Deep Space 9 Livetweet, S2, Episodes 11-15
A yet-unsaddened himbo, and his cult-leader mum.———
DS9 S2 Ep 11, “ The Rivals”
– Apologies to Sheridan or nah, bruv?
– This episode has a weird, fun concept involving probability, neutrino manipulation and gambling. TI’s very space fantasy, but it’s got some legs, and is more interested in SF than DS9 has yet shown itself to be.
– Julian enrages Miles by being unbearably Arnold Rimmer—just the fucking worst. Miles ‘dad bod’ O’Brien hates Bashir out of lingering Irish patriotism, probably. And because Bashir is a ponce.
– Quark, discomfited, consolingly coos t.o himself about a profitable racquet ball tournament.
– Keiko is still more attractive than Miles has ever deserved.
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DS9 S2 Ep 12, “ The Alternate”
– Odo’s evil Bajoran scientist/zookeeper dad, who Odo has evidently shaped his face to look somewhat like, is here. Katy observes that these Bajorans don’t wear religious earnings. To have had a lab during the occupation, they must have been collaborating to some degree. We also know, from Odo’s comments about having been made to practice a ‘Cardassian neck trick’, that they actively appeased and flattered their overseers.
– Sisko trolls Jake by making him turn his outing with Nog into a Klingon opera study date. Jake hates this shit.
– Painful awkward family dynamics between Odo and his ‘experimenting on him’ quasi-dad.
– Sisko talks about his own father like he’s dead. Go back to New Orleans and say that shit to his very-much-alive face, Benny boy.
– Why not just take a photo of this column? Why rob it?
– The Cardassians have left Sisko some amazing stained glass. I don’t think he even thanked those Nazis.
– Are we sure this is Dax and not a copy of Dax? Like. Can we be? (Some strange flags were raised, but that was not where the episode ultimately went.)
– Julian has a little incel conversation with himself re Dax teasing him. This is based on nothing. She did absolutely nothing. Just said, ‘have time to get coffee?’ That was it. I wish Julian a very happy ‘why didn’t you die instead of the main character who does?’
– Odo’s dad: I begin to think that the scientific method and criminal investigation have a lot in common—
I mean they’re both often tools of imperialism, so yeah buddy, I guess?
– Odo’s BadDad gives him a psychotic break, and Odo becomes goo about it. It is pretty well-executed both as physical prop-work and as a character moment. Though the technobabble at the end regarding why it happened could have been stronger, it feels like this show is growing up a bit.
– They’re talking about how to get a feral Odo out of the conduits. Just have Quark do some dumb shit at the entrance? If Odo walks around going ‘doin’ a fraud! Doooooin’ a fraaaaaud—’ I guaranteed you no more than a ten minute wait.
– Sisko gives a ‘shoot to kill if necessary’ order on Odo out of nowhere. Why? Odo attacked but didn’t seriously hurt anyone. The worst he did is bitchslap Bashir. We all want to do that.
– Why would this Bajoran scientist say ‘dear god’ when he’s from a polytheistic background, even if he’s not observant? I know expressions like that sneak into writing all the time, but a script editor should catch them, for the sake of world building.
– Everything the show does to seed the Dominion is good. We see them operating as a political force at one remove, via intermediaries affected by their actions (like the refugees whose conquerers were themselves conquered by the unseen Dominion, or the traders who know that the Dominion has the capacity to produce a vast volume of goods).
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DS9 S2 Ep 13, “Armageddon Game ”
– This ‘destroy the bio-weapon’ plot feels really Skaro.
Katy: Unfortunately Quark’s already sold the WMD to some Cardassians! Ruh roh-
– Weirdly it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Bashir or O’Brien that they could have been targeted for elimination, because they know too much about the harvesters.
– Bashir is once again being awful to O’Brien. I don’t know why O’Brien doesn’t fucking nerf him.
– Bashir whines that a Career Officer shouldn’t marry, because it’s unking to make a wife worry about you (to a married man). b i t c h your wife could also be an Officer? What in the sam hell? What year is Bashir from?
– Now Bashir is talking some shit about how parties must mean nothing to Miles, because Miles is married and thus can’t have hook-ups. Buddy, unless you’re angling to find out whether this is an open marriage or something you could get in on, I wish you a very happy ‘this is none of your business’. Also, Bashir is a reasonably attractive dude. If he wants a hook-up, can he not just go to Quarks and find someone interested? I’ve no idea why we’re pretending he can’t get laid by many interesting and attractive women who know the replicator pattern for a ball gag to render him bearable. He yammers on about it like he’s a hyper sexual seventeen year old. You’re at work, man. (Talking about his hot ballerina ex with beautiful feet and great arches—listen buddy, I don’t want to know your FetLife deets? And all I can think of is SHOES FILLED WTH BLOOOOOOOD, beat-up ass ‘en pointe’ feet.)
– Sisko yells at Kira for being upset that O’Brien and Bashir are dead, which I’m sure is very helpful. Thanks, Sisko.
– Bashir is bearable, even a decent person, when he’s doing Doctor Shit, and at no other time. What a fuckboi.
– Julian lent Dax his ‘medical school diaries’ like a ponce. Dax didn’t read them, like an adult.
– Keiko’s Coffee Theory is one of my fav things about Keiko.
– O’Brien takes the piss out of Bashir’s accent. Excellent.
– Bashir has one of those weird faces that looks cute from a lot of angles, but sometimes he’s a sideways mess of lip meat.
– I never know whether I like that Keiko is ‘wrong’ about the coffee. It’s funny if she’s wrong, but it’s super cute and clever if she’s right.
– Tragically, it seems that O’Brien has come into a hideous ‘friend’. Pour one out for Miles.
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DS9 S2 Ep 14, “ Whispers”
– Keiko has found she and her husband a really good Japanese silk embroidered bedcover. Excellent work, Keiko.
– It’s hard not to like a character when they’re homies with Data, and after you’ve seen them have to deliver a baby… with Worf. That is, intrinsically, a bonding experience. For Keiko and Worf, for us and Keiki and Worf and this Unlikely Baby. It’s like that time Brian Blessed delivered a baby in a park and bit through the umbilical cord with his teeth. I feel connected as fuck to that baby, and I didn’t even see it happen.
– O’Brien worried this is a false Keiko: a fakeo. I guess we don’t know whether people on the station have been replaced or whether O’Brien has gone paranoid. ‘Just O’Brien’ feels more likely, on the numbers.
– Why not just replicate separate meals, according to your divergent preferences? The true miracle of replication is that you no longer need to suffer through or never eat stuff one of you hates!
– The whole ‘actually this O’Brien was a clone’ thing is well-conceived, but the mounting paranoia is executed somewhat flatly. This is both a script problem internal to the episode and an issue of broader emotional resonance, attributable to the fact that the show has yet to make me really care about the cast. I don’t think we can say ‘well, it’s early days.’ This would be the end of series three of a British television show: the Liberator would have just blown up, by this point in Blakes 7.
We’ve yet to be given slow-paced, single character-focused eps that open on to solid connection or pathos. The show talks as though, and relies on, a group camaraderie the characters have yet to actually build. It’s still hard to imagine any of these people choosing to spend time with one another wholly outside of work. Even Dax and Sisko, who have a pre-existing relationship, don’t seem to, and while Dax and Kira have good chemistry sometimes, I’m still not sure what they get up to beyond occasionally talking about the plot with space-coffee on a table between them.
In a way, this recalls how ineffective it was when the MCU tried to just speak ‘band of brothers’ into existence and work out its storylines from there. To make ensemble relationships affecting, you have to show that closeness, ease and intra (and thus also extra) textual connectivity at work. That’s a bit fiddly to do, but well-executed, it should actually take up very little page-space. You’ve just got to pound-for-pound infuse scenes that are otherwise deadweight plot conveyance methods with character, and then with interplay. That makes flat dialogue memorable. (And so far, DS9’s dialogue is pancake. Crepe, even.)
This example lacks the ‘sports anime’ warmth I’m looking for from a Star Trek ensemble cast, but right now this feels like Terry Nation DS9. I’m looking for the Chris Boucher edit. Honestly, they should have contracted Boucher to edit these. A lot of the mechanics and logistics are shite in a way he’s good at tightening up. And not fun, blousy shite, just ‘somehow there were ten people in a writers room, and basic if-then causality occurred to none of them’ style gaffs.
I wonder, actually, whether the whole set-up of the writers room, which would seem to make that sort of catch more likely, is, via either its constitution or as a premise, actually making these scripts muddy? Is it resulting in compromise formations? In a writer’s room, there’s a risk of personalities dominating the discussion in ways that don’t result in the best work, and of mutual overly-personal investment in the script that the clear responsibilities of defined roles and process layers might help a team avoid. Ideally, I’d expect a writer’s room to enable every script to access the skills of people involved, and to generate a collaborative synergy But does it play out like that? What do good and bad examples look like, both as workplaces and in terms of their process-flow and output? Can you effectively combine the writers room with a script editor role? Script editing can be enormously effective, and the absence of it can be hugely damaging.
I’m not actually interested in getting too deep into production, because sometimes it can overtake and even prevent criticism; production-first analysis risks becoming something like embedded journalism. I value production history, but it can overwhelm analysis of the resultant art. Ultimately, that output is what people see, and the foremost analytic object.
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DS9 S2 Ep 15, “Paradise ”
– O’Brien and Sisko get embarrassingly mugged by Robin Hood.
– ‘Oh noooo, all our tech doesn’t work on this planet—‘
That is absolutely on purpose. This girl did it. The talky one, with the hair net. Alixus? It was her.
– Alixus coos to her gay, interested son about ‘two more strong, healthy men’ like she made a really successful run to the grocery story.
– Dax laments that Sisko is bad at bluffing in poker. This amazes me, because he doesn’t emote the rest of the year. Just poker, I guess.
– Y e p, Alixus started the cult. It’s a pity, because she’s hot. Couldn’t she have found some people who really wanted to be in a non-religious Amish cult?
– Ah, a torture box. Great, cool. Sure. Everyone loves a torture box—
– Alixus’s tremulous voice makes it sound as though she’s always about to cry, which is interesting as an acting decision. It’s also intense, rendering it a good choice for a cult leader.
– The cult leader has deputised a hot girl to hit on Sisko, which is a neat move.
– I feel like this script doesn’t allow for quite enough in-story time for the conflict Sisko and Alixus are coming into regarding Sisko and O’Brien’s resistance to integrating into the community. Possibly Alixus is trying to induct them fast, for the sake of community cohesion? If so, it would be good to see that reasoning playing out more clearly.
– Kira and Dax share a well-executed scene of problem-solving. Dax fondly reminisces about rope bondage with a Native American partner. Ah, Dax.
– The episode’s field-labour in the hot sun and container punishment give it an especially disquieting plantation vibe.
– Miles has made a neat compass out of some absolute bullshit he found, like a fucking gourd.
– Himbo SAD.
– Alixus’s ‘community’ isn’t based on trust, though? Sooooo.
– Again, does the Federation not have psychology experts to send out to people who’ve been in a cult for ten years? They’re not going to bounce right back and make immediate, permanent decisions regarding leaving. They’ll have to process what they’ve been through.
– This episode might have been stronger for having the Star Fleet characters ever seriously question whether everyone is or can be happy in the Federation, rather than having the cultists’ argument be vaguely Luddite and Communitarian. You needn’t necessarily invite the viewer to interrogate their own relationship with satisfaction, or with technology, but it could be done.
What lack of community are these characters struggling with on Earth? In this vast, post-scarcity meritocracy, everyone competes for the meaningful labour/vanity posts given to the Federation’s abundant geniuses. So how do people fall out of that system, or find its successes bittersweet? Why were these people leaving Earth to begin with? What about leaving will tempt the Maquis later this season? I don’t think you can do Utopia and its Discontents without committing to interrogating the ways a good system can’t necessarily accommodate everyone. At the very least the cult leader herself felt driven to extreme action, even if her motivation was simply that she wanted the opportunity to be an egomaniac and lacked the skill to be the blowhard terraformer featured earlier this season.
– Another interesting way of handling this material might have been a PoV flip, shifting the main focus to a given castaway. You’d either condense the action of the last decade or start the story with the Incursion of Star Fleet, positioning the main cast as dubiously-trustworthy interlopers. That’s a bit too Twilight Zone for Star Trek in terms of its extreme investment in a short-term PoV, but occasionally you have to shake up the terms of viewers’ engagement with the narrative framework and the cast.
I guess the main problem with that would be that the show hasn’t built up a core cast that can sustain that kind of play. But at this point, it’s been three UK seasons. They’ve really run out of excuses for fucking about. I should be able to pretty easily write dialogue for the core cast by now, and I think I comfortably could do—Quark and Nog. Possibly Garak. And let me stress that I can only do Garak because he’s written like Discount Avon.
– How did I immediately know the technology problem was being faked? Was that familiarity wth this plot shape, or memory of the episode itself? I watched all of these at least once, as they came out. There are beats I remember when we see them, but I don’t really know what I know. My memory of the episodes will get better as we go, because of course I was eight when S2 aired.
At some point daddy got a VHS recorder, and we started to be able to watch episodes again. So some episodes I might have seen multiple times, and possibly significantly later than they aired. I remember that I was freaked out about falling asleep during the TNG finale at nine (like I wept), so we must not have had the recorder yet. There are TNG episodes on the tapes, however, and I guess those must have been out of order reruns. Ergo, what of DS9 I’ve seen more than once will really depend on what we caught on rerun and recorded. (Due to VHS recordings of PBS’s nth generation tape reruns, I did see fuzzy, out of order bits of the first two series of Blakes 7 while in high school, as well. I read synopses online for the later episodes, and to figure out what happened when.)
