this out isn’t as interesting as her other relationships though.

Anyway the portrayal of changes in those relationships makes for a very strong episode. This is the kind of thing DS9 does well: it’s some kind of weird SF situation but the story encompasses all of the major characters and they all have a logical and/or natural reaction to it. Worf is probably the hardest to pin down and the show doesn’t try to guess his feelings, because we can’t exactly tap into the human experience of how you should react when your spouse dies, but their symbiont is restored into a new person, and that person becomes your co-worker. It seems about right that he would want to avoid her, yet get jealous of anyone who didn’t do the same.

Overall: 4 out of 5. A necessary housekeeping episode but it gets the job done.

S7E4, “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” (Ronald D. Moore)

Not for the first time, the episode summary and Netflix still looked so silly that we briefly thought it might be a skip. But then it was good! (Just to clarify this before moving on, I don’t think we’d really skip an episode. Especially considering that the two times we thought about it, they turned out to be good, with multiple bad episodes sneaking up on us in between. We are bad at Trek speculating.) And in fact, one of the more entertaining episodes of the series, even if its execution is a little clunky.

So a Vulcan crew stops over at DS9, spurring a few seemingly unlikely coincidences: they are into baseball and want to challenge Sisko’s crew to a game. But it turns out their captain is an old school rival of Sisko’s, whom he insists on challenging through sports despite Vulcans being smarter and way stronger. In this case, they also have a vastly superior baseball team by dint of…knowing how to play baseball. Sisko recruits his staff to challenge them, putting together a rag-tag team that will shock the arrogant favorites with a victory based on heart and desire, not logic.

Hahaha, no, this isn’t what happens at all. Their garbage rookie team gets mauled by the sharply efficient Vulcan team. But that’s what makes this episode great. I say a lot that DS9 doesn’t do the normal thing with a lot of these clichéd setups, and here’s another example. Because a win here wasn’t going to happen. When I was in grad school we had an intramural softball team. It was a lot of fun and I couldn’t tell you how many we won or lost. Probably every team was .500 just by expected randomness. That was our first season, anyway. Our second season we somehow missed a registration deadline and didn’t get to play in the same grad student league, we got tossed into the leftover pile. Mostly it ended up being undergrad fraternity/sorority teams and our team of scrawny library school students got destroyed every time. We usually got mercy-rule’d so at least we didn’t have to suffer for the full six innings every game. So honestly if “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” would’ve gone down any other way I wouldn’t have been a fan. Instead it morphed into a story about Rom’s redemption, Sisko’s ego, and finding joy in unexpected places. The haughty Vulcan jerk can call it “manufactured triumph” (saving that one for a future fantasy baseball team name, btw) all he wants but no one cares.

We wondered a bit if Vulcans would really like baseball. It’s established that they might like good logical games like chess. I could also see them liking games and sports more generally. Anything where there’s a sense of rule and order, where you can refine mental or physical skills. But I can’t imagine they have any kind of professional sports. I’m a dumb human who spends a lot of time watching and thinking about pro sports so I absolutely know how illogical and stupid those are. But I’ll buy that Vulcans like them for their personal enjoyment. Baseball maybe is a stretch since even this era’s humans don’t know a thing about it (but apparently all other ship business can be put on hold for a few weeks for a crash course).

So many good bits from this one that I liked:

• Most players: “Hey batter batter batter Hey batter.” Worf: “Death to the opposition!”
• Their absurd practice jerseys of all colors, shades, materials, etc. It was like they asked the costume designers themselves were from the 24th century and told what baseball uniforms sorta looked like, and they went from there. Although their actual team jerseys were pretty sharp.
• So many good Memory Alpha trivia bits. I learned that Cirroc Lofton is the nephew of Kenny Lofton, actual very good human baseball player. I guess it didn’t rub off because every time Jake pitches they did an obvious quick cut to a stand-in. MA also says Max Grodénchik had been a semi-pro player but he’s playing the laughably bad Rom, so they made him bat lefty and wear his glove on the wrong hand to approximate the proper sort of ineptitude.
  • There’s plenty more in there but I don’t need to relate them all just to relate them. This episode might have the best trivia section of any show of the series.

Overall: 5 out of 5. All-in on “manufactured triumph.”