Spoilers Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

[pukunui]

I found "Distant Voices" a bit boring ... I ended up watching it on 1.25 speed just to get through it faster. The bits between Garak (or "Garak") and Bashir were great. The whole "vain Dr Bashir is worried about getting old so let's age him rapidly to put things in perspective for him" was a neat idea but the execution didn't really work for me. I also felt like the actor playing Altovar was kinda phoning it in a bit, which took me out of the episode.

 

[payn]

I found "Distant Voices" a bit boring ... I ended up watching it on 1.25 speed just to get through it faster. The bits between Garak (or "Garak") and Bashir were great. The whole "vain Dr Bashir is worried about getting old so let's age him rapidly to put things in perspective for him" was a neat idea but the execution didn't really work for me. I also felt like the actor playing Altovar was kinda phoning it in a bit, which took me out of the episode.

Oh yeah that one. An interesting idea that kinda drags. The kinda thing you wont get anymore is shows that dont have 13-24+ episode seasons

 

[pukunui]

Oh yeah that one. An interesting idea that kinda drags. The kinda thing you wont get anymore is shows that dont have 13-24+ episode seasons

I get what they were going for - a suspenseful episode where Bashir has to figure out what's going on as he rapidly ages and a "monster" hunts parts of his mind, etc. It was a neat idea. Just not executed as well as it could have been.

 

[Gradine]

Star Trek seems to be firmly wedded to the notion that you are your memories, personality, hopes&dreams, etc. and that an exact copy of you that happens to have your memories for all intents and purposes is you. From replacement O'brien to replacement Harry Kim to how transporters work to digital uploading of minds, they almost always seem to lean into the 'we're all just digital ink' sci fi framing (except Klingons and Native Americans, which apparently have souls and afterlives, at least until the episode about vision quests or Stovokor ends).

From a physics standpoint, there's certainly some perspectives that would support this. As you move through time, you kinda are just a being with all the memories, personality, and hopes&dreams of the person you once were, just with the (trivial) coincidence that most of your component particles happen to be the same ones that the previous 'you' had.

I mean, there's a reason Pulaski refused to transport

 

[jian]

The Dogs of War

What You Leave Behind

And we’re done. I agree (again) with Avery Brooks - Sisko deserting his wife and unborn child and never coming back does the character dirty and I wish they hadn’t done it.

That last speech of Garak’s seems a lot more relevant now. Back in the day (1999) it might have applied to Nazi Germany or maybe Serbia - too early for Iraq - but now it feels like it’s applying much closer to home.

“We had a rich culture—our literature, music, art was second to none! And now so much of it is... lost. So many of our best people, our most gifted minds....”

“We’re not entirely innocent, are we? No, our whole history is one of arrogant aggression. Oh, no, no, no, there's no doubt about it—we're guilty as charged.”

 

[fba827]

Side note: much like the handling of Tasha Yar/Sela, Thomas Riker is one of those plot points I think they could have handled better. There was plenty of opportunity to have used him again in TNG (it would have been great to have had him on the Southerland in Redemption II, for instance). I suspect the difficulty of playing two roles (when I think just one was hard on his back) probably prohibited Frakes from doing so. Still, it would have been nice if he'd been a re-occurring character on DS9 (maybe given him some nice extra cash between Gargoyles and Beyond Belief) instead of a one-off. Perhaps that would have been an issue, with him upstaging the DS9 cast (or eating into the budget).

I’ll have to find the source but I read before that the original Plan … when riker and Thomas go to the surface and Thomas almost falls down the shaft, riker was supposed to save him and end up falling in himself. And Thomas was going to be a new character on the show, replacing riker (but not in a secret way or anything). However the idea was scrapped because they were doing plans for movies and didn’t want it to be confusing for audiences.

That is also why they didn’t do much else with Thomas: if trying to keep tng episodic then pulling in a recurring character like that would require exposition.
Do I personally agree? No, I would have liked that thread to be played with more,

 

[pukunui]

“Through the Looking Glass”

It’s fun to watch the cast play their mirror counterparts, and this one tugged on the heartstrings with respect to Ben and Jennifer.

But … hoo boy, was Sisko quick to jump in the sack with mirror Dax! (And I presume mirror Kira.)


“Improbable Cause”

I love Bashir and Garak’s talks. I must not have been able to appreciate them when I was younger.

“I’m afraid your pants won’t be ready tomorrow after all.” That’s an understatement, buddy!

Odo’s joke about Romulan uniforms and needing a decent tailor is good. I’d just been thinking how goofy Romulans look with their square shoulder pads.

 

[payn]

But … hoo boy, was Sisko quick to jump in the sack with mirror Dax! (And I presume mirror Kira

Sisko is a method actor.

 

[Staffan]

“Through the Looking Glass”

It’s fun to watch the cast play their mirror counterparts, and this one tugged on the heartstrings with respect to Ben and Jennifer.

But … hoo boy, was Sisko quick to jump in the sack with mirror Dax! (And I presume mirror Kira.)

I don't think her mirror universe counterpart is joined (it seems to be inconclusive in primary canon but there are novels specifying she's not), which would make her just mirror Jadzia.

 

[jian]

Back to another episode I didn’t see back in the day, which is Facets from season 3.

This is all pretty interesting. Firstly, it’s well put together - the main plot of Jadzia meeting her previous hosts via her friends, and confronting the feeling that she wasn’t good enough to be bonded, is parallel to Nog’s story of passing the preliminary Starfleet exams (despite being sabotaged by Quark, whom he’s surprisingly quick to forgive). The forgiveness is paralleled in Jadzia’s forgiveness of Curzon for being such a toxic @$$hole.

Honestly, I’m sort of glad I didn’t see this back in the day because seeing it now puts a lot of Curzon and Odo’s characterisation in a modern context, and it’s terrible. Curzon is a missing stair, a narcissistic and abusive supervisor who indulged his pathetic and inappropriate crush to ruin his charge’s career and is now trying to influence an impressionable changeling for a second go at life. Good thing he didn’t stay bonded to Odo - he’d now have two unrequited crushes on his female colleagues. Honestly, Odo, you wanted this guy to share your head for the foreseeable? You have a lot of issues.