LeftHandedGuitarist

[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.

[7.0/10] The Prime Directive has taken on some water in the fandom in recent years, and I get it. The idea of letting a natural disaster wipe out a pre-warp civilization, or tolerating grave injustices in other communities is a tough pill to swallow when so many real life catastrophes and injustices are allowed to come to pass in a spirit of “not my place to intervene.”

But I’ve long thought that the core principle behind the commitment to non-interference is a laudable one -- humility. However enlightened we may think we’ve become, however advanced our technology may be, the Prime Directive is a bulwark to prevent us from believing that means we have all the answers for anyone and everyone. It is a guardrail against hubris, from imposing our will on others.

“Statistical Probabilities” isn’t about the Prime Directive exactly. It is, instead, about a quartet of troubled, genetically-engineered individuals, who call themselves “mutants”, sent to be mentored by Dr. Bashir in the hopes that they might hear out one of their own. And indeed, Julian is not only able to connect with them, but help them put their talents to good use, using their insights to find better strategies for negotiations and conducting the Dominion War.

But the episode is very much about the same core value of humility that, to my mind at least, underlies the Prime Directive. Because “Statistical Probabilities” wants to ruminate on why the Federation has outlawed genetic engineering, why those who’ve been augmented are prohibited from certain jobs, and whether all of these rules are still fair centuries after the Eugenics War (a baton that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds would pick up years later.

Frankly, it’s the most interesting part of the episode -- one of those philosophical debates that prompts characters on-screen and the audience off-screen to consider what’s just and fair along the axis of the political and the personal. In a dinner party turned boardroom scene, the DS9 faithful put forward good arguments for the current arrangement.

The points run the gamut. If it were allowed, every parent would feel pressure to put their kid through augmentation so they didn’t get left behind. (Essentially the PED argument.) When it was permitted, it led humanity into one of its worst conflicts, that mustn't be repeated. All the arguments made are valid, but they are, by default, made from people outside of the affected group, save, of course, for Dr. Bashir, who plainly feels a little uncomfortable and othered in his role as “the special exception.”

Enter the “mutants”, who went through botched genetic sequencings as children, and who had complications their parents waited too long to seek treatment due to the legal issues and stigma. The idea of these four individuals, all currently institutionalized and mistrusted due to factors beyond their control, is full of pathos. But the justification they give for their institutionalization is much more straightforward than the complex web of history, practicality, and ethical quandaries tossed around by the DS9 officers. The “mutants’” position is comparatively clear -- they think they’re marginalized because they’re too smart for the normies to handle.

There’s an interesting commentary there, in how marginalized groups can turn the thing used to other them into a badge of honor, or beyond that, an emblem of greatness the mainstream collective is too jealous/afraid of to countenance. While much better adjusted than the quartet from the Institute, Julian himself bristles at having to hide his light under a bushel, or sandbag himself in everything from discussion with his superiors to games of darts lest he exceed his place in the hierarchy. You feel for these people, having committed no crimes and yet being restricted in what they can do with their lives due to outside forces.

There are, however, a few problems with how “Statistical Probabilities” dramatizes that story. For one, the augment quartet are ridiculous, one-dimensional characters. Jack is a motor-mouthed, occasionally violent conspiracy theorist. Lauren is a 1950s pin-up girl who’s horny for everything. Patrick is a grown-up with the disposition of a toddler. And Sarina is the non-verbal, severely introverted character who shows up in pretty much every story about people who are institutionalized. (Speaking of which, maybe Dr. Bashir can enlist Kai Winn to help him out with this one...)

I don’t want to call the four of them cartoony. There is more truth in the actors’ performances than that. But they are undeniable stagey, with mannerisms and affects that feel conspicuous and exaggerated beyond reality. The show wants us to sympathize with them, to feel for them, to maybe even fear and revere them a little, but it’s tough when they, at best, exist in such a heightened reality. Jack, Lauren, Patrick, and Sarina are archetypes more than characters, which doesn’t help us understand or appreciate their plight.

But that’s okay! They’re basically magic anyway. The twist here is supposed to be that despite the world writing the augment quartet off given their problems and eccentricities, Dr. Bashir realizes that they are stunningly perceptive. A chance glimpse of a speech from Damar (who’s been promoted to puppet king of Cardassia) reveals them able to suss out his entire psychological profile, hidden alliances, and past actions.

It is, in a word, absurd, and that’s before they start making claims to be able to predict the future. I don’t want to be churlish here. Clarke’s Third Law applies here as always. The transporters are basically magic. The replicator is basically magic. Odo’s shapeshifting abilities are basically magic. The Prophets and their vision-granting orbs are definitely magic. So why is a group of augments who can tell everything about a person by hearing them speak for fifteen seconds a bridge too far?

I can’t tell you why, only report that it is. The show pushes things too far, giving the augment quartet effectively supernatural abilities to perceive true motives and hidden facts that leaves the realm of incisive analysis and reaches the level of telepathy or just plain fantasy. It makes their ability to “contribute” seem goofy rather than earned, and it immediately casts doubt when they start claiming to be able to use statistics to predict with certainty how the Dominion War will go, which undermines the point of the episode.

(It’s a whole other can of worms, but there’s also something uncomfortable about how these characters who are coded as developmentally disabled or struggling with mental illness are portrayed as magic somehow but too simple to fully get it. It’s a form of condescension and othering in and of itself, which runs against the sympathetic aims the episode seems to have.)

I want to grant the premise here, but when the augments’ abilities strain credulity even on an outsized show, it’s hard to take the point “Statistical Probabilities” wants to make on the back of those abilities too seriously.

Because Bashir and his new team of advisors discover that, based on their calculations, the Federation will lose the war and suggest that the best option is to surrender rather than risk nine hundred billion lives lost. And against all odds, you feel for Bashir, who feels like he’s banging his head against a brick wall when arguing with Sisko and O’Brien about all this. He thinks he sees the truth, and Cassandra that he is, no one will listen. You don’t have to be a genetically-engineered genius to have experienced times when you felt like you had the right answer but didn’t feel like you could get people to listen.

Julian has the courage of his convictions, but is only willing to go so far. When the augments are tired of being ignored and want to give crucial intelligence to the Dominion in the hopes of a quick end to the war rather than an extended, bloody engagement, it’s a bridge too far for him. He, of course, talks to Sarina into freeing him from captivity when they tie him up for standing in their way, and thwarts the augments from, as Arrested Development might put it, “a little light treason.”

Therein lies the big point. The danger of these augments is not their intelligence, or the societal pressures they create -- it’s their myopic certainty in the rectitude of their conclusions. It’s the danger that thinking you’re smarter than everyone makes you think that you’re right, and worse yet, that it’s incumbent upon you to act in everyone’s best interests, whether the people affected agree with that or not. It is, to gild the lily a bit, a lack of humility.

“Statistical Probabilities” is still a middle-of-the-road episode in Deep Space Nine’s golden era. But I appreciate that point. Bashir points out to Jack that the augments failed to account for Sarina’s actions, so who knows what else they might have missed. The dire predictions of the Federation’s chances are already suspect in their precision, but there’s so many potential confounding factors out there that no one assessment could possibly factor in all of them.

Most of all, no matter how bright you may be, how right you may feel, there are things outside of your purview, beyond your ability to anticipate, that could make all the difference. That recognition of your own limitations, despite your abilities, is one of the key principles behind the Federation. And for a genetically enhanced doctor who feels he has to slow down to let his friends and colleagues catch up, it’s a reminder that maybe the reason he makes sense in Starfleet in the way his quartet of proteges don’t, is that he’s internalized that core value, of having the humility to respect others’ autonomy even in the face of your own certainty, that makes him more than fit to serve.

WARNING: This review contains spoilers for both part 1 and part 2 of "Broken Bow". Do not read if you haven't seen both episodes of the two-parter.

[7.1/10] I like the idea of Star Trek: Enterprise. I like the notion of seeing how Starfleet became Starfleet, when humans were taking their first steps into the final frontier rather than blazing through it. I like the theme of humans and Vulcans not trusting one another, the former feeling limited by their overprotective guides and the latter feeling tested by their impulsive allies. I like the idea of a temporal cold war, and a species trying to speed up evolution, and a period setting when the familiar was still foreign.

But boy, the execution leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. The bones of a good Star Trek series are here (no pun intended), but the details, the texture, the characters that are meant to bring it all to life and make you invested in those space-bound adventures just don’t. Unconvincing dialogue, hammy acting, gratuitous attempts at sex appeal, and character dynamics that feel retrograde rather than like homage absolutely hobble Enterprise right out of the space dock.

It’s the latter point that really concerns me. It takes both writers and actors time to figure out a show, and pilots are always due some leeway. But it seems clear that Archer, T’Pol, and Trip are meant to carry the same dynamic and focus of the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triumvirate. That push and pull is all well and good, but there were parts of their interactions that come off tonally awkward today, and yet are forgivable for a show that started airing in 1966. The same can’t be said for one debuting in 2001 (an appropriate year for a space odyssey), with optics issues that are harder to resolve if the show means to stick with this setting throughout its run.

At least the show is sound enough to connect that tug-of-war with the larger theme of the episode, and some preliminary character arcs, however ham-handed it may be in the early going. If the overall theme set up here is tension between humans and Vulcans, than it’s represented by the tension between Archer and T’Pol (and to a lesser extent, Trip). Archer holds a grudge against the Vulcans for what he views as preventing his dad from using his warp engine to take to the skies. And T’Pol sees humans as arrogant and reckless, with some gestured-to connection to Archer’s father’s past to boot.

But what do you know, Archer proves the worthiness of his way of doing things by risking his life to save T’Pol’s, and T’Pol proves her trustworthiness by following Archer’s plan when he’s incapacitated when she has the authority to play it safe. By the end of the episode, there’s still friction between them, but they see one another’s value and are letting their preconceived notions melt away a little. The dialogue underline that idea a little too strongly, and those dramatized obstacles make the point a little too neatly, but it’s a solid enough basis to build on.

The same goes for the specific plot of the episode. The crew of the Enterprise NX-01 is in search of a Klingon who was blasted in a midwestern cornfield on Earth. The Klingon is being chased by a some a small group of Suliban, a previously unknown race, who have augmented themselves to be able to camouflage and twist limbs and do all other sorts of things to advance their development. Both our heroes and the Suliban Cabal want the Klingon, leading to a race and a fight through different locals as both sides play capture the flag with him.

It’s not much in and of itself, but it provides an excuse for the titular Enterprise to go on its first mission early, heightening tensions between the terrans and the Vulcans. Along the way, there’s some interesting reveals and teases. An unnecessarily seductive informant tells Archer that the Suliban are trying to incite civil war among the Klingons by staging attacks to look like internecine skirmishes. There’s talk of the Suliban getting help from some shadowy figure from the distant future. And there’s even some hand-to-blurry-hand combat between Archer and one of the Suliban fighters in some weird time-dilated chamber.

The graphics and effects used to make all this happen are nothing to write home about. Even for 2001 on television, the CGI looks obvious and unconvincing, most everything looks obviously like a soundstage, and the quality is just close enough to the present to look a little rudimentary without the charm of seeming retro. That’s all easy enough to forgive rationally, but dampens the show’s ability to be exciting or visceral when it’s trying to ramp up the thrills and chills.

Worse yet are the painfully transparent attempts at sex appeal. Lord knows that the 1960s show had its fair share of cheesecake, due in no small part to William Theiss’s barely-there costumes. But decades later, that same tack is just embarrassing. Whether it’s a shot of a couple of alien erotic dancers, a thinly-justified seduction routine from a shape-shifted Suliban, or a mutual scrubbing between T’Pol and Trip with camera pans that make Game of Thrones seem reserved, UPN clearly wants to be HBO and it’s utterly cringeworthy.

Still, all of this is tolerable, particularly with the richness of the premise, if only the nuts and bolts of the show were better. Archer seems like a generic, self-righteous douche. T’Pol is meant to be the Spock analogue but can’t find either the stoicism or subtle snark that the inimitable Leonard Nimoy brought to the role. Trip is a standard space cowboy. And the other characters have gimmicks more than they do personalities at this point, which there’s time to fix. On top of that, the dialogue is pretty rough here, with tense moments that lack any real punch, emotional exposition that is overly blunt, and tin-eared exchanges that are bereft of either fun or gravitas.

In short, the opening salvo of Enterprise is, like many first outings for Star Trek series, one with more potential than proof. It’s the black sheep of the Star Trek flock, and while I want to give the show a fair shake, it’s hard not to see why fans had their doubts based on this first outing. There’s plenty of promise here -- in the theme of human/Vulcan friction, in the temporal cold war arc that’s kicked off, and in the beginning of Starfleet exploring in the galaxy -- but there’s also plenty of basic T.V. thing the show does weakly that might rightly make you wary of venturing deeper into the galaxy with this crew. Let’s hope Archer and company manage to right the ship.

[7.8/10] I always forget that Deep Space Nine is a spiritual show, one as steeped in religion and mystical elements as it is in the more traditional science fiction that’s been Star Trek’s usual trademark. I shouldn’t, though. The mysticism has been there from the beginning, and Sisko’s visions have only become more salient once the plague of locusts descended upon Bajor during this opening gambit of the Dominion War.

But the way that the spiritual element of Deep Space Nine tends to lurk as an undercurrent beneath major events, rather than an overwhelming wave, means the writers can still use that aspect of the show to surprise you. “Sacrifice of Angels” does that beautifully.

I’ll admit, I thought I had this raging climax pegged. Sisko makes his grand move. Dukat counters. The Klingon cavalry comes in to give the good guys the edge they need. The Dominion’s nonetheless ready to set off the mines and give themselves an insurmountable advantage. Kira, Rom, and the rest of the resistance act to sabotage the occupiers. Badda bing, badda boom! Sisko and company storm in and retake the station. All is well again.

Would it be a little too tidy? Sure. But Deep Space Nine had laid enough groundwork to where it would still come off like an earned victory.

Instead, “Sacrifice of Angels” zigged where I expected the story to zag. The moment where Rom declares he’s successfully thwarted the Dominion from destroying the mines, only to realize that he’s a second too late, and Damar has now removed the only impediment to thousands of Jem’Hadar ships pouring through the wormhole, is a genuine shock. A loss like that, a failure with so much on the lines, is a big gut punch, one that took me aback given how much the show seemed to be setting up Sisko’s victory.

That’s a good thing! It’s nice to be surprised, especially when the surprise isn’t some out-of-nowhere twist, but rather the bad guys being (gasp) competent enough in their own right to stave off our heroes’ last minute rally. Sometimes in real life the villains have their stuff together too and pull out a win, however demoralizing it may be. It’s nice to see the antagonists’ planning, preparation, and strategic acumen pay off too, and not just the courage and boldness of the characters we’re rooting for inevitably winning out.

Enter the Prophets. While savvy watchers could predict a last minute save from the Klingons, the involvement of the wormhole aliens caught me by surprise, at least. In hindsight, it seems natural that eventually they’d get involved somehow, given that the Dominion invasion was proceeding through their “celestial temple”.

I appreciate the fact that, as usual, they’re generally detached and unconcerned by our corporeal squabbles. True to form, their only concern is for “The Sisko” trying to sacrifice himself to protect his allies and “end the game.” While a daring gambit to retake the station would have been plenty satisfying, there’s something much more true to the spirit of Deep Space Nine in the fact that it takes more than a sharp military maneuver, instead a plea, nay a demand, made upon disinterested gods, to save the Federation’s bacon.

Most of all, I love how much of it hinges on Bajor, the planet and people who have always been the linchpin of the series. Sisko’s case to the Prophets isn’t merely founded on his own life; it’s founded on the idea that these beings, however disconnected from temporal existence they claim to be, are “of Bajor,” and must act to protect it. The Emissary commanding them, through both logic and emotional appeal, rather than merely reacting to them, marks a vital new phase in his relationship with the Prophets. It takes courage and an attempt at self-sacrifice to get their attention in the first place, and then a willingness to stand up to gods themselves to claim their intervention.

So when the 2,800 Jem’Hadar ships disappear into thin air, rather than arriving to strengthen The Dominion’s hold on the Alpha Quadrant, that development manages to feel earned too. It would be easy for a divine thumb on the scale to come off like a deus ex machina. But in addition to Sisko’s attempt at martyrdom and advocacy to the divine to make it happen, their aid comes at a cost.

In just the last episode, we heard about how Benjamin intends to make his home on Bajor. The price of the Prophets’ assistance is that he’s now fated to “find no rest there.” In that, Benjamin Sisko becomes a Moses figure, someone able to lead his people to the promised land, but not able to enter it himself. If you invoke the gods on their side, or other fantastical happenings, there has to be some cost or limitation, otherwise the victory feels cheap. Deep Space Nine knows that, and makes sure this supernatural victory comes both with some legitimate dangers and some real strings attached.

Apart from the grand triumph, there are, as expected, some wonderful character moments sprinkled into the proceedings. In contrast to past episodes where Quark sold out the good guy in order to line his pockets with latinum, here he’s the last line of defense when Damar throws Kira, Jake, and Leeta into a holding cell with Rom as a “precautionary” measure. Seeing him step up to the plate to help his friends, and his flabbergasted catatonia after he takes out a couple of Jem’Hadar guards, is an altruistic high point for the character.

There are smaller moments that still leave an impression. There’s a nice contrast between Dukat counting his victory chickens before they’ve hatched, while Weyoun counsels caution, knowing the variable possibilities of war and the challenges of holding a “prize” like the Federation, in a sign of who’s blinded by ambition and self-satisfaction and who sees the situation with more clarity. There’s a plain difference between them, in how Weyoun puts on a bright smile but isn’t afraid of wholesale slaughter, while Dukat talks a big game but ultimately wants to be loved by his people, not seen as a conqueror.

Of course, one of the most powerful moments here comes from Odo, who switches sides again at the last minute when he realizes what siding with the Founders would mean. I still wish he’d been a bad guy for more than a few scenes to make his heel turn and face turn come with more meaning. But it’s still a hell of a moment when Kira and Rom get their bacon saved from the Jem’Hadar by mysterious Bajoran gunfire, only to see that Odo’s come to rescue them.

And even if it doesn’t excuse his betrayal in the first instance, the fact that Odo is willing to give up, or at least delay, his entry into paradise, if it comes at the cost of Kira’s life, is a sign of his abiding love for her. There is, as always, much more that needs to be worked out between the two of them. Odo’s treachery can’t be swept under the rug despite his good acts right now. But saving the galaxy, and doing not for a general good, but to save Kira’s life specifically, is a big first step.

The first step back onto DS9, though, belongs to Captain Sisko, who earns a barrel of bloodwine from General Martok for the honor, something that cements the camaraderie they’ve developed after charging into battle and achieving great victory together. In an amusingly ironic note, Dr. Bashir and Chief O’Brien are still keen to playact the Battle of Britain after fighting in a real war. Dax and Worf are blissfully reunited with a wedding on the way.

You will find few moments more triumphant in all of Star Trek than Benjamin retaking the station to the raucous cheers of his comrades, entering as the champion liberator of a home he once wanted to abandon as quickly as possible. The victory is joyful and jubilant, in a way that only comes with a commitment to challenging the status quo for a long stretch in a way that makes this homecoming as glorious as it should be.

Well, not for everyone. By the end of things, Gul Dukat is a mess. He has been a brutal villain here: commandeering our heroes’ home, being a creep with Kira, selling out Cardassia’s civilian government to a bigger conqueror. Yet, in a tribute to both Deep Space Nine’s writing, and Marc Alaimo’s performance, Dukat is full of genuine, pitiable pathos amid a loss so devastating.

Because in the final tally, Dukat has lost everything. He was so close to the victory he’d long wanted, and it took a literal act of god for it to slip through his fingers. He wants desperately to be loved, to have the power to force his people to respect him, and on the brink of success, he is instead brought low and humiliated again.

And if that weren’t enough, he loses his daughter too. I’ve never been a big fan of Ziyal as a character, but it’s undeniable that she’s carried meaning for Dukat. She is a daughter whose existence threatened his position, but whose status as his own flesh and blood he could not turn away from. She is the last vestige of a relationship with someone he loved. And she is the symbol of belief in the good of him, in forgiveness and love despite, albeit not because, of what he’s done.

So when Damar kills her for her treachery, the last stable part of him is shattered. All he can do is mutter his forgiveness to a dead girl. Marc Alaimo gives the performance of a lifetime, of a wounded animal whose soul is shattered in a matter of hours. He is not just defeated in all of this; he is well and truly broken. And as much as the series makes this victory feel triumphant for those who ought to come out on top, it also sells the personal tragedy of someone who thought he’d finally achieved his dreams, only to lose everything he hoped for and held dear, in a few miserable moments.

The Prophets work in mysterious ways. A terrible villain becomes a sympathetic broken man. An amoral swindler becomes the hero the station needed in its most desperate hour. An ageless being divorced from the concerns of mere mortals becomes their champion due to his love of one of their number. A hopelessly overmatched military commander becomes the lever of the gods. There is a certain magic in the storytelling of Deep Space Nine. Always has been. And in one of the show’s brightest hours, it’s made manifest once more.

One of the largest battles ever in this franchise. Visuals look a bit outdated and could use an overhaul in HD. Sadly this won't happen. But it's still exciting. That's not even the best part. The part aboard the station are as consequential. Dialogues are great. Ziyal and Quark are great. Rom is great.

There's a couple of things I don't like: the Defiant is suddenly strangely alone. Shouldn't the Vorta and the Founders be strategic masterminds? After all, they conquered a major part of the Delta Quadrant. And here they seem to be totally dependent what the Cardassians do. They obviosuly screw this up and the Vorta realize this very late. Don't they have their own Vorta generals and Jem'Hadar's commanders who can win a war? Odo's switch back to the Bajoran side is too quick and too easy. Is that all it needed? Kira imprisoned makes him rethink his actions? He didn't strike me as a man that made decisons entirely based on personal feelings. He should have realized who's bad and who's good based on ethical criteria. As much as I have accepted that the mystical wormhole aliens are "real" and an elementary building block of the show, and as great as Sisko's speech is, it feels that this a cheap way out. Why all the minefields and all that war when the wormhole aliens were always prepared to save Sisko and Bajor?

It's still a great episode but it's worse than the previous episode.

Weyoun: "Time to stop packing". :-)

[7.8/10] Up until now, Star Trek had largely been free of table-setting episodes. These are the “calm before the storm” type outings that are more common in the age of serialization, where there is less actual plot movement and more setting the stage for what’s to come. The single-serving nature of most Star Trek stories to this point has its downsides. For one thing it’s often meant sweeping the consequences of major happenings under the rug in time to reset for the next adventure. But the upside is that what you’re seeing matters for this story, right now and isn’t just a prelude to something bigger happening soon.

Well, this Dominion occupation arc marks a change, with Deep Space Nine justifiably leaning into more serialization given all the groundwork it laid for this broader confluence of conflicts. But “Favor the Bold” (shouldn’t it be “Favor*b*s the Bold”?) is very much a table-setting episode. The scenes we get here are good. The character moments are engrossing. But it’s hard to deny that this exists to get everything in place for a rollicking mini-finale rather than something that tells a story in its own right.

That’s okay! We’ve had close to six hundred single-serving stories in Star Trek at this stage of the franchise. It’s alright for one to try something a little different, especially in service of an inflection point the series had been building to for five years. But it’s funny watching this one from modern eyes, in an age where many are a bit nostalgic for this era of network television, and watching Deep Space Nine indulge in the storytelling rhythms that current T.V. shows often face criticism for.

But something big is happening! Captain Sisko is going to make a move to retake the station! Damar is on the verge of being able to neutralize the minefield! The Dominion knows that the Federation forces are coming in and are battening down the hatches! The Starfleet and Klingon cavalry may or may not be able to join Sisko’s fleet in time! Jem’Hadar reinforcements are waiting in the Gamma Quadrant! Things are about to go down!

But...not just yet. If there’s a main credit to “Favor the Bold” (that improper conjugation is going to bug me every time I type it), it’s that the episode heightens your anticipation for what’s to come. You can practically taste the space battles, the resistance rising up, Sisko making his play, in every line of dialogue here. This remains more of a setup for big things to happen than a script where big things actually happen, but it’s easy to leave this one licking your chops with anticipation.

And yet, as good as this arc has been, there’s a part of me that wishes Deep Space Nine stretched it out a little longer. We have two major changes of heart here, or at least moments where significant characters rethink their loyalties and associations, and both feel pretty sudden.

The first is Ziyal and, cards on the table, I don’t think the character’s ever quite worked after her first appearance. It doesn't help that the performance is so-so at best, but she’s more of a prop than a character. Adding something that Dukat cares about beyond power and Kira is a good choice, but Ziyal’s simply never done much of interest, nor has her relationship with her father been particularly fleshed out to this point.

So when Ziyal spurns her father after he refuses to pardon Rom, it’s supposed to be a big deal. This is supposed to be shattering Ziyal’s image of her dad as a compassionate man who’s been unfairly vilified, and expose his faux-benevolence as the facade it truly is. Her siding with Kira is supposed to be a grand betrayal. But the truth is that we haven't actually seen Ziyal spend much time with Dukat or Kira. The importance of those relationships has been more told than shown. The person Ziyal’s spent the most time with is Garak (don’t get me started there). So the end result is that this supposedly momentous turn in her loyalties invites a shrug, not a gasp.

To some degree, the same goes for Odo. He’s obviously a much more developed character than Ziyal is, and his relationships with the others on the station (Quark, Kira, Garak, Sisko) are one of the series’ high points. His connections, and his loyalties, matter.

Which is why there’s power in he and the Female Changeling surveying the Promenade and looking down, literally and figuratively, upon the solids as so tiny in comparison. Odo is truly becoming timeless and detached, divorced from the needs and concerns of his former friends, in a way that’s sad yet understandable. His change of heart has a certain Dr. Manhattan quality to it, a demigod losing touch with humanity when exposed to wider possibilities that make their comparative squabbles seem picayune by comparison.

Except that mode lasts all of about one scene. The Female Changeling mentions “breaking” the solids, in her paternalistic lecture about them, and that’s all it takes, seemingly, for Odo to realize the error of his ways. Odo returning to the side of the angels seemed inevitable from the jump, and his feeble apology to Kira, which falls on deaf ears, is a nice dramatization of his remorse. But we haven't gotten enough time with him siding with the Dominion, or at least the Founders, for his sudden second thoughts about the association to come with real meaning.

All of that said, the real winner here is Kira. She gets to tell Odo off for his disloyalty and put the deaths that might ensue on his shoulders. She works with Quark, Jake, and Morn of all people to smuggle a message and a warning out to Sisko. And not for nothing, she gets to knock Damar’s block off after several episode’s worth of barely-restrained bigotry. Nerys truly gets to shine here, which gives “Favor the Bold” a gold star on its own.

Kira aside, the episode is full of nice scenes, even if they’re more of a tapestry than part of a unified story. Nog getting a field promotion to ensign, and an attaboy from Chief O’Brien is wholesome as hell. Sisko talking about how he plans to make a home on Bajor is low key stirring. Weyoun lamenting the Vorta’s weak eyes and lack of appreciation for aesthetics is humanizing for one of our most dapper villains. Worf and Martok resolving to convince Gowron to join the fight is a good tease. Rom caring more about his friends using their resources to maintain the minefield than his own life is noble as all hell. And Kira, Leeta, and especially Quark doing everything in their power to save him anyway is sweet as all hell.

That is the funny thing about table-setting episodes. They’re not inherently bad. At their best, amid the piece-moving that is necessary to get everything in place for the big crescendo, they sprinkle in important character moments, time outs to remind us who these characters are, something harder to do in the midst of heaping doses of high octane action. This isn’t a mode Deep Space Nine adopts on a regular basis. And I’m not exactly asking for more of it. But at a time like this, with the show trying something bold and daring for the franchise and the times, it fits just right.

[8.0/10] Moreso than anyone else on Deep Space Nine, Odo is someone with divided loyalties. He is deeply devoted to his surrogate family aboard the station, but he yearns to be closer to his people. He cannot deny a desire to be with other Changelings, but he’s repulsed by their war and stung by their punishment of him for defending his allies. He has a special bond with Kira, but has also had a deep if evanescent bond with the Female Changeling.

So if it makes sense for anyone in the main cast to do a heel turn, to side with the Dominion over the budding resistance, it’s him. One of the coldest moments in the whole show is Odo hanging Rom out to dry -- not because he forgot about their mission of sabotage, but because the Female Founder got in his ear (so to speak) and now the concerns of the solids seem so miniscule to him now. The one who’s been pure to a fault in his devotion to his fleshy friends, and his attachment to Kira in particular, is suddenly willing to throw both down the tubes.

That could come off cheap in the hands of a lesser show, but “Behind the Lines” sells Odo’s inner conflict and his change of heart.

The episode does well to show him at the center of an emotional tug of war between Kira and the Female Changeling. In truth, the dynamic is a little strange. On the one hand, there’s the sense of a mom disapproving of her son’s girlfriend. The Female Changeling probes Odo about his air of familiarity with Kira, and answers him on the ways of their people with the knowing air and instructive bent of an older relative. Kira frets about Odo being manipulated in the same way someone under the thumb of emotionally abusive parents might be.

At the same time, there’s the sense of a pull between romantic rivals to the whole situation. Kira is aghast that Odo linked with the Female Changeling in the way a prospective girlfriend might be shocked to discover the object of her affections slept with someone she abhors. Indeed, there is, again, something intimate in the depiction of the two Founders blending with one another. This is as much a personal choice, in Odo choosing between his longstanding bond with Kira and his nascent but powerful one with his fellow Founder, as it is one with him choosing between the Federation and the Dominion.

Odo isn’t the only one looking at the war from a new perspective, though. The B-story features Admiral Ross promoting Captain Sisko as his new adjutant, a move that takes him out of the active fighting. There’s not much in the way of story or conflict to it. Sisko accepts the order willingly, if wistfully. But it’s still tremendously compelling as an internal story, about what it feels like for Benjamin to sit on the sidelines, watch his dear friends lead the Defiant into battle, and be forced to regard them as something above and outside of their individual struggle, rather than someone who’s a part of it.

I’m reminded of Captain Kirk’s advice to Captain Picard in Generations: “Don't let them promote you. Don't let them transfer you. Don't let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you're there, you can make a difference.” Savvy viewers can probably guess that Sisko won’t be watching the war from the Admiral’s Club forever. But I like seeing that tension within him, the same way there was in Kirk once upon a time.

In the season premiere, Benjamin told his dad, “It's wartime. It's not up to me. I go where I'm sent.” And you see him here, dutifully carrying out his duties alongside Admiral Ross. Unlike the man who first stepped onto DS9 five years ago, Sisko is a loyal Starfleet officer, ready to do what’s asked of him. And you can see with Admiral Ross wants him in the position, how his strategic thinking and leadership skills could benefit more than just the Defiant crew and his close friends aboard the ship.

The exploration of what it’d be like to be in the fray and then extricated from it while your friends are still fighting, is outstanding, though. Even with a day of duties ahead of him, Sisko can’t help staying up half the night waiting for news on how Captain(!!!) Dax and company fared on a dangerous mission. The episode juxtaposes a makeshift ceremony of Benjamin “retiring” a power cell from his ship to the cheers of his men at the beginning of the episode, with him having to watch from afar when Dax does the same at the end of it.

Sisko is used to being in the heart of the action. This is new. It’s different. It’s uncomfortable. It’s even a little sad.That’s not the kind of story we often get in Star Trek, the kind of mixed emotion about doing your duty but missing the fight; the survivor’s guilt of being the one safe behind a desk while your comrades are out on dangerous missions. It’s a worthwhile perspective to explore, especially via someone with such well-forged connections and devotion to his crew as Sisko, so I like this one a lot as the type of vignette that doesn’t fall into the typical Star Trek patterns.

Neither does sabotaging an occupying force who’s in possession of your home base for an extended period. Watching Kira, Rom, and Jake set the Cardassians and the Dominion against one another is delicious. Rom using his busy hands to slip the Jem’Hadar a secret report from Damar suggesting they be poisoned lest they run amok once the Alpha Quadrant runs out of ketracel white is a brilliant way to sow discord. The show has played up the tenseness and mutual disdain between the Vorta and the Cardassians as strange bedfellows since they banded together, and it’s neat to see the good guys capitalize on those growing fissures.

Quark’s rant about not wanting to work for the arrogant Cardassians or the creepy Jem’Hadar forever is hilarious, and him using an old bottle of kanar to juice the truth out of Damar about how they’re neutralizing the minefield is that perfect Quark mix of clever, noble, and self-serving. And Rom, Kira, and Odo concocting a way to thwart the occupiers from executing the plan, replete with perfectly-timed sabotage and fruit basket-based covers, shows both the tight spot our heroes are in, and their resourcefulness in getting the job done despite that.

It also sets out a test of Odo’s loyalty. This plan depends on him. If he doesn’t run a security diagnostic at the right time, not only will Rom be exposed, but the Cardassians will be able to halt the minefield, and the already precarious position of the Federation in the war will become that much more precarious if thousands of Jem’Hadar reinforcements are able to come through the wormhole. There could hardly be more at stake.

That’s why it stings so much when Odo is too busy linking with the Female Changeling to care. This is a political betrayal, as Odo gives up on assisting the resistance in favor of giving into the “above it all” pretensions of, as Kira puts it, a murderous warlord. It’s a moral betrayal, since the choice will lead to the deaths of countless “solids” at the hands of a reinvigorated Dominion. It’s a personal betrayal, as Odo leaves poor Rom to take the fall and breaks his word to his friends. And it is a romantic betrayal, as Odo turns his back on Kira, choosing the life of a Changeling and the possibilities it commands over the life he’s forged here, with her as a dear friend and maybe more, over the past five years.

You can understand his reasons, whether you want to chalk it up to manipulation from the Female Changeling, or the irresistible catharsis of accepting what his heart and his biology seems to be telling him to embrace, or simply the fig leaf of “You wouldn’t understand” that suggests there’s genuinely something different about how the Founders relate to and communicate with one another that make the fleshy squabbles of we solids seem petty and small. It hurts, because in a way this is Odo turning his back on the audience as well, but as with so much in Deep Space Nine, such hard decisions are as comprehensible as they are dispiriting. There are layers to every scene, choice, and interaction, which makes this feel like such a rich text.

At the end of the episode, both Odo and Sisko are standing apart from those that have become their family for the past five years. Their circumstances are very different. One’s a betrayal, the other’s simply a professional development. But in a way, the result is the same. They’re now at a remove from what they were once close to, and it’s not certain when, or if, they’ll bridge that distance ever again.

(SPOILERS for later in the series: I legitimately don’t remember from when I watched the show as a kid, but this Benedict Arnold routine has to be a feint from Odo right? Presumably he’s learned something from linking with the Female Changeling that could help end the war, but he has to sell himself as an undercover agent by proving a break with Kira? Or he has to protect her somehow through this? I assume it’s meant to be poetry with the opening of the episode, where Kira basically tells him “We pulled off this operation without your involvement because we thought it was right.” Or maybe I’m nuts and he really does turn heel here..)

[3.4/10] The universal translator is one of the biggest cheats in all of Star Trek, but also one of the most necessary ones. The fact that nearly every alien, no matter how far-flung or unusual, is able to effectively speak English for the audience, allows us to relate to them, to intuitively understand them, because they’re literally speaking our language. It’s basically magic, and shouldn’t work as well as it does in practice, but it’s one of those worldbuilding shortcuts that I’ll gladly accept because it makes life so much easier for both writers and viewers.

Because when you mess with the formula, you get an episode like “Nemesis”, where everyone talks like an idiot, and it makes the big drama and Serious Message:tm: Voyager intends to send utterly laughable.

When Chakotay meets the belligerent locals on the planet of the week, they do still speak English. But they have weird synonyms for everything -- “fathom” instead of “understand”, “trunks” instead of “trees”, “far-beyond” instead of “afterlife”, “clasher” instead of “soldier” -- and by god, it just sounds silly. This is supposed to be a tragic story about the depths of hate, and while it has many devastating flaws in the form of feeble acting, poor storytelling and, you know, having Chakotay as its main character, even if you could fix all those other things, “Nemesis” would be playing from a deficit given its goofy linguistic conceit.

Now I don’t want to go too far with my thesis here, because you know what other episode has a silly linguistic conceit? “Darmok” -- the rightfully lauded episode of The Next Generation where Picard gets stranded with an alien who only talks in metaphor. But whether it’s due to the superior acting from Patrick Stewart and Paul Winfield, or the fact that it’s a story about communication, or the appeal to nerds like me who can practically communicate with one another purely through pop culture references, the concept there lands while this one crashes and burns.

It’s a shame, because in reality our heroes should encounter more situations like this! The universal translator being able to translate words, but struggling with certain local slang and syntax and makes a ton of sense. Hell, go to someone who speaks a different regional language of your same Earthly language, and you’re bound to find alternate words and idioms that seem peculiar to you, but are an everyday part of how the locals converse. There’s something neat conceptually about writer Kenneth Biller trying to pull off that same concept here, and something realistic about it.

But I’m reminded of a story about Deadwood, David Milch’s period drama set in 1870s South Dakota. With his commitment to the truth of the setting, Milch’s original script for the show used period-accurate curse words and slang. The problem was that the dialogue sounded ridiculous to modern ears, and true to life or no, people couldn’t feel the sentiment of the scene when the language used is a barrier. The same major pathology afflicts the whole runtime of “Nemesis”, with goofy terms and phrases popping up all over that undercuts the gravity of the tale.

There’s another purpose to it beyond realism though. The script intends to communicate to the audience that Chakotay has internalized the hate of the local aliens, named the Vori, when he starts using their slang. And you know what? That’s pretty clever. If it were reduced to a few unique words and phrases, if it were done more subtly, and if the words themselves didn’t sound so nutty, I think I’d like it as an external way of conveying an internal change.

Unfortunately, those words still undermine the project, but the good (bad?) news is that Chakotay’s change isn’t really worth investing in in the first place.

Much of that has to do with how obvious the mind-blowing “twist” at the center of the story is. Despite the fact that the Vori paint themselves as honorable fighters waging war against cruel “beasts” who have no humanity, it turns out they are just as vicious and cruel as the Kradin they paint as barbarians. What a shock!

In fairness, some of this isn’t Voyager’s fault. Star Trek has been doing “it turns out both sides are bad and locked in a pointless conflict” since the 1960s. I often wonder how certain episodes would play to viewers who aren’t steeped in franchise history. I was at an age where Voyager could have been my entree into Trek, and if so, this one might have had more of the impact intended.

But so much rests on that twist, on the audience feeling common cause with the Vori at the same time Chakotay does, only to have the rug pulled out from under us that the Vori and the Kradin are Not So Different:tm:. And when the turn is that obvious, it makes all the fumfering around before the reveal seem like dull wheel-spinning.

Dull is the order of the day, though. I’ve said my piece about Chakotay and Robert Beltran, but suffice it to say, neither is the poster child for a story about communicating internal change. The Vori are all generic nothings, with the soldiers seeming interchangeable despite rushed attempts to differentiate them, and the villagers playing like cardboard cliches. Even beyond the ridiculous verbiage use, the dialogue and the conflict-as-described are all paint by numbers, without the slightest interesting wrinkle among them.

There’s plenty of times when a savvy audience can foresee where a Star Trek story is going, but it’s still fun to get from here to there. “Nemesis” is not that, with a tepid lead, forgettable characters, and a heavy-handed point that suffuses the proceedings.

The episode deserves credit for two things in its setup, though. The first is that, even if the twist is obvious, the show deserves some credit for playing on the usual Star Trek tropes, where if an alien species looks mean and evil, they probably are. The Kradin look like Naussicans or the Chalnoth, and franchise history teaches us to expect them to be nasty and brutish. So even though the script plays transparently coy about who Janeway’s talking about when she speaks of their allies on the planet, there’s at least the tiniest modicum of juice when the Kradin ambassador shows up on Voyager and seems like a reasonable, amiable guy.

The second is the importance the Vori place on being placed face down when they die. It too plays as pretty silly, sunk by the dialogue and performances around it. But it does expose how arbitrary and community-specific the “proper” treatment of earthly remains is. That choice encourages the viewer to think twice about our own cultural expectations and resentments of those from outside of our societies for not observing our mores. It’s a canny inclusion.

Still, a few smart inclusions can’t save the piss-poor execution of all these ideas. Worse yet, the twist is far dumber than the trite but still potent, “Both sides see the other as monstrous, and both use that projected image as an excuse for shameful dehumanization and brutality” message. It’s not enough to show that the Kradin feel the same way about the Vori, apparently. No, instead, the Vori were specifically indoctrinating Chakotay through a bizarre and implausible combination of drugs and holographic simulations, to the point that he sees Tuvok as a malevolent Kradin raider. Uh...sure?

The actual point is admirable enough -- that it’s too easy to indoctrinate people to hate. But sci-fi excuses or no, it’s hard to take Chakotay’s descent seriously when it happens so fast and in such a cliche manner. It’s even worse when the entire setup and rug-pull is an unconvincing head-scratcher that makes no sense. The dialogue is painful with its title drops. And the closing scene, where Chakotay recoils from the apologetic Kradin and all but announces the theme of the episode to the audience via his comments to Janeway about it being tougher to unlearn hate than it is to be taught it, makes this one of Voyager’s true stinkers.

At times, “Nemesis” plays like a strait-laced parody of Star Trek: the funky alien lingo, the “both sides of the conflict are blameworthy” moralizing, the rote messaging at the end of the episode. But it isn’t. The episode is just a feeble rendition of a familiar form, that fails on its own terms, or whatever terms you or I might like to use for it.

[7.3/10] “Day of Honor” is a title with a suitable double-meaning. But if they wanted to rename the episode, I think “B’Elanna and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” would be a suitable replacement.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but this is another Voyager episode with an interesting pair of concepts at its core, that becomes dull and unavailing for most of its runtime thanks to a tepid execution.

On paper, I love what they’re going for with B’Elanna. At base, there’s a key story shape here that I tend to like. Everything is going wrong. A parade of horribles happens, to where even the good intentions and good works of our protagonist leave them lost and scrambling. Only then, just when it seems like things are at their lowest, they get some sort of reprieve, some bit of redemption, some measure of validation, that makes it all seem worthwhile in its way, like the universe sees and rewards you for what you’ve been through.

If you’ll pardon the somewhat odd comparison, it’s a frequent sort of tale for Spider-Man. The Web-Head’s key feature is that even when he wins, he loses, and so you often see stories where his suffering is given meaning in that way. It’s the essential structure behind Spider-Man 2, which is not only the wall-crawler’s best movie, but one of the best superhero movies to hit cinemas.

“Day of Honor” doesn’t meet those lofty standards, but it’s built the same way. Everything goes wrong for B’Elanna. She misses her alarm. Her sonic shower doesn’t work. Everything in engineering is on the fritz. She messes up things with Tom. Her Klingon “Day of Honor” holodeck program is a bust. An attempt to produce a transwarp conduit goes terribly awry, to where she has to eject the warp core. And when she and Tom go to retrieve it, some testy salvagers attack them and leave them stranded, free floating in space, with dwindling oxygen.

These events are mostly unrelated, but that only makes it easier for B’Elanna to feel like she’s cursed, that she’s somehow inviting this string of bad luck, that she deserves it for being herself. It’s a relatable tack, the way an accumulation of little things, that snowball into big things, can make you feel miserable and worthless. You feel for B’Elanna through all of this, even if the bad outcomes start to feel a little too over-the-top in terms of bad luck by the end.

The problem is that the scene-to-scene writing isn’t very good. The performances are largely fine. This one asks a lot of Roxann Dawson, and while this isn’t a homerun for her, it’s a solid triple. But there’s so little palpable feeling in most of these scenes. The dialogue is tin-eared and unnatural, and you never quite get the full range of human emotions as all of this piles up. Instead, much of it feels like a box-checking exercise of the plot until you can get to the far more compelling section of the story where Paris and Torres are stranded together.

The same largely goes for the B-story, which sees Janeway dealing with some needy Borg refugees and teaching Seven about altruism in the process. There’s a lot of strong ideas in that premise!

I love how the Caatati’s sob story forces Janeway and the audience to consider Voyager’s position -- that even if they’re stranded far from home and in need of certain resources, they’re still comparatively ahead of a lot of local species scraping and scrounging to survive in the Delta Quadrant. The aliens’ scaly, avian design is striking, and the balance of their plea for help and recriminations against Seven for her Borg origins pose interesting moral and psychological questions for the crew.

Likewise, I’m a sucker for stories about people from bad systems learning that there’s another way to live, and different values to live by. Continuing the metaphor of Seven emerigng from a center of abuse, or even a cult, I applaud the idea of her witnessing Janeway model the behavior of kindness and consideration for others in need of help, having never really thought that way before, only to gradually internalize it and practice it herself. It’s not the most robust or lived-in dramatization of that idea, but the bones are there, and I’m here for it.

But again, while from a big picture standpoint, these are both compelling and even moving ideas, a lot of the realization of them is stilted or too direct. And in a world where there’s already tons of skepticism about refugees and those asking for help, I’m not crazy about the Cataati turning out to hold Voyager over a barrel for more resources when they get the upper hand. Voyager doesn’t handle moral gray areas as well as Deep Space Nine, so the aliens just seem malevolent, rather than complicated. And it’s clear they’re mostly a base obstacle through which Seven can demonstrate some growth, rather than unique foils in their own right.

Still, despite the very mixed execution of the episode’s big ideas, I like where they go with B’Elanna once she and Tom are left to float in the vacuum of space and hope for a rescue that may never come. There’s an honesty to their interactions, a truth and warmth in their back-and-forth, once the script dispenses with all the “horrible luck” business, that reminds me why I like the two of them together. Their banter about “first contact” is downright cute, and it’s always nice to see Torres open up. (See also: her downright sweet interaction with a generous Neelix, who’s as endearing as he’s ever been when trying to comfort her).

And there is something clever, even moving, about the twist in the final moments. Yes, it’s a big deal that closed off B’Elanna finally admits her love for Tom. But what’s bigger for me is what it represents. The holographic “Day of Honor” Klingon warrior asks B’Elanna what she’s done to prove her warrior spirit, to earn her place in the Klingon pantheon. She doesn’t have much of an answer beyond a relatable admission that she doesn’t know, but is trying her best.

And yet, there, on the verge of death, B’Elanna engages in an act of great courage. She admits that she pushes people away to avoid getting hurt, and instead she has the bravery to literally and figuratively bring someone closer. To admit her feelings, to be vulnerable like that, is a bold move, one that shows her living up to the strictures of the Klingon Day of Honor, if only in her own characteristically unique way.

The beauty of that idea kills me, because once more, Voyager doesn’t quite know how to build to it or capitalize on it. The ingredients are there to tell a personal, emotional story about both B’Elanna and Seven facing challenges but coming out better for them. Instead, there’s a heap of dullery and uninteresting scenes that serve as the building blocks for an otherwise stellar story. There’s plenty worth saving and worth holding onto from this one. “Day of Honor” is, nonetheless, another episode that makes me wish Voyager could live up to its potential.

(As an aside, I remembered this one pretty clearly from when I was a kid -- or at least I thought I did. In my memory, Tom and B’Elanna spent the whole episode floating together, rather than just the last couple of acts, so it was a bit of a surprise to me that this was that episode. Still, I didn’t remember how cool the visuals were here, with some unique angels that sell the sense of the duo being lost in the vastness of space, and a particularly cool image of Voyager reflected in B’Elanna’s helmet.)

[9.0/10] The world is turned upside down. For five years, Deep Space Nine has been teasing a conflict with the Cardassians, a conflict with the Dominion, an existential battle for this all important sector, and now it’s finally here. The fight the series has been saving for a rainy day is finally brought into the light, and reader, it was worth the wait.

“Call to Arms” is the biggest Star Trek has ever felt. From The Wrath of Khan and “The Best of Both Worlds” on, blockbuster films and season finales have felt the need to up the ante to ridiculous degree. The running joke about the Alex Kurtzman era of Star Trek is that every season of every show is some galaxy-threatening existential threat. But such calamities pop out of the woodwork out of nowhere and fade away just as easily.

“Call to Arms” is the early crescendo, if not necessarily the culmination, of tensions that have been with the show from the beginning, and friction that has only escalated since Sisko and company first met their new foes in the Gamma quadrant. The fate of the station, the fate of Bajor, the fate of Cardassia, the fate of the Alpha Quadrant as a whole, suddenly rests on the actions of our heroes. And the seismic changes that come feel absolutely earned on the back of five seasons’ worth of steady, engrossing development.

So the big shit goes down. The station’s faithful brace for war. Bajor signs a nonaggression pact with The Dominion. So do the Romulans. The Bajoran residents evacuate. The Dominion-Cardassian alliance attacks. Sisko and company defend just long enough to lace the wormhole exit with mines to stop further Dominion convoys. After one long season of waiting, the big confrontation is here.

And that is exciting as all hell, the earned payoff of a committed and continuous build. But what elevates “Call to Arms:”, and Deep Space Nine as a whole, is that this momentous installment is as much about the human moments that persist despite war as it is about the plot-heavy mechanics of this clash of civilizations.

Yes, the world is about to be turned upside down. But Leeta and Rom are still planning to get married. Captain Sisko and his son still have to hash out the awkwardness of Jake becoming a Starfleet reporter. Kira and Odo still have to dance around the recent revelation of Odo’s feelings. And, sigh, even Garak and Ziyal must still contend with their ill-considered flirtation.

The writers could have entirely leaned into the plot developments and still satisfied the audience. (That’s basically what they did with “In Purgatory’s Shadow”, to great acclaim.) Instead, there is as much about how these mixed up people relate to one another, despite and because of the desperateness of their circumstances, as there is about diplomacy and strategy. It’s a bold choice, and one that retains the human core that always drew me into DS9 and Star Trek.

What I appreciate the most is that it’s not a trite or facile “There is still the light in the darkness” sort of message about war. IT is, instead, about how human relationships persist, but are also disrupted by these epochal conflicts. There is a human cost, beyond the casualties that pile up, in the frayed connections forced upon people in times of conflict.

Odo and Kira put their feelings on hold during the pendency of this crisis, and in an amusing turn, both seem downright relieved by it. (It’s also a convenient out for the writers.) And Chief O’Brien sends his wife and kids to Earth. (Another move that makes sense under the circumstances, but is convenient for characters the writers don’t seem to care to write for.) And right after their awkward first kiss, Ziyal must leave for Bajor, while Garak must find another refuge from the Bajorans and Gul Dukat. And Dr. Bashir preps the infirmary while Jake stands ready to assist as he did in “Nor the Battle to the Strong”. And Jadzia accepts Worf’s marriage proposal, right when they’re about to be separated by war and at mutual mortal peril.

And then there’s Rom, the unsung hero of Deep Space Nine. Despite big things in his future, “Call to Arms” may be his greatest triumph. It’s Rom who comes up with the self-replicating mines idea that provides a suitable Federation bulwark in front of the wormhole. After fears of being unlucky in love, he marries his dream girl in a sweet little ceremony on the brink of war. And the tragedy is that he has to say goodbye to her right after because of the evacuation. (Though candidly, I’m not over the moon about the fact that he imposes this decision on Leeta without so much as discussing it with her. We gotta take the good with the bad.) He even becomes a Starfleet spy.

This is the high water mark for a character everyone, including his own son, had written off, showing that he is worthy of respect, love, and even admiration, when put in the right environment to come into his own.

He’s even noble toward the brother who doesn’t deserve his affections. Quark tells Rom to evacuate with his wife, but Rom refuses. He’s working to reinforce the station’s infrastructure and defenses, despite the fact that there’s plenty of “hyoo-man” engineers to do it, because come hell or high water, he wants to protect his big brother. There is something so piercing and perfect about Quark calling him an idiot, and kissing him on the back of the head. It’s an emotional highpoint from the least sentimental character on a series that includes Odo, and I don’t mind telling you that it made me tear up for a moment. If ever there were a benediction for Rom, this was it.

Those smaller, human moments make the big moments feel that much more momentous. Weyoung offering a plausible feint and plea for peace, only for Sisko to recognize it as a smokescreen for an attack shows the savvy of the station’s commander. The folks fleeing the DS9 while our heroes batten down the hatches comes with a charged energy. Kira “formally protesting” the Federation hanging onto the station before reporting for duty is a fistpump moment.

And then the battle happens. Dukat and Weyoun lead the charge, the two slimiest villains this side of Kai Winn, both with their teeth finally bared. The episode lives up to the billing. The cavalcade of Dominion and Cardassian ships circling DS9 while the station’s defenses fend off their foes leads to a magnetic space battle. The simple task of trying to hold the line long enough for Dax and the Defiant to lay down the mines creates an accessible goal for the audience to understand, and adds specific urgency to our heroes’ mission beyond “just stay alive.”

The joint attack even gives General Martok one hell of a “Big Damn Heroes” moment that vindicates the collaboration and trust the Klingon commander has developed with Starfleet over the course of the half-season. And it’s a nice counterweight to the season premiere, when the phony General Martok was exposed as a changeling.

In short, the battle is everything we’d hoped for -- epic in scope and scale given the long-simmering enmity involved, visually impressive with the flurry of ships entering and exiting the stage at the right times for dramatic excellence, and full of great storytelling moments that make this battle part of a larger narrative, not just a dose of spectacle to sate our nerdy expectations.

The biggest shock is yet to come. After protecting their home long enough for the mines to be set, our heroes (mostly) evacuate the station, and the bad guys move in. Captain SIsko is no longer installed in the posting he accepted back in “Emissary”, and Gul Dukat is back in the office he coveted on the newly redubbed “Terok Nor” in the same episode.

It is a hell of a bold move from Deep Space Nine. I won’t belabor how long the change lasts, but even if it were just for this episode and we flashed forward to everything being hunky dory immediately afterwards, it’s startling to see all that viewers have come to know and love over the past five years dismantled and replaced by the villains in the span of forty-five minutes.

To compare it to other star-bound franchises, this is Deep Space Nine’s Empire Strikes Back moment. The good guys have been expelled from their home. Dukat strolls the promenade as its overseer once more, with even Kira forced to kowtow to him.

With that change in status comes intriguing possibilities for what’s to come. WIth Bajor capitulating to The Dominion, how will Kira react to being under the Cardassians’ thumb again, let alone Dukat’s dirty digits. How will the self-serving Quark readjust to life aboard a Cardassian station after having reluctantly internalized some of those insidious Federation values? How will Odo handle remaining as station security chief when the power behind the power worship him as a god? How will Rom fare at pretending to be his brother’s put-upon employee again when he’s actually there to funnel information to the Federation? How will Jake get by when trying to stick around the station to report the story? Can the Dominion and the Cardassians coexist, let alone Dukat and Weyoun, when their interests already seem to be in tension? The teases here for next season are all completely thrilling.

(Okay, that last one is pretty cheap. I’m sure it’s a cool hook for the writers to leave, but I don’t believe for a second that Captain Sisko would leave the station without knowing his son is safe. The fig leaf they try to put on it with Benjamin’s “He’s a man; he can make his own decisions” is something, I suppose, but not terribly convincing given the father-son bond we’ve seen to date.)

Nonetheless, despite the loss, this is a hell of a moment for the Federation. You can almost feel Deep Space Nine reassuring its fans. The Starfleet-Klingon force is coming! They effectively damned up the wormhole! While the DS9 faithful kept the Dominion forces busy, a Starfleet detachment wrecked their Alpha Quadrant shipyards! The good guys may have lost this battle, but they still have a shot in the war. Balancing those two, the sense that our heroes have been bruised in a meaningful way, but that they’re still in the fight, is not easy. “Call to Arms” does it to perfection.

And this is also a hell of a moment for Captain Sisko. You may see no more politically noble move in the franchise than Sisko telling Bajor to sign up with the Dominion, because he cares more about preserving what they’ve built over the last five years than he does about any loyalty to the Federation. His speech to those who will remain and those who must leave the station after Starfleet’s last stand there is stirring, an affirmation of the roots and connections he and so many others have forged here. He and Kira’s final sabotage of the station is a nose-thumbing final gambit. And that damn baseball, still sitting on the desk in the commander’s office, is a hell of a taunt to his successor that he plans to be back.

It’s those kinds of touches that elevate this episode, and this series, to something incredible. With five years’ worth of subtly laying the groundwork, the powers that be have finally pulled the trigger on a full blown confrontation between the Federation and the Dominion. What results is one of the series’ high points, a dramatic earthquake of meaningful changes to the show we know and love in ways that are concerning but organic to the situation.

But this is also a story not just of nations, but of people, who found their place upon that old bicycle wheel, find their lives thrown into chaos with the advent of war, and still hold onto the pieces of one another they can cling to amid the phaser-singed wreckage. There is, of course, more to come. But as an opening salvo into another era of the show, Deep Space Nine pays off so much of the monumental, and of the personal.

[7.7/10] I wish Voyager had held onto Kes. I wouldn’t have said that when I started this rewatch, and in truth, I still have my qualms about the character and the performances. But on paper, there was far more potential to explore a unique alien species, her developing abilities, and her relationships with the rest of the crew. The original plan was to ax Harry, and mild spoilers, but considering how underdeveloped he still seems by the end of the series, there was likely more potential (not to mention gender balance) in sticking with Kes instead.

But if she had to go, this is a respectable send-off for her. You can tell that “The Gift” is speed-running various developments the producers had presumably been saving for a rainy day with her. She not only develops telekinesis, and can not only psychically detect problems on the ship, but can change the fabric of the universe itself. I really wish we’d had more than a single episode for these elements to emerge, and more time for Kes to reckon with this monumental change. Nonetheless, I’m glad that we get this goodbye.

Except it’s also a hello. That’s the peculiar thing about this episode. It’s as much an introduction to Seven of Nine as it is a farewell to Kes. That feels unjust somehow -- to write off a major character who’s been with the show since the beginning and have her story seemingly take a backseat to the arrival of the new kid on the block. Her story feels shortchanged even in her bon voyage episode, which isn’t great.

All of that said, I like the central conceit of Seven’s plot, by way of veteran Star Trek scribe Joe Menosky. The question posed is a simple but powerful one -- should Janeway listen to Seven when she says she wants to be returned to the Collective?

Frankly, I had some serious misgivings about Janeway’s approach here. Seven is an autonomous being. If she asks to be left on the nearest habitable planet and given a subspace communicator to contact her people, who is Janeway to say no? There’s a fair obligation to get Seven well again, and make sure that it won’t put the ship in danger. But otherwise, there’s something uncomfortable about Seven asking for her freedom only for the Captain to deny her because she thinks she knows what best.

I think it’s supposed to be. Seven offers the recrimination that, for all of the Federation’s vaunted values of agency and liberty, the fact that they’re basically turning her human and keeping her from her people against her will makes them hypocrites. And you know what? She has a point.

This is a bold call from Janeway. In truth, you can feel the writers fumbling for an excuse to keep this character in the show. But I like how the script wrestles with the ethics of that -- even if it’s a little curious that the Captain who once held firm that they couldn’t jostle a blade of grass in the Delta Quadrant if it violated Starfleet principles, no matter how far away from home they were, is now making alliances with the Borg to fight other local species and forcing a drone to revert to her human state despite her wishes. A Captain making more daring, morally fraught calls in the throes of being stranded makes for more interesting storytelling, and this is no exception.

And while I’m apt to wring my hands over Janeway’s actions here, the episode gives her a good reason. She fears that Annika Hansen was basically brainwashed by the Borg and so cannot reliably make an independent decision. There’s something fair in Janeway’s insistence that Seven retain at least some of her human faculties before making that call, even if holding someone against their will and overriding their agency is uncomfortable.

There’s the sense of Seven as someone who came from a family of abuse, or even a cult, with someone trying to act to undo the trauma and manipulation they suffered, even if they claim to want to return to it. You can imagine a Seven years down the line thanking Janeway for having her best interests at heart, even if she didn’t recognize it at the time.

Granted, their final confrontation over it, and Seven collapsing in Janeway’s arms feels more like a cheap After School Special than a grounded exploration of the complex interpersonal and moral considerations at play here. Plus, her post episode transformation into Borg Barbie is the height of Berman-bound ridiculousness. And yet, in an episode that moves quickly through a lot here, I appreciate the writers taking time to delve into both perspectives and the tricky business of balancing individual wants and a concern that someone’s judgment may be clouded.

I’m still hesitant about forcing humanity on someone, or trapping them with you when they want to leave. But at a minimum, you come to see that Janeway’s intentions are good, and that she has reason to think Seven might not be in a place to consider the issue clearly.

As much as that storyline seems almost spackled onto the Kes story, there’s a thematic connection, because it contrasts with a truly lovely scene between Janeway and Kes. Kes tells Janeway that she’s decided to leave Voyager. Janeway says it’s not the right time. Kes asks if the Captain would really stop here. And Katherine responds that she’d argue and plead, but wouldn’t stand in her way. When the time comes, she even helps Kes get to a shuttle.

It’s a marked and important contrast. Janeway has so much more interest in keeping Kes on Voyager than she does Seven. One of the more lovely developments in the series, and one that I’m loath to lose, is the mother/daughter relationship that the two women have developed. And yet, as hard as it is, as painful as it is, Janeway recognizes that Kes is clear-headed about what she wants, and that ultimately it’s Kes’ decision to make.

The comparison is subtle, but it’s a nice way to show that the Captain isn’t in the business of simply overriding someone else’s will when she thinks she knows best. She just wants to be sure that the young woman making the decision to leave, be they Borg or Ocampa, is in the right frame of mind to do it.

Not for nothing, beyond the character exploration, it’s simply a touching scene. Watching the two women tear up and hug pays tribute to all they’ve been through together over the past three years. One can’t help but wonder if Jennifer Lien's real life departure from the day-to-day work of the show bled into their on-screen goodbye. Whatever the reason, it’s a poignant scene and a beautiful one.

That’s the best thing you can say about “The Gift” on Kes’ front. It blows through the character transformation that had been slow-burning to this stage in order to reach a plot- and show politics-mandated endpoint. But the episode does take time to add a grace note to Kes’ major relationships on the show.

Her psychic mentor, Tuvok, uses his mind meld abilities to give her just enough stability to get off the ship in time, and lights his meditation candle in her honor. Her interaction with The Doctor is briefer than I’d like given the importance of their pairing to the show, but she does tell him that she’s missed him, and vindicates that they’ve become friends, not just colleagues.

Most importantly, the show finally puts a pin in her relationship with Neelix! Neelix being happy for Kes, declaring that he was just holding her back, and celebrating her achievements is sweet and redemptive for the impish Talaxian. And Kes saying that she’ll always love him, but something changed, even as she recognizes she wouldn’t have reached this state without him, is the right sort of bittersweet vindication of their relationship.

The Kes-Neelix coupling was the most boneheaded choice Voyager made at its inception. And after Kes’ possession-spurred break-up speech in “Warlord” it seemed like the show just wanted to forget about it. So seeing their connection end on such a heartening and human note is a pleasant surprise.

The story could still do with more real estate. The hugs and tears are well done, but come off quick-fire given how much else needs to happen with Seven’s transition and Kes’ powers. Kes goes from summoning a hypospray to rippling the ship’s hull in no time, which feels sudden. And her ascension into one of Star Trek’s famed energy beings comes out of nowhere. (In my headcanon, her interactions with Species 8472 kick-started this, even though the dialogue kind of disclaims that idea.)

Still, the episode ends on a moving note. Even as Kes leaves the ship behind, and the friends she made there with it, she leaves them with the titular gift. Using her abilities to shave a decade off their journey, and move them out of the heart of Borg space, is the kindest of kind gestures, one that vindicates her bond with these people, even as the next phase of her evolution necessitates severing it.

In a way, it also vindicates the choice to have Seven stay. Kes was a refugee on Voyager once (albeit one who came willingly). Though she was not of the Federation, she became a part of that vaunted “family” that’s been de rigueur to mention in the show’s dialogue. She came into her own with the help and support of those on board. She became the best version of herself, one who cast off old limitations, and felt honored to return the favor. If anyone’s story gives Seven reason to want to stay, it’s Kes’.

Unfortunately, that story ends here. (Sigh -- pretty much.) There was more room to run with Kes, which you can tell from how rapidly the show bolts through her changes here, and how even her deepest relationships only get a scene each because there’s too many of them that need to be covered. (Thankfully, they spare us anything with Tom.) Compared to the other candidate for an exit, she had deeper connections to the other characters and more possibilities in her character construction. In hindsight, it’s a shame that this is goodbye. And yet, for all its rushed storytelling and imbalance on who gets the spotlight, it’s still a darn good farewell for a character I went into the series dismissive of, only to reach this point and wish we’d gotten more.