Family Business

**** (4 stars out of 5)
The Ferengi Commerce Authority (FCA) holds Quark accountable. You see, his mother Ishka has been earning profit! They send a Liquidator to stomp on the problem. So Quark (with Rom in tow) flies home to quash their "Moogie" before the government sells her.

"My house is my house," says Quark by rote.
"As are its contents," Liquidator Brunt replies.

Moogie Ishka never got the hang of subservience, but now she's a radical. She wears clothes and everything! Quark's head still rings with childhood taunts. "Your mother won't chew your food. Your mother talks to strangers."

Quark shouts at his moogie for her insolent ways. "You're not like other females. You like to think about things. You have opinions."

Moogie wants to push her society towards enlightenment. It's got a long way to go.

(Also, I don't quite know what I'm supposed to think about Rom's use of his vibrating ear machine. Is this merely good aural hygiene?)

The three bars of latinum Ishka made from her beetle farm is the tiniest tip of the iceberg. She's got her own financial empire under multiple aliases.

"Moogie's got the lobes for business!" Rom observes.

Rom spent a decade longer in the hobbit-hole than Quark did, and he learned the truth about their father. Keldar was a good family man, but a business failure. "He couldn't hold onto latinum if you sewed it into his pants!"

I love Rom so much here; finding his voice in the family as peacemaker.

For love of her sons, Moogie "confesses" and surrenders her fortune to the FCA. (Well, a third of it. She's not the type of cash-hungry lady goblin to repent or relent.)

Star Trek magazine and I UTTERLY disagree about "Family Business". They give it one star and call it the worst of the season.  I think it's remarkable. Our first look at planet Ferenginar! Three wonderful new characters in Andrea Martin's cunning Ishka, Jeffrey Combs' blunt Brunt, and Penny Johnson's Kasidy Yates (the freighter captain selected by Jake to be his dad's new love interest.)

Jetrel

**** (4 stars out of 5)

15 years ago, in 2356, the Haakonians conquered the Talaxians. This defeat was marked by the death of 300,000 Talaxians on the moon Rinax, including Neelix's family. His mother, his father, and his little brothers.

Rinax went from a balmy world to a frozen wasteland overnight thanks to an appallingly destructive and scientifically fascinating Metrion Cascade designed by Haakonian scientist Ma'bor Jetrel. "Jetrel's Cascade" may sound like something you'd put in your dishwasher, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it.

Cross Dr. Emmett Brown with Sam The American Eagle and you get Jetrel. Dr. Jetrel flags down Voyager to screen Neelix for the disorder metremia, which has caused soldiers and civilians alike to perish ever since. The "lucky" ones died in the blast, and the unlucky charred and mangled survivors suffered much longer. Weeks, for one little girl named Palaxia. Bad enough to be born Palaxia from Talaxia without ending your tiny span of days as a bacon bit.

Jetrel's wife left him years ago for exactly the reasons you'd imagine, and he's dying of metremia. Neelix was drafted back then, but he'd gone AWOL out of cowardice and/or conscientious objection- depending on how you look at it. In his times of self-loathing, he's not too sure himself.

With a modification of the miraculous transporters of Voyager, Jetrel desperately hopes to reintegrate the disintegrated victims of Rinax with DNA records and wide-beam targeting scanners. His government refused funding to this mad plan from a 'Talaxian sympathizer'.  Will Janeway let him try? Can Neelix make peace with his past?

"Jetrel" is another wrenching Trek performance from James Sloyan. They knew they could go to that well for brilliant and tormented characters. For your history lecture today (I know, I KNOW enough with the history, you only watch Star Trek for the boobies.) About 246,000 humans died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6-9 1945. Not as many people as on Rinax, surely, but infinitely more horrible because they were REAL PEOPLE. Although it might be poetic if the guys who came up with the hydrogen bomb died of cancer, as Robert Oppenheimer did, it was throat cancer. Because smoking kills. And real life is rarely poetic.

Explorers

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Bashir meets Leeta.

Sisko grows a goatee.

(Leeta!)

Bashir tries to work up the nerve to speak to the woman who got the top grade in his class: Dr. Elizabeth Lense; leader of the intergalactic peacekeepers called the Lensmen.

(Leeta!!)

Sisko and Jake build and sail a tiny solar-powered spaceship from 800-year-old Bajoran blueprints.

(Also, Leeta!!!)

Jake works up the nerve to tell his father that he's been accepted to study at the Pennington School in New Zealand, proving that in the future that country makes writers as well as criminals. Hey-yo!

Ben's story about leaving home for the first time was poignant to me when I first saw this. In the summer of 1995, I was about to leave my home for the first time, too.

The conversation between Julian and Elizabeth is something of a comparison between starship-based TNG and station-based DS9. Writer Ira Behr was pushing for more long-term humanity and less lifeless one-shots of self-importance. Whether it always worked is a matter for debate, but this episode is an exemplar: father-son bonding and drunk male bonding with Bashir and O'Brien on a sing-a-long.

Enjoy a pleasant and peaceful moment while it lasts: even the Cardies are only shooting off fireworks today.

"Explorers" is charming and fun and I never got over the opening scene with the first appearance of Chase Masterson's breathy bombshell Leeta. A nuanced, well-rounded, full-figured performance! Are we to assume that she did, indeed, have a cough? Are we to further assume that Dr. Bashir did, indeed, examine her chest? (Lucky Bashir.)
Next time on Star Trek: Deep Space Leeta-- Homina Homina Homina.

Faces

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Oh, that B'Elanna Torres. She's just going through a phage!

Paris, Torres and Ensign Durst have been captured by Vidiians. As Garrett "Harry Kim" Wong said at a convention just before this episode came out: "Guess which Ensign doesn't make it?"

The icky, drippy Vidiian Chief Surgeon Sulon extracted Torres' Klingon DNA. This guy's fallen out of the psychiatry and hit every branch on the way down. He's grown himself a fully Klingon (and phage-resistant) version of her, and tossed the now human version into slave-slash-involuntary-organ-donor jail.

This makes perfect sense. No part of this raises any questions. For example, it's reasonable to assume that both would have Torres' complete memory with only slight emotional variation. And reasonable that removing a little DNA would magically turn Torres human. The same thing happens every time she donates blood: her forehead swelling goes down for days! Oh, and a genetronic machine capable of the instant cloning of an entire working set of organs is so commonplace that it could have no other application to the needs of people always desperate for new organs.

The holographic Doctor monster-ates Chakotay for sneaking into the compound. The first officer uses what seems like the weakest bluff in the universe: "I just had a new face grafted". AND IT WORKS! The Vidiian guard does not immediately ask the follow-up question 'What's your name?' because the answer would surely be 'Grafty... McFace...ton...son.'

Escaped from her slab late one night, the Klingon beheld an eerie sight. She rescues the Human. They get to play 'The Enemy Within' for awhile by firelight over rats and s'mores.

"Faces" is cheesy gibberish but well-performed and has its profoundly creepy bits. Janeway disappoints  by not following through on her earlier threat to fight any Vidiians who came NEAR her people. Too bad for Durst, and Skinny Talaxian Dude, and every other meat popsicle left behind when the rescue comes. Voyager only helps those who help themselves!

The Die Is Cast

***** (5 stars out of 5)

The station is buzzed by a fleet of Romulan and Cardassian vessels with cloaking devices, all de-cloaking for what I can only assume is a 'Neener-Neener' maneuver on their way to Kill All Changelings.

Tain and Garak reminisce over their cheery torturing days, chortling over a glass of Jack Bauer's ground-up old bones. Tain implies Garak might get a kick at Dukat when they get home. The old villain's even toying with the idea of killing his nosy housekeeper. How can a guy in a Charlie Brown sweater be so evil?

Romulan Colonel Lovok is creeping up on the Founders' Homeworld at Warp Six so they won't be detected through their cloaks. But Sisko's not F-ing around with no Warp Six!
Disobeying a direct order to guard Bajor, Sisko takes the Defiant out after Odo. Billions of Bajorans won't mind being left unprotected. They can PRAY away the Drug-Addled Space Reptiles!

Trying in vain to prove himself to Tain, Garak tortures the Constable with viciousness demonstrable. All we learn is that each of them would much rather be with their own people, and each of them is a frakking bad-ass.

The Battle of The Omarion Nebula is a dismal failure. I think Admiral Ackbar knows what I'm talking about: "IT'SH A TRAP!"

Lovok was a Changeling in disguise, helping gather the evil creme de la creme of the Alpha Quadrant into one place to be shredded like old newspaper. Fortunately, the Founders are a foolish and forgiving people who have never held a grudge.

"The Die Is Cast" is our half-way point, cadets and kittens! I've been making this blog journey for a WHOLE year now. It feels more like 371 years. Like Mr. Garak, I am forced to wonder whether I'm getting any enjoyment out of this endeavor or whether I'm just beating a dead changeling. Either way, chums, the Rubicon is crossed!

Cathexis

** (2 stars out of 5)
Janeway's playing a new holonovel in Ancient England, as Ms. Davenport, governess to the children of Lord Burleigh. She's already one up on Dr. Pulaski by knowing the correct response to 'One lump or two?' is 'Two.' not 'Lumps?'.

Today's modern holodeck is not run off the warp power grid, but off a previously unheard of holodeck matrix. The upshot of which is even if you're so short on replicator power that you're forced to strain your shoelaces for food, you can still play Jane Austen holonovels and starve to death in Mr. Bingley's gazebo.

Chakotay returns from a mission brain dead, with no neural activity at all. I will refrain from the obvious joke about the writers writing what they know.

Tuvok reports he was attacked by aliens in a dark matter nebula. Tuvok reports a lot of things today.

In the light of this unknown invader, Janeway transfers the command codes to the Doctor in case the senior officers act strangely. Well, stranger than usual.

Tom waxes nostalgic for his old Doc Brown, who provided lollipops, recent holocomic books, and house calls. Also he had a very cool classic Delorean hover car.

Kes is left in a coma by what Tuvok reports as an alien attack. Tuvok pulls his phaser on Kim for having a momentary daydream.  Tuvok is also the last person to talk to the holographic doctor before someone shuts him off, locks him down and encrypts him.

Guess which crewman is the puppet of the evil vampiric energy beings called the Komar? I'll give you a hint and it rhymes with Bluvok.

Tuvok, Tom, and Torres are reduced in rank today, but not as part of the story. I have to assume it happened off screen, for good reasons, such as mutiny in 'Prime Factors' rather than because of a costuming error or because their names start with 'T'.

"Cathexis" is Greek for 'Occupation' and what gets me is how they can have sensors that show alien souls wandering around, medical scans that can tell one brain from another, and no way to add those things together to scan for Chakotay's wandering ghost. SCIENCE!

Improbable Cause

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Just to break up the monotony of constantly opening episodes with Bashir and Garak on a lunch date, Garak's Tailor Shop blows to smithereens.

Who could have done this misdeed? Let's ask O'Brien and Odo from CSI: Bajor. Not helpfully, O'Brien has forgotten what a pheromone-triggered bomb is. Back when Quark was nearly hit by a Ferengi locator bomb in 'The Nagus', O'Brien explained this concept to Odo, now Odo is explaining it back again. Almost like they BOTH know this stuff already but have to explain to some invisible audience...

Nobody can get a straight answer out of Garak, even when it's seemingly in his best interest.

Garak even lies about things right in front of us, telling Bashir a Kobheerian at the next table is a Talarian. Unless, of course, he IS, in which case there are at least three kinds of Talarians and one of them looks pretty much like a Dopterian. THIS ONLY BOTHERS NERDS! SO STOP DOING IT! I'M HAVING A FIT!

After the tailor's newest whopper that he was exiled for a false tax return, exasperated Bashir tells the fable of 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' and says the moral is nobody will believe you if you always lie. Garak is convinced the moral is actually "Never Tell The Same Lie Twice".

Odo and Garak continue to dig into the mystery. Who wanted Garak dead apart from everyone?

The answer will gladly kill you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

"Improbable Cause" is taut and interesting for a virtual bottle show full of two hander conversations. It's clear that solid writing and brilliant performances can make anything fascinating. Even Odo interrogating a poisoner by quizzing him on perfume fragrances is riveting.