Star Trek: DS9 Season 3 “Life Support” and “Heart of Stone”

In which Kira turns into a rock. No, seriously.

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:

“Life Support”

Synopsis

Vedek Bareil is injured on a transport coming to DS9 and Bashir must try to help forestall the potential brain injury that’s happening. Meanwhile, the Bajorans are in important peace talks with the Cardassians, spearheaded by Bareil’s efforts and grudgingly agreed to by Kai Winn. Bareil’s condition continues to deteriorate even as the peace talks enter pivotal phases. Bashir utilizes experimental techniques to keep Bareil alive, but strongly urges him to go into a kind of stasis so they can cure him later. Bareil refuses the recommended treatment and continues to push for more and more dangerous treatments. Ultimately, the peace talks seem to be successful, but Bareil dies, having already had enough treatments to be very little of the man he once was.

Commentary

Wow, this was a tough episode to watch. Somehow you keep hoping that Bareil may just pull through, but it all seems inevitable from the beginning. The ethical dimensions raised here are interesting, but some of the difficult questions they’re dealing with–whether to do treatments that may cause more harm than good, whether the patient is truly the last say so far as which treatments can or should be done, and more.

I genuinely thought Kai Winn must have had something to do with Bareil’s injury, and that the plot would go in the direction of having the peace talks undermined by that very thing, but the writers didn’t go there, and I have mixed feelings about it. It seems like a potential missed opportunity for increasing the nefarious nature of Winn, but it also seems like it would be possibly too much if they had gone that way.

It’s worth mentioning this is also a piece of good development for Kira, who is stuck between the wishes of Bareil and her own.

The secondary plot following Nog and Jake and their different cultures is a good development for them, too, adding another dimension to their relationship that wasn’t there before.

Grade: B “It felt a little like it could have been more, and the questions it raised could have gone father, but it was an interesting character piece with some good ethical quandaries.”

Wife’s Grade and Comment: A- “It was good further development of characters we already knew, plus some ethical dilemmas from Dr. Bashir.”

“Heart of Stone”

Synopsis

Kira and Odo crash land on a rocky moon after chasing a Maquis vessel. On the moon, Kira gets stuck in a rock which quickly reveals itself to be some kind of energy shifting organism. Meanwhile, Nog has come to Sisko to ask to get a recommendation for joining Starfleet.

As the two try to figure a way out of the mess, and the rock-energy-organism takes over Kira more and more, Odo begins to open up to Kira more than ever.

Commentary

Odo! Tell Kira already!

The genius of this episode is that it uses Odo brilliantly. Here, we don’t have him using tricks of his own shapeshifting to do something mundane like being a glass on a tray or something. No, he is purely using his powers of deduction to show that he remains as totally awesome as he did before.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in this episode is the plausibility of having the other Changeling as the villain. It’s not so much that a shapeshifter like Odo couldn’t turn into Kira and look as it did, but the problem is rather that Odo at one points fires a phaser on fake Kira which would, presumably, have greatly harmed the Changeling. Yet there is little-to-no reaction from her. Oh well.

Grade: B+ “Odo being Odo as Odo does best.”

Wife’s Grade and Comment: B+ “I think it was an interesting look into Odo’s character and fun Nog development, but utterly implausible.”

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!

Be sure to follow me on Twitter for discussion of posts, links to other pages of interest, random talk about theology/philosophy/apologetics/movies/scifi/sports and more!

Star Trek: DS9– For more episode reviews, follow this site and also click this link to read more (scroll down as needed)! Drop me a comment to let me know what you thought!

SDG.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season 2 “The Crossover” and “The Collaborator”

Bajorans have issues, yo.

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:

“The Crossover”

Synopsis

Kira and Bashir experience a strange glitch in the Wormhole and end up in an alternate reality with copies of everyone on Deep Space Nine. In this alternate reality, however, the Cardassians, Klingons, and Bajorans have formed a kind of alliance and conquered humanity. Sisko gets special treatment as a kind of rogue trader. Bashir is thrown to slavery, with Odo as the overlord. He manages to convince the O’Brien copy that there may be more to life than drudgery even as Garak threatens to kill Bashir if Kira doesn’t take her copy’s place. O’Brien and Bashir are captured in an attempt to escape but Bashir’s words about a world in which humans aren’t all slaves inspires Sisko to take up the fight. He aids Bashir and Kira in getting back to their own reality and copy Sisko and O’Brien stay to continue the fight.

Commentary

Now we’ve had two episodes in a row that don’t do anything to move the plot forward. I’d like to reflect on some perspective here. In “The Next Generation,” it barely mattered if an episode happened wherein nothing that happened impacted the broader world because that’s often the premise of the show. It’s just a spaceship flying around running into things and occasionally dealing with much wider-scale problems. But DS9 has set itself up, for better or worse, as a show built on strong continuing narratives. Because of this, it’s really frustrating to get episodes where there’s not any continuation of the broader narratives, and this episode suffers from those expectations.

Anyway, the episode is also problematic in that it has established characters acting completely abnormally. That goes along with the premise, but instead of creating an aura of weirdness, there is a sense of impossibility. Bajorans… working with Cardassians? And Klingons partnering with others for conquest? Sisko as a marauder? Yeah, these things are weird, but they also go against basically everything that has been established about these races and people groups.

All of that said, the episode was kind of fun in a campy, cheesy way. It’s silly, it’s impossible, and it takes itself all too seriously. But it somehow still manages to kind of have a sense of fun. Not a good episode, but not a terrible one, either.

Grade: C- “Another episode where actually nothing that happened mattered.”

Wife’s Grade and Comment: B- “I don’t know. It was just weird.”

“The Collaborator”

Synopsis

Bajor is gearing up to select a new Kai. Bareil seems like the logical choice, as he was hand-picked by Kai Opaka. However, when an exiled Bajoran informant returns, Vedek Winn, Bareil’s opponent and an able conspirator, grants him permission to return to Bajor. She begins to use the exile as evidence of a collaborator elsewhere on Bajor, namely, Bareil. Kira is given the chance to prove Bareil is innocent, and attempts to do so with the help of Odo, and a dash of Quark’s hacking skill, seems to implicate Bareil even more. However, when Kira confonts Bareil, he argues the collaboration was necessary to save Bajoran lives. Kira can’t accept this, but continues her investigation and discovers that Kai Opaka herself was the collaborator, not Bareil. Opaka sacrificed the life of her son to save 1200 other lives. Bareil sacrificed his career to preserve Opaka’s prestige. Vedek Winn is made Kai.

Commentary

Here’s an episode full of twists and turns. It’s clear almost from the outset that Bareil is hiding something, though I didn’t expect he’d be covering up for Opaka. That was a big reveal, and one that asked questions about what is important in life–and death. Did Opaka do the right thing? Should such a decision that she made be paraded out in front of all of Bajor for analysis? Was Bareil’s sacrifice valiant or foolish because it allowed Winn to become Kai?

None of those questions have easy answers, but they do promise for more intrigue on Bajor, which is an exciting prospect.

Another great aspect of this episode is it doesn’t try to hard. There’s no overly dramatic shots or scenes. The plot is dramatic enough, and it relies on its own drama rather than tricks of camera or overdone lines to draw viewers in.

Grade: A “It had enough twists that it was exciting all the way through, but not so many that it became unbelievable.”

Wife’s Grade and Comment: B+ “I always enjoy a good, sleuthy detective story.”

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!

Be sure to follow me on Twitter for discussion of posts, links to other pages of interest, random talk about theology/philosophy/apologetics/movies/scifi/sports and more!

Star Trek: DS9- For more episode reviews, follow this site and also click this link to read more (scroll down as needed)! Drop me a comment to let me know what you thought!

SDG.