Tom Salinsky

DS9 S05E20 Ferengi Love Songs (). Quark’s bar is infested with voles leading him to somewhat hysterically claim that he hates his life. Rom only makes matters worse when he reveals that he’s getting married to Leeta. Returning to Ferenginar to see mom brings even worse news – Moogie is shacked up with Liquidator Brunt. Cecily Adams is fine as Moogie, but I miss Andrea Martin who was a force of nature. I’m also weirdly perturbed by the low arched doors with thick yellow frames, which I don’t remember noticing before. They look like something out of Dr Seuss.

The versatile Jeffrey Coombs shows up for his second episode running but playing a different recurring character, and Wallace Shawn is back as Grand Negus Zek, hiding in Moogie’s wardrobe in the hope of concealing their romantic secret from Quark. Back on the station, Rom and Leeta enact a variation on the same theme. It’s all pretty trivial and unamusing. The only reason this is watchable at all is that Armin Shimerman is so accomplished. Moogie is right – leave your action figures in their original packaging.

VOY S03E22 Real Life (). Like a gender-flipped, mystery-free WandaVision, the Doctor has decided that –rather than adding famous psychopaths from history to his programming – his bedside manner will be most improved if he puts himself in a holographic 1960s American sitcom before work each day. Torres decides it would be more interesting if his family were awful instead, and I think we’re supposed to be moved when his pretend daughter suffers a fatal injury, but, c’mon. Meanwhile, in – let’s hope it’s the A-plot – the friendly Zagbars whom Janeway was hoping to rendezvous with are little more than smoking rubble in space when Voyager gets there. That leads to examinations of a wibbly thing in space, and when both plots run out of steam, Paris and Torres discuss literature instead. Torres has a new wig. I don’t like it.

DS9 S05E21 Soldiers of the Empire (). Martok is being patched up by Bashir who is (winkingly) more worried about the state of his carpet than the risks to the Klingon’s life. JG Hertzler is a real asset to the show, providing a fascinating link between Federation officer Worf and the wider Klingon Empire. Now, he and Worf are despatched to retrieve a missing Klingon vessel, meaning that Worf is no longer subject to Starfleet regulations – and the other members of the regular cast have to pick up the slack, except for Dax who is coming along for the ride. It’s the sagacious yet playful Trill onboard the Bird of Prey which kicks this one up a notch. Like A Matter of Honor with Riker participating in the officer exchange programme, we learn more about them and through this juxtaposition.

In a signature Deep Space Nine move, the episode is concerned far more with the journey as the destination, with the demoralised crew confused by Martok’s unwillingness to pick fights and Dax more than holding her own. Cunningly, Worf challenges Martok in order to lose, and thus re-energised, Martok gets his mojo back and leads his rackety old ship to a famous victory. Confusingly, Klingons speak mainly English, with smatterings of Klingon dialogue, implying that they are not talking Klingon to each other. Why not?

VOY S03E23 Distant Origin (). In some very familiar-looking cave sets, a pair of Silurian scientists have found a skull which they are both mysteriously thrilled by. This enables them to reconstruct a human-looking skeleton whose non-saurian biology threatens a long-held theory. When a battered piece of uniform is added to the puzzle, it seems inevitable that this is the remains of one of Voyager’s crew. We’re getting closer here to a bonkers-big-swing-of-the-week show, wherein our heroes are seen through the lens of alien palaeontologists. But these high concept episodes built on grand ideas never seem quite as nourishing as the best episodes from elsewhere in the franchise which hit me in the gut rather than stimulating only my intellect. And the drawback of aiming to stimulate mainly my intellect is that I know more about evolution and taxonomy than Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky demonstrate here, and the errors and omissions are irritating. When we switch from chin-stroking philosophising to action-and-adventure, things improve a little, and the shot of tiny Voyager inside the vast alien craft is very striking, but we quickly abandon this in favour of a routine courtroom drama. Also disappointing: the religious-doctrine-vs-scientific-evidence drama of the dinopeople feels over-familiar, and the clumsy parallels with immigration don’t work. A year is a very short time to reduce a human body to nothing more than bones – assuming that a Zagbar year is similar to a human year. Speaking of which, these guys have an amazing transwarp drive which can cover huge distances in very short times, but Chakotay doesn’t even ask to see some schematics. Yet again, a straight line from the Caretaker to the Federation leads to a connection with Earth. Space feels very small on Voyager.

DS9 S05E22 Children of Time (). The pitch sounds more like a Voyager episode than anything else. Unwisely stopping off to check out a mysterious planet, the Defiant is cheerily greeted by a bunch of humans who claim to be our crew’s descendants, a situation which arises when the hardy little ship is flung back in time 200 years, er, in two days’ time. In TNG this would definitely be a trick, but here it appears to be genuine, and the gameplan involves preserving this timeline as well as getting our people home. Shockingly, this turns out to be the deception. Sisko has to choose between returning and erasing this timeline with its 8000 people, or letting time repeat itself and condemning everyone on board to painful years of isolation and rebuilding (except Kira whose injuries prove fatal).

Speaking of Kira, Shakaar, who hasn’t appeared in many episodes, is written-out off-screen. This is another symptom of a season of this show displaying an unease and uncertainty about decisions made in past episodes which was rarely if ever seen in Seasons 3 and 4. Odo here completes his journey back to his previous incarnation: isolated, shapeshifting, mooning over Kira. But while that’s a concern, it’s not something which hurts this particular episode because while “our” Odo is poured into a jar, a 200-years-older Odo confesses his love for Kira, and that’s what makes this a DS9 episode. It’s an incredible scene, building expertly on almost five years of shared history and Nana Visitor and René Auberjonois play it beautifully.

The difference between the two shows is stark. On Voyager, we get a science-fiction treatise on what it is to be human (in Distant Origin). Here we get a richly human look at what a science-fiction plot might feel like. It’s a shame that a crew of nearly fifty people is rendered just as six members of the regular cast. Surely they should have at least been consulted. That’s a bit of fridge-logic but it just barely knocks half-a-star of what’s a superb hour of television on the whole.

VOY S03E24 Displaced (). Remarkably, someone on Voyager remembers something that happened on a previous episode of Voyager. Sadly, this brief scene errs on the side of substituting bickering for character development, but there are hints here of something more vulnerable underneath Torres’s tough exterior. Then a dude in a funny hat appears and we’re watching Voyager again. It’s too cold and bright for him onboard. Not a bad critique. Episodes of this show tend to be too focused on plot and not enough on character – too keen to be clever, not keen enough to make the audience feel anything.

Funny hat guy has seemingly swapped places with Kes who vanished at the same time as he appeared. Pretty soon Harry vanishes too. Harry and Kes both gone? Y’know, I’m not mad about it. But for each underwritten cast member that disappears in a shower of pixels, another glum individual with eccentric headgear shows up. We don’t switch focus to the Zagbar colony until Torres is snatched – and by then she’s figured out that they’re doing this deliberately. This is quite a nifty insoluble problem (if a bit familiar from the end of Basics Part I) and it’s fun to see some of the lower decks characters with a degree of agency (just until we get to the prison planet, natch) but why are the Zagbars so grey and uninteresting and why does none of this seem to affect our main characters in any meaningful way? Like the Enterprise crew in TNG Season 1, they mainly just work the problem professionally until 45 minutes is up.

The exception to this rule is Torres and Paris, but – as noted – they tend to do little more than bicker. However, there is promise here, and even Robert Duncan McNeill (who has tended to coast along with the thin material he’s generally given) begins to show some of the fire which he displayed in some earlier episodes like Non Sequitur. That, and the difficulty of the problem, earns this slender episode an extra half-star. It almost loses it for introducing a hugely powerful long-distance transporter which is never even considered as a route home.

“I’ve never been completely cut off from the ship before,” protests the Doctor, staring at the mobile emitter he was given 400 years in the past while completely cut off from the ship.

DS9 S05E23 Blaze of Glory (). According to Cadet Security Officer Nog, the Klingon security forces are obnoxious, disobedient and frequently intoxicated. Sisko’s advice to pick a fight with one of them doesn’t strike me as particularly sound, and Nog and Jake’s B-plot is hardly ever interesting. In the rather more compelling A-plot, Martok’s forces have picked up a Maquis message intended for Michael Eddington which asserts that missiles are heading for Cardassia – missiles which might be cloaked. Maquis missiles killing millions of Cardassians means Cardassia demanding that the Dominion exact equally bloody revenge on their behalf, which means that the missiles – if they exist – have to be stopped.

Michael Eddington and Benjamin Sisko make a fine pair, and Deep Space Nine loves nothing more than sticking two characters in a shuttle/runabout/the Defiant and having them put the galaxy to rights. As invincible forces meeting impenetrable objects go, these two manage an enviable level of tension and wit and detail. It’s very good stuff and Kenneth Marshall makes the most of his final appearance. Sisko tries to force Eddington’s hand by leading the ship towards a Jem’Hadar fleet and Eddington’s solution seems to involve putting Sisko in as much jeopardy as possible. It’s pretty much standard-issue shaky camera, technobabble dialogue and lots of pixels but both actors play it with commitment. However, this intimate mano-a-mano stuff feels almost trivial compared to the apocalyptic threat we were promised in the teaser. And indeed, it turns out that the missiles never existed, which is clever but still feels like a let-down. In keeping with the theme of this season – tying off loose ends – that seems to be it for the Maquis, introduced way back in TNG’s seventh season.