"There is a Hole in Your Mind" (B5 Pilot - "The Gathering" '93)

The 1998 re-release title card.  (No, it wasn't cut off on the air.)

February 22, 1993

(Synopsis on The Lurker's Guide)

The problem with analyzing "The Gathering" is that there are actually two different versions of the pilot, the one that aired in 1993 and a re-cut version that aired in 1998 after Babylon 5 moved to TNT for its fifth and final season.

This presents a difficulty for the blog, since on one hand part of the conceit here is to analyze the show as it aired, but on the other hand, it is difficult to find copies of the original '93 version.  The one on my DVD set is '98, while the episodes available for viewing on the WB site don't have either version, starting instead with the first episode from the series proper, "Midnight on the Firing Line".  (Oddly enough, the WB site clearly uses a fifth season image for the series despite only having the first and second seasons available to watch as of this writing.  It makes you wonder sometimes.)

Fortunately the synopsis I've linked to above was written in 1993, so if you read that one you'll get a sense of what was on the air in February.  I'll discuss the '93 version exclusively in this entry, while the next entry covers the '98 re-release and the changes that were made and how the series changed between the pilot and the first season debut a year later.

Right away in this version in particular, a viewer is burdened by massive amounts of exposition.  The show starts with a brief tour of the station for arriving telepath Lyta Alexander, which lets Commander Sinclair ex-posit on the station's physical layout and general mission.  Then we have a meeting of the senior staff where they talk about how secretive the Vorlons are.   And so on and so forth throughout the whole episode.  Just about the only scenes that aren't weighed down by exposition are the brief cutaways to the villain of the piece going about his covert actions.

This isn't all bad, mind you.  Some of the scenes are actually quite effective, especially the ones where things about the characters are revealed alongside the data dumps.  For example, the scene where Londo laments the fall of the Centauri shows how much his people's decline galls him, despite the smiling face he's obligated to put on as his people's ambassador:

"There was a time when this whole quadrant belonged to us! What are we now? Twelve worlds and a thousand monuments to past glories. Living off memories and stories, and selling trinkets. My god, man! We've become a tourist attraction. "See the great Centauri Republic - open 9 to 5 - Earth time."

                                                                                   -Londo Mollari, "The Gathering"

That's the brilliance of Babylon 5, really.  Because Straczynski knew where Londo was going character-wise, he could put clues to his rise and fall in the very first episode.  For all that Babylon 5 spends a lot of time breaking televised science fiction traditions, "The Gathering" spends much of its time playing strictly to type, primarily so that the series itself can break those types over its knee.  Londo, for example, is set up as the semi-serious victim who's pushed around by the Narns, faded in glory, and needs the protection of the powerful Earth Alliance.  By comparison, G'kar is clearly the villain of the piece.  He's a devious schemer who's trying to start a war and is the guy to be watched out for.  And yet by the end of the series, five seasons later, one could say with some honesty that Londo and G'kar had managed to swap roles along the way.

Speaking of G'kar, another example of decent exposition worked into a scene rather than just dumped into the middle of it came in G'kar's confrontation with Delenn.  G'kar's frustration that Delenn won't play ball causes him to yell at her about the conclusion to the Earth-Minbari War.  With that conversation we learn more about the mystery there, without a single human in the room.

Delenn in "The Gathering"

We should talk about the three faces of Delenn, which is appropriate given how important the number three is in Minbari culture.  The original plan was for Delenn to be male throughout the first season then have him become female through the chrysalis.  That plan was abandoned when the techniques for altering Mira Furlan's voice proved to be inadequate.  So the plan was changed to make it so Delenn was a normal hairless Minbari throughout the first season, then have her become half human thereafter.  The problem was that they didn't realize the sound technique sucked until well after they'd shot the pilot.  So Furlan ended up in the distinctly masculine prosthetics throughout the pilot, leading to one of several discrepancies between the pilot and the show proper.

First season Delenn.

So far I've only talked about the alien ambassadors.  The reason for that is because the casualty rate among the human characters was pretty ridiculous.  Indeed, of all the humans in "The Gathering" only Michael Garibaldi makes it to the start of season two.  We'll discuss who left and why in the '98 analysis, but suffice it to say that the three characters who worked the best in the cast were the alien ones.

Delenn as we mostly know her.

So what else can we say about "The Gathering" in 1993?  The story is pretty basic once you get past all the world-building and exposition that's being flung around hither and yon.  Assassin tries to kill the Vorlon, nearly succeeds, frames Commander Sinclair, and nearly gets away with it but the good guys catch him in the end.  

The CG graphics were state of the art for 1993, but are laughable two decades later, especially when viewed in HD.  The show would get better at them later on, but these early efforts are difficult to take seriously now.  Granted, some of the effects are still effective, especially the Vorlon fleet deploying around the station.  But others, such as the close up of the breaching pod on the side of the station are just so obviously computer generated as to be distracting.  

Not that I could tell that when I saw "The Gathering" myself on a cold February night down in Champaign, Illinois, where I was attending college.  Unlike the gathering of friends in a comfortably furnished basement with discounted pizza and a big TV that were there for my first exposure to Deep Space Nine, my first experience watching Babylon 5 was a solitary one.  I was alone in my dorm, watching it on a fuzzy 13' black and white portable TV.  The heating there had never been adequate, so I was bundled up under blankets with the TV in my lap. 

Even with the inadequate viewing conditions, I could tell that there was a lot of potential in that ninety minutes of TV.  There was a lot wrong too, of course, but even then I was TV savvy enough to know that they usually fix things after the pilot.  I was ready, willing, and able to get into watching the show proper next week.  Except I couldn't.  The show wasn't on the air yet, and wouldn't be for another year.  So I gradually forgot about Babylon 5, and when Deep Space Nine came back on in March, I watched it instead.  

So what happened?  What changed from '93 to '94?  Or, for that matter, what got changed between '93 and '98 when "The Gathering" got re-edited and put on the air again?  To find that out, you'll have to come back on Friday for "The Gathering" '98!

"The Prophets Await You" (DS9 Early Season One Interlude)

February 22 - March 13, 1993

Station, wormhole, runabout.  This is Season One.

(Season One Summary on Memory Alpha)

On the eve of Babylon 5's debut, we should pause here and see what we've learned about Deep Space Nine so far.  Normally, we'll be doing these interludes at the end of the season, and we will still have one for Season One in a few weeks time.  However, this is a natural break point, not only because we're going to be having our first close look at Babylon 5 in the next installment, but because this was the first real break for the series itself.

In American network TV one rarely gets an entire season of a show in one uninterrupted string of episodes.  Instead, a show's episodes are strung out over much of the year, with frequent breaks with the show putting on repeats of earlier episodes.  Furthermore, the way shows get paid in the USA relates to the Nielsen Company ratings system.  How much a network can charge its advertisers in any given quarter is based on how well a show does in each 'Sweeps' period.  Naturally, a show has incentive to put its best foot forward during Sweeps, so new episodes inevitably appear during those periods.  When are Sweeps?  Well the exact dates vary from year to year, but in general they correspond to the months of May, July, November, and February.  What a surprise, then, that here at the end of February as Sweeps in '93 ended, Deep Space Nine would take its first break.  Further, when it comes back in March it will only be for two episodes before going on break again until the middle of April.  Then there's a continual stream of episodes until the end of May, catching the May Sweeps, with first season concluding in in June.

So the string of episodes we've just talked about was the first chance that viewers had to evaluate Deep Space Nine and decide whether to continue with it.  After all, while watching a new show every week can be habit forming, you have to really enjoy it to get back into that habit after a few weeks away.  So let's make our own examination of the first batch of episodes ourselves, shall we?

From an overall impact perspective it's fascinating how little there is through out the first half of the season.  Events in "The Emissary" are mission critical, of course.  And there are a few references to the Kohn Ma and Kira's history as a terrorist from "Past Prologue" to be had throughout the series, especially while the Cardassians are the main villains in the first couple of seasons prior to their displacement from that role by the Dominion.  Garak, of course, would be a major addition to the show who came out of "Past Prologue" as well.

But beyond those first couple of episodes, it is amazing how disposable the rest of the season is.  Q and Vash never return to DS9, thogh Q does go back to his natural foil on the Enterprise.  Neither does the race whose civil war Dax meddled with, or the people that Kajada and Vantika are from.  Indeed, the idea that it is possible through technology to pass your mind into someone else's body is also never mentioned again.  For that matter, the first race we meet from the other side of the wormhole, the Hunters and Tosk, are never heard from again either.  There were some plans to include the Hunters as part of the Dominion, but they were dropped, and the Tosk shrouding ability was given to the Jem'Hadar instead.

So these episodes are mostly dispoable one-shots except for the way they introduce us to the characters.  So how did that work out?

Structurally, the first half of the season was mostly single character focused with one group piece, "Babel", and one poorly conceived guest episode, "Q-Less".  Every actor who's listed in the opening credits got his or her own episode to play with, except Armin Shimmerman's Quark who gets his in two episode's time with "The Nagus" and Cirric Lofton's Jake who doesn't really get his own episode at all this season.

Indeed, Jake is more or less a forgotten character through much of the series.  When he does get the spotlight, such as the fifth season episodes "...Nor the Battle to the Strong" and "In the Cards" and especially the fourth season "The Visitor", they're able to do some quality work.  But for the most part Jake only appears to add a layer of complication to Sisko's life rather than as a major player in his own right, despite his being in the opening credits.

What then have we learned about the characters to date?

Commander Benjamin Sisko is treading new ground as a Starfleet captain.  He's not as diplomatic or rules bound as his immediate predecessor, Jean-Luc Picard, but neither is he a frontier renegade like James T. Kirk.  What Sisko is, however, is more devious than his counterparts.  That was most notable in the season premiere before he heads into the wormhole when he blackmails Quark into staying on the station, or when he commanded Odo to look the other way to let Tosk escape in "Captive Pursuit".  Most recently, he faked out Vantika by sneaking the reversion beam in the with the tractor beam in "The Passenger".  Granted that last was just a variation of the trick Kirk played on Khan in The Wrath of Khan, but even so, it was nicely handled. Still, the point remains.  Until later in the series, Ben Sisko hasn't got much in the way of military force available to him.  As such, he has to out think his opponents, and so far  they've been pretty consistent about portraying him that way.

Dax and Kira, alas, haven't had as much luck.  Both are pretty distinct in their own episodes, but outside of "Dax" and "Past Prologue" respectively, they pretty much just act like regular button pushers, pilots, and sensor scanners.  There hasn't been as much opportunity for them to distinguish themselves from the rest of the cast as yet.  O'Brien on the other hand, is pretty well characterized, though of course Colm Meany had years to work things out for O'Brien on The Next Generation first.  Bashir, like Sisko, also plays counter to  type by avoiding the humble and wise Starfleet doctor trope as exemplified by Doctors McCoy, Crusher, and Pulaski.  He's mostly been pretty annoying, but that will eventually change.

One pair of characters that works brilliantly is, of course, Odo and Quark.  Like Londo and G'Kar on Babylon 5, there's an instant chemistry between a pair of veteran actors playing antagonists who become almost friends by the end.  The downside to that, however, is the temptation to keep those two together as often as possible, to the detriment of their interactions with other characters in the series.  The solution to that quandary is a mixed bag.  For Odo it eventually leads to a relationship with Kira and the Changeling episodes.  For Quark the often dire Ferrengi episodes, the first of which is our next DS9 episode, "The Nagus".

In conclusion, the character work is a nice beginning but still mostly incomplete, while the episodes themselves are mostly forgettable.  It's a mixed bag, to be sure, but not actively bad in most cases.  Much of DS9's audience felt the same way and most returned after the first break.

But before we do so, we have to get 1993's only Babylon 5 entry.  So "The Gathering" is on deck.  I'll see you there.

"There's Nothing Wrong With a Good Delusion" (DS9 1-9 "The Passenger")

February 21, 1993

Dammit, I'm just here to help!

(Synopsis on Memory Alpha)

This should have been the Bashir episode.  Indeed, he has more to do in this episode than he had in any episode since he got to hang out with Garak back in "Past Prologue" or failed to cure the disease in "Babel".  Certainly this is Siddig El Fadil's episode to win or lose.

So let's start with him.  Properly, the actor who plays Julian Bashir is named Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi.  For the first few seasons of Deep Space Nine he was credited as Siddig El Fadil.  By the start of the fourth season he'd grown tired of people mispronouncing even that shortened version and switched his credit to Alexander Siddig.  His friends call him Sid.  We'll go with Siddig.  Siddig's from the Sudan but grew up in London.  During the show he'll fall for Nana Visitor and when we get the odd plotline of Kira carrying Miles and Keiko's baby at the end of the fourth and through the fifth season, it would be because of Visitor's pregnancy with Siddig's son Django.

So far Siddig's been playing Bashir as an arrogant prat.  He's simultaneously totally full of himself and blindingly naive.  He was unpopular to begin with and, after the first season, there were network executives who wanted him gone from the show, much as Dr. Crusher was removed from The Next Generation, and the way Dr. Kyle would leave Babylon 5 after the pilot.  In all three cases, the result was different.  For Kyle the pilot was the end of the road.  For Crusher, the executives would repent after they found her replacement, Dr. Pulaski, even more objectionable.  Here on Deep Space Nine, the showrunners had both a plan and the will to hold on to Bashir.  They stood their ground, and Bashir stayed.

The plan that saved the good doctor was, as it happened, the same thing that almost got him booted from the series.  Bashir was designed to be unlikable and arrogant.  The plan would be to show him grow as a person, learn humility, and become a shining example of a Starfleet officer by the end of the series after having been through the crucible.  In the end the plan more or less succeeded, but it had a rough start here.  Siddig plays Bashir as so oblivious and arrogant that he can be hard to watch.  In addition, the way he's been portrayed as an inveterate womanizer, while in the tradition of Kirk and Riker, adds an unpleasant aspect to the character as he overplays his hand and shoots way past charming into creepy.  That doesn't come into play much in "The Passenger", mind you, but was pretty distinctive in both "Q-Less" and "Dax:".

You can transport memories now?  Really?

The funny thing about "The Passenger" is the way the mystery wraps up.  Once you've heard that evil scientist Vantika can pass his memory and personality by touch, it's not hard to remember that he choked Bashir in the teaser.  For that matter, if you pay close attention, it's clearly Siddig's voice whispering the threats when Vantika confronts Quark.  So it really wasn't as much of a surprise as it ought to have been when they make the big reveal of a possessed Bashir as the villain.  Alas, the solution to the crisis is more technobabble.  Modulate the tractor beam here, use the transporter to beam out the bad memories there.  It's all quite unsatisfying.

Future showrunner Ira Steven Behr wasn't a fan of "The Passenger", saying:

""The Passenger" was a show at the time I felt could have just as easily been about Geordi. There's nothing wrong with the episode; I just don't have much of a feeling for it. It could have just as easily taken place on the Enterprise"

                                                           -Ira Steven Behr, Captains' Logs Supplemental

So if the plot of the episode fails to impress, what about the performances?  Siddig's reading of possessed Bashir was too stiff for my taste, though the fact that we only get the one line from the original Vantika before his death makes it hard to compare.  Still, there are just too many odd pauses that makes the line readings seem forced and unnatural to me.

The Law and a Criminal meet in a bar...

More successful, however, is the banter between Odo and Quark.  It's funny and the chemistry between René Auberjonois and Armin Shimmerman is perfect.  It's rare to find that kind of excellent teamwork between actors, especially only a few episodes into the series, and the people behind Deep Space Nine were quick to realize the potential there.  Eventually we'd get an episode of the show that was nothing but Odo and Quark, season five's "The Ascent".

Speaking of security, we're introduced to a new recurring character who only barely recurs, Lieutenant Primmin.  Primmin is thrown in as a Starfleet security representative.  His main role is to act as a red herring for this mystery and to annoy Odo by stepping on his turf.  The drama in that aborted B-plot is neutered right off the bat, though, as Sisko back Odo unequivocally, which means there's no conflict since Sisko forces Primmin to accept Odo's authority.  By the end of the episode the two learn to work together somewhat, but it means little because Primmin's next appearance in the next episode "Move Along Home" would be his last.  When DS9 would add another Starfleet security officer at the start of the third season they would do a better job.

Always with the prosthetics.  Well, at least it's not the Narn get up!

A character who performs better in this episode is someone else who's changed her crediting the way Siddig did.  At the time of this episode, and later when she appears on Babylon 5, the actress who plays space cop Kajada was going by Caitlin Brown.  Nowadays she's Julie Caitlin Brown, and more of an agent than an actress, though she still got minor roles as recently as 2010.

Brown would go on to play a character on The Next Generation later in 1993, then switch over to a recurring role on Babylon 5.  There she played G'kar's firebrand assistant, Na'toth.  It was a great shame when Brown decided not to continue in the role beyond the first season, and, like Saavik's switch to Robin Curtis after Kirstie Alley, Brown's replacement as Na'toth, Mark Kay Adams, just wasn't the same.

That brings us to the Babylon 5 moment of the analysis.  The crossover actor.  There is, of course, a finite pool of character actors to draw on in Hollywood at any given time.  When two shows are running simultaneously, it is pretty much inevitable that some actors and actresses would appear on both shows.  The most egregious of them was Robert Foxworth who played a general on Babylon 5 but was unavailable to return to the role for an important episode because he was off playing an admiral on Deep Space Nine.  There were, of course, others.  Andreas Katsulas would take some time off from B5 to appear as Romulan Commander Tomalak in The Next Generation's finale, "All Good Things," and, as mentioned previously, Walter Koenig would have a major recurring villain role on Babylon 5.  Even the voice of the computer, among other Trek roles, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, would get a guest role on B5.  In short, we should remember that neither show was being made in a vacuum, and that there's a lot going back and forth between them, including members of the cast.

Next up, we'll have a look at where we've been for DS9 then get into B5's pilot, "The Gathering".

"Live, Jadzia Dax" (DS9 1-8 "Dax")

This isn't even about you.

February 14, 1993

(Synopsis at Memory Alpha)

"Dax" is a sucker's bet, because you go in thinking you're finally going to get to know Lt. Jadzia Dax of Starfleet, and instead you find out far more about the late Trill Ambassador Curzon Dax.  And yet it still qualifies as one of our character introduction episodes, because it introduces us to the complexity of being a Joined Trill.

Unfortunately, Terry Farrell doesn't play up that complexity very often on Deep Space Nine.  If it weren't for the spots and the way she sometimes seems unusually smug, you would rarely get the feeling that there's a three hundred year old symbiote living in a young woman's body.  She just doesn't know how to play an old person in a young person's body.  For a clinic on that technique done right, I refer you to Doctor Who, and in particular Matt Smith's performance as the Eleventh Doctor.

So we're not even going to try to stick to the source material, are we?

Most of the time, the only way you would guess that there's anything beyond 'science officer' going on with Dax is when they go out of their way to do a Trill episode, of which "Dax" is the first.  So let's talk Trill, shall we?  First of all we need to admit that beyond the name and basic premise, there isn't a lot left from the original Trill concept as seen in the fourth season The Next Generation episode "The Host."  In that episode, the Trill character doesn't have spots, he's got forehead ridges instead.  Fine, that's just a cosmetic thing.  Spotted Trills are from the north and ridged Trills the south or some such.  Besides, it was pointed out that Terry Farrell didn't look as hot with the ridges than she did the spots, and further, prosthetics cost more and take more time to apply than dotted makeup.  Just ask Michael Dorn.

Okay, maybe they had a point vis a vis spots vs. ridges.

But that wasn't all they changed.  In "The Host" it's made clear that whenever the symbiote enters a new body it totally takes over that body.  There was nothing left of Will Riker throughout the second half of "The Host."  Instead, the Odun symbiote was in total control of Riker's body while they were merged.  So much so that Odun kept up his romance of Dr. Crusher despite the fact that it had to be pretty awkward for her to be getting backrubs from what used to be a colleague and superior officer.  Indeed, the fact that Odun was perfectly willing to keep up the romance even when transferred to a female body speaks well for Odun's open-mindedness, even if it doesn't say much for Crusher's that she rejects the new her.  Babylon 5 would go rather farther in that regard, though the final revelations on that score would prove to be somewhat unsatisfying.

Oh, and in "The Host" it's made clear that Trill's can't use transporters, as that disrupts the link between the host and symbiote.  Needless to say that complication, as well as the symbiote dominance aspect of Trills, is jettisoned pretty damn quick.  All told, I can't even say that these were the wrong decisions.  What are fun complications when used on a guest star can be crippling liabilities for a main character, so changes in appearance and in the way Trills function were made and no explanation was given.  It was assumed that the fans would come up with some sort of in-universe explanation, and indeed one was found in the DS9 novel "Forged in Fire."  In short: it's all the Klingons fault.

So setting aside how Trills were introduced on TNG, let's see how they get used on DS9.  In "Dax" we get the question of whether crimes committed during one host's lifetime carry over to the next.  As the crimes Dax is accused of here carry the death penalty we have the added problem that, since Jadzia can no longer survive without the symbiote, to kill the Dax symbiote for the crimes of Curzon Dax would necessarily mean executing Jadzia for a crime that occurred before she was born.  Had they kept the 'symbiote-takes-all' angle from TNG this would have been less of an issue, but here in "Dax" they argue that each new joining is a true merger of separate entities.  That's what gives Sisko his case to try and halt Dax's extradition, and it makes for an interesting debate, and one that isn't actually settled by the episode before Odo shows up with a witness to get Dax off the hook.  

Of course since the episode  brings in a Trill expert from Trill itself, it's pretty odd that neither lawyer nor the arbitrator bothers to ask how they handle symbiote crime on Trill.  After all with your entire society built around the little worm guys, you'd think whether or not the current host is responsible for past crimes would be a pretty basic legal precedent to set, eh?

Though Dax sitting silently while on her way to the gallows is kind of frustrating, it's no more so for us the audience than it is for Sisko who's watching an old friend seem to be willing to walk off a cliff without being willing to explain herself.  This is a pretty good episode.  Sisko has some good scenes, and we see Odo in investigator mode for the first time, and it's well done.  Finally, some kudos.  I've pointed out in the past when we've run into guest actors who don't measure up, so it is just that I also mention particularly effective performances as well.  The late Anne Haney played her role as the annoyed and sarcastic Arbiter perfectly.  She doesn't have a ton of scenes, but the ones she's in, she steals.

That was "Dax."  We now know that she's willing to face execution to keep her word to an ex-lover, and that she has a lot of baggage from her past lives to work through.  It will turn out that much of that baggage will have to do with Klingons, but that comes later.

So let's have a look at Babylon 5's equivalent character, Commander Sinclair's old friend Delenn.  Here's what Straczynski had to say about the Minbar ambassador in one of his first posts about B5 back in late 2001:

"Shortly after Sinclair was named Commander, the Minbari assigned their first ambassador to the station.

His name is Delenn. And he stays very close to Commander Sinclair.

Some say he is keeping a close eye on Sinclair.

Some say he is Sinclair's friend. And some say there may well be something very lethal behind those unreadable Minbari eyes."

                                                                  -J. Michael Straczynski, GENIE 12/31/91    

You read that right.  He.  We'll talk more about the changes to Delenn in once we finally get to "The Gathering," but suffice it to say that the Curzon to Jadzia Dax thing almost had a direct analogue over on Babylon 5.

First, though, we have a little more DS9 to cover.  So come back next time to get to an unusual mystery episode, "The Passenger."

"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?

"Die With Honor, O'Brien" (DS9 1-6 "Captive Pursuit")

He's living prey.  He's a Starfleet engineer.  Can they avoid getting shot?

January 31, 1993

(Synopsis on Memory Alpha)

With "Captive Pursuit" we get the first episode devoted to a character who's been around for ages but has only been "Chief Miles O'Brien" for a relatively short amount of time. Colm Meany appeared in the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Encounter at Farpoint," as the guy running Ops on the Battle Bridge. Starting with season 2 of TNG, he was the Transporter Chief. Over time, he grew in importance, and things were added to him. He went from Transporter Chief to Chief O'Brien to Chief Miles O'Brien. He even got married to one of the Enterprise's botanists, Keiko, and together they had a daughter named Molly, who Worf helped birth in the otherwise forgettable TNG episode "Disaster." (Come to think of it, that episode was pretty forgettable even including the "tough guy is challenged by having to be a midwife" plot, but never mind that.)

O'Brien was, in short, the most important character on TNG who wasn't in the main cast. Therefore, it was pretty reasonable that he'd end up as one of the main cast of Deep Space Nine, especially since they'd shown in the TNG episode "The Wounded" that O'Brien had a history with the Cardassians.

Throughout The Next Generation, O'Brien had been shown to be loyal, hard-working, and dependable. Here in O'Brien's first episode as the focus character, we see that he's loyal, hard-working, dependable, and badly overworked. So things haven't changed all that much for O'Brien, except for his workload.

Invoking British Redcoats and big game hunters much?

This episode challenges O'Brien with the station's first visitor from the Gamma Quadrant, a being named Tosk. Tosk, as we discover halfway through the episode, is raised and trained to be living prey for the Hunters. Needless to say there's something of an ethical dilemma involved for our Starfleet crew in this practice. On one hand there's the obvious fact that it's wrong to hunt sentient creatures. Especially to the point of death, as they do here. On the other hand, Tosk is happy to be hunted, and has in fact trained his whole life to be hunted. He knows it will end inevitably in his death, but being hunted is the ultimate expression of skill in his culture. To be a Tosk is to fight to extend your life just one more day in the face of incredible odds. Everyone in his culture, Hunter and Tosk both, look up to the Tosks, and they are heroes in death.

We'll touch on the themes of sentient beings manufactured for a single purpose by the end of season two when the Jem'Hadar make their debut. It is a debate that I see in reference to AI a lot too. If we are ever able to create true artificial intelligence will the constraints that are placed on them by their builders make them slaves?  Heady stuff, and worthy of some interesting debate.

Alas, that's not really what we get in this episode.  Because another of Star Trek's quirks pops up instead, the Prime Directive.  Confusing, inconsistently used, and more known for its breakage than its correct application, the Prime Directive is supposed to keep Starfleet from screwing around with other cultures.  In theory, it represents hard lessons about what happens when you give advanced technology to primitive cultures.  A long-held fan theory that was eventually disproved by Enterprise was that the original disaster was Starfleet giving the Klingons warp technology leading to generations of bloody conflict with a society that wasn't ready to hit the stars.  So making sure that not only does Starfleet tech stay out of primitive hands make sense, extending the directive to ban any kind of interference with other cultures seems like a great idea.

That's the theory.  In practice, though, the writers of Star Trek shows are pretty loose on what constitutes "interference."  From series to series, and sometimes even from season to season of the same show, the Prime Directive fluctuates wildly in what it means the crew of a starship can or can't do.  Sometimes it is explicitly stated to only apply to pre-warp cultures.  But other times, and as it is applied here in "Captive Pursuit," it means not messing around with another culture, even when that culture involves shooting up your space station!

And that's the problem with the Prime Directive.  Like technobabble, it has become a crutch for bad writing. Need to insert some quick drama to your morality play?  Wave around the Prime Directive.  Need to keep the characters from using the obvious and rational solution to a problem?  Prime Directive says you can't.  So sorry.  Does it matter that last season we used the Prime Directive in a way that completely contradicts what we're doing here?  No, no it does not.

Fortunately, Deep Space Nine's station-bound format limits the show's opportunities to trot out the Prime Directive.  Compared to the original Star Trek, The Next Generation, or Voyager the Prime Directive rarely comes up.  For the most part, the crew of DS9 aren't going out looking for trouble, and as such, the Prime Directive simply doesn't come into play.  Which is for the best, I'd say.

Overall, I find "Captive Pursuit" to be much like the Prime Directive itself.  It contains potentially interesting ideas that are marred by poor execution.  While Colm Meany's performance as O'Brien is solid as usual, I never connected to Tosk.  He never seemed as dangerous as the show was making him out to be, and I never felt much sympathy for his plight.  Some of that was script and direction, and some of it the acting.  Either way, I never really bought Tosk as a character, and since he was half of a two man play, the whole structure of the episode collapsed for me.  But hey, they can't all be winners.

Over on the B5 front, JMS had nothing whatsoever to say about this episode.  But he did say this:

"What the hell am I doing up at 4:15 a.m. my time? Watching B5 for the ten zillionth time. Picking it apart. Making notes. This is nuts. I'm going to bed. See you all in the afternoon....."

Which is pretty amusing in that twenty years later I found myself staying up to 4 am picking apart Deep Space Nine and will soon be doing the same to Babylon 5.  Some things never change, I suppose.

Next time, a pair of TNG characters stop by DS9 for a visit.  Which ones?  Well, I'll bet you can guess at least one of them when I tell you the episode is titled "Q-Less."  I'll see you there.

"We'll Haggle Over Price Later" (DS9 1-5, "Babel")

(Synopsis on Memory Alpha)

Dammit, who's going to unstop the toilet if O'Brien dies?

January 24, 1993

With three character focused introductory episodes in the can, Deep Space Nine opted for an ensemble episode for episode four. It's the first episode of the series that isn't really about any one character so much as it is about a plot event. In this case, the plot is a classic of science fiction, the Big Disease.

The Big Disease has a storied history in Star Trek. "The Naked Time," an episode of the original Star Trek series is considered a classic. The idea of a disease that unleashes the parts of ourselves that we keep hidden or under control was a good one, plus you got to see Sulu chase people around with a sword, and who doesn't like that? "The Naked Now," The Next Generation's version of the same idea was somewhat less successful, but showed us a few new things about the characters. What it showed about the female characters in particular is why the episode was less successful, but never mind that.

Both Naked episodes showed up early in their respective series runs, as the fourth episode aired for Star Trek and the third for The Next Generation. Similarly, "Babel" is the fourth episode of Deep Space Nine. That's understandable because one of the nice things about the Big Disease plot is that it lets you put the characters under stress in a way that they aren't accustomed to. This is particularly notable at the end of the episode where, "Ten Little Indians" style, Odo and Quark are the only ones left functioning in Ops after everyone else has either left or succumbed to the disease.

What "Babel" doesn't do, however, is recycle the Psi 2000 inhibitions destroying disease. Instead, the DS9 crew is infected by an aphasia virus that interferes with the victim's ability to use language. What's more, it wasn't just a random plague, but a Bajoran created bio-weapon designed to take out the Cardassians. The plan of the Bajoran terrorists seems pretty ill-conceived, though. If you're going to make a bio-weapon that, as we see, can affect Bajorans as easily as it does the Cardassians it's meant to kill, why are you planting it on a space station in orbit around Bajor? Surely there must be better places to release the bug, like Cardassia Prime for example.

The twist to the episode is that unlike Doctors McCoy and Crusher, DS9's Doctor Bashir doesn't get to find the cure to the disease. Major Kira does that by kidnapping the assistant to the scientist who'd created the weapon in the first place. You'd think that kidnapping a prominent doctor and risking his life by exposing him to a deadly disease would merit some kind of censure, but no, we're informed by the closing voiceover that "things are returning to normal."

"A Man Alone" ended much the same way, with Sisko making a log entry about how things are back to normal. It's an unsatisfying way to end an episode, in that it basically says that events in this episode have no greater significance. Considering that Odo was nearly lynched last episode and Kira kidnapped a guy in this one, you'd think that there ought to be more long term effects. That there isn't is a disappointment but not a surprise. Episodic television has almost always been a one and done state of affairs. Excepting the two parts of "The Menagerie" and the fact that the Romulans were introduced in "Balance of Terror" so you should probably watch that one before you watch "The Enterprise Incident" which has Romulans in it, pretty much any episode of Star Trek can be watched in any order you like. There are few recurring characters and even fewer direct references to previous events. Likewise, while The Next Generation dabbled in continuity, with such continuing stories as the Borg threat to the Federation or Worf, his family history, and the Klingon Empire, it was dabbling only. For the most part, as long as you ignore Riker's beard and the changes in uniform from season to season, The Next Generation can be watched is pretty much any order just like the original Star Trek.

Deep Space Nine breaks from tradition by having long running storylines throughout much of the length of the show. The first two seasons deal pretty heavily with Bajoran politics and religion, with a side of Federation and Cardassian politics. Then in the season two finale we're introduced to the Dominion, and the rest of the series tosses Bajor into the dustbin of history and focuses instead on the growing Dominion threat and the slide to a cataclysmic war. There's a reason for the sudden shift in tone, and his name is Ira Behr, but that's a while off yet. Suffice it to say that Deep Space Nine seems for its first two seasons to be a show about Bajor, the Federation, and the Cardassians, and becomes something else entirely for its last five years.

Which is an odd observation to make when writing about an episode that has no continuity implications what so ever. Neither the disease, the men who created it, the Bajoran terrorists who planted it, or even the panicked freighter captain who nearly blows up the station are ever heard from again. This is a purely stand alone episode. But sometimes you can see something best by comparing it to its opposite. So this is what we mean when we're talking about stand-alone episodes. It's an episode that, excepting certain signs that time has passed like changes to the opening credits, Sisko's hair, and Cirroc Lofton's height, could be seen in the beginning of season one or the end of season seven without changing at all.

As with many things, the gang at Babylon 5 felt less constrained by tradition than the Deep Space Nine crew. Of course, for the B5 team there was much less tradition to be constrained by. Rather than two previous television series and a handful of movies, Babylon 5 only had to worry about the basic rules of episodic television, narrowed down to science fiction television.

They mostly spent their time breaking those rules with a sledgehammer.

For instance, while Babylon 5 had several stand-alone episodes, especially in the first two and a half seasons, they also had one lone story arc that ran throughout the length of the show. Indeed, that was one of the main selling points of the show, that it was, in effect, a five year long novel. As Straczynski put it, three days before "Babel" aired, both in his comparison of his show to DS9 and about the ongoing story:

"Those who have seen the two shows have no problem telling them apart. And future B5 stuff will continue to remain separate and fresh for the same reason that the pilot is different and fresh: because it proceeds from another voice. Just as Clarke's stories have always been different from Asimov's has been different from Ellison's have been different from Bova's have been different from...well, you get the idea."

"No comparison of quality implied there, only as examples of voice. (One final note: B5 has always been conceived as, fundamentally, a five year story, a novel for television, which makes it very different as well.)"

And if there was one thing that sets the two shows apart, it's that. Deep Space Nine was a traditional television show that dabbled in longer story arcs. Babylon 5 was trying to tell one long story over five years. In 2013, that concept is widely accepted. Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and 24 all had either season long or series long stories. There is no such thing as a stand-alone episode of Game of Thrones, where every episode flows from one to the other like chapters of a novel, which is exactly what it is.

But in 1993, this was a very big deal indeed. It hadn't been done before quite that way, at least in American live-action television. Unless you counted soap operas, that is. Or the old serials of the 1950's and '60s. Or...

So perhaps it is more accurate to say that while the idea wasn't new, the implementation was. Certainly it broke the mold of what was expected in science fiction television. Fans of the idea, and the show, said that telling one story all the way through gave the B5 universe more depth and gave you more reason to care about the characters. Detractors said that if you missed the beginning or more than one or two episodes along the way you were screwed because you'd be lost and have no way to catch up. Both sides were right, after a fashion, and we'll get into that more when Babylon 5 finally catches up.

We should also say that when Babylon 5 gets to do the Big Disease show, they break the mold even more than "Babel" does here.

Sworn enemies working together.  We should do this more often.

What else do we have to say about "Babel?" It does seem odd to me that if Quark's Ferrengi immune system is so good that he can be unaffected by the virus, why weren't the rest of Quark's crew helping him out in Ops? I'll forgive the conceit, though, since the Quark and Odo scenes are very good in this episode. Indeed, if there was a B-Plot in this episode it was Quark and Odo, though like the better B-Plots, this one merged with the main plot by the end of the episode.

Thus we find that "Babel" is a reasonable if unexceptional episode of Deep Space Nine and move on to the next episode, "Captive Pursuits," where Chief Miles O'Brien finally gets his time in the spotlight. I'll see you there.