Tom Salinsky

DS9 S04E14 Return to Grace (). Kira is having to get her jabs before she goes to a Cardassian outpost with her new fancy boyfriend. In a follow-up to the excellent Indiscretion, she is accompanied by Dukat, who has been demoted due to following Kira’s advice regarding his half-Bajoran offspring. Their verbal sparring is delightful – Dukat trying and failing to drive a wedge between the Major and her new beau – but when they arrive, Klingons have destroyed the outpost. Dukat picks a fight with a Klingon Bird of Prey and isn’t fired upon – there’s no honour in destroying a virtually defenceless freighter. Pretty soon, Kira and Dukat are reluctantly joining forces in hunting down and destroying the Klingons. This is typically nuanced stuff, Kira and Dukat make a great pair, and again we end with a new status quo – Dukat’s daughter living on Deep Space Nine. It’s nothing special by the very high standards of this show, but that’s still makes it an engrossing and worthwhile watch.

VOY S02E16 Meld (). In an unusually grim teaser, the burned remains of a murdered crewmember is found in engineering. Since it turns out there’s a weirdo on board and since Brad Dourif is available, he’s played by Brad Dourif. In fact, he’s more than a weirdo. He’s a stone cold psychopath who killed a man just because. This is something which Tuvok cannot accept. But the bigger problem is: adrift decades from home, with no higher authorities to refer to, what is to be done with an irredeemable danger to others? Tim Russ is as good as ever, and for once manages to become something a bit more than just Spock Lite when the Doctor therapeutically removes Tuvok’s emotional control.

DS9 S04E15 Sons of Mogh (). Not a title guaranteed to inspire enthusiasm in me, this one. As the title suggests, Tony Todd is back as Kurn and wants Worf to murder him in some kind of ritual Klingon honour code blah de blah. This is all because Worf refused to join in with the war against the Federation and that is not reflected on the rest of his family. Worf manages to get the blade into his bro, but he lives and Worf is chewed out by Sisko who thinks all this wokery has gone too far and he’s no longer going to be supportive of cultural diversity which involves bloodshed. The upshot is that Kurn ends up working for Odo which seems to me to be wholly lacking in interest. The writers presumably agreed and so this phase of the story bites the dust. Pick an idea and stick to it, guys. The resolution, involving mind-wiping and plastic surgery is redolent of bad pulp comics. Of rather more interest are the shady Klingon war games which Kira and O’Brien stumble over on their way back from some inspection or other. Klingons have been mining the area but not for long.

VOY S02E17 Dreadnought (). B’Elanna is coming into focus now. Roxann Dawson has been impressive from the start, but initially her only character trait was “shouts and throws things”. This is, to be fair, a significant improvement on Harry Kim (“is young”) and Chakotay (“unspecified type of Native American”) but not much to build a character on. More recently, something more detailed, conflicted and interesting has emerged, and this storyline is a great vehicle for those traits, as Torres has to disarm a deadly self-aware missile which she created (and creepily programmed with her own voice).

You have to swallow a lot of coincidences to make this one work – it’s basically a square DS9 storyline, hammered into a round Voyager hole – but once you get past that, you get a foe which rivals Nomad or the Doomsday Machine for its implacable cunning, and personal stakes which actually feel like they mean something. LeVar Burton directs and makes the most of the tense script. That creepy lieutenant is still writing fan mail to Seska, but she’s got her assistant to fend off his advances now.

DS9 S04E16 Bar Association (). Family Business delved deeper into Ferengi society with some success and set up a new recurring villain in Liquidator Brunt. Here, Nog cos-plays as Fred Kite and becomes the Quark’s Bar shop floor steward, but the satire is weak, the insights into alien races slim, and the drama almost non-existent. If you’re a huge fan of the Ferengi, this is fine, but it doesn’t add anything to what we know already and just feels a bit inconsequential. Equally inconsequentially, Worf is bunking up in the Defiant, which is… fine, I guess. I am liking the pairing of Worf and Dax, however. One extra half-star for the fact that Rom quits the bar and doesn’t go back. Every time this series does stuff like that, I have to remind myself that this went out in 1996, when everybody “knew” you had to design episodes to be completely self-contained and watchable in any order. And everybody was wrong.

VOY S02E18 Death Wish (). While I’m waiting for Seven of Nine to turn up, I dimly remember that the pairing of Q and Janeway is meant to be rather good fun, especially as Q’s visit to Deep Space Nine was the rather soggy Q-Less. Alas, it’s not John de Lancie who materialises on the transporter pad, but rather Gerrit “The Critic” Graham whose impersonation doesn’t have the bite and fizz of the original and who badly overdoes the hand gestures. Thankfully, the OG isn’t far behind, patronising Janeway and smarming around the bridge, whereupon the Q who wants only to die seeks asylum onboard Voyager. That hearing takes up the rest of the episode, which seems a bit low stakes given that either party could whisk everyone home in an instant. Flowing in to fill the gap is a return visit from Jonathan Frakes as Riker – in the old costume (plus, rather less interestingly, Maury Ginsberg and Isaac Newton). Excitingly, Janeway offers the mortal Q the chance to join the crew. Predictably, he goes ahead with his plan to take his own life.

Mixed in with all of the legal wrangling, and Q-stunts, there are some real world considerations of assisted suicide, but unlike say the excellent TNG episode Half a Life, here it plays as didacticism rather than drama. The double Q effects are disturbingly poor. Speaking of double acts, Michael Piller wrote the script with his son Shawn.

DS9 S04E17 Accession (). The commander of the station being adopted as a Bajoran prophet is one of the odder concepts assembled for this series. We get a quick reminder of this set-up just in time for a 200-year-old ship to come through the wormhole with a Bajoran on board who claims that he is the Emissary. Rather sweetly, he’s a poet who learns that schoolchildren can recite his most famous works from memory. But he wants to take Bajor back 200 years and reinstall the ancient caste system, which would mean Kira becoming an artist instead of a soldier. The set-up is strong, but it’s the strongest beat – the Bajorans enthusiastically and murderously getting with the old/new programme – which has to be hastily discarded off-screen to make the ending work. We’re just told that everybody believed Sisko’s story without question spontaneously agreed to pretend that the last few days had never happened.

Elsewhere, the Battle of Britain having been holographically won once more, Bashir and O’Brien are faced with a far bigger conflict – the fit that Keiko will have once she sees the bachelor pad which her husband has made of their family home. This domestic strand really only serves to reintroduce Keiko and otherwise is of not much interest.

Only Star Trek script from Jane Epsenson who used to write an excellent blog about screenwriting – she also worked on Buffy, Battlestar Galactica and Torchwood among many others. Worf has no wish to help Keiko with another birth after his experience onboard the Enterprise in Disaster.