Quark Work

I'm still watching Deep Space Nine. Last night was a 1994 episode called "Profit and Loss" in which Quark, the shady Ferengi bartender, is surprised when his old flame visits the station, a Cardassian woman and her two students. She's become a political dissident. Quark goes goo-goo eyes for her and she slaps him. It's really broad and the two characters have zero chemistry. I never got any sense of why the two characters are attracted to each other. A lot of Quark episodes seem to coast on Quark's basic charm, a charm I no longer see, if I ever actually did. But I don't hate everything he does and, in other episodes, I still find him interesting. The episode is more interesting for Garak's part. The only Cardassian resident of the station was at this point a mysterious figure whose connexions to his homeworld were still unclear. Is he a spy? Is he an exile? Is he somehow both? It's fun to try to figure out from watching his performance and I like this scene in which he and Quark discuss fashion.

The previous episode was "Playing God", an episode focused on Jadzia Dax who's mentoring another member of her species. He's a young man who wants to be implanted with a symbiote organism to achieve the combined consciousness only select members of their species can attain. Meanwhile, the two of them accidentally pick up a small "proto-universe" which they bring back to the space station to study. The thing starts to expand and threatens to destroy the station in the process, bringing about the ethical question of whether they can destroy an entire universe just to save themselves. Their eventual solution, to dump it in a distant part of the galaxy, seems to me like it would be only temporary if the thing is truly going to expand to universe size. Still, it's an interesting idea, but I feel like it was expanded on better in the Futurama episode in which the robot, Bender, becomes God.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix, Futurama is on Disney+ and/or Hulu.