1x16 If Wishes Were Horses

[4.4/10] Star Trek has done the “thoughts made real” bit plenty of times. The Original Series did it with “Shore Leave”. The Next Generation did it with “Where No One Has Gone Before”. It’s well-trodden territory. That’s not to say Deep Space Nine couldn’t take its own swing at the same idea, but you have to come up with a new spin on it. And “If Wishes Were Horses” just doesn’t.

The DS9 crew’s imaginations are surprisingly dull for an episode devoted to the power of them. Someone wishes for it to snow on the Promenade. Quark wishes for sexy ladies. Some other rando wants some kind of alien fowl running around. For the endless possibilities of the human mind, the inevitable limited budget of a 1990s television show leaves the denizens of the station seeming rather provincial.

Even the more adventurous (and practical) wishes are odd and, at a minimum, a source of missed potential. The most puzzling is Chief O’Brien accidentally conjuring Rumplestiltskin. I suppose the point of him is to challenge how far Miles would go to save the station, particularly if the cost of rescue was his daughter. But in practice, it’s just some poor little person in troll makeup pestering the Chief over and over again to no point or purpose.

The biggest missed opportunity is Dr. Bashir accidentally creating a version of Jadzia who’s desperately in love with him. For one scene, the show actually explores what a strange, constitution-testing situation that would be. There’s good beats, like Dr. Bashir not wanting to take advantage of a frisky Dax because he assumes something must be wrong if she’s coming onto him, another unexpectedly heartening paeon to consent. Jadzia reassuring Julian that it’s natural to have fantasies, and if anything, she feels like they invaded his privacy is a really interesting perspective to explore.

But from there, the whole thing turns into unfunny broad comedy of how cartoonishly smitten Faux-Dax is, and any potential to say something through this strange yet unique scenario goes out the airlock. How two people would react to a romantic fantasy for one about the other coming to life would be compelling and challenging if the show took it seriously. Instead, we just get a bunch of hacky shtick.

The same can be said for most of “If Wishes Were Horses”. This is, for lack of a better term, a comedy episode of DS9. But the humor is so superficial and obvious that you can’t paper over the stupidity of the whole situation with laughs. There’s the occasional chuckle, like Odo’s dream turning out to be Quark in jail. But for the most part, “If Wishes Were Horses” is a near-endless parade of gags that land with a thud and plot points that are dead on arrival.

The one exception is the connection between Commander Sisko and the recreation of Buck Bokai, his favorite ball player. The notion of how Sisko knows something is afoot, but is still warmed by this opportunity to converse with his hero adds the one effective bit of sentiment in this episode. I’m not much of a baseball fan, but getting to tell one of the greats who inspired you how much their career means tugs on the heartstrings. (And having Deadwood’s Keone Young in the role doesn’t hurt either.)
The problem is, there’s not much of a plot here. Sure, there's a crisis of the week with the latest spatial anomaly threatening the station. But it’s perfunctory set dressing while most of the episode is devoted to our heroes dealing with their quasi-magical problem in would-be comical tones. So the episode doesn’t progress; it just kind of kicks around.

I do appreciate the way the ending ties into the main idea of the episode. I’d naturally assumed that the explanation for how these imaginary friends all became real was a product of whatever the weird space phenomenon of the week was. But it turns out, the latest threat is also a product of our heroes’ imaginations, most notably Dax’s, when a strange reading led her to accidentally think a crisis into existence. The “We just have to believe things are fine!” ending is a little silly and abrupt, but there’s merit in the recursive solution to the problem.

Still, it definitely falls into “Don’t think too hard about it” territory. The limits of the imagination powers are never really clear, and what makes one vision triumph over another doesn’t really make sense. How many aliens are pretending to be tulpas, and what exactly makes them appear or disappear, and why various events stop and start with a ship full of believers and the like seems random rather than directed.

And not for nothing, it falls back on some tired Trek tropes. We’ve done the “godlike beings come to check out humanity” routine so many times, and again, there’s nothing particularly interesting about this one. What the aliens who cause all these problems hope to accomplish is never particularly clear beyond a vague “see how you’d react” handwave. Nobody’s motivations here add up, which lends itself to a lump hour.

The best “If Wishes Were Horses” has to offer is a generalized paeon to imagination. I always bristle a bit at such self-flattery in science fiction shows. Anytime uber-powerful aliens stop by to tell humans (or at least humanoids) that they’re extra special in some way feels like vanity. And the whole “power of imagination” speech is trite, fit for a preschool show, but not really for Star Trek.

And yet, despite all my qualms about the episode, I can’t help but like its final thought. The alien posing as Buck Bokai tells Sisko that what’s so impressive about him is how much he connects to a figure he never even knew, how the idea of him can feel so real that it’s genuinely inspiring to those who connect with him via their robust imaginations.

The same, of course, is true for devoted Star Trek fans. The likes Mr. Spock, Captain Picard, Constable Odo, and the others exist only in fiction. They are not real. And yet through a combination of writing, performance, and presentation on the one hand, and imagination and acceptance on the other, what they stand for, what they choose to do with their lives, what their experiences are, have meaning for us in the real world.

In a way, we’re all constantly conjuring our heroes or worries or fantasies out of thin air, just not in so literal a way. That doesn’t stop those notions from moving us, even changing us, thanks to our ability to connect with them across distances in time and fiction. I think that’s what “If Wishes Were Horses” is going for, and it’s an admirable idea. But I wish the writers of this one had dreamed up a better way to illustrate it.