Empok Nor

*** (3 stars out of 5)

It's not often you get a haunted house massacre where you supply everything yourself!  There's faceless nobodies Pechetti, Stolzoff, Boq'ta, & Amaro to be picked off one by one, Garak to be the murdering maniac, Cadet Nog to be the quivering hostage, and Chief O'Brien to be the brave and plucky Final Girl.

The titular Cardassian space station Empok Nor is dark and empty. Just add drugs for a fine old evening of racing around sweating, screaming, bleeding, tripping, falling down stairs, breaking necks and stabbing one another playfully with flux couplers!

The famously resource-poor Cardassian Empire never does anything in half-measures. Except when it comes to evacuating, stripping, and booby-trapping abandoned space stations. Leaving useful conduits, heaters, gravity generators, oxygen, expensive racially enraged super-soldiers programmed to murder non-Cardassians, and other bric-a-brac carelessly behind.

These intelligent, efficient villains leaving Empok Nor and its 2 out of 3 successful psycho killers so very intact is confusing. When they fled Terok Nor, Bajorans and Federation types moved right in. So... why was Empok Nor abandoned? It still works! Why isn't it crawling with Breen or whoever drove the Cardies out? Why not tow it away? Break it down for scrap? If it's so useless, WHY leave anyone to protect it? And why, why, WHY would Cardassians need psychotropic drugs to hate and kill? They're famous for doing those things while stone-cold sober enough to make good tactical decisions.

"Empok Nor" also begs the questions: why go into this dangerous place with a handful of frightened tech nerds in a relatively slow, unarmed space rowboat? If keeping DS9 in good working order is vital to the survival of the entire Federation, why is repairing it such a low priority? Why didn't they send in a starship with more troops in the first place? Amaro gets a lot of flak for being a racist in Starfleet, but that's one of the only parts I DON'T find illogical. If they're always one bad trip away from spearing you in the breadbasket, it's probably not easy to be loving and tolerant of the spoon-heads.

Battle Lines

*** (3 stars out of 5)

The Bajoran spiritual leader Kai Opaka leaves her home world for the first time and visits Deep Space Nine. Wouldn't have been my first choice, but it is conveniently close. I wonder if Dr. Bashir is trying to be funny when he says she looks "preoccupied". (See, because Bajor was under military occupation all her life? Geddit? No, he probably wasn't joking.)

Speaking of Bashir, how is he packed and ready to tag along on the Kai's runabout trip through the wormhole before Sisko thinks of offering one? And shouldn't she be in a bullet-proof domed Kai-mobile?

Out for a spin, they visit an unknown moon and are shot down by its satellites. Opaka's spine breaks in the crash and she dies. Didn't I JUST say Kai-mobile? Or even a seatbelt?

Still, she gets better almost immediately.

Cellular biomechanisms (nanites, to those playing along at home) have granted her eternal life, more or less. The moon's prisoner populace see this as a curse. They suffer and die over and over but are always revived.  Yet somehow not killing each other hasn't come up.

Although the conflict between the Ennis and the Nol-Ennis may once have had a cause, it has been forgotten in the struggle for bloody, stab-happy vengeance. (You should have seen what happened to the Garth Ennis...)

It's a lackadaisical sort of war, so Angry Kira tries to get them to fight it more efficiently. (Great plan.) Opaka asks Kira to embrace the violence within herself and try to move beyond it.

The leaders Zlangco and Shel-la can't come to a truce. Sisko offers to jailbreak and resettle them. They can't even stop stabbing long enough to discuss this. Bashir learns resettlement is not an option: the microbes will fail if they leave. (Why isn't this an option again? Is unending hell preferable to oblivion?)

Opaka chooses to stay and grab Ennis ears until they see sense. Or they dice her into chunks and set the chunks on fire. Whichever.

"Your pagh and mine will cross again," Opaka declares to Sisko. That's a thing on Bajor. Although, maybe she said path.

 "Battle Lines" is awfully similar to the original series' "Day of the Dove", only without the sense of closure. And maybe that's not a bad thing: maybe we need to hear more often that violence is futile. That said, if a bunch of heathens took the Pope out for a joy ride in a dune buggy and came back without him, don't you think Catholics might be a little miffed? Oh, relax, I'm sure Deep Space Nine will be fine: Bajorans seem very reasonable. How many terrorist bombers could they possibly have?

Wolf in the Fold

**** (4 stars out of 5)

Scotty was recently concussed in an explosion caused by a woman. McCoy & Kirk believe the remedy for this is a pre-arranged rendezvous with a belly dancer on the pleasure-oriented world of Argelius. This young lady, Kara, is expected to head off any lingering resentment Scott might harbor toward the fair sex.

Sadly, seconds after they leave the club and run off giggling into the fog, the dancer is stabbed dozens of times... and stunned Scotty's got the knife!

Treknology Today: The Psycho-Tricorder. Thankfully, it's not a tricorder that wears a dress and murders you in the shower. No: it can give a 24 hour mental record of what happened to amnesiac Scotty.

What an extremely useful invention! Why, I bet a mind-reading box would come in handy plenty! (Never seen again on screen.)

Did you guys have that last year? You could use it with shapeshifters, mute people who can only blink yes or no, suspected murderers of Tellarites, Captains accused of jettisoning Records Officers, mad Commodores on the edge of suicide you can't gather enough evidence on to relieve of duty... well, the list goes on.

Why, it could remove the need for many long, wasted minutes of traditional speculation, investigation, court martials, and dramatic tension... oh, I see, never mind.

Psycho-Tricorder Technician Lt. Karen Tracy, the girl with the magic box (so to speak) is also done in while alone with Scott. Oh noes!

Argelian empath Sybo is recruited to conduct a seance according to the Old Ways. Another female assigned to stand near Scotty in the dark... GOOD PLAN!

She senses ancient, raging evil, a hunger that has a name: Beratis. Kesla. Redjac.

And it is her last statement because, well: Scott, Knife, Back.

Her widower, Prefect Jaris, agrees to have the investigation continued under truth analysis computer- with the agreement that if guilty, Mr. Scott will be executed by slow torture. See, Argelians are such peaceful hedonists they never got around to updating their laws.

The Enterprise computer turned up the names Sybo named: Red Jack aka Jack The Ripper of Earth centuries ago, Kesla of Deneb II more recently, and Beratis of Rigel IV last year: all unidentified mass murderers of women. And all, it seems, the same alien energy creature that feeds on horror, and takes various host forms with hypnotic camoflaugue (the cause of Scotty's amnesia). But Scott was never the host body, only the patsy...

Administrator Hengist (mildly overseeing the proceedings all this time) came from Rigel IV, and he brought the murder weapon with him! Unfortunately, once caught, Hengist falls dead and Redjac seizes control of the ship computer instead. It's high-pitched distorted laughter froze my blood as a youth. Cree-hee-pee!

Best line: "Whoever he is, he sure talks gloomy," says Mr. Sulu, ultra-ultra mellow from McCoy's sedative. 440 people are now too relaxed and doped up to sustain the creature's need for fear. These cool cats wouldn't even fear a supernova.

Redjac hops desperately back into Hengist's corpse, which they beam into space on wide dispersion.

"Wolf in the Fold" is exactly as creepy as it should be: totally!

It's not gory but it's deeply unsettling stuff thanks to writer Robert Bloch and a good cast. John Fiedler (known to me only as the voice of Disney's gentle Piglet character) was really darn freaky scary good. Not good, I mean. Horribly evil in kindly guise, the worst kind.

It's the better choice for Halloween scares if your only other option is 'Catspaw'.