Busy Space Nine

I'm still working my way through a rewatch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and recently I got to the late third season two parter, "Improbable Cause"/"The Die Is Cast", which aired in April, 1995. This is one I used to rewatch a lot when I was in high school. When we were studying Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in one English class, I told the teacher that this set of episodes referenced the play, and it does, at the beginning, when Bashir and Garek are talking about it over lunch. She let me show that scene, but then I told her the whole episode contained references to the play, so she showed the whole first of the two episodes to the class. I tend to cringe looking back on that because the rest of the two parter really has very little to do with Julius Caesar, apart from a quote of the famous "fault is not in our stars" line at the very end of part two. But, when I think about it, she didn't have to listen to one of her students and play a whole episode of Star Trek she'd never seen before. She probably just saw a chance to grade papers or something while the show babysat the class. That's how in classes of all manner of subjects we so often ended up watching Back to the Future.

This is the two part episode where Garek teams up with Odo and they encounter Garek's former boss, Enabran Tain. This two parter kind of ruins Garek for the rest of the series because, before this, although we had a relatively good idea that he'd worked for Cardassian intelligence at some point in his past, he was still an enigma, and that added something to every scene he was in. It seemed like there was a lot less reason for him to turn up after this. But I still like his chemistry with Odo, especially since this episode is mainly Odo being the hardass instead of the emotional puddle, I mean figuratively.

As a teenager, my friends and I liked the big space battle, and used to compare it to the high water mark at that time, the space battle in Return of the Jedi. Of course, there have been space battles in movies since that have at least exceeded those in number of ships a thousand fold, a thousand times over. CGI got good at rendering spaceships a lot earlier than it managed to perfect anything else. The Return of the Jedi battle sequence, with its remarkable practical effects, still looks great, though, but this episode's looks stiff and slow. It still works as a story point, at least, and it effectively establishes how dangerous the Dominion is when they're able to fend off the combined Cardassian and Romulan fleets.