Yora reviews Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - All of it!

[Cikomyr]

Cikomyr stated he'd only heard about actress's not returning to a role due to issues with the makeup. I gave some examples of men. Hence similar issues and not same issue.

I totally accept these examples. I wasn't trying to make a commentary of anything, but merely pointing out what I had learned.

[The New Bruceski]

Another great episode. Doing comedy episodes in non-comedy shows is rarely pretty to watch, but ferengi almost always work for me in Deep Space Nine. I don't think I did when I first saw the series, but these days I find the Nagus to be one of my favorite minor characters. I only know realized what actor is playing him, you should look it up. I can't even say his name in a normal voice.

Spoiler

Show

Rule of Acquisition #53: never go up against a ferengi when death is on the line!

[Yora]

In hindsight, it's quite obvious.

With regards to Melora, while I didn't dislike that particular episode as much as Yora - it's Hans Christian Anderson in SPACE!!! which I found interesting if nothing else - I would submit that one-off romance episodes are almost all mediocre-to-terrible in Trek. You know the guest star love interest is going away and will likely never be mentioned again and that's not really a solid basis for developing a romantic plot organically so you neither have cause or time to invest in them at all.

My unholy trinity of awful Star Trek episodes has for a long time been Time Travel, Transporter Accidents, and Holodeck Malfunctions. But when I was looking through the episode list before starting this rewatch, I also noticed that single episode romances are a very close fourth runner up. You can't do a romance story in 15 minutes of screentime.

On another note, we haven't gotten into any "the universe hates Miles O'Brien" episodes yet, have we?

No. I will be counting those when we get to them.

[Kitten Champion]

My unholy trinity of awful Star Trek episodes has for a long time been Time Travel, Transporter Accidents, and Holodeck Malfunctions. But when I was looking through the episode list before starting this rewatch, I also noticed that single episode romances are a very close fourth runner up. You can't do a romance story in 15 minutes of screentime.

See, I can think of some good time travel ("City on the Edge of Forever", "Trials and Tribble-ations", "Cause and Effect"), transporter accident ("Mirror, Mirror", "The Enemy Within", "Second Chances") and holodeck malfunction ("Our Man Bashir", "Bride of Chaotica", "Ship in a Bottle") episodes. I liked the "Past Tense" two-parter on DS9 as a time-travel episode too, but a certain amount of that might be that it shared my politics and I enjoyed the novelty of time-travelling only a few decades into our future. I'm also unclear if "Far Beyond the Stars" counts.

For one-off romance episodes though, I can think of some that are tolerable but nothing I'd choose to sit through again.

I will point out though that DS9's holodecks never actually malfunction. Even in Our Man Bashir they're technically working correctly but are being McGuyver'd into something they're not intended to be used for due to circumstances unrelated to them. Which is kind of ironic given we're told and shown repeatedly how Quark's willing to cut corners as a scheming miser and readily abuses his maintenance staff that he's still got a better record than the flagship of the Federation in maintaining his little holo-suite operation.

[Saph]

I will point out though that DS9's holodecks never actually malfunction. Even in Our Man Bashir they're technically working correctly but are being McGuyver'd into something they're not intended to be used for due to circumstances unrelated to them. Which is kind of ironic given we're told and shown repeatedly how Quark's willing to cut corners as a scheming miser and readily abuses his maintenance staff that he's still got a better record than the flagship of the Federation in maintaining his little holo-suite operation.

Yeah, one of the things I always liked about DS9 was that their holosuites were basically used as full-VR live action roleplay. So you got Kira and Dax playing the King Arthur story, Miles and Julian fighting at the Alamo, etc. Which sounded incredibly cool to me as a teenager.

The holodecks in TNG and Voyager were either vehicles for some sort of philosophical dilemma or they were malfunctioning in some weird and/or horribly dangerous manner to the point that no sane person who didn't have Main Character Plot Armour would set foot in the things.

Honestly, you get the feeling that Federation engineers have absolutely no idea what they're doing when it comes to holodecks. It's like they stole the technology from the Vulcans or something and don't actually understand how it works.

[Lord Vukodlak]

I will point out though that DS9's holodecks never actually malfunction. Even in Our Man Bashir they're technically working correctly but are being McGuyver'd into something they're not intended to be used for due to circumstances unrelated to them. Which is kind of ironic given we're told and shown repeatedly how Quark's willing to cut corners as a scheming miser and readily abuses his maintenance staff that he's still got a better record than the flagship of the Federation in maintaining his little holo-suite operation.

Liability, we know lawsuits are a thing on Ferenginar and Quark would not want to get sued. His holo-suites probably won't even function with safety's off. Or maybe its just Rom as he's the one Quark allowed to do maintenance.

[Kantaki]

I will point out though that DS9's holodecks never actually malfunction. Even in Our Man Bashir they're technically working correctly but are being McGuyver'd into something they're not intended to be used for due to circumstances unrelated to them. Which is kind of ironic given we're told and shown repeatedly how Quark's willing to cut corners as a scheming miser and readily abuses his maintenance staff that he's still got a better record than the flagship of the Federation in maintaining his little holo-suite operation.

Well duh.
Quark is making latinum with those holo suites.
If they don't work he doesn't earn anything.
Worse, if something goes wrong poor Quark might loose money.

So yeah. Shady deals? Sure. Jacking up prices? Business. Cutting corners? Profit. Exploiting his employees? Ferengi.
But risking sure profit? Nope.

Those fifth-hand parts are cheaper than the second-hand ones, but is that really worth risking Moriaty taking over the bar?

[Kitten Champion]

What's sad is the Enterprise has personnel to run every subsystem - including the Turbolifts for some reason - they even have a dedicated bartender and barber... but you never hear of anyone whose job it is just to maintain the holodecks. It only ever seems to come up once its already malfunctioned and then you get a team of senior officers and engineers who need to work furiously to fix it, there's never some holodeck chief for Riker to kick around condescending.

[Yora]

S2E8: Necessary Evil

Quark is Bajor, visiting a woman in a fancy house during a thunderstorm and a power outage. He asks her why she called him after all these years and she would like him to get a box that is hidden in a wall in her old shop on Deep Space Nine. She claims she doesn't want to go back to the place where her husband was murdered, but he doesn't buy it and tells her she just doesn't want Odo to see her there.

Late at night, Quark and Rom break into the store and Rom turns out to be really good at lockpicking and quickly getting into the wall without noise or leaving much traces. They find the box and take it to the bar to open it, but all they find inside is a list with eight bajoran names. Quark sends Rom to get a scanner to make a copy of it before they reseal the box, and while Rom is gone a bajoran man comes in, takes the list from quark, and shots him. Rom comes back, finds Quark on the floor, and calls for help.

Bashir saves Quark's life, but he remains in a coma. Odo is questioning Rom about what happened and accuses him of murdering his brother to inherit the bar. Sisko tries to defend him, but when Odo keeps pressing he gets the hint and Rom quickly spills about them breaking into the store and finding the list that has disappeared. When Rom shows him the store where the list was hidden, Odo immediately makes the connection to the murder of its previous owner.

Some years earlier during the Cardassian occupation, Odo was called to the shop by Dukat, who shows him the corpse and asks him to investigate who did it. His own men probably won't get much answers from the Bajoran slaves, but they seem to be trusting Odo as a neutral party who has an ability to solve conflicts. If Odo refuses the job, they will just go with the standard Cardassian procedure and start killing people until someone rats out the murderer. Odo rather would not to and seems rather uncomfortable talking to Dukat and not showing much confidence, but he's not really given a choice. Dukat takes him to the dead man's wife and Odo starts questioning her. At first he's rather akward and uncertain, but when he starts to notice that she doesn't seem terribly bothered by her husband's death, and quickly gets his confidence and is on a roll. The woman tells him that her husband had something with another woman and had promised her to end it, and so the woman probably killed him for that.

In the presence, Odo keeps questioning Rom and somehow gets him to remember the first name on the list, which was Chis'o. Probably. Maybe. it's not much, but he tells Kira to see if she can find anyone with that name that might have been connected to the murder of the store owner. He goes to Bajor to talk to the wife, suspecting that she was the one who told Quark to get the box from her old store, but she says she had not been talking with him for years. He asks if she knows any Chis'o, but she denies that as well. However, Odo mentions that just this morning she had paid her outstanding power bills and got her power restored, and wonders where she got the money. She says it was a loan from a friend and she want's to protect his anonymity, and without any hard evidence for any wrongdoing he has to leave it at that and returns to the station.

The next day, Kira has good news and bad news for him. The good news is that she found the man Odo wanted her to find, and his name is Chis'aro. The bad news is that he accidentally drowned in a pond in his garden the last night. Obviously the wife had him murdered right after Odo mentioned the name to her.

After the murder of her husband, the wife showed Odo the woman her husband had been with and it turns out to be Kira. Odo checks her alibi and has no problem finding out that she paid off Quark to cover for her. While he is telling it to Quark's face, Dukat comes around the corner and congratulates him on his progress. But Odo insists that he does not yet know if he has found the murderer and Dukat should not make any arrests yet. When he talks to Kira again, she asks him which side he really is on, and Odo persists in his conviction that he is on nobody's side. If Kira killed the man, he will hand her over to Dukat, if she did not he won't. So she confesses that she's been send to the station by the rebels to sabotage the ore refinery and tells him to check the reports from last night, which confirm her story. Dukat comes by to see if Odo has the murderer, and Odo tells him that she's not the one and he will tell him once he knows who did it.

Meanwhile, the man who shot Quark comes back for another try in the infirmary, stabs the redshirt security guard, and attempts to suffocate Quark. Rom happens to come by and starts screaming, which alerts Odo who overpowers the assassin. Odo tells Rom to stop screaming. Everything is allright now. Quark will live. Which makes Rom start screaming again. Kira comes to Odo, telling him she now knows the whole list that was in the box. Seven other bajorans had each just transferred the same high amount of money to the wife. Odo is certain they were blackmailed, with their shared dark secret being how they managed to get that much money during the occupation. Which they really only could have gotten by secretly getting paid by the Cardassians.

The wife is brought to the station for questioning and Odo and Kira show her the assassin who is in one of the cells. She says she has never seen that man before, but Kira tells her that they know they had been calling each other many times in the past days and she transferred a lot of money to his account. Finally she stops making up lies and instead requests to talk with her lawyer. In his office, Odo tells Kira that he now finally has it all figured out. Kira was able to find Chis'aro and the other seven people so quickly because she already knew who they were. The rebels had been suspected that they were secretly working for Cardassians, as were the store owners, and had send someone to the station to assassinate them. Kira admits that she wasn't the one who sabotaged the refinery, but the one who broke into the store to search for the list. When the owner saw her, she actually killed him before he could call guards. Odo fully understands why she did it, but is disappointed that she didn't tell him during the whole year the Cardassians had been gone and they been working together. She says she always wanted to, but never found a good way to do, and Odo is willing to forgive her.

--

Aw, yiss! Dat's de stuff!

Great episode. Didn't have much Odo for a while now and here he's back in action in full force. I think this might be my favorite episode so far. The crime and the investigation seen very intriguing when they are introduced, and remain so throughout the episode, but are actually pretty simple so that even with the many time jumps it all is fairly easy to follow. I really liked Odo at first being very withdrawn and awkward at first, but very quickly getting his feet under him once he finds that he's right in his element. Him accusing Rom of murdering Quark just as he was been taking to the infirmary in critical condition seemed a bit unreasonable, but it's actually an approach that works very well to get Rom talking instead of trying to cover for Quark by saying he doesn't know anything about anything and has no clue who could have done it or have a motive. A bit mean, but it works very well. As in previous situations, Odo changes his interrogation style to the person he is talking to instead of sticking to his own standard procedures. He's a bit rough and grumpy, but he really knows subtlety and how to manipulate people into being cooperative. This episode we also have an opportunity to explain how he got into the position of having worked as law enforcement on the station for both the Cardassians and the Bajorans.
At the end of the episode, we get Odo and Kira starting a propper friendship. Until this point, they mostly were just the people working together on the station for the longest and having little appreciation for Starfleet procedures. They had one moment very early in the first seasons, but back then it really was because Odo was the only one she could talk to about being on the fence about the Federation.

I think this episode we also get the first real introduction to Rom being technically gifted. And as always, we get some jokes about Rom and Quark both being willing to sell each other out for their own profit.

Somehow, I find myself not having much to say about this. It's great. Great script, great acting, great direction, and great editing. This probably wasn't easy to make, but the end result works like a charm. The only aspect where there might still be some room for being even better is that the ending comes somewhat suddenly. When I noticed the episode getting towards the final act, there was only a minute or two left. The plot is actually perfectly wrapped up with no obvious loose ends, and I can't really think of anything that could have been added to the end. But it's such a well done mystery with interesting developments that even at the 40 minute mark I was still expecting more twists and revelation to appear. I'm not actually sure if this should be seen as a good or a bad thing. It kind of means that there is more material and tension stuffed into the 45 minutes than usual.

I found it quite interesting that this is only eight episodes in, but already I gave this season more Green ratings than the whole first season. Things really have improved a lot.

[Cikomyr]

This was a fantastic episode. The core was serious, but there was a rich intertwining of comedy elements. Everything about Rom was great, but here's the best:

Commence Station Security Log, Stardate 47282.5.

At the request of Commander Sisko, I will hereafter be recording a daily log of law enforcement affairs. The reason for this exercise is beyond my comprehension except perhaps that Humans have a compulsion to keep records and lists and files – so many in fact that they have to invent new ways to store them microscopically. Otherwise their records would overrun all known civilization.

My own very adequate memory not being good enough for Starfleet, I am pleased to put my voice to this official record of this day:

Everything's under control.

End log. "

[Kantaki]

This was a fantastic episode. The core was serious, but there was a rich intertwining of comedy elements. Everything about Rom was great, but here's the best:

Well, yeah. Rom is awesome.
And I can understand Odo's antipathy towards Federation's love for bureaucracy.
On the other hand he should keep those logs on his own.
If only to prevent some clown making stuff up to cause trouble.
Or you know, in case someone needs to look them up while he is unavailable.

[Gnoman]

See, I can think of some good time travel ("City on the Edge of Forever", "Trials and Tribble-ations", "Cause and Effect"), transporter accident ("Mirror, Mirror", "The Enemy Within", "Second Chances") and holodeck malfunction ("Our Man Bashir", "Bride of Chaotica", "Ship in a Bottle") episodes. I liked the "Past Tense" two-parter on DS9 as a time-travel episode too, but a certain amount of that might be that it shared my politics and I enjoyed the novelty of time-travelling only a few decades into our future. I'm also unclear if "Far Beyond the Stars" counts.

For one-off romance episodes though, I can think of some that are tolerable but nothing I'd choose to sit through again.

I will point out though that DS9's holodecks never actually malfunction. Even in Our Man Bashir they're technically working correctly but are being McGuyver'd into something they're not intended to be used for due to circumstances unrelated to them. Which is kind of ironic given we're told and shown repeatedly how Quark's willing to cut corners as a scheming miser and readily abuses his maintenance staff that he's still got a better record than the flagship of the Federation in maintaining his little holo-suite operation.

"City on The Edge Of Forever" is, in part, a one-episode romance.

[Cikomyr]

"City on The Edge Of Forever" is, in part, a one-episode romance.

DS9 had actually some solid time travel stories.

"Children of Time", "Time's Orphan", "Past Tense", "Trial and Tribble-ation". In a way, "Things Past" looked initially like a time travel story.

[Kitten Champion]

"City on The Edge Of Forever" is, in part, a one-episode romance.

Oh, you're right. Though I always took Kirk's love more as admiration for a great and pure person to heighten the tragedy. She wasn't, like 99% of Kirk's romances, merely physically attractive, of the correct age, and around him for an appreciative length of time.

I also thought of the "The Enterprise Incident" which is more of a suspense/thriller thing but the Spock/Romulan Commander relationship was one of the more interesting in the franchise's history, mostly because they played off the ambiguity of Spock's feelings.

[Yora]

S2E9: Second Sight

Sisko meets a strange woman on the promenade. She suddenly disappears in the middle of a conversation, but it still puts him into a good mood. Dax is working with a Federation scientists on preparations to attempt to restart a dead star. This is 10 minutes in and I am already bored out of my mind.

Sisko meets the woman again but she suddenly rushes off again. He asks Odo if he could try to find out who she is because he thinks she might be in some of trouble. Dax wants to hear some gossip. The scientists invites the officers to his ship for dinner and he introduces them to his wife, who looks just like that strange woman but doesn't seem to know Sisko.
The woman meets Sisko again but keeps being very elusive about who she is, where she came from, and what's going on with the other woman who looks just like her. Then she suddenly fades away into thin air. 30 minutes in and nothing has happened!

The ships leaves the station to try the experiment with the star, and Sisko comes along. He has a conversation with the scientist in which they don't actually talk about anything. Then the weird woman shows up again, and he calls Dax to take a look at her. She scans her with her tricorder and finds that she's not actually a person but some kind of energy illusion. They want to take her to the scientist and his wife, but when they arrive the wife is unconscious. The scientists explains that the woman is an subconscious projection of his wife, caused by her depression. He admits that he is a very difficult man and his previous wives all had the sense to leave him, but his current wife's culture always marries for life and so she sticks around with him.

Sisko talks with the woman but then gets a call from Dax. The scientist had stolen the shuttle with the equipment that will reignite the star and manually crashes it into it, killing himself.

--

This is dreadful. Easily the second worst episode of the series so far. There is not a single thing in the episode that is even halfway decent. It just sucks from the first moment to the last. there is never any trace of tension or something resembling a meaningful plot. What's the point of any of this? I can kind of see how the single sentence pitch for the idea could have made the producers say "that could be interesting, please draft a script and send it to us". But as soon as they had it on their desk, it should have gone straight to the recycling bin. They finally wanted to make an episode about Sisko and this is what they managed to come up with? A single episode romance with no A-plot? Terrible! Just terrible! This is no D-, this is an F.

Also, casual spontaneous suicide instead of marriage counselling, and everyone seems to be fine with that.

Also, the science in the episode is complete junk. I usually don't bother to mention this anymore because I don't remember having seen any halfway decent science in this series so far, but here it's especially bad because the concepts are so simple and straightforward. The star seems to be a black dwarf, which are almost certainly a real thing, but it takes hundreds of times longer than the current age of the universe for small stars to burn out. If such black dwarfs were around it seems very unlikely to be possible to reignite them, though there might be a slight theoretical possibility of getting a bit more heat out of them. But even then, there would be no possibility at all of accidentally causing a supernova. Stars that could potentially become a supernova will 100% end as a supernova and can never burn out and cool down. I don't think the writer made any effort to learn even the slightest basics of what a star is. At least there isn't any technobabble about what supposedly happens.

This sucks. I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.

[Kantaki]

Huh. That episode doesn't sound even remotely familiar.
I mean it's been a while since I watched DS9, but still...
Telling.

Also, originally I wanted to make up some nonsense on how the reigniting a star that's older than the universe would work and totally makes sense, but... yeah.
I got nothing.

Maybe if you toss a replicator or three dozen into it?
The guy didn't kill himself, he tried to save time unloading.
Or he was aware of being a one-off character in a just plain terrible episode and just wanted out...

[Yora]

The scientist actually had a certain charm. Or at the very least, the actor was able to get a good performance out of the material he had. He's at the same time completely full of himself, but also fully aware of it and always trying to make people feel welcome. Dax says that it's actually a common trait of scientists working in terraforming because they are used to performing miracles on global scales. He's fun and charming, but the actor hits the right spot to make it just a little bit too much, so you get that he would be pretty insufferable to be around for long. He's friendly, kind, and considerate, but the one scene with his wife makes it clear that they really are not a good match and it's not surprising that she's suffering from depression because of it. They don't actually say it out loud, but I found the implication very clear and obvious.
But indeed, he's not actually contributing anything to tiny bits of plot, and so the scenes in which he's in don't seem to be contributing to anything, making his whole performance go to waste.

[Seppl]

Huh. That episode doesn't sound even remotely familiar.
I mean it's been a while since I watched DS9, but still...
Telling.

Also, originally I wanted to make up some nonsense on how the reigniting a star that's older than the universe would work and totally makes sense, but... yeah.
I got nothing.

Same. I was sure I could remember every DS9 episode at least partially but this one does not ring any bells. Apparently just completely forgettable, not even so bad you remember it for being bad.

[Inchhighguy]

S2E9: Second Sight
This sucks. I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.

Yup.

Really the only thing this epsiode has is the ''Sisko comes out of his shell" bit.

And the writing is awful....the USS Promethius has been docked at DS9 for days...days....and not one single person other then the science guy leaves the ship? Not even one?

And...er...notice how the Prometheus has no crew? Was ensgin Smith really in command of the ship? Why was there no captain or bridge crew? (you know other then they would out rank all the stars of the show...wink wink)

[Yora]

S2E10: Sanctuary

A ship comes through the wormhole with bad damage and four passengers. The translator takes a bit of time to figure out their language. Once it is working the matriarch explains that they are refugees whose world has been destroyed by soldiers in the service to the Dominion, though they don't know why. There's three million of them left and they have been searching the Gamma Quadrant for the wormhole, that was prophecised to lead them to a promised new homeworld. Once she has contacted others of her people, larger numbers of refugees arrive at the station, which puts some strain on everyone.

Nog starts pranking some of the refugee boys which only stirs up more trouble. The matriarchs decide that the one of them who found the wormhole should be their leader in the search for their new home. As she learns more about Bajor, she becomes certain that it is the world that has been prophecised. She request for her people to settle some depopulated regions on Bajor, but the government denies it on the grounds that they can't risk their plans for land restoration failing and having three million more people in need of government aid. Even promises to not request aid under any circumstances do not change that decision.

The refugee leader is quite bitter about it. Her son steals a ship to go to Bajor by himself but gets shot down by orbital defenses when he ignores traffic control. The aliens move on and settle on another planet.

--

Not quite sure how to review this. I wasn't really motivated to watch this, and don't feel very motivated to review it in depth, but I want to cover all episodes in order, even with a long stretch of weak episodes in the middle of season 2.
It's not a terrible episode. I say it's okay, but barely so. Again, the main weakness is plot. There just isn't really anything happening or much of a conflict. The translator not working immediately doesn't last long and doesn't have any actual consequences on what happens after that. Quark complaining about poor refugees on the promenade and Nog harassing them also doesn't lead to anything else. The refugees proposing to help with restoring Bajor's agriculture, but the Bajorans refusing because they feel it's too risky to have another vulnerable population in their responsibility is an interesting conflict in theory, but it really lasts only for one short scene. In the end, there's not really anything in the way of a resolution.
If someone would rate this episode among the bad ones, I would not argue against it. It's just not as frustrating or infuriating as the really bad ones. Just extremely meh.

And looking at the episodes of this season, there's still seven more until we finally get to something I remember as being good. This is going to suck.

[Cikomyr]

We'll be with you every step of the way.

Every other step. Minimum.

Anyway. I feel this episode has only become more topical nowadays than when it was released.

[Dragonus45]

It feels like the kind of thing that would work better as a running B plot across a couple episodes, so that you have time to get attached to Leader Guy or feel more for the plight of the refugees. Perhaps let the various good and bad reasons why Bajor should or shouldn't give them the space. But there is only so much time in the world so it gets a truncated mediocre one episode.

[Yora]

I noticed that there are a couple of episodes that sound like really strong ideas when you describe the concept in a single sentence, but end up without any substance in the execution. Stuff where, as a producer, I definitely would tell a writer presenting me with the pitch to go ahead and bring me a full script.

Maybe they didn't even think it was good material, but when they got to the point where they had to start shooting episodes, they simply didn't have anything better to pick from. I've been wondering a couple of time how the actual planing and executing of each season was done. Did they have all 26 scripts ready and final when they started shooting the episodes? I believe there's a couple of interesting episodes related to long term story and character arcs towards the end of the second season, so I postpone my speculations about that until then.

[Yora]

S2E11: Rivals

Odo arrests an El-Aurelian who is chatting with an old woman talking her financial investment plans. Odo accuses Martus to be a con man who uses his natural ability to make people chatty to swindle them out of their money and is currently wanted for fraud. He ends up in a cell with an old alien in rags who starts pestering him with a story about how he lost everything he had because of a gambling toy he keeps playing with the whole time. Suddenly he finally gets a win and in a moment of joy has a heart attack and dies. Before he calls Odo, Martus takes the toy from the dead man.

O'Brien goes to practice some kind of tennis game in a small court he build in an empty room and finds Bashir already there warming up wearing a fancy sport outfit. O'Brien isn't too happy about it but allows Bashir to have a game with him, who then goes nerding out about championships and how he was as top ranking player back in his time at medical school. After the game, O'Brien comes home completely exhausted and really pissed about being humiliated by his poor performance. Bashir has a chat with Dax about how O'Brien got so obsessed about playing and refusing to stop that he got worried that he might pass out from exhaustion.

Martus plays with the toy and unlike the previous owner has a winning streak. Odo comes in to tell him that he is free to go because the people who have accused him of fraud have withdrawn the charges. He goes to Quark and tries to sell him the toy for some money. Quark wants to pay him a pittance for it, but when he realizes that Quark is really eager to get it, he decides to hold on to it for a while longer. On the promenade, Martus sees a Bajoran woman closing up her shop, and with just a few words gets her to open up a casino with him in the rooms of her store, in which they install replicated copies of the toy as gambling machines. It works out really well and Quark complains about losing most of his customers.

In ops, Dax is having a lot of luck with the computer getting her results for searches that could have taken days in just a few minutes, while Kira keeps getting her almost completed reports eaten by the computer. Sisko notes that there have been a lot of minor accidents and mishaps across the station recently, and Kira slips on a stair and falls. All of a sudden, everyone in the Casino is having a winning streak, and shortly after customers are moving back over to Quark's. Dax' files have disappeared again, while Kira comes back from the infirmary because it turned out she didn't actually injure anything. Quark announces a big sports match between O'Brien and Bashir and asks people to bet on the outcome, telling everyone that the two insisted that half of the profits will be donated to an orphanage. Without having asked them, but now they hardly can say no. Martus' place is pretty much deserted and he hugs one of his waitresses in a moment of sadness, just when the Bajoran woman he had partnered with and got to believe that he will marry her walks in. She is furious, and with the location still being rented by her, she kicks him out. But at least, he still has enough profits from the casino to help the woman he talked to at the start of the episode to fund her mining company.

Before the match starts, Quark pops in with Bashir to give him a bottle with a herbal drink he got from the monks running the orphanage, that will give him some extra energy. But Bashir wisely scans it before drinking and Quark had added a sedative to it. Bashir still is going to play, but forces Quark to donate all the profits to the orphanage. Dax has been taking a look at the solar radiation in the system, and discovered that inside the station, the quantum states of particles are not random in the way they should be, indicating that something is very wrong with probability on the station. Bashir and O'Brien start their match and against both their expectations O'Brien is playing amazingly well and Bashir keeps slipping, tripping, and braking hit racket. Noticing that something is off, O'Brien has Bashir throw the ball against the wall, but every time it bounces directly into O'Brien's hand. They call Sisko and Dax, who then go searching for the source of the anomaly, which they find in Martus' casino. Not knowing how to turn the machines off, they destroy all of them. Just then Odo shows up to arrest Martus because the fraud case is now going to go to trial. In the jail, he is excited to see that the old woman with the mining company has come to bail him out, but instead Odo puts her into another cell because she was caught scamming her investors with the fake mining business.

--

This is an episode I enjoyed, but I won't defend it against anyone who calls it a bad episode. Like the previous episodes, this one doesn't really have much in the way or plot or character development. It's just a bunch of scenes without a clear conflict holding it together. What makes this one different is that it's a comedy episode with no pretense of being anything else. And I found the jokes to be funny. This is the second episode of Bashir and O'Brien doing stuff together, and it's still a bit difficult, but they get much more comfortable with each other when they have Quark as a shared target of their resentment and when they get working on trying to figure out what is going on with the weird match they are playing.

The tech and science here is a joke, but it's a deliberate one. They mention neutrino spins not obeying the natural probabilities, but I am very grateful to the writers not to mention "quantum" a single time. Those physics-babble lines from Dax make me think that the writers knew about an actual experiment from quantum physics that got the researchers a noble prize, but unlike so many people back in the day they apparently understood that this has nothing to to with people having suspicious winning streaks or unlucky accidents. This is jokes "inspired by actual science" without spreading nonsensical Quantum-woo. I am totally fine with that.

[Inchhighguy]

Maybe they didn't even think it was good material, but when they got to the point where they had to start shooting episodes, they simply didn't have anything better to pick from. I've been wondering a couple of time how the actual planing and executing of each season was done. Did they have all 26 scripts ready and final when they started shooting the episodes? I believe there's a couple of interesting episodes related to long term story and character arcs towards the end of the second season, so I postpone my speculations about that until then.

No. First, American TV at the time was split in two parts. Typicaly two sets of 12 epsiodes, with a two part epsiode in each to make that 26. The first epsiode of a season would run in the fall, typicaly the end of August, and you'd have new epsiodes up till mid Novenber. Then they would take a break all the way till at least mid Febuary. This second set also often had a break in April of a couple weeks until maybe Mid May. The season finiale would be set right before or at June.

The 2nd season was still using ''The Next Generation" (Star Trek) way: They always have roughly 100 scripts, though many are rough drafts. They meet at the end of summer and quickly approve some generic scripts to get started. Next they make sure each character gets one show. And they pick a vague arc(for season 2 it was The Cricle triliogy---->Rules of Accuastion(with the name dropped Dominion)---and the big Dominion at the end of the season. This leaves a much of holes ''Ok, so after the Cricle some stuff happens, and then Zek comes to the station". Well, saddly, the ''stuff" is simply any script they have laying around....and it shows.

[Yora]

So when the first episodes are being filmed and edited, the later ones are still not locked in with finished scripts. Good to know. This probably will be factoring in with my thoughts and observations of story and character arcs.

[Dragonus45]

Odo bringing the woman in at the end is still one of my favorite punchlines in a tv episode.

[Yora]

S2E12: The Alternate

Quark is trying to sell the powdered remains of a Ferngi businessman to another Ferengi when Odo walks in and says he wants to buy a box. Quark doesn't believe him, but Odo does have the latinum. However, before he pays, he want to have an assurance that these are actually the remains of the man, because he just found out that he is actually still alive. Quark claims that he was conned by his seller. In walks Doctor Mora, a Bajoran scientists who obviously looks very much like Odo and knows him very well. He was the first one to study Odo after he had been found, and Quark is very excited to meet Odo's family, which greatly annoys Odo.

Odo and Mora had not been in contact for several years, but he wanted to see Odo again and wants his help with a short expedition to the Gamma Quadrant to investigate the discovery of organic material that greatly resembles Odo's substance. Odo, Mora, his assistant, and Dax fly to the planet. During the flight, Mora tells Odo to tell Dax stories about their time at the lab when Odo had just been found, but then keeps interrupting him to tell most of the story himself, and comes across as very patronizing. They beam down to old ruins and within a minute of arrival, they find a small simple amorphous life form. Which is good, because only another minute later the ruins are hit by an earthquake that releases toxic gasses that incapacitate everyone except Odo, who beams them all back to the ship and takes them to the station. Dax recovers quickly, but the two Bajorans are in critical condition. The life form gets put into a science lab where it starts to quickly grow, but O'Brien doesn't know what to do with it and hopes that Dax will take care of it when she's back up the next day.

During the night, Sisko gets called to the lab that got completely destroyed and the life form escaped from its container. O'Brien goes hunting after it through the maintainence shafts, but when he finds it it's just a puddle of dead sludge. The next night, Bashir hears something in the infirmary and when he goes looking he's jumped by a large amorphous creature but scares it of with one of his laser instruments. Dax takes a sample left behind in the infirmary and has the computer run a search for comparable life forms, which will take a couple of hours. Mora is back up on his feet and goes to see Odo. He tells Odo that he immediately recognized the sample that Dax is analysing as being from Odo, and since the destruction of the lab and the attack in the infirmary both happened while Odo was sleeping, he believes that Odo has started sleepwalking. He tells Odo to come back with him to his lab on Bajor so they can study him further, otherwise he might be considered as dangerous and put into permanent confinement. He's pestering Odo with intimidation and guilt to the point that he snaps and turns into a large amorphous blob that smashes the console on his desk, with Mora running away just in time.

Mora hurries to ops and explains that the creature they are hunting is Odo and that he has apparently been taken over by an instinct to hurt him. They come up with a plan to trap Odo with force fields on the promenade, and Mora offers to make himself the bait to lure him out. The plan works fine and Odo is subdued. Bashir finds some traces of the gas that incapacitated the others in Odo and is able to neutralize it, but admits that he has no idea what it might possibly have done to him, but it seems that Odo is fine now. Mora apologizes for always having treated Odo so badly and more as study object than a person and ask him to give him a chance for them having a more normal relationship from now on, to which Odo agrees.

--

Changeling episode #2

Not a great episode, but I think it very much qualifies to be considered good. Again, this is a story with great potential with an execution that could have been much better, but this one manages to be still very decent. It just doesn't feel as sharp as the really good episodes we had so far.

Mora is quite well done. He is friendly and polite and seems like a decent enough person, but the way he talks with and especially about Odo does come across as somewhat improper. He often gets very patronizing with Odo, praises him for his social integration and career success even when he saw just very little of how Odo actually lives now, which he also does in front of other people, and he seems to be completely oblivious to Odo's discomfort about all of it. He also loves to talk about Odo's initial training with other people, even though Odo clearly does not, keeps suggesting that they resume doing research on him, and overall treats him like his very well trained monkey. He's friendly and likeable, but does also feel very wrong at times and like someone who Odo is clearly better off without. I imagine such a role is hard to perform, but here it's done really well.

I find it interesting that the episode does dance a bit around the question of whether Mora's research of Odo was somewhat abusive. Nobody speaks about it, and the idea is suggested that Odo's dissociative episodes could have been caused by the gas, but Bashir says out loud that he has no basis to prove that. It might just as well have been a stress reaction to Mora barging back into his life without warning and then unintentionally bullying him into returning back to his role as a research subject. I wonder why they didn't make the episode about that more clearly. It's very clearly present in the subtext. Even the apology at the end doesn't actually apologize for anything specific.
I believe one of the later seasons has another episode that more or less picks up where this one ends, and that one gets much more explicit about it, but I haven't seen that one in ages. Will be interesting to see when we get to that.

We had to mentions of the Dominion this season, and two moments of foreshadowing about Odo's instincts related to his specie's culture. This episode Mora mentions at one point that he's not at all surprised that Odo got into police work and doing work as an investigator, as that's just the way he remembered him. They clearly already had plans to do something with both the Dominion and the Changelings in the next season, but I wonder if they already knew that the two would be connected?

[Traab]

It may have been meant to leave it up to the viewers to decide. It sounded to me like he treated odo as more of a research product than a person, but also a bit like a pet that you taught to do tricks and are very fond of, but as "your" pet. Not as its own being. In a way yeah thats abusive because obviously odo is a sentient being, not a trained parrot who learned how to mimic real people without actually being one. But I dont think it was intentional.

[Cikomyr]

It was kind of an unfortunate accident brought upon by Mora 's circumstances.

He had no idea whatsoever that Odo was even a life form, even less that he was sentient, or even sapient. So he subjected him to a lot of treatments that could have been considered torture, while being completely emotionally uninvested in creating any bond with his lab sample.

Odo, understandably, kind of developped a severe aversion for Mora as a consequence..

Odo's method for bonding with a Changeling was forced to have similar methods, but he tried engaging emotionally with the baby instead of treating it as an unthinking mass of strange goo. So he would probably have turned out better.