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.
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