"I'm Not Picard" (DS9 1-7 "Q-Less")

Star Trek can tell many stories well.  Romantic comedies are not among them.

February 7, 1993

(Synopsis on Memory Alpha)

For the most part, the various Star Trek shows didn't really crossover with one another very much.  Star Trek, of course, had nothing to crossover with, excepting the second season episode "Assignment: Earth," which was a backdoor pilot into a spin-off series that never materialized.  The Next Generation managed to get some of the original series characters in for guest spots, but otherwise did not acknowledge the other shows.  Voyager and Enterprise being separated from the rest of Trek by space and time respectively had limited opportunities to crossover.  Indeed, the one time Enterprise did manage to do a crossover was the series finale, and doing so sparked tremendous outrage from Enterprise fans who felt cheated to have an episode focusing on Will Riker rather than a proper resolution for Captain Archer and company.

Deep Space Nine was different.   Characters and concepts from The Next Generation in particular showed up all the time.  And that wasn't all.  Deep Space Nine the station appeared in the first episode of Voyager, and the DS9 crew would crossover, in an episode cheekily named "Crossover", with the Mirror Universe introduced in the original Star Trek.  The piece de resistance would be season five's "Trials and Tribble-ations" where-in digital technology would integrate the DS9 crew in and out of the Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles."  And of course, as we've discussed, Miles O'Brien is himself a crossover character from The Next Generation, and TNG's Captain Picard was there for DS9's first episode.

The odd thing about "Q-Less", then, isn't its status as a crossover episode.  We'll be having another more traditional crossover episode later in the first season when Lwaxana Troi shows up in "The Forsaken," and arguably "Past Prologue" could be considered a crossover episode in that the Duras sisters from The Next Generation showed up in Garak and Bashir's B-Plot then smuggled the bomb to Tahna Los in the A-Plot.  They weren't all that important in the episode as a whole, though, so I wrote them out of that analysis entirely.  That said, Deep Space Nine would tend to have two to three episodes per season that could be considered crossovers. So crossovers were a pretty common event on DS9.

No, what makes "Q-Less" such an odd duck is that none of the Deep Space Nine characters are the lead in this story.  Instead, this episode is about Vash.  Vash is an interesting character.  For one thing, through three appearances on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine we never find out what her first name is.  Which is odd, since she's presented as a potential love interest for both Jean-Luc Picard and Julian Bashir.  One would think that he first thing you'd ask your date is what her first name is, right?  Given that this is the Federation and its infinite diversity I suppose it's possible that Vash is her first or only name, but if it's the former then we never learn her family name which is still weird, and if it's the latter then why does she reminisce about not seeing Earth for years?

In her two previous appearances on The Next Generation, Vash served primarily as a foil and romantic complication for Captain Picard.  She represented everything he'd left behind when he set aside his first love of archaeology in favor of a career in Starfleet.  As the "road not taken", Vash is a figure of temptation to Jean-Luc.  What's more, she's the Belloc to Picard's Indiana Jones: the dark archaeologist interested in profit rather than  preserving the historical legacy of her finds.  She can lie, cheat, and steal to get her way in a fashion that Picard cannot.  That interaction and counterpoint between the way she acts versus the way Picard does sets up most of her best scenes.

Space babies, menacing Starfleet since "An Encounter at Farpoint"

Unfortunately, Picard is nowhere to be found in "Q-Less."  And without him, without someone to transgress against, we find that Vash is like a mirror without anyone's image to reflect.  There just isn't that much there.  Which is a problem because this episode is about Vash, and she doesn't actually do anything particularly interesting.  You see, as a trangressive figure, Vash should be going around causing trouble in sneaky and clever ways.  Instead, she ends up spending the whole episode reacting to everyone else.  She gets rescued from the Gamma Quadrant, stashes some loot at the bank, gets hit on by Bashir, and gets offered a chance to auction off her acquisitions by Quark.  Sure, it turns out that her best piece of swag is in fact yet another space egg that's about to hatch, but she had no way to know that.  Even at the end, when Q inspires her to get her mojo back and she chooses to work with Quark to explore the Tartarus system rather than take a cushy job back on Earth, it's an empty gesture because this is also her final appearance in any Trek on screen.  The promise of further Vash adventures is never fulfilled.

Who wouldn't want to punch this face?

Of course, "Q-less" doesn't just bring back Vash, it brings back John Delancie's Q.  Alas, Q turns out to need Picard almost as much as Vash does.  Sure, the scene where Q taunts Sisko is fun, but since Q isn't there for anyone else except Vash, the scene ends up being basically meaningless.  There's that exchange that everyone remembers from this episode:

"You hit me...Picard never hit me."

"I'm not Picard."

"Indeed not.  You're much easier to provoke.  How fortunate for me."

                                                                                                      -Q and Sisko, "Q-less"

But it isn't fortunate at all, because provoking Sisko means nothing to Q.  And since Q, like Vash, never returns to DS9, learning that about Sisko doesn't help anyone.  So instead, Q just flits around being sarcastic at people.  His only really meaningful scene is at the very end where he accepts that his time with Vash is really at an end, and he manages to return her to her "true destiny" of a shady archaeologist.  But one good scene does not redeem an episode of wasted opportunities.

There is one thing else that happens in this episode that I have, albeit reluctantly, to touch on.  And that is Ferrengi ear sex.  It's a weird thing to have to discuss, but here it is.  Vash strokes Quark's ears to get him to lower his percentage of the auction proceeds.  Since the ears are an, perhaps even the, erogenous zone for Ferrengi, what Vash is doing here is pretty close to giving Quark a blow job to get a better deal out of him.  Which is, on one hand, about the only rule-breaking thing she does all episode, and since I was disappointed by how little of her old roguish personality was on display in this episode seems like an odd thing to complain about.  Furthermore, stroking someone's ears is a somewhat intimate but not an overtly sexual act from a human perspective, so Vash could easily defend herself by saying "it's just his ears!"  And yet...

And yet there's a layer of seediness to the act that I find uncomfortable.  Certainly, Quark is a seedy character.  He took the obvious next step to holodeck technology and created his holosuite brothel with it.  There was a scene at the beginning of "Captive Pursuits" where we learn that Quark's dabo girls are contractually obligated to provide him sexual favors.  So from Quark's perspective, this kind of manipulation makes sense.  But not so for Vash.  Vash, after all, distinguished herself to Picard as the one person on Risa who didn't want to hop into bed with him at the first chance.  Granted, she became more attracted to him later on, and him to her, but that was after they'd gotten to know one another better.  Vash's debut on The Next Generation was about her archaeology and the fact that she was something of a scoundrel, not because she was a sex object.  To see her used as such in "Q-less" was another disappointment in an already disappointing episode.

Thus "Q-less."  What was going on over on the Babylon-5 front around then, I wonder?  Well, it's hard to say because there's a gap in the JMSNews archive from the end of January to the beginning of June in 1993.  Which is a shame, because that covers the public debut of "The Gathering" on February 22nd of '93.  Still, in late January Straczynski was talking about the results of some press screenings, in which we find the following throwaway line:

"BTW, Walter Koenig saw the pilot and said it was "a winner," adding that he thinks it "should get a lot of the Trek fans, plus a lot of more mainstream viewers."
                                                                            
                                                                  -J. Michael Straczynski on GENIE, 1/30/93

Koenig was willing to put his money where his mouth was, as he would appear several times through out Babylon 5's run as the ruthless PsiCop Bester.

So "The Gathering" looms ever closer, but we still have a couple of DS9 episodes to get through first, then I'll do a "what we've learned so far" post for DS9, then blow down the doors with "The Gathering," about which I have a lot to say.

But first, our one by one character examinations continue with "Dax."  Guess who that one's about?