DS9 S3.E15 - Destiny

Season 3, Episode 15 - "Destiny," or "How To Turn a Prophet"

I swear, Erick Avari is the face of The Actor With A Face I Can Never Place. I've seen him everywhere but I can never remember exactly where and when, until I consult Wikipedia or IMDB, and a light turns on and I go, "Oooh yeah, you DID have exactly three lines in that one episode of West Wing!"

Avari is an effective Vedek Yarka. Like Kai Winn, he's manipulative and zealous. And, also like Kai Winn, he's occasionally right. Yarka arrives on DS9 with a prophecy of doom. Three vipers will return to their nest in the sky and burn the gates of the temple. Yarka believes this prophecy describes the arrival of two Cardassian scientists aboard DS9 as they attempt to set up a communication relay through the wormhole.

It doesn't really matter that there are two scientists, not three. Yarka's conviction and narrative necessity means a third shortly arrives, and she does. When a third "unannounced" Cardassian scientist shows up on DS9, Major Kira starts to believe.

Prophecies always work this way. The best prophecies are like riddles: couched in metaphorical language and open to multiple interpretations, they take on an air of inevitability when events fit into their interpretive mold in retrospect. The most effective prophetic expressions rely on a combination of the listener's faith, multiplied by their capacity for creative interpretation. Humans are pattern-makers. It isn't enough that we receive data; we also synthesize, correlate, measure and interpret data. It's in our nature to create meaning.

There's an entire fascinating subset of study that involves our attraction toward (and need for) prophecy, astrology, and prediction. We're always looking for signs, even if our activities are decidedly secular. We have an entire system of speculation called the stock market, which fluctuates based on (at least in theory) our habit of reading into the tea leaves of contemporary politics. Some people have lucky numbers. Some people go to seances. Some people like to have their palm read. I've personally known people who lived and died based on their faith in prophecy, effectively gambling away huge sums of money on the words of an astrologer.

But that's neither here nor there. This episode is a fairly bland episode wrapped around a pretty interesting question, which is: What was Trakor's Third Prophecy actually trying to say? The question isn't "Was Trakor's prophecy valid?" because we know the answer. The answer is yes. Yes, Trakor had prophetic power; in the Star Trek universe, multi-dimensional aliens who can see the past, present, and future exist. They are called the Prophets and Trakor was one of them.

By the end of the episode, we discover that Trakor's prophecy was true, but cleverly misinterpreted. Yes, there were three vipers--but they were not the three scientists. The three vipers were three comet fragments hurtling toward the wormhole, threatening to destroy it. The "burning" of the wormhole was not its destruction but the physical reaction between the Silithium element and the wormhole itself.

But the bigger question to me is this. If Trakor is a prophet who can see past, present, and future, then how does he benefit from delivering opaque, cryptic prophecies? It makes more sense that he'd just tell you exactly what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, and how to stop it.

So it occurs to me that Trakor probably couched his language in metaphor intentionally, because he knew it would be misinterpreted, and its misinterpretation would set into motion a series of necessary events. Or maybe this is Agnes Nutter all over again, and Trakor's prophecies survived three thousand years because Bajorans, like humans, much prefer the opaque and the cryptic to the clear and direct. Nobody wants an accurate prophecy. Those aren't any fun.

Overall, Destiny was a merely okay episode reminiscent of some of TNG's decent one-shots. I really liked our three scientists (or rather, our two scientists and one Obsidian Order representative). Why is there always a representative of the Obsidian Order in every group? Two's company, but Three's being spied on by the Obsidian Order? Is it like that old WoW guild, <And Two Stealthed Rogues>, except it's <And One Obsidian Order Spy>? If the Cardassians had Christmas, would they have their own version of Twelve Days of Christmas where the refrain was "And an Obsidian Order spy in a pear tree"?

DS9 S3.E14 - Heart of Stone

Season 3, Episode 14 - "Heart of Stone," or "Using Your Noggin"

What I love about DS9 is its endless capacity to surprise me. I never paid much attention to Nog, but when I did, I barely considered him a character. I'm prejudiced against Ferengi. I've never considered any Ferengi a real character until Quark showed up. Like his namesake, Quark is a theoretical concept that I'm never quite sure really exists. The Ferengi are comical to an extreme, a holdover from Star Trek's campiest roots. Their culture is self-parody and their appearance is designed for comic relief. Quark is therefore the exception that proves the rule: the one well-developed, believable Ferengi with a personality I can relate to.

And as usual, DS9 proves me wrong.

I don't think I've ever cheered harder for any character in Star Trek than I did for Nog in this episode, and I don't think I ever imagined I'd say those words in that order. Ferengi rites of passage into adulthood involve a period of apprenticeship whereby a "newly minted" Ferengi adult bribes his way into working for a mentor. Nog, beaming with pride upon recently becoming a man, designates Sisko has his mentor.

Nog wants to join Starfleet. Sisko doesn't believe it, and frankly neither do I. But I found Nog's enthusiasm so infectious that I couldn't help but smile.

This is neither here nor there, but Nog's rite of passage reminds me a little of the act of taking a spiritual guru in Hinduism. Being accepted by a guru is a form of apprenticeship; in order to formalize the agreement, a young novice traditionally goes around a congregation of friends and family, hands holding out the long hem of his or her shirt, to collect money and coins. This money pays the tithe of the guru's service and formalizes the beginning of their spiritual relationship.

The Ferengi Attainment Ceremony has absolutely nothing to do with the aforementioned Hindu ritual, but the similarities were coincidental enough that they bear mention.

Anyway, Nog really wants to be in Starfleet, and no one seems to believe him. He's willing to put in the work, though. Sisko sends him through a trial run organizing a storage facility, and Nog passes with flying colors. He's got some real talent, but at the same time, Starfleet has never recognized a Ferengi cadet before.

I can't help but respect Nog's determination in this episode. He's determined to be the first Ferengi officer in Starfleet, and it doesn't matter at all that he'd have to break with Starfleet tradition and prove his worth to a group of people eager to discredit him. Why? Because Nog doesn't want to be like his father.

This is one of the most humanizing moments I've ever experienced in DS9. Nog describes his father, Rom, as a talented engineer resigned to a lifetime of menial service to his elder brother, in a dead end job with no prospects, no opportunities for self-expression, no chance to live his best life. Nog's dilemma is the dilemma of any young person trying to be the first in their family to do anything. The first to go to college. The first to buy a house. The first to run their own business.

I sympathized hard with Nog. I think many of us are afraid of becoming like our fathers. Our fathers are usually the first figures of authority we ever know. Growing up, they seem indomitable and powerful. It's only when we become adults that we begin to see them for the flawed human beings they often are. Some of us live in our parents' shadow, wondering if we'll ever live up to their expectations or outshine their example. Some of us spend our adult lives trying to convince our parents that we're worthy of their love. And some of us, like Nog, see our parents as tragic figures; we are motivated to surpass them, and in surpassing them, we redeem them.

The way Nog describes his father is a lot like the way we describe artists, writers, musicians, creative and intellectual people in a society that values the concrete over the abstract, money over art, and trade over vocation. Rom could have been an engineer the way our mothers and fathers could have been artists and writers and musicians, but the rigors of his society and the expectations levied on him by enormous social pressure robbed him of that chance.

I have a complicated relationship with my dad, not unlike the relationship Nog has with Rom. I don't watch Star Trek (or consume any fiction) in order to see myself in that fiction; but the ability to relate to a character on a personal level, the inevitable moment where I understand what Nog and Rom are going through because I've gone through the same experience, creates empathy and attachment--and ultimately, pleasure.

This is a deeply satisfying episode. It's so satisfying that I'm going to save my reader the eyerolling-inducing nonsense of the A-Plot, which involves Odo confessing his love like a teenager with a crush, and an illusory Kira trapped in a rock like a bad metaphor for a captive audience.

I hope Nog has a long and fulfilling career in Starfleet. I wish him the best.

DS9 S3.13 - Life Support

Season 3, Episode 13 - "Life Support," or "First, Do No Harm"

My assessment of this episode changed dramatically between the time I spent watching the episode and the time I spent realizing the credits were rolling and that Vedek Bareil really is dead. I didn't see his death coming at all, partly because I am deeply unaccustomed to Star Trek killing off one of its recurring characters, but also because I am so inured (after three seasons of DS9 and seven seasons of TNG) of the Star Trek formula: a problem in Act 1; a complication in Act 2; a last-minute solution and a return to the status quo in Act 3.

"Life Support" breaks that formulaic structure. I noticed curious inconsistencies in "Life Support," which should have clued me in to feeling like this episode was going to end differently. But I simply never did the arithmetic. For example, the complication in Act 2 is unsolvable. We march steadily toward Act 3 without any kind of viable solution proposed for Bareil's condition. The "problem" in this episode is a problem of attrition. Bashir is trying in vain to prolong the life of someone who is dying in pieces.

Days before critical negotiations for a peace treaty between Bajor and Cardassia, Vedek Bareil--one of the principle architects of the treaty--suffers a serious accident that very nearly takes his life. But for a miracle of medicine, Bashir manages to snatch Bareil from the jaws of death. Bareil's condition is critical, and deteriorating by the day. He's living on borrowed time. Bashir can't cure Bareil, but he can put him in a comatose stasis so that one day, years from now, maybe someone can find a cure. The other option is a dangerous, destructive medicine that will prolong Bareil's life for a few days, but almost certainly kill him in the end.

Bareil insists on the latter. He doesn't even have to think about it.

This entire episode is haunting me in ways I can't quite understand, so I'm trying to unpack everything that happened. This is a very strong episode for Dr. Bashir, because it demonstrates a fundamental problem for any good doctor: sometimes you can't save a life. The purpose of a doctor is to save lives, but inherent in that purpose is the realization that you're always fighting a losing battle against death. Everyone's going to die sooner or later, and sometimes the best thing you can do for your patient is to allow them to go in dignity, after you've exhausted every other option.

Bashir spends the majority of this episode arguing passionately on behalf of his patient. He absolutely will not give up on advocating for saving Bareil's life, even if it means trying to manipulate Kai Winn into lying to Bareil. (Winn refuses, but Bashir still tried.) Bashir will do absolutely anything for the highest good, even if it means breaking social norms. Bareil will do absolutely anything for the good of the system in which he lives, even if it means giving up his own life. The central tension in this episode--Bashir who wants to save Bareil's life at the cost of the negotiations, Bareil who wants to save the negotiations at the cost of his own life--beautifully illustrates just how deeply entrenched and bitter the difference between a Neutral Good and a Lawful Good character can be.

This is also an episode about what it means to have a good life. I was badly shaken when I realized, at the very very end of this episode, that Bareil was not going to make it. And I had distant, inkling suspicions this might be the case. His halfway brain operation which left him an emotional ghost of his former self felt like a lobotomy. His life had been prolonged, but how much of his soul was lost? Bashir is not a religious person. I'm not sure religious people exist among humans in the 25th century. But what he described as the "spark of life," the ineffable neurological mystery that exists in some abstract space in the synapses of the mind, is essentially the soul. If Bashir had replaced Bareil's whole brain with an artificial one, his soul would have been lost.

Part of having a good life is realizing that none of us are immortal, and that when we pass, we can pass with dignity, knowing we had spent our time well. It's touching and sweet to me that Kira doesn't spend her last moments with Bareil begging him not to go, grappling in futility with an inevitable death. Instead she reminisces about their first meeting, and remembers why she loved him. The moment is sweet because Kira accepts how transitory her life and her relationship with Bareil is. She accepts his passing and all the pain that comes with it as Bareil accepts the confusion that comes with being a Bajoran at this moment in history.

I was so taken by Bashir's ongoing struggle to save Bareil's life, and Bareil's subsequent passing, that the news of a peace treaty felt dull and distant to me, like a faintly registered feeling. Yes, the Cardassians and Bajorans have made peace--but Bareil is dead. It's a new day for Bajorans, and the possibility of a lasting peace for both species is still alive--but Bareil is dead. I couldn't get over how big a moment this was.

There's a side story here about Nog and Jake struggling with their socio-cultural differences as a result of being Ferengi and Human. And it might seem inappropriate when cast against the backdrop of such a big, brooding story about life and death. But...it's not. Nog and Jake are young. They're kids. Kids don't think about death and shouldn't. Kids think about dating, relationships, growing up, and the stupid things that piss each other off. Life goes on in the space station even as Bareil passes away, and the B-Plot was a potent reminder of that.

I've had my criticisms of Bareil in the past. There were times where he seemed dry and wooden enough to make Al Gore look like Guy Fieri. I sometimes struggled to appreciate his relationship with Kira. But, this episode has put my misgivings aside. He was a good-hearted, noble character in a story full of complicated and morally gray individuals. In the end, he did right by the Bajorans and by himself.

DS9 S3.E11-12 - Past Tense, Parts I & II

Season 3, Episodes 11-12: "Past Tense," or "Riots-A-Roni: The San Francisco Treat"

Star Trek really loves naming its time travel episodes after the rules of English grammar. We had "Future Imperfect" during Season 4 of TNG, and "Past Tense" in DS9. I'm looking forward to the episode titled "Subjunctive Mood," where the cast talk about the possibility of doing something in the future.

"Past Tense" is a pretty traditional Star Trek episode, even for DS9. Ever since Harlan Ellison's "City At the Edge of Forever" (Star Trek: TOS), time travel episodes have been a staple of the series. Often these episodes are among the best of the series. "Yesterday's Enterprise" may be TNG's very best episode, if "All Good Things" didn't exist--also a time travel episode. "Time's Arrow" had Data traveling back in time to a 19th century San Francisco to clash with a cantankerous Samuel Clemens; it wasn't brilliant, but it was good fun. "Tapestry," "Cause and Effect," the list goes on. Star Trek loves its time travel episodes, and "Past Tense" is one of the better ones.

Past Tense has more in common with the original City at the Edge of Forever than anything else. And I believe Tense is the better episode of the two. While "City" was a good piece of science fiction, ultimately it had little to do with Star Trek; "Past Tense" is a powerful exploration on causality, and the fragility of individual moments in history; but it's also an episode relevant to the Star Trek universe.

The mechanics of time travel aren't important here. Sisko, Bashir, and Jadzia end up in the good old 21st century after a transporter accident. 2024, to be exact. Four years from now, mass unemployment and income inequality has driven America into a state of enforced segregation; the ultra-rich live in luxury, while every undesirable in society--the jobless, the mentally ill, the poor, the violent, and the unfortunate--are sent off into Sanctuary Cities where they live and die in silence.

Sanctuary Cities are reminiscent of Venetian and German ghettos. They carry the emblems of apartheid and Japanese internment camps, ICE detention centers and post-apocalyptic ruins. They are places that have existed in our history, exist today, and may exist again in the future; what the Sanctuary Cities lack in verisimilitude, they make up for in accurate symbolism. It's 2019, and we talk about building walls and shoving illegal immigrants behind them. Out of sight, out of mind. Sanctuary cities are places for the unwanted elements of society to disappear and stop being a problem. They're quarantine zones, and the implication is that people without a job ("Gimmes"), people with mental health problems ("Dims") and people with a criminal record ("Ghosts") all constitute the same class of pariah; they're all part of the same melting pot of the unwanted and unwelcome.

This episode aired in 1995, thirty years away from 2024. The people writing this episode imagined a world thirty years in the future. Many of the same problems interrogated in this episode are problems we're struggling with today: poverty, class division, joblessness, homelessness, lack of adequate mental and physical health care. If this episode were written and produced in 2020, then we would be imagining the world in 2050. Would these ideas feel dated if they took place in 2050, rather than in our present day? Are they any less relevant?

Sisko and Bashir are trapped in a sanctuary city a few days before a historic riot. A violent uprising in Sanctuary City A ends with the deaths of hundreds of civilians, but out of the brutality and violence, public opinion begins to change. These riots--known as the Bell Riots--represent a watershed moment in American history. This is rock bottom for our country; after the Bell Riots, we finally begin addressing the problem of social and economic inequality, a trajectory which leads to Starfleet, the Enterprise, and the stars

The Bell Riots are named after Gabriel Bell: a good man in the right place at the right time. Bell was supposed to save the lives of several hostages and die in the process. His martyrdom becomes emblematic of the riot itself and helps change public opinion. While trapped in Sanctuary City A, Sisko and Bashir accidentally get into a fight that was never supposed to happen. Gabriel Bell dies in the scuffle, and Sisko takes up his name in an effort to repair history.

This is all fairly rote time travel fiction. Something disrupts the timeline. The heroes have to repair the timeline by replicating the arrow of causality, so that everything that was supposed to happen actually happens.

And to be honest, as a time-travel episode, this is okay. It doesn't do anything particularly new or exciting with the tropes of time travel. The Bell Riots happen. Sisko fills in for Bell. The momentary disruption of history repairs itself with Sisko acting as a temporal band-aid.

But where "Past Tense" stands out is in its raw and honest interrogation of contemporary society. This is a two-part episode that could easily have been edited down to a single, full-length episode. Instead, "Tense" spends scene after scene wallowing in the quagmire of its own setting. Half an episode's length goes by before Bashir and Sisko do anything. There are long, hard scenes consisting of nothing other than Bashir interviewing a social worker or Sisko arguing with a local guard. Very little actually happens in Past Tense.

And I like that. Past Tense is as much documentary as it is a piece of science fiction. It forces the audience to look at the problems of the 21st century in the eye. Bashir and Sisko spend the majority of the episode helpless to do anything but wait, and we're stuck right there with them, just hanging out in Sanctuary City A until the inevitable riots happen.

This isn't to say that I loved Past Tense. There's a lot about this episode that irritated or exhausted me. I hated everything about Biddle "B.C." Coleridge--a long-haired, fedora-wearing douchebag who comes across like a very bad impression of Jason Mewes. Everything BC said and did got under my skin. He's like Fox News's idea of an angry Millennial.

It's tempting to say that Past Tense is topical, or appropriate for 2019. It's more accurate to say that Past Tense is relevant, because it has always been relevant. We have always been fighting a slow, hard fight for human and civil rights. The Million Man March to DC was a demonstration for jobs and civil rights. The issues brought up by this episode were relevant in 1995, and they're relevant in 2020, and they're going to be relevant in 2050.

Change is slow and difficult to measure. I don't know if the world of 2024 will be better or worse than the one imagined by this episode. I don't know if the world of 2050 will be better or worse, whether we will have destroyed our environment or cured cancer, whether we'll be living in a dystopian-fascist society or in some kind of post-capitalistic golden age. For some viewers, "Past Tense" is an idealistic exercise in naivete, placing its faith in the rickety idea that sooner or later, we'll hit rock bottom and finally realize that things have to change. For other viewers, this episode is an inspiring reminder of the possibility of change--that all things must inevitably change, because nothing about us is permanent.

I'm in the latter camp. Nothing really last. Not the good days, but and not the bad ones either. I had problems with Past Tense. I'm not even sure I enjoyed it, or would watch it again. But for all its narrative flaws, this episode made me think seriously about the future. The best science fiction always does.

DS9 S3.E10 - Fascination

Season 3, Episode 10 - "Fascination," or "..."

DS9 really is a show dedicated to its fans. I can't imagine Star Trek series of this caliber, with actors as talented as this cast, willingly devoting an entire episode to a fanfic writer's script.

I don't really have a lot to say about Fascination, an episode in which every character in the series becomes madly infatuated with someone other than their significant other. I could talk about how uncomfortable this episode was to watch, alone in my living room in 2019. I can't imagine how uncomfortable it must have been to watch this episode with family at prime time in 1997. I could talk about how Fascination feels like it was written by a little cabal of breathtakingly untalented producers insisting on shoehorning low-brow sex jokes and the crappiest tropes of Harlequin rom-coms into a series known for its subtle and high-minded character development. I could talk about how extraordinarily relieved I would be if this entire episode was the fever dream of a drug-addled Quark passed out in one of his own holosuites, except Quark has entirely too much taste to indulge in this schlock.

DS9 has been so consistently outstanding that the show had to balance itself out with this episode.

A million monkeys on a million typewriters are more likely to produce a work of Shakespeare than they are to produce anything worse than Fascination.

If the Dunning-Kruger effect were an episode of Star Trek, it would be Fascination.

Fascination is the Uwe Boll of episodes.

Fascination is to Star Trek what M. Night Shyamalan is to Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Fascination is the lowest point in the actors' careers and in their characters' lives.

Fascination was written, directed, and played by Lwaxana Troi.

If this episode has a single redeeming quality, it is that it ends.

DS9 S3.E9 - Defiant

Season 3, Episode 9 - "Defiant," or "will.i.am.not"

For the life of me, I cannot remember an episode about William Riker's Chaotic Good twin. I know I've seen this episode, because I have reviewed every episode of TNG. I suspect that if I were to rifle through my archives of TNG reviews, I would have said something about Riker's Twin along the lines of: "an unforgettable episode that will haunt me for the rest of my days."

Serves you right, Past Me.

Anyway, I was absolutely certain Defiant would've been the first DS9 episode I actually disliked. Its first fifteen minutes unfold like a droll by-the-numbers Very Special Episode of DS9 in which an aging Jonathan Frakes appears on set to make one last desperate attempt to remind the show's fans that Riker is still the galaxy's most eligible beard.

Riker saunters into the show with all the swagger of a walrus on a ketogenic diet. Kira and Jadzia give him sidelong glances like gossiping schoolgirls eyeing up the hot new substitute teacher. Riker and Sisko banter about gambling and gambling-related dancers, as men should. And right up until the moment Riker shoots Kira in the back, I'm convinced I'm going to have to MST3K this entire episode.

But something I'm discovering about DS9 is that my expectations are routinely undermined by the show's commitment to good storytelling over familiar, well-worn tropes for their own sake. The concept of a guest star in an episode is an old and familiar one, reminiscent of Chief Engineer Scotty's heartwarming and bittersweet appearance in the final season of TNG. I expected a valedictory episode saying goodbye to Riker (and by extension, Frakes, and all of TNG) using DS9 as its vehicle. I expected this to be an episode where the usual business of DS9 steps aside for a few moments, yielding 50 minutes of space to a charmingly self-indulgent episode about a charmingly self-indulgent William Riker.

As usual, I was wrong.

Defiant's plot is fairly simple at first glance. Commander Riker is actually "Tom Riker," a clone of our original, familiar Riker whose life diverged from his origin point following a tragic transporter accident. Like two species experiencing divergent evolution, Tom Riker and Will Riker become two different people. But there are still similarities, still some overriding characteristics they both share. A penchant for the dramatic, a flair for grandstanding, and a commitment to doing the right thing at any cost.

Tom Riker has joined the Maquis. He steals the eponymous Defiant, ostensibly with the intention of using a massive warship against the Cardassians. The Cardassians--namely, Gul Dukat--freak out at the realization that the Maquis have a warship in their hands. This is roughly the equivalent of the Sinn Fein getting their hands on Optimus Prime and turning it against the British Empire. Riker's actions precipitate the Cardassians and the Federation to the brink of war, so Dukat and Sisko put aside their differences and try to prevent Riker from striking a match on the tinderbox of Federation diplomacy.

What I love about Defiant is its elaborate layering of its own plot. This entire episode reads like a cold war thriller. The Cardassians don't want to go to war with the Federation. The Federation doesn't want to go to war against the Cardassians. Riker doesn't want to hurt Cardassians--he wants to destroy a group of clandestine Cardassian extremists building up their forces, illegally, in the Delta Quadrant. Meanwhile, the Obsidian Order doesn't want Gul Dukat discovering what Riker knows. Everyone has a gun to everyone else's head in this episode, and nobody wants to shoot first.

There's a lovely episode of West Wing about a tense Cold War situation between Taiwan and China involving wargames in the South China Sea. The crux of the episode involves the United States having to choose between supplying Taiwan with advanced ballistic missiles while dealing with Chinese belligerence, and over the course of the episode, we realize that the US was never going to give Taiwan any missiles, but had to pretend like they would, so that China could pretend like they were being belligerent, so that Taiwan could act like they had the US on their side. So everyone's beating their chests and rattling their sabers and waggling their metaphors, but no one's actually going to do anything.

This episode reminded me of that quality of dangerous Cold War brinksmanship. The Obsidian Order is playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship by raising a military fleet in secret, gambling that the Federation's treaty with the Cardassians will inevitably dissolve. Riker is playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship by driving the Defiant right into the heart of the Obsidian Order's operation. Sisko and Dukat are both grappling for advantage, trading one another political favors in exchange for Riker's life.

This episode is political maneuvering on the highest level, and it is delicious. I was stunned by the deftness with which the episode pivots away from a Very Special Riker Episode and hammers right into Hunt for Red October territory. In a way, this episode wants me to be fooled by the folksy, hammy charm of its first ten minutes. As I lower my guard at the sight of Riker's cheesy grin and poorly aged smolder, I'm vulnerable to the sucker punch that follows.

Any episode in which Gul Dukat and Sisko play political chess for the preservation of Federation-Cardassian peace is an episode I love. Throw in some razor-sharp Cold War maneuvering and a genuinely strong performance from our beloved Jonathan Frakes, and I'm in love.

Excellent episode.

DS9 S3.E8 - Meridian

Season 3, Episode 8 - "Meridian," or "Sixty Year Latency"

I swear I've seen this episode before. Something about Meridian's idyllic beauty and bucolic lifestyle reminds me of a TNG episode where the crew visits some Edenic planet, mingles with beautiful locals, and discovers some horrible secret buried underneath.

Meridian is different because by all accounts it seems to be a real Utopian society. Somewhere in the Gamma Quadrant, the crew discovers a planet that shifts in and out of existence. This is Meridian: a planet trapped in an interdimensional bubble, the properties of which drag the planet in and out of our dimension at steady intervals of sixty years.

Even Meridian is vulnerable to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, though. Entropy always ruins everything. Meridian's internal clock is degrading, and after every 'shift,' the planet lingers in our dimension for a shorter and shorter duration before vanishing again.

As for the people of Meridian, they exist in a state of pure conscious, incorporeal but aware, waiting sixty long years for the moment of their return. In this interstitial place, the people of Meridian do not eat, sleep, or age; they just exist.

The ephemeral quality of Meridian sets up an effective story of (literally) star-crossed lovers. Jadzia falls in love with a Meridian man named Jeral. It's a classic dilemma, but a compelling one: when Meridian returns to its own dimension, Jeral must go with it. Jadzia will not see him again for sixty years. Will she stay with DS9 or follow her love into the unknown for sixty years? Will Jeral let Jadzia go and keep her memory in silent vigil until they meet again, when she's grown old? Or will he walk away from his own people and live with her on DS9?

I didn't think I'd like the romance between Jadzia and Jeral, but in fact I did. It's an oddly genuine and sweet romance, occasionally flirtatious and occasionally intimate. I was surprised by the speed with which Jadzia fell head-over-heels in love with Jeral, but I believed it. I don't think I'm cynical enough to believe that love at first sight is a myth, and there is something to the idea that you could meet "the one," and then never see them again because of impossible circumstances.

The show respects my skepticism, though. Even Sisko is skeptical of Jadzia's motivations: Curzon Dax was an incorrigible romantic who chased one love after another, but Jadzia always thought things through. Jadzia insists she isn't Curzon, but we've heard that argument before, haven't we? As much as Jadzia insists on her fundamental individuality outside of Curzon's influence, she and Curzon are part of the same gestalt entity. They are, together, Dax. And Dax can be an incredible romantic.

The episode was at its best when it explored the genuine love and pain between Jadzia and Jeral, carried by Terry Farrell's excellent acting. Yes, I was even okay with the delightfully cringe-inducing "count each others' spots" joke. It was nice to see Jadzia participate actively in her own courting, to flirt back even as she's flirted with. She has this independent, bon-vivant energy that I really admire.

I wasn't wild about the secondary plotline, though. I wanted to be, because I'm fascinated by some of the questions suggested by (but never properly explored) this plotline. Back on DS9, Alien Donald Trump Tiron pursues an unhealthy obsession with Major Kira. Kira has absolutely no interest in his receding orange hairline or his creepy advances, so she rebuffs him (by, adorably, pretending she's already with Odo. Poor Odo.)

Tiron doesn't take no for an answer. He waves several bars of latinum in front of Quark and convinces him to create a custom holosuite program involving a perfect likeness of Major Kira. It's horrible--but also raises an interesting question:

What is the difference between a flawless holographic simulation of Major Kira, and Major Kira herself? If there is no difference at all, are they the same person? If they're not the same person, is the hologram a person? If the hologram is a person, does the question of consent come into play? If the question of consent does not come into play, can we say the hologram is sentient? If the hologram is not sentient, is it truly a flawless simulation?

This is a subtle and compelling question in latter-day science fiction. Even Destiny has a fascinating little snippet of lore where a Warmind creates a perfect simulation of various scientists and subjects that simulation to horrible torture, and the scientists (the real ones) don't know if they're in a simulation--because if they are, then they've already lost.

I'd love to see an episode about the question of simulated sentience. TNG kind of touched on this idea when it gave us Holographic Moriarty, and Data explores the question of simulated humanity through his very existence.

Unfortunately, all my philosophical navel-gazing is for naught. This sub-plot has absolutely nothing to do with the ethics of sentience, and everything to do with green-screening Quark's leering bedroom eyes on the exquisite legs of a lingerie model. Possibly with a smoky saxophone solo.

It's hilarious comic relief, but I would've preferred the philosophy.

Some episodes have problems trying to figure out what they're about. Meridian knows exactly what it's about. It's a star-crossed lover story set in a dimension-shifting planet. Because the episode is committed so hard to its central premise, everything tangential to that premise really suffers. Most Star Trek episodes that are any good at least try to explore the drama in their science. A character will die if Bashir can't synthesize the right amino acids. A society will collapse if a power source dies out.

But in Meridian, we have an episode that feels impatient and distracted by its own science. Jadzia breezes over the complex problem of stabilizing Meridian's "quantum flux" over an afternoon of datapad calculations and coffee. The problem and solution present themselves with a wave of a hand and a sentence or two of jargon, which made the whole problem of Meridian's stabilization seem scientifically trivial.

It was nice to see Jadzia's romantic side, though. I like just about every side of Jadzia I've seen, which, I suppose, is also every side of Dax that I've seen.

DS9 S3.E7 - Civil Defense

Season 3, Episode 7 - "Civil Defense," or "Alexa, Overreact"

I want to see the blooper reel from Civil Defense. Not the blooper reel of the episode--no, I want to see all the out-takes from Gul Dukat's series of pre-recorded contingency videos in response to a theoretical Bajoran rebellion.

At some point in Gul Dukat's career as Overseer, he had to work with a production team to make a series of videos designed to play in case of a Bajoran rebellion. Sort of a "If you're seeing this, the world has already ended" deal. There was probably a script, camera direction, maybe a makeup artist. I'm pretty sure Gul Dukat asked for multiple takes.

"Bajoran workers. You are in direct violation of your orders. Return to your posts immediately or I will be forced to release Vespene gas--wait, damn it. Sorry. Neurocine. Neurocine gas. Can we go again?"

At what point in his career did this recording session happen? Was it something he penciled in between meetings? Which department of Cardassian government is responsible for contingency videos? Did Gul Dukat harbor secret fantasies of making it in the movies? Was this his big break?

In "Civil Defense," Jake, Sisko, and O'Brien accidentally trigger an anti-rebellion failsafe embedded in DS9's central computer system. This failsafe is a relic of Cardassian control and wasn't removed from DS9 during the transition. It's a bit like someone else giving you their computer but forgetting to tell you their password. And after entering the wrong password, instead of locking you out of the computer, there are now nukes headed to your destination.

There's something interestingly fascist about the way Cardassian security systems automate counter-insurgency programs. The calculus for determining the location, size, scope, and risk of a rebellion is built into the system itself. There's no intelligent being to reason with. No one is making any decisions at all. The computer just decides that a rebellion must be happening based on certain immutable parameters, and by cold Cardassian logic, deduces that the threat must be eliminated by any means possible.

"Civil Defense" is about trying to outfox a Cardassian security system designed by ultra-paranoid Cardassians. Redunancy after redundancy after redundancy is built into the program. Every attempt to shut down the program triggers another redundancy, heightens the perceived threat. The effect is darkly comical. It goes a little bit like this:

Sisko accidentally triggers a contingency interpreted by the computer as a Bajoran uprising. Non-existent guards fail to put down a non-existent rebellion, triggering another contingency. The computer now believes the rebels must have won, and locks down the rest of the station. Up in the Bridge, Jadzia Dax tries to cut off the ship's life support to shut down the contingency system, which triggers another contingency. The computer now believes the rebels have destroyed the life support system and triggers a total self-destruct mechanism.

The entire system spirals horribly out of control. It's like getting a Blue Screen of Death that actually wants to kill you. It's like getting an Illegal Operation error that's actually illegal. It's like if McAfee Antivirus determined that human life itself was a virus upon the consciousness of the universe. It's like if Alexa interpreted you shutting it off as a terrorist act.

"Civil Defense" is a series of unfortunate fuckups, at least on the surface. But digging a little deeper into the episode, and it's clear that the Cardassian computer system is an expression of Cardassian paranoia and Cardassian logic. It's Murphy's law taken to a Cardassian extreme: anything that CAN go wrong WILL go wrong and therefore must be controlled and blamed on the Bajorans.

It's interesting to me that the Cardassian's computer security system sees no real difference between "security threat" and "Bajoran." In fact, it sees no real difference between "security anomaly" and "Bajoran." Security is a matter of life and death to Cardassians, and to be secure is to obey the rules, no matter how irrational or inhuman those rules may be. The entire episode plays like a darkly hilarious exercise in dystopian security.

This episode is at its best when it's about Cardassian security devouring itself through raw paranoia. Gul Dukat himself falls victim to his own system when he tries to transport off DS9. To absolutely no one's surprise, this, too, is a contingency, which the computer interprets as cowardice on Dukat's part: an attempt to abandon ship during a time of crisis.

How deep do these contingencies go? Is all of Cardassian security just an elaborate contingency system? A Jenga tower of worst case scenarios whereby the one precipitates the other until all of society collapses into self-destruction through teleological inevitability? What exactly is the code at the heart of Cardassia?

While true: Escalate?

I could go on and on about the central idea behind "Civil Defense," because it's so interesting to me. There are shades of hostile AI here. The Security Program feels SHODAN-esque in its ruthlessness. And I liked the central premise being explored here.

But I didn't really like this episode.

This is partly because I've seen this episode before. It was called "Disaster," and it happened during Season 5 of TNG, and it was one of the best episodes of that series. "Civil Defense" has a very clever premise, which it executes admirably, but there's nothing else outside that premise. It's an episode about Cardassian paranoia, yeah, but they're ALL episodes about Cardassian paranoia. It's an episode about security contingencies and how irrational they are, and to the episode's credit, it is a very clever way to explore that particular angle of Cardassian society.

But it's also an episode that abandons its central premise three-fourths of the way through. Where "Disaster" is ostensibly an episode about a massive technological failure aboard the Enterprise but actually an episode about the capacity for heroism and leadership among the Enterprise's most neglected characters, "Civil Defense" is at its heart just another bottle episode about a computer failure.

It's an interesting computer failure with devious Cardassian tricks embedded in its code, but in the end, it's just another computer failure. Inevitably, the solution to the episode hinges on discovering some marginal exception to the contingencies, explain it away in technobabble, and save the day with two seconds left on a self-destruct countdown.

DS9 S3.E6 - The Abandoned

Season 3, Episode 6 - "The Abandoned," or "The Care and Feeding of Jem'Hadar"

Jake's got game. That's all I'll say about his side story involving a ridiculously attractive Bajoran Dabo-girl.

It's been interesting watching Odo transform from a hard-assed, humorless, iron-fisted Chief of Security who spends his downtime sleeping in a bucket to a hard-assed, humorless, iron-fisted Chief of Security who spends his downtime practicing art. Let's be honest, here. Odo's private quarters are his studio. Furnished with elegant and complex works of abstract architecture, Odo practices the art of being a shapeshifter. That's what art is. It's something you do to express your feelings and ideas.

Being a shapeshifter must be like being an artist. You convey your relationship with the world around you through physical transformation. Actors do that. So do musicians, if you think of their music as an extension of themselves. Odo still values privacy, which I find really interesting. He's a security chief, and part of his job involves getting into other peoples' personal business.

But in this episode, I saw Odo deliver a passionate defense on the importance of private spaces. You can be yourself in private spaces, where no one is watching. It's interesting to me that instead of berating the young Jem'Hadar for his violent tendencies, or trying to turn him into someone else, Odo teaches the young Jem'Hadar to control himself in public, and express himself in private. If what you want to do is fight and kill, then fight and kill in the safety of a private simulation.

This idea of bifurcating the public from the private is fascinating and important to me. There is a Japanese concept known as honne and tatemae; broadly, the distinction between the face we show in public, and the person we are in private. Both identities can be wildly different. Both identities are true. Both are real. You can be multiple people in multiple different situations, and that doesn't make you a fraud. Who else but a shapeshifter would so perfectly understand the multitude of identity? All of us are many.

Odo adopts a troubled young Jem'Hadar in this episode. We don't know his name. The Jem'Hadar boy struggles with his own genetic conditioning. He was genetically designed to express certain behavior patterns, to obey certain hierarchies of power. All shapeshifters--"changelings"--are gods to the boy, and so Odo wields authority over him without even trying. Similarly, all other races are enemies. Jem'Hadar are defined by their violence, their need for destruction. They're genetically designed to be dependent on a certain enzyme, injected externally into their blood. Without this enzyme, they become uncontrollably violent. With it, they're still violent--but they're also lucid.

There's a salient line the young Jem'Hadar tells Odo. "As a shapeshifter, I know that you are better than me. And I know that everyone else in this space station is beneath me. Therefore, you must be better than everyone else."

It's really hard to break through the concrete foundation of Jem'Hadar psychology, but Odo makes a valiant effort. He tries so hard to teach the Jem'Hadar boy some enlightened ideas about equality, freedom of choice, justice, lawfulness. He's trying to instruct the Jem'Hadar boy, but the problem is that his psychological programming can't be undone by logic and reason.

The Jem'Hadar aren't driven by logic or reason. They're driven by violence and power, which they internalize into their own logical arguments. They've been programmed from an early age to think a certain way, to treat everyone other than themselves as enemies. Every feeling the boy has--isolation, confusion, hope, admiration--is filtered through the lens of competition, domination, and violence.

And in the end, Odo can't really save him. Odo believes that everyone can choose who they want to be, and even if you're born into one culture or species, you don't have to live the same way everyone else of that species does. But either he can't get through to the Jem'Hadar, or his psychological programming is too strong.

For my part, I'm not convinced Odo was wrong to try. I just think his methods were inadequate. You can't teach a Jem'Hadar not to crave violence just through a few days of lessons. Undoing that kind of programming takes a lot of effort, and it's never a smooth process.

I knew an older guy, back in middle school, who'd impart brotherly wisdom to me now and then. Something he said that still sticks with me is: "Everyone is many people. You're one person at work. One person with friends and family. One person with your spouse. One person in public. And one person when you know nobody is looking."

The Greek word for "persona" comes from the name of the mask worn by Athenian actors. We all wear masks in front of different people. The person we are underneath--sometimes we're the only one who knows who that is. Sometimes even we don't know.

This was a bittersweet episode. Odo and Sisko both experience critical moments as fathers. Sisko realizes he underestimated his son. Odo treated the young Jem'Hadar as his adopted son, and in the end, he overestimated his own influence and the Jem'Hadar's willingness to change.

DS9 S3.E5 - Second Skin

Season 3, Episode 5 - "Second Skin," or "Shampoo and Conditioning"

"Treason, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder."

I'd be a little annoyed at Garak's talent for theatrical larceny if he wasn't so entertaining. It's a little unfair to Nana Visitor and Kira Nerys that Garak, with something like ten minutes of screen time, steals the entire show. I'll explain later.

"Second Skin" is the third, fourth, fifth-or-so episode exploring Cardassian mind games and psychological torture. I went through about three-fourths of this episode paying a nominal degree of attention, because I'd seen it all before. I've seen Cardassians kidnap their enemies and subject them to insidious psychological tortures exquisitely devised to extract information and scar the subject's ego forever.

One of the first truly great DS9 episodes--"Duet"--was about false identities and the lengths a Cardassian will go to conceal their true feelings. Cardassia is a culture enslaved by its neurotic need to be Cardassian; the masks worn by Cardassians become second skins, impossible to remove.

To that end, I wasn't really surprised by anything I'd seen in "Second Skin" until the very end. I'd seen Cardassians play with the heads of everyone from Picard to O'Brien. It seemed only inevitable that Kira have her turn on the Gaslight Ferris Wheel.

"Second Skin" has Kira kidnapped, transformed into the daughter of a Cardassian Legate, and pressured into believing her entire life was an elaborate deep-cover lie of an agent of the Obsidian Order. Kira is not Kira at all, but Iliana Ghemor, or so they would have me believe. The problem is, no matter how hard Cardassian Jake Gyllenhaal wants me to believe it, I know Kira Nerys is Kira Nerys. This is an incontrovertible fact. I can't possibly suspend my disbelief long enough to believe the premise of this episode, so I don't feel any suspense.

Kira doesn't crack either. Not really. She plays this episode with a completely straight face. She's an absolute stick-in-the-mud and refuses to play nice with the Cardassians. She has no sympathy at all for Tekeny Ghemor, a doting and worried father convinced that Kira--that is, Iliana--is his beloved daughter come home and suffering from a terrible loss of memory.

For the longest time, I was convinced I was one step ahead of the Cardassians, and by extension, one step ahead of this episode. I was so sure Ghemor and Entek were playing an elaborate game of Good Cardassian Bad Cardassian in order to trick Kira into -- into what, exactly? That was the problem with this episode that I couldn't quite resolve. Why go through all this trouble just to mess with Kira's head? Cardassians, with the exception of Garak, aren't trolls.

If there's anything I've noticed about Season 3, it's that this season really wants to (forgive me for using this phrase) subvert my expectations. It's as if DS9's writers are keenly aware of the tropes of their own IP, and enjoy stringing along viewers who know exactly how "this whole Cardassian thing is going ot pan out," and then throwing a fourth act twist my way.

In this case I admit the twist was clever enough to pique my attention.

The Cardassians never wanted Kira at all. They wanted Tekeny Ghemor, the proud Legate, the doting father. Ghemor is a dissident, and Cardassia is a police state. Even Legates fall under the surveillance of the Obsidian Order, whose insistence on cultural purity and state-enforced loyalty extend to the highest reaches of Cardassian government. Cardassia has a very Soviet-style political milieu, where every Cardassian public official shakes with their left hand and carries a poniard behind their back with their right.

The only thing more satisfying than being a good Cardassian is killing a bad Cardassian.

Maybe that's why Garak takes so much obvious pleasure in vaporizing Corbin Entek during a daring rescue operation? The last ten minutes moved in a blur. Kira figures out what's going on. Corbin anticipates this and moves to intercept Kira and Legate Ghemor. Then Garak, Sisko, and Odo intercept Corbin and rescue Kira. Garak delivers a few brilliant one-liners worthy of a swashbuckling musketeer swinging to the rescue on a chandelier, then phases Entek into a landing a role in Spiderman: Far From Home.

It's hard for me to really qualify whether I like this episode, because it's hard for me to actively dislike any episodes of DS9. Unlike TNG, Season 3 hasn't had any weak episodes so far. I haven't run into any ridiculously campy episodes or cringe-worthy scripts. DS9 is so consistently good that its set its own bar consistently high.

If Second Skin were an episode of TNG, I would've loved it. Measured by DS9's high standard, it's merely pretty good.

DS9 S3.E4 - Equilibrium

Season 3, Episode 4 - "Equilibrium," or "Jadzia Flips A Table"

A Trill symbiont is legion. Every Trill host that bears a symbiont is a gestalt entity. The memories and experiences of previous hosts, their personalities and their emotions, become threads in the tapestry of a host. The act of joining is carefully curated. Hosts must be disciplined, must exercise self-control, and must possess a spirit wide enough to accommodate so many minds. For this reason, only a few Trill ever become hosts--and yet the basis of Trill culture has the symbiont at its foundation. Everyone aspires to be a host, even though very few Trill can ever become a host.

What happens when something goes wrong? DS9 has a habit of asking that question. Where TNG was concerned with the Enterprise's relationships with the cultures and planets they visit, DS9 is more concerned with the problems of alien cultures. It's a question the show asks again and again. What happens when the Cardassian system of oppression unravels itself? What happens when Bajorans become terrorists? What happens when Klingon obsession with honor leads them to destroying themselves?

I suppose it's only reasonable that the Trill should have their turn on the Wheel of Cultural Deconstruction. I admit I didn't see this episode coming, largely because the "Equilibrium" plays itself along the lines of familiar Star Trek tropes--a crewmember behaves irrationally, which leads to medical investigations, which leads to a potentially dangerous treatment--that the true stakes of the episode aren't obvious until the very end.

For about thirty minutes, I was convinced this episode was about Jadzia Dax struggling with a psychological condition related to being Trill. It wasn't until the last ten minutes that I realized "Equilibrium" was about how Trill society is built on a lie, and how vulnerable it is to completely falling apart.

Briefly: Jadzia Dax discovers she can play an instrument like a maestro despite having no previous experience or talent for music. She doesn't know why. She loses her temper at Sisko, threatens Kira's life, and doesn't know why. She hears a melody and doesn't know why. She has vivid, violent hallucinations and doesn't know why.

Bashir, Jadzia, and Sisko try to discover the source of her troubles. Something is imbalanced. There's some kind of Trill hormone or enzyme or something associated with sanity or control over her gestalt personalities, and it's a lot lower than it should be and dropping fast. Bashir doesn't know what to do, so they head to the Trill homeworld to find out.

What I liked about "Equilibrium" was how well this episode balanced the personal and the universal. I loved the personal moments between Jadzia and Bashir. I know Bashir has feelings for Jadzia, but he's a gentleman and a professional in her presence. The way she confided her fear of doctors in him was touching, and his response was likewise heart-warming. I admit I sympathize with Jadzia. It's easy to be afraid of doctors, but Bashir's answer--a doctor is there to help you, and to heal you--is reassuring and reminds me of just why I love Bashir as much as I do. He even offers her a bunk in his quarters, and there's nothing sexual about it. (Well, aside from the subtle tension.)

"Equilibrium" also does an excellent job staying internally consistent. This is one of those episodes that unravels slowly over time. As Bashir and Sisko dig into the mystery behind Jadzia's condition, they discover an elaborate and suspicious cover-up and evidence of a conspiracy. Indeed, Jadzia isn't suffering from a psychological condition at all. She is host to one more mind than she ever knew. Somewhere in the history of her symbiotic joinings, Dax joined with a violent, troubled (but musically brilliant) young Trill named Joran. Joran's mind is part of the elaborate, many-faceted mind of Jadzia Dax, but because she never knew of his presence, and never internalized his personality, Joran has been reasserting himself over her.

Joran is a ghost buried by the Trill Symbiosis Commission, concealed and locked away inside Dax's mind. His life, his crimes, and the records of his joining were all systematically purged. But he still exists inside Dax, as a part of Dax.

This is a subtle, multi-layered episode with a lot going on. In a way, Joran is a metaphor for the fragility of Trill society. Joran was able to join with a symbiont despite being clearly unqualified. He's living (well, formerly living) proof that Trill society is built on a lie. At least half of all Trill are capable of joining, which means the elaborate rituals and traditions of the Symbiosis Commission and the Academy are all false. The Commission erased any records of Joran's existence in order to save their society.

What would happen if everyone learned the truth? The symbiont organism would become a market commodity. Trill would buy and sell symbionts like slaves, and the entire moral framework of Trill culture would fall apart to the ravenous excesses of a market. An entire species might be wiped out in the process.

Sisko keeps the Trill's secret, but I can't help but wonder what will happen when someone else discovers the truth, someone less scrupulous than Sisko. An entire society cannot be built on a lie and expect to last. It's like building a house on a shaky foundation. Sooner or later, the Trill are going to have to come to terms with reality.

DS9 S3.E3 - House of Quark

Season 3, Episode 3 - "House of Quark," or "Bat'leth Wedding"

Before I begin ruminating on "House of Quirk," I have two questions. First, who is Quark's tailor? Is it Garak? Someone tell me how any Ferengi can look this good. Quark's outfits look like they've been textured with a Geocities background from 1997. Quark makes MC Hammer look like a Calvinist minister. Quark's outfits looks like Joseph's Technicolor Dreamcoat hooked up with a Jackson Pollock painting.

And my second question is this. Did anyone else notice how Gowron looks a lot like Klingon Steve Buscemi?

It occurs to me that House of Quark is the first time I've ever seen a story focused entirely on the relationship between the Ferengi and the Klingon. I'm vaguely aware of the socio-political tension between the various species of the Star Trek Universe, but I never really knew how Ferengi and Klingon got along at all. Prior to this episode, I always assumed the most interaction the Ferengi had with the Klingon was if a Klingon knocked one over on their way to the bar.

"House of Quark" is an outstanding episode that surprised me at every turn. When I watched the opening scene between Quark, Rom, and a lone Klingon drunk off his ass in an empty bar, I felt like I was walking into a joke and waiting for a punch-line. I expected a farcical Ferengi romp as a palate-cleanser after the last three episodes of heavy narrative lifting. I expected a comedy of errors, shotgun weddings, awkward conversations between Quark and his ultra-violent wife, and timely discourses on the virtues of the Rules of Acquisition.

What I got was a clever, subtle, sometimes touching, frequently poingant episode about relationships.

Quark gets into an ugly scuffle with a drunk Klingon named Kozak. Kozak stumbles around with a brandished dagger, trips, and falls on it like a disgraced Roman general. Quark seizes on the opportunity to spin an elaborate yarn about his struggle to the death with a brutish Klingon lout. The story earns him some respect and the attention of Kozak's arch-rival, D'Ghor.

The political maneuvering that follows is elaborate and twisted, but the situation is that Quark's braggadocio has landed Kozak's widow, Grillka, in serious risk of losing the rights to her own house. Grillka makes a desperate play to win her house back by evoking an ancient Klingon law whereby a widow may marry the warrior responsible for slaying her husband.

The synopsis of events isn't really important here. "House" is an episode about relationships. Relationships between people, between cultures, between rivals, and between friends.

Keiko and Miles have a loving and sweet relationship. Their own marital problems are a sub-plot to Grillka and Quark. It's odd to describe Keiko and Miles as having marital problems; they don't really have problems. They have marital solutions. They work through their problems together, but the nature of their problems don't originate in their marriage.

Keiko is unhappy, but it isn't Miles's fault. She's unhappy because the conflict with the Dominion drove families off DS9; no families means no school; no school means Keiko has no outlet for her profession. She has no way to be her most authentic self. She can't allow herself to complain in front of Miles, because she doesn't want him to feel guilty for keeping her on DS9 as a glorified stay-at-home wife with no outlet to express her most authentic self. So while Keiko and Miles's problem is professional, their solution is personal.

I really enjoyed watching Miles slowly try to figure out how to help his wife. The underlying problem is her unhappiness. Keiko is unhappy and Miles doesn't like it. The nature and cause of her unhappiness are important, but secondary to the simple fact that she is unhappy. I loved their mutual sense of empathy for one another, expressed through shared affection. Miles is a good husband. His attempts to cheer her up are good-natured and a bit ham-fisted, but sweet.

Similarly, I enjoyed watching Miles have intimate talks with the other men in DS9 about the problem of a relationship. Sisko is a remarkably perceptive guy and has a lot of empathy, which is not so surprising, I guess, seeing how he's a commander. Even Bashir's advice comes from a place of empathy and understanding; underneath his shameless flirting, he's a sensible fellow.

The Miles-Keiko subplot was a nice foil to the short and turbulent arc between Quark and Grillka. Grillka hates Quark but needs him to wrest control of her House back. Quark is terrified of Grillka, but I think part of him sees the ridiculous injustice built into the Klingon system of jurisprudence. Klingon obsession with honor leads to ironically dishonorable political games. In fact, this is not the first time Quark has gone head-to-head with the irrational behavior of the chronically honorable: remember his speech about "buying peace at a discount price"?

What I love about Grillka and Quark is how well they work together. It's almost as if, despite the racial antipathy between Klingon and Ferengi, the two people can benefit from one another's strengths. Quark's business acumen and diplomatic finesse is essential to winning Grillka's house back. He can be subtle and nuanced in ways that are utterly alien to the headstrong, pugnacious Klingon. Similarly, Klingon notions of honor and upright behavior do resonate powerfully with Quark, and his surrender to D'Ghor at the end of the episode was a stunning combination of Ferengi theatrics and Quark-like logic.

That's what I really like about Quark as a character. He's not like Rom. Rom is subservient to the Rules of Acquisition. Rom treats being a Ferengi like a religion, perpetually self-conscious about his obedience to Ferengi doctrine. Quark still cares about Ferengi culture and identifies powerfully with being a Ferengi, but he has a strong sense of self. Quark knows who he is and what he stands for, and that always comes before bull-headed obedience to cultural norms. You'll never see Quark betraying who he is just because the Rules of Acquisition call of it; no, he'll find a way to bend the rules to his own ends.

How can I not admire that level of self-confidence? Quark is a little guy, but he stands tall. Even when he's on his knees surrendering his life.

DS9 S3.E1-2 - The Search

Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2 - "The Search," or "Odo Phone Home"

The Search is alright, I guess. Thanks for reading my review.

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Anyway, my opinion on The Search is as complicated and varied as my experience watching this two-part intro to DS9's third season. I don't really know what to make of the entire package. Ostensibly a two-part episode, "The Search" follows on the heels of the Jem'Hadar within days of the episode's conclusion, so we're really dealing with an episode in three parts.

In that sense, "The Search" is clearly a pivot point. I can sense the narrative of DS9 turning, and these three episodes are its hinge. The Jem'Hadar, the fragility of the Federation's alliance systems, the emergence of a dangerous new threat, and the fanfare'd introduction of the USS Defiant suggest the show is entering into a brand new arc. I fully expect entire seasons of stories devoted to Jem'Hadar incursions into Federation territory.

On the one hand, I'm not really surprised. The Wormhole was always a gateway into dark and alien territory. Star Trek is ostensibly a show about exploring the unknown places of the galaxy, but DS9 turns this principle of Star Trek on its side: some places in the galaxy are best left unexplored; strange and mighty powers lurk in the fringes of the Gamma Quadrant; sooner or later the Federation's anthropological curiosity is bound to yield a dangerous and hostile enemy. The Wormhole is an open portal to distant stars, and the Jem'hadar are the monsters that come oozing forth.

Wait, I'm sorry. Did I say the Jem'Hadar? I meant the Borg. We've already seen this happen in TNG; Picard and the Enterprise go too far at the edge of the known galaxy and run afoul of the Borg, a being so strange and inscrutable that their very nature threatens the foundations of sentient civilization.

We've been here. We've done this. I maintain that the Borg are everything the Jem'Hadar seem to be, yet twice as terrifying. I'm just not frightened of the Jem'Hadar, and DS9's every attempt to instill terror in me doesn't work. It occurred to me halfway through the episode that, if I was expecting the Jem'Hadar to compete with the Borg, I was bound to be disappointed.

The Jem'Hadar are closer to the original, old-school Klingon during the earliest years of the Federation and the Original Series: a brazen, violent, warlike species of conquerors conditioned toward violence for its own sake. And to that end, Jem'Hadar culture is potentially interesting. The warring cultures of Federation space are in a deadlock: Klingon, Cardassian, Bajoran, Vulcan, Romulan, and Human exist in a fragile ceasefire trembling with incipient tension. War exists only in potentia, capable of breaking out at any moment yet somehow held at bay by the collective will of the Federation Alliance.

The Jem'Hadar don't really care about peace, which is why it's so weird to me that their first overture toward the Federation is the olive branch. The Federation tangles with the Jem'Hadar, loses, and the Jem'Hadar offer them peace and ask for a place in their alliance? I've played enough Crusader Kings to know that's never how things work.

So you can see why I don't know what to make of the Jem'Hadar at all. Every political archetype already exists in our setting. We have the devious and arrogant cultural imperialists known as the Romulans; we have the warrior-caste Klingons coming to terms with the sunset of their imperial years; we have the xenophobic fascists in the Cardassians, a people for whom nationalism and racial supremacy are exactly the same thing. So where the hell do the Jem'Hadar fit? Are they warriors like the Klingons or schemers like the Romulans? Do they play political games like the Cardassians? Are they xenophobes or aggressive cultural imperialists? Do they want to convert, subjugate, or destroy?

I just can't understand what danger the Jem'Hadar pose that any other extant species doesn't already pose. They feel like a redundant people, a representative of the Gamma Quadrant yet so familiar and well-worn that they actually bore me. I think I would've been happier seeing the Gorn make a comeback.

My ambivalence toward the Jem'Hadar aside, I don't really think "The Search" is an episode about them; I think these are episodes about Odo, and Odo's personal story happens to dovetail nicely into an overarching arc about the Jem'Hadar and their threat to Federation space.

I loved absolutely everything about Odo, and his presence in these episodes are the difference between a tedious and slightly confusing introduction to a redundant new enemy faction and a genuinely outstanding story.

I've always read Odo as a kind of emotionless hardass, masking his feelings as readily as he masks his own appearance. Changelings are by their nature inscrutable, and underneath his grumpy hardass of an exterior, Odo is a sensitive person with real feelings. I appreciated that a lot.

It occurred to me, watching the first episode, that Odo is a foil for Data. Hear me out.

Odo and Data are, as far as they know, one of their kind. Neither of them are fully human; Odo does his best to pass for a human out of necessity, and Data resembles a human the way a robot's chassis resembles a human. Odo and Data both grapple with what it means to be human; Data believes he's human but, being an android, constantly searches for some evidence to justify his yearning for a place to belong. Odo realizes he can never belong among the very people he imitates, and for that reason he resents them.

Data wants to do Starfleet proud; Odo hates Starfleet and resists them at every turn. Starfleet is deeply suspicious of both Data and Odo, but where Data tries to win over Starfleet's acceptance through reason and patience, Odo rejects them outright. Data is Roddenberry; Odo is Post-Roddenberry. Data realizes he's different and believes that the Federation has a place for everyone, including him; Odo realizes he's different and believes the Federation will never welcome him.

I love Data and sympathize powerfully with his own self-awareness; the constant search for his own humanity has made Data ironically the best example of humanity in his entire crew. By that same token, I also love Odo and sympathize powerfully with his own sense of isolation. Odo is trapped in an impossible circumstance where he has to put on a mask just to be accepted by the people he protects and serves. Starfleet and the Federation don't represent him or have his best interests at heart, and yet he is still of the Federation and serves the Federation's interests.

Odo's yearning to find other people like him, other people who understand his isolation and know how it feels to exist, is essential to the human condition. I will go so far as to say that what Odo feels is what humanity has felt ever since it went out of the cave, and explored the world, and went out into the stars: our search for life is a search for ourselves. We want to believe that we're not the only ones who experience what it is to be alive. Finding someone else like ourselves allows us to feel like we're not a freak accident, a fluke in the arcane chemistry of life.

I'm not going to summarize the events that lead to Odo's discovery of his own species, or his painful and haphazard reintegration into that culture. All I can say is that I sympathize with that, too. The shapeshifters Odo returns to are no more capable of understanding who he is than his friends back on DS9, and Odo's arc of yearning, finding, and becoming disillusioned is a very human thing to do.

I came away from these two episodes with a stronger appreciation for Odo than I did for the Jem'Hadar. I know DS9 wants me to start taking the Jem'Hadar seriously, and I was on the verge of taking them seriously after the episode seemed to commit to its own massive plot changes--we saw the Federation agree to an alliance with the Jem'Hadar, saw Sisko lose his position, saw Garak die to a phaser shot and the Bajorans declare war. And part of me thought: is this for real? Is this happening? Is the show actually taking these risks, committing to these massive changes? I'm in a post-GoT world, and I'm willing to believe anything is possible, but...

...In the end, none of it was true. The episodes fell back into the comfortable old trope of a virtual reality simulation, thereby invalidating everything that happened over the last episode-and-a-half under the convenient evocation of "it was all a dream." And while I realize that memory manipulation and virtual reality simulations are well within the technological limits of Star Trek (and we've seen both used to powerful effect), as a viewer I felt let down.

Even if the Jem'Hadar's scheming and political maneuvering wasn't real, even if the alliance never happened and the Bajorans and Romulans didn't drop out, Odo's journey was still real. I've always liked Odo as a character, but this is the first time I really appreciated him as a person.

DS9 S2.E26 - The Jem'Hadar

Episode 26 - "The Jem'Hadar," or "The Jem'WhoDar?"

I don't know why anyone ever leaves DS9. Nothing good ever comes of leaving the Space Station. No one ever had a pleasant jaunt across the system without being visited by some horrible misfortune. Here, a small list of some horrible consequences of leaving DS9:

* Sisko and O'Brien crash-land on a Neo-Luddite commune run by a psychopath. Sisko is put in a box.
* Kira and Bashir accidentally find themselves in the Shadow Dimension.
* O'Brien takes a work trip to the Parada system and accidentally gets cloned.
* And in literally the last episode, O'Brien is sentenced to death for going on vacation.

Just don't leave DS9. Stay home. Visit Quark's. Hang out in a Holo-Suite. In "The Jem'Hadar," Sisko and Jake spurn my well-intentioned advice and go traipsing into the Gamma Quadrant in some kind of misguided father-son weekend, with Quark and Nog inexplicably in tow. Nothing interesting happens.

Sure, they're kidnapped by the Jem'Hadar--some kind of mutated cross between the Goombas from the Super Mario Brothers movie and Old Greg--and made to sit in the Circle of Silence while Quark screams about having rights as a Federation citizen. Meanwhile, Jake and Nog respond to the sudden disappearance of the two adults in their group by hijacking the runabout ship, pulling out its guts, disabling auto-pilot, and then sailing off into the endless expanse of the void for no discernible reason.

I'm surprised by how aggressively boring this episode is. "Jem'Hadar" is the storytelling equivalent of missing every single beat in Guitar Hero. It's the kind of story that comes out a D&D session gone horribly wrong in every way possible.

It is, in short, a Season 1 TNG episode.

I don't really know where to begin with this episode, so I'll begin with the eponymous Jem'Hadar. This episode exists to introduce the Jem'Hadar to us, and bring a new and dangerous adversary into the Star Trek universe. We've seen this happen before with the Borg, but where the Borg are terrifying and incalculable in a kind of techno-Lovecraftian way, the Jem'Hadar are just utterly tedious. In the Borg, we saw a powerful threat capable of destroying the entire Federation. We didn't have to be told of the Borg's power; their power was manifest, clear to see.

So what's wrong with the Jem'Hadar? Let me put it this way. We meet exactly one of the Jem'Hadar named Talak'talan. I don't know why his name sounds like a Daler Mehndi album, but whatever, let's just go with it. Talak'talan is...how do I put this?

Have you ever roleplayed in World of Warcraft? Have you ever met one of those roleplayers who shows up to the tavern, shrugs off every attempt to arrest him, godmodes his way through spells, /spits in your face, and laughs every time you try to challenge him? He's the servant of some unspeakable, unknowable power; he knows no fear and he spells the doom of the Alliance.

That's the Jem'Hadar.

They're apparently immune to phasers or something, don't care about containment fields, don't care about tractor beams, don't care about basic courtesy, don't care about the Federation, and don't care about you. The entire episode is a forty-five minute long wank of the Jem'Hadar, where our favorite characters reduce themselves to bumbling caricatures in order to lift the eponymous villains up into a semblance of competence.

For Elune's sake, we lose an entire Federation starship to a Jem'Hadar suicide bomber. Odo and Kira have an uncharacterstically wistful exchange, verbally clapping one another on the shoulder as they gear up for the fight of their lives or something.

I didn't leave this episode feeling a sense of creeping dread, awe, or terror at the introduction of the Jem'Hadar. I don't know what I felt at the end of this episode. Possibly hungry, because it was late at night and I had sauteed broccoli for dinner.

Part of me wants to say that everything about this episode sucks, but I'm going to try to be good and not deal in absolutes. The episode's strongest moments are the very rare, genuine moments of tenderness between Jake and his father. Sisko and Jake have a wonderful dynamic. They're temperamentally different but clearly love and respect one another, and watching them try their best to find common ground and develop a good relationship is sweet, endearing, and deserves an entire episode.

I would have gladly watched an episode consisting of nothing but Sisko and Jake learning to be friends as well as father-and-son. I would have gladly watched an episode devoted to the cruelty and malice of the Jem'Hadar. These two ideas deserve to be separate episodes; together, they're about as compatible as peanuts and chewing gum.

DS9 S2.E25 - Tribunal

Episode 25 - "Tribunal," or "The Verdict is Guilty; Let the Trial Begin"

The Venn Diagram of DS9 nerds and D&D nerds has at its center an alignment chart, and for the longest time, I had no idea who occupied the upper left hand corner--Lawful Good. In a show about nuanced characters with complex motivation, the purity of a fundamentally law-abiding, good-hearted person driven by compassion and duty seemed out of place. Jean Luc-Picard practically volunteered for the alignment; in DS9, the spot seems impossible to justify.

Well, until this episode happened. I really think Miles O'Brien is Lawful Good, and I present as evidence his impassioned speech describing a lifetime of honorable service to Starfleet and the Federation, not out of duty but out of moral conviction.

"Tribunal" is somewhere between dystopian farce and Kafka-esque courtroom drama. Cardassians arrest O'Brien just as he's about to take a much-needed vacation with his wife, subject him to horrible tortures, lecture him on the virtues of their legal system, and then drag him through a ridiculous mockery of jurisprudence where his execution is guaranteed, his guilt pre-determined, and his trial an elaborate pageant performed for the benefit of a captive audience of Cardassian citizens.

I don't have a lot to say about this episode's plot. It's...alright? Nothing really happens. Or rather, this is an episode in which nothing almost happens. The typical story beats of a courtroom drama are either absent or lack drama altogether. We know O'Brien's innocent--we met the guy who framed him in the first five minutes. We know O'Brien isn't going to be executed; he's O'Brien and not Ned Stark. We know the Cardassian justice system is a twisted nightmare of fascist propaganda and Orwellian doublethink.

What compels me isn't the plot (there isn't much) or the suspense (there isn't any). It's the farcical stage play that is Cardassian jurisprudence. I'm compelled to watch because I want to see just how obscenely dystopian Cardassian culture can get. It's morbid curiosity that drives me forward. "Tribunal" feels like an episode inspired by Franz Kafka, where nothing makes sense, the absurd is commonplace, and injustice is justice. Cardassian culture has a nightmarish quality. It's a culture where everyone has learned to live with paradoxes.

Take the Cardassian idea of justice, for example. Cardassians don't actually believe in justice the way we do. They believe in summary executions with the appearance of justice. The appearance is more important than the essence; indeed, the essence of justice as a good and moral force in the universe flatly does not exist to Cardassians, and yet they take great care to cultivate and uphold the image of a Cardassia that is the pinnacle of righteousness. The Cardassian system of jurisprudence works backwards: the sentence is first determined, and then sufficient evidence is produced to support that sentence. You're guilty--and then proven guilty. I say it's confirmation bias. Cardassians say it's efficiency. I say Cardassians are wrong. Cardassians say there is no right or wrong, only what benefits the state.

As a plot--as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end--"Tribunal" fails. As political and social satire, "Tribunal" is brilliant. Cardassian justice made me think a lot about Venetian justice in the medieval and renaissance era, where local gossip was not only accepted as evidence in a court, but encouraged. Guilt and poor citizenship were one and the same, and the court was as much theater as judicial system. Cardassia and Venice have a lot in common: states operating by elaborate rules of secrecy, obsessed with pageantry. Cardassians never let truth get in the way of a good story, and a good story is always one that serves the state.

What I love about this episode was its straight-faced dedication to the Orwellian absurdity of the Cardassian system. Every single Cardassian believes, right down to their brittle Cardassian bones, that the best thing for an innocent defender to do is plead guilty. Some of the things said in that court are positively chilling, because they sound so much like our own. I found this exchange particularly horrifying:

Odo asks a witness the name of his "reliable contact."
The witness says: "I can't divulge that information. That would jeopardize the security of the state."

How many times have I heard that exact line uttered to the press during the war on terror? Trust us; we're the government; we know the truth, but we can't share it with you because that might jeopardize your safety.

By the way, Odo is fantastic in this episode. If you want to see an incredible example of a Lawful Good person working with a Lawful Neutral person to fight back against a Lawful Evil system, "Tribunal" is exactly that. The way Odo carries himself with confidence through this episode, the way he holds back a sneer of contempt at these ridiculous Cardassians but tries his best to work within their laws, the way he can't help but take an occasional shot at the judge at the risk of being held in contempt. I loved Odo in this episode almost as much as I loved O'Brien.

It occurs to me that O'Brien and Odo don't have a lot of episodes together. They'll make a passing comment at one another, but rarely is there any chemistry between them.

Anyway, it's late and I'm going to go to bed, because I don't want to carry on ruminating over the messages buried in a satirical episode. There's a lot to unpack here, especially as it relates to our own fears of totalitarianism, and the elaborate courtroom farce reminds me of nothing so much as the Russian or Chinese style of trial by propaganda.

But that's for another time. I get the feeling "Tribunal" is not the last time the Cardassians try to foment a war.

DS9 S2.E24 - The Collaborator

Episode 24 - "The Collaborator," or "Bareilghazi"

It's strange how much more comfortable DS9 is with sexuality and implicit nudity. "Crossover" had Mirror-Kira lounging in a bath, concealed from the camera by a fortuitous curtain of fabric. "The Collaborator" has Vedek Bareil and Kira Nerys lounging in an afterglow and murmuring what might be the most embarrassing pillow talk I've certainly ever heard. This is to say nothing of the bizarre, Freudian sex-dreams Bareil explores through his religious hallucinations, one of which involves a hilariously inappropriate erotic dream of Vedek Winn--the Dolores Umbridge of Bajor.

In "The Collaborator," Bajoran politics make their way to Deep Space Nine when Vedek Winn discovers a dark secret in Vedek Bareil's past. Winn, the underdog in an election for Kai (some sort of Bajoran President-Pope. Popident?) wants to use this information to destroy Bareil's campaign and secure the position of Kai for herself. Bareil was supposedly responsible for the massacre of 43 Bajoran rebels by giving away their position to the Cardassians, and Winn conscripts Kira into investigating the truth.

If there was ever an episode that elicited mixed feelings in me, it's "The Collaborator." I went from utterly bored to intrigued to genuinely surprised to utterly bored again. "Collaborator" comes so close to undermining my expectations and breaking free of the necessities of plot. There is a moment in the third act of this episode where the story goes somewhere I never expected it'd go--to an honest and real place. Unfortunately, "Collaborator" only visits that place before circling back to familiar territory. We come so close to seeing some real, genuine ambiguity in Bareil's character.

Bareil and Kira's relationship is strange and uncomfortable for a few reasons, partly because Bareil comes off about as wooden and unemotional as Al Gore. It doesn't help that Bareil's idea of pillow talk is a sultry "So, are you going to vote for me?" Kira's attraction to Bareil feels like puppy love; physical attraction and careless play, not tender enough to humanize Bareil and not meaningful enough to feel romantic. Their sex seems like a diversion--something they do when they're bored.

I really wish Bareil and Kira's relationship were not so explicitly sexual yet, and instead rooted in tension. Because, oddly enough, there is tension between them. A lot of tension. It's so strange to see them consummate that tension but never have it go anywhere. They're tense before they make out and they're tense after they roll off each other in bed. Is this a Bajoran thing? Are they just chronically incapable of living with abandon and putting aside any thoughts of Bajoran politics for a couple of hours?

It doesn't help that Winn comes off like a nun hiding a dagger in her habit. I want to find a reason to at least empathize with Winn. I want to relate with her. I can't. Her mannerisms are so comically scheming that she makes Cruella DeVille feel human. This is the same Vedek Winn that nearly plunged DS9 in sectarian violence. She makes no effort to conceal her naked ambition (I'm not sorry), and her every expression of faith drips with insincerity.

I expected this episode to follow the same beats of any political frame-job. Kira investigates Bareil, convinced he can't possibly have been responsible for the Kendra Valley Massacre; Kira finds sketchy evidence pointing to Bareil; Kira finds even MORE sketchy evidence pointing to Bareil; Kira is momentarily led to beleive Bareil was guilty, until we discover that by some trick, he set himself up or took the fall for someone else, and therefore his fall from grace trampolines into sainthood.

And, for the most part, the episode proceeds exactly like you'd expect. All the evidence (circumstantial as it may be) points to Bareil's guilt.

What I didn't expect was Bareil owning up to his own guilt. There's a point toward the end of Act 3 where Bareil confronts Kira and admits that--yes--he was responsible for the Kendra Valley Massacre.

Why did you do it, she asks him.

Because the Cardassians would have slaughtered every single village in the region until they found the rebels in Kendra Valley. By handing them over to the Cardassians, Bareil saved lives. He traded 43 lives for thousands.

And I wanted the episode to just end there. Just stop right there. Let Bareil have some blood on his hands. Let him participate in the cruel arithmetic of war. Let his soul be tarnished by calculating the weight of one life against many. I wanted one episode where all the evidence pointed to Bareil, and the evidence was correct, and he was guilty. In a show about ambiguity and uncertainty, Vedek Bareil (and the Bajorans generally) are so unambiguously archetypal that they actually turn me off.

But the episode didn't end there. We discover that the previous Kai was responsible for the Massacre at Kendra Valley, and sacrificed her own son to the Cardassians. The Judeo-Christian undertones are not lost on me. But with this unsubtle and obvious twist, Bareil washes his hands of the blood that stained them for all of ten minutes.

Bareil went from a casualty of war to just another martyr. I would have respected him more if he had sacrificed forty-three Bajorans to save thousands. That decision, I think, is much harder than sacrificing his future as Kai in order to preserve the Bajoran's faith in their own society.

It's possible I am being a little too harsh on poor Bareil. He's a subtle character, outwardly pious but inwardly practical. He understands politics and understands that if Bajorans knew that the previous Kai was responsible for the Massacre, the damage to Bajoran society would have been irreparable.

It's just a shame that the subtle implications of this episode are drowned out by the frankly bizarre and unintentionally hilarious Freudian dreams.

DS9 S2.E23 - "Crossover"

"Crossover," or "Deep Space Ten"

Something I never thought about until watching this episode: when do gestures fall out of use? How long have people been using the middle finger as an expression of obscenity? Are there any colloquial gestures used in the Star Trek universe that are somehow widespread in the 24th century, but as yet unknown in the 21st? Did biting one's thumb make a comeback from Shakespeare's era?

I ask this because I noticed Julian Bashir said he he was "this close" to Chief O'Brien by crossing his index and middle finger. Of all the gestures to survive three centuries into the future, I'm glad that one made it.

Anyway, in this episode, Kira and Bashir run afoul of the vicissitudes of quantum mechanics while traveling through the wormhole and come out in the Mirror Universe. I don't know what the Mirror Universe is, but the episode establishes early on that this is the same alternate universe visited by Captain Kirk.

I've never watched TOS. I'm not familiar with that episode or its contents, so this reference is lost to me. If you did watch TOS, I imagine this episode was either epiphanic or infuriating. Long story short--Kirk ends up in this dark mirror of a universe where everything is familiar yet wrong. Humans ("Terrans") are barbaric despots until Mirror Spock reforms them into a peace-loving society of enlightened philosophers, whereupon they are summarily conquered and subjugated by an alliance between Klingon and Cardassian.

All the players are the same, but the roles are different. Kira is a hedonistic, narcissistic administrator in charge of DS9; DS9 is an outpost and ore processing facility with a dystopian, Snowpiercer-esque class society where Terrans toil as a subjugated class, while Kira and her cronies live in enlightened decadence.

I admit I initially rolled my eyes when Kira and Bashir end up on the opposite end of the wormhole with no DS9 in sight. "Oh, this is probably some sort of time travel/alternate dimension episode where everything's gone wrong. Kira and Bashir probably have to find some way to get back home before an artificial clock renders them permanently trapped in this strange reality. There's probably some gross Klingon woman who fawns over Bashir, and Kira probably learns to sympathize with a friendly Cardassian or something."

I was so hilariously wrong.

I'm so accustomed to this sort of thing happening in TNG. Alternate reality/dimension-hopping episodes are a well-worn and well-loved trope of Star Trek's storytelling, and there's usually one in every season, so I just assumed this was DS9's token dimension-tripper.

What I love about this episode is everything I've come to love about DS9. Even in this strange, dark reflection of the world, the characters are nuanced and complex. Mirror-Kira saunters about like an 80's dominatrix in elaborate leather and an ostentatious silver torc, but there are layers to her. She has Prime-Kira's compassion, trust, fire, and authority. She has pride. I don't like her, but I don't hate her either.

Nana Visitor's acting doesn't get nearly enough credit (from...well, from me, I guess) because Kira has until now been a fairly one-dimensional character; but in this episode, it's hard for me to believe Kira and Mirror-Kira are the same person. They're standing face to face with each other, and there are times where I swear they're two completely different actors.

Crossover is such a brilliantly unsettling episode. Before Game of Thrones, mainstream shows were never comfortable killing off their major characters for dramatic effect; DS9 is no different, but an alternate dimension is a little like an alternate canon. You can do anything there. The consequences are very real for everyone who exists in that dimension, but only temporary for us. "Crossover" kills off a few of our major characters, but never in a way that feels wasted or gratuitous; Mirror-Quark's death hit me hard--not because it was my favorite lovable little Ferengi scamp, but because Mirror-Quark was both vulnerable and deeply sympathetic. He's a fundamentally decent guy sticking his neck out for some poor terrans, and it never feels out of character. I already know Quark has some decency in him, and so Mirror-Quark's selflessness never takes me by surprise. It feels genuine because it is genuine.

Therein lies the genius of this episode. Mirror-Characters are not, in fact, alternate versions of themselves. They are dark mirrors. Every character in this episode contains some quality intrinsic in their original counterparts. Mirror-Kira is proud, driven, and sympathetic; she loathes violence but values loyalty, and can be driven to violence by a breach of trust. Mirror-O'Brien is a talented engineer and a decent, conscientious, gentle man under his brusque exterior. Mirror-Sisko is a leader of men, a hardline pragmatist who nonetheless yields to his own better angels at the last possible moment. And Mirror-Garak is just Garak if he was never banished, and therefore never humanized.

My favorite moment in this episode is when O'Brien, captured and forced to answer for his role in assisting Bashir, tells Mirror-Kira why he threw away his life. Kira and Bashir represent the way things could be, the way things should be, if they only happened differently. The characters are all the same; it's only their circumstances that have changed.

"Crossover" is going to stick with me for a while. This is an episode about what it means to be you. Are you who you are because of your circumstances? If the events of your timeline changed, would you still be the person you are? Or is there a fundamental you, a basic immutable image that defines you regardless of your environment? It's an episode that explores the question of nature and nurture, but even if I'm not looking at this episode philosophically, it's incredibly well-written, suspenseful, and has some of the best performances I've seen out of Nana Visitor.

To me, in the Prime-Universe, "Crossover" was an outstanding episode at the end of a pretty good season.

To the version of me in the Mirror-Universe, "Crossover" is the most nihilistic and horrible season finale ever. But hey, at least we got an amazing ending to Game of Thrones.