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.
No comments:
Post a Comment