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?
