Over to Sky One for some episodes of Deep Space Nine. In Progress, Bajor is going to tap the geothermal energy of one of its moons, and on a final check, Kira discovers a colony on the moon who haven’t been evacuated. As always, they’re not happy to leave their homes.
Nog and Jake try to offload a batch of Cardassian sauce to make some money. They end up making a few swaps, ending up with some land that suddenl;y becomes in demand, so Nog gets his latanum.
Brian Keith is the settler who doesn’t want to leave. He’s there with two other Bajorans who had escaped the Cardassian occupation years ago.
Kira has to try to persuade him to leave, but she likes him, and sees a mirror of herself under the Cardassians in him. When Sisko comes to try to sort things out, there’s a lovely scene where he gets right to the heart of it. “But you have to realise something, Major. You’re on the other side now. Pretty uncomfortable, isn’t it?” “It’s awful.”
No happy ending here, though, as Kira has to relocate Keith against his will, but she promises to look after him.
The next episode is If Wishes Were Horses. Chief O’Brien reads the story of Rumplestiltskin to his daughter Molly. Then Rumplestiltskin appears in Molly’s room.
Jake is followed home by a baseball player.
Bashir tells Jadzia that’s he’s in love with her, over dinner. She politely bats him away, but then later, there she is in his quarters, being a lot friendlier than he expected.
But when they go to the bridge, he discovers that it’s not Dax he’s with at all.
These people have been conjured out of their imaginations. Odo makes an announcement. “I’m going to have to ask you all to please refrain from using your imaginations.”
There’s a subspace rupture that’s growing, which might destroy the whole Bajoran system. And the three imaginary people seem to have an agenda.
They try to close the rupture, but fail. So Rumpelstiltskin offers to fix it for them, but his price is O’Brien’s daughter Molly.
Luckily, the rupture is also a figment of their imagination.
In the next episode, The Forsaken, there’s a guest appearance from Lwaxana Troi as one of a group of ambassadors.
She and Odo get stuck in a turbolift as the station’s computers start malfunctioning. Chief O’Brien thinks there’s something sentient in the computer system. And if Odo can’t return to his liquid form in 16 hours he’ll die.
As he approaches the time, he’s embarrassed, telling her it’s a private matter, than nobody has seen him like this. So she hands him her wig. “Nobody’s seen me like this, either” she says. Lwaxana gets a lot of hate among Trek fans, but I really like this episode.
Next, in “Dramatis Personae”, a Klingon ship emerges from the wormhole, and immediately explodes. The sole survivor beams onto the station, and his dying word is “victory”.
Odo is trying to find out what the Klingon mission was. Quark tells him they were looking for “something that would make the enemies of the Klingon Empire tremble.” But almost immediately after he learns this, Odo has some kind of attack.
There’s something strange happening to the characters in this episode. They often start having very pointed conversations, that seem a bit out of character. Something is probably manipulating them. Odo is unaffected, and works out that a telepathic matrix is controlling them all, and creating a power struggle between Sisko and Kira. With Bashir’s help, he manages to drive out the matrix into space.
The final episode here is Duet. Harris Yulin plays Marritza, whom Kira believes to have worked at a brutal Cardassian labour camp.
He claims first he was never at the camp, then that he was merely a filing clerk. Then the only existing picture of Cardassians at the camp is found, and reveals that he’s actually the commander of the labour camp, Gul Darheel.
Or is he? He knows things about Major Kira that the head of a labour camp shouldn’t know. And Gul Dukat swears that Gul Darheel died, that he attended his funeral. So who is the man in the cell? Odo digs around, and believes that the man wanted to get caught, specifically at Deep Space Nine.
And when Kira brings the evidence to him, Marritza breaks down, remembering his inability to do anything but clock out the screams of the suffering. He hoped that, going on trial as Darheel, it might bring about changes on Cardassia.
It’s a really good episode, Harris Yulin is great as the dissembling Marritza, turning into the unrepentant Darheel, then into the guilt-wracked Marritza again. It’s the kind of story it took The Next Generation a couple of seasons to do well, but DS9 managed this in its first season. Quite excellent.
After this, half a trailer for tomorrow’s programmes before the tape ends. I was very efficient at excising ad breaks at this time.
P.S. Sorry for the late posting of this entry. I’ve been on holiday this week, camping, and the previous week my wife was in hospital, so I didn’t have time to build up a backlog of entries to post while I was away, so the last couple of them have been written in the middle of a field with no internet connection. But I’m back home now and everyone is well, so normal service should resume soon.