Exasperated Calculator

Another trip to the time travel well, fortunately with something new to offer.

This episode is very reminiscent of Cause and Effect, but given that was one of the best episodes ever that’s not the worst base to build off. There’s a new direction taken here, and the episode ends up standing well on its own. Perhaps there’s a bit too much plot, and not quite enough character, but it’s still an entertaining hour of television.

This episode is an example of ‘good’ technobabble. Any science fiction show is going to have its share of incomprehensible technologies. When it’s good, it’s used to create interesting situations with clear rules that allow the audience to follow what’s being done. The bad sort is when it’s used to justify a quick fix at the end of the episode, acting as a deus ex machina to get the writer out of the hole they’ve dug. Too often Star Trek does the latter, so it’s important to remember that the other sort of technobabble isn’t a problem per se.

278 down, 459 to go.

It took the best part of a season, but Deep Space 9 now officially has an episode to rival the best of Next Generation.

The greatest strength of this episode is that it draws almost solely on the setting on Bajor, and outside of that is barely science fiction. It’s a bold, courageous approach to take, and could very easily have worked out very badly. It succeeds brilliantly, mainly thanks to the performances of Nana Visitor as Kira and Harris Yulin as Marritza.

Another important reason why the episode works so well is that the plot manages to avoid a lot of the cliches or recurrent plots around the ideas of captured war criminals – there’s a genuinely new approach here, and it makes for excellent viewing.

277 down, 460 to go.

Time for DS9 to take another run at the ‘possessed by alien energy’ plot. This one works a lot better than The Passenger, but that’s not a hard bar to clear.

There are some nice bits and pieces – Sisko as the disengaged yet vicious leader was nice. It was also a nice touch that the aliens were just twisting reactions and events, rather than replacing people’s memories wholesale. But it developed out of hand a bit too quickly, with Kira skipping from ‘annoyed’ to ‘assassinate the Commander’ too quickly to be believable even with the aliens.

I’m normally pretty easy to please in terms of suspending disbelief, but the ending with the alien energy sucked out of them and then sucked out into space? That was a bit too much even for me. For once, I think I’d have preferred the technobabble.

276 down, 461 to go.

The most interesting transporter malfunction so far. In a call back to the TOS episode The Enemy Within, Riker is duplicated in a transporter accident. Only this time it’s not an evil twin.

It’s a refreshing take on the older idea, and my only quibble is the lack of trauma in ‘Thomas’ Riker. He’s been trapped, alone, in this isolated base for eight years. But he doesn’t seem traumatised at all by it – in fact, you get the impression that the existence of the other Riker is the only thing causing him trauma. Frakes does a reasonable job in separating the two Rikers, but I think it would have been helped if he had a bit more to work with in the script.

275 down, 462 to go.

Oh dear, it’s Lwaxana Troi.

Despite that handicap, I liked quite a bit here. O’Brien’s relationship with the computer seemed quite real to me – I’ve had similar thoughts about some of the computers that I’ve worked with. And while Lwaxana’s normal predatory approach was annoying, we learnt quite a bit about Odo that made his character seem much more rounded.

And is it just me, or did Lwaxana actually look a lot better without the wig?

In the end I found myself enjoying this one, as even the silly subplot with Bashir and the ambassadors worked quite well.

274 down, 463 to go.

Y’know, if I was Gowron I’d just go in the other direction whenever I saw Worf – he always seems to be caught in the middle of complicated difficulties for the Klingon Empire.

This time around he’s rewriting the Klingon constitution by reforming it into a constitutional monarchy. It’s a good episode, driven by Worf’s doubts and inner journey. It manages to transcend the somewhat silly premise of cloning an original Klingon hero.

As an aside, it’s interesting that we’ve now had almost a dozen episodes focused on Klingon politics, and really only one about those of the Federation. As a result we know far more about the Klingons, which seems odd.

273 down, 464 to go.