Meridian

** (2 stars out of 5)

Despite the very real threat the Dominion made, (wherein they would pulverize anyone found in the Gamma Quadrant) the Defiant traipses back and starts MAPPING. As O'Brien puts it: 'picking flowers'. I know Starfleet loves to explore, who doesn't? But isn't this like flying across the Neutral Zone and urinating on a Romulan's boots?

What do they gain from this?  Languid, irritating villagers on an even more irritating planet. The paradise world Meridian regularly disappears into a non-corporeal dimension for 60 years, returns unchanged for 2 weeks and vanishes again. Since this other dimension doesn't sound like it offers anything, why don't they just evacuate? Answer: they are impossibly, irritatingly tranquil.

Handsome Deral Handsomeface asks how far down Dax's markings go. "All the way." she says. You just put your liver spots together and blow! A promising beginning blossoms into a dull, dull whirlwind romance of tree-climbing and mild strolling. After briefly offering to go live with Dax, Deral mopes about having to leave his vital career (of eating fruit and lying around followed by decades of utter nothingness) until Dax agrees to tinker with her own quantum structure so SHE can throw her life away and move in with HIM.

It goes horribly awry. Meridian leaves without her. (Even I can't quite believe that Bashir would risk suffocating Dax by botching her molecular modifications ON PURPOSE.) And yet suffocating in space does seem preferable to a relationship with Deral.

The 'B' story is way better than the 'A' story. Quark's scandalously wealthy chum Tiron (played to the deviant hilt by Jeffrey Combs) has the hots for Kira and is not dissuaded from stalking her by her claim that she is Odo's lover. (I notice Odo is not remotely complaining.)

Tiron hires Quark to design a custom erotic holo-program with Kira in a starring role. She dodges his attempts to snap her image, and she and Odo catch him hacking her personnel files. They turn the tables and give the final holo-wench the face of Quark. Tiron is not a satisfied customer.

Neither am I! This could have been the WHOLE story: Quark following Kira to the gym, to the shower, to Naked Church(!)... well, you get the idea.

"Meridian" somehow needed to make me care about Dax's hook-up and tragic loss. Not make me think back fondly on Troi's tepid romance in 'The Masterpiece Society'. Possibly it could have been done in song: this was meant to be a musical, at least in the planning stage. Would that version have been dreadful, or bring out the emotion that was utterly lacking?

Civil Defense

*** (3 stars out of 5)

In which O'Brien accdentally activates a lurking Cardassian anti-insurgency computer program. Somehow, neither the Chief of Operations nor any of his team nor the AI "PUP" ever located this program before. Also, nobody ever noticed all the poison gas emitters or the 'Lock-you-in-your-room-with-the-poison-gas-emitters' brand forcefields over the last three years, either.

Ah, Deep Space Nine! Precarious stacks of old land mines in every closet and venomous adders in every light fixture...

Great reminder actually: I should clean my house more often.

Everyone is locked in and scrambling for their lives, from Odo and Quark in the security office to Larry Appleton and Cousin Balki down in the mailroom. Dax burns her hands and Bashir doesn't help her with the dermal regenerator last seen in the Ops first aid kit. (I'll assume it doesn't work during insurgencies when the power's out and not that the Doctor forgot it exists.) Garak's sneaky-peeky spy codes let him wander freely, but not interfere. Everything our heroes touch makes it worse, from a decreasing countdown to a phaser turret in the replicator.

Having received a distress call from a recording of himself, ex-dictator Dukat drops in to see whether he can make things slimier. The deadly program with its deadly bees was made by Gul Dukat to efficiently execute Bajoran ore workers if they should revolt. Speaking of revolting, Dukat struts and preens in what Garak recognises as an attempt to hit on Kira. Revolting, no? See if Bashir's heard of penicillin, cause this guy's laughter is infectious.

Dukat milks the situation for too long, and his gloating turns to bleating when a program secretly left by his boss won't let him beam out in the midst of a worker riot.

Now if the station rotates slower than 50 miles per hour, Keanu Reaves will explode!

"Civil Defense" is fun, but nothing to write home about, because if you try to mail an unauthorized letter from Deep Space Nine, you'll set off the hydrochloric acid sprinklers. It's boiling acid! you'll squeal, but only Batman will be able to save you.

The Abandoned

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Jake Sisko's dabo girl steady Mardah from Bajor looks forward to dinner with his dad.

Speaking of dads, Quark avoids his chance to be one when Boslic femme fatale Rionoj sells him a bunch of Gamma Quadrant salvage... including a squalling infant in a box.

Ben Sisko coos over the foundling, but in a twinkling it becomes a tween, then a teen! He's the product of some very advanced genetic engineering or too much sugar cereal.

Speaking of growing up too fast, Jake is 16 and Mardah is 20. Ben's not so keen, but mellows when he learns his son is a writer and a dom-jot hustler (calm down, that's pool, remember?).

Kira brings Odo a housewarming plant. He no longer sleeps in his bucket, reverting to his gelatinous state anywhere in his new quarters. Might want to child-proof the EPS taps... or put down a tarp.

The abandoned kid is a Jem'Hadar, a killer with a severe enzyme deficiency, loyal to changelings at the genetic level. So Odo tries to make a connection, rather than let the kid end up in a lab.

Bashir starts pumping the loyalty drug into Punchy the Reptile Boy at the neck. Odo wants the kid to understand equality and self-determination. In response to his desire to know more about his people, Odo shows the recordings. Snuff videos: is that really the best idea ever?

Odo gives the kid a holosuite combatant to stab with Andorian knives, if he will agree to be restrained and peaceful in the real world.  It's not working, maybe because the kid was designed without ears? Also, his invisibility power blossoms... he pulls a gun on Sisko and flees.

Though Odo offers to go to unexplored space together if it means the youngster doesn't have to be a soldier- it really is the only thing he wants. Killing inferior species is every page in a Jem'Hadar book, it seems.  

"The Abandoned" was, in the eyes of director Avery Brooks, a metaphor for young brown men, raised only to be fighters and hooked on drugs from the very first. To me, if there's a trait where Ben Sisko proves himself above Kirk and Picard, it is as a loving, devoted father. Whether to his underlings constantly asking 'Dad' if they can borrow a runabout, to his actual son Jake given enormous leeway to make his own mistakes, to abandoned babies with nothing in their hearts from minute one but death and hate. Starfleet might not see Sisko's compassion for the enemy as an asset in the face of what's to come. But I sure do.

Second Skin

*** (3 stars out of 5)

So, the result of discovering one was once a psycho killer (in Dax's case) is mild surliness.
Also some anti-grav sailing with Kira in the holosuites! Kira doesn't like holosuites, thinks they can't match the adventures of the real world.  Silly Kira! Saying that is almost like daring the real world do something outlandish...

Kira gets a weird call from a woman researching Elemspur Detention Center, and although Kira believes she was never in a Cardassian prison, they have a picture and a punched time-card or something. She and Odo check up on her co-ed cellmate, who nods along. A plan for a ten year death camp reunion has Kira leaving the station all alone, much as O'Brien recently did... and (surprise, surprise) waking up on Cardassia. Much as O'Brien recently did. Does DS9 have K & R Insurance? Or do they just collect frequent kidnapping miles?

Makeover! Kira's having one of those 'Face of The Enemy' days. Deanna Troi knows what I'm talking about! Her "old friend" and "mentor" Entek tells her she's long-term covert agent Iliana Ghemor of the Obsidian Order. She was given a Bajoran terrorist's face and memories a decade back. For funsies! Restoring the face is easy, but the memories... not so much. Her powerful Legate "Daddykins" Ghemor wants to welcome her back but she only remembers being Kira.

Sisko takes reluctant Garak along on the Defiant rescue, under threat of exiling the deadly tailor from the safety of his exile.

Entek shows "Iliana" the corpse of the real Kira, and a recording from her patriotic young self heading into surgery to stop the Bajoran terrorists. Kira starts to crack up.

Kind-hearted Ghemor, to spare his daughter Entek's interrogation, uses his dissident contacts to get her to safety. Which is what the Order wanted all along: evidence that Ghemor is a traitor. Garak's quick draw phaser ends Entek, but despite his obvious helpfulness and utility, Ghemor warns Kira never to trust Garak. Obvious fatherly advice to file alongside 'hot coals make terrible earrings'.

The resources needed for Obsidian Order Operation "Second Skin" are staggering. Gul Madred told sob stories of Cardassia's starving street urchins, whose only art supplies are bleached bones, yet Entek set up this insane, dangerously unpredictable, and presumably expensive plot simply to expose Ghemor, with the emotional torment of some minor former terrorist as the icing on the Tarvokian pound cake. Falsified records, activated agents, abduction across interstellar borders, clones, finicky surgeries. And what's a sarium krellide battery for a phaser cost? Like ten credits?

Equilibrium

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Hey, kids! Let's take a trip to the planet of the Trills! It's such a nice day out, so we'll spend it all in dingy caves or sterile hospitals.

Jadzia Dax discovers a talent for the piano, and becomes irritable enough to bang her head on the keyboard like a Sesame Street character. She's haunted by a spooky robed Mummenschanz with mask under mask under mask.

Is it delayed stress from her three years of endless tests at the Symbiosis Commission? The people who make the Japanese school system look like a Jamaican beach holiday? Prospective Trill hosts are rigorously examined. The accepted wisdom of modern Trill medicine is that an unsuitable host will kill both the slug and the meat puppet in a matter of days. But is that really the case?


The Guardians (unjoined Trills who spend their lives troweling mud in symbiont cave pools) are good with slugs. Not so great with going outside. Guardian Timor intuits that Dax's mental problem is with a previous host.

The Piano Man turns out to have been Joran Belar. Dax's fifth host died in a shuttle crash 86 years ago, and the six-month coma invented for the official record was really the short, tumultuous life of Joran Dax, Musical Murderer.

The Symbiosis Commission erased Dax's memory to cover the fact that slugs can ride wildly unsuitable hosts with no ill effects. Except if you include killing a guy as an ill effect.

If the secret gets out that Joran could host, well, why not EVERYONE? And there aren't enough worms for everyone. So the Trill government agrees to let Dax regain the memories if Sisko agrees to keep quiet. And Jadzia stops going on murder sprees with decrepit old Klingons.

"Equilibrium", a story about a government cover-up, and a repressed traumatic memory returning. Also an intriguing look at the weird world of lower brains and the wet-t shirt contests going on to win them. Or something.

The House of Quark

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Business is slow at Quark's. Rather than drinking their problems away, people are wallowing in terror about the Dominion somewhere else... church maybe.

That is, until a drunken Klingon falls on his own knife while trying to sheath it in Quark. The dead guy, (head of the House of Kozak) pays his hefty bill in spades as Quark regales the morbidly fascinated crowd with self-serving lies of how the bartender took Kozak down in self-defence with extreme prejudice.

And if Klingons should happen to make a scene about it? "I'll stand up, look them straight in the eye, and offer them a bribe."

The bribery plan fails utterly as Kozak's widow Grilka abducts Quark to the Klingon home world of Kronos for a knifepoint wedding. She's desperate to keep her lands and property from her House rival D'Ghor, and she can't do that without a male heir or unusual circumstances. (One prays she's gunning for 'unusual circumstances'. Their kids would be ugly enough to open rifts in space-time.)

Keiko closed the school when all the Bajoran families fled the station. Miles tries to cheer her up with romance, and, failing that, some potted plants in a disused cargo bay, but finally he proposes she go back to her career passion. She'll pack up the kid and run a botanical survey of Bajor's unexplored Janitza mountains for the next six months. (Correct. There's an UNEXPLORED mountain range on a 500,000 year old space-faring culture's home world. Must be one of those brand-new mountain ranges imported by the Cardassians? I'd much rather they'd said a nearby moon.) 

Speaking of moons, Honeymoon Quark proves D'Ghor used financial trickery to weaken Kozak's house. But Chancellor Gowron and the High Council can't follow his economics lecture on their kPhones. It comes down to a Klingon's word against a Ferengi's. Only a duel will do.

After running out on his wife in the middle of the night, Quark son of Keldar returns wielding a bat'leth. And dramatically throws it on the floor. Kneeling, he points out how dishonourable a fight this is. D'Ghor shrugs and moves to kill. Gowron has seemingly picked up a lot of honour in the years since he probably poisoned the last guy on this throne, because he turns the Imperial back on D'Ghor and gives Grilka 'unusual circumstances' status to run her own house. She quickly gives Quark a divorce with the back of her hand.

"The House of Quark", you might imagine, is for Quark fans only. And you'd be right, but thankfully I am one. DS9 was not bad at comedy but let's just say it was rare. So indulge me if my favourites tend to be the farcical ones. Additionally: it is a measure of how little anyone cares what happens to Quark that he can be abducted to the Beta Quadrant (what should be a weeks' travel AT THE ABSOLUTE MINIMUM and by all rights should be well over a month) and no one will notice, much less go looking.

The Search, Part II

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Long ago, the Changelings of the Omarion Nebula sent Odo and 99 other newly formed shape-shifters into the galaxy. He is the first to return, thanks to the wormhole. They didn't expect him back for 300 years, or they would have turned themselves into a cake.

Their Female Spokesjelly explains that the basis for their society is the Great Link: a joining of form, thought, and sensation. As far as changelings are concerned, it's the best thing ever. Now that Odo's tried it, he agrees. It's a little like a sneeze. And it's ooey gooey good.

Changelings call mono-forms like Kira 'Solids' and they trust them much less far than they can throw them. Changelings were once peaceful space explorers in search of knowledge, but in the face of distrusting, murderous solids they found safety only in isolation. They retreated to a planet with no sun, unplugged the phone, and drew the curtains.

While Odo splashes around in the Locals, Kira literally uncovers a startling truth: the Defiant crew are underground, captured for days in a simulation to test their reactions to peace between the Alpha Quadrant and the Dominion. A simulation wherein the Federation politely drew up a treaty, bent way over to sign it, and handed DS9 and Bajor over to their foes. The crew proved mainly that if you pushed them they would fight, sacrifice Garak, and maybe collapse the wormhole rather than kiss scaly Jem'Hadar ass.

Borath, the foreign guy in the monokini running the simulation is not one of the Founders as he claimed. The Founders... are the Changelings.

Odo's Mingling Partner declares: "The hunted now control the destinies of hundreds of other races... because what you can control can't hurt you."

Odo, a being of justice, cannot conscience the mass slaughter carried out by his ancestral shut-ins in the name of order.  Since Changelings have never harmed one of their own, they let him and his pet solids go... but the Alpha Quadrant may need to have some order imposed soon.

"The Search, Part II": Seek and ye shall find. Having captured the mighty Defiant, the Dominion apparently find it utterly beneath their notice. The weapons, the cloak, the uppity attitude, they ignore it all, spank the humans and send them to sleep without supper. Not an auspicious first sortie. Might as well attack the sea with a sword.