Vortex (DS9)

So we took a week off, unannounced. Sorry about that. But we are back now, with a Deep Space Nine recap: Vortex.

Throughout its early seasons, Deep Space Nine drops hints about two things: Odo's origins and the Dominion, the sinister force that intimidates the peoples of the Gamma Quadrant. Those two long plays, along with Bajoran politics, are the first hints of the unprecedentedly serial nature of this show.

Vortex is the first episode to delve into Odo's origins, and although it turns out to be an elaborate bait and switch it still manages to lay an impressive groundwork. On the one hand, we learn about shapeshifters as a children's story, as part of the mythology of the Gamma Quadrant. On the other hand, we see how deeply the mere possibility of learning about his past can effect Odo; how drastically it can shake his normally steadfast moral compass.

This tension will really define Odo to some: some of his best episodes will put his devotion to his adoptive family against his curiosity about (and eventually loyalty to) his birth parents, as it were. This episode lays the groundwork.

A desperate criminal who happens to have a shape shifting key chain and a knack for running cons realizes Odo's weakness. And he plays him like a drum.

That's an interesting angle on and of itself, and a strong thing for a show in its early stages to do: take the strengths we've just learned to love about our characters and twist them into weaknesses. But vortex had another trick up its sleeve, twisting Crodan back to hero again in the eleventh hour, and showing us that there might just be the odd thing Odo values over law and order.

"Vortex" doesn't really have a B-plot, opting instead to pad the plot with a Quark-centric first half featuring some generic extralegality and a new race doggedly dedicated to their twins, which I obviously found somewhat touching.

And there's a place to pad the episode with sandbox stuff -- cat and mouse Quark and Odo stuff that gives us the "business as usual" of their relationship. But this episode's strongest stuff is Cronan and Odo and testing the limits of our favorite incorruptible lawman -- first with temptation, and then with compassion. And we end the episode with a much stronger, more complex Odo than we ever knew we had.

No observations this week, I've said my piece above. Pictures hopefully to come.

The Nagus (DS9)

The Nagus is a good episode that portends great things to come. It's the first real Ferengi episode, episodes where the A-plot centers around Quark, Rom, sometimes Nog and a range of recurring Ferengi guest stars. None of them more high-profile than Wallace Shawn's Grand Nagus Zek, notable for just how much Wallace Shawn-ness shines through his layers of makeup.

The Nagus paints the Ferengi in their usual heartless, conniving light, although with a little less nuance than the show will land on. The Ferengi here are almost Klingon in their willingness to assassinate whomever's in charge, and that bloodthirstiness doesn't quite play well with the narrative mission the writers have set aside for them.

Ferengi episodes (this one included) are farces, broad comic pieces with cartoonish characters, physical comedy, and often outright zaniness. Sometimes this makes for a jarring disconnect with the rest of the station crew, who tend to infringe only tangentially on the plot. Other times the rest of the crew is relegated to an unrelated B-plot. (The exception being Odo, who has a way of finding his way into Ferengi stories via the tabs he perpetually keeps on Quark.)

I've come to think of these comic episodes (which tend to be more successful than attempts to go broadly comic with the whole crew, like "Fascination") play an important role, especially as the rest of the series finds its way to a darker tone. This isn't to denigrate the actors behind the Ferengi at all, by the way. They all have serious chops and the comedy often stems from how seriously they take inherently silly situations (one is reminded of Frasier, even.)

This time, Quark gets made ruler of the Ferengi people, with plenty of Godfather references to go around. On Ferenginar, corruption is built right into the system, so the Nagus is no public figure. He's the CEO of the Ferengi, or more accurately the Gilded Age boss of their town. He has his hands in every deal and rules with an iron fist -- but he's constantly watching his back for assassination attempts. It's a job not for the faint of heart. The initially disarmingly goofy Zek turns out to be every bit as shrewd as any other Ferengi.

The specific twists and turns of who's killing who and who's not really dead aren't really as important to note here as the general appeal of the episode. About halfway through it I had this realization "Wow, I feel like I'm watching Deep Space Nine." I think the worst of season one is behind us.

And that's even more apparent in the B-plot, which spins off of the main plot when the visiting Ferengi higher-ups pooh-pooh Nog's attendance at Keiko's school (which is being substitute-taught by O'Brien, I assume because the show hit its guest star budget with all those Ferengi). This is a minor qualm of mine, actually: Ferengi society should at least value literacy, a pretty important skill for a shrewd businessman.

Anyway, Sisko continues to be annoyed by Jake's friendship with Nog, and suspicious when Jake misses dinner repeatedly. After some advice from Dax in a very sweet scene, he goes to find him (thank you creepy Big Brother computer technology) and discovers his elicit extra-curricular has been tutoring Nog all along. It's a very simple, even predictable story, but it grows the characters well and presents a sweet counterpoint to the tale of backstabbing and betrayal (goofy though it may be) that constitutes the main plot.

Random Observations:

-- Suddenly Rom is a character. The sharp curve of his season one evolution is crazy.

-- The season continues to slyly lay the groundwork for the Dominion War and the direction the wormhole is going to take the rest of the show (more on that next week!) Here, we see a smart decision to set up the Ferengi as an interested party because of the propensity of business opportunities a new quadrant represents. This ties Quark into the larger scene of galactic politics in a way that will allow the writers to fit him into many stories to come where he otherwise wouldn't have had any reason to be around.

-- I know I promised a double post, but life is crazy right now! Hopefully the week after next I'll be able to get to it.

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?

The Passenger (DS9)

Some of the most watchable, and yet most forgettable, early Deep Space Nine episodes feel like solid Next Generation episodes. I love DS9 primarily because of the ways it differentiates itself from its predecessors (and even from its successors). I'm not as impressed by an episode that rides on guest stars, that doesn't enrich or develop the characters of any of the regulars, even if it's well done, even if it's entertaining and it works.

"The Passenger" is one of those episodes. Possession is very, very well-trodden Star Trek territory, for one thing. Off the top of my head, there's TOS's "Turnabout Intruder", TNG's "The Schizoid Man" and "Power Play", DS9's "The Assignment", Voyager's "Warlord" and "Cathexis" (the former of which is really very close to this premise). I'm certain there are quite a few more. So if you're going to return to that well, you'd sure better be bringing something new and innovative.

This episode at least doesn't follow the typical possession formula, where the possessor jumps from body to body. But the possession does serve as a twist ending in the story, and it's a little too predictable to be a good one.

Ok, he doesn't completely lack his own face.

Everything sort of leaves "The Passenger" as another Deep Space Nine episode that executes well, but there's no there there. The cop who's chased the fugitive for her whole life has the potential for a sort of Les Mis story about obsession, but Vantica, the criminal, is such an obvious, non-gray baddy that that doesn't take. Besides that, he's barely seen throughout the episode, and lacks his own face, which makes it hard to build a character.

Most of the plot is the crew working together to catch the bad guy, with the help of guest-star cop lady. And, of course, since a conceit is needed to keep the action on the station, the bad guy is not just trying to get away but to pull off a heist. A heist of ... a mysterious technobabble material, I guess? The word forgettable keeps coming back.

But the idea of attacking whole systems to get at protected files, and the battle-of-wits aspect to the chase are nice touches, with a little more thought in them than the typical shield modulation shenanigans these chase scenes usually entail. The pacing is good, the tension builds nicely. I have no complaints, per se, but nor was I blown away by anything.

One thing that works here is the subplot with Lt. Primmin, the Starfleet security officer who butts heads with Odo. It works because Primmin is surprisingly deep (and upon his introduction seems like he's going to be VERY one-note) and because neither of them is entirely right or entirely wrong. Odo's fear of being replaced is understandable, but it's his pride that keeps him from working with Primmin. And Primmin can't work with Odo until he gets over his own prejudices and stops thinking of him as a country bumpkin. This idea of Bajor as the boonies, the bible belt to Earth's east coast, is one that hits some good notes and isn't always explored enough. It's too bad Primmin never comes back, but the tension does - we'll see the same struggle play out with Michael Eddington and, to a lesser extent, Worf.

Maybe the story fails because it leans too heavily on Bashir and Dax, who, at this point in the series, are still the weakest regulars, both in their own acting and in the writers not knowing how to use them. Alexander Siddig plays Vantica with all the subtlety of a large mallet, and I couldn't help but think "this is not his best work." Maybe it fails because there's just nothing in it interesting or innovative. Either way, it is what it is: a pleasant, enjoyable, bland background episode that will stand out as no one's favorite. But hey, they can't all be.

 Random Observations: 

- One small blessing of this episode is a famous Odo line. In response to Kajara's "What kind of idiot are you?" he smugly replies "My own special variety."

- Deep Space Nine, moreso than other shows, has almost The Office-like cold opens, especially early in the series. These are really fun and give a slice of life that often gets lost in the action later in the episode. Here it's Bashir being way too obliviously smug in front of Kira. It's just a shame the distress signal comes before she gets the chance to give him the earful he deserves.

- Up until now, doctors in Star Trek have played the role of sages, more or less. McCoy and Crusher's status as healers also allowed them to stand as Captains' consciences and confidantes. So, as much as Bashir's early characterization is 2-dimensional and oh-so-irritating, as a subversion of previous shows it's quite clever. He's a very good doctor, but so naive and socially oblivious and self-centered he's a very poor confidante. I don't mean to hate on Bashir. I think Siddig is wonderfully talented, and by the end of the show Bashir becomes one of my favorite characters, and frankly one that I see a lot of myself in, especially in his flaws. But boy does it take a while for him to get there.

- Feel free to list possession episodes I forgot about in the comments. Would be good to have an exhaustive list. In fact, you know what, I'm adding a tag for it.

Dax (DS9)

This creatively named episode is about Dax. It was about time this show did an episode about Dax, actually. I said before that the Dax-Bashir thing (which they try to make work again in the cold open here) doesn't work because the writers started doing it before they developed either of them as characters. So far Dax has been plodding along through these scripts, rattling off some technobabble here, talking about past lives there, but generally being one-dimensional compared to the rest of the cast, with the exception being Bashir himself.

So it is really good to see Dax in the spotlight, as much as she is here. But actually its an episode about the other characters grappling with Dax, more than anything else. And that's kind of hard to care about, because, once again, the legwork isn't done. Eventually, Kira and Dax are going to be friends. But the show just started, there's no evidence they're friends yet, and yet, Kira is working her butt off trying to save Dax who doesn't want to be saved. Bashir wants to save Dax, but it feels like it's more because he wants to sleep with her than because he cares about her, and Odo wouldn't be Odo if he didn't care more about justice than people.

So, in the end, it feels like Sisko is getting out and pushing every other character, including Dax herself, to care about this damn Dax plot. It's a lot of work for him! It feels like a lot of work for the audience. Meanwhile, the intellectual core of the plot is muddled. The characters have to keep reminding us that it's an extradition treaty not a trial, but Odo saves the day by overturning the evidence of the trial, rendering the extradition trial which took up the whole episode wholly irrelevant.

Sisko and company are arguing about the question of whether Jadzia Dax can be held accountable for Curzon Dax's crimes, and that's a legitimately interesting question, but there's two problems. One, there really ought to be sufficient precedent here that it doesn't merit a hearing. The idea that its under Bajoran jurisdiction who believably might never have encountered the Trill before sort of skirts this, but it's just hard to believe its not open and shut at this point. But the second problem is that the episode never resolves this question, either legally or morally, a real problem for the question that's supposed to be at the heart of the episode.

What is at the heart of the episode, in the end, is what Dax herself thinks about this question: that no matter what her legal responsibilities, her honor binds her to keep Curzon's promises, to save Curzon's lover's reputation. I wish this worked better than it, in fact, does. But it stands to reason that, for a Trill, self-preservation is not purely self-interested. Jadzia Dax shouldn't want to die, because she shouldn't want to cut Dax's life short. And later in the show she (or possibly Ezri) expresses that sentiment. But the fact that here she's willing to put an old lover's reputation over her symbiote's life strains credibility.

So the episode is plagued with high-level problems, even though all the pieces are still fun to watch. Unfortunately, I'm afraid the high-level problems are not going away. Dax is never quite integrated into the cast. Because her backstory is so alien and so not tied into the rich history and politics of the station and the wormhole, all the episodes that focus on her for the rest of the series feel out of place, like TNG episodes cut out and put into Deep Space Nine. I don't count a single Dax episode among my favorites, even though I like the character. I think she won't really feel like part of the show fully until Worf shows up.

Random observations: 

- O'Brien is away on Earth celebrating Keiko's mom's 100th birthday, so he's not in the episode. No one cares why Jake's not in the episode, apparently.

- Speaking of people who are 100 years old, I love the old Bajoran judge lady in this episode. It's great when a bit part has a real character, and the writing shines with her. DC Fontana's last Star Trek teleplay, apparently.

- I kind of like that Odo has no problem going away to a random planet to play cold case detective. Odo is passionate about his work, and Rene Auberjonois lets just a little bit of glee shine through Odo's curmudgeonly veneer to let us know that he loves his job. It's nicely done.

Captive Pursuit and Q-Less (DS9)

Captive Pursuit

Why does it matter that there's a wormhole? That's a pretty good question to ask Deep Space Nine.

After all, there was no wormhole in TNG or TOS and they still met brand new aliens whenever the story needed them. The galaxy in Star Trek is beautifully and conveniently uncharted, even "close to home." But, since Deep Space 9 doesn't move, it can't be on the outskirts of the known space. A wormhole is a way, perhaps the only way, to bring the exploration aspect of other shows to the doorstep.

But the other thing a wormhole does is it lets us bring in the really alien aliens. I mean, we're pretty used to Klingons and Romulans and Vulcans, but what about some people who present some real ethical quandaries. Or language problems.

That's sort of the promise of "Captive Pursuit." The first brand new alien turns up from the Gamma Quadrant. He's acting shifty. He's on the run. He's not interested in cultural exchange of any kind. O'Brien befriends him, despite not getting much in the way of reciprocity.

It turns out Tosk, the alien, is the prey in a bloodsport, running from hunters that eventually find him on the station, penned up in the brig for trying to steal weapons. Sisko is the commander and therefore our resident Federation moralist, and he's impressively livid when he finds out what's happening. At the same time, he's not on secure moral ground. Tosk is really bred for the hunt. It's not fully clear whether it constitutes oppression, when that oppression is built not only into the culture but into a whole race's very DNA.

Sisko errs on the side of the prime directive, as good captains do, and lets the hunters take away Tosk. But O'Brien can't handle betraying his friend, so he busts him out, giving him the only thing he can give him, a fighting chance. And that's it. The aliens leave the station engaged in the same blood sport they began it in, DS9 has made no new allies, and Sisko lets O'Brien off with a stern warning and a slap on the wrist.

This is a good episode, I think, because it doesn't cheapen its own questions with easy answers. On one level it's a story about how we shouldn't automatically judge other cultures against our own moral standards. On the other hand, what should we do when we encounter something that looks so much like ritualized abuse?

It's also a story about how people can make big changes when systems can't. Sisko's hands are tied by the prime directive, but O'Brien's aren't. And O'Brien doesn't feel compelled to fix the system, only to help his friend. But we're left to wonder what exactly that help has bought Tosk. A few more days? Another year? Is it worth it?

We get lots of questions, but no answers, just a juicy taste of what's beyond that wormhole.

Q-Less

Some popular episodes beg for sequels. When Vash and Q disappeared for parts unknown at the end of "Qpid," it's no surprise fans wanted to see them again. And I can imagine the conversation in the writer's room that led to the idea that they would turn up not back on the Enterprise, but on Deep Space Nine.

It was a good theory. In practice, though, with no TNG regulars in the story - particularly no Jean-Luc Picard, the third man in their weird love triangle, Q and Vash are just two random people on the station. There's no particular reason for our heroes to be invested in them.

It's layers upon layers really. I've always found that when Q himself enters into a romance with a "normal," it's awkward. Q is supposed to be so much more advanced than humans that they're irrelevant bugs to him. It's pretty weird when he starts acting like a dumped high school boyfriend on one's account.

So we have Q and Vash's relationship, which is both inscrutable and irrelevant, in the spotlight of what ought to be an episode of Deep Space Nine.

It's not that Q doesn't work with the Deep Space Nine cast. It's that Q really doesn't have any reason to interact with the Deep Space Nine cast. He's just sort of there while they deal with a problem that doesn't have anything to do with him. And the problem is a big stupid MacGuffin - some artifact Vash brought back from the Gamma Quadrant is destroying the station because it's actually a giant space sting ray or something.

Q has a scene with Sisko and it's actually pretty good except for the part where its totally pointless. Neither of them actually needs anything from the other, so they're just characters interacting generically without motivation. It doesn't help that Q brings up the TNG cast, especially Picard, every chance he gets. I think that's one lesson the writers learned prior to Q's much more successful turns on Voyager.

Vash and Bashir actually have some potential as a plotline - what better to actually make Bashir seem like a lady's man than to get him with Jean-Luc Picard's girlfriend, right? And there's some chemistry there (not a lot, on account of Bashir's supply of impossibly cheesy lines.) But instead, Bashir is completely written out and forgotten about by a prank of Q's and returns only as a punchline. His plotline serves no purpose in the story.

Basically, the DS9 writers got two TNG guest stars and totally failed to write them into the show, instead writing them a trite and insipid solo adventure that happened to take place on Deep Space 9. It's the worst sort of crossover, satisfying no one.

Random Observations

- "Captive Pursuit" is our first O'Brien episode, and it shows Colm Meaney off nicely. His everyman charm provides a very relatable motivation to his actions in this episode.

- There's an effort to build an O'Brien-Quark relationship here with some animosity in it, but it doesn't work, I think because O'Brien comes off as too much of a jerk toward Quark. Their relationship through the rest of the show doesn't stand out to me as at all memorable, or even necessarily consistent.

- Why is it that when an object on Star Trek has mysterious properties it always ends up turning into a space jellyfish?

Babel (DS9)

After a solid pilot and a few great character episode, "Babel" is an ensemble show truly in the mode of The Next Generation. The crew getting infected with a disease is a trope that show used far too many times, including in their second episode.

But "Babel" does the disease story better. And it's not TNG's fault. Really good disease stories follow the mode of classic movies like The Andromeda Strain, where the disease threatened to spread and wipe out all life on Earth. The highest stakes TNG could manage were that everyone on the ship would die.

But Deep Space Nine, this episode reminds us, is a port. There are civilians and unaffiliated ships docked, and a disease threatens everyone. And if an infected ship leaves port, the disease could threaten the whole quadrant.

"Babel" features a disease with slightly silly symptoms but deadly serious import. It affects characters we really care about, and gets dangerously close to taking them all out before a handful of immune characters manage to save the day. The stakes rise appropriately to create a drama-filled hour: not bad for episode 4.

The "day in the life of OBrien" motif that starts the episode is delightful, but also drives home some of the themes of the pilot - how, while other crews have been in harmony with their ships, the DS9 crew is constantly wrestling with Deep Space Nine - and O'Brien is their champion in that fight.

When O'Brien falls ill, the spotlight shifts to Bashir, as we get to see him do what he does best: researching under pressure, researching frantically to cure a deadly disease. When Bashir succumbs, the focus shifts again to Kira, and we get to see what she does best: playing outside the rules and circumventing Bajoran politics.

While the merry-go-round of expertise is doing it's thing, the show is showing its hand by pairing up odd-couple Odo and Quark, though not for the last time. The producers are already discovering the level of delight that can come from Armin Shimmerman and Rene Auberjonois sharing a plotline, as they first play a cat and mouse game over Quark's illicit replicator use, and then are forced to team up as Odo runs out of unaffected potential deputees. We start to see that Quark is, or can be, one of our heroes, when push comes to shove - an important, if perilous, direction for the show to move in.

This is still DS9 trying to be TNG, but it's a notable episode because it's DS9 trying to be TNG and, in many ways, doing better at it. The frontier situation, the intercast conflicts, the consequences of being parked, all come into play in positive ways to raise the stakes of this outbreak story. DS9 has proved it can leverage it's strengths to tell an old story with some oomph.

Observation

- Odo's reason for catching Quark at his replicator shenanigan's - that Rom "couldn't fix a straw if it was bent" - is totally wrong, it turns out. Odo prides himself on being observant, so I'll leave you to ponder whether he truly misread Rom, or whether he was playing a larger game with Quark.

A Man Alone (DS9)

So, I failed in doing my research. "A Man Alone" was intended to be the actual second episode of the show, not "Past Prologue." And I think it works a little better as a second episode, actually. It's slower paced than the other and tries a little harder to give us a slice of life on Deep Space Nine. The second scene of the episode establishes this nicely, using the huge set of the promenade to full advantage and staging three simultaneous conversations on the various levels, which set up the different threads of the story.

More on that in a second; I want to hit the first scene of the episode first. You could make a case that the Dax-Bashir nonrelationship kind of sums up everything that's wrong with the first two seasons of Deep Space Nine. The big problem with it is that the writers haven't really figured out Dax OR Bashir yet, and they're basically the two shallowest characters on the show at the outset. Bashir's characterization is that he's booksmart and streetdumb, young, and overeager. Dax's characterization is that she has a worm inside her that makes her wise beyond her years.

And that's it. At this point, that's all there is to these characters. The "locals" - Odo, Kira, Quark - all have occupation backstories tied to the plot. O'Brien has imported backstory from TNG. Sisko's backstory takes up a good chunk of the pilot, and is also tied into the plot. Alone in the main cast, Bashir and Dax just work here. So when you have two characters sorely in need of more depth, the smart move is not to throw them into a relationship with one another. It might seem good on the surface, but what you get is a relationship between two types, not two characters. Bashir hits on Dax inexpertly, cause he's all clueless and stuff. She rejects him, cause she's all old and stuff. That's it. Never mind that later we'll find out that what Dax says about Trills avoiding relationships is a complete lie.

Ok, digression over. In Quark's, Quark and Odo are at the bar watching two conversations across the room: Miles and Keiko O'Brien fighting because, basically, Keiko hates it on Deep Space Nine and feels useless, and Sisko and Dax catching up. Like I said, it's a smart use of the sets. The promenade is more open than any set on TNG or Voyager, where a starship necessitates tight corridors. And Deep Space Nine is a place where a lot of things happen at once, not just a single mission of the week that everyone's wrapped up in.

Quark and Odo's gossip session is interrupted by the arrival Ibu Dan, a Bajoran criminal Odo is not happy to see. Odo would like to just throw him off the station, but Sisko tells him Starfleet's kind of into due process and individual rights and Odo needs to get on board with that. Still, Odo makes his dislike of Ibu Dan pretty obvious, which is a big problem when the dude turns up dead locked in his quarters. All signs point to Odo as the murderer and the restless Bajorans on the station start to go full on pitchfork mob as he (with Bashir's help) rushes to solve the case and clear his name.

That A-plot is solid stuff: It helps define Odo's somewhat ambiguous social role and professional function on Deep Space Nine. Odo's outsider status meshes pretty nicely with his job - cops often feel like outsiders, since they might find themselves arresting anyone, and all close bonds are, in some sense, potential liabilities. When Quark says that being Odo's enemy makes him the closest thing Odo has to a friend, it's not a silly line. It has some real resonance. That's the essence of Odo's character: A Man Alone.

Meanwhile, over in the B-plot, Keiko is starting a school on the station. A big challenge is convincing Rom to send Nog to the school. Rom is rather jarring here, lacking all of the markers that made him into the beloved character he would become. Here he's just another Ferengi, and nearly a villain. There's not too much to say about the school plot, as it just feels very much like a setup, a loose end that didn't fit into the pilot. We've got these kids on board and Keiko, what do we do with them?

Odo's plot ends with a convoluted and sightly troubling clone-related twist, complete with a Scooby Doo-style rubber face mask ending. (Probably the most awkward part is when Sisko reveals in a voice over that the clone Bashir was growing "Woke up and began a new life.") Cloning is a pretty lofty issue with a lot of ethical nuance and grey area, and TNG did at least one episode all about the subject, so to see it turn up here as a technological MacGuffin with no discussion or ethics or repercussions is a little jarring. And the premise is a tinge convoluted.

So the episode succeeds in being meaningful and interesting throughout, but fails to stick the landing, in my opinion. In terms of establishing the tone and style of the series to come, though, it's a solid sophomore outing.

Random Observations:

- Morn, everybody's favorite barfly, is in Odo's lynchmob. This is kind of strange, though it's possible he was just swept up in the crowd, I guess.

- For more about Bashir's prowess with women, this is a highly recommended read.

-This episode features another forgettable Bajoran dude, whose name I am not going to bother to look up.

Past Prologue (DS9)

The second episode of a show gets a smaller budget than the pilot and less attention, but it's just as crucial, especially if the pilot was original enough to make people a little unsure what they were getting into even after it ended.

TNG's second offering, The Naked Now, made the mistake of trying to be a lot like a TOS episode, to assure the old fans that they were still getting Star Trek. Deep Space Nine might have been tempted to try the same stunt, delivering a TNG-style offering. And they do offer us two TNG guest stars in the form of Klingon sisters and politicos Lursa and B'Etor. But it's more of an Easter egg for returning fans than anything else -- the sisters' role on TNG is totally irrelevant to their presence as galactic petty thugs here.

For the most part, this is Deep Space Nine opening with DS9 strengths, not TNG throwbacks. It's a plot with Bajoran politics at its center, a looming Cardassian threat at the edges, and interpersonal cast conflicts throughout. Plus, it introduces Garak, one of many semi-regulars that will enrich the tapestry of Deep Space Nine life.

There's no real "B-Story" here, just a few different threads that come together in the end. The first thread, though, feels as if it's going to be a B-Story, as the young, naive Julian Bashir is joined for breakfast by Garak, the enigmatic tailor that Starfleet assumes is a spy. This relationship has absolutely captivated fans, many of whom have turned it into a bonafide 'ship. It's easy to see why. Garak is supremely quotable, and Bashir feeds him the perfect straight lines. Dialogue between them crackles with nuance and double meaning.


Clearly excited about his enigmatic breakfast, Bashir bounces up to Ops despite having no reason to be there and begins to pester the rest of the crew. Ops is playing the role of the bridge here, but visits to it will diminish as the show goes on. It's where everyone has to be though, when plot comes crashing into the system in the form of a Cardassian warship chasing a Bajoran vessel carrying a former resistance fighter turned Kohn-Ma terrorist.

Tahna Los is kind of a dull white guy, like pretty much every other former Bajoran freedom fighter we'll meet over the course of the show. When it comes to non-clergy Bajoran men on this show, it seems like the writers don't make much of an effort at characterization. They're all pretty interchangable. But Tahna is the first, I guess, so we'll give him a pass.

The conflict here is mostly an internal one for Kira. While the rest of the cast (including Garak and Bashir) are involved in tracking the nuances of the criminal plot that brought Tahna and the Klingons to the station, Kira is being forced to choose between old loyalties and new, and to confront whether she's sold out by allowing and assisting the Federation presence on Bajor. Nana Visitor plays internal angst really well, delivering certain lines such that you can just tell she doesn't quite believe herself.

It also becomes a conflict with Sisko, with Kira attempting to go over his head on the decision about whether to grant Tahna asylum. The attempt is hilarious -- why would Kira ever think a Starfleet admiral would trust her over a Starfleet commander? -- but understandable. Kira needs to be in control of things and gets frustrated when she's not. For her, doing something is better than waiting for someone else to make a decision, even if it's a stupid something.

I love the Sisko-Kira arguments, by the way, because they're written in such a way that it's not clear who's right and who's wrong. But it is clear who wins and who loses.

The episode has internal conflicts driving interest throughout, but it finishes with action, and pretty good, keep-you-guessing action at that. The one odd thing is that Kira and Tahna are so blase about sealing off the wormhole. Their back-and-forth is almost entirely about the economic benefit of the wormhole for Bajor, but it completely ignores the whole "Celestial Temple" angle. As a setup for the rest of the show (which this episode does mostly strongly) it's a curious omission.

This is a pleasantly surprising second episode, and one that makes me eager for more Deep Space Nine. I'm investing in not just these characters, but this place, and the surprisingly complex politics within and around it. And we haven't even gone through the wormhole yet!


Random Observations

- Really nice Kira-Odo scene here that sets up their friend relationship as one where Kira trusts Odo enough to be vulnerable in front of him.

- Weird that Kira and Tahna are old friends, but call each other by their first names (the Bajoran family name) rather than their last. It's like the writers forgot that detail about Bajorans.

- No Quark this episode. (Or Jake actually). I can't decide if this is smart or not, dropping some characters early on to focus on better developing others. But I have to say I didn't miss him too much.

- All Cardassians are hams. It's a simple characterization, but somehow it works wonders. Garak is much more subtle than, for instance, Gul Danar, but there's a subverted hamminess to his performance as well.

Emissary (DS9)

Nineteen ninety-three was an unprecedented year in Star Trek history. Up until then, there had only ever been one Star Trek on the air. But with the success of The Next Generation and the Original Series movies, Paramount was ready to introduce a second concurrent show.

Everything that makes Deep Space Nine special stems from this decision. With most of the Next Generation's creative team at work on TNG still, a new team of creators stepped up for Deep Space Nine. And in order for the show to draw an audience, it had to deviate from the Star Trek viewers knew. Those new creators and that new direction would spin Deep Space Nine into something different from any other show in the franchise.

(I owe a lot in the forthcoming reviews to Terry Erdmann's extremely excellent book, The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion. I've read that book so many times I've internalized a lot of it, so any behind the scenes story I tell probably comes from there (or MAYBE from the DVD special features.))

Anyway, Deep Space Nine. If Star Trek is “Wagon Train to the Stars,” as Gene Roddenberry initially envisioned it, Deep Space Nine is “The Rifleman” in space. A man and his son in a lawless, frontier town.

So, the episode starts differently than any other Star Trek pilot. It starts a few years before the action of the main show, during the Battle of Wolf 359, also known as TNG two-parter “The Best of Both Worlds.” Surprisingly little is ever done with this particular tie-in to TNG, but what's important is we see a defining moment in Benjamin Sisko's life – the death of his wife, Jennifer.

The man we're meeting, our new captain, is not a swashbuckling lady's man like James Kirk, or a married-to-the-stars lifelong bachelor like Picard (I know, in the books he's not a lifelong bachelor, but give me my rhetoric). Sisko is a single father and a widower. Moreover, he's a broken man. He's given Starfleet everything, and Starfleet has taken everything from him. And now it's sending him to the worst imaginable assignment: to oversee longterm rebuilding efforts on a decrepit space station orbiting a war-torn world.

Our new captain is also a black man. I never thought this was all that important in the 24^th Century. But what I've come to realize is it's very important here in the 21^st. It's important to Avery Brooks, and it's important to the franchise. But here, in the pilot, it has only the meaning the viewer chooses to give it. There are many more compelling things about Sisko's character than the color of his skin.

This is a pilot that moves fast. Sisko and his son arrive on the station to face one crisis after another. The station, built by the Cardassians and abandoned when they left town, is literally out to get them. The first person we meet is a hapless Miles O'Brien, freshly transplanted from TNG bit player, who has evidently been here a while trying and failing to fix up the place. A quick scene in the Sisko quarters gets at the gist: the station is a mess, and for Jake it's like when the family vacation turns out to be to a run down old cabin in the woods – and then your Dad tells you you're moving there. Cirroc Lofton nails every note of that.

O'Brien asks Sisko if he's ever met a Bajoran woman, in a way that is supposed to, I believe, remind viewers in the know of some of O'Brien's past run-ins with Ro Laren. And then we get Major Kira 1.0. The Bajoran liason officer, Kira Nerys is much angrier and more one-note than the complex character Nana Visitor will settle into over the next couple episodes. Still some nice notes in the introduction, with Sisko and Kira's first meeting being a power struggle, where neither wins easily, but Sisko clearly takes the upper hand.

One of Gene Roddenberry's cardinal rules was that Starfleet personel did not have interpersonal conflict, and on TOS and TNG that meant no intercast conflict (barring alien influences). But with non-Starfleet crew and even civilians in the cast, Deep Space Nine was free to thrive on intercast conflict, and this is evident even in the pilot.

There's a lot more to set up in this episode. Sisko blackmails Quark into staying and becoming a community leader. And the Kai of Bajor (kind of like the pope) declares Sisko to be the Emissary of the Prophets, and leads him to an ancient Bajoran artifact called an orb. The main plot of the episode is about these orbs leading Sisko to discover a wormhole into the Gamma Quadrant, in which the Prophets, non-linear aliens worshiped by the Bajorans as gods, reside.

It's a lot to take in. It's already setting itself up as a show that will require a lot more investment than The Next Generation, where all you need is a basic familiarity with the crew to enjoy any given episode. DS9 promises us politics, it promises us religion, it promises us ongoing character conflicts. Big stuff for Star Trek in 1993.

There's a scene between Captain Picard and Sisko that bears mentioning. Every pilot has a “pass the torch” guest star in the pilot. It's a tradition. But in the TNG, it's Dr. McCoy opposite Data. In Voyager it's Quark opposite Kim and Paris. Here, it's the old Captain, probably one of if not the most acclaimed actor in Star Trek history and the new Captain. And they're not being friendly with each other. It's a gutsy move, symbolically setting this show up not as a friend to TNG but as an icy rival. The scenes are nothing special, but it's a joy to watch these two actors play against each other for the first and last time. It's a moment for me where I'd like to imagine, if I were watching this show for the first time, I would know it has what it takes to carry the torch.

There's a few more regulars to meet. The writers smartly delay the arrival of Julian Bashir and Jadzia Dax, two characters it will take them a good long while to figure out exactly what to do with. Here they've chosen to have the former hit on the latter, a relationship that will never pan out, nor should it have. Dax is a Trill, which means she plays host to a symbiotic lifeform, which in retrospect was probably one more plot thread than the show needed, since unlike almost all of the others it never really ties into the larger narrative of the show. But it's ok, it's a pilot. Lots of things have been thrown in the stew, and we're seeing what works.

One thing that works is Marc Alaimo as Gul Dukat, former prefect of Deep Space Nine. He's not the first Cardassian to appear on Star Trek, but he redefines the genre, with just the right mix of smug bravado and creepiness. The supporting cast might still be finding it's legs, but the show has found it's hero and it's villian and they will both stick it out until the end.

The pilot has also found it's Trekkiness, as the tension builds on a political faceoff, but the real climax is a conversation about the nature of humanity. The Cage was about God-Like aliens testing humanity. Where No Man Has Gone before was about the test of humans turned into gods. Encounter at Farpoint saw a being with god-like powers literally put humanity on trial. Here a human being tries to teach someone's actual gods how to play baseball. Not just that, but also tries to teach them why the human experience of time, for all it's flaws, is special, meaningful, and irreplaceable.

And unlike some other god-like beings, these ones aren't going away. They'll be Sisko's neighbors for the rest of the show. The Bajorans will still live down the street, and the Cardassians will be waiting in the next town over. Emissary doesn't end with the captain pointing his finger and the ship warping away. It ends with a slow zoom out as repairs and lives continue. The message is clear: get comfortable. We're not going anywhere.