A very standard and predictable story about bickering rivals getting stranded together actually turns out to be quite good fun thanks to the great chemistry between Odo and Quark, and the actors who play them. The mountain scenery makes a nice change and we get to see Odo experience how frail a human body can be now that he doesn't have his shape shifting abilities.
The arguments between them do get over-the-top. Odo has had numerous chances in the past to "catch" Quark in a crime, so it feels a bit odd that this is the time he finally decides to do it. And of course, we know that the two of them don't really hate each other at all, although calling what they have a "friendship" does feel like a bit of a stretch. The closing moment of the episode encapsulates this nicely.
In some ways the b-story with Jake and Nog is even more fun as it rips off The Odd Couple. The show always managed to make Jake's relationships with both friends and family feel natural and it's easy to get invested with them. Sisko does a pretty great job at sorting their problems out, and I quite liked that his solution was a simple as "deal with it!".
Nothing special overall, but quite an easy watch.
[7.9/10] I don’t think you could do “The Ascent” with just any two characters. There's something special about Quark and Odo, in the way they both genuinely hate each other and genuinely love each other.
I don’t know how else to describe it. When Odo calls Quark a fraud and a failure, when Quark calls Odo a freak and a fascist, when they run down their list of grievances with one another, you believe they mean it, even without their laughing affirmation of it at the end of the episode. It is born of such loathing, from men at their most desperate and unvarnished, angry at life at taking it out on their favorite targets -- one another.
Yet, whatever they say, their actions reflect profound love. So many times when the two of them strive to climb the mountain whose altitude might allow them to send out a distress signal, either could leave the other for dead. Instead, Odo expresses legitimate concern when Quark falls over. Quark goes to great lengths to give Odo a makeshift splint and stretcher to carry him up the mountain. They dress it up in self-interest as always, but every major choice they make is one of self-sacrifice to protect, save, and even honor the other. They can say whatever they want. What they do tells a different story.
And what is it, yet a peculiar blend of love and hate, to be able to know exactly how to hit another person’s sore spot. You have to be perceptive to clock a subconscious desire from Odo to become a solid despite all his gripes, or at least know the accusation would eat at him. You have to know Quark to know how diminishing him as a small-time crook who’ll never be able to play with the big boys would burn him up inside. And you have to have a certain emotional suicide pact to throw it back in Odo’s face, and call him the bigger failure for never catching him despite ten years of trying.
It’s not a healthy friendship, or one founded on mutual admiration and respect. But it’s a friendship nonetheless, however peculiar it may be. It takes caring about a person to dredge those sorts of perfect barbs up, to push them to their limits, to exceed yours in trying to save them. With the way they bicker, but show deep acts of kindness, you’d think Odo and Quark had been married for years. I suppose, in a way, they have.
But if Quark and Odo are an old married couple, Jake and Nog are the young couple who just moved in together. With Nog moving back to the station for “field study”, the two young men share quarters together, and find that they’re not as copasetic as grown roommates as when they were much younger friends.
It’s a cool idea! More so than any other Star Trek series of this era, Deep Space Nine is about change over time. So marking the distance between when Jake was the ostensible good kid and Nog was a comparative troublemaker, to where Jake is the lackadaisical writer and Nog is the self-disciplined cadet dramatizes how far each has come. Who they are as young adults is different from who they were as kids, and their lives and dispositions might not fit together the same way they once did. That's a neat thing to explore!
The problem is three-fold. For one, it’s realized in caricatured bits where Jake is a lazy slob and Nog is an overbearing mini drill sergeant. Their conflict is a stock Odd Couple routine, without a ton of down-to-earth relatability. For another, their sillier interludes are an odd tonal match with the A-story, which has its comic elements, but is a more intense and personal story of survival.
Most of all, though, it just sort of ends without a real resolution of the problem. Captain Sisko and Nog have a nice conversation as fathers about their sons needing to be a little more like one another. So despite Nog and Jake’s tiff, Ben just jams them back together and all is solved. There's no realization, no growth, no acknowledgment that anything’s different. It’s like their dads just flipped a switch somehow.
Maybe there was another beat there originally, but it was cut to give more time to the Odo/Quark storyline. If so, that's the right call given the gravity there. But Jake and Nog’s shaky reunion and ensuing disagreement is a compelling storyline that could use a more grounded take and more time to fully explore.
That said, part of my frustration is that Quark and Odo get plenty of time to simply bounce off of one another (in some cases literally), and the show makes magic from it. If you’ll pardon the expression, there's a nice sense of escalation to their storyline. As things progress, the two unexpected partners grow more and more frustrated with one another. Their situation gets more and more desperate. They’re more and more physically and emotionally challenged. The principle here is the same, but this is an almost textbook outing in how to keep raising the tension and the impact of the challenge to test where and whether your characters will crack.
A great deal of credit owes to the make-up, costuming, and production team, who use their talents to make the Ferengi and the Changeling look truly ravaged by the end of the episode. As with Odo’s deterioration in “The Die Is Cast”, the craftspeople do an incredible job at showing what a physical impact the journey up the mountain is having on Odo and Quark, in a way that conveys the hardship on their bodies that mirrors their psychological decline through all of this.
And of course, a great deal more rests on the shoulders of the actors, who must not only communicate that degradation both mental and physical as well, but show the layers of two men who despise one another but would die for one another. Armin Shimmerman and Rene Auberjonois have sublime on-screen chemistry, making it believable that they could get on one another’s last nerve, but also know each other so deeply that they cannot help but grow attached.
It’s a funny thing. Even in Deep Space Nine’s rocky early years, Quark and Odo were a pairing that worked from the jump. The loud disdain for one another. The quieter moments of looking out for one another. The drive to one-up and beat one another. The deeper drive to protect one another. It’s all there almost from the beginning. With the deep web of connections across the show, they may have the strongest and most complicated relationship of anyone on the station. Bringing it to the forefront in an episode like “The Ascent”, and letting two actors, two characters, and a bizarre but compelling bond shine in the spotlight, makes for a unique, memorable outing that could only come from these two noble schmucks.
Review by Alexander von LimbergBlockedParent2021-12-28T19:24:28Z— updated 2023-08-18T11:14:30Z
Good episode. Pretty standard really and predictable but this duo makes it fun and the great scenery contributes to the above average quality of this episode. If only they had the budget to shoot more episodes in the great outdoors. Again, Quark proves to be a tenacious and resourceful fellow. I still think it's strange that Odo never got a proper "you're a solid now episode" in which he explores the joy of being a solid. This episode sort of shows some aspects of his new life: Quark brutally points out that Odo still behaves like a miserable outsider and Odo is confronted with the limits of his new fragile corporal existence. But that's only one part of Odo's new self. Discovering the joy of being a corporal is a story for later episodes. I'm looking forward to it.
The B-plot with Jake and Nog isn't exactly a masterpiece. But mirroring the Odo/Quark story was a good idea and seeing Nog returning is great anyway. Their unlikely friendship is great. It always was. They are friends but there's enough friction to make it interesting.
Best scene: Rom suspects Nog is a changeling :-)
PS: Make-up is great in this episode