LeftHandedGuitarist

[8.5/10] One of the keys to any kind of art is layers. Whether it’s a story, a character, a performance, or a world, the idea that there’s more going on under the surface than what we immediately see, which can then be unveiled or communicated to the viewers as they go, is vital to artistic expression regardless of what form it takes. That’s a principle “Proving Ground” takes to heart, giving us layer after layer of the Andorians’ connection to our heroes, and creating an outstanding outing for Enterprise in the process.

The episode starts with the first layer of the Andorians’ intentions when they approach the Enterprise out of the blue (no pun intended): “We want to help.” At first, Archer is understandably skeptical. The humans and the Andorians haven’t exactly seen eye-to-eye in any of their past encounters, even if they’ve reluctantly been on the same side of one conflict or another. T’Pol raises some legitimate (if a bit biased) concerns that the Andorians might be duplicitous, only interested in what suits them.

But Shran (who is back and great as always) makes a good case for why the Andorians would intervene on Earth’s behalf. For one thing, Shran once again owes Archer after he helped prevent a war between Andoria and Vulcan last season, and Shran doesn't like owing debts. For another, it’s plausible that even an Imperialist group like the Andorians would feel for the plight of a people who lose seven million souls in a single attack and be apt to join them in a quest for revenge and glory.

Most of all, he puts forth a self-serving reason why the Androians would be willing to join Enterprise’s crusade -- to help shift the humans to being loyal to them rather than to the Vulcans. Shran deliberately underlines the fact that none of the Vulcans joined the Enterprise’s mission or offered assistance with their mighty fleet, and that T’Pol had to resign her commission to stay with it. This is an opportunity to for the Andorians to supersede their pointy-eared rivals as Earth’s best friend, whether that gets them strategic or resource gains, or just the petty joy of winning the loyalties of the Vulcans’ designated allies out from under them.

The case is plausible enough that when Shran wants to have members of his crew board the Enterprise, help them make repairs, share sensor data between them, and assist in the mission to intercept the Xindi weapons test, it seems fair for Archer to accept, especially when the ship is in rough shape after a particularly serious encounter with an uber-anomaly. The Xindi still just feel like the Evil League of Evil right now, even with the nice touch of Gralik’s sabotage coming to fruition when their prototype is tested, but the test provides a nice excuse for the Enterprise crew and Shran’s crew to pull of a fun, joint operation.

If nothing else, it’s a hoot and a half to see Shran trying to pull of the ruse of being a representative from the “Andorian Mining Consortium” looking for a “rare” mineral called “Archerite.” Jeffrey Coombs nails every part of this episode, but the high point may come when he expertly delivers the layers of that little performance within a performance. Shran needs to come off as affable and harmless, but a harsh reception from the Xindi has him struggling to keep his natural combativeness under wraps while staying in character.

Still, we get glimpses at the Andorians’ character on the Enterprise which suggest there’s yet more to these “wig-heads” than meets the eye. Part of that comes from the B-plot of the episode, which sees Reed and Andorian Lt. Talas working to repair the ship’s tactical systems together, and bonding a bit in the process.

In truth, their trajectory is fairly predictable. They start out not wanting to help one another, find that each is talented at what they do, and eventually develop a professional respect and the beginnings of a personal friendship as they learn they’re more alike than they initially thought. Still, the two characters have good chemistry, and the script strikes the right tone, both of cultural gaps needing to be bridged, and of a common understanding that comes from the hardships of being in a military family and their dedication to their jobs.

Of course, the episode turns that connection on its head when it’s revealed that Talas sabotaged the Enterprise’s sensors so that the Andorians could steal the Xindi weapon for themselves. That adds a whole second layer to everything we’ve seen. Shran’s comments to Archer about wanting to help Earth are all part of a ruse to get in his good graces. Talas’s warming up to Reed was a calculated effort to gain his trust and, more importantly, access to his sensor panel. This uncharacteristic bit of altruism turns into a characteristic bit of opportunism from the Andorians, just like T’Pol predicted.

The show even gives them a good motvation. The Xindi weapon will finally give the Andorians the upper hand in their clashes with the Vulcans, something to motivate their adversaries to lay off the border skirmishes. The episode plays the betrayal for drama nicely, giving us a smart space heist set piece that culminates with Archer being jettisoned in an escape pod. Thankfully (also, conveniently), Archer subscribed to the “trust but verify” mantra, and made similar preparations against Andorian treachery, playing a game of chicken with them over the weapon that ends in it being destroyed, the Andorian ship being hobbled, and the Enterprise able to go on its merry way.

So that’s it, right? Simple story. The Andorians pretended to be good to get something they wanted, but it turns out they’re bad, and our heroes were prepared for it. There’s nothing wrong with that type of story, especially in genre fiction. But good art takes things a layer further, a layer more complicated, a layer more interesting, and that’s exactly what “Proving Ground” does.

Because even though Shran “graciously” refuses Archer’s help, the implication is that he secretly transmits the Andorian ship’s sensor data on the Xindi weapon to the Enterprise. When in contact with his commanding officer, Shran asks if there’s another way and preemptively rejects a commendation. Hell, for all we know Talas genuinely made a connection with Reed, but just did her job the same way Shran did. We learn that the most prominent Andorian on Enterprise is someone who pretended to have good intentions, when he truly had bad intentions (or at least, self-serving intentions), but was following orders and, left to his own devices, would have made good (or at least, better) on those original good intentions.

It adds complexity to the relationship between humans and Andorians and on the relationship between Archer and Shran. One of the best scenes in the episode, and maybe the series, sees Trip asking Shran for the Andorian’s antimatter converters. Shran demures, but expresses sympathy for the loss of Trip’s sister in the attack and empathizes with the quest for vengeance. Trip rebuffs the suggestion, saying that it’s not about revenge; it’s about keeping others from having to suffer the same fate. Shran confides a story of losing his own sibling in battle, and with that shared sort of loss between them, agrees to give Trip the technology.

Maybe it’s all an act. Maybe the tech was fairly pedestrian and it was another part of the scheme to gain the Enterprise’s trust to where the Andorians could complete their mission. But I’d like to think it was genuine, another sign that Shran continues to see potential in these “pink-skins”, enough for him to give them the smallest bits of help along the way. As Archer puts it earlier, he and Shran keep finding themselves doing favors for one another, and Shran replies that it’s how alliance are born. Alliances are never that simple, but built on layers of trust and false starts and personal relationships. Great art, in Star Trek or elsewhere, is built on the same.

[5.4/10] Sometimes you have to find your Star Trek-related joys around the margins. Having Scott Bakula portray the steely, determined commander has never been Enterprise’s strong suit. Having him become romantically entangled with the latest love interest of the week, or any romance at all for him, has not been its strong suit. This episode is full of both, which means that the good parts come in those blessed few scenes when neither Archer, nor the titular Rajiin, are on screen.

This episode is basically a watered down version of “Dear Mrs. Reynolds” from Firefly. Archer and company go down to a local market to buy the formula for Trillium-B, and in the process, come across a bewitching sex worker. Archer goes all Pretty Woman, taking her on the ship as a refugee when she wants to get away so that he can save her. She wanders around, using her super-seduction powers to subdue everyone she runs into, until the crew catches on that she’s a double agent for the Xindi, albeit one who may be coerced.

The upshot of all of this is that much of the episode focuses on Archer’s interactions with Rajiin. That’s most annoying when she plays coy, because Archer is clearly enamored of her, but trying to maintain the dignity of his station, leading to lots of awkward looks and indicating from Bakula. At the same time, actress Nikita Ager does a pretty pitiful Betty Boop/Marilyn Monroe routine through most of this, playing shy and coquettish in a broad, cheesy way.

But then the charms come on, and we’re subjected to scene after scene of Rajiin plying her wiles on anyone and everyone she comes across. Naturally, this is an excuse for the show to put her in any number of barely-there costumes and up the steam factor wherever possible. I’m no prude, and can enjoy a bit of televised passion as much as anyone, but this feels like a transparently exploitative stunt. It’s particularly galling when it leads to what amounts to another unfortunate bit of sexual assault being visited upon T’Pol. (Seriously, why is this show so interested in going back to that well over and over again?)

Contrast that with the opening scene between T’Pol and Trip. The show goes nowhere near as gratuitous with it, but there’s a familiarity and intimacy between the two of them that makes the simple act of a neck massage sexier than all the candle-lit rooms and cavorting astro babes that Enterprise can muster. I also love the fact that Trip is a little anxious about people gossiping and getting the wrong idea about their sessions, but T’Pol basically saying that it’s none of the crew’s business and the two of them shouldn’t care. There’s a maturity to T’Pol that’s always been admirable, and it’s endearing seeing Trip be reassured by it.

I also like the continuing subplot of the Enterprise, chiefly Trip and T’Pol, aiming to make Trillium-B so that they can insulate the ship from the various anomalies in the Delphic Expanse. I have to admit, the Delphic Expanse has been surprisingly tame so far given how it was hyped up, but I appreciate that our heroes still have to at least take steps to protect themselves within it. And again, as good romantic chemistry as Trip and T’Pol have, they also just have good on-screen chemistry generally, making their working out a problem together engaging independent of the other business going on.

The other strong points that “Rajiin” can boast are its little bit of worldbuilding before we lurch into the plot, and an actual confrontation with the Xindi. As to the former, it’s neat to see Archer, Trip, and Reed rumbling around an alien marketplace. There’s a bit of exoticism going on that’s mildly uncomfortable, but for the most part, it’s just interesting to see them roaming around somewhere they’re clearly out of place and having to adjust and barter and deal with aliens who aren’t sporting the usual familiar forehead prosthesis. It adds little to the plot, but the alien chemist going gaga for black pepper helps add a sense of place to this region of space, and is, frankly, just plain fun.

The same is true for the Xindi assault on Enterprise. As I mentioned in my write-up in the last episode, while this show still doesn't feel equipped to do “dark post-9/11 allegory”, it is pretty good at action sequences this season. While Archer’s fight with the alien pimp in the first act is laughable, the final act’s skirmishes with the Xindi boarding party is much more exciting. There’s a borg-like quality to the Reptilian Xinidi, with the way they make an essentially unstoppable march through the ship to retrieve Rajiin giving them some legitimate menace and proving that humans aren’t the only species with space marines. Some of their schtick is cheesy -- like the animated dark throwing goop -- but on the whole, they’re scary enough to pass muster.

Unfortunately, before their arrival we just get more tedious Archer/Rajiin banter, and after we get more of the council of ridiculous looking aliens discussing their evil plan. Archer’s attempts at hard-nosed interrogation always come off more comic than dramatic, and the show’s efforts to cast Rajiin as a victim of circumstance in her own right are equally floundering given the similar limitations of the performer.

Eventually, however, we learn that Rajiin’s purpose was to scan the humans, so that the alliance of Reptilian/Bug-like Xindi can work on a biological weapon, which the primate/human Xindi oppose and want to stick with their original plan to use some other crazy sort of weapon. And the porpoise Xindi are, halfway in between, I guess? The show is trying to go for a continuing threat, and mostly comes off as ridiculous with the usual villain sneers and declarations, but it at least adds some information and complexity to their plot, which is something.

Sometimes, that’s all you get with Enterprise. When the main course is nothing to write home about, you have to sate yourself on the side dishes, and at least those, or their T.V. equivalents in “Raijin”, are worth digging into.

[7.6/10] “Talk less, fight more,” to paraphrase Aaron Burr (or his fictionalized equivalent), is not a bad mantra for Star Trek: Enterprise. Dialogue has never been the show’s strong suit. So as odd as it seems to have a Star Trek show more focused on fisticuffs and fireworks than high-minded meditations on diplomacy and philosophy, it may be playing to *Enterprise*s strengths.

Because the truth is that when you have the crew of Enterprise fighting off a pirate invasion, or trawling through an alien storehouse, or getting into a firefight with an alien ship, Enterprise is pretty enjoyable! I still contend it doesn't especially feel like Star Trek (or at least feels closer to the movie version of Trek that was bigger on excitement and less interested in the sort of thoughtful themes the T.V. series had time for), but it’s something that the show’s editors and effects team and camera crew is good at, which is more than you can say for the show’s script.

That said, however much I might bitch about lines here and there, the show does a good job at keeping the proceedings interesting, even apart from the skirmishes with an alien ship in the anomaly cluster of the Alpha Quadrant (I assume?). As I’ve said in prior write-ups, a lot of Star Trek episodes work best when the crew has clear goals. Here, the episode doesn't skimp on that.

Enterprise’s crew’s mission is clear: recover their lost gear before they run out of gas, track down the alien pirates who stole it; download the Xindi database from those same pirates. It helps add a directness to everything going on, where despite some of the “no, you guys, Enterprise is different now!* stuff, you can appreciate the show having a pretty clear throughline of cause and effect from minute one to minute forty-three.

The big problems are two-fold. For one, the show’s effects are just corny to a viewer in 2019. I try not to judge Enterprise too harshly on that front, anymore than I would judge The Original Series for putting a little dog in a cheap halloween costume and calling it an alien in the 1960s.

Still, willing suspension of disbelief is hard to maintain when you have Archer dealing with an obviously computer generated mid-air coffee spill, or a big lump roaming through the decks and tossing crewman flat on their asses. The idea that the laws of physics don’t work the same way in The Expanse is a novel one, especially when it means the usual warp equations don’t work, but the way the show tries to represent that idea is downright laughable in the modern era.

The other problem is that, apart from a reasonably tight story of the Enterprise crew losing their stuff, getting back, and then getting more still from the people who robbed them, “Anomaly” utterly belabors the point that Archer and everyone else is going to have to break some of their moral codes to get along in the expanse. The conversations between Archer and the captured pirate are completely and totally facepalm-worthy.

We get it, Enterprise! The Expanse calls for a more rough and tumble form of diplomacy than was possible in the rest of the Alpha Quadrant! And Archer in particular might be slipping morally and ethically given the demands of this region of space and his own frustrations over his home planet being attacked. There’s something to be said for the show dramatizing American anger circa 2003, and a sense of being wiling to torture prisoners and do other boundary-violating things that the shining city upon a hill would once shudder to countenance, at least publicly.

But as usual, the show makes that point with thunderous directness, making sure the audience understands in no uncertain terms that Archer is losing his moral compass when he suffocates the pirate for information, and having the same pirate pontificate about how mercy is a losing quality in The Expanse. Both the message of these sequences, and the relation to then-current events, are utterly obvious to the point that these scenes really detract from the episode, and the early part of the season, as a whole.

But when the Enterprise crew is just fighting off a pirate attack? Or spelunking their way through a giant metal sphere hidden in a cloaked part of space? Or having to stay close to the pirate vessel despite an ongoing firefight? That’s all pretty thrilling stuff that “Anomaly” does well. Sure, sometimes the overcharged musical stings and the way everyone seems so dang severe now feel over the top, but the nuts and bolts of these sequences are good, and tied to clear goals, which makes them more propulsive than the rest of the episode.

It’s also nice to see Hoshi getting something to do for the first time in what seems like forever. Between her translating the pirate inventory so that the crew can find their stuff in the sphere, to her recognizing the Xindi markings within it, to the way she’s able to download most of the Xindi database from their pirate pursuers, it’s nice to see a member of what has become the B-team getting a little of the spotlight.

Otherwise, Enterprise still does some very Enterprise things, like gratuitously focusing on a young female corporal while the gang is changing into their evac suits, or putting too fine a point on Trip and T’Pol’s “Vulcan neural pressure treatment” creating sexual tension, or having Scott Bakula play a laughable combination of anger and seriousness that he doesn't really have the gravitas for.

Still, when Enterprise focuses on the mission, and the dogfights and intraship skirmishes that go with it, it’s a better show. That’s not necessarily what I want from Star Trek. A well done interrogation of how proto-Federation morality holds up in a lawless frontier is more my speed (and something that Discovery attempted more than a decade later). But if Enterprise isn’t capable of that, or at least not capable of doing it well, then the least it can do is keep us entertained with more of this nonstop, reasonably tense action.

[7.2/10] Star Trek: Discovery does a better job of telling the audience that a relationship is important than spurring us to feel that importance. Your mileage may vary, of course, but across the series, characters have these soulful conversations about how much they mean to one another, and it’s rare, if not unprecedented, for the show to have earned that emotion through lived-in dynamics and experiences that believably bring two characters closer together.

But Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Saru (Doug Jones) are one of the big exceptions. They’re the two characters on the show who’ve arguably changed the most over the course of the series. Michael went from disgraced mutineer to respected captain. Saru went from a timid, by-the-book stiff to a more open and adventurous officer. And,as is Star Trek tradition, along the way, through hardship and heroism, they went from being mutual skeptics of one another to trusted friends.

Where so many of the friendships in Discovery fall flat, Michael and Saru are among the few who play with the ease and care of genuine confidantes. So an episode like “Under the Twin Moons” comes with the power of (supposedly) being Saru’s last hurrah as a Starfleet officer and, more importantly, his final mission alongside Michael Burnham.

In truth, the mission itself is no great shakes. The latest break in the Progenitor case sees the duo beaming down to the planet of the week, a lost world protected by one of those ancient technological security systems that Captain Kirk and company seemed to run into every third episode. The art direction work is laudable, with some neat designs of the weathered statues and other remnants of the fallen civilization, and a cluttered jungle locale that comes off more real and tactile than most of Discovery’s more sterile environments.

But this largely comes off as video game plotting, even before the show reveals that the Progenitor mission is essentially one massive fetch quest. The sense of skulking around old ruins, avoiding weathered booby traps, and using special abilities to avoid obstacles and find clues will be familiar to anyone who’s played Jedi: Fallen Order from the other half of the marquee sci-fi franchise dichotomy, or even precursors like the Zelda series of games. The challenges the away team faces feel more like perfunctory obstacles than meaningful threats to be overcome.

Still, these obstacles accomplish two things, however conspicuously. For one, they show Saru’s value to Starfleet in his alleged last mission. He shoots down ancient security bots with his quills. He attracts and evades their fire with his superspeed. He detects the hidden code with his ability to detect bioluminescence. And he’s able to use his strength to move a large obelisk back and forth to find the last piece of the puzzle. On a physical basis, it’s not bad having a Kelpian on your side.

More to the point, he also looks out for Michael. There’s a nice low-simmering conflict between them, where Michael wants to save Saru so he can enjoy the bliss of his civilian life with T’Rina, and Saru wants to fulfill his duty as any other officer would and protect his friend. In an episode themed around frayed connections between people, it’s nice to see that tension play out in an organic, selfless way between these two longtime comrades. Their ability to work together to solve problems, figure out puzzles, and most importantly, put their necks out for one another (in some cases literally), does more to honor Saru’s place in the series than all the Kelpien superpowers in the galaxy.

For another, they give Tilly (Mary Wiseman), Adira (Blu del Barrio), and eventually Captain Rayner the chance to do something science-y to help Michael and Saru down on the planet. Granted, their “Why don’t we use an ancient electrio-magnetic pulse?” solution strains credulity a bit, and Rayner’s advice boiling down to “You need to think like an ancient civilization” isn’t that insightful. But it gives a couple of the show’s players something to do, and reveals, however ham handedly, not only Rayner’s facility in the field, but his willingness to help out even when he doesn’t have to.

That's a good thing, since he’s joining the cast as the new first officer (something portended by Callum Keith Rennie’s addition to the opening credits. The dialogue to get him there is clunky, with thudding comments from Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) and Burnham about Rayner being a good man despite some poor choices born of tougher times. But after only a couple of episodes, Rayner is a welcome addition -- a fly in the ointment for a now-cozy crew, bolstered by Rennie’s vividly irascible performance.

While the signposting is a little much, the idea that Burnham does not just want a first officer who’s capable, but one who’ll have the guts to challenge her and her perspective is a good one. That approach puts her in the good company of Captain Picard, among others, and shows a humility and an openness in Michael that's commendable. Her willingness to give someone else a second chance, given what the one she received allowed her to accomplish, speaks well of the still-new Captain, and adds some poetry with Discovery’s first season in its unexpected final one.

On a meta level, this is also an interesting thematic tack for the series. Rayner is coded as conservative, battle-hardened, even sclerotic in a way that clashes with traditional Starfleet principles. The idea that he has a place on the bridge, that his viewpoint is worthwhile, and most notably, that he can be brought into the light of Starfleet’s new dawn, fits with the aspirational tone of Star Trek. It’s worth watching how the character arc, and the ideas and subtext in tow, play out from here.

The same can't be said for Book’s (David Ajala) interactions with Moll (Eve Harlow) and L'ak (Elias Toufexis). The show wants to make some trite yet strained point about bonds between individuals in the already-tortured estrangement between him and Michael. The tired pop psychology from Dr. Culber (Wilson Cruz) doesn’t help on that front. But worse yet is the acknowledged unlikely coincidence that Moll is the daughter of Book’s mentor and surrogate father, a contrived familial connection that attempts to gin up through genealogy what the show can't from character-building alone.

Except when it can. The mission may be stock, and the surrounding plot threads may be underbaked, but the goodbye between Michael and Saru is legitimately touching. From Michael nursing Saru through his harrowing transformation, to Saru counseling Michael through good times and bad in her ascent up the ranks, the pair have blossomed into genuine confidantes over the course of the last four seasons. It did not always come easily, but that's what makes their connection now, and the parting poised to strain it, such a poignant, bittersweet moment between two friends.

Who knows if it will stick. Dr. Culbert came back from the dead. Tilly’s back in the fold despite leaving for Starfleet Academy. Saru himself returned to the ship despite ostensibly leaving to become a “great elder” on Kaminar. Discovery doesn’t have a great track record of sticking to major character exits.

For now, at least, Saru gets a swan song not only worthy of what the character, and Doug Jones’ impeccable performance, has meant to the series over the past seven years, but also of what, unassumingly, became one of the series’ strongest relationships. Michael will keep flying. Saru will hopefully enjoy some wedded bliss. But as “Under the Twin Moons” reminds us, they’ve both left a mark on the other that will stay with both of them, wherever they finally end up.

[6.8/10] Enterprise is back and it is dark and edgy, man! We’re in The Delphic Expanse where everything is harsh and weird! The alien species are duplicitous! The ship has a new complement of military guys! Captain Archer is angry and determined!Trip is violent and troubled! T’Pol has a new haircut and costume! The theme song is now jaunty and jazzier! This ain't your father’s Enterprise, pal!

If you can’t tell from my sarcastic italics, I am more than a little skeptical of Enterprise’s efforts at rebranding at the start of its third season. The show wants to turn a corner here, and after 50+ episodes using the original premise, maybe it’s the right time to pivot. Still, as Discovery would learn a decade and a half later, trying to mesh the vision of Star Trek with grimdark prestige brutality isn’t always an easy mix, whether you’re at the start of the Sopranos boom or the end of it.

The season premiere sees the crew at six weeks in the Expanse, and there’s the whiff of the show trying to pull off what Voyager was meant to be. Here are our otherwise high-minded heroes, deposited into a strange region of space they don’t know, without the benefit of being able to call for help whenever they run into trouble. That means new, unknown aliens, more rough-and-tumble encounters, and the way the dynamic of the ship changes when the mission du jour is seek and destroy rather than explore and befriend.

Enterprise just doesn't feel much like Star Trek in the process. Archer and Trip’s crawl through an alien sewer feels like something out of the original Star Wars trilogy. The council of cryptic-speaking, poorly CGI’d bad guys plays like something out of the Star Wars prequels. And the Enterprise deploying a compliment of space marines comes off feeling more like something out of Aliens or even Starship Troopers. Whatever problems I had with Enterprise’s first two seasons, there was something comforting about them because they felt of a piece with the franchise, its rhythms and its bearing, in a way that “The Xindi” just doesn't.

But maybe that’s a good thing. Lord knows that Enterprise didn’t work perfectly in its first couple of seasons. Franchises and art of all stripes need to evolve or risk growing stale. I’d be lying if I said the view of Starfleet or the weekly adventures promised if this is prologue really wowed me or drew me in, but it’s good for the things we like to make us uncomfortable now and then. It’s a sign that a show is taking risks, trying new things, letting the series develop into new directions that force the creators, and the audience, to adapt.

The problem is that Enterprise isn’t very convincing in its new darker and edgier vibe, at least not yet. I don’t want to eliminate the possibility. The show is still early in this new experiment, and as hokey as the Delphic Legion of Doom seems, there’s promise in the notion of a vengeance-seeking Starfleet ship having to cope in a rougher section of space. I don’t want to belabor the point, but the reimagined Battlestar Galactica was basically “darker Star Trek” and totally made it work. The catch is that on early 2000s network television, Enterprise can’t help but feel like a kid putting on his older brother’s clothes and pretending he’s a tough punk. It’s just not convincing yet.

Still, however discordant this opening salvo into the show’s brave new world is, there’s still plenty to like here. However cheesy some of the interactions are, I like Archer and Trip getting trapped in an alien mine and having to sneak and fight their way out. There’s some neat setpieces of them crawling through crap or scaling a plasma shaft, and there was a scenery-chewing charm to their interactions with the proto-Immortan Joe who runs the place.

That foreman/warden of the facility, naturally, doublecrosses our heroes and tries to make them his slaves, necessitating the tactical deployment of Major Hayes and his space marines. As much as the fight that follows doesn't feel like Trek, it’s still cool to see their hand-to-hand combat efficiency, or watching one of their sharpshooters snipe a firing alien from down below. You can still feel the show straining to let you know things are grim and serious know in a way that comes off a bit cornball, but the actual nuts and bolts of the standoff is well-done and exciting from a framing and blocking standpoint.

The episode also does a nice job of expanding the world of the bad guys a little bit. While the council of villains comes off poorly, the Xindi prisoner that Archer interrogates opens up some interesting avenues. We’re so used to planets and peoples being unified in Star Trek to the point that it’s genuinely surprising to learn the Xindi are not just another villainous alien race, but a collection and alliance of different species who jockey for power and have their own internal squabbles.

It feels like a nice fictionalization and figurativization of the United States having to deal with the different tribal alliances and rival groups during the War in Afghanistan, rather than the unified nation state we tend to think of in international conflicts. The notion that Archer and company have a lot to learn in this unfamiliar place, not just a lot of fighting to do, does feel very Trek-y.

Fortunately or unfortunately, not everything has changed on Enterprise. The series has still found new, not especially creative ways to have its female cast disrobe and moan and otherwise endeavor to titillate the nerdlingers in the audience. It’s more bargain basement exploitation when the show gins up reasons for Trip to massage a half-naked T’Pol here.

On the other hand, the scene is a testament to the benefits of genuine chemistry. The show has tried similar (if not entirely as crass) moments between Archer and T’Pol, and the complete lack of chemistry between Bakula and Blalock separately and independently doomed them. Blalock and Trineer have a much better dynamic, and it means that even when you’re facepalming because of the script, the proceedings are at least a little endearing because you can dig the vibe between the two characters on screen.

That’s what we have to hope for in the back half of Enterprise. This cast has settled in over two seasons. The creative team has settled in over two seasons. And the fans have (maybe) settled in over two seasons. As the series charts a new course, we have to hope that the seemingly misaimed efforts to inject the show with post-9/11 darkness can find fertile ground in a show and a crew that know how to do what they do at this point, or at least, what they used to do.

[5.2/10] For a while I’ve worried about Enterprise falling into the same pattern that The Original Series did, where the three main characters get all the stories and the rest of the crew, give or take the occasional Scotty episode, have to fend for scraps. It doesn't help that Enterprise, like the 1960s series, relegates the people of color in its cast to being supporting characters most of the time. So I’m inclined to appreciate the installments where Mayweather or Hoshi or Dr. Phlox get the spotlight for an episode.

The problem is that those episodes need to be, you know, good, and “Horizon” pretty much tops out at “boring.” A story with tinny emotions, slack pacing, and a sort of knowingly inessential vibe make Mayweather’s day in the limelight feels like a big waste. The threats here are minor, the personal relationships are stock and weakly-developed, and the conclusion is predictable and rushed.

The premise of the episode sees the Enterprise passing by the freighter owned and operated by Mayweather’s family. Travis asks for a brief leave to visit them, only to learn that his father, who captained the ship, died before word could reach him. What follows is an awkward, semi-presumptuous visit home, where Mayweather is excited to see his old digs and impart what he’s learned, but his brother, Paul, is far less welcoming.

“Horizon” is basically doing a less traumatized version of “Family” from The Next Generation here. Travis’s brother is resentful that his brother left the family trade to go join Starfleet. He is contemptuous of his brother’s vaunted place in the world, and has an implicit inferiority complex while trying to succeed his father in running the freighter. Travis, meanwhile, is conflicted between his desire to help his family and their ship run better and be safer while he’s there, with his own remorse at wondering if he’s abandoned his family and his old crew, and if he even has a place with them anymore.

That’s strong stuff! As befits the product of a writer who would go on to pen scripts for Mad Men, there’s complex familial and generational issues at play. The rub is that the delivery of those ideas, in story, dialogue, and performance, is all facepalm-worthy.

I feel bad for singling out Anthony Montgomery, but he’s just not really up to conveying the complicated emotional situation the episode wants to depict. Granted, the script does him no favors, being riddled with tin-eared dialogue and on-the-nose statements about what everyone’s thinking and feeling. But Montgomery does little in these stretches to suggest he should get this sort of focus more often (not that it stops the show from giving it to Bakula). While he does some nice nonverbal work in the moment where he’s crying in his little crawl space, every time Mayweather’s called upon to actually say a line, it feels like he’s announcing it rather than delivering it.

The other side of the coin is that maybe it’s not Montgomery’s fault, because the same thing happens with every other character on the Horizon, from Mayweather’s brother, to his mom, to his childhood playmate. There’s a stagey atmosphere to all of this, where each of the characters gives performances with the vibe of a high school play. Star Trek isn’t always a den of naturalism, but the hokiness of the line delivery across the board robs the episode of whatever tiny bit of emotional force the script might be able to muster.

That’s part of why the most enjoyable part of “Horizon” is its B-story. It sees Trip arranging a screening of Frankenstein, and he and Archer cajoling T’Pol to come to movie night and see it. It is, without a doubt, a trifle of a subplot, and it yet again teases romance between Archer and T’Pol that I just don’t buy. But it’s fun! Not everything has to be a high stakes outing, and just seeing the Enterprise’s senior staff goof off around an old movie without having to carry all the dramatic weight makes for an entertaining, seven-minute lark.

Still, it ultimately offers a more worthwhile point than the main story does. Maybe this is a cheap thing for a critic to like, but I particularly appreciate how T’Pol pulls out a different interpretation of the film than her colleagues intended. The idea of the story as a rumination on how humans treat those who look and act different from them, something that T’Pol and by extension, other Vulcans could relate to, causes Archer and Trip discomfort, but is a legitimate take.

Beyond the humor of T’Pol preferring a dramatic reading of the original novel or Dr. Phlox nitpicking the medical procedures, there’s some nice irony in the fact that T’Pol’s crewmates wanted her to learn more about humanity through its art, and she did, just not in the direction they were hoping. There’s a statement about the malleability of stories and the way we share them that is as worthwhile as it is pithy.

Were that I could say anything else in the episode was pithy. Back on the Horizon, Travis has predictable friction with his brother, predictable reminiscing and uncertainty with his old friend, and predictable reassurance from his mother. There’s a lot of “Did I ever tell you about the time?” scenes, and a lot of painfully ruminating on the same “You left us! The whole world is leaving us!” issues over and over again. This episode loses the thematic punch of the same topic in “Fortunate Son” by couching it in a tired kitchen sink drama and a barely-there action-y threat. The whole thing ends up dull.

That’s frustrating, because it suggests a lack of care or quality from these sorts of outings that suggests we won’t get many of them. One of the best things about Star Trek is that, from the beginning, the franchise has been about ensembles. It would be nice to see Enterprise taking advantage of that, and featuring other characters more often. But given the middling work and middling results in “Horizon”, that doesn't seem very likely.

[9.4/10] I tend to like naturalism in most things, even in stories in outer space. It’s why I found found the original Star Trek difficult to warm to at times, with all of Kirk’s grand pronouncements about this and that, and a certain pulpiness that was always the intent of the show. All else equal, I want the conflict, the characters, and their reactions to feel real, even if the setting or scenario are outlandish.

But by god, somehow the Klingons just bring out my inner cheese. (Surgeon General’s Warning: If you or a loved one start autogenerating dairy products internally, please consult a physician.) There is just something about those growling, shouting, gesticulating aliens that works for me, and turns a tone that might seem over the top elsewhere into something I can absolutely vibe with.

The same goes for courtroom drama episodes for that matter. There’s an artificiality to the setting, one where people are called upon to make big speeches in a structured setting, that lends itself to a certain amount of grandiosity and presentation. Lawyers “act” when making presentations to juries or arguing in front of judges, so it makes sense that actors playing lawyers would, well, act as well.

So when “Judgment” presents a Klingon legal drama, it can be loud and boisterous and grandiose in what it offers the audience, and it goes down as smoothly as a nice slug of bloodwine, even for sticks in the mud like me.

The episode sees Archer brought before a Klingon tribunal and charged with fomenting rebellion. Using a Rashomon type presentation, the courtroom scenes are, in part, a frame story to depict a skirmish between Archer and Klingon named Captain Duras (a name that raises instant suspicion among Next Generation fans). Captain Duras tells his side of the story, a tale of a duplicitous, Klingon-hating, terrorist-helping human who defied the Empire and dishonored a proud warrior. And then Archer tells his side, of his crew rendering aid to a group of beleaguered refugees harassed by the Klingons like the ones we met in “Marauders”, of defending his ship from a Klingon-instigated attack, and of the mercy she showed his enemy despite the opportunity to slay his opponent.

It’s all done well enough, with some cool firefights and explosions. The true set of events are predictable enough, but it’s fun to see the Enterprise through a lying Klingon’s eyes, and the episode adds enough wrinkles and new details to what really happened to make the retelling of the story compelling. It all sets up Archer as someone resourceful, proud, and noble, who not only outflanked a Klingon battle cruiser, but who is willing to sacrifice his own life in order to save a group of people he’s barely met, because it’s the right thing to do.

That’s not the most interesting part of the episode though. It’s fine to see Archer presented as the good captain yet again, but it’s far more fascinating to see another glimpse of the Klingon legal system, to hear about the degradation and change of the Klingon society, and to see the story of one man (er, Klingon man) seeing Archer’s stand as an object lesson for standing up for his principles.

The Courtroom drama part of it is just downright fun. Sure, theoretically Archer could be sentenced to death, but c’mon. The spark of the judge’s weird ball glove gavel, the rabble of the chanting crowd, the tet-a-tet between the defense advocate and the prosecutor are all great texture and great television. There is a certain amount of enjoyable scenery-chewing that goes on when Orak, the mercenary, decorated prosecutor, goes full “j’accuse!” with Archer, and it’s just as fun when Advocate Kolos is roused from his complacency by Archer, and starts using his craftiness to meet Orak head-on.

But what’s even more engrossing is Kolos’s recollection of a more enlightened Klingon society, and his lamenting how much his people have devolved into rank warriorism. I’ve watched literally every other Star Trek series, and outside of a few notable exceptions, I only know Klingons as the proud, revelrous warriors that they’re typically presented as. The idea that there’s other classes of Klingons than the ones the likes of Kirk would likely meet on the interstellar frontier is neat in and of itself.

Even more compelling, though, is the notion that the Klingons were once a diverse set of people who had scientists and teacher and real lawyers, who devolved into an “honor and war above all” corruption that would overtake the culture as a whole. There’s an antiquated sort of species essentialism to Star Trek: all Vulcans are logical, all Klingons are war-like, all Ferengi are greedy. Different stories have subverted these ideas on the margins, but “Judgment” is the first Trek story I can remember to suggest that it didn’t have to be this way, that for Klingons at least, this was a regrettable cultural homogenization, rather than a speciesist inevitability.

Kolos aims to fight against that tide. He tries his hardest for the first time in years, and earns Archer a commuting of his death sentence to life in prison. Inspired by Archer’s example, he publicly questions how far these Klingon courts have fallen in his time, regretting his complacency, challenging the hypocritical sense of honor, and speaking truth to power. It earns him the same trip to the penal colony of Rura Penthe that Archer gets, cementing the ways in which “Judgment” is a spiritual successor to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which dealt similarly with kangaroo courts and hard-won shifts in Klingon society.

In truth, the episode runs out of gas a bit once the setting changes to the frozen prison. The enjoyable Klingon bravado, the heightened reality of the tribunal setting, fade a little into standard Trekian folderol. Still, the convenient rescue is an enjoyable post script to these proceedings, and even better is Kolos resolve to stay and improve his people’s lot.

The show isn’t subtle about it, with Kolos outright stating why he’s had a change of heart, what he means to atone for, and how he’ll have the will to go on. But maybe with these operating Klingon stories, subtlety is overrated. There is something heartening, maybe even stirring, about this cynical man finding reason to believe in something again. Even I would be hard-pressed to ask Enterprise to turn the volume down.

[5.6/10] For me, the greatest sin of a television show is wasted potential. Some episodes are liable to be great. Some episodes are liable to be terrible. A good many more will vary between “fine” and “pretty good.” As I’ve exhaustively detailed on this website, there’s a ton of reasons for that, some of which are understandable and some of which are maddening. But the most frustrating thing when taking in a story of any stripe, is feeling like somebody had a great idea, or great premise, or sniffed greatness, but then left some of the best possibilities on the table.

“The Crossing” leaves more than the best possibilities on the table. It leaves most of the possibilities on the table. The prospect of non-corporeal beings, touring the human body as a vessel of choice through meatspace, is a thrilling one. As “Return to Tomorrow” from The Original Series showed us, the notion of what beings without bodies do once returned to them can be an illuminating experience for the characters and the audience alike.

But Enterprise dispenses with all of that for a rote pod people story. Instead of any philosophical exploration of what it means to encounter a new form of life or the costs of their form of existence versus ours, “The Crossing” does a cheap spin on a horror tale, with Stepford Smilers and “who’ll be brainwashed next?” questions that don’t amount to much beyond some bargain basement scares.

That wouldn’t be so bad if the show’s would be ghost story were any good. As much as I enjoy Star Trek’s more philosophical side, there’s nothing wrong with just telling a simple, creepy tale in the confines of a spaceship. The problem is that the invasion of the “wisps” is pretty dull, and doesn't make much sense.

Most good stories that involve the supernatural (or the “may as well be supernatural”) have rules for how things have to operate. These rules take the nigh-magical and not only ground it in something the audience can relate to, but make the characters earn their success (or failure) in dealing with it. Here, the rules are all so opaque and nonsensical that it’s hard to invest in any of the problems or solutions.

Are you unsure whether or not a fellow crewman is inhabited by a wisp? Well that’s no problem, because Dr. Phlox just invented a wisp detector! Are you running from a being that can go through walls (which, in fairness, are the episode’s best sequences)? Don’t worry about it! These things that the sensors can’t even really detect are repelled by the alloy in the catwalk for some reason! Is a third of your crew infested with these beings who might have evil intentions? That’s fine! We can just gas them out of the ship without any ill effects to the human beings they’re inhabiting! What about that massive alien ship that you can’t outrun and which is so technologically advanced that it takes over all of your systems? Just blow it up!

I’m used to easy Treknobabble solutions to what ought to be thorny problems, and I’m not a nitpicker, but “The Crossing” takes the cake. It stacks arbitrary implausibility on top of arbitrary implausibility until you wonder if the writers even began to think this whole situation through. I’ll concede that there’s something clever about T’Pol using her psychic abilities and disciplined mind to discern the wisps’ plan after one tries to take her over. But for the most part, the episode introduces a series a big, difficult problem and then comes up with all sorts of convenient answers that don’t pass the smell test.

Some of this would be more tolerable if the episode didn’t feel like it was stretching to fit the required runtime. My compliment for the last episode was that it knew how to evolve its central problem to create new challenges for our heroes to overcome. “The Crossing” does nearly the opposite, giving us the gist of the problem early on and then letting us watch Archer and company tread water for most the episode before figuring out how to solve it. In the meantime, we get a bunch of lifeless scenes of Archer yelling generic missives at his wisp-possessed crewmen and, bafflingly, multiple silly fight scenes starring Dr. Phlox: action star.

The episode also tosses in some weird sexual harassment material with the wisp who possesses Malcolm which is, dare I say, problematic. Either it’s meant to be a source of menace, in which case it feels cheap and especially galling for the show to try to pull that crap using T’Pol as the victim again. Or it’s meant as comedy, which may be even worse. There’s something interesting about a non-corporeal being experiencing sexual curiosity and desire, without understanding human mores, but Enterprise doesn't have the skill to explore that fraught material with any grace or nuance, and the whole thing comes off as uncomfortable for other reasons than what the show seems to be going for.

That’s the cinch to all of “The Crossing.” There’s grand metaphysical questions at play about what it’s like for a being without a body to suddenly find itself able to talk and eat and feel again, and for a human to suddenly experience the world through a different lens. There’s grand ethical questions about whether it’s right for a wisp to do this, and how much leeway to give a species that’s long removed from issues of bodily autonomy. And there’s compelling moral dilemmas about a group of dying lifeforms seeking salvation and how we measure their lives against ours.

But Enterprise just blows them up, literally and figuratively. Gone are the engrossing questions of different forms of life, and in comes a procedural horror story that’s rife with boring interludes and quick fixes. When the series had the chance to tell us a story about the famed “new life and new civilizations” from the once-famous, now-jettisoned intro, it gave us a mostly-fine but uninspired possession story that barely bothered to graze any of the imaginative qualities and curiosity that made Star Trek great.

I can handle bad Star Trek episodes. Hell, I love some of them. What I truly don’t like are episodes like this, that feel like they waste something great to settle for something less.

"If you call yourself enlightened, then you have to embrace people who are different than you are." - Jonathan Archer

I chuckle silently whenever I hear someone say the world has changed a lot and has largely embraced the LGBTQ+ community and people living with HIV/AIDS. It's easy to say you see no problem when it doesn't directly affect you and you're far removed from it. Yes, there has been some (mostly superficial change), but stigma and discrimination still exists, its just more subtle and insidious in many places, still brutal and life threatening in others. Remember, the United States of America isn't the only country in the world, and it's still (in 2022) very much a danger to live "differently" to the norm in some countries (even in some places in the USA)... and yes, we watch Star Trek in other parts of the world too, so it's relevant. Lol

Sure, it might just be that the episode felt rather personal for me, but I found this one to be an Enterprise winner. I particularly liked that it was obvious they were talking about the stigma against HIV/AIDS and homosexuals. I loved that the dialogue was blunt, to the point and unambiguous rather than overly covert. The juxtaposition with Danobulan sexuality created a good contrast by which to examine how relationships and intimacy may differ culturally. This is the kind of Star Trek I prefer, rather than the purposeless hypersexualised nonsense and weak writing I've seen of Enterpise thus far.

Well done.

[7.5/10] Seventy-five percent of this episode is pretty darn good, if not great. The first part of “Shockwave” gives us a problem that threatens to not only ground the Enterprise, but to halt human deep space exploration for decades. It offers a solution that the characters don’t expect in a sideways sort of way. And then it presents the crew working as a well-oiled machine, taking the lessons they’ve learned over the past twenty-five episodes to win the day and clear their names.

Is that stretch flawless? By no means. The gaping hole at the center of Enterprise continues to be Scott Bakula as Jonathan Archer. With a full season of adventures and guises under our belts, it’s safe to say that Bakula cannot convincingly play the brooding layabout, or the romantic lead, or the high-minded explorer, or the amiable good old boy at anything above an “eh, it’s fine” level. That means any episode of this show centered around him is going to playing from a deficit, just like Archer’s beloved water polo team, from the getgo.

But the ideas in “Shockwave” are very good, and even some of the nuts and bolts writing and character decisions are strong. While Bakula doesn't necessarily do a great job at selling Archer’s despondence at having potentially grounded Earth’s space flights for years, the magnitude of the loss shines through. Archer’s “mistake” caused 3,600 souls to lose their lives, and led to the diametrically opposite result that this first mission was supposed to achieve.

The Enterprise’s first mission is to make first contact, to “seek out new life and new civilizations,” and instead, our main characters have seemingly destroyed it. The mission is an effort to prove that humanity is ready to join the interstellar community, and instead, this mistake is poised to make the elders of spaceflight confirm their views of terrans as impulsive and not ready. And worst of all, Archer’s mission is supposed to be a vindication of his father, and a thumb in the eye of the Vulcans who’d held human spaceflight back; instead, he appears to have handed the Vulcans the fodder to say that their reluctance toward both Archers was justified.

And yet, this being not only Star Trek, but a season finale at that, the savvy viewers can probably guess that our heroes weren’t responsible for the “oversight” that led to the decimation of the miners, and that the true culprits probably involves the Suliban and some time travel chicanery. Still, “Shockwave Pt. 1” lingers just long enough on the sense of failure, on the crew planning what they’re going to do after Enterprise, to let the weight of the consequences land, even if we can be reasonably sure that those consequences won’t ever actually come (especially considering that there’s 72 more episodes to get through!)

My favorite of these moments comes from T’Pol, who finds herself in a scene that mirrors the one with her and Archer from “Shadows of P’Jem.” This time, it’s her prompting her Captain to fight for his job, to try to show that there were extentuating circumstances, to convince their respective governments that this journey is worthwhile.

There’s a fatalism to Archer’s position, one that reflects human nature but which is no less wrong, to look at the worst of ourselves when things go wrong and be blind to the best of who we are. T’Pol, having been around humans enough to recognize their irrationality, but also to believe in what we’re capable of, encourages Archer to see all the things he did right, all the value he and the Enterprise brought, over the past ten months.

But it takes a visit from Daniels, the time-traveling crewman from the last major scrap with Silik, to fully convince Archer to snap out of his funk and get back to work. In truth, I didn’t necessarily love this portion of the episode, if only because the show spends a lot of time on Archer feelings out the situation of being thrust back in time when it feels perfunctory to longtime Star Trek fans who are used to hops to the past and future. Still, it’s enough to convince Archer than the explosion was the result of Suliban sabotage, and give him the tools to fix it.

What follows next is Enterprise at its team-work and action-y best. Seeing the crew work together to create a device to detect cloaked Suliban ships, keep the comm on the fritz, and stymie their enemies long enough to complete their mission is outstanding. To boot, the sequences where the main trio sneak onto a Suliban ship, stun grenade the baddies, and nab a series of data disks that prove what really happened is as exciting as all hell. It shows the team learning and growing, taking risks, but being good enough at their jobs as Starfleet officers to make sure they work out.

It’s a hell of a thrillride, except for the fact that it basically ends with a giant tease for part two that grinds the episode to a halt. Silik and his ships surround Enterprise and, per the Future Guy’s instructions, Silik demands that Archer turn himself over to them or they’ll blow up Enterprise and everyone on it. So we get this faux goodbye, where Archer peddles some faux wistful nonsense about believing in the impossible, with awful pacing, that culminates in the Captain being transported to a future that is unexpectedly post-apocalyptic. The whole thing feels like a spiritual rip off of “Best of Both Worlds” with half of the charm and execution.

But in the end, the first half of “Shockwave” represents the strengths and weaknesses of the show. It has some good character growth from T’Pol, some well done ensemble work and action sequences to show what the team in front of and behind the camera can do, and it plays with some very interesting ideas about internalizing guilt and the personal weight of expectation and diplomacy. But it also features some questionable acting from its lead character, and a creaky capper to the episode that only serves to remind the viewer of better Star Trek cliffhangers.

If you’d just cut this one off with ten minutes left or so, you’d have one of the standouts of Star Trek’s first season. But forced to not only tell the immediate story, but squeeze in some extra, overdramatized, timey-wimey nonsense, and focus more on Archer, the cracks in Enterprise’s foundation begin to show.

Still, I have enjoyed this first season of the show. Fan sentiment had me fearing the worst, and rest assured, Enterprise has yet to match the heights of its predecessors. But while the show has plenty of stinkers, it also has plenty of shining moments. As the cast continues to gell, and the interesting ideas in the premise continue to be harvested, I have high hopes as we head into the next season, despite the sour taste “Shockwave” leaves in my mouth.

[7.5/10] I recently read an article about Star Trek Discovery, praising the character of Captain Pike. The author argued that Pike was a much-needed masculine role model after the supposed degradation of men in popular culture. He argued that the manly, decisiveness of Pike was a sorely needed corrective to the deconstructions of masculinity that have been en vogue of late.

As you can probably tell from my tone, I don’t necessarily agree with the premise. Discovery’s Pike is great, but one of the important and useful things pop culture has done in the last couple of decades is pry away at the trappings and expectations of masculinity in our modern era and in our past, and examined the unsettling underbelly of those cultural tropes and pressures.

But then I come to an episode of Enterprise like “Desert Passing”, and it reminds me how much Star Trek in particular has long been a purveyor of notions of different sorts of masculinity, beyond just macho manly man nonsense. Sure, Kirk never found a situation he couldn’t punch or sleep his way out of, but Spock was a dignified alternative, Picard was the picture of dignity and unassuming strength, Sisko carried emotional baggage and was warm with his son, and Voyager had...uh...Tuvok I guess? Well they’re not all winners, but the fact is that Star Trek has often put forward these sorts of role models, who modeled different but no less strong ways to be men to scores of impressionable nerds like yours truly.

And while I have my beefs with Archer as a character, I like how he too fills that role here. He is venerated as a warrior, as a tactician, and legendary freedom fighter here, the sort of Rambo-esque figure who drops in, single-handedly fights an army, and then saves the day. But Archer not only brushes off those sorts of comparisons, but show’s a different sort of caring, wit, endurance, and self-sacrifice that are traits less associated with the sort of image that article’s author wanted to conjure.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a weird Top Gun-esque space lacrosse scene where Archer and Trip go shirtless and knock over their alien competitors. (Which, I guess, at least helps balance out some of the weird cheesecake the show does with T’Pol?) But the focus of the episode is not on Archer as a manly man; it’s on him as a survivor, someone who is giving and kind.

The meat of the episode sees him and Trip tracking their way across an alien desert while they wait for help to arrive. That challenge means you never see Archer throw a punch. You see him give his water to Trip, who’s suffering from heat exhaustion. You see him being smart enough to remember seeing shelter when they arrived, in case they needed it. You see him being resourceful enough to jerry-rig a way to boil some contaminated water to make it potable. And you see him coming up with all sorts of ways to keep Trip awake and engaged so as not to lose his good friend in the throes of a fever.

In short, Archer is someone unbelievably sharp and giving here. He spends none of his time plotting against attackers or showing anger at a semi-betrayal or frustration with his circumstance. He spends all of it figuring out the situation, helping his dear friend, using his wits and his kindness rather than anything more traditionally masculine.

The same goes for the episode’s interesting take on Starfleet and the Enterprise’s role in the interstellar community. I love the fact that Archer and company’s exploits have been bent and twisted out of proportion, to where random freedom fighters on other planets see the Enterprise as powerful allies to the downtrodden who will save and fight for them with the push of a button. That is very much a Captain Kirk mentality: show up some place, decide that you don’t like the way things are run, and so blow the whole society up and remake it the way you’d like it to be.

But “Desert Passing” engages with the way things are more complicated than that. The humanoid who befriends our heroes seems nice and gregarious (and Clancy Brown hamming it up in the role, Harry Mudd-style, is tons of fun). He offers a believable story that tracks with American history, of minority groups being officially and technically granted equality, but facing softer and realer obstacles when hearts and minds and public institutions have to put that into practice. But we also get a countervailing story from the official government of the planet, that Archer’s friend is actually a terrorist, whose allies are attacking cities and peoples. And then we see that same government be curt with T’Pol and harsh with Archer and Trip.

It’s an idea you don’t always see much of in Star Trek. We’re used to planets being essentially unified nation states, where making contact with one group means that they represent the whole. As Hoshi points out, first contact is likely to be trickier than that in most instances, with situations like the one in “Shadows of P’Jem” that suggest our main characters are trifling with complicated internecine struggles that it’s hard to comprehend, let alone interfere with, after an afternoon of getting to know someone or a single distress signal.

While the show once again lays it on thick with a “directive” reference, at the end of the day, Archer decides that discretion is important, that deferring to governments rather than individual starship captains is the right way to go, and that forbearance is the right choice, no matter how uneasy he feels about it. It’s the exact opposite of a “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality that you might expect in a more traditionally manly leader, but Archer represents that Star Trek ethos of not just ethical righteousness, but calm deliberation, making hard choices that sometimes lead to a queasy stomach rather than an exciting firefight.

At the end of the day, Archer is worried about the health and well-being of his chief engineer and best friend. He’s worried about the complexities of using the Enterprise’s arsenal to take sides in a war that may be just, but which probably has more nuance to it than can be gleaned from one partisan in a high dudgeon. He is not the innocent-saving, evil-basting cowboy rocking through the galaxy. He is an occasionally supercilious, sometimes cavalier, but ultimately well-intentioned, altruistic, and thoughtful leader. It’s a flavor of masculinity that might not please the anti-feminist sceeders out there, but which is part and parcel with Star Trek’s more nuanced take on what being a man is and can be.

(As an aside, I really liked the production design and directing here. The desert landscapes were beautifully composed, and there were tons of creative shots like Archer and Trip emerging from their sandy hiding place. Certainly the most visually appealing the show’s looked so far!)

[5.1/10] One of my most frequent complaints about The Original Series is that it would have about twenty minutes worth of plot stretched out to a full episode length. The pacing of T.V. shows was different in the 1960s, but even so, you can only try to ruminate on some small amount of incident for so long before the whole thing just becomes boring. With “Rogue Planet”, Enterprise seems to be imitating its primogenitor on that account.

If you’ve watched any amount of Star Trek, you could probably predict the plot of this one in about ten minutes. Archer and company run into a group of alien hunters who are on the titular rogue planet for a sporting excursion. There’s some tension between the groups given T’Pol’s Vulcan vegetarianism that hunting has apparently fallen out of fashion on Earth a century prior, but the whole cultural relativism thing keeps everyone getting along. Then, in a private moment, Archer sees a random beautiful woman who knows his name and who rings a bell in the back of his mind, who’s treated like an apparition or a delusion by both his crewmates and the new alien friends who are sharing their campground with the Starfleet officers.

It doesn't take long to guess that the woman is some manifestation of the planet, asking Archer to help save her from the hunters. This is Star Trek, so despite the headfake of Enterprise’s hallucinogenic spore episode earlier in the season, we can reasonably suspect the woman is more than just a random hallucination from Archer. The episode spends way too long with Archer wrestling with that fact, until the hunters finally admit that she is a “wraith”, a sort of space slug that’s native to the planet and which tries to defend itself by “getting into the head” of the humanoids hunting it.

That’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s a neat enough concept to build the episode around. The problem is, Enterprise doesn't reveal that until about 75% of the way through the episode, and doesn't really develop anything beyond that point. There’s the slightest of slight interesting clash between Starfleet’s impulse not to interfere with other cultures’ beliefs and practices and its impulse to protect all sentient life. But we never hit any really pressure points with that. Archer (with the help of Phlox), just treknobabbles his way to having his cake and eating it too, giving the space slugs a treatment that allows them to avoid detection by the hunters.

And that’s it! There’s a predictable mystery as to what the nature of the mysterious woman is. There’s a predictable reveal as to what the conflict between her and the hunters is. And there’s a predictable, all-too-easy solution to the issue that doesn't require any real challenge or sacrifice from our heroes. Enterprise labors over those basic plot points for forty minutes without much, if anything, to show for it.

This is also an Archer-heavy episode, which weakens things in my book. The show once again seems to want to place him in the Kirk role, lusting after vaguely-sketched women from his past on a strange planet (see: “Shore Leave”) with whom he has some faux-meaningful exchange before she disappears forever. “Archer falls in love with a space slug” is an idea just weird enough to work, but this is about the dullest possible execution of that idea.

“Rogue Planet” tries to elevate that interspecies infatuation to the idea of “reaching for the unobtainable.” Archer eventually connects that the woman is the image his mind conjured as a child when his mom used to read him a poem by Yeats. The poem was about a man who caught a fish that turned into a beautiful woman and disappeared, that he then chased for the rest of his life. It’s a thin connection, but there’s a solid enough idea there about continuing to search for meaning and beauty in the universe even when it seems vast and impossible. But the delivery of that message is trite, and stapled to a flat, almost procedurally generated episode.

So what’s good about “Rogue Planet”? Well, while it looks a little silly at times, there’s something kind of cool looking about seeing both the hunters and the away team rolling around with their little laser tag outfits. As usual, T’Pol is a beneficial presence here, with her barely-restrained disdain and cuttingly-worded retorts for the hunters being both amusing and potent, and her skepticism about Archer’s visions being well-founded despite the inevitability of there being more to them than meets the eye. And again, it’s bold, to say the least, to center an episode around the reveal that Archer is trying to romance an alien snail who’s taken the form of his childhood fantasy.

The execution of that premise should just be way more interesting than this is. Archer’s concern for sentient life is admirable, but “Rogue Planet” quickly sheds the intriguing thought of whether Archer would be so apt to help if the slug had taken on the form of a scantily clad man. There’s intriguing notions of adaptation, how both predators and prey evolve to attack or defend themselves through unique methods, that have some juice, and would be seen very differently by the hunters and the hunted, but the episode mainly elides them in favor of Archer going all moony-eyed over his ghost lady.

Lord knows that Star Trek has made a home for any number of unusual romance over the past fifty years, from various men and women falling in love with various forms of artificial intelligence, to women falling for dreamy psychic aliens, to Zephram Cochrane himself learning to love a wild energy being. But those stories all leaned into the strangeness of those setups, exploring them beyond some vague metaphor for continuing to go after the impossible. This is, by contrast, an episode that feels made of spare parts, hardly able to capture your attention with its telegraphed reveals and boring, overstretched escapades.

[7.6/10] I like this episode because it’s basically a hangout, more of a chance to get to know everyone better than a spate of high drama. Sure, there’s a bit of action here. Reed and Mayweather have a ticking clock to finish their work before the sun comes up on the comet, and their shuttle falls through the ice, and there’s a daring (if doomed) claw machine rescue attempt. But none of that really comes into play until the last ten minutes of the episode, and it’s fairly low stakes by Star Trek standards. Instead, this is a low-key episode, as devoted to helping to scaffold the relationships between our characters and their erstwhile allies as it is to any game-changing plot machinations or high intensity conflicts.

That comes down to four scenes in particular, some of which are connected, but many are almost just little vignettes, nominally related to one another, but mostly just small sketches to give us character details.

The most effective, if not the most artful, of these scenes was the one where Archer and the rest of the bridge crew responded to the questions of an Irish elementary school class. It’s a good narrative device for providing exposition, answering queries about food, feces, and fraternization that fans may have been wondering about as well, like the impudent little schoolchildren that we are. But it also gives each of the bridge crew a moment to shine. Archer tries to project statesman-like certainty and assurance, but worries about how it went. Hoshi explicates the challenges of using the universal translator but expressing budding self-confidence. Proud but insecure Trip doesn't want the moppets to think he’s an intergalactic toilet-cleaner. And Dr. Phlox shows himself off as a delightfully nerdy blowhard.

It’s not much, and it’s a little cheesy at times, but again, it does what it sets out to do in a genial fashion. It explains some of the sundry details of Enterprise in a didactic way that’s swallowable given the context, and it gives several members of the cast to have those little character moments that are both fun and endearing.

But my favorite scene in the episode is the one between T’Pol and Trip where the Vulcan seeks her crewmate’s advice on what to do about her wedding. On the one hand, it’s a superb interaction from a character perspective. We see a different side of T’Pol, one who’s worried about her personal life to the point of insomnia and headaches, who’s taking Dr. Phlox’s advice to talk about her problems, and who is trying to balance her responsibilities to her people and her responsibilities to her crew. We also see a different side of Trip, one who is still blustery in his way, but who’s also apologetic and rueful about violating T’Pol’s privacy and who seems genuinely interested in connecting with her as a friend. (Methinks the Captain’s discussion about dating is not a coincidence.

Still, it’s also a great representation of the differences between Western and Eastern views of individualism. Trip represents the Western view of self-determination, being able to direct one’s own life and pursue life, liberty, and happiness. T’Pol represents the Eastern view of community, where one’s responsibility to a greater whole, one’s culture and family, comes before individual pursuits. Enterprise isn’t exactly even-handed in the debate, but it acknowledges both sides of it, which makes T’Pol’s inner turmoil, and eventual choice at the end of the episode to choose the Enterprise over her marriage, a much more meaningful one.

As much as this is, at heart, a T’Pol episode, about her being stuck between those two impulses, it’s also another human/Vulcan diplomatic kerfuffle episode. Archer feels like the Vulcans have had a contingent “looking over his shoulder” at least since the Andorian Incident. But he’s trying to kill them with kindness, hailing and greeting the Vulcan captain, trying to include them in the Enterprise’s expedition, and even inviting him to dinner.

That dining scene is impressively awkward, calling to mind a similarly touch-and-go effort at dinner table detente between humans and Klingons in Star Trek VI. Archer is bending over backwards to try to connect with Captain Vanik, who is begrudgingly polite but as curt and rude as any Vulcan you might expect. The sense of Vulcan arrogance, of seeing humans like the children Archer was just reaching out to, comes through loud and clear, with him not appreciating the good will behind each of these gestures if not the gestures themselves. The scene does a great deal of work to help justify the resentment that Archer and others feel for the Vulcans, showing him trying very hard to accommodate his green-blooded counterpart and getting nothing but dismissals and thinly-veiled insults in return.

That’s what makes the final major scene of the episode so impactful, and the culmination of Archer’s attempt to connect with Vanik and T’Pol’s efforts to connect (in her own distinctly Vulcan way) with Trip. When Archer tries to rescue Reed and Mayweather on his own, rebuffing Vanik’s offers, the echoes of that dinner scene are present. He wants to buck Vanik’s impression of humans as bunglers who need the Vulcans to save their bacon on routine missions. But T’Pol interjects that Vanik expects Archer to reject his help, that they see humans as prideful, but that Archer, being human, can choose to put his crewmen’s lives over his pride. It’s not the most elegant threading of the needle you’ve ever seen, but it’s sound and significant.

So is the closer, where T’Pol sends (through official channels) what’s implied to be her message that she’s staying on the ship, allowing her wedding to be canceled, and getting to know these humans, and their different but potentially liberating customs, a little better. It’s not exactly subtle, but her trying Trip’s pecan pie at the end of the episode is a superb way to symbolize that. And “Breaking the Ice” is a great way for the audience to get to know all of these characters, T’Pol in particular, better in between the galaxy-shaping misadventures which will no doubt provide plenty of fireworks in the episodes to come. Taking this time to let us understand the people in those interstellar firefights, taking a breather where we can just spend time with them as people, makes the biggest blasts and dramatic twists worth caring about.

[7.3/10] This is a tough episode to grade, because it essentially has three parts: a bit of cultural exchange, a zany male pregnancy story, and a diplomatic kerfuffle. I loved the first part, liked the third part, and absolutely abhorred the second part. That speaks to a certain disjointedness in the episode, where it occasionally felt like events sort of careening into one another rather than progressing organically, but enough of the constituent parts were good enough that I still enjoyed the ride.

Let’s talk about the part that I loved: Trip’s contact with the Xyrillians. One of the best things about Star Trek has a franchise is how it looks at the human side of these sort of encounters. On the one hand, this is the Enterprise rendering aid and making connections out in the frontier, but on the other, this is as much, if not more, a story of one individual adjusting to the experience of another culture and way of life, initially hating it and wanting to come home, but eventually feeling comfortable and welcomed in a place, to where he appreciates the experience and how it’s expanded his horizons.

Honestly, you could cut off “Unexpected” at the halfway mark (after Trip first return to the Enterprise), and you’d have a tidy but effective little story to that effect. The show does Trip’s “kid away at summer camp who has a tough first day and wants to come home” routine really well and relatable. I also love the production design and use of effects both practical and technical to convey the alien-ness of Trip’s experience.

The smoke rises in the decompression chamber and he clambors about, complaining about how his lungs are burning. The slowed down, echoey way he experiences speech and the passage of time on the Xyrillian ship is a nicely impressionistic way of convey his “it’s like a fever” transition. And the interiors of the ship itself, wonderfully realizes with oval designs, a back-to-nature aesthetic, and details that seem familiar enough to not require a crazy effects budget, but foreign enough to rattle Trip are nigh-perfect (at least on a network television setting).

Things get even better with Trip’s interactions with Ah'Len. It seems clear in this episode that Trip is meant to fill the Kirk/Riker slot of finding the affections of alien admirers in these journeys. But what I like about his interactions here is that they don’t carry the same womanizing baggage. Sure, Ah’Len falls for Trip a little quickly, but there is, again, that summer camp sense of flirtation and fascination with something outside your experience that makes them both a little more apt to explore and bat eyes at one another.

I think my favorite exchange in the episode comes when Ah’Len and Trip have their hands in the “pebbles”, which grant each some sort of rudimentary telepathy. Trip says, with some surprise, “you find me attractive” and has the hint of a sly smile, and Ah’Len retorts that he likes that she finds him attractive. The romance is necessarily a little quick, but there’s chemistry their, and there interactions are cute and even chastely sensual enough to be endearing in a short amount of time. That first half of the episode is a delightful little journey through Trip’s adjustment from an uncomfortable acclimation to a new environment to joys like the humans’ first interactions with a holodeck and a connection with another soul.

But then, the episode takes a turn, and starts being more about Trip having been accidentally impregnated by those otherwise sweet interactions, and the episode veers into a heap of sub-sitcom-level humor about being pregnant. Trip is suddenly exaggeratedly hormonal, to the point that he’s ludicrously insecure, constantly eating, and freaking out about the safety measures for children in engineering. It’s facepalm-worthy crud, and particularly dispiriting after a fairly decent comic scene of Dr. Phlox, Archer, and T’Pol gently tsk tsking Trip for what they imagine to have been getting a little too close to the Xyrillians amid his brief bit of shore leave.

The best you can say for this part of the episode is that it’s at least a flip of the script from the seemingly innumerable “Counselor Troi is pregnant again!” episodes that The Next Generation would do, even if it devolves into Junior-level comedy. (And Angel would follow in those ignominious footsteps with Cordellia, incidentally). I also suspect, true to my frequent reverse-epiphany experiences watching The Original Series, that this episode was the inspiration for Futurama’s “Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch”, right down to the incidental touch-based pregnancy and romantic row boat ride in the holodeck.

Thankfully, after that bit of unpleasant mishegoss, the show reverts to a meat-and-potatoes Trek conflict -- namely a confrontation with the Klingons. When the effort to track down the Xyrillians in order to figure out what to do with Trip’s pregnancy leads the Enterprise to discover the alien ship’s hitched a secret ride with the Klingons, Archer and T’Pol end up having to talk the characteristically combative Klingons into not blowing them, or the Xyrillians up before they can get an answer.

The banter and negotiation with the Klingon commander are fun, and it’s a nice wrinkle to the first contact story. The fact that Archer tries appealing to general decency, mercy, and harmlessness, to no avail given the Klingon’s pugilistic appetites, is a nice exemplar of how Starfleet is still learning how to get along in this strange new world. And I particularly appreciate how T’Pol proves her usefulness here, exaggerating (which Vulcans are allowed to do, per Spock) in order to retell Archer’s adventures from the premiere in a way that the Klingon commander would be forced to appreciate. Trip appealing to their sense of intrigue and excitement at new technology (right down to an amusing “I can see my house from here” line) is a good finishing touch, showing the essential trio of the show working together to make it work.

It’s hard to know how to weigh each of those parts out. The first half of the episode should almost be its own thing, a neat little representation of acclimating to the ups and downs of first contract. The subsequent pregnancy interlude nearly grinds the episode to a halt with its hackneyed, retrograde humor. But the third part rights the ship, both figuratively and nigh-literally, with some classic Trek diplomacy. All-in-all, “Unexpected” is more of mishmash, but the good parts are worth sticking around through decompression for.

[7.0/10] I often come to Star Trek for the joy of problem solving. In all incarnations, much of the fun of the “strange new worlds and new civilizations” is each new crew facing an array of their own, strange rubik's cubes to figure out how to solve. Using the combination of their wits, their insight, and their technology to leap over whatever the universe is throwing at them is a venerable and above all else, fun mode for the franchise.

And “Strange New World” is part-horror story and part-problem solving. While I like the latter much more than the former, it’s at least something both familiar but novel enough in execution to spice up Enterprise a bit in the early going here. The first half of the episode is about uncovering the mystery of what exactly the threat on this heretofore unknown M-class planet is, and the second half is about how to address it. The show goes a little overboard on the whole haunted mystery and potential sabotage angle at first, but once it becomes a question of how to save everyone from the identified risk, the show becomes much more clever and even humane.

In some ways, the episode feels like a mishmash of different Original Series installments. You have the Vulcan vs. Human jousting while stranded on an alien world of “The Galileo Seven.” You have the ghost story motif of “Catspaw”, and you have the cave-based panic of “The Devil in the Dark” (which gets a subtle nod from Captain Archer). Moreso than other sequel series, Enterprise seems to be borrowing from its 1960s predecessor, and if that’s the tack, the mixing things together is a sound approach to keep it fresh rather than repetitive.

The problem, though, is one I often encountered when watching The Original Series -- namely that I’m apt to side with the Vulcan stick in the mud rather than the ornery human questioning their detached and/or utilitarian judgment. Enterprise recreates the same dynamic that Dr. McCoy and Spock often had with Trip and T’Pol, right down to the southern drawl and recriminations of heartlessness.

I don’t know how to feel about it. To be fair to Enterprise, I think the show wants to bring the audience over the Trip and the rest of the redshirts’ point of view of T’Pol in the first half just so it can flip the script in the second half. You literally see the other crewmen’s hallucinations so that it seems like T’Pol is lying. But it’s also playing on the bias the humans have against the Vulcans, even as T’Pol is explaining why everyone must be mistaken and that their suspicions are motivated by preexisting frustrations between the species.

That’s a bit of a cheat in the first place, but it also makes it hard for the show to win you over to Trip and company’s side when you’re pretty skeptical of their motivations in the first place. Enterprise wants you to buy into the “Vulcans have held things back and may not be able to be trusted” thing, but for longtime viewers (at least Spock-appreciating ones like me), it’s hard to buy into that long enough for the episode to pull off its twist.

It also doesn't help that this episode is full of pretty hammy acting. Trip’s mental breakdown is downright Shatner-esque in its over the top lunacy mode. The rest of the crewmembers aren’t necessarily super convincing in their panic and paranoia either, though Jolene Blalock does a pretty damn solid job of conveying slipping Vulcan stoicism in a difficult situation.

What I do like about the episode is its effort to create that scary mood, and Archer’s solution to the problem. The former is pretty hit or miss. But Mayweather’s ghost story is a lively one, and while frequently overblown, the show’s effort to go full horror movie with unknown creatures moving around in the shadows of the cave is a commendable one. Spookiness is a rarer look for Star Trek, but it works in this context, particularly in one of the first, unexamined worlds that Starfleet encounters.

Archer’s solution to the problem is even better though. Once he realizes, via Dr. Phlox, that there’s a toxin in the local flora that’s creating the hallucination, and the weather prevents them from shuttling down or beaming anyone up, he starts trying to talk Trip out of his psychosis long enough to let T’Pol apply an antidote.

What I like best about this problem-solving is that it has stages. At first, Archer tries to get Trip to realizes that he’s not at his mental best, to just talk some sense into him, with a touching story from their shared history to try to drive it home. It’s a little too much (and frankly, part of what turned me off to the solution used in the last episode), but it doesn't work! Instead, Archer goes to Plan B, which requires leaning into Trip’s paranoid delusions, but coming up with a plausible enough story to convince him to stand down long enough to let T’Pol do her work. The cover story, the use of Vulcan by Hoshi, and the chance to stun him long enough to make it all come together is a smart and tense solution to the problem, in the best Trek tradition.

Granted, the path to get there is a mixed bag at best. But it ultimately plays like an Aesop’s fable in that same Original Series-esque way. On the one hand, you have Trip getting an object lesson in not letting his preconceived notions about Vulcans get in the way of assessing a situation. And on the other, you have an event that lays the groundwork for General Order 1 and the Prime Directive, or at the very least some protocols to help ensure that the Federation doesn't go waltzing into a patch of hallucinogenic poison ivy.

At the end of the day, that’s a big part of what I ask for from episodic Star Trek. What is the problem? How did they solve it? How did it impact the characters? And what did we and they learn? “Strange New World” isn’t the boldest or best rendition of that form, but it’s a solid version of it, and after a shaky intro to the series, I’m glad for it.

[7.3/10] I don’t mind the spiritual elements of Deep Space Nine, but the truth is that we’ve dealt with a lot of them already. Sisko’s uncomfortable with his role as the Emissary? Now he embraces it and wants to make his home on Bajor. Kira is a true believer in the way few others in the main cast are? Now she’s reckoned with her faith and her connection to the Starfleet officers in a pretty thorough fashion. Kai Winn is mercenary in her attitude toward Benjamin? Now (or at least, in her last appearance), she seemed to accept him as an instrument of the Prophets. Are those Prophets honest to goodness gods who prophesize and punish, or are they mere “wormhole aliens” whose effects have rational explanations? Well, whatever you want to term them, they know the future and, as we saw at the end of the Dominion occupation arc, will actively intervene in major events when it suits them.

There’s a few dangling threads out there. The Prophets promised Sisko that they’d extract some penance from him for destroying the Dominion fleet. How their prophecies will play out is an open question. Not every circle has been square. But many of the spiritual mysteries the show started with have been sorted, and the personal issues that fell out of them have been resolved.

In that, “The Reckoning” is something of a relaunch of that part of the show, providing supernatural fodder for the show to chew on between here and the end of the series. There is a new prophecy! And the Prophets, not just the Pah-wraiths, possess people now. And each side has champions locked in a battle to determine the fate of Bajor!

And the truth is I don’t love it. Some of that is the pure aesthetics of it. I’m always inclined to forgive Star Trek for the effects of its eras, but something about a possessed Kira absorbing lightning, a red-eyed Jake speaking in an echo-y voice, mysterious wind blowing at each of them, and the duo shooting orange and blue energy beams at one another comes off as downright silly. I can appreciate the show’s production team trying to represent the larger-than-life epicness of this battle using the tools at their disposal, but it’s hard not to roll your eyes a bit at the cheesiness of it all.

More than that, though, I’m not a fan of the form this new religious element of the show takes. Contrary to popular belief, Star Trek has long had a penchant for the spiritual and the supernatural. (Other writers used to joke about how many of Gene Roddenberry’s stories ended with some kind of god.) But there tends to be something unknowable, inscrutable, even downright weird about the more metaphysical entities Starfleet officers interact with. Their role is often to remind us of how much lies beyond human comprehension, to make us reflect on human existence and ethics, and deepen our appreciation for the countless mysteries of the universe.

The titular reckoning between the uber-Prophet possessing Kira and the demonic Kosst Amojan possessing Jake, is a bog standard good guy vs. bad guy conflict. Star Trek has rarely gone in for that sort of Manichean, good vs. evil-type deal. To the point, with its outsized heroes and villains doing battle with positive and negative energies, “The Reckoning” feels more like Star Wars than Star Trek. And I love Star Wars! But its brand of superpowered battles between light and dark doesn’t necessarily fit well within Star Trek’s general framework, let alone Deep Space Nine’s tendency toward gray areas and more committed moral complexities.

And yet, strangely, I like what comes before the supernatural showdown and what comes after it.

The before is a chance to take stock, and something of a referendum, on all the spiritual elements of the show that have sunk in so far. Dax gets to joke about whether, in Ben’s next vision, he should ask for a dictionary. Quark gets to talk about how the religious fervor is hurting business (and institutes a constant happy hour in response). Julian gets to play the skeptic about the doom and gloom prophecy, while others debate whether the wormhole instability and natural disasters on Bajor are some version of a biblical plague.

Most importantly, Jake gets to talk about how hard it’s been to see his dad incapacitated by such “visions” not once but twice over the last year. There’s a story-related reason for giving him and Benjamin a scene to ahs that out, but even if there weren’t, I’m glad that Deep Space Nine is delving into what all of this must be like for Jake. Whether you believe or not, seeing your last living parent put through the wringer, and almost lose him on multiple occasions because he seems to care about his spiritual duties more than you now and then, would be tough to take. Exploring that, and having Benjamin affirm his connection to his son, is good stuff.

I’m more mixed on what the episode does with Kai Winn. I don’t mind her being a villain, but in her last appearance, she’d seemed to not only accept Sisko’s role as the Emissary in earnest for the first time, but was contrite about the resistance she’d put up in the past. We even got to hear her explain why she thought her form of resistance and suffering was no less meaningful than Kira’s in a way that deepened and softened the character.

Now she’s back to being the stubborn, passive aggressive social-climber she was before. She gripes at Sisko for taking the Bajoran artifact du jour. (And her motives may be impure, but she’s not wrong that he probably should have consulted the Bajoran government before absconding with a recently-discovered archeological relic!) She seems to want to undermine him and supplant him at every turn. This reversion to her velvet-gloved jerk characterization feels like the show back-tracking.

Yet, she may also be the most interesting character in the piece. I think the show means to damn her with her choices and disposition here. But when none other than Kira speculates that after striving her whole life to become the spiritual leader of Bajor, it must be hard for Kai Winn to have to share that role with the Emissary, and an outsider to the faith no less, you sympathize with her. When Kai Winn kneels before the uber-Prophet inhabiting Kira and practically begs to be her servant, and the uber-Prophet just ignores her, it’s quietly devastating.

Imagine living your whole life as a true believer, who could only dream of speaking with your god, only to go unregarded and unheeded when you’re finally face to face with them. Kai Winn is in the running for Star Trek’s greatest villain. (Her only disadvantage is sitting side-by-side with Dukat.) But Heaven help me, I felt for her in that moment. Something like that would be shattering.

That feeling leads to the most clever part of the episode. The turn in the story comes when Jake walks onto the promenade, imbued with the spirit of a Pah-Wraith. Suddenly, Benjamin’s calculus changes. Over the warnings of his officers, he wanted to let this reckoning play out. He’ll evacuate the station to protect civilians and officers alike, but he believes in the Prophets’ plan now, and he won’t stand in their way. Until, suddenly, it’s his son standing there. Especially after their tender scene earlier, you might reasonably expect that he’ll damn Bajor to protect Jake.

Except he doesn’t. “The Reckoning” flips your (or at least my) expectations on their head. You’d expect that it’d be Captain Sisko who’d flood the promenade with chroniton radiation to stop the showdown and save his son. You’d expect the erstwhile Pope of Bajor to let the will of the Prophets play out, and damn the consequences.

And yet, it’s Sisko who trusts that the Prophets would protect his son, that Kira would want to be their vessel, and that this is what’s intended to happen, it’s not his place to stand in their way. He has gone from the man uncomfortable with his role in these outsiders’ religion, to a man embracing their precepts and spirituality. And it’s Kai Winn who deploys the chroniton radiation, prematurely ending the divine battle, regardless of what the prophecy says. Whatever she believes, she cares about her position in this biblical drama more.

The script says as much through Kira, who accuses Kai Winn of not being able to stand that their gods would choose Sisko and disregard her. But I’m also compelled by Winn’s statement that if the Prophets defeat the Pah-wraiths, and indeed usher in a new “golden age” for Bajor, there’d be no need for Kais or Vedeks. Regardless of Benjamin, she’s scratched and clawed and schemed to get where she is. To postpone the arrival of paradise, or even scuttle it entirely, because if it came you’d have to serve rather than lead, is as damning and compelling a motivation for Kai Winn as there could be.

At the same time, there’s something truly wholesome that emerges from this situation between Kira and Odo. Having finally coupled up, they’re adorable together, flirting after a wardroom meeting and nuzzling one another, with Kira acknowledging Odo’s softer side that he keeps from the world. All’s not perfect in paradise though. This prophecy allows Odo to politely cluck his tongue a bit, at why the Prophets are so cryptic, about how if this is so important, they really ought to be more clear. He has a point!

But he tells her that he does believe in something -- her, and it’s one of the sweetest little moments on the show. Odo doesn’t just talk the talk. When push comes to shove, and Kira is being inhabited and put at risk by the Prophet possessing her, he acknowledges it’s what she’d want. She accepted it willingly, and even if Odo loves her, even if he doesn’t buy into the cryptic nature of the Prophets, even though he doesn’t share her beliefs, he respects her and gets her. That’s enough.

Choices like that are why Odo/Kira make so much more sense than Worf/Dax ever have. There are different people in many ways, but there’s a respect and appreciation for where the other is coming from, that seems all but absent from Worf in DS9. There’s lots of series arc-heavy stuff going on in “The Reckoning”, but the part I like best may be how these monumental events also serve to reinforce the bond within a new relationship.

Despite that, “The Reckoning” is, as the Prophets riddle us once more, as much of a beginning as an ending. These two supernatural forces have been unleashed in the world, with little suggestion that they’ve been vanquished or defended for good. Kira the believer is prompted to contemplate the fact that she was chosen by her gods, and had an experience as up close and personal with them as one’s likely to have. And the closing lines of dialogue suggest that we’re officially in uncharted territory, even for gods, to where for all their wisdom, the Prophets don’t know what’s coming next. Who knows when or if the tears of the Prophets will drown the gateway to the temple.

Some of that’s probably necessary. Considering the last major event featured a deus ex machina solution (albeit an earned one), checking in with the Wormhole Aliens, factoring them into the proceedings of the ongoing Dominion war, changing Captain Sisko and Kai Winn’s connections to them leaves the board open for more to come in the show’s final season. But it also flattens and simplifies the inscrutable demigods who affected our heroes’ lives to this point.

Nevertheless, I’m still compelled by those lives, and the impact that the spiritual aspects of the show have on them. More so than arguably any other Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine is concerned with religion, and prophecy, and the divine. But it remains a show focused on its characters, as invested in the people reacting to these supernatural events, as it is in the beings who make them their playthings.

[1.0/10] Some Star Trek episodes feature comedy that falls completely flat. Some Star Trek episodes feature messages or depictions that have aged like milk. “Profit and Lace” is the rare Star Trek episode that does both, and it may be the worst of the lot because of it.

Thanks to Ishka’s shining influence, Grand Nagus Zek has essentially added a clause to the Ferengi constitution that allows women to wear clothes and make profit. As a result, Ferengi society has been thrown into chaos; Brunt has ascended to the role of acting Nagus; and Zek, Ishka, and the Ferengi braintrust aboard the station must work together to restore Zek and ensure that this progress isn’t lost.

There are worse premises for an episode of Deep Space Nine. Ferengi politics have walked the line between loony and serious, but one of the more consistent threads has been the gradual case for women’s rights upon the misogynistic planet. Forcing our Ferengi heroes to band together to cement those rights, in the face of Quark’s recurring foe from the homeworld, has merit to it.

But that’s about where the good times end in “Profit and Lace”. The episode is widely considered one of the all-time worst of the franchise, and it’s not hard to see why. The comedy is broad and atrocious. The sitcom-like realization of the premise is abominable. And the way the episode tries to draw humor from sexual harassment, attempted sexual assault, and gender fluidity lies somewhere between backwards and reprehensible.

The most charitable read of the episode is that it’s a story about Quark fully accepting not just his mother, but feminism, after having to walk a mile in her shoes. When Quark’s ranting effectively gives his mother a heart attack, he’s forced to temporarily become a woman, replete with body modifications and hormones, in order to secure the support of an influential legislator to put Zek back on the throne.

That idea is problematic as hell, but the best version of it would be one that takes the transition seriously, with Quark having epiphanies and bursts of empathy about what it’s like to be on the other side of the double standard. Instead, it’s a loony farce, with the most stock and hacky gags about what women are like, that just makes you want to put your head in your hands.

Part of the problem is that the humor is hackneyed writ large. Even if you could somehow separate out the problematic elements in “Profit and Lace”, the comedy would still be downright bad. The running gag of someone describing Brunt as Grand Nagus only for someone to correct with “acting Grand Nagus” quickly becomes exhausting. Tepid soft drink-based humor about Nilva slinging “sluggo cola” is embarrassing. If last season’s “Ferengi Love Songs” taught us nothing else, it’s that going for broad sitcom energy with the Ferengi is a recipe for disaster.

And yet, I’d tolerate all of that if it could avoid the backward, retrograde humor that “Profit and Lace” deploys in the rest of the hour. Good lord, the gags about the female Quark, dubbed “Lumba” (in another pitiful play on words) are disastrous and ugly. This is the most unfortunate, “estrogen makes you weak and weepy”-style sexist humor to ever make it into Star Trek. Quark frets about walking correctly, about the size of his hips, about wanting a hug from Odo after being emotionally overwhelmed. It’s the worst kind of “Men are from Mars/Women are from Venus” nonsense.

It’s also a wrongheaded betrayal of the trans community. Despite some progressive treatment of Dax and her identity not changing even as her gender does, “Profit and Lace” sets that back fifty years. Between the way Quark’s transition is treated as a source of ridicule and ridiculousness, and Rom harboring some kind of identification with the traditional elements of femininity being treated as an oddity and source of humor, this episode feels downright bigoted in a way that thankfully few episodes of Star Trek do. I’m sympathetic to the idea that norms change, and you have to accept film and television as products of their time, but this kind of depiction was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.

That’s before you get to the laughs the episode tries to wring from sexual harassment and assault. Watching Quark try to use his position as boss to lean on one of the dabo girls to sleep with him is contemptible, but not out of character for Quark. His insinuations are disgusting, but they give him somewhere to go later in the episode, post-transformation. In that light, it could be forgivable. Characters have to start somewhere lacking if you want to watch them grow.

What isn’t forgivable is the humor the show attempts to squeeze from Nilva chasing “Lumba” around the room and trying to have his way with her, despite her obvious protests. What the show plays for yuks is quietly horrifying, and something the show normalizes by treating it as light farce. The fact that the solution to Brunt’s accusations that Lumba is a man is her flashing the assembled is downright embarrassing, And even at the end, when Quark is supposedly more enlightened from his experience and doing right by the dabo girl he harassed earlier, they pivot into a “She actually likes it and Quark hasn’t actually changed” kicker, which undermines and good intentions you could possibly draw from this garbage fire of an episode.

I don’t want to say there’s no way you could draw humor from these scenarios. Unfortunately, they’re regular occurrences in our society, and anything that people can relate to can be a source of humor and catharsis. But it would take a delicate hand, not a sledgehammer covered in clown makeup. The broad, regressive comedy at play here would be bad for any show, but it’s especially damning in a franchise that aspires to be progressive like Star Trek.

What’s extra maddening about this whole catastrophe is that it undermines the good work Deep Space Nine has done to this point. The show’s Ferengi episodes have been a mixed bag to be sure, but along the way, there’s been a quiet but palpable arc of Quark gradually becoming more open-minded in his view of women and gender in general.

From his revulsion-turned-respect for the cross-dressing Pel, to his appreciation for the call of duty felt by his Cardassian paramour/freedom fighter Natima, to the programmatic partnership and eventual affection he develops with the Klingon Grilka, to the deeper understanding and appreciation he develops for his own mother and the good she could do for herself and her people as a woman of business, Quark has steadily become, if not a feminist, then certainly someone who sees the potential and capabilities of his distaff counterparts in a way he didn’t before.

“Profit and Lace” throws all of that out the window for cheap comedy, retrograde sexual politics, and an attempt at another step of “evolution” for Quark that inadvertently erases the progress he’s made and sets him back even further. The arrival of women’s rights on Ferenginar should be an opportunity for the culmination of Quark’s journey; instead it’s a rank embarrassment that practically counts as character assassination, undoing the good work the show has done to date.

This isn’t the first time Star Trek has bungled comedy episodes or gender politics, but few thank sink so low or have so few excuses as “Profit and Lace”.

One of Ira Steven Behr’s first writing credits in Star Trek, TNG’s “Captain’s Holiday” aims for light escapades, only to crash and burn in the process, but the results are harmless. “Elaan of Troyius” from The Original Series is a franchise low, where Kirk slaps a bratty princess into “behaving” and falling in love with him, but you can, at least, semi-write it off as a product of the 1960s. The TOS finale, “Turnabout Intruder”, is infamous for its sexist take on women and has rightfully been ignored in the franchise ever since, but can at least boast an interesting concept and a conclusion for the show’s original run that is fitting, if not exactly great. And “Angel One”, one of The Next Generation’s attempts to comment on current societal norms by flipping them, is a mixed bag at best, but has its heart in the right place.

There’s no such excuse for “Profit and Lace.” It botches its comedy. It butchers its gender politics. It destroys any efforts to do better on topics of sexual harassment and assault, which Star Trek doesn’t have a great record on to begin with.

At best, I think the writers, including showrunner Behr, are trying to do Deep Space Nine’s version of Some Like It Hot, a hilarious cross-dressing comedy that doesn’t fully jive with modern sensibilities, but which has a surprisingly progressive and transgressive streak for a classic film. But it’s not 1959 anymore, and 1998 wasn’t so long ago that these kinds of blindspots can be excused nearly four decades later. “Profit and Lace” earns its place as one of Star Trek’s lowest of low lights, with a unique blend of terrible humor, terrible character work, and terrible messaging that mean it ought to be obliterated from the memories of fans and friends.

Deep Space Nine remains a transcendent show, including its treatment of some topics where the rest of the franchise falters. With episodes like this one, though, well...nobody’s perfect.

[8.8/10] Star Trek has tons of big affecting moments. Spock’s sacrifice, Picard’s torture, Sisko’s loss of his wife, all rend the heart in ways these stories earn. But they’re also massive, critical moments, of extreme duress, life or death, rife with grand gestures. That is its own kind of difficult--to go big and make it convincing--but it’s also easier to modulate big emotions to big moments.

What’s so powerful about “Time’s Orphan” is that it is one of Deep Space Nine’s most affecting episodes, at least in my book, and it does so with moments that are so much smaller. A feral young woman tosses a ball back to her father after much encouragement and much trial and error. A long lost daughter not only allows her mother to brush her hair the way she did when her kiddo was eight years old, but seeks it out. The curmudgeonly, justice-minded constables doesn’t throw the book at the beleaguered parents breaking the law to protect their child, but instead encourages them to finish their task without a moment’s thought.

Maybe these moments did move you. Maybe you were (not unreasonably) distracted by the prehistoric time portal or the convenience of the situation that forces the O’Briens’ hand. But they moved me. The notion of losing the ability to guide your child for a decade of development, only to see her start to regain a measure of it, is heartening. The sense of losing that connection between mother and daughter through a terrible accident, only to find that bit of intimacy anew is touching. And the least outwardly sentimental character on Deep Space Nine showing compassion, and breaking his own rules to help two people in need, is powerful.

These are not grand moments. They are, instead, tiny gestures. Yet, they’re no less potent, no less full of earned emotion, and no less meaningful.

The trick to it all is in the approach that “Time’s Orphan” takes to its plot. Make no mistake, this is one of the more out there high concept premises Deep Space Nine has attempted in a while. On an O’Brien family picnic, Molly falls into a time gateway. By the time they’re able to retrieve her, due to the temporal relativism, the girl they bring back has not only aged ten years, but had to fend for herself, alone in the wilderness, for all that time.

Despite the wildness of that premise, I like the story on two fronts. First and foremost, because the episode takes an outlandish setup seriously. To have your kid come back feral, need to adapt to her old existence again, and the toll it would take on a family, is a lot to process. “Time’s Orphan” doesn’t shy away from the impact it has on Miles and Keiko, the challenges for Molly to adjust after so long away, the steady but arduous progress made in habituating her to the basics. Much like Miles’ own recovery from an outsized sci-fi struggle in “Hard Time”, the episode gains strength from exploring what the readjustment would be like for both a child and their parents in this situation with commitment and conviction.

Second, I like this because it’s a family story, something we don’t get enough of on Deep Space Nine. Considering that three main characters are parents, the writers typically find ways to sideline their kids (and in Miles' case, their spouse), since it doesn't fit in with either traditional Trek or the dark edges of the series. So it’s nice to have an episode that acknowledges that part of Miles’ character, that recognizes the hardship of being apart from his wife, that sees him put his duties as a member of Starfleet behind his duties as a father.

To the same end, I like the B-story here, which is simple but sweet. With the O’Briens dealing with Molly, the Worf/Dax family agrees to look after Yoshi while they’re occupied, and it becomes an opportunity for Worf to prove himself as a good father in Dax’s eyes. Now, you just have to go with this one, even more than the wild sci-fi plot in the A-story, because surely several years parenting Alexander outweighs a brief time babysitting someone else's kid. But if you can set that aside, Worf trying to prove himself with a baby is a winning setup.

There’s something inherently endearing about the station’s gruffest resident (give or take Odo) looking after its tiniest tyke. Worf struggling with a crying infant while Dax goes “Are you sure about this?” is sitcom-y stuff, but it’s cute. Him feeling like a failure when Yoshi ends up with a bump on the noggin is sympathetic. And his sense of surprise and pride when the little fella has internalized the Klingon technique Worf used on him, is downright adorable. What can I say? I’m a sucker for the “grumpy dude becomes a good dad” trope. I liked it on TNG, and I like it here.

But Worf’s is the much simpler story. Rehabilitating a child who’s been unintentionally abandoned for years is much trickier, and none of it would work without a stellar performance from Michelle Krusiec as the older Molly. It would be so easy for someone playing a feral child, unable to fully vocalize and more wild and stunted in her development, to devolve into something that seems ridiculous. Instead, Krusiec fully commits to the role, creating a version of Molly who is believable in her animalistic movements, convincing in her fear and distress, and heart-rending in the moments where she reestablishes a connection to her parents. It would be a challenging performance under any circumstances, and that doesn’t stop the actress from nailing it.

The performance is also tricky because, like The Babadook, the story in “Time’s Orphan” also works as a sci-fi abstraction of the challenges involved in raising a child with special needs. The stirring moments of progress, the dispiriting setbacks, the challenging outbursts, and the pitfalls of a system that isn’t built to handle those who fall outside the norm, all give this story a little extra impact in how Miles and Keiko try to look out for their daughter’s interests, despite all the bumps along the way.

Some of those bumps are pretty big. If I have a significant complaint, it’s that at about the two-thirds mark, a plot that’s moved at a very measured pace suddenly kicks into overdrive. Molly lashes out and wounds a patron of Quark’s; the Federation wants to evaluate her at a facility she may never return from; Keiko and Miles steal her away and aim to send her back to the time and environment she knows. It’s all very sudden, and unlike the painstaking and open-hearted parenting we get to see as the O’Briens slowly bring Molly along, you can practically feel the creative team realize they’re running out of time and need to get this one to the finish line.

But I like what it comes down to. While I wish the choice had more time to breathe, Keiko and Miles deciding that they’d rather parted from their daughter forever than be with her and see her suffer in a cage of one kind or another is the kind of self-sacrificing parental act that moves the heart and stirs the soul. Sure, it’s a little convenient that when they do, older Molly sends her younger self back to the present, restoring the status quo. But I still feel the power of the O’Briens losing someone they love most in order to protect her, and poetically, regaining them through their putting her needs before theirs.

Seeing Miles and Keiko reunited with the Molly they know in the end is reassuring, and the little one’s drawing that matches her older counterpart’s is a nice touch to show that the young woman they came to know over the past week lives on. But the emotional high point of the episode comes when that young woman says three simple words: “Molly loves you.”

It may not have the energy of Kirk yelling into the ether when his son is killed, or the punch of Lal telling Data “Thank you for my life” before she shuts down forever. The moment is simpler, shorter, more understated. Sometimes, though, it’s the small, down-to-earth nature of those moments, that makes them hit as harder, or harder, as any more grandiose wallop in the Star Trek pantheon.

[5.8/10] I can’t say it’s impossible to craft a character who becomes vitally important to your main players in forty-four minutes. It is, after all, the lifeblood of Star Trek. Some guest character arrives, forges connections with our heroes, only to inevitably have to depart for some reason, imparting some key meaning or lesson before they do. It’s hard to imagine the franchise without that particular story shape.

But it’s also hard! Characters need time to develop, to form connections, to see their relationships evolve. That takes time, and even in the more serialized later seasons of Deep Space Nine, time is a luxury that isn’t always available.

So I admire all-star writer Ronald D. Moore swinging for the fences with “The Sound of Her Voice”, an episode about Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien each forging a deep, personal connection with Lisa Cusak, a Starfleet captain stranded on a faraway planet whom the Defiant crew must race against time to rescue. The wrinkle is that they bond with Captain Cusak entirely “over the phone”, without being able to see or interact with her otherwise.

It’s a cool concept. Particularly in an age where many people have strong friendships with individuals they mainly (or exclusively) know online, there’s something prescient about trying to depict those types of connections forming without people being able to meet face to face. The choice never to show Cusak conversing on screen necessarily brings the writing to the fore and puts the audience and the regular characters behind the same veil with respect to Lisa. This is a challenge, and a unique high-concept sort of story, both the sorts of things I like to see this series tackle.

The problem is that the conversations we here are never convincing enough to make up for the fact that, between a B-story and final act with a race-to-the-finish and a series of eulogies, we only get maybe half an episode’s worth of back-and-forths between Captain Cusak and our heroes. The dialogue would have to be downright extraordinary to make up for that fact, and it gives me no pleasure to say that it’s middling at best.

Lisa talks to Sisko about his relationship with Kassidy Yates. She talks to Bashir about his haughtiness and ignoring others when consumed with his work. She talks to O’Brien about his sense of distance from his friends due to the constant precariousness of war.

These are all worthy topics! Benjamin’s relationship with Kassidy has, frankly, been underserved since they got back together, so examining what it means to him could be really rewarding. How Julian relates to his colleagues now that his out as a genetically enhanced augment has likewise received scant exploration outside of a couple of episodes, so it’s nice to see that brought to the fore as well. And working through what a return to war means to a veteran like O’Brien could be poignant and revealing.

What all these topics have in common, however, is that they have too much depth to try to explore in seven minutes or so a piece.

Even then, the rush job might work if it felt like Captain Cusak had some unique insight or real rapport with this trio of officers. Instead, she mostly offers trite truisms and banal cliches. Some of her answers were so stock, so hollow, that I thought she might have just been manipulating Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien with empty bromides that told them what they wanted to hear.

You knew there was going to be some twist when they found her, and I was 50/50 on whether it would turn out that she was dead by the time they could reach her (tragic!) or that she would turn out to be a Founder who staged this whole thing to manipulate/capture the Defiant crew (devious!). I suppose they already pulled off the latter trick with Odo and “Kira” in the cave, but the fact that these supposed deep conversations that result in fast-forming bonds could plausibly double as a secret agent deceiving our heroes with cheap platitudes doesn’t speak well of the conversations.

Speaking of cliches, the B-story sees Quark wrapped up in a hacky, sitcom-level plot involving Odo. The Constable is still persnickety with his enforcement of Quark’s minor infractions, so the resident bartender hatches a plan to distract Odo with considerations of his one month anniversary with Kira in order to be able to conduct his “business” undisturbed.

It is the most tepid comic setup, with Quark’s protestations about Odo needing to recognize the milestone, and the inevitable conflict when Odo moves his date night to a different day than the one Quark was planning to make his criminal exchange, both coming off broad and hackneyed. Jake is a useless appendage in the story, becoming little more than a prop for Quark to deliver exposition to. This could have been a real waste in an episode already pressed for time.

But somehow, against all odds, its ending becomes the best thing in the whole episode. Quark’s lament that he supported Odo through his rough patch when pining for Kira, and still gets the business from the local security chief, is sympathetic. Quark really was there for Odo during the worst of things with Kira, and he’s not wrong to resent the way he’s treated like a criminal rather than an ally.

And the fact that Odo surreptitiously hears Quark’s complaints while hiding in preparation to bust him, and takes it to heart, is even better. The script signposts his thought process a bit too much, but it’s still downright sweet that Odo chooses to reschedule his date to not only keep Quark away from his own prying eyes, but give the Ferengi the sense of having finally gotten one over on the Changeling. My read on the pair is that Odo and Quark are, unbeknownst to themselves, the best of friends, and Odo making an active choice to support his friend, against his duties and his most deeply held law and order principles, reveals the depth of their friendship in a touching way.

If only the A-story ended up that touching! They try. Moore and company have the good sense to at least feature Benjamin, Julian, and Miles having vulnerable, personal conversations with Cusak, to communicate that the three of them have let their guard down. The actual dialogue isn’t great, and sometimes they even seem out of character, but the intentions are good.

I’m particularly a fan of her conversation with Chief O’Brien. His confession about thinking war wouldn’t be so bad this time, only to still feel the precariousness of his situation, in a way that leads him to isolate from those closest to him, is heartbreaking. I don’t love his discussion of not wanting to talk to ship’s counselors and thinking you should be able to just talk to friends, but it (a.) reflects real life feelings from folks like Miles, so his sentiments have the ring of truth and (b.) Cusak validates his feelings but wraps him back around to counselors being his best option if he’s going to close himself off for others.

And I’ll say this much -- if there’s one thing that almost makes this all-but-doomed endeavor work, it’s the vocal performance from guest star Debra Wilson as Captain Cusak. She knows how to bring the character to life through performance alone -- teasing Julian, nudging Miles, relating to Sisko -- in a way that helps balance out the inevitable shorthand that comes from trying to tell such an expansive character story in such a compressed time frame.

The twist is that when they actually find her, she’s already been dead for three years, and their conversation was only able to happen due to some time dilation from the latest funky energy field. The reveal is pretty weak. There’s only a slight difference between her dying from regular old hypoxia in real time, so it feels like a pointless attempt to add a sci-fi element that doesn’t strongly affect the thrust of the story. In theory, there’s some poetry in the fact that not only was the Defiant too late, but it was always destined to be too late, which doesn’t diminish Lisa’s connection with the crew. But it’s pretty thin gruel.

Still, it’s better than the elaborate toasts the main trio of people she spoke with gives at their post facto funeral for her. Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien all give loving tributes to Cusak, that fail on two fronts. For one, the speeches are on-the-nose with the character-specific epiphanies and takeaways to the point of artlessness, which saps them of their emotional power. For another, the fleeting interactions the audience has seen don’t support the glowing, loving terms in which the three men eulogize their fallen comrade. Try as it might, “The Sound of Her Voice” simply doesn’t earn that.

It’s a hard thing to earn in less than an hour! Building a single deep bond among a pair of characters in the usual Star Trek runtime is a challenge. Building three in the same stretch is a herculean task, if not something outright impossible. The notion of a stranger who becomes a close confidante through conversation alone is a compelling one, but despite a noble attempt, “The Sound of Her Voice” ultimately falls on deaf ears.

[3.6/10] I firmly believe that any actor can be used well. Some have greater range and greater talents than others, but if you find a director who knows how to get the best out of them, and a project that suits their strengths, any performer can do great work.

So while I’ve groused repeatedly about Robert Beltran’s prowess, or lack thereof, as an actor, there’s no reason he couldn’t be an asset to Voyager. Yes, he’s a little subdued and flat in his performances, but if you use that to make him a no-nonsense officer, one whose directness and lack of expression serves his devotion to duty, it could work. Chakotay often works best as a sort of disciplinarian, standing firm with subordinates and insisting that they follow orders or fulfill their duty.

“Unforgettable” is not that kind of story. It is, instead, one not only founded on romance, but on a romance between two characters the audience has never met before, that must click nigh-instantly for the story to work. And by god, Beltran is just not up to it.

Neither is Virginia Madsen, who guest stars as Kellin, a member of a species called the Ramora who, through a quirk of biology, fade in the memories of those they interact with, I’ll confess that I don’t know much of Madsen’s work. I enjoyed her voice acting in the D.C. Animated Universe well enough, but the truth is that I haven't seen enough of her filmography to make any broad statements about her talents. Unfortunately, she too is downright awful here, and between her and Beltran, “Unforgettable” is dead on arrival.

The premise is that Kellin is a Ramoran “tracer”, i.e. a bounty hunter. With some undercooked world-building, she explains that due to the Ramoran’s “leave no trace” philosophy, they don’t allow anyone to leave their communities. Kellin was tasked with bringing in someone who fled, tracked them to Voyager, and fell in love with Chakotay in her time aboard the ship, even knowing he would have no recollection of her once their dalliance ended.

Now she’s fleeing, because she wants to rekindle the relationship with Chakotay, and he’s understandably hesitant about this woman who knows all these intimate details about him, while he effectively knows nothing about her.

With that setup, “Unforgettable” runs into a few plausibility problems, but none that are outside the usual tolerances for soft sci-fi like Star Trek. The idea that the Ramorans’ pheromone can affect any alien life form strains credulity a bit, but is probably fair for Star Trek’s loose approach to biology. The fact that they also have technology that ensures they can’t be tracked or scanned is a bit of a cheat (The Doctor wouldn’t remember her?), but the script puts at least a few fig leaves over the idea. And Chakotay only thinking to make a hard copy record of these events at the end of this episode is a bit convenient, but fits comfortably in the realm of poetic license.

Honestly, though, I appreciate the high concept premise. Star Trek should be a canvas for big ideas and grandiose “What If?”s. The notion of sharing a deep love with someone, but knowing they’ve forgotten you, and you’ll have to start over again, is an interesting set of emotions to explore. In the same way, meeting a stranger who makes outrageous claims and has a sense of familiarity with you that’s both alluring and overwhelming is an equally interesting experience to explore.

These just aren’t the performers to do either with. Beltran and Madsen are independently less-than-great in their roles, and together, they have all the sparks of a pair of boiled carrots. I don’t know why the Voyager creative team keeps trying to cast Chakotay as a romantic lead. Sure, he’s handsome, but he’s always so stolid, so subdued, that it’s hard to sense anything remotely approaching passion from him. (Which is, why, I think his understated courtly romance with Janeway works better than any of the explicit love stories the writers throw him into.)

Madsen’s no better here. She too is flat and unconvincing in all of their scenes together and beyond. As with Beltran, every line read she offers seems dry and desultory. The diminished nature of the performances are out of sync with the passionate, emotionally layered nature of the story. But it also means that, for much of its runtime, “Unforgettable” is just plain boring, with long, languid scenes that sap all the energy from the piece and from the viewer.

Now I want to be fair to Beltran. At about the halfway mark of the episode, Kellin comes to Chakotay’s quarters with a big, “I left my people for you; am I chasing after something unreachable here?” speech. And while Beltran’s delivery of the line is as monotone as ever, he does some great nonverbal acting with his eyes in particular, giving the sense of someone emotionally overwhelmed who doesn’t want to let it out. It’s damn good work.

But it’s also too little too late. There’s a high degree of difficulty to a story like “Unforgettable”, because you need your main couple to have nigh-instant, smoldering chemistry with one another to make it work. Kellin has to look at Chakotay with the knowing, longing look of a lover who’d give up everything for the object of her affections. Chakotay has to be reluctant at first but drawn to Kellin in a way he can’t explain, like his body knows what his mind forgot. And when they do come together, it has to have the comfort and catharsis of two people who seem meant to be together.

That’s a lot to ask of any two actors, especially when you only have forty-four minutes in which to pull it off. That Madsen and Beltran aren’t up to it is no sin. Hell, even the fact that they’re pretty terrible is forgivable under the circumstances. But the writers and producers deserve blame for putting them in that position, centering Chakotay in a plot Beltran is unsuited for and casting Madsen in a role she’s not up to. The choice makes them, the episode, and the show look bad.

It also completely neuters the ending. The conclusion of “Unforgettable” is supposed to be tragic in its poetry, with a tracer using an Men in Black-style memory erasing device on Kellin. Now Chakotay’s the one in love, and Kellin’s the one who’s forgotten. And with her mind wiped, she’s not willing to try again.

You can see the bitter irony the show’s going for with that choice. But with a romance that has all the passion of gluten free wonder bread, the loss of their relationship feels like, well, no great loss. Again, in fairness, that’s a recurring problem with Star Trek, that (hot take alert) goes all the way back to “City on the Edge of Forever” from The Original Series. Guest characters aren’t going to join the cast, so any new love interests must be disposed of by the end of the hour. That means the writers have to go into overdrive to sell the tragedy of the loss of a relationship that viewers have only seen for less than an hour. It rarely works out. (See TNG’s “Half a Life” for one of the few times it does.)

The unfortunate result is that we get more labored attempts from Beltran to make Chakotay seem furious, or crestfallen, and again, the performance weakens the noble efforts here. The point seems to be delivered in Neelix’s closing speech: that love is mysterious, not a formula, and that’s part of what makes it so profound. But it’s thin gruel after forty-four minutes of dullness.

Outside of the rare cast departure like Kes, for most shows, chances are that your cast is going to be set from the beginning. The core group of performers are going to have to carry your series come hell or high water. That means learning how to write stories that align with what they do well, that take advantage of their natural talents, and minimize their faults. Whatever his limitations, Beltran’s rarely seen stories are parts that do that for him in Voyager. And while he’s far from my favorite actor on the show, I have some sympathy for the guy as an actor. Because in episodes like “Unforgettable”, the writers and producers are doing him no favors.

(As an aside, I don’t like to write about “Here’s what I would have done instead” because I think that’s an unfair way to review film and television. But halfway through the episode, I thought the turn in the narrative would be that Kellin did visit Voyager in the past and was forgotten, but that this second visit is all just another ruse to try to catch the Ramoran fugitive hiding out on Voyager, and she thought that using her knowledge of Chakotay’s personality to romance him would help get her closer to collaring the culprit. That would at least be a semi-neat twist, and could help account for some of the forced and unsuccessful attempts at chemistry between Madsen and Beltran.)

[3.5/10] Hoo boy. A 1990s network television show is doing a story about sexual assault. Buckle up. The message of “Retrospect” is simple but problematic as hell -- we should be extra vigilant about false accusations of rape, because that's the real harm to be concerned about here.

When meeting with the Doctor in his guise as a psychologist, Seven recalls being attacked, incapacitated, and having her Borg implants tested and collected by a local trader named Kovin. It’s presented as a clear metaphor for sexual assault. Only, Seven’s memory is apparently false, and even the accusation makes Kovin so squirrely, that he basically commits suicide by cop rather than face the charges in his people’s judicial system.

There is...a lot there. Let’s start with this. Star Trek doesn’t have a great history when it comes to sexual assault. Uhura faced, at a minimum, attempted rape in “The Gamesters of Triskellion” and it’s never addressed. Kirk himself has a shaky at best concept of consent. The Next Generation’s “A Matter of Perspective” has a woman accuse Riker of rape while being, charitably, somewhat mixed up about what really happened. Poor Counselor Troi has been psychically violated more times than she’s “sensed anger” in a snarling villain on the other side of the viewscreen. Star Trek: Enterprise would end up doing its own rape metaphor while characterisitcally making a complete hash of. And Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman Rand on TOS, heavily implied that none other than Gene Roddenberry sexually assaulted her.

Which is all to say that if you’re turning to Star Trek for a sensitive and progressive approach to the treatment of rape victims and accusations of sexual assault, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree to begin with.

That doesn’t excuse an episode like “Retrospect”, which less charitably, could be described as coming with a moral of “Don’t believe women -- falsely accused men are the real victims here.” I don’t want to slate a show from decades ago for not anticipating the change in norms that took hold in a post-#MeToo world. But if any franchise should be ahead of the curve, it’s Star Trek.

In a world where experts estimate that more than half of rapes that go unreported due to both challenges posed by the legal system and a society that still unduly shames rape victims, and where the number of unreported rapes dwarfs the number of false accusations, it’s almost malpractice for a theoretically forward-thinking show to treat people who’ve experienced some form of sexual assault and their friends and advocates as the bad guys, or at best, dangerously overzealous in their desire for justice, rather than people who too often go unheard and unheeded despite suffering gross violations.

As always, I want to be charitable when it comes to Star Trek. You can, generously, read “Retrospect” as an episode about the need to “trust but verify”, where Janeway and Tuvok take Seven’s allegations seriously, but also work to substantiate them before condemning anyone. There’s nothing wrong with that in principle.

That said, this is the rare episode where it feels like Voyager’s heart is in the wrong place, with more sympathy offered to Kovin, with narrative choices that make him the wronged party and create the sense of a system stacked against him, rather than ones that vindicate Seven and The Doctor’s courage to raise the issue. No one forced the writers to make this a false accusation story, and using the show’s platform to suggest that even purported rape victims with no ill intent can’t be trusted, and that men who act like condescending jerks even before they’re charged with grievous crimes are the real victims here, is morally questionable at best.

Still, trying to be charitable, I think you can take “Retrospect” as a reflection of the then-extant “Satanic Panic”, where some psychotherapists used techniques to surface dubious “recovered memories” of ritual abuse from their patients, which led to ill-founded accusation and unjust prosecutions. Read in its best light, this episode is a metonym for such moral panics, underscoring the need for impartial investigations into serious crimes, rather than rushes to judgment based on the severity or sensationalism of the accusation.

But decades later, I’m reminded of the Pulitzer Prize-winning news story, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape”, where a young woman with a checkered history reported her rape, was disbelieved by her caretakers and law enforcement, and was even “made an example of” and charged with false reporting, only for other authorities to eventually catch a serial rapist and discover evidence that substantiated the young woman’s allegations.

The story of “Retrospect” unfolds in similar ways. Janeway doesn't fully trust Seven after the ways she’s acted out recently. She’s had “visions” before that reflected true memories which had nevertheless become twisted through time and other damage. They know that she’s suffered trauma from her time in the Collective and worry that it’s clouded her judgment and jumbled her recollections. In short, she is not an easy person for the authorities on Voyager to believe.

So while the point of “Retrospect” seems to be, “See how easy it is for a false accusation to destroy someone’s life?” all I can see is an example of “See how easy it is to disregard and overlook violations visited upon people who are less than perfect victims?” The fact that Seven is treated as honest in her recollections, sincere in her accusations, but nevertheless unreliable in what she alleges is damning on the writers, and uses the platform of Star Trek to furnish a culture that implicitly discourages the reporting of sexual assault and runs the charaacter and credibility of women who dare to speak out about it through the wringer.

On its own merit, apart from its misguided values, “Retrospect” is still a feeble episode. Much of the story progression and dialogue here is tedious and dull. Its points are ham-handed and overly didactic. Kovin is a flat character, with no sense of inner life or deeper characteristics. Generously, if you squint you can potentially see the show trying to say, “Just because someone is a one-dimensional, patronizing prick doesn’t make them a rapist and doesn’t mean they should be railroaded”, but it’s pretty thin gruel. And the fact that Janeway won’t even fire on his ship simply to disable it, even though it’s putting Voyager at risk, because he’s “been under enough fire” already is baffling.

Here’s the thing about Star Trek -- not all of it ages well. If you revisit a franchise that’s been telling stories for more than half a century, you have to accept that sometimes, even a high-minded series like this one is going to screw up, sometimes royally so. It comes with the territory, and serves as a reminder that progress doesn’t come in a straight line, and we should extend our forebears the same charity and understanding we hope that future generations will extend to us for our missteps and blindspots.

But here’s the other thing about Star Trek -- usually its heart is in the right place. Even if our understanding on a topic changes, or our societal norms evolve, this franchise is generally founded on understanding and empathy, which makes it easy to extend grace to places and times where our appreciation for certain mores and principles hadn't quite solidified yet.

“Retrospect” is the opposite. It teaches mistrust and disregard for those who speak out about sexual assault. It offers criticism about the treatment those accused received in the justice system at a time when even those convicted of rape are given light sentences in the name of “not ruining their futures.” It’s more worried about the fraction of false accusations than the avalanche of sexual assaults that go unreported and unpunished. This is one of the thankfully rare times when Star Trek is wrong-headed and wrong-hearted, albeit in an area where the franchise has an embarrassingly large number of missteps.

Maybe the real lesson here is just as simple -- that for all its merits and glories, Star Trek isn’t equipped to handle a story like this one, and never has been. aaa

[8.3/10] I love it when a story has layers. “In-universe” the Voyager crew has been cast as a small but plucky and resourceful resistance group trying to fend off their malevolent occupiers. In “real life” the Voyager crew are also a small but plucky and resourceful resistance group trying to fend off their malevolent occupiers.

Because the Hirogen have taken over the ship off screen, but rather than eviscerating our heroes and collecting their organs and bones, these hunters want to use the crew as fodder for their games on the holodeck, which recreate famous historical battles in the guise of teaching the Hirogen more about their enemies.

Like all holodeck stories, you do need to walk into this one with a fair amount of willing suspension of disbelief. This whole episode turns on the hunt-obsessed Hirogen having “neural interfaces” that not only work nicely with human (and Vulcan and Talaxian and half-Klingon) biology, but are able to sync perfectly with the holodeck’s database and (mostly) override the crewmembers’ actual personalities and memories. Technology has long been basically magic in Star Trek to this point, and “The Killing Game” duology leans hard into that, but the quality of the story justifies the indulgence.

Because unlike much of Voyager, this episode is just plain cool. Many holodeck episodes in Star Trek know how fun it is to see our heroes step outside of their workaday professionalism and cosplay in some unique setting for a while. There’s something downright neat about transposing Janeway and company into a Cabaret style nightclub, where they entertain Nazis by night but plot against them by day. Hell, kicking things off with the Captain as a Klingon comes with a winning novelty to it.

This is a monotony-breaker of the highest order, and watching the good guys decode allied messages to aid the resistance, or fire machine guns at alien nazis has a cool factor that’s tough to articulate.

But I think some of it comes from how well “cast” everyone is. The first half of the “Killing Game” makes great hay from the roles the Voyager crew step into. Some of the dynamics are a little convenient, but I’ll take it in the name of engaging character interactions and fun surprises. The parallels between the characters’ real life roles and their fictional personas are especially striking.

Janeway is a natural as the head of the resistance unit who has to use diplomacy with her adversaries and guile in the shadows. She’s obviously skilled as a leader, so the shoe fits, but it’s also a treat to see her schmooze guests and play host in a way we don’t often get to see. Tuvok slots in nicely as her number two, the “logical” tactician of her squadron. And Neelix as the well-met baker who’s nonetheless aiding the resistance is a fun role for him.

The best “casting”, though, is Seven, who plays the musical entertainment in Janeway’s club, but is the pugnacious and mistrusted munitions expert for the resistance in her spare time. While a touch too coincidental, I appreciate how Seven’s role as the new addition to the resistance unit whom the others worry may be an untrustworthy turncoat, at the same time Seven herself is a new addition to the Voyager crew who’s given Janeway and company cause for alarm about her loyalties.

Seven’s 1940s musical numbers go on a bit long (and oddly presage a bit of Borg balladeering in Star Trek: Picard), but this is as different a persona as we’ve seen her take on, while the character’s “shoot first, ask questions” later nature cannot be denied. That’s one of the things I like about the construction of this one; you can see the characters’ real personalities bleeding through their programming in interesting ways.

That dynamic also works when Harry and The Doctor figure out a way to de-hypnotize Seven while she’s in the simulation, at the cost of her not remembering anything about the scenario she’s been plopped into or the character she’s supposed to play. The way French Resistance Leader Janeway suspects Munitions Expert Seven of being a double agent dovetails nicely with how the real Seven suddenly seems uninterested in their plans to bring down the Nazi communications grid and “forgets” to do basic tasks for the explosives. It’s canny and clockwork writing.

The same goes for how Harry and the EMH are working with a few collaborators to try to surreptitiously take back the ship at the same time Faux Janeway and her collaborators are trying to take back their French village. And the parallels even benefit the characters who aren’t involved in the simulations.

To the point, this may be the most I’ve ever liked Harry. He often takes on the role of the naive, wide-eyed ensign. But here he’s courageous, assertive, clever, and even a little manipulative. The way he stands up to his Hirogen captors making him repair and remake the ship, the way he conspires with the Doctor to find a means of subduing them, and the way he covers up his actions by invoking the Hirogen chain of command all show a guile and a self-possession we’ve never really seen from Harry before. Let’s see more of it!

This is an equally good outing for The Doctor. His twin roles of having to patch up the poor souls injured in the Hirogen’s games, while working against them in secret, recalls his actions in “The Basics” and shows how he can “do no harm” while also taking steps to protect and defend his colleagues and friends.

Hell, even the Hirogen are interesting here! To date, they’ve mostly gotten by on vibes alone, as tall, menacing, single-minded hunters who thrive on the intimidation factor of their look and their trophy rooms. Here, we get a little bit more. The Alpha Hirogen, the one who organized this peculiar kind of theater, isn’t just playing around in the holodeck. He’s trying to forge a new way forward for his people. There’ll be more to explore here in the second half, but the idea that he’s a Hirogen who sees a day beyond “the hunt” as an all-consuming thing for his culture, but rather a need that could be met through this technology, freeing them to do more, and do better, once this “territory” is exhausted, is intriguing.

Not for nothing, it’s also nice to see him dress down a Nazi! It works on multiple levels. For one, it helps demonstrate that there’s something sympathetic, even honorable about the Alpha Hirogen, even though he’s the antagonist here. For another, it countermands Star Trek’s unfortunate history of Nazi apologia (mostly in The Original Series). It shouldn't be a big stretch to have a character say “Nazis are bad,” but considering how hard it’s been to get current political leaders to admit that, and considering how Star Trek itself has tried to excuse Nazism in oblique ways, there’s something oddly rousing about hearing this alien brute point out the flaws in the Third Reich’s ideology and dub them cowards.

That’s just another layer to add onto this one. What’s great about “The Killing Game” is that it works on multiple levels.

It works as pure story. Even if you didn’t have the Hirogen, the tale of a small French resistance band trying to weaken their Nazi occupiers before the American cavalry arrives is an exciting plot. Even if you didn’t know Tom and B’Elanna’s romantic history, the tale of an American G.I. reuniting with his onetime French sweetheart, only to find she’s a member of the resistance carrying a Nazi officer’s baby, is a captivating setup. Even if you didn’t have the holodeck simulations, the story of the Doctor and Harry working under the Hirogen’s noses to take back the ship with guts and guile is gripping.

And then, with all those layers, all those parallels, Voyager literally blows up the walls between them. Suddenly, the American soldiers think they’ve found a Nazi bunker. The Hirogen on Voyager have to deal with holographic/brainwashed characters spilling out onto the regular corridors of the ship. The fake good guys and the real bad guys and the fake bad guys and the real good guys are all suddenly mixed together into one explosive collision course.

There are better Star Trek: Voyager episodes than this, but there may be none more thrilling, or more cleverly constructed, with all the different levels of this one coming together in one blockbuster crescendo.

[7.7/10] When Rian Johnson and his creative team were writing The Last Jedi, they had a big task ahead of them. As the middle chapter of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, they wanted something to match the famous “I am your father” moment from The Empire Strikes Back, the single line that upended Luke Skywalker’s world and created an electricity blockbuster cinema has arguably continued chasing ever since. To line up their film with that one, Johnson and company didn’t try to find another familial connection that would be even more mind-blowing, but instead, reportedly asked themselves, “What would be the most devastating answer for our protagonist to hear?”

The approach is smart. The impact of the famous reveal from Episode V came from more than a shocking father-son connection; it came from how it forced Luke Skywalker to reevaluate who he was and what he was fighting against. Focusing on that part of the equation, rather than the latest “father's, brother's, nephew's, cousin's, former roommate"-style twists that have all but consumed genre film and television is what allows you to match that one’s power.

Which is what I appreciate about “Wrongs Darker than Night or Death”. The episode introduces some wild revelations about Kira’s mother, some crazy time travel plots, and an unexpected connection between her past and her present. But more than that, it delivers the most devastating possible news for her.

Kira is a fierce resistance fighter. Her mother was a collaborator. Kira loathes Gul Dukat with everything in her. Her mother loved him. Kira fought in part to honor the memory of her mom who died due to Cardassian oppression. Her mother, it turns out, lived for years after on Cardassian largesse.

What that means to Kira, how it changes her worldview, how she balks at the truth, is worth the narrative and continuity shenanigans it takes to get there.

Only barely though. It’s a little convenient that Kira is able to go back in time to see what the real deal with her mother is, but there’s a precedent for it (albeit in the somewhat winking Original Series tribute episode), and you can chalk it up to the “will of the Prophets.”

The bigger problem is that we’ve never really heard Kira mention her mother before, so while the idea that she’s a big part of Kira’s psychological motivation is plausible, it comes out of nowhere and lacks some emotional resonance. Likewise, the idea that Dukat had a relationship with Meru, which perhaps influences his attraction to Kira, isn’t crazy. We’ve seen his preference for Bajoran women, and he’s perverse enough to go after his former lover’s daughter. But it too seems like something that would have come up before now, or at least had hints in that direction, so for it just to be dropped out of nowhere like this is jarring.

That is both a feature and bug, because it’s jarring for Kira too. However contrived the setup is, however much of a “small universe problem” this creates, Kira denying Dukat’s “confession”, but having to see the truth for herself is a strong setup. We are, the Major, skeptical of Dukat’s claim, and a little shocked when it turns out to be true. So the out-of-the-blue suddenness of it all helps put us in Kira’s shoes.

The Orb of Time also puts us in the shoes of those in the throes of the Cardassian Occupation. As with past flashback episodes, it’s intriguing to get a glimpse of what life for Bajorans, and life on the station looked like before the Federation came into town. The scant rations and infighting among Bajoran refugees, young mothers being indiscriminately torn from their family impressed into service as “comfort women”, the beginnings of the ore refinery and work camps and resistance, all paint a picture of living through the occupation we’ve only seen in snippets before. The grimness and cruelty of it stands out, as do the hard choices Bajorans have to make to survive within that oppressive structure.

The most interesting to me is Basso, the quisling Bajoran who collects the women for Dukat and his officers to abuse, stage-manages them as their judge, jury, and executioner, and seems to have no compunction whatsoever about his role. He represents the kind of collaborator Kira loathes, and it’s not hard to see why.

And yet, it’s also not hard to see why Kira’s mother, Meru, ends up accepting her life as Dukat’s companion. It is a privileged life in a sea of oppression. Dukat cuts a faux-benevolent figure and exudes surface-level gallantry, which buttress rationalizations that he’s “not so bad.” Meru has suffered for years. To her mind, resisting wouldn’t change the system; it would only make things worse for her and her family. The combination of an easy life for her, a better life for her children, and the unmovable oppression she lives under makes this the right choice in her eyes.

But it damns her in Kira’s. All Kira sees is someone who could choose to fight who instead chooses to live in luxury. Kira sees through Dukat’s bullshit and knows the horrors he has inflicted and will inflict in the future; but Mira is wooed and convinced by it. Kira sees someone who she believed to be a martyr, dying for the cause, is instead someone who accepted abandoning her family to sidle up to the enemy. The revelation is enough for Kira to try assassinating her own mom and Dukat all at once.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, she forebears, because she sees Meru crying at a message from Kira’s father about how much this choice has improved their family’s life and how much he misses her. She recognizes the humanity, the fallibility, the mixed emotions in this supposed betrayer, which complicate Kira’s feelings and her choices.

If there is a traditional Kira story in Deep Space Nine beyond “What happened to you, Nerys? You used to be cool,” it’s Kira entering a situation with a black-and-white mentality and learning that there are shades of gray. That idea is in keeping with the broader themes of the series, which seek out the gray areas in supposed Federation nobility and frontier pragmatism.

So it feels right, then, for the purpose of this revelation to be to give Kira a broader perspective. As we learned back in “Necessary Evil”, if there’s one thing Kira hates more than a Cardassian, it’s a collaborator. The Bajorns who betrayed their own people, who gave aid and comfort to the enemy, are in some ways worse than their oppressors in Kira’s eyes.

This jaunt to the past allows her to see that, as always, things are more complicated than that. Kira being Kira, her mind isn’t completely changed. She’s still aghast at her mother, still not sure if she did the right thing by sparing her, still unwavering in her belief that it was wrong. But she also understands, at some level, that her mother did this partly because a life of misery makes a life of pleasures easy to accept, but also partly because it meant a better life for Kira and her siblings. Being away from them was painful. War and occupation breed sacrifices and compromises, not all of them pretty, to help take care of those you love. That is a bitter truth, for us and for Kira, but it speaks to something true and unfortunately real.

In truth, the famous reveal of Empire Strikes Back is a bit contrived as well. George Lucas hadn't intended it when he wrote A New Hope, and if you look closely, it shows. And yet, the moment remains powerful because it changes everything for Luke. He thought he was fighting evil on behalf of the good, avenging the father who died at a villain’s hands. Instead, the man who’s memory he’s fighting for is the same dastard he’s trying to kill now; his mentor lied to him; and his enemy is the one telling him the truth and reaching for connection. It turns his world upside down, in a way that makes him realize the light side and the dark side are not so black and white.

In a way, despite the title, “Wrongs Darker than Night or Death” does the same for Kira. It takes what and whom she thought she was fighting for and shakes her idea of both to the core. It complicates her feelings for a mother whose connection she still feels, but also affects her thinking on what lies in the heart of a collaborator. In short, it expands her perspective, and deepens her understanding of the other players in this game.

I still don’t love the tacked on backstory and retconned connections. But that idea, that reveal of the worst possible thing, that broader perspective and recognition of the tangles and complications of hearts and minds and grave injustices and impossible choices, is Star Trek and Deep Space Nine to a tee. And it puts them both in very good company.

[7.9/10] There’s a lot going on in “Inquisition”. It is part paranoid thriller, part examination of justice and fairness in the face of exigent investigations, part standard Trekkian mind-bender, and part commentary on the contradictions of the Federation. That is a lot of ground to cover in forty-four minutes, but thankfully, Deep Space Nine does it well.

The episode sees Deputy Director Sloane from Starfleet Internal Affairs investigating a potential Dominion mole and setting his sights on Bashir. William Sadler plays the rock-ribbed, manipulative, and intimidating officer convincingly, with a mix of sly smugness and military certainty that makes him a good antagonist in the episode.

He’s an unknown quantity in a known setting. If there’s one thing “Inquisition” does well, it’s helping the audience share in Dr. Bashir’s disorientation and bewilderment at the turn of events during Sloan’s investigation, which helps link the disparate ideas in the episode together. Julian gets hints as to what’s happening at the same time we do, with Sloan playing mind games while he’s confined to quarter, pretending to be friendly before turning into a hardass, and leaving us as uncertain as he is about what’s really going on. The vibe of maddening uncertainty and sense of unfairness to all of this puts the audience in Dr. Bashir’s shoes in a nice way.

At the same time, though, the writers do a good job of putting us in Sloan’s shoes as well, at least when the story’s still maintaining the pretense that this is a standard Starfleet investigation. To some extent, Sloan comes off like a biased investigator when he lays out his case against Julian. As with Lt. Cdr. Remick in TNG’s “Coming of Age” or Admiral Satie in TNG’s “The Drumhead”, the story features a motivated Starfleet interrogator taking the least charitable interpretation of events the audience has witnessed.

The way Sloan invokes Dr. Bashir’s sympathy toward the Jem’Hadar in “Hippocratic Oath”, his time in Dominion captivity that could have let the Vorta get their hooks in him from “In Purgatory’s Shadow”, his recommendation that the Federation surrender in “Statistical Probabilities”, and even the improbability of his escape from the Dominion prison camp in “By Inferno’s Light”.

I’m always a sucker for when a show remembers its continuity, and has another character use it against our protagonists. (Hello Game of Thrones fans!) Sloan seems like a biased asshole, taking the worst possible spin, the least generous interpretation, of every action Dr. Bashir’s taken, even though the audience has seen him and his earnest intentions in action. As Sisko himself relays, while Julian may have made mistakes, his motives have always been pure and loyal.

But even in the face of our obvious sympathies, the show does two very smart things to combat them. One, it plants a seed of doubt in both Julian and the audience. And two, it raises a suggestion that, however much of a jerk he may be about it, Sloan may not be unreasonable in trying to put these pieces together to finger Julian as a possible traitor.

For the former, Sloan suggests that Julian might have suppressed his memory of being turned, or had it turned for him. So while viewers may be skeptical that Julian is a turncoat, it’s much more plausible that he’s been brainwashed or coopted somehow, a la Geordi’s Manchurian Candidate experience in TNG’s “The Mind’s Eye”. At the same time Dr. Bashir is questioning himself, wondering if there might be something under the mental surface he’s not privy to, the audience wonders the same. The choice is another nice dovetailing between the character’s experience of these events and the viewer’s.

For the latter, as much of a Prick as Sloan is, you can see how, to an objective observer, who hasn’t had the privilege of the nigh-omniscient vantage point of the audience, would be skeptical of Dr. Bashir. Sloan’s right that Julian lied to get into Starfleet and didn't admit the truth until he was caught. He’s right that even Chief O’Brien questioned Dr. Bashir’s choices with respect to the Jem’Hadar they were stranded with. Sloan’s right Julian and his augment association’s recommendation that the Federation surrender was, at a minimum, unusual. And Sloan’s right that it was odd that the Dominion just let a functional Starfleet runabout hang around one of their prison camps. (And hey, good for this episode for acknowledging the show’s own narrative shortcuts and even putting them to good use!)

Add those things up, and you have a surprisingly reasonable case that, if there's a suspected traitor in your midst, Julian might very well be your number one suspect. I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for television series threading past events together like this, especially when they use the collective whole to put them into a new light.

That said, it’s still easy to feel indignant on Julian’s behalf. He still seems railroaded, mistreated, unjustly cornered by Sloan and his men. We know with the benefit of hindsight that it’s all a sort of endurance trial to test Julian’s mettle, resolve, and loyalty. But if I didn’t know better given the timeframe, I’d think this was a Patriot Act commentary. The truth is that it’s an unfortunately recurring trope in real life, but the way Sloan uses war and special dispensation from command to let suspicion lead to detention and strip the doctor of his rights ties into the broader theme of this episode, about the Federation perhaps losing its soul in the throes of war, or its principles having been cracked from the beginning anyway.

The same goes for the interrogation Julian endures, which plays like a commentary on law enforcement methods and pressure placed on the accused. The sense in which the deck is stacked against Dr. Bashir, in how his interrogators blame him for the deaths of their comrades and family members, in how his rights are being disregarded despite the protections of his captain, how his privacy is being invaded, make you understand why someone would give in just to make it all stop.

So too does the sense from Dr. Bashir that he’s not certain he can trust his own memory. There are shades of Kira’s experience in “Second Skin” here, where you wake up in a dizzying scenario out of nowhere that forces you to reckon with how much you can rely on your own recollections. By the same token, this episode is of a piece with Riker’s experience in TNG’s “Future Imperfect”, and the Doctor’s experience in VOY’s “Life Line”, where the protagonist isn’t sure what’s real and what isn’t, and keeps having the rug pulled out from under them, to where eventually the audience is forced to play the same guessing game, and wonder who’s telling the truth and who’s mixed up.

“Inquisition” does well at that game, when Dr. Bashir is purportedly beamed out by Weyoun, who tries to remind Julian of their methods for getting him to remember his complicity in the Dominion’s actions. It’s a brilliant use of Weyoun, whose entire M.O. is genteel manipulation. The way he tries to paint Dr. Bashir’s supposed betrayal as a move to save lives, that history will remember as a humane act, is in keeping with Bashir's principles. And superstar Jeffrey Combs has the perfect silver-tongued salesman’s bent to persuade both Julian and us that the doctor did succumb to the Dominion’s entreaties, and it’s been programmed out of him.

Savvy viewers can probably guess that Dr. Bashir isn't really a turncoat, even a brainwashed one. But Deep Space Nine is not above major twists like this, many of which have involved Bashir (i.e., he’s secretly a changeling, he’s secretly an augment, he’s secretly a yorkshire terrier). Weyoun puts the idea just close enough to the line to make you wonder if the Vorta might just be telling the truth, and Julian’s been caught up in another Dominion ploy.

Thankfully, the way the show snaps out of it in the perfect way. I particularly appreciate how the script has Julian, and by extension the audience, clued into what’s wrong with this scenario on both an interpersonal and a practical basis. Julian realizes something is off when everyone on the Defiant believes the worst about him and doesn’t even hear him out. I love the fact that what reassures him that this whole thing is some kind of scam comes from knowing his friends well enough to recognize that they wouldn’t treat him this way, and trusting that they’d have his back even in the roughest of circumstances. It speaks to the bonds he’s formed over the past six years.

And on a particle basis, the show sets up that Miles injured his shoulder in one of trademark kayaking runs, allowing Julian to smell a rat when he shrugs off a touch of the arm with remarkable dexterity. It’s some good setup and payoff, and enough to feel like “Inquisition” is playing fair when Sloan turns off the holodeck and reveals that this whole thing was a ruse to see if Dr. Bashir had the right stuff.

Enter Section 31, which may be the most Deep Space Nine concept in all of Deep Space Nine. There’ll be more time to talk about them later, but in short, there’s something dark, and galling about the idea that there’s an autonomous agency, using questionable methods to recruit people, doing whatever it deems necessary to protect the interests of the Federation, using loopholes in the charter. Julian is right to be aghast, not only at how he was treated, but at how this runs counter to everything Starfleet has been about since fans first saw the organization.

The dialogue lays it on a little thick, but if there’s been a guiding principle for the UFP, it’s that the ends don’t justify the means; that there are certain principles that are inviolable, and our heroes would rather lose fairly or suffer justly than survive at the cost of their ideals. Section 31 is the opposite of that, an organization that believes the lives saved, the paradise preserved, is worth whatever tactics and dirty work are necessary to ensure it.

It’s hard to imagine a concept truer to showrunner Ira Steven Behr’s view of the show, and of the Federation, that something so ostensibly so shiny and upstanding must have a dark underbelly and a pit of compromise in order to sustain itself. I’m a fan of deconstructions, and recognition of unpleasant pragmatism beneath the glistening ideals, but Section 31 is a big deal, arguably the largest betrayal of Gene Roddenberry’s vaunted vision there’s even been in the franchise. That’s the point.

I love how the rest of the DS9 crew is galled by the revelation, all except Odo, who recognizes that the great powers of the quadrant have each sported a secret organization to protect their interests. The Federation is supposed to be above such things. Roddenberry’s excuse for why Starfleet didn’t use cloaking technology was, “We don’t sneak around.” Well, apparently we do, and what we’re willing to cover up, and look the other way over, is much broader and more bracing than anything the great bird of the galaxy might have been able to stomach.

It’s tough for Julian to stomach too. He loves his James Bond-inspired fantasies, but as with his interactions with Garak in “Our Man Bashir”, he’s come to discover that the actual espionage is much less glamorous, much more harrowing, and much more morally compromised than he’d countenanced before. As is so often the case in Deep Space Nine, the truth is darker and more complicated than the fiction.

That is, of course, a lot to encompass in a single hour of television. “Inquisition” arguably bites off more than it can chew here. And yet, what it gnaws on is good stuff, with room to explore more of it down the line. The world of Dr. Bashir, and of Deep Space Nine, would never be quite the same after this, when the show questions if Julian might be compromised, and instead reveals that, instead, it’s the whole damn Federation.

[7.2/10] Deep Space Nine needed an episode like “Change of Heart”. One of the core problems of the Worf/Dax wedding episode is that it was largely about Dax acquiescing and accommodating to be with Worf. That's been true with much of their relationship, right down to her helping him play Cyrano for Quark. Time and again, Dax has been the one to go the extra mile, to suffer Worf’s stick-up-his-own-ass behavior like siding with the Puritanical extremist on Risa, to have to understand and sacrifice for him, not the other way around. There hasn’t been nearly enough of Worf doing anything close for Dax.

“Change of Heart” is a tonic for that problem in two big ways. One is smaller, but significant. We get to see the two of them together, playful and fun as a married couple, in a way we never really have on an extended basis before. It’s striking that, outside of the wretched Risa episode, the show has mostly featured the two of them together in subplots, or even individual scenes, rather than episodes where we get to see the couple growing closer as a main focus.

Giving over the episode to them makes room for those smaller moments, the kind that good relationships are made of, but which often aren't dramatic enough to make it to television. Seeing them banter about work and about fun, seeing them canoodle and then have to get up and go to work in the morning, seeing them chuckle and accommodate one another over how Trills hate heat and Klingons hate cold is downright sweet.

Outside of a scant few kisses and friendly scenes, the audience hasn’t had many opportunities to observe Dax and Worf simply being a couple. And what do you know? It’s easier to like them and root for them when we see them being sweet and playful with one another.

But it also gives us an opportunity to see Worf bending toward Dax, not the other way around. In truth, it’s told more than it’s shown, but Dax acknowledging Worf’s attempt to fulfill his duties as a husband by being a little more easy-going to suit his wife is heartening after the bullshit lead-up to their wedding. The simple fact that he’s happy to go on a pampered honeymoon, rather than a grueling one, because he knows it’s what Dax wants, is a nice sign of him being willing to accommodate her, rather than always insisting that she accommodate him.

Again, these are little things, and little moments, but they’re also the things that matter in relationships, even if they don’t overwhelm you with drama, so it’s great to see Deep Space Nine giving these interactions the time and space to breathe.

Which is why it’s somewhat strange that Ronald D. Moore takes time out of the best rendition of Worf and Dax yet for a forgettable, middling-at-best subplot about Chief O’Brien and Dr. Bashir trying to beat Quark at tongo.

Candidly, I don’t know what the point of it is. Charitably, it’s just a bit of a lighter change of pace with an A-story that gets pretty serious. I like the notion of Miles needing a “challenge” to focus his mind on to take his mind off missing his wife. I like the idea of Dr. Bashir being willing to help his friend under the circumstances. And I like the fact that Quark is good at tongo, and by extension business, not just because he’s good at numbers and strategy, but because he’s good at reading people, able to understand how to push their buttons. You’d expect nothing less from a stalwart bartender.

What I don’t like is returning to the idea that Julian is still hopelessly smitten with Jadzia, and maybe Quark too. (Though I figure the Ferengi is purely mercenary here.) Dr. Bashir mooning over (and frankly creeping on) Dax was never my favorite part of the show, and I thought we’d moved past it. Resurrecting that nonsense now, even to throw Julian off during a game of tongo, feels misplaced.

But the best you can say for the return of that ignoble idea is that for all Julian and Quark’s complaints about “Commander Boring” and assumptions that Worf and Dax’s relationship wouldn’t last longer than a month or two, “Change of Heart” does a superb job of showing why their connection has been so much more venerable than that.

In truth, I don’t really care about the plot of the A-plot. The show wants to make a big deal about a Carddassian operative who’s jumpy about his extraction. And through convenient logistical hurdles, Dax and Worf have to hike through the jungle without comms or transporters to get to him. In practice, it’s an excuse for them to wander around a theoretically dangerous but largely unremarkable wooded setting for the back half of the episode. Director David Livingston does his best with the material, but a few inventive shots and large lizards can’t make up for this sense that a lot of this feels like kids playacting in their backyard.

Despite that, I like their little quest because it gives us more time with Worf and Dax ribbing and relying on one another. You can see Worf come out of his shell a little when he’s alone with his wife. You can see Dax being playful and her husband responding well to it. You can see Worf caring for Jadzia when she’s injured, worrying that it’s his new more relaxed attitude that caused the injury, and most heartwarmingly, promising to smile every day if Jadzia promises to make it.

I don’t know, they feel like human beings here, like a loving couple who have their differences, but deep down care about one another with passion and conviction in a way we’ve never really seen before. This is a couple I can get behind, in interactions big and small, and I’m glad that Deep Space Nine finally gave it to us.

Therein lies the other big part of the tonic that “Change of Heart” provides -- because at the end of the day, Worf is willing to sacrifice his mission, his duty, maybe even his career, to ensure the safety and well-being of the woman he loves. It’s the most romantic thing we’ve seen him do arguably ever (and is weirdly in line with him throwing off his combadge to go slay Duras after Duras killed K’Ehleyr).

So much of this relationship, particularly the wedding episode, has been about Dax needing to give things up to be more in line with Worf. It’s been high time for an equal and opposite gesture, and this more than fits the bill.

Despite Worf occasionally bailing to join the Klingon fleet, if there’s one thing we know about him, it’s his devotion to his duty, his insistence on following orders, his pride in his place within Starfleet. Beyond that, as Sisko notes, the well-being of millions, maybe billions is on the line with the intel the Cardassian agent has to offer. In the end, none of it matters more to Worf than saving the woman he loves. He’d disobey orders, give up his chance at command, maybe even damn the whole quadrant if it means protecting Dax. It is, frankly, the kind of sacrifice I’ve been waiting for, one that shows Worf is as willing to bend, as willing to compromise, as his partner is, if not more so.

The closing lines are touching. Sisko gives his subordinate the obligatory dressing down, but admits he’d do the same thing in Worf’s position. Dax comes to and thanks Worf, in her own cheeky way, for his gallantry. The two exchange “I love you”s and kiss, the sign of two people who are equals, lovers, and friends.

Where the hell has it been? Why did it take until now to get it? I don’t know. Different writers have different takes on different characters. You can’t expect total consistency. But this is the Worf and Dax I’ve been waiting for, the ones who feel like human beings (more or less) in a real relationship. The wait was long, but I’m still glad they’re finally here.

(Spoilers for later in the series: Worf’s reaction to Dax’s near death only makes what happens down the line seem more tragic somehow. Candidly, I don't remember Worf’s reaction to that event, but I hope it’s informed by how he acts here.)

My kitten, who was born deformed and only lived 12 weeks, used to watch Futurama with me as though it was the greatest thing since catnip. Though she was born without a tail -- or much of a lover torso area. Or feet ... I loved her so. Pookie was very tiny, but man was she spunky. Was the 1st to do everything too. including the switch to kibble. And she was more than capable of getting around on her front paws and would more or less balance perfectly. Not to mention climbing vertically. She blew my mind with how able she was. Had next to no idea what she was that different. Least, not till the very end. But it was tiring for her. So I converted one of my exes beanies (with long strands hanging down) that happened to be my favorite Sesame Street character, Cookie Monster and hung it around my neck. Kind of like a birds nest. Even had my dad's neon orange beanie nestled inside. For support. Anyhoo, she would perch on the edge and stare at the TV as I watched. And I wouldn't trade the experience for world. Oddly enough, ever since I was a little sh!t, I knew one day I would have a pure white "half kitty." It was meant to be. And though it nearly broke me given I (was going thru separation from my partner of 12+ years as well) instantly fell for that little critter. But I kept her littermate being that they all were an accident and Zelda's been with me for over 8 years now. And more than makes up for all the headaches of ol' with being such a love bug. Bless all critters, everywhere. And I hope this show brings you all the joy that still brings me today. I'm so glad Pookie made it through all their episodes. All of it was absolutely as it should be :yum:

[4.7/10] I’m a believer in the idea that there are no bad story ideas. Sure, there’s some that make your degree of difficulty higher, but the story is in the telling. There’s tons of films and episodes that sound bonkers on paper, but end up soaring in their execution. Nothing should be out of bounds.

But by god, at some point in this process, I wish a member of the creative team had taken a step back, looked long and hard at the script, and asked “Are we really doing a story where Captain Janeway goes on the run from aliens with a holographic Leonardo da Vinci?”

I don’t know what to tell you. Some episodes feel like they’re doomed out of the gate, and this is one of them. The basics of the plot aren't bad. Some high tech scavengers raid Voyager and steal some key components, forcing Janeway and company to head to the nearby fence planet to get them back. With the right character focus and wrinkle to the situation, you’d have a fine foundation for a Star Trek narrative.

But the problems start with the fact that Janeway was running her da Vinci holodeck program when the raiders attacked, and somehow in the tumult, that means the character of da Vinci was taken alongside the Doctor’s mobile emitter and is now working for Tau, the crime lord in charge of the operation.

Look, I don’t like to ding Star Trek for plausibility. Basically everything involving the holodeck is a flight of fancy, and you just have to go with it if you’re going to accept an idea that’s been in the franchise since the 1970s. Yes, it’s awfully convenient that everything turns out this way, but if they’d done something better with the result, I wouldn’t have minded. (See: Moriarty’s appearance on TNG, which this episode is trying desperately to replicate.) Unfortunately, nothing about this passes the laugh test.

The fact that holo da Vinci processes everything in this alien bazaar as some reflection of the world as it was in the 16th century is absurd. What use the local crime lord would have for his antiquated ideas is baffling. And while there’s some utility in Janeway keeping him around since he has an in with Tau, the fact that Janeway’s willing to risk the Doctor’s mobile emitter on this nonsense is questionable at best. The whole situation feels downright silly, when the show largely wants us to take things seriously.

What’s so funny about all this is that da Vinci isn’t the problem! John Rhys-Davies is so darn good, and so darn charming, that you half-buy the idea of this 16th century polymath running around the Delta Quadrant on the strength of his performance alone. On a base level, he’s entertaining, with a theatrical flair and dramatic presence that help you understand why the producers wanted to bring Rhys-Davies back after his turn in the “Scorpion” duology.

But frankly, I don’t understand what the point of his inclusion is. On a plot level, he’s semi-necessary for Janeway to locate and gain access to the main computer component. But from a broader lens, it’s not clear what purpose he serves in terms of characters or themes. When the episode began, with Kathryn encouraging him not to give up on his projects or abandon his home, I assumed he would turn things around at some point. I figured the theme would be that despite setback, Janeway herself shouldn’t get discouraged or give up on trying to find a way home for Voyager.

“Concerning Flight” never really goes that direction. You can sort of read it into the Captain’s interactions with her maestro, but there’s never really a problem or even a bit of dialogue that dramatizes the idea. Instead, the only character with an arc in this story is da Vinci, who gets frustrated and stymied, but then has a wondrous experience, and comes back inspired and resolved to throw himself back into his work again.

That’s all well and good except that, you know, da Vinci is a hologram, and not one programmed to persist, adapt, and grow like the Doctor. I’m not sure if we ever see him again, so maybe I’ll eat my words later. But for now, it seems pointless. I’m not sure why I should be invested in a fake da Vinci gaining new inspiration to craft already-known art and fake 16th century contraptions. My predilection is to find the human story in everything, and to think that’s worth it on its own, but this is barely a story, more of a series of silly escapades that blend together until the credits roll.

To the point, “Concerning Flight” doesn’t really feel like an episode of Star Trek. Maybe it’s just the hang glider ending, which reminds me of the 1980s Ewok films of all things, but this episode plays more like an oversimplified kid-friendly adventure story than anything with the heft or craft that the best of Star Trek comes with.

You do have a touch of philosophy in da Vinci trying to reconcile who and what he is with his present circumstances, but it’s clumsy and quickly dropped. There are a couple of what are, frankly, filler scenes where the Doctor is desperate for gossip after being trapped in Sick Bay again, and some more romantic tension between Seven and Harry. But for the most part, the events of “Concerning Flight” are, well, a random flight of fancy, that don’t have much to do with business-as-usual for Voyager and often feel like an off brand installment of some kids show called My Historical Pal rather than something that fits with Star Trek.

I don’t like dismissing this sort of thing off-hand. Captain Kirk meeting Abraham Lincoln was, unexpectedly, one of the best parts of “The Savage Curtain”. Captain Picard going toe-to-toe with a self-aware holographic Moriarty is one of the most iconic parts of The Next Generation. Commander Sisko running into an alien manifestation of Rumplestiltskin in Deep Space Nine was....okay, it was terrible.

But the point stands! Star Trek has taken some goofy premises and made great hay with them. I wouldn’t want to see a version of the franchise that didn’t take these sort of big creative swings now and then. (See also: Strange New Worlds’ outstanding musical episode.) Nonetheless, certain ideas feel fated for failure, and Captain Janeway’s misadventures with the da Vinci hologram is one that probably should have been left on the cutting room floor.

[7.7/10] It’s easy to reduce the various Star Trek species down to one particular characteristic. The Vulcans are logical. The Klingons are warriors. The Romulans are conniving. And so on and so on and so on. We’ve seen variations in these groups over the years, which is commendable, and Star Trek loves nothing but to play the Not So Different:tm: card with every alien race it can find. But in the popular consciousness, at least, it’s hard to shake off those topline characteristics as applying across the board to every pointy-eared or prosthetics-laden alien who encounters a Starfleet vessel.

And yet, after a decade in the franchise, and more than five seasons’ worth of appearances in Deep Space Nine, the Ferengi have become more than their single characteristic. Yes, it’s easy to reduce them to being pure profit-motivated to a cartoonish fault. But through Quark’s misadventures alone, we’ve seen that there’s that many more shades and hues in the lobe-laden rainbow.

There is Quark himself, who complains about backwards Federation values but finds himself adopting them. There’s Rom, who’s reflexively kind and more attuned to mechanical engineering than engineering profits. There’s Nog, the first Ferengi in Starfleet who’s become a duty-bound soldier. There’s Ishka, the Ferengi feminist who challenges the strictures of her society. There’s Brunt, the conniving functionary whose schemes are as personally malevolent as they are focused on latinum. And that’s just the recurring characters.

Which is all to say that I don’t think you could have done an episode like “The Magnificent Ferengi” in Deep Space Nine’s first season, let alone in the TNG days. It took time to develop this many Ferengi characters with different motivations and personalities, to where a grand Ferengi team-up to rescue one of their own wouldn’t just be a collection of samey characters. The abiding theme of the episode is Ferengis proving that they are more than their stereotype, and the very fact that DS9 can pull a story like this off means they’ve already succeeded.

The premise is, true to the title, a Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven take-off, where Quark must gather a team of fellow Ferengi to rescue his moogie, Ishka, from the Dominion. It requires calling in every debt, favor, and familial connection to put together a squad that can pull this off. And Quark isn’t merely motivated by a desire to protect his mother, or even to claim the fifty bars of gold-pressed latinum reward the Nagus has offered, but to show that he’s every bit the hero that the Starfleet chumps who get all his patrons’ praise and attention are.

That may be my favorite part of “The Magnificent Ferengi”. Everybody wants something different out of this. Quark wants to earn the respect of his peers. Rom wants to save his mother. Nog wants to put his Starfleet skills to use. Leck’s just in it for the adventure. Gaila wants to pay off his debts. And Brunt wants to curry favor with the Nagus.

They all have different attitudes and affects, and don’t necessarily get along famously when smashed together. It’s a small thing, but the simple fact that Deep Space Nine could kick up this many Ferengis, and convincingly distinguish them in identity and motivation like this is a tribute to how far the show, and the species have come in Star Trek.

Their story nicely walks the line of the comedic tone that most Quark-centric stories have, with enough genuine adventure and excitement to make the stakes feel real. There is a silly, bumbling quality to the Ferengi Force doing holodeck simulations that go horribly wrong, or running around like chickens with their heads cut off when their prisoner gets loose, or walking their neurostimulated Vorta corpse puppet into a wall. But the sight of a horde of Jem’Hadar with their weapons trained on Nog’s position is genuinely freaky, the negotiations are appropriately fraught, and the prisoner exchange is still reasonably tense.

This one remains light and fun while also offering legitimate thrills, which is a tough line to walk, especially given the show’s track record with Ferengi stories.

There are also some nice touches of continuity here. I appreciate Sisko and Kira helping to get Quark a bargaining chip to trade for his mother after his heroics at the end of the Dominion’s occupation of the station. The fact that Quark resolves to make the prisoner exchange on Empok Nor is a bit convenient. Not only does it save on new sets to use a doubly established location, but I guess they must have disabled all the Cardassian booby traps on the last go-round? Still, the fig leaf that it’s a separate location where they’ll nonetheless know the layout and that Nog’s visited before totally works.

The plot’s full of enough twists and turns to keep things interesting as well. Quark calling in favors to gather his team has a nice “getting the band back together” quality to it. Their lack of a ship, followed by Brunt offering his as a chit to join up provides a good reason why they’d tolerate the presence of a liquidator. The turn from a commando raid to a more Ferengi-friendly negotiation is a smart way to show Quark and company turning things more toward their wheelhouse.

The actual negotiation with Yelgrun, the Vorta in charge of Quark’s mom shows Quark’s shrewdness in these endeavors, coming up with both the leverage (Yelgrun will want the Vorta in their possession, if only to know what secrets he’s divulged), and the logistics (Yelgrun must send his Jem’Hadar away to preserve the Ferengi’s safety), that shows he has a mind for strategy, not just business. (Incidentally, Iggy Pop does good work as Yelgrun, and joins Mick Fleetwood in surprising musical guest stars in Star Trek.) And the turn from the buttoned up prisoner exchange to the Weekend at Bernie’s-style ruse when the Ferengi’s prisoner is accidentally shot throws an amusing monkey wrench into the proceedings.

In short, there’s enough incident here, in ways that pose legitimate problems for our heroes, while making them seem sharp in improvising their way out of them, to keep this one entertaining and interesting the whole way through.

So when it all works, it’s triumphant. The scheme is silly, but there’s a thrill when it’s effective. The Ferengi are not known as warriors, but it’s still pretty cool when they knife-fight and blast their way out of danger (albeit at a six-to-two advantage). And Quark is not a sentimental man, but there is genuine sweetness when he embraces his moogie after rescuing her. As unlikely (and admittedly sloppy) as this operation is, the fact that it succeeds is a joy, however unexpected to both the audience and the characters.

The end result is a simple revelation -- the Ferengi contain multitudes. Yes, they are business savvy, latinum-loving clowns much of the time. But they can also be loving family members, dependable Starfleet officers, and even heroes. The boost Quark himself gets from realizing that is heartening. And the fact that Deep Space Nine can pull something like this off is a tribute not only to the ecumenical spirit that suffuses the show, but also its willingness to develop anyone and everyone who strolls the promenade, revealing there’s that much more to them, and everyone, than what we see on the surface for our favorite fictional groups, and for the real ones too.

And so the end game begins. I'm very excited. Every time.

This episode can't be judged as a stand-alone episode. It's obvious to everybody that this is only the humble beginning of something bigger. As a stand-alone episode that's perhaps a 6/10. Some stories in this episode are not concluded and there's frankly not much happening. Or you could say "too much is happening". Namely, a lot of seemingly unrelated subplots without a clear direction (or so it seems) But it's almost masterful how they prepare the chessboard and the pieces. Seen as part of something bigger, it's a 7/10.

Ben's destiny is essential to the show's story. The show and the final season started with Ben's emissary story. And thus, this final last stretch of the show, starts with another vision (which in the end turns out to be true for reasons Ben nor Kasidy understand yet). It makes sense.

I'm also pretty impressed by Damar. From humble extra and cynical, power-hungry collaborator with an alcohol addiction, to freedom fighter (don't you see it yet? It's all too obvious).

I also like Ezri and Worf. That's much better than everything that they tried before. It's the first time I see it too: there's still some Jadzia left. After sex, everything seems to be said and explained [w/o actually talking about it on-screen]. Good, this needed to resolved at one point.

Plus, the Breen. It must have been hard to not use these fascinating people before more often. In earlier episodes, they introduced them just enough so that we take them serious. But that's why their sudden appearance on the chess board is that powerful. They were never over-used.

[5.3/10] I’m a firm believer in the idea that we should judge films and television shows for what they are, not for what we wish for them to be. In other words, it’s tempting to come up with a better story in your head and slate an episode of T.V. for not doing that instead, rather than judging it based on the merits and flaws of the story it did choose to tell.

So I will start out by telling you that “Random Thoughts” is a pretty tepid mystery story. On a planet full of telepaths named “the Mari”, the local police chief, Nimira, arrests Lt. Torres for thought-crime. B’Elanna had an angry thought about a random dude who bumped into her, and the violent retribution she imagined, but did not actually commit, turns out to be a criminal offense in a society of psychics who claim to have eliminated aggressive thought. When that random dude commits a beating of the shopkeeper after interacting with B’Elanna, she’s the one who has to pay the price for such “violent mental contamination” under Mari law, and it’s up to Tuvok to prove her innocence.

You can kind of see the appeal. A detective story where the only clues are thoughts has a certain sci-fi charge to. And the smartest choice writer Kenneth Biller makes in the script is to center Tuvok in a story about a society founded on mental discipline. Having him conduct an investigation in a community that might seem like a paradise to a Vulcan security officer -- one practically free from crime and full of citizens in control of their thoughts -- only to discover its dark underbelly, could be a major growth moment for the character.

Unfortunately, the mystery, and its major figures, aren't very interesting. The mystery itself depends on the conceit that there’s something sinister going on here beyond B’Elanna having an idle thought, which already gets the story off on the wrong foot. Beyond that, it rests on B’Elanna having perceived an important negative thought from a creepy shopkeeper that she conveniently forgot (or had repressed). The fact that it can be dredged up with a minor targeted mindmeld, a technique normally treated as intense and potentially dangerous, also drips with convenience.

Some shortcuts would be easy to forgive if the characters made more of a splash. The random dude who commits the attack is little more than a cardboard cutout. Neelix’s alien crush on the planet is as stock as anything. The creepy shopkeeper antagonist isn’t fit to stalk Lon Suder’s boots. And Chief Nimira, who gets the most fleshing out, is fine as the law enforcement representative devoted to her people’s ways, but still comes like a cipher ready to be forgotten as soon as the credits roll.

The big twist is that it turns out the creepy shopkeeper (named Guill, for the record) is running an illicit ring where enthusiasts steal and trade negative thoughts with one another, and he’s the real source of thought contamination here. I can mildly appreciate the inventiveness of the idea, but in execution, the baddies are completely cheesy. There is some juice when Tuvok gets into a psychic battle with Guill and shows how terrifying Vulcans can be despite their calm exteriors. For the most part, though, Tuvok’s dalliance with the underworld is a cartoony, overstretched bout of tedium.

“Random Thoughts” does make a point that offers food for thought -- suggesting that societies which try to suppress or even outlaw negative or aggressive thinking don’t snuff it out; instead they only push such ideas into the shadows where they fester and metastasize into something worse. It’s easy to transpose that concept onto retrograde groups with strict norms about propriety that only succeed in shunting into the dark corners of their communities. More basically, you can take it as a commentary on 1990s pearl-clutching about violence in film and television, and attempts to censor or suppress it. This limp mystery and strained reveal makes for a pretty weak vehicle to convey those ideas, but there’s something under the hood here, which counts for something.

So taken on its own merits, “Random Thoughts” is a meager mystery story, with some potential given its character focus and social commentary, that’s largely wasted on its stock and uninvolving execution. That describes any number of Voyager episodes, so while this one is a disappointment, it’s not a particularly remarkable one.

What’s maddening about “Random Thoughts” though is that it sidesteps a more interesting story. When Chief Nimira tells Janeway “We’re going to perform a potentially dangerous surgical operation on your crew member’s brain for having a Bad Thought:tm:,” the interesting response isn’t, “Well, I’ll set my security officer to prove that she didn’t, in fact, have a Bad Thought:tm:”; it’s “We mean to respect your laws and principles, but I won’t allow a member of my crew to have their personal and mental autonomy violated for having an idle thought they didn’t act on.”

On the one hand, I low key loathe this episode because it feels like Tom is the only member of the crew who isn’t taking crazy pills in his reaction to this situation, and even he’s treated a bit like he’s blinded by his personal attachments. Everybody else seems cool with this “work through the Mari investigatory system” approach, and no one seems to take Tom’s “We should have a back-up plan to protect B’Elanna in case these aliens try to crack her skull open and pick through what’s inside” suggestion seriously. You can write it off as confidence in Janeway to solve the problem, but the fact that it’s B’Elanna’s oldest friend on the ship, Chakotay, who basically tells Tom “relax and do some busywork rather than worrying about this” is maddening.

On the other hand, challenging this system rather than solving a mystery within it is simply the more interesting story. Voyager’s “Random Thoughts” is basically a redo of “Justice” from The Next Generation. In that episode, Wesley is sentenced to death for the minor crime of accidentally trampling some flowers in a forbidden area on the planet of the week, and Picard has to balance Starfleet’s principle of respecting other species and their laws with the Federation’s values of substantive justice. It’s not a perfect episode, but the richness of that debate makes it a highlight of TNG’s early years.

“Random Thoughts” had a chance to surpass that episode because, frankly, Wesley’s situation was stupid. The TNG writers put a fig leaf on the aliens’ system of justice, with their leaders acknowledging it was harsh but claiming it was necessary to preserve the 1980s Skinemax paradise their community represents. Even if you could accept that, the idea that respecting their culture means letting a Federation citizen, who had no understanding or warning about this system of laws, and caused no actual harm, be put to death by a foreign government, is absurd, and weakens the ethical dilemma at the center of the episode.

“Random Thoughts”, on the other hand, has a much more compelling case to make. Chief Nimira can point to harm that B’Elanna caused, in the way her violent thought led a random Mira citizen to commit grisly acts of violence. (At least before the silly twist where B’Elanna got that thought from elsewhere and then plum forgot about it.)

Moreover, Chief Nimira could argue that the consequences demanded by the Mari justice system are curative, not punitive. She doesn’t want to mess with Torres’ head just to punish her, as with Tom in “Ex Post Facto”. Instead, she wants to extract that violent thought from B’Elanna’s head so that it can be excised from the Mari community to prevent something like this from happening again. The fact that an old lady, similarly consumed by violent thoughts, randomly murders Neelix’s crush could add to the urgency of Nimira’s point: “I’m not trying to punish a criminal; I’m trying to stop a contagion.”

That would raise all sorts of fascinating ethical, political, and practical questions. Where do you draw the line when it comes to respecting another nation state’s laws? (There’s a big difference between, say, making your citizens pay local fines when they violate alternate speed limits versus subjecting them to amputation for committing theft.) Is it fair for a community to impose those sorts of rules on uninitiated outsiders, even if that outsider causes grave harm? And if you’re the technologically superior power, does might make right? Is it just to use your advanced technology or greater firepower to exempt one of your people from local justice, just because you think their system is wrong?

How do you balance the safety and security of your crew member against the potential damage to a whole society? Does a reflexive revulsion to punishing “thought crime” warrant reexamination when interacting with a society full of telepaths? There’s no easy answer to any of these questions, and “Random Thoughts” minimizes all of them or sidesteps them entirely in favor of a soggy whodunnit.

There’s other big questions that situation could present in a dramatically-interesting way. On a purely pragmatic level, on a vessel where you’ve already lost needed crewmembers, how do you balance the strictures of the Prime Directive against the risk of someone screwing with the mind of your chief engineer who’s proven vital to keeping the ship humming? And on a more philosophical level, there’s an interesting question about whether invading people’s mental privacy like the Mari do could be justified by a society free from crime, or if our mental and physical autonomy should be sacrosanct and inviolable, to where no outcome could justify such an invasion.

I veer toward the latter perspective, of course, but having Janeway and/or Tuvok actually engage with this clash of values, alongside the diplomatic and practical intricacies of the situation is a rich vein to explore in the proud Star Trek tradition. Far richer, I would add, than a tepid mental investigation to prove B’Elanna’s innocence. The starting point should be, “Yeah, she had a negative thought. So what?” and let the conflict spin out from there, not “What if her negative thought was secretly caused by something else?”

The best we get is some idle conversation from Seven about how these types of situations keep happening with Starfleet in general and Voyager in particular, and it’s pretty foolish to continue allowing them to pop up under the circumstances. And honestly, she has a point! Especially given Voyager’s predicament, risking conflicts with every wide alien colony in the road is arguably misguided, or at least somewhat questionable, and it’s nice to see someone not named Seska acknowledge that. Aside from the fact that there wouldn’t really be a show if Janeway took Seven’s advice, in-universe, it’s still nice to hear Janeway affirm Starfleet’s values of exploration and stand-up for the idea that the benefits of cultural exchange are worth the risks.

But that is thin gruel in an episode that isn’t really about that, and instead plummets headlong into a story that is far less worth telling. I still believe in judging a show or a movie for what it is, not what it isn’t, let alone what it could be. Only, when an episode like “Random Thoughts” comes along and gestures toward a much more interesting path, before wandering down a much more boring one, I cannot help but walk away frustrated, if only from the boatloads of missed potential.