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shallownessDS9 season 2 Disc 4
I started watching this disc several months after watching disc 3 and I watched two episodes consecutively, then took a month to watch the last two episodes, and on the whole, I was disappointed.
Armageddon Game
The set-up of this episode was lame and irritating - irritable married O’Brien and irritating singleton Bashir are lumped together with O’Brien near death (let’s pretend the scary bioweapon had difficulties with human DNA, otherwise it wasn’t really THAT scary.)
There was expositionary dialogue, which invited me to poke holes.
While the senior crew was sad because they think they’ve lost these two thanks to the ambassadors' plot, it was never affecting - the best bit in the episode was Quark’s sincere, but ridiculous toast when he believed they were dead.
Keiko saved the day, not smart Dax or paranoid Odo, because a Mrs knows her Mr, except it was rescinded for a gag.
Whispers
I thought it a pity that this episode immediately followed Armageddon Game, because it quickly became apparent that O’Brien (believes he) is in danger for his life and my response was ‘Ugh, AGAIN?’ There was the whole business with the physical that could have referenced the previous episode, but didn't, so whatever stardate they’d given this, it did not track emotionally. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that these episode are in this order for production reasons.
Although Meany did a great job of monologuing – I was quite disengaged by what he went through on the station, which made him increasingly paranoid. My theory was that he’d never really returned and was in a holosuite or some form of VR pretending to be the station, and unknowingly undergoing a test of his motives.
As it turned out, it wasn’t that. ‘O’Brien’ was a replicant. And then all the interesting questions questions of what the replicant was were made of, his sense of who he was etc were shelved as he was killed off in the last scene, just as the truth had been revealed, which seemed like a waste of the idea.
Paradise
They presumably picked Sisko and O’Brien for this mission because they’re family men with a more immediate tie to the station than others. Fortunately for my O'Brien tolerance, it was a little more about Sisko than O’Brien, but if there hadn’t been that month’s delay I’d have been irked, because this episode didn’t do it for me much more than the previous two – and the few scenes of Kira and Dax looking for their colleagues made me long for them to have the A-plot, actually.
You’d have thought there would be some sort of protocol that Sisko and O’Brien should have followed when visiting an unexpected colony of humans on a lonely planet, the kind of thing that would avoid the situation that unfolds. Because this planet had an EM-canceling field, rendering technology useless and meaning these Federation colonists were stuck there. To survive they’d built a Community (you felt that capitalisation was implied) under strong-minded Alexis, who assured the newcomers that they needed to give up on their tech dependency and any idea of getting rid of the nullifying field so that they could contact anyone offplanet and return home – to their families.
Sisko gradually started to suspect the worst of Alexis. The PTB were clearly thinking of Katherine Hepburn when they cast Alexis.
O’Brien’s ingenuity and the ladies’ persistence saved the day, while Sisko offers noble resistance against Alexis. It was all rather predictable.
I’d really have liked at the end, once all Alexis’s wrong-doing was unmasked, for the Community to have had more than a couple of minutes to absorb that they’d been forced to unknowingly live a lie for years and to speak for themselves, instead of having an individual/an actor with a speaking role to speak for them all i.e. saying they wanted to stay on the planet and might just swtich that nullifying field back on. I know the writers were looking for a tidy way to round off the story, but it just left me indignant.
Shadowplay
This is the best of the four in some ways.
Dax was teasing Odo about romantic entanglements (which featured accidental Odo/Kira foreshadowing) because he was clueless about them on the way to investigate something. A particle field had drawn them to a particular valley on a GQ planet where they unexpectedly found a village. An odd village.
People had been disappearing from the village, but one big clue helped our science officer and security officer figure out the not very mysterious mystery.
The guy playing the man in charge of security was likeable and they cast a very good child actor, which helped with the interactions.
But I was really miffed that [spoiler] newly self-aware holograms got self-determination unlike the humans at the end of ‘Paradise’.
Meanwhile, on the station, refrencing the last episode (woo!), Jake got a job with O’Brien and blurted out that he was no Wesley Crusher. Sisko took the fact that his non-genius son didn't want to join Starfleet quite easily, even though it felt like they were building up to some conflict over the point.
Also, Kira was keeping an eye on Quark because Odo was offstation. (Bashir was useless as a subcontracted spy, BTW). So Quark tried to use the hot Vedek to distract her, but Bereil is a chatty kisser, so Kira thwarted Quark AND got kisses. Ha!
But apart from the Kira/Bereil developments, and a wee bit of manouvering/restating about the Dominion, Changelings and Odo's tragic childhood, this episode was mainly a distraction. AI/hologram consciousness had been done repeatedly on TNG before, BUT this was more entertaining and less stupid than the last three episodes.
I started watching this disc several months after watching disc 3 and I watched two episodes consecutively, then took a month to watch the last two episodes, and on the whole, I was disappointed.
Armageddon Game
The set-up of this episode was lame and irritating - irritable married O’Brien and irritating singleton Bashir are lumped together with O’Brien near death (let’s pretend the scary bioweapon had difficulties with human DNA, otherwise it wasn’t really THAT scary.)
There was expositionary dialogue, which invited me to poke holes.
While the senior crew was sad because they think they’ve lost these two thanks to the ambassadors' plot, it was never affecting - the best bit in the episode was Quark’s sincere, but ridiculous toast when he believed they were dead.
Keiko saved the day, not smart Dax or paranoid Odo, because a Mrs knows her Mr, except it was rescinded for a gag.
Whispers
I thought it a pity that this episode immediately followed Armageddon Game, because it quickly became apparent that O’Brien (believes he) is in danger for his life and my response was ‘Ugh, AGAIN?’ There was the whole business with the physical that could have referenced the previous episode, but didn't, so whatever stardate they’d given this, it did not track emotionally. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that these episode are in this order for production reasons.
Although Meany did a great job of monologuing – I was quite disengaged by what he went through on the station, which made him increasingly paranoid. My theory was that he’d never really returned and was in a holosuite or some form of VR pretending to be the station, and unknowingly undergoing a test of his motives.
As it turned out, it wasn’t that. ‘O’Brien’ was a replicant. And then all the interesting questions questions of what the replicant was were made of, his sense of who he was etc were shelved as he was killed off in the last scene, just as the truth had been revealed, which seemed like a waste of the idea.
Paradise
They presumably picked Sisko and O’Brien for this mission because they’re family men with a more immediate tie to the station than others. Fortunately for my O'Brien tolerance, it was a little more about Sisko than O’Brien, but if there hadn’t been that month’s delay I’d have been irked, because this episode didn’t do it for me much more than the previous two – and the few scenes of Kira and Dax looking for their colleagues made me long for them to have the A-plot, actually.
You’d have thought there would be some sort of protocol that Sisko and O’Brien should have followed when visiting an unexpected colony of humans on a lonely planet, the kind of thing that would avoid the situation that unfolds. Because this planet had an EM-canceling field, rendering technology useless and meaning these Federation colonists were stuck there. To survive they’d built a Community (you felt that capitalisation was implied) under strong-minded Alexis, who assured the newcomers that they needed to give up on their tech dependency and any idea of getting rid of the nullifying field so that they could contact anyone offplanet and return home – to their families.
Sisko gradually started to suspect the worst of Alexis. The PTB were clearly thinking of Katherine Hepburn when they cast Alexis.
O’Brien’s ingenuity and the ladies’ persistence saved the day, while Sisko offers noble resistance against Alexis. It was all rather predictable.
I’d really have liked at the end, once all Alexis’s wrong-doing was unmasked, for the Community to have had more than a couple of minutes to absorb that they’d been forced to unknowingly live a lie for years and to speak for themselves, instead of having an individual/an actor with a speaking role to speak for them all i.e. saying they wanted to stay on the planet and might just swtich that nullifying field back on. I know the writers were looking for a tidy way to round off the story, but it just left me indignant.
Shadowplay
This is the best of the four in some ways.
Dax was teasing Odo about romantic entanglements (which featured accidental Odo/Kira foreshadowing) because he was clueless about them on the way to investigate something. A particle field had drawn them to a particular valley on a GQ planet where they unexpectedly found a village. An odd village.
People had been disappearing from the village, but one big clue helped our science officer and security officer figure out the not very mysterious mystery.
The guy playing the man in charge of security was likeable and they cast a very good child actor, which helped with the interactions.
But I was really miffed that [spoiler] newly self-aware holograms got self-determination unlike the humans at the end of ‘Paradise’.
Meanwhile, on the station, refrencing the last episode (woo!), Jake got a job with O’Brien and blurted out that he was no Wesley Crusher. Sisko took the fact that his non-genius son didn't want to join Starfleet quite easily, even though it felt like they were building up to some conflict over the point.
Also, Kira was keeping an eye on Quark because Odo was offstation. (Bashir was useless as a subcontracted spy, BTW). So Quark tried to use the hot Vedek to distract her, but Bereil is a chatty kisser, so Kira thwarted Quark AND got kisses. Ha!
But apart from the Kira/Bereil developments, and a wee bit of manouvering/restating about the Dominion, Changelings and Odo's tragic childhood, this episode was mainly a distraction. AI/hologram consciousness had been done repeatedly on TNG before, BUT this was more entertaining and less stupid than the last three episodes.
