Let's do this.
The Mirror Universe counterpart of Kira's dead love takes her hostage on Deep Space Nine as he is running from the evil Alliance of his universe.
I can no longer tell which of my Star Trek thoughts are things I say all the time in a variety of places and which aren't. I suspect my thoughts on how the mirror universe should only be used sparingly are things I've shared to a number of places, online and off. So I'll give my spiel once and for all below and hopefully just hyperlink to it going forward; no point wandering through life sharing the same spiel to anyone who'll listen about the same topics as triggered by Star Trek!
The mirror universe can work once or twice on the idea that there is no throughline-continuity in the mirror universe, that's it's just like a random dimension-scrabble at any one time, from a transporter accident or Q-snap or whatever, like tuning to the one spot on the dial at any one given moment that will never exist again where this weirdly-improbable-impossible "mirror" universe for the main cast exists. That's it. Once, twice, three is pushing it, and I'm talking across all the shows. And one of those is already (always) TOS' "Mirror, Mirror," so really, you can do it only twice.
The moment you start having it be one continuity you can go back and forth to - and as soon as you tie it into the mirror timelines of the other shows - the whole thing collapses, and I don't care how many gymnastics you perform to tie them together. There is no way the Mirror Universe of TOS "Mirror, Mirror" becomes the timeline seen in any other show; zero, done, nada. It is not a failure of imagination to assert this; it is a failure of imagination to assert it is not. This pretty much goes for reboots as well as for alternate dimensions starring the cast in mustaches or where Hitler won the war, etc. Ask DC.
I give the DS9 folk kudos for trying some new things with the concept; none of the mirror episodes hit me as dumb the way news (I haven't watched them) of the Discovery episodes does. But the concept simply cannot support the close examination repeated use makes inevitable, so whatever merits this story has - and everyone does a nice job - it's handicapped by that from the first.
I often hear people scoff in a "if you can swallow the transporter or the replicator or warp speed, you can swallow the mirror universe" manner. The difference for me is that I can see technology advancing to a point where people invent transporters or replicators or warp speed, so it's written into the concept of the show to be okay with the iffiness of those things. Whereas technological advancement will - I'm going out on a limb but I feel it will support my weight - likely not lead to the discovery of some ongoing mirror universe where all our friends and family are still nearby, in a Frankenstein'd, artificial construct that maintains the same structure over multiple franchises despite the characters arising from completely different circumstances.
The Defiant picks up a distress call from Captain Lisa Cusak, whose escape pod has crashed on a remote planet following the destruction of her ship, the Olympia.
Early in this episode, Odo starts giving Quark crap about the barstools or some nonsense. It's meant to demonstrate Odo's state of mind, but it's ridiculous Quark would take him seriously or comply with this. This is by no means a hill to die on, just something that mildly irritated me. Then again, Odo and Quark are starting to be better and closer frenemies at this point, so wrapped up in Odo's compliance is likely recognition that Odo's petty tyrannies are masking inner turmoil.
Speaking of Quark's, just a question on money: do they cover the adjustment Federation members must make to a market (not to mention bribes and fines) economy in seasons one, two, or three? For that matter, how do Federation peoples handle commerce with cultures with whom they share Promenade space but do not pay wages/ have a system of exchange? Do they replicate money? That could be a problem.
The twist is cool but not really integrated well. You could see it coming a mile away, I thought, not that that ruins it. This lady was a commanding officer, though? Some suspiciously poor radio discipline on these distress calls. Her demeanor in general kind of doesn't feel real to me. Maybe it's just not a good performance. I hesitate to put it on that, though.
When Dukat tells Kira that her mother did not die when Nerys was three but was actually Dukat's lover, Kira goes into the past using the Bajoran Orb of Time to find the truth.
This one is silly. One day Dukat drunk dials Kira to tell her he banged her Mom? And then she time travels to see if it happened? What? This Orb of Bajor might've been used for something else in some other episode for some nobler purpose. (To put it mildly.)
But they really wanted to tell a story about comfort women, I guess, and it's reverse engineered from that.
While on General Martok's ship Worf is reunited with his estranged son, Alexander.
It's a shame Brian Bonsall couldn't round out his arc as Worf's son. I don't know what it was about this one that irked me. In retrospect I kind of liked it fine. It was a bit ham-fisted in some regards. This is the one with Gabrielle Union as a Klingon. In my head canon Michael Dorn whisked her away in his Cessna 340 after taping finished and they had a whirlwind romance, in character.
The Ziyal/ Kira/ Dukat triangle was less interesting to me.
Bashir attempts to reintegrate genetically engineered misfits into society, but they are asked by Starfleet to become a think tank when they provide insightful analysis of upcoming Dominion peace talks.
Very annoyed with all these folks. Good performances - I guess? It's tough to tell. I think so. - but more interesting than enjoyable for me.
I kept waiting for Bashir to bring up the places from "Whom Gods Destroy" or "Dagger of the Mind." Did I miss it? Or did they shut those places down?
An attack on the Starfleet ship carrying Gul Dukat to a hearing for war crimes, as well as Captain Sisko who is to testify at the hearing, leaves the two of them stranded on a deserted planet together.
Kira is like Number Six from BSG here is. Ron Moore! So much BSG back there in this and VOY. Then again, without checking, the tormenting-ghost-figure is probably as old as Aeschylus.
Were they doing an Enemy Mine thing in this episode? It amuses me to compare so many things to things like Enemy Mine that are likely not the touchstones for anyone else but to proceed from a place assuming they are. "What do you mean this isn't an homage to Megaforce?" etc. is a confusion-of-perspective that always makes me laugh.
Sisko creates a risky plan to disable a critical Dominion sensor array, while on Terok Nor, Kira, Jake, Rom and Odo seek to undermine the Cardassian/Dominion Alliance.
More of Odo exploring his sexuality. Great. ("Do you want me to stop?")
The intergalactic warlord aspect is still confusing about the Dominion. There is no credible reason why the Changelings would want to create a Buck Rogers-style star empire. Nor why they would go about it the way they did. For the thousandth time: the Changelings/ Dominion / Maquis make only retrograde sense.
Too many "Cadet!"s with Nog. They really fell in love with that this season. Not sure why only Sisko feels the need to be his drill instructor, or why this aspect of military training survives into the otherwise enlightened military future of Trek. Plus why is "Chief" O'Brien doing this? Is he an officer or isn't he? Then again, the traditions of the space navy are erratic to say the least.
The broad set-ups on this show are good: war/ resistance/ prophecy. (Come to think of it, that's BSG too isn't it?)
Worf's plans for a traditional Klingon wedding hinge on Martok's demanding wife, Sirella, accepting Dax into their family.
Fine, but it's mostly made-up Klingon stuff, so tough to gauge. They don't mock Worf mercilessly enough for his every-Klingon-boy-dreams-of-a-Klingon-wedding sentiments. Holy moley. What's even funnier is it kind of fits Worf as a character, which is why I wish it had been a sort of mocking-thing between Jadzia and him.
Sisko is called to Bajor when an ancient tablet addressing
the Emissary is discovered at B'hala.
The season's big Bajor/ Emissary episode I guess.
I was just thinking 'cool premise but no real buld-up' when Sisko smashed the tablet. Nice. Things get more interesting from there.
Starfleet Intelligence recruits Chief O'Brien to infiltrate the Orion Syndicate to find a Starfleet informant.
"Oh FFS" is what I wrote in my notes. Funny - not sure exactly why. This is a pretty good episode, I guess. Real flair in performance, execution, and script. Feels a little like a mini-movie. What is it that turned me off? I suppose I could watch it again to find out. (Rubs eyes and shakes head in cartoon-noise fashion) Sorry, sometimes I say things...
Why is no one in Orion ever super tall? I don't understand Orion in Trek really. I also don't really understand the lack of green Orion people in this episode. It's unfortunate when space shows go for a terrestrial gangster angle in space. It seems silly. Anyway, the Orion seem like an untapped area of Trek. I'm sure Picard and Discovery will fill in all the gaps with space trans racism. Thank the makers.
As Sisko considers leaving Starfleet due to the destruction of Captain Swofford's ship, the Cortez, he has a vision of himself as a science fiction writer in the 1950s.
At the risk of being accused of tone deafness or worse, I'm afraid I wasn't blown away by this episode. What this episode need is a Don Cheadle from The Family Man/ Q angle. (We just watched Family Man, pardon the reference. But I've taken to saying "What this needs is Don Cheadle" around the house re: scramble-the-timelines.) It doesn't have one. So we have essentially a "very special dream episode" instead of, say, an "Inner Light" episode. One thing I've learned: DS9 doesn't do "The Inner Light."
Anyway, it's not terrible, but watching it in 2020 just makes me think of how pandering Ira and some of the other DS9 brass can be. (Particularly in that Netflix documentary about the show.) Armond White's recent review of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom has a line in it that made me think not just of this episode but a certain "type" of episode / person: a "conception of black artistic struggle as overacting." I'm not the guy to ask about any of this, I guess.
I like the prophets angle, and I really like Michael Dorn as a ballplayer in love with Kassidy. That's another problem with this one; Dorn is just way too likable. Watching this episode you can see a whole career Dorn might have had in another show had he not done Trek. He chose pretty well either way, but it's a good performance.
Sisko asks Garak to help him get the Romulans to join the war against the Dominion. However, Sisko finds that he might not be able to keep his ethics intact to do it.
A bit overwrought. Cool enough I guess. I probably would've loved it in the 90s. I don't care for the direct to camera address. And Avery Brooks is doing all his weird mannerisms and then some all episode long.
Just a war logistics question: with replicators doing what do, shouldn't there be a planet of replicators be working overtime now, for months and months, to pump out the equivalent of the Romulan fleet? If Voyager can 3-d print shuttlecraft as needed, can't some Starfleet Factory produce starships as needed? (Unless - as in the Abramsverse - Starfleet is still putting these things together on the ground, solely so characters can drive up to it and gaze upon their future destiny.)
Ditto for the Jem'Hadar breeding facilities, etc. This is partly why "war" doesn't work too well in the Trekverse for people who like to meditate on Trek concepts. Take the antimatter chamber, for example; anyone ever beam a micron or two of antimatter over to someone's bridge? Thing would blow up, right? How far away do you have to be to beam this stuff? Meh.
Anyway, these aren't the takeaways from this episode; we're supposed to be blown away only by the introduction of moral ambiguity into the Trek-verse. (Surely what was lacking from TOS was moral ambiguity! Thanks, Ira!)
Bashir shows off a new Holosuite program of a martini lounge with a 1960s Vegas singer named Vic Fontaine who is very perceptive. Vic delivers the conclusive advice to Odo he needs to hear to woo at last Major Kira.
Vic Fontaine was a big part of my first positive feelings on DS9. But I never saw his debut episode until now. Good for James Darren. (Although, for continuity sake, they could've gotten Joe Piscopo. How would we feel about Joe Piscopo had he done this role, I wonder? I don't think he'd have done as good a job, but it's interesting to consider.)
It's unfortunate the Doctor from VOY and Vic Fontaine never met. I bet the Doctor would've been annoyed by him. It'd have been fun to see.
Anyway, his strokes are broad, and this is basically Hitch for Odo, or The Tao of Steve, or any of those type of things. I guess The Tao of Steve came along later. I further guess there's some Commedia dell'arte or even more ancient precedent. Goes on a bit too long/ too one-note. But hey. Harmless enough.
Bashir is accused of unknowingly spying for the Dominion.
Directed by Michael Dorn. ("Today is a good day for... 'Action!'") We see the widening of Trek into something else here, something 'darker.' More successfully, for my money, than in "In the Pale Moonlight." Still, Bashir's moral indignation is a little silly. Isn't everybody at war FFS? Some of the hair-splitting gets a little much. Then again, of gods and generals and all that. Of these things and more is good drama made.
Sloan and his guys are obviously the same guys from Die Hard 2. So that changes how I view the end of Die Hard 2. Obviously the plane's wreckage was beamed in as they beamed to the future or what not. Who the hell is General Esperanza supposed to be in the Trekverse? Interesting development. I didn't expect to have a new take or reason to love Die Hard 2 in 2021. I thought peak Die Hard 2 had been reached long ago.
Dax, O'Brien, and Bashir board a Runabout, which is shrunken to four inches long as they investigate a rare subspace compression phenomenon.
I don't have much to say about this one except that it doesn't quite capitalize on its premise as much as it might. Otherwise it's a fun one. There's something a little, I don't know, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olson about the whole thing.
Three months into the war, DS9 is still under Dominion control. Sisko and his crew are given a mission to destroy a vital Ketracel White facility deep in Dominion space using a captured Jem'Hadar ship. Jake is working for the Federation News Service. Odo is head of Terok Nor's security supported by the Vorta Weyoun.
Nice set-up for season 6. (More BSG! I promise to stop saying this, but FFS someone needs to write the definitive Thematic and Structural Overlap in Berman-Era Trek and the Moore/Eick Battlestar Galactica.)
Good stuff, what more to say? Hate to leave cruddy reviews, but what say you?
Sisko and his tired crew crash on a planet where they encounter a band of Jem'Hadar.
From the get-go here, I liked this one.
So many BSG parallels. Good stuff at the end.
I am the worst reviewer on the planet.
Jake and Nog come under attack by the Jem'Hadar and are rescued by a rogue Defiant class starship, the Valiant, under the command of Starfleet Red Squadron cadets.
Red squad! red squad! red squad! It's a little too much. This feels like it was written by people who didn't make the varsity squad and honed the resentment into a critical worldview rather than worked through it.
That said, I like this one. I wanted to listen to Cirroc Lifton and Aron Eisenberg's podcast episode on this one, if they did one. But time ran out and I didn't get to check, never mind listen. There's a bit at the end where Nog says "In the end he was a bad captain." Hey Nog! Says you, CADET. Maybe tactical hierarchy is not your purview? It certainly isn't from a military standpoint. The ending feels like a movie about wartime made by Hollywood, which is, more or less, a problem with DS9-at-war in general. Here, though, specifically, the episode should have let people make up their own mind. There are any number of other arguments from people with much more experience regarding the who and how of a good Captain, especially during wartime.
Learning of thousands of Dominion reinforcements gathering in the Gamma Quadrant, Sisko initiates a plan to retake Deep Space Nine and secure the wormhole before the minefield is detonated. (And) Sisko commands the Defiant and 600 Federation ships against a Dominion/Cardassian armada to retake Deep Space Nine. Damar has Kira, Jake, and Leeta arrested.
It's kind of unbelievable to me that they (the Jem-Hadar, Cardassians, whomever) wouldn't keep a Defiant-deterrent ship around.
All the drama(s) in this episode. Good stuff.
When Jadzia Dax is critically injured on an away mission, Worf must choose between saving his wife and completing their assignment. O'Brien becomes obsessed with beating Quark at Tongo.
The Worf/ Dax/ soundstage-jungle plot is pretty good. And the Tongo duel between Quark and Bashir is fun. I was hoping Bashir was faking being so distracted. I'm not sure how his genetic enhancements wouldn't neutralize such things. But perhaps Quark is just that good.
So when Worf mentions Nikolai here, does his creator get credit/ royalties? Who created Nikolai? Ron Moore wrote this one; Naren Shankar did the teleplay for "Homeward" on TNG. Ron and Naren worked closely for years; I wonder if it was just tossed out in the writer's room. ("Mind if I reference Nikolai?" "Lease 'em to you for a dollar.") I keep hoping someone with writer's guild sort of experience/ lawyerly know-how will opine on the subject and let us all know.
Starfleet Command begins an offensive against the Dominion, and Sisko is chosen to lead the invasion of Cardassia, but the Cardassian/Dominion Alliance has secretly reinforced their borders with unmanned orbital weapons platforms.
What is it with admirals in Starfleet? Admiral Ross (Barry Jenner) is so milquetoast. Is it only to contrast the Captain, is that why they do this?
"We're in the middle of taking over the Alpha Quadrant" says someone on the Dominion side during this. I really need to go back to the earlier seasons. Is there ever a time where the Dominion makes sense? It all goes back to some kind of solid/liquid war? I mean, really? So they became space empire overlords? Did they ever meet the Metrons? Or the Organianians? Or Q?
Vic Fontaine is like that buddy of yours who only communicates in bad Dad joke memes. Whereas Martok (at least in this episode) is like that buddy of yours that communicates only in"Mister Spock's Dank Meme Stash" memes.
Dukat! Jedzia! Oh no! The drama. This whole angle on Dukat/ X-men transform is pretty wild. The mad Pa-Mach Prophet.
BLOWED UP BIG ROCK IN SPACE! would've been a cool subtitle for this episode. The ending evokes "The Paradise Syndrome". Good set-up for season 7.
I'm undoubtedly overranking this one, but screw it. I'm enjoying the Ferengi so much on this re-watch and this is such a pleasant surprise to me. All the actors do such fun work.
Morn is killed in an ion storm and Sisko informs Quark that Morn left his entire estate to him. But Quark has a little competition.
That extends to this and one of the next two, as well. I just enjoy the Ferengi episodes more than the others, I guess. This one, digging into the mystery of Morn a bit, has that sort of "Captain's Holiday" chase-fun/treasure-hunt quality to it, as well. And President Logan to boot.
I often cite Cheers parallels with Berman-era Trek. Morn is obviously a reference at least in nomenclature to "Norm," but this episode hints at a more Al-Rosen-type presence on the show. I wish there was a subtitle of him saying "SINATRA!" in some episode. Or a Cheers episode where Al vomits up some latinum to pay his bar tab.
Yaay, it's the O'Briens... Even the writers must've felt this way, really. Consider the mutations of family dynamic of the typical O'Briens episode: possession, brainwashing, disappearing into a prison fantasy for years and PTSD in close quarters, etc. And yet, is this their finest hour? I think so. The whole thing was unexpectedly moving and tragic. One of the emotionally-truer meta-statements on parenthood Trek has pulled off, I think. The ending - like the ending to "Children of Time" - has a lot of stuff to unpack, not all of it pleasant. Rosalind Chao gives a good performance, as does Hana Hatae, hell even the Chief breaks out of his usual comfort zone here. Great marks all around.
The Worf/Jedzia/Yoshi stuff was nice, as well.
Quark helps out when Zek's status as the Ferengi Grand Nagus is put in jeopardy by proposing equal rights for Ferengi females.
Hey-oh! Anything I can possibly say about this Dr.-Bashir-directed episode seems redundant. Or something. Wow! To think this Ferengi journey began with "The Last Outcast." The metaphor gets away from them a little bit. But who cares.
All the Nog stuff is great. Mrs. Quarkfire is more hit or miss but Nilva (Henry Gibson) and Slug-o-cola (the slimiest cola in the galaxy) are great. And great stuff as always from the Nagus bodyguard guys. Well, "guys."
At one point I thought of how much talent and weirdness was on the screen before me. Quite an impressive achievement this episode. I'm not one to congratulate a show for the optics of such things, but I do praise audacity when judiciously applied, and having a main character undergo surgery to bribe a visiting captain of Ferengi industry with sex is a hell of a thing to pull off properly. And they did here. Kudos. I imagine that's whence the conspicuous-hook-up babe at beginning and end, to placate anyone uncomfortable with such implications.
The score during this whole scene from commercial break to the bitter end is really something. It's like a little movie, or scene from an opera.
"You may be a lousy son, but you make a wonderful daughter."
And now...
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LEFTOVER SCREENCAPS. |
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| Bye Jadzia. (Or, as the girl who got me into DS9 once put it, "Have fun on Becker, you traitorous hussy.") |
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| Gregory Itzin. |
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| Hana Hatae. |
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| The single most disturbing visual in the Trek universe. |
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| "It's called 'teamwork.'" |
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| "It's called 'mweamwowk." |
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| ... |
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| ... |
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| "Hate us because we're beautiful well we don't like you either we're cheerleaders! cheerleaders! ROLL CALL!" Okay, okay, wrong team I know. |
