One of my favourite episodes of Deep Space Nine when I was a kid was "Second Sight", a second season episode from November, 1993. Imagine my surprise when I discovered yesterday that it's widely considered one of the worst episodes of Deep Space Nine, both by critics and by people who worked on the show. No accounting for taste, I guess. I watched it last night and I still like it but, sure, it's not a masterpiece. In fact, I think one of the reasons I always liked it was that it's kind of low key, not really presuming to be anything much, despite the fact that it features a guy reigniting a dead sun by crashing a shuttlecraft into it.
That's the subplot, though. The main plot is a romantic story in which Commander Sisko (Avery Brooks) meets a mysterious woman called Fenna (Salli Elise Richardson). She wears a red dress and has pointy ears, two classic, immediate turn-ons. They flirt a little and have some chemistry and then she just vanishes. They have a couple other similar encounters before Sisko gets to the bottom of the mystery.
It turns out to be something similar to the concept of Kon Satoshi's 2006 film Paprika. Fenna turns out to be a psychic projection of another woman, a manifestation of that woman's subconscious. I guess I liked the little tragedy of Sisko having chemistry with a woman's subconscious desires but having nothing at all between himself and the waking woman, a situation that can only be resolved by the two of them never speaking again.
Dislike for the episode generally seems to revolve around the woman's husband, played by Richard Kiley. Maybe I've had it mixed up all along and his was supposed to be the main plot and Fenna's the subplot. It really doesn't come off that way, though.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix.
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