Warhead

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Taking the late shift is a good way to get command experience, at least that's the way Harry Kim sees it. Of course (and I can't stress this enough) away missions really, really, REALLY should have experienced people making the decisions.

I mean, when the Doctor finds a talking metal tube that thinks it's a person, is there anyone who DOESN'T think to themselves: "Hey, that might be a bomb."? Especially anyone who's seen Dark Star?

But, no, it's afraid and we're very compassionate people who have never come across dangerous sentient metal things before and, whelp: "seek out new life" as they always say... so they bring the bomb on board and it turns out to be a bomb. Everyone is shocked. Especially when Cray-Cray Kablooie there hacks the EMH program and holds them all hostage, demanding a ride to the planet Salina and an order of fries. Sorry, that's fried planet Salina.

While the Druodans who prematurely fired off Rex Plode the talking bomb would've been giddy about all this a few years ago... there was that pesky armistice and all. Tensions mount as Robert Picardo does acting. Can our heroes talk the "Warhead" down before it drones over and ruins some civilian wedding? And I don't mean ruins it with the Doctor's singing voice.

Say... weren't we going to put some firewalls around the Doctor's brains the LAST time he went crazy? I guess we know how THAT turned out. It turned out FAIL.

Tacking Into The Wind

**** (4 stars out of 5)

The Dominion's Founder leadership may be failing, but they'd take the whole galaxy down with them out of spite. And on that note: it's a Bad Leaders theme day!

Kira and Worf fight uphill battles with the empires that have never taken them seriously. Though they hate her completely, the Cardassians need Kira's guidance. Likewise, the Klingons need the generally despised Worf. I don't mean Generals despise him- General Martok's flower units about the boy. But the outsider's perspective is required for some radical changes.

Damar of Cardassia suffers grievously when the Dominion has his innocent wife and child shot. When he wails about the injustice of his oppressors, Kira all but chortles in his face. And so Damar must choose whether to kill his blindly racist friend Rusot or his honest foe, Kira. All phasering aside, speeches are what it's all about on Star Trek.

Take my Worf... please! As it becomes obvious to everybody that Gowron would get his whole army slaughtered if it made a good photo-op, Worf keeps silent. Ezri is even brave enough to tell Worf that the Klingon Empire is dying- and deserves to die if they won't defy their corrupt, dishonourable leaders.

When he can bear it no longer, Worf assumes governmental control in the usual manner: petitions, leaflets, and filibusters. NAH! Just kidding. With sharp, stabbing things! That pop-eyed, poisoning snake Gowron has had it coming for seven years!

"Tacking Into The Wind" proves that heavy is the head that wears the crown. Klingon heads being plenty heavy enough already, Worf fobs the actual job off on his brother-in-arms. Qap'la, Martok!  Maybe his hard-ass wife will even crack a smile when she hears she's now the First Lady. If Martok gets a darling new cape, perhaps Sirella gets new shoes?

Relativity

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Just a little bit of history repeating...

Seven has been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and The Kodan... huh? No, that sounds like a fan fiction. I meant Seven has been recruited by Captain Braxton and Lt. Ducane of Federation timeship Relativity.

These Time Cops have taken Miss Sept de Neuf 500 years into the future to be a Secret Time Agent and disable a temporal disruptor. It was planted by a deranged lunatic just before Voyager's launch five years ago. It will have/is/is going to destroy the ship! For the fifth time! This year!

The save has been tried twice before, and both Sevens died. Third time better be the charm, because four times will cause serious sensory aphasia and/or temporal psychosis. Also McFly's family will erase and the two Brigadiers may have a mental breakdown.

Speaking of which, time travel turned Braxton into a completely different man. He's apparently the same Braxton from "Future's End" except he remembers the timeline where he suffered through decades of 20th century pharmaceuticals. From which he went mad, MAD I TELLS YA! Plus he got portly and his hair changed colour.

If you squint and try not to think very hard... this can be a crazy fun run-around. If I demanded more logic than enjoyment it would probably drop to 3 stars. But today I won't.

Most confusing to me is Ducane's plan to "re-integrate" three Braxtons, two of which are innocent, and put the resulting multiple man on trial. I can't even begin to follow that reasoning! The foremost question I have is: at what point does he become the Bartender of Destiny from the final episode of Quantum Leap?

"Relativity" is a compromise of what the rabid fans wanted: Seven dies and dresses in Starfleet garb! (Neither is permanent.) Do her leftover corpses collapse into uncertainty particles now that her past self lived, or did they just throw them on the pile? Do these Pre-Cops pilfer people from parallel places? Are a couple of universes now missing their Sevenses of Nines? Like I said: don't think, just like.

When It Rains...

**** (4 stars out of 5)
Whenever I see Klingon Chancellor Gowron throwing his weight around I always think back to something I heard him say repeatedly in the ST:TNG VHS video board game: "YOU WILL EXPERIENCE BIJ!" (pronounced BEEEJ, means 'punishment').

And we're all getting punished today: Gowron's jealous of Martok's wartime prestige so he's moving in to take command and credit, Ross and Sisko order Kira to hang out with the fine, upstanding men of the Cardassian rebellion, Odo discovers he has the same wasting disease as the Founders, and Dukat goes temporarily blind. (Not from looking at Kai Winn in the buff, you understand, but from peeking at the devil's books, I guess.)

Sisko gives Kira a drab new uniform and battlefield commission so the Cardassians won't have to think 'Bajoran' while she's bossing them around. Although it's really her face that gives it away... so... whatever. She's not making many friends teaching Killing Cardies 101 at the Cardassian Learning Annex anyway. Also, it's easier to work with Damar and think of him as a hero if Kira and Garak never bring up the way he shot their friend Ziyal in the back.

Dr. Bashir has a scheme to learn rapid organ replacement synthesis from whatever Odo's made of. We'll never know if this payed off... except otherwise Odo would never have found out he was sick. Well, the 'crumbling to dust' would've been a clue, but doctors like to feel useful. Like the desk-bound PADD-pushers at Starfleet Medical: who wouldn't lift a finger if it might help Odo. A cure for Odo might get back to the Founders. And nobody wants THAT. The Founders might be grateful or shamed by Solids who show compassion or something.

As Bashir deduces, that hardly sits well with the solids who infected them in the first place: our old pals, the spooks at Section 31.

"When It Rains..." is continues the gripping saga with desperate humanity eager to throw the Founders to the wolves, Sisko forced to do the same with all his non-Federation peeps (except Quark, I guess), the Kai throwing her blind ex-lover into the street, and Gowron settling in drunk behind the wheel of the bus he's throwing Martok under.

11:59

*** (3 stars out of 5)

No science fiction for you today! Or, more accurately, the minimum daily allowance of science fiction.

Captain Janeway gets to reminiscing, and the reminiscing causes flashbacks, but the flashbacks do not cause Kid Chaos to emerge from null space or Chakotay to start boxing.

Instead, here's a gentle, meandering tale of Janeway's distant ancestors in the distant year 2000 and how most of what she was told about them is probably wrong or made-up. Instead of a mighty astronaut in a private plane who conquered the moon and built massive erections with her own two hands and clever words Shannon O'Donnell was an ordinary engineer who ran out of gas in Indiana and (shudder) procreated with a crusty old bookstore owner named Henry Janeway. Along the way, Henry teaches Shannon to slow down, and Shannon brushes the cobwebs off Henry. Between the pair of them and his plucky lad Jason, they played an extremely minor part in occupying a Mars colony prototype-slash-giant mall still in place 376 years later.

Still, as Chaoktay reminds her: "She may not have known she had to live up to your expectations."

Also, it could be worse: they could have ended up like Harry's ancestor Jack Kim. In 2210, with a crew asleep in stasis, he made a 6 month trip to Beta Capricus. And in the 6 months slog back to Earth, he probably had lot of time to plan a murder against whoever thought there was a star there. Because there wasn't. You don't want to be the telescope guy who f-ed THAT up.

"11:59" turns the hearts of the children to their fathers, the hearts of the fathers to their children, and no bad thing.

The Changing Face of Evil

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Clearly, 2375 is not a good year to visit San Francisco. Or to visit Ben Sisko, who is bound to be in a terrible mood.

The Dominion chose well when they brought the Breen race into their war with the United Federation of Planets: a direct assault on Starfleet HQ is something not even the Klingons ever achieved. Those Breen are real go-getters! Very admirable work... uh, I mean, GO EARTH! These colours do not run!

As if his new wife semi-intentionally burning his beloved bell peppers to get even with him when he tries to make her take a vacation wasn't bad enough, Captain Sisko also narrowly avoids exploding at the biggest space battle setback yet. Scores of Alliance vessels (mainly Federation and Romulan) are struck down by a fancy-new Breen power siphon, including that brave little toaster: Defiant. The eventual owners of the Chin'toka system should look into the burgeoning field of salvage... once the plasma fires go out and the giant frozen clouds of red and green blood dissipate.

The female shapeshifter makes sure her troops let the escape pods do their escape thing. Lots and lots of demoralized enemies means spreading tales of Dominion bad-assery... somehow still very necessary at this late stage? This should stop that SISKO character fighting back... for about a week.

But what's this? Coming up from behind? Why, it's those heroic-slash-treacherous Cardassians. Instead of doing what they asked for and just handing Cardassia the conquered universe on a shiny silver platter, those Dominion jerks have mostly been riding to victory on the backs of seven million dead space lizards. Now the space lizards rise up against their re-branded oppressors when Legate Damar begins to speechify.

Bajor's Kai Winn is shocked when her assistant Sobor discovers her own personal space lizard, Dukat, is not all he claimed. Further discoveries on Sobor's part are necessarily limited when Winn discovers what substance is required to read ancient forbidden Pah-Wraith texts. Here's a hint: may contain platelets.

"The Changing Face of Evil" continues the rock-solid. slam-bag, gee-whiz, ka-blooey final chapter. Did I mention 'P-tchoo! P-tchoo!'? Because it has plenty of that, too.

Someone to Watch Over Me

**** (4 stars out of 5)

The Doctor's self-appointed mentor position in Seven of Nine's life takes a strange turn as he tutors her in matters of romantic love. (Frankly, I love the man's slideshow. Where the hell did he get a picture of Species 8472 making out? Was he hiding in the bushes with a holocamera during 'In The Flesh'?)

Having struck out with a hologram of superhero Arthur from 'The Tick', Seven tries her luck with Lt. Chapman, an affable if awkward descendant of Johnathan Hayes. For those in the know, Hayes was Captain of the 21st Century generational vessel EarthStar Voyager (no relation). Hayes was himself descended from Stephanie Speck's jerk ex-boyfriend from the early AI biopic 'Short Circuit'. Are you getting all this down somewhere?

Meanwhile, Neelix must play chaperone to a hedonistic, lecherous, "priestly" Kadi called Tomin. Instead of prayer and somber ritual the guy wants to find out how far down a bald, blue Bolian is bifurcated. Can our helpful hedgehog keep the former Kid In The Hall from passing out drunk in the hall?

The title is drawn from the song, since the hologram and the former drone sing together while he begins to unexpectedly fall in love with her. Indeed, this is the theme song of a hologram's unrequited love on Red Dwarf as well, which probably means something in the grand scheme of things, I just can't think what.
"Someone to Watch Over Me" is an adorable, hilarious, even slapstick rom-com that deserves all the praise I can heap on it. Remember how I didn't take to Seven of Nine? Well, I take at least a third of that back! The only thing that keeps this from being 5 stars is that the writers intentionally ended the romance before it got started. I think the Doctor would have been the best thing to ever happen to Seven of Nine.