Tom Salinsky

DS9 S04E21 The Muse (). The teaser consists of two brief moments. Jake is people-watching and coming up with loglines for short stories in the way that I don’t think any short story writer has ever done. Then Lwaxana turns up and tells Odo she’s pregnant. Both of these strike me as rather silly and not in a good way. Mrs Troi has run away from her new husband whose culture believes that boys should be raised exclusively by their fathers. Eventually, Odo has to “pretend” that he is in love with Lwaxana and wants to marry her. None of this feels like it means anything or amounts to much, and Lwaxana obediently leaves the station once Odo’s sacrifice has been made, although René Auberjonois never even hints that this is the worst script he’s had all year.

Elsewhere, a mysterious older woman spouts gibberish at Jake, promising him all sorts of “exercises and techniques” which will make him a better writer, if he comes to her quarters tonight. She might as well be telling him there are sweets and puppies in her van. Talk of Jake’s writing career (and his career-making novel Anslem) brings back fond memories of The Visitor, but this has nothing like the level of invention and depth of feeling of that episode. Lwaxana also brings up the events of Crossfire. Something about this episode compels everyone to intone their dialogue at half speed and the overall effect is close to numbing in its soporific mood. Jake’s “muse” gives him amazing and innovative authorial advice like “editing exists”. Eventually, the twist is that the eerie older woman with a predatory interest in Jake who isolates him from his father is actually – crumbs! – the bad guy.

This is the last time we see Lwaxana and it makes rather a poor swan song for her despite (or because of) Majel Barrett’s own hand in the script. That’s Meg Foster as Onaya – she was the second Christine Cagney, taking over from Loretta Swit after the pilot and being replaced herself by Sharon Gless after the first season of Cagney and Lacey. Jake seemingly writes his stories with a pencil, even before Onaya introduces him to this newfangled “paper”.

VOY S02E23 The Thaw (). A message from a dead planet includes strict instructions to stay the hell away, so of course Janeway puts their journey home on pause and rapidly beams up their stasis pods and begins trying to defrost them. Examining alien machinery from the other side of the galaxy, Kim begins confidently pressing buttons and announcing what the people in the pods are experiencing. In fact, most of what’s said about the pods is nonsense. Why bother going into stasis if you’re going to be conscious the whole damned time? You might as well just build a bunker and make some sandwiches. Surely the point is that your consciousness skips the intervening years?

Kim and Torres enter the dreamscape which looks like some kind of hideous children’s television version of a sex party, redolent of some of the more embarrassing episodes of TOS like Catspaw or The Empath. It’s ghastly and even the frequently-brilliant Michael McKean can’t save it – the grey romper suit doesn’t help, but it’s a doomed enterprise in any case. There’s a glimmer of that handy ethical dilemma about saving the lives of artificial persons, but the one-dimensional moustache-twirling of The Clown makes it all thoroughly unconvincing. Once more, all of the dialogue is blandly functional. McKean’s Clown reels off facts about Kim and Torres but that doesn’t amount to them registering as people. You could swap pretty much all of their dialogue and it would sound the same. They are also dumber than usual. “It’s almost as if he can read our minds,” announces Harry at one point, seemingly having not understood a word of what’s been said to him for the last fifteen minutes. The plot is resolved only when the Clown acts decisively against his own interests and lets Torres go virtually on a whim. Including a little person as a dose of added weirdness is pretty nasty as well, considering we’ve never seen a little person on the crew of this or any starship. Half a star for the quietly effective closing seconds, but this was very close to being a one-star clunker.

DS9 S04E22 For the Cause (). Klingons having devastated Cardassia Prime, the Federation are having to bail out the Cardassians with industrial replicators, but there’s a worry that the Maquis will try to intercept the delivery. The finger of suspicion falls upon Kassidy Yates which creates a conflict of interest for Sisko, the pillow-sniffing softie. Disappointingly, he opts to protect his girlfriend rather than Federation allies (he does say Odo can search her ship if he can find a suitable excuse). Eventually, he follows her in the Defiant, but it turns out that this was a ruse to remove him from the station. This is very clever plotting, disguising a turncoat rebel story as a personal relationship drama. And the fact that it’s Eddington who turns Maquis is brilliant. He’s a familiar face, but we don’t know a lot about him, except that he’s rubbed some people up the wrong way. Gratifyingly, Sisko owns his mistake, telling Kira that everything that happens on the station is his responsibility. Meanwhile, red-blooded, all-hetero Garak is sharking after Dukat’s daughter Ziyal (now played by a different actor) and they share a chaste Cardassian sauna together. Their arid flirting is quite horrifying and knocks half a star of what’s otherwise a typically strong episode.

VOY S02E24 Tuvix (). I remember this one. And I remember the stink about it from those who criticised every decision Janeway made from blowing up the Array onwards. Apparently the ethical thing to do was to let Tuvix live. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. From the first season of TOS, a malfunctioning transporter has been a handy plot-generating mechanism. It’s best not to ask exactly how it works. Just as no physical principle exists which could split Kirk into good and evil, no physical principle exists which could combine a Vulcan and a Talaxian into a single living entity with a blended personality. And it’s notable that the transporter functions as a body-back-up whenever there’s a debilitating disease doing the rounds and at no other time. (The Doctor also asserts that he has none of Tuvok or Neelix’s DNA on hand, which seems profoundly unlikely. There would be skin cells on their pillows for a start.)

Anyway, this is really about Tom Wright’s performance as “Tuvix” and it’s a testament not just to him, but to Tim Russ and Ethan Philips that this works at all. You couldn’t do this with, say, Harry Kim and Chakotay because bland plus bland still equals bland. But Tuvok and Neelix are distinct and they are well-defined enough by now for this to work. Sadly, the rest of the bridge crew are their usual dry professional selves for the most part. Only Kes shows a flicker of emotion at this extraordinary turn of events, although she tries not to show it – and that further saps the drama. The episode’s best scene uses Kes’s loss to shine a light on how Janeway is dealing with being stranded in the Delta Quadrant. And after that, I can accept any decision the Captain makes.

I am surprised that the script doesn’t rustle up a medical emergency which forces the decision to separate but I think it is a more interesting story when it doesn’t let Janeway off the hook, even if the outcome is never really in doubt – of course she’ll kill one person to save two (especially when those two are in the opening titles). That makes all the brow-furrowing and anxious standing around doing nothing from the rest of the crew feel a bit synthetic and half-assed. This storyline was originally pitched as a goofy comedy, and I admire the decision to try and play it more seriously, but the last five minutes of the script feels as helpless in the face of this dilemma as all of Tuvix’s crew mates. It is a nice scene with Janeway, though.

DS9 S04E23 To the Death (). Returning in the Defiant, Sisko and team find that an entire pylon of the station has been destroyed, leaving multiple casualties – the work of the Jem’Hadar. It’s a devastating opening, and it’s smart (as well as budget-saving) to play it as a discovery by the returning crew and not have the melodrama of putting us onboard the station when the attacks occur. It puts us in their shoes. On the theme of Hippocratic Oath, Sisko’s ship ends up rescuing a bunch of Jem’Hadar grunts, but with them is the smooth-talking Weyoun, played in this and countless subsequent episodes by Jeffrey Coombs (even though he’s seemingly offed in the closing minutes). He’s a wonderful addition to the extended cast, filling the void left by Dukat, who has been somewhat gelded over the course of recent episodes.

Continuing with the Deep Space Nine theme of: everything is grey, it turns out that there are good and bad Jem’Hadar and this group (and the station) were set upon by renegades who are trying to build a “gateway” which will make them “virtually invincible” (according to Sisko). This is apparently picking up a discarded thread from Next Gen Season 2, but I don’t think it needed to be (it reminded me more of All Our Yesterdays). Of far more interest is the Jem’Hadar attitude to Worf, Sisko and in particular Odo, who they see as a god that has inexplicably turned against heaven. It’s absolutely fascinating.

We take our sweet time getting to the Jem’Hadar Death Star, but the lengthy journey never feels like padding or busywork. The scenes with Weyoun and Odo, Worf and Sisko and especially Dax and O’Brien are wonderfully written and played. However, as the centre of gravity of these stories moves inexorably away from the now largely settled Cardassian-Bajoran conflict, Major Kira is getting less and less to do. Let’s hope that she finds a place in the new landscape before too long, and we don’t get many more of these “You have the station, Major,” moments. She’s not Tasha Yar for crying out loud.

Worf doesn’t wear his baldric into battle.