Vox Sola

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Kreetassans take great offence if you eat in front of them, to the same level as if you took off your pants and did a little dance. Still, humans aren't the only perverts around here. Some Kreetassans I could name should clean their airlocks more often! A sneeze-covered raggedy kleenex crawls off their bowling pin and hides in the walls.

Mayweather knows the way to get Reed to watch 'Wages of Sin', a 1953 French movie: "No, you'll like it. Things blow up!"  (Just as I'll watch anything if you tell me it has a robot or a flying car.)

Film Buff crewman Michael Rostov has apparently never watched a horror movie, because he strolls right up to some goo dripping out of the ceiling and before you can say "Hentai Tentacle Monster" he and four others are having a little enforced mind-meld of their own. Trip, Archer, Kelly and Guy Fleegman (the unlucky security guard with no name) are strung up like sausages in a Room Wide Web and mentally linked.

Thanks to Jon Archer, the being we'll call Paste Pot Pete expands its knowledge of water polo ten thousand fold, but otherwise very little is learned by anyone. When to clench and when to relax, maybe?

Lieutenant Reed has been experimenting with Starfleet's attempts at EM barriers. He's got one that can absorb a phase pistol blast 6 out of 10 times. We like those odds if it keeps everyone else from getting slimed.

Travis' ability to feign sincerity, T'Pol's star-math, Phlox's wishy-thinking, and Hoshi's translator program team up to save the day. Gloop is put back where gloop belongs.

"Vox Sola" gets full marks for a fairly unique alien. We never find out how it got lost in the first place, or what it thinks of all this. It's a good bet it won't be putting on a uniform anytime soon, but we're coming out on top if we can keep it out of our pants.

The Adversary

**** (4 stars out of 5)

 

Ambassador Krejensky notifies the newly-promoted CAPTAIN Sisko of a major season-ending event.

There's been a coup among the Tzenkethi, on their home planet of Flimsy-Pretext.  Somebody better rush out there in a gunship and rile them up or there might be another Federation-Tzenkethi War. (Like Sisko fought years ago: so terrible no one ever even mentioned them before.)

Someone on board is not what they seem!


We learn today that Defiant carries a crew of 47, only one of whom seems to be an engineer (O'Brien, of course) and most of whom can be confined to their bunk beds with no loss of ship's function. Take a lesson, Voyager (they can't run with less than 60 or 70)!

Also, we learn that nobody in this crew ever saw either the 390 or 360 year old movie 'The Thing'. Not even on Blu-ray. Or they'd have come up with their "defense" against shapeshifters a little faster:

Draw blood from a human- you get blood. Draw blood from a shapeshifter- not so much.

Of course, you really have to double up on blood guys in case of shifty-dickery. You need a buddy system for everything and nobody here can seem to manage it. (I can criticize through my Tostito-dusted lips knowing full well you'd be able to tell ME from the Shifter by the crap in my pants and the fact that I'd be dead before Act One.)
Again we hear the mantra from Chokey the Changeling while he's trying to spark an interstellar conflagration: "No changeling has ever harmed another." Sure, we attack Odo, but harm? Never.

But can you call it a victory if you defeat one drop from an ocean?

"The Adversary" is derivative but worthy. Great effects, good stunts, intense jeopardy, and especially strong paranoia. And Deep Space Nine gets even better NEXT season!