Tom Salinsky

DS9 S04E10 Our Man Bashir (). Jay Chattaway’s music is a pitch-perfect pastiche of mid-sixties John Barry, as Bashir indulges his adolescent Ian Fleming fantasies on a Holosuite, whereupon Garak intrudes, eyes ablaze with curiosity. Knowing now what I do about the behind-the-scenes debates regarding the Garak/Bashir relationship, it’s easy to surmise that this was the production team’s effort to de-queer the good doctor by casting him as the red-blooded star of a thoroughly butch spy adventure. The only problem is that the James Bond films are so ludicrously camp that the attempt is doomed to fail. Probably for the best.

Dependable Eddington has to perform an emergency beam-out to save Sisko and much of the senior staff from a sabotaged shuttle and the crew ends up “stored” in Bashir’s recreation of Sean Connery spy movies. This is a fabulous opportunity for the cast to play new versions of their characters, something I always appreciate. Kira becomes a Russian femme fatale. Dax is a kidnapped scientist. O’Brien an eye-patch wearing henchman. Worf a white jacket-wearing casino owner. And Sisko is the big bad Dr Noah.

Some of the satire here is spot on – the costumes are wonderful. Some is rather sub-Austin Powers (the name “Mona Luvsitt” almost caused me to chuck the remote control across the living room). But then again, Austin Powers was still two years away. The name of the episode is a nod to James Coburn’s wannabe Bond flick Our Man Flint. Meanwhile, Rom is quickly proving himself to be O’Brien’s (or LaForge’s) equal when it comes to jury-rigging get-out-of-jail-free devices. His lash-up to connect the Holosuite to the Defiant looks like something out of Apollo 13.

In a complete reversal of Distant Voices, Bashir is incensed when Garak suggests that they should quit while they’re ahead. And it’s that not-quite-climactic scene which pushes this delectable nonsense firmly into the five-star league. Everybody mispronounces “valet” but that’s so typical now that the wrong pronunciation is virtually correct.

VOY S02E12 Resistance (). Neelix, Janeway, Tuvok and Torres are undercover in an attention-grabbing teaser. Janeway is shot and they are all arrested in pursuit of this week’s supply of unobtanium, the absence of which requires Voyager to drop its shields (briefly). Bafflingly, junior ensign Harry Kim is the one tasked with repairing the warp drive, whereas chief engineer Torres is part of the team on the planet below.

Janeway’s absence on the bridge means that Chakotay is in the centre seat, running things with his usual bland efficiency. Held prisoner by the invading Zagbars, Tuvok and Torres make a more interesting pairing, but Tuvok has yet to reveal anything beyond standard issue Vulcan detachment. Speaking of which, Janeway finds herself seemingly adopted by Very Fancy Guest Star Joel Grey, one of the native Zoobles who mistakes Voyager’s captain for his missing daughter. This is all perfectly decent adventure hijinks, with purring villains interrogating our captive heroes, political manoeuvring from orbit and so on. Joel Grey’s subplot feels a bit fresher, a bit more meaningful, but can’t transcend the overall feeling of familiarity, despite the excellent performance from the Broadway legend.

DS9 S04E11 Homefront (). Nothing’s quite right on the station. The wormhole has the jitters. Someone has moved Odo’s chair 3cm to the left. But this pales in comparison to the massacre committed during a peace conference on Earth – a bomb which left 27 people dead, and it looks like the work of the Changelings. Sisko’s family has always been a bigger feature of his life than Picard’s was for him. We were introduced to him with a wife and son. Now we meet Brock Peters as Sisko’s dad, who’s keen for him to spend time in New Orleans. It’s a slightly odd mix. Ben is at pains to point out that this trip is not a vacation, but his later conversation with Jake is all about domestic chores and there’s scarcely a mention of the galaxy-spanning crisis he’s actually there to deal with. And this tone of cheerful levity is maintained when O’Brien and Bashir visit Quark’s, straight from cos-playing as the Dambusters (complete with full costumes and funny voices).

The two strands collide when Sisko’s dad refuses to submit to Changeling-testing, and before long there’s an unexplained planet-wide power outage, and Sisko insists to the Federation president that Earth be put under martial law. The question here is a pertinent one – how much freedom are you prepared to surrender in order to preserve your way of life? The trip home also makes possible a reunion between Jake and Starfleet Cadet Nog, who has belatedly discovered that “Academy” is another word for “School” and is having trouble fitting in. This doesn’t really go anywhere, but this is part one of two.

On Earth, Sisko is back in his TNG-style uniform, which makes the Voyager togs even more confounding. And not for the first time, a potential job-change for a member of the regular cast is played as a doom-laden act-out. Susan “Leah Brahms” Gibney returns as new character Benteen. Klingon gods were more trouble than they were worth, and so the Klingons had them all executed.

DS9 S04E12 Paradise Lost (). Now the “Red Squad” storyline set up by Nog last week takes centre-stage. Far from being a Dominion vs Earth narrative, this is actually Starfleet vs the Federation, which is pretty dark and nihilistic even for this show. Worse is to come, as Sisko is removed as Acting Head of Earth Security, fails to get the Federation president on side, and is taunted by an O’Brien changeling who tells him that the humans’ fear is what will defeat them. Admiral Leyton – latest in an implausibly long line of corrupt, misguided or compromised Starfleet top brass – manages to frame Sisko as a shapeshifter, and with his old friend out of the way, he looks forward to essentially installing himself as dictator. Like I said, this is dark stuff. And that’s before we get to the Admiral ordering his ships to destroy the Defiant. The climax is hurried though, with the major plot-resolving decision being taken off-screen by someone we barely know – due to budget limitations perhaps?

VOY S02E13 Prototype (). Prior to the episode’s start, Voyager has picked up a silver mannequin which looks alarmingly like the shapeshifting Kamelion robot from 1980s Doctor Who. Unable to determine its power source, Torres pulls an all-nighter. We actually get some glimmers of personality as she spars with first Kim and then Neelix, and Roxann Dawson is better than ever. Repairing the machine is really only act one busywork however. It perks up and its unsettling politeness now causes it to remind me of Legion from the Red Dwarf episode of the same name. V’Ger-like, it wants to find that which created it. It is – like so many things in science fiction stories – supposedly the last of its kind and it kidnaps B’Elanna so she can make it new double-A batteries and revive its fellows.

As director, Jonathan Frakes shoots the teaser from the automated unit’s point of view, RoboCop-style, which adds a little interest, but this fairly routine outing is only really worth watching for Roxann Dawson, and the Cybernaut-style costumes are particularly silly and unconvincing. Did Frakes really learn nothing from the Exocomps? The final reveal that the war between the Zagbars and the Zoobles only continued because the robots wanted to keep fighting is a nicely savage twist, but I could have done without Torres literally saying “My god, what have I done?’

Torres asserts that there is only one sentient artificial life form serving in Starfleet – Data. That will change before the series is over.

VOY S02E14 Alliances (). The Kazon, least impressive season Big Bad candidates since the Ferengi first showed up, have Voyager pinned down, but mysteriously depart before dealing the final blow. In engineering, some poor boob has been badly burned when his console exploded in his face – they really should do something about that. There’s nothing the Doctor can do to save him.

There’s often a feeling on Voyager that – despite all the complex reality-bending plotlines – nothing much matters because it’s always reset city. Bumping off a character who’s never been heard to speak before doesn’t change that, whether or not Roxann Dawson looks grief-stricken, whether or not Robert Beltran tells bland stories about first meeting the guy. So when Chakotay pitches a change in tactics to Janeway, making Voyager more Maquis and less Starfleet, it’s not so much that I don’t want that to happen, or I don’t believe any of the changes will be lasting (although both are true), it’s that I don’t much care. It feels cosmetic.

Since Chakotay is a walking charisma bypass, when Tuvok makes all the same points, in a well-acted but rather laborious scene, Janeway does an abrupt about-face and decides to forge an alliance with Seska – yay, more Martha Hackett. But I’m increasingly dismayed at the extent to which Tuvok is becoming Just Another Vulcan. His relationship with Janeway is similar to that between Spock and Kirk, but where is the McCoy character to round out the triad? Voyager’s most significant on-ship relationship is turning out to be a two-legged stool.

Eventually, circumstances solve Janeway’s dilemma for her when a more palatable alliance presents itself. Her attitude to the Prime Directive (which i thought only applied to pre-warp civilisations) switches from “We are forbidden from involving ourselves in local affairs” to “If there’s a chance to bring stability to this region, I can’t pass it up.” There are interesting ideas here, but there are so many different plot beats packed into 45 minutes that none of them really has a chance to register. We go from we’re Starfleet, to we need to be more Maquis, to we need an alliance with Seska, to we need an alliance with the Kazon’s enemies, to our enemy’s enemy can’t be trusted, to the one thing we don’t need is to be more Maquis. So on the one hand, Starfleet’s supremacy onboard ship is assured, and on the other, there aren’t any real consequences for the ship, which has plenty of food and anti-matter, despite the dire circumstances of the teaser. They don’t even make good use of Martha Hackett. I’m incredibly disappointed.

DS9 S04E13 Crossfire (). Everyone’s in their dress blues to welcome First Minister Shakaar whom we first met at the end of the last season, but he made so little of an impression that everybody spends half the teaser reciting his backstory at each other. He’s played by the ghost that bothered Crusher in the idiotic TNG episode Sub Rosa. He’s fairly punchably smug, and that doesn’t make me want to assassinate him – but Cardassian extremists disagree. Shakaar almost courts his own demise, insisting on parading around the station with minimal security, allowing Worf and Odo to bond over how annoying it is when people change their plans.

Star Trek has a pretty poor record when it comes to love stories. They tend to be perfunctory, like Kirk’s various squeezes, ludicrous like Worf and Troi, or easily forgotten whenever they’re inconvenient like Crusher and Picard. The torch Odo carries for Kira is a little different. It’s a tragic tale of love unrequited, seen most clearly and affectingly in the otherwise rather silly episode with Kira seemingly consumed by a giant crystal. Now, Shakaar confides in Odo that he similarly has the hots for the Major, and Odo takes his bad mood out on Quark. Neither TNG nor Voyager could ever get away with this kind of story, so it’s exciting to see it attempted here, but Shakaar’s bland anti-charisma manner makes him scarcely a threat to the far more appealing shapeshifter, who valiantly saves all three of them from a plunging turbo lift.

While I struggled with the First Minister, I can’t fault René Auberjonois and Nana Visitor, and if anything it makes the love story play better when we see only those glimpses of it which Odo is privy to. Auberjonois in particular manages to create amazing depth from behind all of that foam latex. The whole story is written in his eyes. And then, incredibly, and rather sweetly, it’s Quark who is able to put Odo back together, again (for purely financial reasons of course).

VOY S02E15 Threshold (). Paris and Torres are working on a new trans-warp drive. I note that Torres seems to be able to recruit whichever regular character seems convenient to help her with engineering problems – Janeway, Paris, Kim, the Doctor, even Neelix. Similarly, if Starfleet’s best pilot, Lt Tom Paris, isn’t medically fit for the record-breaking, epoch-defining test flight, Junior Ensign Kim can take over. These people not only don’t have much in the way of interiority, they don’t even have areas of expertise we can rely on.

The warp ten conversation is pretty much gibberish. If that’s the theoretical limit, tending to infinity, then why do they need to cross it? Wouldn’t getting 99% of the way there be just as useful for all practical purposes? And once Paris does get the shuttle to Warp 10, nothing we see looks anything like infinite velocity. It just brings Paris back as a rapidly-decaying, pan-allergic, chlorine-breather. But as a vehicle (sorry) for examining the main characters, it’s serviceable – at least to begin with, Paris getting more character stuff than he’s had all season. And I’m really warming to Torres. I loved her acid-tongued “fill him in” as she leaves the table to get snacks while Paris and Kim attempt to sum up years of warp theory in two minutes to an eager Neelix. The Doctor’s sarcastic quips struck me as a little overdone this week though.

It all goes tits-up in the finale however, which sees Paris and Janeway transformed into corpulent whiskery seal creatures which have sired rubbery offspring. Big news you say? Nah, they’re restored to full health and sanity moments later. Phew. It’s often said that DS9 was far more interested in the consequences of its characters’ actions, and had no need to return to the status quo at the end of each episode, whereas Voyager always had its finger on the reset button. If so, this is Voyager’s “hold my beer” moment, as the last act is practically made of reset button, taking mere seconds to reverse the biological calamity visited on the Captain only minutes earlier, and all off-screen. This is a famously terrible episode, many peoples’ least favourite, but I thought the first twenty minutes weren’t that bad, whereas Alliances – although nothing in it is quite as terrible as Paris and Janeway fish-fucking – was basically nonsense all the way through.

Also, since the trans-warp drive did work, kinda, after only a month of trying, and based on what seemed like a fairly minor insight, it does suggest that generations of Federation engineers didn’t create this simply because they didn’t want to. Despite their partial success, Voyager’s crew doesn’t seem to want the gift of infinite velocity much either, because they never return to the project. On the other hand, threads with disloyal crewmembers, began last episode, continue to pay off, which is heartening.