I’ve completed my re-watch of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Now it’s time to start Deep Space Nine! I am much less familiar with this show, though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen about 80-90% of the episodes. It’s been so long that I’m sure it will all feel brand new. My wife has never seen the show. She and I will go through, review every episode, and give commentary and a grade from A-F. There are SPOILERS for each episode below. Without further adieu, here’s:
“Progress”
Synopsis
Jake and Nog hear that Quark has a huge amount of yamok sauce, and Nog decides to get Jake to help him on an enterprising adventure to attempt to trade or sell the sauce for more and more different things in an effort to acquire profit. Meanwhile, Kira is sent off-station to help get a farmer, Mullibok, and his two mute friends off the land that is going to be used for an energy transfer. Nog and Jake manage to acquire land for one of their trades, and learn that the land is desired by the Bajoran government. They deal Quark into the mix, finally turning a profit. Kira finally must choose between her duty to Starfleet and Bajor and her empathy for Mullibok’s experience, ultimately choosing the former and going so far as to force him to leave by burning down his home.
Commentary
Yeah this was a weird episode. Kira deserved about a dozen court martials for her defiance of orders, but then turns around and goes way over the top. I remember commenting to my wife jokingly: “She’s totally gonna burn the place down to make him leave.” Apparently I was unintentionally prophetic there, as that’s exactly what Kira ended up doing. It wasn’t a bad storyline, it was just strange.
The other thread here was another Jake and Nog adventure, and I admit I have a decided soft spot for them, having grown up thinking we could be playmates on board DS9 (and reading the series of kids books that basically let you follow all their adventures). So I kind of liked this silliness that helped give more flavor to their relationship. Sure, it’s childish, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
What are we left with, then? A strange mashup of two episodes, neither capable of standing on its own, that becomes, well, basically the sum of its parts. It’s two half-episodes. Not great, but not terrible.
Grade: C+ “It feels incomplete and mashed together, but I’m a sucker for Jake and Nog storylines, so this one isn’t the bottom dweller it otherwise could have been.”
Wife’s Grade and Comment: B for Kira storyline and A for Jake and Nog play the paperclip challenge storyline.
“If Wishes Were Horses”
Synopsis
Across DS9 people’s imaginings start to become real. As the station is overrun with strangeness, Sisko and crew must work to try to solve the problem, ultimately revealing some kind of rupture in the plasma field that is threatening the base. As all their efforts fail, Sisko finally decides even the rupture must be imaginary, and he solves the problem by simply disbelieving it. Turns out all the imaginary friends were some kind of observers sent to see how humans (and others) in this part of the galaxy work.
Commentary
[An earlier version of this post mistakenly referred to this episode as “If Wishes were Fishes.” Hey, steal a common phrase and expect people to get it wrong.]
I don’t really know how to feel about this one, which leaves me to decide that I feel largely ambivalent. It’s yet another strange episode in a chain of weirdness that is starting to make me think that DS9’s season 1, while better than TNG’s is quite “colorful,” and not always in a good way.
The reveal at the beginning when Rumpelstiltskin appears basically takes away whatever dramatic buildup was possible–imagine if the first thing that had happened was the Dax/Bashir encounter. We’d be weirded out and surprised, but it wouldn’t be obviously imaginary. Rumpelstiltskin just is not real; so having it be the first thing to show up immediately gave the game away. On the other hand, the playfulness of the episode is kind of its saving grace, such that at the end I don’t mind so much that a long-dead baseball player is telling me about his alien race. Yeah, that’s a sentence I just wrote.
The actors did a pretty decent job selling the whole thing, so I guess bonus points for that. It was weird, it was fun, and it was off-putting all at once. How do you even rate such an episode?
Anyway, can we mention baseball again here? The thought that baseball just dwindles away to nothing is a remarkably sad look at the future, especially for me as a Cubs fan just observing their first World Series win in more than 100 years. Let’s just pretend this pretend future really is pretend and pretend it won’t happen, k? K.
Grade: C “Another weird episode. Maybe DS9 season 1 just is a series of kind of strange, off-beat science fiction stories.”
Wife’s Grade and Comment: B “That was a weird one. It just didn’t make sense.”
Links
J.W. Wartick- Always Have a Reason– Check out my “main site” which talks about philosophy of religion, theology, and Christian apologetics (among other random topics). I love science fiction so that comes up integrated with theology fairly frequently as well. I’d love to have you follow there, too!
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SDG.
Eclectic Theist 