What's Past is Prologue

**** (4 stars out of 5)

The evil Terrans, in the course of wrecking up planets and junk, are sucking non-renewable energy from the mushroom network and if not stopped will suck the life out of the entire multiverse. Why, did you need higher stakes?

Gabriel "Make The Empire Glorious Again" Lorca's been a Mirror Man all along. To paraphrase Devo, Gabriel Lorca "is a man with a mission. A boy with a gun. He has a picture in his pocket of the lucky one. He is a big, big mess." He frees his ACTUAL crew including the Mirror Ellen Landry (poked a bear in episode 4, torn to shreds?) from their year-long agony booth spa day and throws them into the Emperor's cannons. Nobody who hears Lorca's tale of torpedos, transporters, ion storms and probably a mongoose bite that all converged to swap him with the (good?) Lorca a year ago survives this episode. Lorca also claims he shared a bed and coup attempt with Mirror Michael Burnham but at this point I wouldn't believe Lorca if he told me Kelpians are delicious.

And I certainly do love the taste of Saru in command! His speech to his now entirely trustworthy infiltrator-free team about ideals in the face of certain death is bitchin'.

If Michael and the Ewoks can get the shields down from the inside, Discovery can stop the evil energy orb, and as an added bonus, Paul can surf the explosion back to home base.

The Emperor backstabs Lorca and he screams exactly, I mean EXACTLY like a TIE fighter as he is (disintegrated?) by the spore network that can send you anywhere. Never to be heard from again. NEVER.

It's a grandiose SFX heavy firefight. I do miss Star Trek phaser beams instead of Star Wars blaster bolts- I didn’t know what universe I was watching BEFORE I didn’t know what universe I was watching.

The Siege of AR-558

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Quark offers his two slips on the well-known Rule of Acquisition #34 "War is Good For Business"... but only from a distance. The Nagus wants a Ferengi-eye view of the front, so the luckless bartender enjoys a field trip with the Starship Doom-N-Gloom.

Here's some shell-shocked Starfleet soldiers now! Reese, the Steve McQueen of the gang. Even the Jem'Hadar don't want to meet this thug in a dark alley. Vargas, who won't change his bandages because they are all he has left of some jerk he didn't like. Oh, that's just the space gangrene talking! Kellin, the soft-spoken Enginerd. Descended from the great early galactic pioneers called the Space Family Robinson. Identical cousin to Lennier the ever-faithful Minbari aide. I'm trying to say the man likes Roly Poly fish heads. It's Bill Mumy! He's worth two stars just for showing up!

The enemy is using Houdini mines- deplorable, underhanded sneak attack weapons that appear without rhyme or reason from that domain of the demonic, subspace.  Their use is condemned by Starfleet types... mainly because they didn't have any before now.

If you ever got the impression that Nog was promoted too fast, then it should be noted that there's no better on-the-job training than a horrific interstellar war. No better for teaching people how to die in droves, with or without dignity. How to be maimed- Like a Man! You get the picture.

"The Siege of AR-558" went as badly as the earlier sieges at AR-557 and 556, and there aren't any lovely spaceships exploding serenely against the void. Just a bunch of scared, filthy people getting screwed up. Or deceased. For other mid-90s space war drama commemorating the 50th anniversary of the miserable debacle at Guadalcanal in 1942, please see the Space Above and Beyond episode with the more evocative title "Sugar Dirt". If you like. They're both good, just gloomy.

Visionary

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Chief O'Brien takes a radiation blast in the face, and shrugs it off with a dollop of old school hyronalin, yo. But the lingering effects keep tossing him a few hours into the future, for a tiny glimpse of what he's about to do... in 5 hours time. (Time in the Star Trek universe seems like an extremely accessible, infinitely malleable dimension. Pick up the wrong fork- travel through time. Lean against a dimmer switch exactly on the quarter hour- travel through time. Sneeze and hiccup at the same time near a warp core- kiss the universe good-bye.)

Meanwhile, brusque Romulans try to wring out of Kira every scrap of information they can legally find about the Dominion. Drunk Klingons are picking fights and setting booby traps like the Spy Vs. Spy comics.

Somebody blows up the station for some reason. The explosion of DS9 with fleeing runabouts is some really beautiful effects work. Cheers!

Miles and Miles meet in the middle and figure things out. Mainly that time travel makes no sense and they both hate it.

Technogeekery is the star here. Not logic, not emotion, just people saying science-y things and O'Brien passing out now and then.

Yet a true technogeek knows if you have Romulans around, and a troublesome quantum singularity that's also INVISIBLE, then maybe you have a cloaked Romulan ship! How come no one, especially science officer Dax, mentions that likelihood? So that's the big surprise at the end... unless you're been paying attention to other episodes ever. Or decided that Dr. Bashir's doohickey made from the Romulan warbird model kit owned by plenty of nerds (yours truly included) might be a clue.

"Visionary" is more fun than 'Time Squared', though it quickly invites the comparison with its Double Picards, explosions, and non-logical time events. At least 'Visionary' has action and semi-believable jeopardy, and most importantly, when one O'Brien perishes and his "future" self somehow doesn't, it wasn't because one COLD-BLOODEDLY SHOT the other, like the Picard in 'Time Squared'. Possibly the local Miles has died, and been replaced by one from a virtually identical parallel dimension. Since there's no dead body a few hours later, where did that guy go? Did he die at all or was that prevented somehow? Question mark?