Tag: sisko

3.06: “The Abandoned”

I actually liked this one a lot more than I remembered liking it, and I ended up having a lot more to say about it than I expected. As established, I’m not really the biggest Odo fan, but I actually liked him a lot in this episode, and felt like they were doing some really interesting things. I get that they didn’t want it to just be a retread of TNG’s “I, Borg”, but I also found it a little disappointing that the show seems to come down on the side of genetics as destiny with the Jem’Hadar, particularly when Odo himself points out that he’s started to reject his own genetic “programming”.

Content warning: I do talk a bit about Mardah, the dabo girl dating Jake, and how her comments about her background have some pretty troubling implications, perhaps more so than the writers intended. I don’t get graphic or anything, but just wanted to mention that the possibility that she was, essentially, being sexually exploited as a teenager is a theme I examine for a bit. The Mardah section of the post is pretty clearly demarcated, though, so it should be easy enough to skip over.

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3.01: “The Search, Part 1”

Wow, wow, wow. I know I said back at the end of season one that I was shocked to have gotten all the way there, but that applies even more now, let me tell you. It has been a lot of fun, and I am really, really grateful to everyone (well, all four of you, by the most generous estimate) who’s been reading and commenting and talking to me on Twitter. Here’s to season three!

(Bonus: a couple of my top “I need cheering up” episodes are coming up in the next few weeks, so we’ve all got that to look forward to, as well.)

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2.26: “The Jem’Hadar”

This episode is interesting for me, because while it does its job — having Our Heroes encounter the Dominion directly for the first time, and making it clear that the Dominion will be a direct threat in the future — those parts aren’t actually what I enjoy most about it.

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2.20: “The Maquis, Part 1”

I am in a dev bootcamp all week and so do not have the amount of free time to spend on writing these posts that I normally do, which is a shame, because WOW is there a lot going on here. Of course, the silver lining for y’all is that you are spared a good deal of my yelling about how horny Dukat is for Sisko.

Not all of it, though.

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2.15: “Paradise”

First of all, this has nothing to do with the episode, but I feel like Sisko would approve: NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATS

Anyway.

This one was solid! Not particularly memorable, for me, really, but solid. It definitely had an Original Series vibe to it.

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2.09: “Second Sight”

So after a pretty wild few weeks, this one is a bit more lightweight — even forgettable, at least insofar as, like Nidell with Fenna, I had completely forgotten it since my last rewatch just a couple of years ago, and I am not much more optimistic that I will remember it this time. “Forgettable” also means that, while not great, it’s at least not memorably bad, so it’s got that going for it, I guess?

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1.01 and 1.02: “Emissary”

OH BOY HERE WE GO.

  • OH MY GOD JAKE IS SUCH A BABY!!!!!!!
  • I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again that one of the ways you know this is a pre-9/11 show is that one of the characters is not infrequently referred to as a former terrorist, and it’s used interchangeably with “freedom fighter”, and that character is one of the ones played by a white woman rather than the one played by an Arab man.
  • I appreciate that they actually make a point of showing that for all his…what might very generously be called “naive romanticism”, and perhaps more accurately “paternalistic imperialist fantasies”, Bashir is in fact really good at his job. His competence is one of the few things that makes him remotely tolerable early on in the show.
  • Off of that, I think one of the reasons it seems so obnoxious and wrong-headed from Bashir is that he’s really the only Starfleet crew member who initially comes into the show with much of that attitude. Sisko’s having what I can only call a crisis of faith around Starfleet, O’Brien is openly mistrustful of the Cardassians; Jadzia has moments, but she also has more years of experience than Sisko and O’Brien combined to temper the enthusiasm and naivete. Worf has some trouble adjusting when he joins the cast later, but even then, he’s spent enough time as an outsider in Starfleet and has enough of a career behind him already that he doesn’t have nearly as much of a rosy filter over his vision. So rather than Kira’s cynicism or Sisko’s exhaustion being the exception to the rule, Bashir is the dude who really needs to read the room.
  • As Star Trek-ishly heavy-handed as it is (and tbh having been raised on Trek I tend to find the heavy-handedness kind of charming), Sisko’s encounter with the Prophets/wormhole aliens really is a lovely, poignant meditation on grief and trauma. Their patient yet merciless explanations that they aren’t the ones dragging him back to these places/times in his life, he is, ughhh just kill me right now because this rewatch is gonna be so full of emotions.
  • On a less heavy note, I feel like the DS9 fandom really does not talk enough about how horny Dukat is for Sisko??? Like we all know he’s horny for Kira and really pretty horny in general, but we really do not discuss how, when it comes to Sisko, he is attempting to board the Acela Express to Bonetown, morning fish juice and New York Times in hand, from MINUTE ONE. He is 100% ready to rail and/or be railed by Sisko on their shared desk.

Horniness rankings

  1. Dukat. Let’s be real, if he’s in an episode, he is almost certainly going to top the Horniness Rankings. Holy shit guy, get your life right.
  2. Bashir, who is horny for a. Dax and b. the FrOnTiEr. Again, GET YOUR LIFE RIGHT. How am I capslocking this at him rather than at Dukat? How?? Perhaps because I believe he can do better while Dukat never will?
  3. Quark. On the one hand, I appreciate that his incessant sexual harassment of women around him is presented as gross, on the other hand, wowwwwww are there some Real Unfortunate Implications to that being because he is from a race of people who are defined physically by short stature and an exaggeratedly large appendage on their heads, and culturally by morality based solely on greed, who are slavishly devoted to backwards laws that are out of step with modern civilization, all making him therefore much more laughably unfuckable than others (BASHIR) whose behavior seems to be presented as, while annoying, ultimately unthreatening and perhaps even a little bit charming.
  4. Sisko and Jadzia have some awkward low-key “oh no she’s hot now”/”oh no I find him hot now” horniness for each other and it’s hi-friggin’-larious.