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innerbrat and I have started intermittently watching Deep Space Nine. We have just finished episode eight, which seems like as good a place as any to start putting up episode reaction posts.
For future reference: Debi has seen through season three or four before giving it up out of overwhelming scientific frustration. I have seen only one episode previously while actually paying attention, but I am watching with the vague spoiler awareness that one gets from having episodes on in the background all the time in my parents' room growing up, and also occasionally seeing gifsets go by on my tumblr dash.
1 & 2. Emissary
Neither Debi nor I realized that this was a double episode when we started watching it and were very confused about why this episode seemed to stretch on forever, much like Sisko's tragic backstory. "But you exist here!" YES. WE DO. FOREVER, APPARENTLY.
Anyway the main outcome of this episode was a tentative affection for the cast and a vague lack of interest in existential wormhole aliens.
3. Past Prologue
Kira episode! I am way looking forward to more Bajoran politics. Garak is introduced and asks Bashir out on a date; Bashir is way too interested in being a SEXY SPY to notice, triggering the first of many, many groans of "OH, BASHIR." We both vaguely expect Kira's terrorist friend to weight the moral scales irretrievably by proving to have killed LOTS OF CARDASSIAN BABIES in his past, so his actual moral extremism seems fairly light by comparison.
4. A Man Alone
Odo episode! This is the one where I start shipping Odo/Quark, to my vaguely horrified shame. It's just, it hits my noir buttons AND my jaded-enemies-who-are-each-other's-best-friends-but-won't-admit-it buttons! I'M SORRY EVERYONE.
This is also the one where Bashir clones a guy to prove that the original guy killed another one of his clones, and then completely fails to explain what they're going to do with the newly created clone after that. Like, how is that first conversation going to go?
"Hello, citizen! Welcome to existence!"
"???"
"Here is a suit of clothes, courtesy of the Federation, and a biographical dossier on your murderous clone-brother."
"???"
"Now go forth and become . . . not a murderer, I guess. Bye now!"
In other words, ACE BIO-ETHICS, DEEP SPACE NINE COMMAND TEAM.
We also have a lot of questions about who found a bucketful of proto-Odo and brought him home to foster. Like, who first looked at that bucket of baby slosh and was like, "how cute! I bet it's sentient! Can we keep him?"
5. Babel
This is the one that got us really excited because we thought it was going to be a plot about universal communicators breaking down and examine science and social linguistics!
. . . it was not a plot about any of that, instead it was an excuse to have a generic "OH NO PLAGUE!" plot. I mean normally I like "OH NO PLAGUE" plots, but in this case I was disappointed.
This is also the episode that sets up the problem of O'Brien being the only engineer on the station and having to fix ALL the vending machines ALL the time and then utterly fails to solve it, which means that Debi and I have now headcanoned that O'Brien cloned himself at the end of the episode and in all future episodes, whenever O'Brien is onscreen doing something plot-related, somewhere an O'Brien clone is toiling away sorting out somebody's plumbing. Look, we have already established that Deep Space Nine has ACE CLONING BIO-ETHICS.
6. Captive Pursuit
In this episode O'Brien (or maybe O'Brien Clone One) gets tired of not having a special alien friend to call his own and therefore adopts one. Everyone else has one! Bashir has Garak and Quark has Odo (okay, Quark and Odo have each other, I guess) and Sisko has Kira and Dax and O'BRIEN HAS NO ONE, except now he has the star of The Most Dangerous Game who has to leave at the end of the episode anyway. SORRY, O'BRIEN.
7. Q-Less
This is the one where Sisko demonstrates that he has no tolerance for any of this weird flirty trolling that Q likes to pull by punching him in the face. This is also the one where Odo calls Quark into his office because Quark is having a thing with Q's ex-girlfriend Lara Croft, and they have a conversation where Quark leans way over into Odo's personal space and demands to know if there is anything he desires, anything at all, and I swear to God they are acting out a scene from a noir movie with Odo as PI and Quark as femme fatale. I DON'T EVEN KNOW.
Meanwhile, Bashir flirts with everything in sight and then falls asleep for the rest of the episode. "The problem with Bashir," says Debi, "is he learned about girls from books and then got really attractive."
8. Dax
This is the one that firmly establishes for me that Odo just wants to be in a noir movie, because he's kind of annoyed about being sent off to investigate a murder that the previous Dax might or might not have done until the backstory gets all sleazy and scandalous and then you can almost see him putting on the mental fedora.
(Also, Debi and I have decided that this show would be way better if they'd hired the Capital Scandal costume designer. UNIFORM FEDORAS FOR EVERYONE.)
Meanwhile Sisko plays lawyer, we learn a lot about Trills in an effort to establish that THE PERSONALITIES ARE SYMBIONT, NO SERIOUSLY, SYMBIONT, Kira is extremely awesome in her ten seconds of screen time (there hasn't been enough Kira for ages!) and the show flirts with letting Dax make out with a lady but we're not quite there yet. Debi assures me that it will come.
innerbrat and I have started intermittently watching Deep Space Nine. We have just finished episode eight, which seems like as good a place as any to start putting up episode reaction posts.For future reference: Debi has seen through season three or four before giving it up out of overwhelming scientific frustration. I have seen only one episode previously while actually paying attention, but I am watching with the vague spoiler awareness that one gets from having episodes on in the background all the time in my parents' room growing up, and also occasionally seeing gifsets go by on my tumblr dash.
1 & 2. Emissary
Neither Debi nor I realized that this was a double episode when we started watching it and were very confused about why this episode seemed to stretch on forever, much like Sisko's tragic backstory. "But you exist here!" YES. WE DO. FOREVER, APPARENTLY.
Anyway the main outcome of this episode was a tentative affection for the cast and a vague lack of interest in existential wormhole aliens.
3. Past Prologue
Kira episode! I am way looking forward to more Bajoran politics. Garak is introduced and asks Bashir out on a date; Bashir is way too interested in being a SEXY SPY to notice, triggering the first of many, many groans of "OH, BASHIR." We both vaguely expect Kira's terrorist friend to weight the moral scales irretrievably by proving to have killed LOTS OF CARDASSIAN BABIES in his past, so his actual moral extremism seems fairly light by comparison.
4. A Man Alone
Odo episode! This is the one where I start shipping Odo/Quark, to my vaguely horrified shame. It's just, it hits my noir buttons AND my jaded-enemies-who-are-each-other's-best-friends-but-won't-admit-it buttons! I'M SORRY EVERYONE.
This is also the one where Bashir clones a guy to prove that the original guy killed another one of his clones, and then completely fails to explain what they're going to do with the newly created clone after that. Like, how is that first conversation going to go?
"Hello, citizen! Welcome to existence!"
"???"
"Here is a suit of clothes, courtesy of the Federation, and a biographical dossier on your murderous clone-brother."
"???"
"Now go forth and become . . . not a murderer, I guess. Bye now!"
In other words, ACE BIO-ETHICS, DEEP SPACE NINE COMMAND TEAM.
We also have a lot of questions about who found a bucketful of proto-Odo and brought him home to foster. Like, who first looked at that bucket of baby slosh and was like, "how cute! I bet it's sentient! Can we keep him?"
5. Babel
This is the one that got us really excited because we thought it was going to be a plot about universal communicators breaking down and examine science and social linguistics!
. . . it was not a plot about any of that, instead it was an excuse to have a generic "OH NO PLAGUE!" plot. I mean normally I like "OH NO PLAGUE" plots, but in this case I was disappointed.
This is also the episode that sets up the problem of O'Brien being the only engineer on the station and having to fix ALL the vending machines ALL the time and then utterly fails to solve it, which means that Debi and I have now headcanoned that O'Brien cloned himself at the end of the episode and in all future episodes, whenever O'Brien is onscreen doing something plot-related, somewhere an O'Brien clone is toiling away sorting out somebody's plumbing. Look, we have already established that Deep Space Nine has ACE CLONING BIO-ETHICS.
6. Captive Pursuit
In this episode O'Brien (or maybe O'Brien Clone One) gets tired of not having a special alien friend to call his own and therefore adopts one. Everyone else has one! Bashir has Garak and Quark has Odo (okay, Quark and Odo have each other, I guess) and Sisko has Kira and Dax and O'BRIEN HAS NO ONE, except now he has the star of The Most Dangerous Game who has to leave at the end of the episode anyway. SORRY, O'BRIEN.
7. Q-Less
This is the one where Sisko demonstrates that he has no tolerance for any of this weird flirty trolling that Q likes to pull by punching him in the face. This is also the one where Odo calls Quark into his office because Quark is having a thing with Q's ex-girlfriend Lara Croft, and they have a conversation where Quark leans way over into Odo's personal space and demands to know if there is anything he desires, anything at all, and I swear to God they are acting out a scene from a noir movie with Odo as PI and Quark as femme fatale. I DON'T EVEN KNOW.
Meanwhile, Bashir flirts with everything in sight and then falls asleep for the rest of the episode. "The problem with Bashir," says Debi, "is he learned about girls from books and then got really attractive."
8. Dax
This is the one that firmly establishes for me that Odo just wants to be in a noir movie, because he's kind of annoyed about being sent off to investigate a murder that the previous Dax might or might not have done until the backstory gets all sleazy and scandalous and then you can almost see him putting on the mental fedora.
(Also, Debi and I have decided that this show would be way better if they'd hired the Capital Scandal costume designer. UNIFORM FEDORAS FOR EVERYONE.)
Meanwhile Sisko plays lawyer, we learn a lot about Trills in an effort to establish that THE PERSONALITIES ARE SYMBIONT, NO SERIOUSLY, SYMBIONT, Kira is extremely awesome in her ten seconds of screen time (there hasn't been enough Kira for ages!) and the show flirts with letting Dax make out with a lady but we're not quite there yet. Debi assures me that it will come.
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"The problem with Bashir," says Debi, "is he learned about girls from books and then got really attractive."
This is so true. Bashir's character development is interesting to me, because while it all feels plausible, there's a major twist that I will not go into because SPOILERS, which I believe the writers pulled out of thin air, and yet it works perfectly with what went before. Which had the potential to go so badly wrong, and they got away with it.
I love Bashir, because he does grow up (and the aforementioned twist makes me even more inclined to cut S1-2 Bashir some slack) but early on he hits my embarrassment squick so hard it's occasionally quite hard to watch him - the 'frontier medicine' line, for instance, even though I also enjoyed Kira's entirely justified put-down of him.
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"Yes?"
"I'm twenty-seven. THIS IS AN INFANT."
And normally it's not like I feel particularly adult, but lord, Bashir! On the other hand his ever-present desire to play SPY has generated a lot of entertainment for us around various lot arcs so far, so I guess we can't really complain, except when he forgets about other people's personal boundaries. I hope for many, many more justified Kira put-downs!
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