Opaka Lives

A few days ago I watched "Battle Lines", a first season episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It's not a great episode and it gets sillier the more I think about it.

The spiritual leader of the Bajorans, basically the pope, Kai Opaka (Camille Saviola), has a vision. She has to go through the wormhole to the gamma quadrant. So Sisko (Avery Brooks) takes her in a runabout along with Kira (Nana Visitor) and Bashir (Alexander Siddig).

I used to really love the runabouts when I was a kid. I'm not sure why. They're basically really big shuttlecrafts. "Battle Lines" particularly stands out in my memory as one of the few times (if not the only time?) we see a significant portion of a runabout exterior built to scale for a set. And watching again a few days ago, I realised they got the warp nacelle wrong.

The tip should have the glowing red bussard ramscoop. They clearly reused a nacelle from a TNG shuttle.

Yeah, I was a Trekker.

So as you can see, they crash land on a moon. They discover two warring humanoid factions, one of them led by none other than Mike Ehrmantraut himself, Jonathan Banks, in a rock star wig.

He really doesn't distinguish himself in this episode, sadly. It turns out (spoilers) the warring factions can never die because of some nanotechnology in the air. They can't die but can't leave the planet, either, or the nanobots cease functioning. It might've been more interesting if their characters had been more developed.

The Kai gets killed so she gets stuck on the planet. But that's okay with her because apparently mediating between these two groups is her destiny. What's weird is that, after this, the show basically treats the character as dead. A particularly odd point considering there's a lot of drama over the replacement Kai later on.

Everyone knows the first season of DS9 is pretty rough. I'm fighting the urge to skip ahead, though.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix in Japan.

Twitter Sonnet #1664

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The flooded streets conclude with rainy docks.
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The ladder squeezed the life from all its rungs.
With rubber hats, the masks were shuttled home.
The time of space concludes with land to roam.

Ferengi Magnetism

The first official delegation arrives from the Gamma Quadrant in "Move Along Home", a first season episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It's just Sisko and the crew's luck they turn out to be weirdos obsessed with games who want to go straight to Quark's.

Actually, they're really not that weird. Star Trek was always criticised for having not-very-alien aliens. It's pretty sad the first delegation from the mysterious Gamma Quadrant is just people with paint on their foreheads. But the production had budget problems, according to Memory Alpha.

It's not a terrible episode but I never got caught up in the main drama--Sisko (Avery Brooks), Bashir (Alexander Siddig), Dax (Terry Farrell), and Kira (Nana Visitor) getting caught as pawns in a game Quark (Armin Shimmerman) is forced to play. I must be a big Armin Shimmerman fan, come to think of it, as I just realised I'm watching through two shows he features on now--DS9 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I prefer him as Quark. One of the things I like about this episode is it has a moment where Sisko actually starts chatting comfortably with Quark, showing he can get off the moral high horse. There are some nice scenes between Sisko and his son, too. It seems like Avery Brooks was still experimenting a lot with Sisko and he has all these entertaining little gestures and facial ticks.

Brooks is like a stealth bomber, he seems to hardly move but then he cracks a smile and his whole aura seems to change.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available all over the place. I watched it on Netflix.

Twitter Sonnet #1448

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Your Station for Space Mystery

I like a mystery with a big bucket of red herrings. "The Passenger", a first season episode of Deep Space Nine, kills off its killer at the beginning then puts out a lot of possibilities as to how he could survive. But which is the herring we're actually looking for?

Is it the Federation security chief introduced at exactly the same time, who butts heads with Odo? Did the officer who had the killer in custody switch places with him? Did the killer transfer his consciousness to another body? Dax and Bashir investigate.

I like the unexpectedly sunny smile Dax gives Sisko when he tells her "Good work." I don't remember her being such a sweetheart. The moment almost feels improvised.

The killer looks quite a bit like William Shatner, actually. That would've been a hell of a twist.

Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix.

Twitter Sonnet #1444

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Rene Auberjonois

There are many reasons one might know Rene Auberjonois, who passed away yesterday at the age of 79. From Benson, from his appearances in Robert Altman movies, from Boston Legal. I was delighted to hear his voice in Fallout: New Vegas and I was always creeped out by his skeleton in The Last Unicorn when I was little. But, like many people, for me he was mainly Constable Odo on Deep Space Nine. Last night I watched one of the episodes I used to watch over and over in high school, the second season noir homage "Necessary Evil".

Season two is my favourite season of Deep Space Nine. It's far enough from the premiere that the rough edges have been mostly smoothed out and it's before the showrunners started trying to incorporate more traditional Star Trek elements in season three, like the Defiant. I like the Defiant and many other aspects of the series post-season two but two seems like the high water mark of what the show set out to be in the beginning; a place resting on several economic, political, and cultural fault lines slowly trying to heal from horrible recent history. "Necessary Evil" is a prime example because half of it is flashbacks to when the station was controlled by the Cardassians occupying Bajor. And there's a concept lending itself perfectly to a noir plot like Out of the Past or Witness for the Prosecution.

Quark (Armin Shimerman) is shot and Odo is compelled to reopen a murder investigation dating back to the Cardassian occupation--his first job as the station's investigator, in fact. Assigned to the post by Gul Dukat who suspects the shapeshifter will have a knack for the job, we see Odo's first efforts at interrogation and, indeed, his keen skills of observation honed in the interest of perfecting his imitation of humanoids enables him to spot signs of duplicity, among other things.

Now a more experienced detective in the present, he's forced to reassess his earlier judgements. This was Odo at his best, in my opinion. My interest in the character diminished when every episode about him became about his connexion to his people and his emotional vulnerability. Auberjonois could play both brilliantly but I preferred the hard nosed detective with just a hint of oddly childlike, earnest vulnerability.

Maybe if the show were resurrected we wouldn't see Odo, anyway. Maybe they could recast the character since he is a shapeshifter, after all. But it would seem like sacrilege now continuing without Auberjonois who was a very big part of what made Deep Space Nine one of the highlights of the Star Trek canon.