Move Along Home (DS9)

Usually, bad Star Trek episodes fail on execution. The episode might be really badly written, it might have huge plot holes or inconsistent characterization, but at least the heart of the story is something that makes you say "Yeah, I get why the writing staff accepted this pitch."

 Not so "Move Along Home," at least as far as I can tell. The plot bears more similarity to "Labyrinth" than to Star Trek. But it's labyrinth on a TV budget without David Bowie or Muppets. And considerably less aware of it's absurdity.

Aliens from the Gamma Quadrant, the Wadi, come to Deep Space Nine to establish first contact. Everyone gets dressed up in their finest, but the aliens are more interested in gambling at Quark's than in even meeting the Federation delegation. Despite Sisko's warnings to him about not screwing this up, Quark tries to cheat them after they have an unnaturally lucky run at the Dabo table. He gets caught, of course, and the Wadi challenge him to a new game. And that's where the plot goes from boring to wonky.

 The new game is a board game, but it also automatically captures Dax, Sisko, Bashit, and Kira and transports them to the Wadi ship, where they go through weird trials that match up with what's happening in the game as Quark plays it. Odo mounts an ineffectual rescue attempt, but eventually falls back on glaring at Quark, which more or less seems to solve the problem.

Oh yeah, none of it matters at all because, as Kira puts it "We were never in any real danger!?" The crux of this episode's failings are the impossibly low stakes. The audience knows nobody's going to die, the Wadi know no one's going to die. The characters think they might die, and that's where the episode tries to find tension, but it just doesn't land. The game is too silly to be terrifying, and it doesn't make any sense for the Wadi to come from the Gamma Quadrant and initiate first contact by killing four high ranking officers in a convoluted and random manner. A thinking viewer has no reason to fear that's what's happening, and every reason to include that, in fact, the game is just a game.

 Maybe the problem is that, in a world of holodecks and safety protocols, our first assumption should really be that an elaborate simulation is safe. In the Star Trek universe in general, usually our cue that something is deadly is when they throw a redshirt at it and he dies. It's clumsy, but it works.

And then on top of that, the challenges within the game are totally uninspired, and they don't bring out very much interesting in the characters. They just sort of wander through the game out of a vague, loosely articulated sense that it's what they are supposed to do. It's like the framework of a good adventure story, without a goal of any kind or character agency that makes it worth caring about. 

Sometimes I forget to talk holistically about shows, because I'm quite fixated on writing and plotting. So I will give the show kudos here on sets, props, and makeup. The Wadi have a very consistent aesthetic that connects the game Quark is playing to the labyrinth Sisko and company are trapped in, and even to the colored tattoos the Wadi wear. For a one-shot race with a remarkably flat characterization, the Wadi are at least interesting looking.

 The B-plot is that Jake is interested in girls. It would have been a more interesting B-plot if Jake were interested in boys. But really not that much more interesting. You can hardly call it a B-plot, actually. It's just sort of the writers desperately trying to find things for Jake to do in this show, because he's in the credits. Eventually the writers on this show decide to write for whoever and not care who's in the credits, which I find refreshing. The pattern with Jake in Deep Space Nine is that he gets a handful of his own stories/father-son stories and they're mostly good, and the kid acts them well. He gets a handful of quirky B-plots with Nog, which are hit and miss. He does not really participate in the ensemble shows, with a few exceptions. The show hits its stride when it just embraces it.

Random Observations: 

 - Bashir is not getting less annoying yet.

 - O'Brien isn't in this episode. This is another reason not to like it.

 - Kira makes a really out of character outburst about being an administrator and thus ill-suited to go on adventures, which is just totally at odds with her action hero past. Similarly, this is the second time Dax has espoused an "I've had seven lifetimes, I'm ready to die" attitude as opposed to the "I have an obligation to protect the symbiote" that seems more appropriate.

 - The climax of this episode is supposed to be the moment when Quark breaks down and begs for the other characters' lives. Armin Shimmerman tries his best, but it's a mess, actually. Possibly because of the whole "we know they're not gonna die" thing. But also because, as a character moment, there's no legwork done. He comes off as "petty criminal in over his head" moreso than "bad guy growing a conscience."

 - Lt. Primmin is back! But he doesn't really do anything except be astonishingly negligent re: the disappearance of four senior officers. Someone's got their eye on an ill-gotten promotion!

 - Speaking of which, I'm going to take this opportunity to air a grievance that I have with Star Trek all the time. The computer can tell you at any time where somebody is. It is apparently constantly monitoring everyone's movements and life signs. But when someone is abducted, they never know until they look for someone. How hard would it be to set up an automatic alert when people leave the station in some manner other than the station's transporters or the airlocks? Why don't they do this on any ship or station on the show ever?