3x01 “the search, part 1”
i could quibble about how dumb sisko showing up unannounced with the defiant is, but the truth is it’s an incredibly effective bit of storytelling. everyone’s reactions and the fact that it slips right through the station’s defenses really helps both to emphasize that the ship is built to be upfront dangerous in a way starfleet ships usually aren’t and to solidify the very real shift in stakes & tone the show achieved in the previous season’s finale.
the fact that the federation’s response to the haymaker the dominion threw at them at the end of the previous season is to beef up their defenses but also to send sisko & co on a very dangerous mission of peace is something i sincerely appreciate. and sisko is fully bought in. he makes no bones about the fact that he doesn’t especially expect the mission to open a dialogue with the founders to succeed, but that doesn’t stop him from being fully committed to that mission. this is peak starfleet imo. i think the difference between ds9 & tng isn’t so much that picard & sisko are cut from entirely different cloths. they’re pursuing the exact same ends, it’s just that the facts of the situation are markedly different.
as we get deeper into the dominion war, i can think of at least one very specific instance where i think sisko makes a choice that picard wouldn’t, and i’ll be interested to see how i feel about that episode when we get to it, but i appreciate that we get a very clear sign that sisko’s values and the federation’s are lined up much in the same way that it was the case for picard. to rise to the kind of position they’ve both risen to really does require being something of a paragon of virtue.
the other thing that really comes to a head in this episode is all the shit going on with odo. when starfleet assigns a starfleet security chief to ds9, he throws yet another of his epic hissy fits over it, and for what feels like the hundredth time decides to resign. kira, obviously not wanting to lose one of her closest friends on the station, manages to maneuver him into at least accompanying them on the mission to the gamma quadrant. and that puts him in position for his plot to continue for the next episode & a half.
the fact that kira really stuck her neck out for odo here and he repays her by effectively kidnapping her & deserting the ship during a crisis is something i feel like doesn’t entirely get dealt with? like, she’s definitely pissed at him when she wakes up in the shuttle, but odo continues to just do all kinds of flagrantly dealbreaking shit on this show and never get taken to task for it. it’s probably one of my biggest frustrations with the show tbh.
but yeah, ending this episode with the introduction of the founders’ (we don’t know they’re the founders yet) homeworld was an incredibly strong choice. this is both a super eventful episode & a super well-made episode. it’s a great reinforcement of how the previous season ended, and a great start to what the show is going to be about moving forward. a-rank
3x02 “the search, part 2”
i’m going to be very honest here, the first time i saw this episode i straight up never figured out that everything going on on the alpha quadrant side of things was a simulation. and because i watched a few episodes of ds9 here & there when it was airing, i knew for a fact that the wormhole continued to be a going concern later in the show, so when sisko & co stole the runabout and blew up the entrance to the wormhole, i was like, “wait, what?”
watching it now, though, there are enough things subtly wrong with this part of the plot that i’m a little embarrassed i didn’t figure it out? like, i think they did a pretty actually great job of balancing not totally giving it away but also making it very possible for a less credulous viewer than me to have figured it out? like, everything is ever so slightly “off,” but in a way that’s subtle enough that you could be forgiven for just thinking the episode is kinda weird?
i fucking love that the simulation totally nails garak, btw. the part where he pretends to betray sisko & co, and tells the bewildered jem’hadar, “you mean no one told you? you see, i pretend to be their friend… and then i shoot you!” just abruptly changing who he’s betraying mid-sentence like one last little victory lap before he guns them down. just fucking pure, uncut garak.
the way this episode totally flips the a plot & b plot is such a wonderful star trekky move. like, you’re kind of wondering why we’re spending so much time on the odo & kira stuff when it seems so much less consequential than the fate of the galaxy type stuff happening elsewhere, and then it turns out all of that was happening in a simulation literally meters away from where odo & kira have been this whole time.
this is just a fucking awesome misdirect that feels so rewarding. and having it turn out that odo & kira have been interacting with the founders this whole time is such a great way to flip the script considering that the other plot has been all about figuring out who the founders were & what they wanted. it’s such a great way to have these plots intersect.
this two-parter had a lot to accomplish, and i think it accomplished it about as well as it could have all things considered. especially in this era, it was really hard to change the entire trajectory of a television show in a way that feels natural & true to that show’s core identity, and i think they pulled that off admirably here. they cemented the seismic shift that happened at the end of the last season, and actually double downed on that with the bombshell that odo’s been a founder all along. this is truly great television, and more importantly truly great star trek. a-rank
3x03 “the house of quark”
so, what do you do in the immediate aftermath of completely changing the landscape & dramatic stakes of the show? some klingon & ferengi comedy shit to reassure people this is still a star trek program, of course!
in fairness the episode does open with quark lamenting the fact that the dominion threat is driving people away from the station, and consequently business away from his bar. but yeah the vast majority of the episode is some pretty cute (and potentially deadly) hijinks where quark accidentally kills a klingon and ends up embroiled in a family/political conflict that reaches all the way up to the klingon high council! which, yes, means we get tng’s klingon daddy himself gowron in his first (but far from last) ds9 appearance!
there’s a lot of great stuff in this episode, and i’m not just saying that because i want grillka to step on me. i do think it’s pretty wild that the klingon high council is willing to let a ferengi lead a klingon house but not a klingon woman? like, if they’re really holding to traditions that are so backwards that they exclude women from leadership, it’s pretty surprising that there isn’t an equal measure of xenophobia in those traditions? but more importantly, how have they not changed this yet? it is the 24th fucking century, my dudes. fix that shit!
quark also gets some of his best moments in the entire damn series in this episode. him doing forensic accounting to the escalating dismay of gowron & the rest of the high council was freaking hilarious, and the way he maneuvered his way out of a fight to the death by pointing out the cowardice & hypocrisy it would represent on his opponent’s behalf was such a believably brilliant move.
i gotta say, though, i violently disagree with him asking grillka for a divorce? who the fuck wouldn’t want to be her boytoy? bad move imo. (though, the fact that she grants this divorce by slapping him across the face so hard he falls to the ground & then spits on him is a mitigating factor.)
although trek (and ds9 in particular) is often very serious at its best, this kind of intentionally comedic tone has been a part of the franchise’s dna since all the way back in tos, so it’s always nice to see later shows nail it every now & then. and if anything, it’s oftentimes even better when serving as a contrast to more serious, higher-stakes episodes. a-rank
3x04 “equilibrium”
okay, like.
there’s a lot of stuff i like about this episode. i super love our first visit to the trill homeworld. the best worldbuilding here is unquestionably around the guardians and the caves with the symbiotes. any time you get a trill in a flowing white robe/gown thing you know you’re in for some cool science/mystical shit, so it was nice to get that going.
i also really liked the way the episode introduced the fact that something weird was going on with dax. dax saying that none of her hosts were musicians but then playing that hauntingly beautiful melody and trying to figure out where it came from is a great mystery hook, and one that i’ve seen work well on a number of other shows.
hey, come to think of it, one of the first shows that comes to mind is the battlestar galactica reboot, which actually used this plot device twice to great success. i wonder if this was a ronald d. moore idea, or if he just brought it with him to battlestar. either way, it’s a really effective hook.
but that actually leads us into our problem. the overall idea of the episode–that the dax symbiote had a host both jadzia & the symbiote don’t remember because their memories of him were intentionally suppressed–is a fantastic one. but for it to really be fully leveraged into a great episode, dax should have driven more of the action of the episode. there’s this now pretty-familiar pattern of decently good dax episodes where the men around her are actually the protagonists of the episode, and everything is about their feelings for dax & how important she is to them, but ffs just let her be the protagonist of one of these damn episodes!
i still have mostly positive feelings for this episode, because again, i love dax and i love trills in general, and i’m just a sucker for all the bullshit in the caves. it’s just that dax’s discovery of this incredibly meaningful aspect of her past that had been obscured really doesn’t have the kind of narrative focus it should? for what it’s worth, this is expanded upon greatly in a future episode, but it just feels like we really could’ve gotten the ball rolling here, and in general focused on dax more given that this is ostensibly a dax episode.
again, i liked it. but at this point in the show too many of the dax-focused episodes have fallen into the category of “i liked it, but.” b-rank
3x05 “second skin”
this is superficially extremely similar to the tng episode “face of the enemy,” except that kira actually has a ton of history with the cardassians and also troi wasn’t being gaslit into believing that she was a romulan. so uh, yeah! kind of an immediately strong premise right there.
this also somewhat answers a frustration i expressed last season, about the show not really ever sympathizing with cardassian civilians who are living under a fascist regime. the reason this doesn’t entirely answer that frustration is that we still aren’t seeing the plight of cardassian civilians but rather a dissident member of the military, but even that is definitely a step in the right direction because it shades in some of the gray areas and makes it clear that there are cardassians who oppose their fascist government.
but yeah, this is a very well-written episode, and garak shows up and kinda steals the show at times like he always does. but make no mistake, this episode is mainly about everyone & everything getting out of nana visitor’s way and letting her do her thing, and she absolutely puts the whole show on her back and says “i got this.” she kicks so much ass, guys. a-rank
3x06 “the abandoned”
this is a well-structured episode that sets up two main plots that have drastically different stakes & scale but have very coherent themes that dovetail effortlessly with each other. one of those times when it’s very clear what the show is saying without it being remotely forced.
the problem is that what the show has to say in both of these plotlines fucking sucks.
in one corner, we have a rapidly-aging jem’hadar that was recovered from some gamma quadrant salvage and became the station’s problem. odo takes the boy under his wing, and it’s all very sweet until it isn’t? but we’ll come back to that. in the other corner, jake sisko, a 16-year-old boy, is dating a 20-year-old girl. his father is, rightly, really fucking upset about that, but the whole plot is about making him okay with that and just. fucking. can we not?
in main, serious plot land, we actually get off to a pretty great start. sisko oohs & ahhs over the infant in sickbay, and i just fucking love how much he lights up in this scene. one of the many things i love about sisko is that he’s consistently portrayed as a kind, nurturing father, and this scene is just such a wonderful concentrated form of that. and when odo takes the boy under his wing, he’s uncomfortable & awkward as hell but clearly has the boy’s best interests at heart.
for like maybe 50% of the episode things are going swimmingly, and then odo boots up a combat program to give the boy a healthy outlet for the aggressive urges he’s having trouble regulating, and kira barges in & pulls odo aside to tell him she violently disagrees with this? and the episode totally bears her point of view out? the only way odo is able to defuse the situation is by taking the boy to the gamma quadrant and turning him over to the dominion to be a soldier-slave, and worse the episode literally ends with him sitting down & telling kira, “you were right.” BARF!
so if you’re keeping score at home, this episode spends most of its runtime asking interesting questions about nature vs. nurture and head-fakes at breaking down prejudice, and then ends up coming down decisively on the side of “nature” & justifying a prejudiced view of the jem’hadar, a race of people that is literally enslaved. COOL.
over in subplot land, there’s some goalpost shifting where sisko’s objections to jake’s relationship with mardah is framed as being about her being a dabo girl rather than JAKE BEING A LITERAL CHILD AND HER BEING A LITERAL ADULT???
they have this family dinner and sisko finds out that she’s actually very smart & pursuing an education, which like, NO SHIT? a lot of people are in demeaning service industry jobs to support something like this, and those of us who are stuck there and have no path out are oftentimes also well-educated? like, that’s his objection? really??? so yeah, that whole thing is just immediately off the rails and at the end of the episode he’s like… still got his misgivings, but not like “this is probably illegal & definitely not okay, STOP”-shaped misgivings?
i just. this whole thing is SO fucking weird & irresponsible, and i cannot believe that it got written, performed, edited, and aired without anyone with the power to stop it doing so? like, i know that plenty of skeevy shit ends up on the air, but this is fucking star trek staking out an “idk, maybe it’s fine actually?” position on adults dating minors????? fucking… HOW is that a thing that happened???
you know what, i don’t care that parts of this episode were good, both of its plotlines are morally bankrupt in ways that are inextricable from the very nature of the episode, i’m not giving this one a pass. it dealt me psychic damage. d-rank
3x07 “civil defense”
they did tng’s “disaster” but not quite as good, and about two seasons too late.
look, i’m not usually one to complain about “plot holes” or logic problems with a story unless they’re distracting, but the premise of this episode is distractingly bad. the idea that they haven’t totally replaced most of the sensitive equipment on this station, especially the main fucking computer???, with federation or bajoran equipment is a such a glaring security & engineering problem that i just can’t stop thinking about it for this entire episode.
like, look, i know i’m describing a rather serious commitment of resources and the creative team liked portraying the station as an underdog posting compared to more prestigious starship assignments, but ds9 was very strategically important before the dominion threat, and now that the dominion is a going concern it’s just difficult to believe that starfleet would leave their first line of defense this vulnerable.
this episode doesn’t take advantage of the “different groups of people trapped together” situation as effectively as the tng episode i referenced earlier, which is really a shame, but it does have plenty of fun shit like dukat showing up to gloat only to end up in the same predicament as everyone else, and dukat & garak getting into a verbal sparring match.
faulty premise aside, this is still a pretty fun ride. not the best, not the worst. b-rank
3x08 “meridian”
gods fucking damn it, guys, they do eventually figure out how to write dax, right? that’s not just my memory playing tricks on me? it’s not just that i’m so enamored with terry farrell with spots as a blueshirt? (tng & voyager’s lack of a blueshirt science officer is a very dumb superficial thing that always bothered me.)
the idea of a planet phasing in & out of our dimension is a pretty cool one that’s pretty well-realized here, and setting a romance on such a planet isn’t the worst idea. but having dax fall head-over-heels, like, “leaving my career & all my friends/chosen family behind”-level head-over-heels for this totally nothing dude is so discordant with everything we’ve seen from this character before & since. and even if you were willing to buy it as a concept, this episode does a pretty bad job of establishing them as having anything beyond an infatuation?
look, i am someone who did upend my life to move in with the love of my life in a fashion that many people would (and did) consider kind of fast. and i have never regretted that decision for even a second. but i am speaking from a very real place when i say i know what that looks like, and this ain’t it.
i do appreciate actually getting a star trek relationship that isn’t weirdly chaste. the line dax says about “counting each other’s spots” is fucking hot, but i wish they hadn’t wasted it on this non-character.
i literally cannot tell you anything about this guy. what’s more, i literally cannot tell you anything about how dax feels about him beyond “idk horny i guess”? this whole romance just feels so weird & forced, and it doesn’t help that his initial hitting on her is so overbearing & icky, but i guess ends up being justified after the fact because she does end up being into him? shades of early kira & bareil interactions.
this show does by & large give its female characters way more to do than tng did, but whenever it throws a romantic interest at them it does it in the most uncomfortable ways. idk. there’s probably a longer writeup in there somewhere, but i don’t have it in me right this second, and i think it falls outside of the scope of this episode.
while all the other dax episodes up until this point have been like “this was mostly good, but i had some issues with it,” this one is a full-blown red alert. stop doing this character so dirty!! #justicefordax. d-rank
3x09 “defiant”
FUCK it is so good to see jonathan frakes again. literally my only complaint is that you EASILY could’ve had will riker show up to help with the search for thomas riker. i can think of a few reasons not to do that, but unfortunately the part of my brain that handles analytical thought is being drowned out by the part of my brain that’s just saying “RIKER RIKER RIKER RIKER RIKER RIKER RIKER.”
pairing him up with kira was also just such a great move??? their chemistry is seriously off the charts, both when he’s posing as thomas & charming her pants off (probably not literally) and after he reveals himself (by hilariously ripping off his fake sideburns which are a thing he had) and they become adversaries.
i super wish we had ever gone back to this storyline, and there was a very unsubtle sequel hook towards the end of the episode, but alas this is the last we see of thomas. which is frankly pretty damn disappointing. the more jonathan frakes the better imo.
but yeah, idk, this episode rules. i was grinning like an idiot when i realized what episode we were on, and i literally squeed with delight when frakes makes his dramatic entrance towards the beginning of the episode with that big, dumb perfect smile of his. i’m so fucking easy. a-rank
3x10 “fascination”
no one:
absolutely no one:
seriously, NO ONE:
every star trek show: oh, hey, it’s time to do our “the naked time” clone episode!
in fairness this one at least had a unique approach (though not as unique as strange new worlds’ take on this), and i have been pretty consistently on the side of star trek being silly, but idk just seeing a bunch of random characters make out really didn’t do much for me? on the other hand i think it’s pretty hilarious that despite her not having as obvious of a reason for being there as she did on tng, lwaxana episodes on ds9 are just drastically better than the average lwaxana episode on tng?
again, though, “a bunch of main characters make out with each other for no reason” is just not really a super interesting episode concept for me? though, once you kind of get used to the episode’s entire deal, every now and then the episode would do a like PLOT TWIST MAKEOUT and it was fun to see it coming when the characters on the receiving end of said PLOT TWIST MAKEOUT clearly didn’t. (english major note: that’s called dramatic irony! … i am in so much debt for no reason.)
the bajoran gratitude festival that’s going on throughout the episode is kind of the main thing i actually enjoyed about this episode, though. just having chill diegetic music going on in the background & everyone walking around in civilian clothes was pretty cool imo. also towards the beginning of the episode, major kira & chief o’brien are both waiting for a transport from bajor to disembark and they have a cute little moment of ldr camaraderie.
speaking of chief o’brien, though, the fight he has with keiko (which was apparently NOT inspired by the weird telepathy shit going on with lwaxana, like the episode goes out of its way at the end to let you know he was unaffected) was just… yeesh. i’m sorry, the writing of their relationship is just so uncomfortable.
relatedly, though, the continued slow burn of miles & julian’s bromance has finally reached the point where they’re hanging out together all the time. nice to see that coming along.
i know i harshed on it a bit, but this isn’t a bad episode, and it’s a fun bit of disposable entertainment, it’s mostly just not a plotline i was super interested in seeing explored and when you add the genuinely uncomfortable miles/keiko stuff on top of it, it just leaves me with an overall negative impression. c-rank
3x11 & 3x12 “past tense”
okay lemme see if i can wrap my head around this super farfetched, grim dystopian future as presented by this speculative science fiction program as a cautionary tale. so, there’s just huge swaths of people living in squalor while others live in unthinkable luxury literally a few blocks away.
for the purpose of dramatizing the situation, let’s pick a totally random city that certainly won’t be an extremely visible example of this in real life–like, it’s happening kinda everywhere, but it’s happening the most in, say… san francisco. y’know, just to pick one at random.
oh and the privileged few living in absolutely morally repugnant luxury? we should have an example of those kinds of people. what should his deal be? oh, hey! how about communication & media. like, a sort of media… where you communicate… socially? and like, with technology & stuff? yeah, cool, let’s go with that.
i know this is going to require a lot of suspension of disbelief, but does it sound like we might have something here?
okay, to step outside the bit, there’s a lot this gets wrong, but holy shit it is scary how much the 2024(!!!) in this two-parter from 1995 resembles the lived experiences of us living here in *checks calendar* … huh. 2023.
uh-oh.
the one thing that really stops me from giving this an s-rank is the bit towards the end of part 2 where dax needs to get her combadge back from a guy with serious mental health problems and the episode just totally plays the whole thing for laughs. it’s basically just outright bullying (not the fun kind). it’s just so out of place in an episode that otherwise has quite a bit of insight & empathy on display.
but like, yeah obviously i would love to punch this script up, not just to remove the ableism but to bring greater emphasis to the police violence. but like, fuck guys, this episode (from 1995!!!) depicts homeless people organizing to fight for their rights and people feeling hopeless because the problems they’re facing just seem too big for them to tackle on their own. this needs like half a nudge to cross those two wires & explicitly tell the audience that what they need to do is organize & work together in solidarity, but fuck it is so close, and it is from almost 30 years ago, so i think it deserves quite a bit of credit for what it did nail. a-rank
3x13 “life support”
the conclusion to winn & bareil’s political rivalry, the best bashir episode of the series so far, and … jake & nog getting into dating hijinks.
i don’t dislike any particular parts of this, in fact i think every individual piece works pretty well on its own, but it really feels like they could’ve held off on the jake & nog stuff for a different a-plot? and maybe given this one a more serious (or at least neutral) b-plot? idk. just seemed like an odd pairing.
the jake & nog stuff was cute, even if i don’t remotely agree that cultural relativism should apply to things like misogyny? but like, making an honest effort to navigate cultural differences is still better than not doing that. (also like, tbf, as long as it’s consensual & with someone i like, i would love to be treated the way nog tries to treat that girl, lmao.)
and regardless of my feelings about the specifics of the situation, this is a really good jake/nog episode. i fucking love the moment when jake tells nog he can’t hang out with him and explains it’s because he has a date, and nog is like “oh word” and just assumes he’s going with him? fucking priceless.
the main plot was… rough. i mean that in an emotional sense, not quality-wise. i’m clearly not vedek bareil’s biggest fan as i’ve mentioned on a number of occasions, but seeing him go through what he goes through in this episode (and the emotional toll it takes on kira) is genuinely difficult. this is also a very strong kira episode, because of course nana visitor does a great job with all the difficult emotions she’s asked to play here.
this is also an interesting kai winn episode. she actually starts out as something of a sympathetic character, but as the episode goes on it becomes increasingly obvious that she is more than willing to hasten bareil’s demise to accomplish her goals. there’s this very obvious contrast of bareil being willing to sacrifice himself in order to achieve the noble goal of peace with the cardassians and winn not really even wanting peace with the cardassians all that much, but just wanting the credit for it to be part of her legacy.
oh, incidentally, the show has done such a good job of presenting winn as a conniving villain that first time i saw this episode i actually found myself wondering if winn had somehow engineered the accident that claimed bareil’s life, and it actually took me at least one rewatch to realize the episode never came close to implying that? like, it just feels like exactly the kind of twist that this sort of narrative would push towards with a character like winn, so much that it feels like it’s baked into the texture of the episode even though it’s not actually there? i’m wondering if anyone else gets that vibe from this episode.
but yeah, the character who ends up coming out looking the best in this episode is actually probably dr. bashir? he gets to tell off kai winn, which is pretty much always going to be a good look for anyone, but in doing so he also displayed the insight to see straight through to kai winn’s motivations.
but what really impressed me throughout the episode was his emotional maturity & professionalism. he advocates fiercely for what’s best for bareil throughout the episode, even to bareil himself, but ultimately respects the vedek’s wishes and presents him with every possible option. he was also so gentle & compassionate towards kira through every step from when they first thought bareil was dead to each step of the treatment, but in the end it doesn’t stop him from telling her what she needs to hear even when she doesn’t want to hear it.
the writing in the second season has definitely toned down how obnoxious bashir is presented as, but i think this episode really is his breakthrough episode. this honestly just doesn’t even feel like the same character from last season, and i think it’s an understatement to say that that’s probably for the best, because this guy i can get behind.
the only real knock against this episode is that, again, i just super don’t feel like these two plots mesh together well at all? but both plots worked pretty well for me in isolation, and i really did especially love what we got out of bashir here, so in the end i’d still have to say this is a pretty great episode. a-rank
3x14 “heart of stone”
yeah i’m not gonna try to force myself to have a lot to say about this one. i just… don’t like odo very much? and super don’t like odo/kira??? so seeing them start to veer in that direction is just… oy.
this is a good episode, though. it’s a very star trek problem that odo & kira try to solve together in a very star trek way (though of course with the twist at the end it turns out it wasn’t kira all along, gasp). it also reveals that the founders are much better at shapeshifting than odo is, which is its own kind of scary.
i’m a much bigger fan of the b plot, though, which is the first steps on the road to nog becoming the first ferengi in starfleet!! i fucking love this direction for his character. and we got some great scenes out of this first step on this journey, most notably the scene where sisko finds out why nog is pursuing this and the scene where quark tries to shut it down and rom finally grows a backbone. great stuff here. b-rank
3x15 “destiny”
i super don’t identify with the word “male,” but i still lowkey want to be hit on by a cardassian woman insulting my intelligence over & over. (fine, it’s not very lowkey.)
also, this totally confirms that garak has been hitting on bashir all this time.
i really liked how the prophecy came true but it ended up actually being a good thing that they totally misinterpreted as being a bad thing. and the bit on the bridge where they see the comet & kira gasps “the sword of stars” was a fantastically tense moment.
i think the best stuff in the episode was the development of sisko & kira’s relationship w/r/t sisko being the emissary (which she believes and he doesn’t), but also being her commanding officer. them having to balance that is a fantastic complication for their relationship, and the way they navigate it really speaks to a lot of the strengths of both characters.
really good episode all around imo. a-rank
3x16 “prophet motive”
pretty exciting to learn that the powerful beings that inhabit the wormhole and are worshipped by the majority of the bajoran populace as gods are communists tbh.
it’s honestly pretty surprising how successful the ferengi comedy episodes are on ds9 considering how much of a dud they are on tng. “house of quark” is still probably the best in this category, but this one is still a solid entry.
ds9 just seemed to have a much better handle on what was funny about the ferengi, what could be mined for genuine drama/empathy, and what should be jettisoned because it was bad television or just shockingly upfront antisemitism.
in another “did ronald d. moore bring this to ds9 or did he just take it with him from ds9 to bsg” detail, when we see the leatherbound book containing zek’s new rules of acquisition the corners are cut off, which is the way books & other paper products look in battlestar to help visually distinguish the humans in that show from earth.
in the b-plot of this episode, bashir is grumpy about being nominated for a prestigious medical award because it’s typically only actually awarded to very old doctors (“so when you said a prestigious award-winning doctor you just meant a very old doctor,” sorry that one’s for my dimension 20 folx). he makes a big huff about how he isn’t going to win anyway so he doesn’t care, but then throughout the episode his friends tease him about it & it becomes clear he really does hope he wins, even going so far as to write up an acceptance speech.
i love shit like chief o’brien casually bringing it up in conversation like it’s something he knows anything about and then whining “how could they give it to roget!!!” when the winner is announced like it’s a fucking sportsball game or something. fucking priceless.
i also loved seeing all of bashir’s colleagues gathered to do a watch party of the ceremony. i just love how much the crew feels like a family. it never feels forced, there’s genuine warmth there.
this isn’t an all-timer or anything, but it’s a fun episode all-around! b-rank
3x17 “visionary”
this shares a lot of dna with “whispers,” and idk why o’brien gets all the great bottle episodes, but yeah this one seriously kicks ass.
basically, o’brien is time-jumping due to a combination of his being exposed to some exotic form of radiation & an orbiting romulan warbird’s quantum singularity-based warp core. it’s frankly a bit eyebrow-raising that everyone didn’t figure this out basically immediately considering that it’s well known that romulans use artificial quantum singularities for their warp cores and it would be kind of astonishing if a naturally-occurring singularity just happened to be orbiting the station, but oh well.
anyway, o’brien keeps jumping 5 hours into the future and sees an escalating series of problems he’s able to avert ranging from his own death (on multiple occasions) to the total destruction of the station. he’s able to bring warnings back to avert these various catastrophes, and yeah this is just genuinely one of the most memorable & star trekky episodes of the whole damn show.
i’ll actually go slightly further. as someone who loves both star trek time travel hijinks & the romulans, it’s pretty easily my favorite pre-worf ds9 episode. s-rank
3x18 “distant voices”
i kinda lowkey hate it when star trek busts out the bad old age makeup, but someone on the creative team clearly has some kind of weird fetish for rapid aging, so we get at least one of these per series. on a plus side, this is pretty easily the best of the bunch.
basically, dr. bashir suffers a telepathic attack and the entire rest of the episode is happening in his mindscape while he’s in a coma. what really makes the episode for me is his interactions with garak (the tennis scene was especially choice) and the fact that the bad guy is just hella threatening & sadistic. like, my dude, call me, please.
this is extremely cheesy, but like, it’s a star trek show y’all. idk what to tell you. i appreciate that even though a lot of people like it because it’s the Serious and Gritty star trek, ds9 was about as far as it could possibly have been from being too ashamed to do its fair share (and then some) of silly star trek bullshit. b-rank
3x19 “through the looking glass”
sisko gets kidnapped to the mirror universe and proceeds to fuck both dax & kira’s mirror universe counterparts and convince his wife’s mirror universe counterpart to join the terran resistance. what a fucking legend.
the tuvok cameo was cute, and i wish we got that kind of thing more often on ds9, but ah well. also it was pretty funny that i had to clarify to my partner who hadn’t seen it yet that it actually was tuvok since tim russ kept showing up as non-tuvok characters in tng.
this episode probably should’ve been a two-parter, honestly? i know it probably couldn’t be since they had already filmed improbable cause before realizing that needed to be a two-parter, but this crams a lot into one episode, and ends up feeling super rushed as a result.
like, what was even the point of having dax’s mirror universe counterpart in the episode when she isn’t going to do anything other than get fucked by sisko? ditto for bashir tbh. (minus getting fucked by sisko. he didn’t even get to do that, he just kinda complained a bunch during a meeting. if this were the super-“ironic” 2010s a la mcu, he totally woulda said something like “this could have been an email” prior to getting a spinoff comedy series on disney plus because that line tested well.) it feels like the entire cast gets pretty shortchanged by the breakneck pace the episode had to move at.
don’t get me wrong. it’s still a very entertaining 45ish minutes of television, though, as mirror universe episodes almost always are. b-rank
3x20 “improbable cause” & 3x21 “the die is cast”
look, i’m just not gonna waste your time here, ok? it’s an action-packed garak-centric two-parter that has romulans, spy shit, and serves to continue nudging forward the dominion war storyline. it’s fucking awesome.
oh, i will also add that i love how the first episode starts with bashir & garak having their usual lunch date and the second episode starts with o’brien being a poor substitute for garak for the same date. sorry, jules. you oftentimes find that your polycule members just aren’t interchangeable like that. you gotta find what works for each relationship. a-rank
3x22 “explorers”
this isn’t one of my favorite episodes or anything, but it’s really nice! i’ve always loved the siskos’ father/son relationship, and this is a really solid, enjoyable episode centered around that relationship. great stuff. b-rank
3x23 “family business”
first & foremost this is our first visit to ferenginar and i really appreciated having this area of the star trek universe filled in a bit. like, it’s pretty much always a momentous occasion when a mainstay species’ homeworld gets shown for the first time.
the plight of ferengi women is something that’s been alluded to since all the way back in tng, and has come up more than once in ds9, most notably in “rules of acquisition” (the episode with pel). but this is the show’s first real attempt to dig into the issue on a larger scale, and i remembered being pretty pleased with it the first few times i saw it, but now that i’m revisiting it… honestly, i have some pretty mixed feelings about it?
what a lot of it boils down to is that very specifically tying ishka’s (and, by implied extension, all ferengi women) fight for liberation to… profit. and like… profit is bad, actually? profit is tied to another economic concept called “surplus value,” which is the crux of the central contradiction of capitalism. without getting too far into the weeds here, the general idea is that the more you exploit people the better it is for you.
so, like, the “more women ceos!”/“girlboss”/“lean in” trends in capitalist-approved, predominantly white brands of “feminism” is essentially saying “let’s not question the essential evils of capitalism, we just want to play too!”
on the other hand, not to be controversial or anything but it’s maybe not great that ferengi women apparently aren’t allowed to go outside or wear clothes? so like. even girlboss white feminism has an iota or two of moral highground here.
and, like, hell… we’re pretty fucking lucky that this episode depicts a ferengi woman fighting for her own liberation rather than, like, the federation swooping in & trying to bully the ferengi into being less misogynistic? because in its more naive moments, star trek oftentimes draws deliberate parallels between the federation and the u.s. (which, hahahaha, NO?), and wow does the u.s. ever love trying to pretend its latest imperialist venture is tied to human rights violations and/or oppression in whatever country it’s bombing into submission this week.
… oh, right, i said i was trying to stay out of the weeds, didn’t i? whoops.
fine, you’re right, at this point i should still be counting my blessings that the shockingly upfront antisemitism that gene roddenberry originally brought to the table for the ferengi has largely been left behind.
on the level of character & relationship drama, this feels like the right time to point out that the show finally figured out how to write rom at some point, and he feels like a fully-fledged character in ways that he never really did in season 1, and showed flashes of in season 2. i think the turning point was when he shut quark down when quark tried to veto nog joining starfleet, and it’s continued here.
yes, rom is still a wonderful himbo who deserves our protection, but he’s starting to be a three-dimensional himbo as his characterization really solidifies, and that’s great! having all three members of the station’s most prominent ferengi family be fully-fledged characters is definitely one for the win column.
on the other hand, the resolution of quark & his mother’s conflict honestly doesn’t feel super earned? like, the idea that rom getting the two of them in a room together was enough to resolve the issue doesn’t make a lot of sense when they were in the same room together multiple times? idk man. i do appreciate rom showing emotional intelligence here, but it just doesn’t really add up or feel motivated by anything else that’s happened in the episode to this point. it’s just kinda like “wellp. it’s almost time for the episode to be over now.”
… i’m really digging into this one a lot, but at the end of the day no matter how much i dig into this stuff i think things like what i mentioned at the top of this review (the worldbuilding around the introduction of ferenginar) matter a whole lot more to me than whether the politics of the episode were good or whether the character conflicts resolve in ways that are entirely satisfying? like, those things matter and are interesting to talk about, but at the end of the day yeah i did enjoy this episode in the sense that it was engaging and had a lot going on and expanded the world quite a bit.
to end on a definitive high note, back on deep space nine, we get some always-welcome sisko family fun times. specifically, cassidy yates–the freighter captain who jake mentioned wanting to introduce his father to in the previous episode–makes her first appearance! unless i’m misremembering i don’t think it’s ever made entirely clear just how jake made friends with cassidy in the first place? but him trying to set them up is super cute. i really appreciate how often this show does right by benjamin & jake. b-rank
3x24 “shakaar”
it had been a minute since we got an update on the bajoran political scene as well as a minute since we’d had a kira episode, so this episode went “those sure are two birds! it sure would be a shame if anything were to happen to them involving this one stone i have!”
tl;dr kai winn is named interim first minister, and tries her level best to make it look like she stumbled into being a fascist while playing innocent the whole time, but is thwarted by major kira & some of her old friends/comrades from the resistance. it does seem a bit weird that shakaar is able to go from a struggling farmer to the leading candidate for first minister seemingly out of nowhere, but other than that it’s a pretty okay episode. i’m pretty much always up for kai winn showing up & fucking shit up, she’s such an especially great foil for kira. b-rank
3x25 “facets”
this is hands down the best dax episode we’ve gotten so far in the series. it also shows off the fact that literally every actor on this show is fucking fantastic, like pretty much all of the golden age treks have great casts but i think ds9’s is head & shoulders better than the rest in terms of just how many staggeringly good actors it has. so getting to see basically every main cast member minus terry farrell playing a completely different person and doing it convincingly was just a real treat.
again it’s just wonderful seeing all of these actors flexing. they really get to demonstrate how damn much range they each have. i think leading off with nana visitor was a great call because i think her & avery brooks are far & away the best actors on a cast of great actors, like their only real competition would be terry farrell who obviously had to play her usual character, so you really did want to start with either visitor or brooks. she really did a great job of selling this concept of each actor playing a completely different character than they usually do, and each successive performance really benefited from the audience’s buy-in. just great planning & execution here.
but i don’t think anyone who’s seen this would be especially surprised to hear me say that in an episode that’s carried by its actors’ performances, avery brooks’ is the biggest standout by a pretty wide margin. everyone is playing against type in a variety of ways, but the character brooks is asked to play is such a departure, it’s genuinely creepy hearing that character’s voice coming out of paragon of virtue commander sisko’s mouth. just extremely great work by brooks here.
it’s also just such a huge relief to finally get a dax episode that’s actually about dax and not about how all the men around her feel about her. and seeing her finally get to actually confront curzon, a plot thread that’s been hanging out there for a while, was just so damn fulfilling. i do wish curzon himself had been taken to task for just how gross his actions towards jadzia were at the time, but the episode does a great job of grappling with the ramifications for jadzia and just how emotionally complicated the whole thing is. a-rank
3x26 “the adversary”
they did the thing in space, so basically they accidentally did among us like 30 years before it came out.
this is a really fun episode in its own right. it also really emphasizes the danger posed by just one changeling, and then at the very end of the episode it hits you with the “you’re too late, we’re everywhere” ton of bricks. just incredible escalation here. we’ve had the threat of the dominion building in a slow burn over the course of a whole season, and just when you think you’ve gotten used to it it gets turned up to 11 in an instant. a-rank
s-rank: 1
a-rank: 13
b-rank: 9
c-rank: 1
d-rank: 2
average: 3.38 (b-rank)
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