Let He Who Is Without Sin...

**** (4 stars out of 5)

 I'll give you two guesses what I liked most about the return visit to Risa, the hedonistic pleasure planet from 'Captain's Holiday'. Babes is bikinis! Bolians with surfboards! Rock Lobster!

Love is in the air. Even crusty brown bartifact Morn has a gal to bring flowers to!

Dax forces her new boyfriend Worf to take a break from brooding under the tropical Risan suns. Also, her friends Leeta and Bashir and Quark horn in on the romantic cruise. Leeta and Bashir because they're in the midst of an unusually amicable break-up, and Quark because Risian women are not at all hypocritical when they say 'All that is ours is yours.' Also, Risian women might be stoned or blind.

I'm just saying, Quark is NO prize. Then again, Grilka seemed satisfied. You know what they say about the size of a Ferengi's... bulbous head. (Oh, and it turns out Leeta is dumping Bashir partly because she secretly has feelings for Rom... so... go figure!)

Worf has a bad case of the surlies, falling in with a crowd of quasi-religious thumpers sweltering in grey tweed on the beach. Their leader, Pascal Fullerton, is sternly lecturing everyone to stop having sexy times or the Borg will punish them. Or something. 

Perhaps because Worf would rather read crazy tracts than pay any attention to her, Dax pals around with Arandis, the Risian who jamaharoned Curzon to death in his bed.

If Quark wielding horghans and Worf in a Speedo weren't worrying you, then mild girl-on-girl hand-holding isn't going to upset you either... but Fullerton's New Essentialists decide to wreck up the joint according to traditional family values. They use Worf's guile to screw-up the weather modification grid. Soon it's pouring down outside like it's Ferenginar (where they have hundreds of words for rain and no word for crisp). That should make all these floozies and him-bos put on some clothes! 

"Let He Who Is Without Sin..." cast the first stone, so the Bible says. Although people in glass houses SHOULDN'T do that, I hear. Risa seems like the sort of place that would build glass houses and still not bother wearing anything while indoors. But as far as voyeurs are concerned, chaste swimsuits is what we get at 5 o'clock on family programming. The writers, Behr and Wolfe, claim that this prudish medium failed their intentions in a show about morality and sex. Twentieth Century versions of Fullerton actually put a shirt on Leeta (the first picture on this page is the unaired version) and isn't THAT the greatest crime of all?!?