77. Our Man Bashir

"Bashir, Julian Bashir." — Bashir, Julian Bashir

#77, Our Man Bashir, Deep Space Nine, Season 4, Episode 9

Star Trek likes playing with genres. From horror, to whodunnits, to courtroom dramas, to slapstick, to war films. The show(s) thrives when it tries something new. TOS took on gangster films. TNG took on Sherlock Holmes and the Old West. Voyager took on 1940s serials. Each one is a deconstruction of the genre, and putting a Star-Trek-y twist on it. At least, they're a break from the usual Federation fair.  Even when the results are mixed, they're usually interesting when Trek breaks itself out of its norm and allows the actors and creators to stretch their legs a bit and play. In Our Man Bashir, we take a look at the spy genre from the 60s with the title character taking on a jet-setting-super-agent based on a certain franchise known for gadgets, femme-fatals, double-crosses, and world domination.

Julian Bashir likes to play James Bond, a registered trademark of MGM, and we get to go along for the ride. The episode examines the tropes of the Bond films and plays with them. 'Our Man Bashir' is far more interested in character than plot. It's more interested in fun than logic. The technobabble surrounding the transporter accident that trapped the crew in his spy-fantasy isn't important. It's background noise. An excuse to make Sisko a villain of epic proportions. To give O'Brien a falcon-based eyepatch. Kira is a Russian double-agent. Dax is the missing geologist. Worf gets to wear a tux and play cards. It's also an excuse to add genuine stakes to what is essentially Bashir playing a spy-themed adventure game.

Each of the crew trapped in the holodeck are an abstraction of their real personalities and true to their nature, yet there's also an inversion of that. Worf is the bodyguard; the gatekeeper for Dr. Noah, but uses subtlety instead of brute force to subdue Bashir and Garrak. Kira, as the Russian Agent, is the foreigner, but she's seductive and silly instead of her usual serious no-nonsenseness. Dax, as Dr. Honey Bear, is the beautiful scientist, yet unsure of her own sexuality and identity. O'Brien's Falcon is the no-nonsense fixit man, but uses violence to get what he wants. And Sisko is the charismatic leader who likes to give epic, epic speeches, yet cast in the role of the villain. The contrasts are played intentionally over the top, and the results are fun to watch.

"Don't let the glasses and the up hairdo fool you. I'm crazy sexy." — Dr. Honey Bear

Also in that abstraction, we look at Julian, and who he wants to be. His alter-ego allows him to play the hero. From his first appearance, Julian has had this desire to be a hero. He's a romantic, coming to Deep Space Nine to be a pioneer on the edge of Federation space. He's super-intelligent, and too smart for his own good. Throughout his holosuit adventures with Miles, they're constantly playing heroes. World War 2 pilots, viking warriors, soldiers art the Alamo. He's constantly playing out his heroic fantasies. Here he goes against a madman with global ambitions.

Dr. Noah's plan is simple. Activate volcanos around the world with lasers to flood the earth somehow and start civilation anew with a few hand-chosen scientists, artists and mercenaries to build a new human race on Mt. Everest. Did I say simple? Because I meant bugfuck crazy, but not necessarily any crazier than any other Bond villain's plan.  Does Avery Brooks as Dr. Noah enjoy cutting loose and giving a devious villain monolog? You bet he does, folks. Every word he utters is forced out with an excited breath, as if he can't wait to say the next line in his diabolical speech.

Because of the circumstances of the transporter accident that left the physical patters of the crew trapped in the holosuite, if he ends the game, they die. If he leaves the game they die. If a character with a crew member's pattern gets killed, their pattern gets erased.

We get the impression that Julian has played this adventure multiple times. Garrak, who joins Bashir on the adventure, mentions that he's been in the holosuite non-stop since the program arrived. Bashir knows the characters, the plot. Even the outcome. He tells Garrak that the game is rigged so that either Anastasia (Kira) or Dr. Bear (Dax) will die, and he will hook up with the other one. Garrak mentions that Dr. Bashir has been playing for hours, so I can only extrapolate that he's played through several times, trying different techniques to get to the finale. He glides through the steps of the game with ease, careful to change his play through only to make sure everyone lives.

O'Brien get to be a meaney. Get it? Puns are a requirement in Bond-parodies.

Garrak is an interesting companion on Bashir's adventure. We're reminded that Garrak has been the very thing that Bashir wants to be, an intelligence agent. Except Garrak is the real deal. He's infiltrated strongholds. Stolen information from the enemy. Tortured prisoners. Killed without remorse for his country. And he's constantly pointing out the inaccuracy and the lunacy of how espionage is portrayed in Bashir's fantasy. Bashir knows it's silly, and not realistic, he just doesn't care. This is his way to blow off steam and the turn the drama of the Dominion War off for a moment and enjoy himself.

And while Garrak provides kind of anti-Jimminy-Cricket advice to Bashir on how real spies in the real world work, Bashir knows how this fantasy-world works and what's expected of him. The Bond films (and spy television shows) of the era are very much of their time, over-the-top male fantasies with high-tech gadgets and women with both revealing clothing and loose morals. They've evolved into bombastic action films throwing realism out the window in favor of bravado, machismo, and sensationalism.*

More often than not, Star Trek is better at being clever, than funny. And this episode is both a clever look at the spy-genre and ends with a clever twist on it. In order to extend the game long enough for the crew to be rescued — beamed from the holosuite to the Defiant —he presses the big, red doomsday button. He saves the day by letting Dr. Noah destroy the world.

Which is not a thing they taught Garrak about being a spy.

--

Next up, Scotty is accused of murder in 'A Wolf in the Fold.'

*While I loved the Bond films as a kid, they have not aged well. But that's a discussion for another blog.

78. Remember Me

'I know what I'm saying is crazy. You have to believe me, Jean-Luc; this is my 'very-serious' face." — Dr. Crusher

 Remember Me, The Next Generation, Season 4, Episode 5

I kind of feel like the Top 100 List is punishing me. Last episode, I plowed through 'I, Mudd' with great difficulty. This time, we get an episode of TNG that just didn't work for me. It's not terrible, but for me it falls in the category, of 'why is this in the list, again?' It's a Beverly-Crusher-centric episode, and that's not always a good thing. In 'Remember Me,' Dr. Crusher is trapped in a reality that's collapsing in on her, eliminating everything and everyone around her.

It starts off with a strange occurrence. Dr. Crusher starts to notice that members of the crew go missing. First, it's just an old friend of Dr. Crusher, seemingly wiped from existence. All record of his presence on the Enterprise is gone. Everyone's memory has been altered and Dr. Crusher has trouble convincing everyone that something is wrong. Others start to go missing, until the Enterprise is staffed with a skeleton crew. And Dr. Crusher fights to convince everyone that what they're experiencing is incorrect. That she's not crazy. That something is very, very wrong on the Enterprise-D.  

Space-Calgon is a very dangerous, and should not be tampered with. 

Let's talk about about Dr. Beverly Crusher. Chief Medical Officer of the Enterprise. Commander in rank. Former head of Starfleet Medical. Widow. Mother. Friend and potential love interest of Jean-Luc Picard. She's supposed to be a strong female character, but more often than not she's relegated to exposition and caretaker. Which means, more often than not, Dr. Crusher doesn't have that much to do other than wave her tricorder and speak nonsense. Unlike McCoy in the Original Series, she's not integral to the show, as demonstrated by her replacement, Dr. Pulaski, in season two. Pulaski, though her service aboard the Enterprise was brief, shook things up, constantly challenged the status quo, and showed more character development in one season than Crusher did in six.

Earlier in the series, Crusher had a will-they-won't-they thing happening with Picard, but other than that, she didn't have that well-developed of a character. She didn't really have a hook, so to speak, like the other doctors in the series. McCoy was the country doctor. Bashir was naive, inexperienced and a bit arrogant. Voyager's EMH was an artificial intelligence looking to expand his existence beyond his original programming. Phlox was an alien outsider and constant optimist. Crusher was Wesley's mom, and not much else going on. Everything about her was seemingly defined by someone else. I can't really put that on the actor, Gates McFadden. She does the best she can with the cards she's dealt.

For Dr. Crusher to carry the episode, she needed to have been a more substantial as a character, and, sadly, she's not. And we're midway through in the series, and she's still defined by her relationships with her captain and her son. We need a reason to care for her more than she's part of the ensemble.

Then there's a shift in this episode when it changes focus from Dr. Crusher to her son Wesley. In that moment, it changes from being about character to being about technobabble. And that's pretty much when 'Remember Me' loses me.

'Wait a minute! Geordie look at this! According to my calculations —which I can totally do in my head — if we can reconfigure the antimatter in the warp-matrix, and re-route auxiliary power to the starboard nacelle, we can bypass main power, and re-channel it through the main defector dish. Then once we use inverted tachyons to generate a stable graviton field, we should be able to have just enough power to do a site-to-site transport and get everyone into the final act of this episode and get my mom back. Also, EPS conduits, and jefferies tubes, or something. I can do this by speaking excitedly and pushing about three buttons on this panel. It probably won't blow up the ship at all." — Wesley Crusher

Wesley is super-duper-special with warp technology and science stuff, or so they tell us. When, it's revealed that Dr. Crusher was caught in an accident from Wesley's warp experiment, my reaction was a hearty 'whatever.' Her passing thoughts at the time of the accident create a reality around her that starts to fall apart as time goes on. I bet she's glad wasn't thinking of giant, killer, mutant spiders when the accident happened. I bet it would have made a much more exciting episode, but what the heck do I know.

The last act is chockfull of warp-speak and metaphysical pseudoscience about thought affecting reality. We even get callback to Season One with an alien who proclaimed Wesley's super-specialness. The problem is that the purpose of Wesley's experiment is vague, and the accidental disappearance of Dr. Crusher is never explained in a way that really connects.* The solution to the mystery presented feels like a cheat. Because it's not one that the audience can solve by piecing together the clues presented, the resolution felt to me like a big, fat 'uh-if-you-say-so.'

When reunited, Wesley falls asleep mid-hug.

Over the course of the series, Dr. Crusher does branch out a bit. When Wil Wheaton left the show, and Dr. Crusher was without Wesley to worry about, we learn that she's interested in command, a playwright and director, a capable leader, and one hell of a tap dancer. Dr. Crusher moves from being a protective mother and eventually evolves into the stalwart moral compass of the Enterprise.

But in this instance, she's still just Wesley's mom.

--

Next up, another doctor steps into the holosuite role of a suave, sixties, super-spy in 'Our Man Bashir.' 

* Okay, it tracks logically, I guess — if you want to get technical about the technobabble — but it comes from a place of plot not emotion, and therefore no one really cares. 

80. The Wounded

The Wounded, The Next Generation, Season 4, Episode 12

'The Wounded' marks the first appearance of the Cardassians, a race that would become a huge part of the Trek mythology. I think back on how far the Klingons have come since their first appearance in 'Errand of Mercy' and look at the depiction of the Cardassians from their introduction to their final appearance, and am surprised how fully formed they were from 'The Wounded.' Aside from the aesthetics of their uniforms, they're pretty much the same here as they are when Ben Sisko takes command of Deep Space Nine a few years later. It doesn't hurt that Marc Alaimo is playing the lead Cardassian here, as he would go on to play one of the most prominent villains in Trek's history.*

Though this was the first and last appearance of these bitchin' Cardassian helmet-things.

The Cardassians are presented as an empire with enough military might to threaten Starfleet. A smaller empire than the Klingons and Romulans, perhaps, but they're the best and worst of those two races. As smart as Romulans, as merciless as Klingons, but without the honor that keeps the latter in check. They are reptilian in appearance, calculating, cruel, and brutal. They will enslave an entire planet and justify their actions because they need to preserve their Empire. In short, they are everything the Federation to are not. But the Federation isn't what it used to be.

With their fleet decimated by the Borg attack, what we have is a Federation about to enter into a conflict they may not win. The war with the Cardassians had raged long enough for Picard to tell a war story from his time aboard his previous command, the Stargazer.**

Picard is ordered to keep the peace at all costs, and has to make some hard choices. He has to hunt down one of Starfleet's own, as Captain Ben Maxwell has gone rogue and attacked Cardassian targets. This could lead the Federation back into war with a ruthless enemy. As a show of good faith, Picard takes on a Cardassian delegation, who are constantly trying to get Picard to compromise Maxwell and let them blow him and his ship to smithereens.

If nothing else, this episode has a lot of sitting and talking. 

To do that, he enlists the help of one of his crew who served with Maxwell during the war, Miles Edward O'Brien. And it turns out this petty officer is far more interesting than a guy that pushes buttons in the transporter room. O'Brien was Maxwell's tactical officer during the Cardassian War, which make this 'simple enlisted man' more complex than he'd been so far. He turns our to be clever, and resourceful.

As O'Brien is not an officer, so I can only infer that his time as a Tactical Officer aboard the Rutledge was a war-time field-commission. It also makes his position on the Enterprise a bit strange. Transporter Chief seems like a demotion from Tactical. Perhaps O'Brien sought the honor of serving on the flagship. Perhaps he needed an assignment that was less intense than Tactical, even if that assignment was on a ship in constant danger. Miles is not shy about his feelings about the Cardassians. He's not a fan. He's seen the horrors of war, and he holds the Cardassians responsible for the man he had to become to survive it. We also see the consequences of families aboard the Enterprise as O'Brien tries to process his experiences with his new wife, Keiko.

But Miles knows Maxwell, and he uses every trick up his sleeve to help Picard bring a peaceful end to Maxwell's one-man war against the Cardassians. As Picard and crew attempt to figure it out, the Cardassian representative, Gul Macet, is constantly angling for the means to end Maxwell. Assuring Picard that the only way to attain peace is through Maxwell's end.

And to do that? Endless, endless meetings. 

Maxwell is presented as a contemporary of Picard's, perhaps his equal. Maxwell is smart, determined, and pulls off some tactical maneuvers that sets him up as a formidable opponent. He commands the USS Rutledge, a ship as advanced as the Enterprise. More importantly, Maxwell is a believer. He's a man on a self-appointed mission to expose the Cardassians as the duplicitous snakes they are. He suspects that the Cardassians are using the ceasefire as an excuse to rebuild their navy for a new assault. Maxwell blows up a science station because he believes the Cardassians are using it to spy on the Federation. He assaults a Cardassian civilian freighter because he thinks the Cardassians are secretly using them to resupply their war efforts.

Picard has to stop Maxwell, and there appears to be no easy way out of it. What makes Picard's job that much harder is that Maxwell is right. Maxwell is a man who has suffered loss. Perhaps he's one a mission to avenge the death of his wife during the war. Perhaps he's attempting suicide via death-by-cop. Perhaps he is doing exactly what he says he is, exposing the Cardassians. The truth turns out to be a mix of all of these things, and it makes Maxwell a fascinating antagonist.

Picard has to choose between doing what's right, and serving the greater good and keeping the peace. He can't even entertain Maxwell's suggestions to investigate the Cardassians supply ships because if Picard has proof, he'll have no option but to drag the Federation back into a costly war.  It's a hard choice, and arguable if he made the right one.

--

Next up, it's Kirk vs. Robots and dudes with handlebar mustaches I, Mudd.



*Note, I haaaaate Marc Alaimo's Gul Dukat with a fiery passion, but not in the way that the creators of Deep Space Nine intended. For more on why he's terrible, please check out my review of #88 on the countdown.

**If I have complaints about the episode they're mostly inconsequential. The timeline suggests that the Federation and the Cardassians have been at war up until a year ago, but it's never mentioned in the first two seasons. As Picard tells his Stargazer story, it implies the war has been going on for quite quite a while. Other than the forehead makeup, the Cardassians themselves look terrible, and went through a much needed uniform upgrade before their next appearance. 

#85, Little Green Men, Deep Space Nine, Season 4, Episode 7

Now's where we hit the cold hard reality of memory versus actuality. I had very fond memories of 'Little Green Men,' where Quark, Rom, and Nog accidentally travel back in time and crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Taken to Area 51, they make contact with the primitive natives. The premise is strong, and we get to see our favorite Ferengi try to hustle forties-era humans out of their planet. It's... well... It's not good. At least, not as good as I thought it was going to be.

I'd remembered it being much, much funnier. As I rewatched it, much of the humor in the episode falls more than a little flat. The jokes were expected and could be seen coming a quadrant away. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. It convinces us that things in the past were good, when, in fact, there's a good chance they were not. I will never look upon the original Battlestar Galactica, A-Team, Dukes of Hazard, the Transformers, or Big Trouble In Little China because there's a zero-percent chance they hold up. This, however, this episode I was really looking forward to. And I was really disappointed.

Quote-hu-mor-unquote.

Maybe it's that Quark and crew are truly at their best when they're ancillary to the story. Maybe it's that this is the second Ferengi-centered comedic episode in the countdown, and much of the goodwill that I felt for Shimmerman's Quark and his compatriots has already been spent on my review of the Magnificent Ferengi. Maybe it's because that episode had Iggy Pop and this one did not. Maybe it's that nothing could possible equate to "Roswell that Ends Well" from Futurama. Both episodes had similar time-travel-to-Roswell-shenanigans, but Futurama did it a bazillion times better.

"Shut up and take my latinum!" — Fry

Maybe it's that funny is really, really hard.

Really.

So, rather than bash on the episode for not being what I remembered it to be (which in all fairness is probably more on me than it), let's accentuate the positive, shall we? Let's talk about how we got Quark from the pilot to this episode and why that's kind of cool. For all the type of bumpy foreheaded peoples in the Star Trek universe, there are few aliens that are really explored in depth. There are only a handful that break out of the monoculture formula. And through the characters of Quark, Rom and Nog, we get to explore a few different aspects of the Ferengi. The three started out as pretty much the same character, and over the course of the series we saw each of them grow into more than their sniveling, greedy, funny-looking species of origin.

'Look who's calling us funny looking. Stupid hu-mon.' — Quark

Quark here, represents the idealized Ferengi. Opportunity, profit, and thrill. Ferengi love negotiating. And here Quark throws caution to the wind, at the mercy (and gunpoint) of a military base, he sets out to conquer their planet, with no weapons, no plan, nothing really to offer. And he does this because he thinks he can. He goes for it with a bravado and fearlessness that's kind of awesome. He seeks challenge in the only way he knows how. In Ferengi society this is referred to as having the 'lobes,' but let's call it for what it is. Giant, giant brass. But throughout the series, Quark is constantly being called out by other Ferengi for not being ruthless enough. Living amongst aliens for so long, he's had to adapt to cultures outside his own, and finally finds a balance between his Ferengi ideals and those of the Federation. That is, until he unceremoniously throws away years of character development in the series finale, but we'll jump off that bridge when we come to it.

Rom, his idiot-savant brother, is far more interested in making things than money. This makes him an outcast. Because he sees more to life than the acquisition of things, he's considered an 'idiot' by his brother. He's clearly not; he's just not wired in the same way that other Ferengi are. Early in the series, Rom was always nipping at Quark's heels. Always scheming to get the bar from Quark. Not because he really wants it, but because he's lost. He's terrible at business. Terrible at negotiation. Terrible at scheming. Terrible at all the things Ferengi are supposed to be. As the character developed, Rom stops being Quark's incompetent shadow, and starts to become his own man. He marries an alien. He gets a menial job on the station, not because it will make him wealthy, but because he loves it. He follows his passions, regardless of what his kin will think of him. Rom went from being a horribly cartoonish background character to an actual person.

Nog starts the series out as Diet Quark. A ne'er-do-well, no-good-nik and a bad influence on Jake Sisko who's sole function seemed to be to create conflict between Jake and his father. He was mean-spirited, willfully ignorant, a liar, and a tiny jerk. School was dumb. Girls were to be opinionless property. Latinum was all that mattered. He was, in essence, the ideal Ferengi in training. As Nog changed, he became more than a foil for the Siskos and came to represent the future of his species. In this episode, he's off to Starfleet Academy. He sees Starfleet was a way for him to better himself. To see something greater. Not because of profit, but because, like his father, he wanted more from life than the acquisition of things. I mean, he still wants profit, don't get me wrong. But perhaps joining a society that has, in effect, no money, may not have been the ideal way to go about doing it. Nog has ambition, but not in the way that his people usually quantified it, making him a new breed of Ferengi.

These characters have changed over the years, and of all the explorations that Trek has done, it's of character that's the most challenging in interesting. The Ferengi are, after all, odd-looking creatures who may appear homogenous, but are far more complex than just their surface appearance might suggest.

Just like the rest of us.

--

Next up, Worf goes reality skipping in TNG's 'Parallels.'

I like to think, somewhere in the infinite number of parallel realities, Michael Dorn is about to write a review of my performance as Lt. Commander Worf.

#91, The Killing Game, Voyager, Season 4, Episodes 18 & 19

Don't worry, folks, it all makes sense in the end. Kinda? 

I have to be honest. I'm not 100% sure where to start with this episode. The two-part Killing Game begins in the middle,  so let's start there. A very Janeway-looking Klingon grunting and fighting off a Hirogen — one of Voyager's attempts at making their own Klingons — dressed as a Klingon warrior.

Klinganeway is wounded and it's quickly revealed that it's part of a simulation. The Hirgoen have taken Voyager, and turned the entire ship into a holodeck hunting ground so that they can practice their skills in a number of different scenarios using the Voyager crew as their prey. Memories wiped and placed into these scenarios with no knowledge of self, the crew fight for their lives, again and again. Only to be stabbed, broken, shot and stitched back together so they can do it again, and again, and again.

If there's one and only one thing we know about the Hirogen, it's that they're driven by the thrill of the hunt. The more dangerous the prey, the greater the victory. And like the Klingons they so desperately want to be, they live their lives by a code of honor. The hunt for them is more than a means of proving themselves as warriors, it's the cornerstone of their civilization. It's what drives their exploration, their technology, and their culture.

And what we have is a Hirogen Commander who's thinking about the future. He's identified that his people are in decline. They've stretched their empire as far as they can. Hunted species to extinction in their quest for the hunt. They have entire generations who strive for nothing but tracking prey. In short, they've stagnated. And a civilization in stagnation dies. The Commander has seen this, and is looking for a new path for his people.

Once upon a time in...
     ... Nazi-Occupied France.

He's using the Voyager holotechnology and the ship's computer database to satiate his people's need to hunt and allow for the possibility of other pursuits. He fires up a program set in Nazi-oppucpied France, with the Voyager crew placed in the role of French Resistance fighters and the Hirogen as SS Officers hunting them down.

So, the choice of a World War II scenario to test his men is an interesting one. And by interesting, I mean it seems entirely arbitrary. Like an excuse to mashup aliens and Nazi uniforms. He constantly has to remind his men to 'play the game' instead of resorting to their predatory nature. But why? If there's a direct metaphor between the Hirogen and the Third Reich, I can't quite put my finger on it. The Commander, by his people's standards, is progressive. An asshat who's torturing the crew, sure, but progressive.

It's the not the first or the last time Trek has directly or indirectly addressed Nazis. The Original Series used Nazi uniforms on an alien world. Enterprise will have time travelers help Nazis take over America. And the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor, introduced in the Next Generation and explored more fully in Deep Space Nine, is a direct metaphor for the horrors of WWII.

It's never explained why he chose this program. What he wanted to prove to his men with it. And even the Nazis within the program question the Commanders devotion to the mission of the 'Master Race.' Then, what's the point here? That myopic vision cannot be sustained? That blind devotion to a set of flawed ideals is futile? I'm not 100% sure. And it's bugging me.

"What's the point? How about the point my shoulder pads?" — Janeway 

While Janeway (who, once again, rocks ginormous shoulder pads) and crew regain their personalities thanks to the Doctor, they retake the ship and stop the Hirogen with holodeck characters from other simulations. WWII soldiers fighting alongside Klingon warriors in the corridors of the ship to take Voyager back from the invaders.

While its message may be a bit muddy, erring more on adventure than a moral lesson, this is the type of episode that only Voyager could attempt with a straight face.

Kinda.

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Next up, Geordi falls for a holodeck physicist in 'The Booby Trap.'

The title is not what it sound like.