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lgbt video game writing advice

The Shitty Trans Take of Remothered: An Analysis

One of my social activities is playing horror video games with my friends. Which is to say, my housemate does the hard part of actually driving, and me and my best friend sit and watch and offer helpful advice like “oh god, run away!” because we are both giant weenies who forget how to use a PS4 controller when we’re startled. The most recent game we all played together was Remothered: Tormented Fathers. Which we were super excited to play because it’s won a ton of awards.

Remothered is a Clocktower-style game, where you’re basically trapped in a limited map (here it’s three floors of a massive mansion) with an effectively immortal monster that can kill you if they catch you. You have to hide, sneak, use distracting items, and spend a lot of time running in the hopes that you’ll get far enough ahead of your pursuer to dive into a closet–and remain calm when they come hunting past your hiding place. In that mechanical sense, it’s a really good game because all of that is incredibly scary. At the beginning of the game, you’re being pursued by the owner of the house, Richard Felton.

On October 11, we played through several chapters and got to one of the game’s big reveals, which I will spoil here because I think it’s a shitty reveal: Richard Felton is actually the mysterious Jennifer who is mentioned throughout the first several chapters of the game! Shock, horror: the sickle-wielding man who has been chasing you through his house–while wearing only an apron and a pair of rubber farm boots–is actually a woman!

When the reveal came, the three of us actually groaned. For me, I’d had a feeling this was coming, and had kind of braced myself for another shitty “trans person as monster” horror moment–and I was sadly not wrong. As one of my friends eloquently put it, this has been done and done again since Psycho. It’s nothing new or particularly creative–though I will say that Remothered is the first one I’ve personally encountered where the reveal wasn’t transfeminine. Regarding the really damaging trans narratives that are particularly endemic to horror movies (and which to a one center around the shock of the reveal, clearly intended for the titillation of cis audiences), I suggest reading:

So anyway, back to Remothered. I typed out my disappointment on Twitter and forgot about it… until, bizarrely, the creator of the game responded.

I have some thoughts about this as a writer, but let’s set those aside for later. First, all right. Let’s analyze why I feel the way I do about Remothered.

The relevant story related to the reveal can be partially summarized as: Jennifer’s father, upon returning home from Ethiopia, decided that he wanted a son rather than a daughter. He forcibly transitioned Jennifer over into a male identity; how much physical alteration was involved is not explicitly stated, but we know there was at least drugs and mesmerism happening to suppress Jennifer’s female identity. “Richard” then grew up as a rather tortured and unhealthy person with “hormonal imbalances” who refused to undergo examinations when being treated for ill health. “Richard” had an arranged marriage that was quite rocky until the couple adopted a girl named Celeste as their daughter; but as Celeste grew up into a young woman, “Richard” began to remember being Jennifer more and more and thus became a threat to Celeste’s safety, thinking that killing Celeste would at last exorcise Jennifer. (This led to Celeste’s disappearance, which is the initial reason the player character comes to the Felton house. It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s beyond the scope of what I want to talk about.)

In the following discussion of the gender narrative, I’m going to use the name Jennifer and the she/her pronoun set to refer to the character we start off knowing as “Richard,” because it’s pretty plain that Jennifer is a cis woman who was forced by her father to take on a male identity and characteristics. I will also note here that while I view Remothered as another brick in the transphobic horror genre wall, I don’t know if it’s entirely correct to address Jennifer as a trans person. She’s a cis woman who is forced to “become” trans by the alteration of her body and identity, which is a horror subgenre that’s not exactly rare. Since the entire storyline is evocative of trans bodies, I will refer to her as trans, but understand that I get this is a murky topic.

NOTE: “The character isn’t really trans” isn’t a defense when the shock/horror of the reveal hinges on the character troubling conservative societal boundaries of gender, which trans, nonbinary, or gender-nonconforming people do by our very existence. There has been a long conflation in popular media between trans people and cis people who crossdress, for example, because the entire point in comedy or horror is the challenge the character presents to strict heteronormative society. Whether the character is “really” trans or not, these images and characterizations can feed into incredibly damaging tropes.

First of all, we cannot ignore the “surprise, trans!” reveal, which is a staple of horror and a thoroughly shitty, harmful device. It serves to reinforce the “deceptive trans person” trope, which gets used in the real world as a justification for violence against us (e.g. it’s the foundation of the “trans panic” defense). Narratively, it is also a device that serves to distance the audience from the trans character; the audience is removed from the trans person’s perspective by the necessity of secrecy for the “shocking” reveal, and the reveal itself pushes them further by forcing them to reconsider their understanding of the character. In Remothered, the reveal comes on the heels of having spent several chapters with Jennifer, in her “Richard” persona, chasing the player character, Rosemary, around and trying to kill her; the reveal certainly is not an invitation to reach out toward her in empathy. Rather, it’s one of the game’s call backs to The Silence of the Lambs–and while there are many ways in which that movie is absolutely brilliant, it’s also incredibly transphobic.

Stories in which a cis character’s gender is swapped, often against their will, are common in a lot of genres. I don’t think this plot device must be inherently damaging to trans people. Often, it’s a way for gender to be explored, troubled, and questioned. Some of these stories might come from a place of cis people trying to wrap their heads around what it means to be trans and how it might really feel to know you are one gender when society violently insists you are another. Unfortunately, forced transition narratives are often done in a way that damages trans people and only serve to reinforce the violently conservative nature of binary gender in dominant culture.

This is particularly true of stories about a violent, coercive transition–but even that doesn’t have to be transphobic in its execution. For example, I think Lynn Flewilling’s The Bone Doll’s Twin is absolutely masterful. But you also get movies like The Assignment, in which a mad doctor conducts forcible gender reassignment surgery on a hit man, thus turning him into, oh the horror, a hit woman. The “gender reassignment as horror” trope can be incredibly damaging because it shows gender affirming care (particularly surgery) as a destructive, coercive, and terrifying process that removes cis people from their rightful bodies–which is literally the opposite of what it is. It also often serves to reinforce the essentialist and wrong idea that genital configuration and hormones define gender.

I give Remothered credit that it’s clear Jennifer’s transition also came with what is effectively extreme psychological programming via drugs and mesmerism. In this way it can be seen to lightly touch on the practices such as “conversion therapy” that have harmed and killed real LGBT people throughout the world. However, making a young cis girl–who is presumably straight, though this is admittedly never defined in the game–the subject of such coersion that makes her “trans” is a mirror view of the reality and erases its victims.

When Jennifer is forced to take on her male persona, she develops a plethora of mental issues due to the suppression of her identity. This leads her to become violent and murderous. She kills her own wife. She might have killed Celeste–that’s unclear. Jennifer does have an unhealthy obsession with her own daughter prior to Celeste’s disappearance, which depending on your reading of the lines, can seem pedophiliac. “Trans/gender non-conforming character as insane and violent because of their tortured relationship with gender” goes hand-in-hand with pretty much every other shitty, transphobic horror trope. (e.g.: The Silence of the Lambs and Insidious 2.) That in Remothered, this “insanity”-driven, murderous violence is linked with Jennifer’s struggle to reassert her gender feels like a particular punch at trans people, many of whom do suffer from mental health problems like depression and anxiety because of the way society treats us. I have personally gallows-humor joked that being closeted at my previous job made me feel like I was two different people in a very discordant way.

Jennifer’s creepy obsession with Celeste, and the reveal that her father forced her to “become male” as a child also don’t get to be divorced from modern contexts, for all that the game takes place in the 1970s. Trans rights have become the next frontier on the culture war, since the right wing’s been forced to cede some ground to basic rights for cis gay/lesbian/bisexual people. And lately right wingers and TERFs have joined forces to spread scare stories about how the “transgender agenda” is coming after children–either as predators (see the bigotted funtimes of bathroom bills) or as demonic influences trying to “convince” children that they are trans and handing out puberty blockers like poisoned candy. As Jennifer reacts with increasing violence toward proxies for the femininity that she believes lost to her, that arguably plays into TERF and right-wing scare stories about trans people “recanting” when it’s too late or regretting their transitions. The [coercive] female-to-male transition of Jennifer by her father–literally a patriarch who brainwashes her–and the inescapable reality of Jennifer’s long-denied feminine identity also, intentionally or not, come across as particularly TERF-y in light of how rad fems treat trans men. I’m not going to link to examples of any of the aforementioned absolute trash. It’s easily googleable; just be ready to scrub your internet connection with bleach after going on National Review or the Federalist or Quillette. 

As Remothered continues and Jennifer goes from her appearance as “Richard” to wearing a dress, the visual narrative becomes extremely troubling–a transphobic gaze to go with the in-game eyeball stabbing. To begin with, proximal to the big trans reveal, we get a shot of Jennifer putting on lipstick while her blonde wig hangs in her face. To me, it immediately evoked a very standard kind of image we get in both overtly transphobic movies and Very Serious Movies About Trans People That Are Really For Cis Audiences: the moment that a trans woman (invariably played by a cis male actor) sits in front of a mirror and puts makeup on, depicting how pitiably (or disturbingly, in horror) she longs to be feminine but will never truly attain that state due to her physical differences. It may seem odd for me to have immediately grasped that feeling when Jennifer, a cis woman, is performing this action, but the facial features she has as “Richard” remain clear; she wears her hair dangling in front of her face to hide them. Jennifer’s attic hideaway, too, with its creepy collection of female-form manequins and dresses, implies an obsession with the unreachable feminine by a person socially constructed as male. By the coercive actions of her father, Jennifer has been made into someone that cannot comfortably exist as either gender allowed by heteronormative society, an underpinning that the game has little interest in examining.

Instead, we get a woman with “masculine” features that evoke the monstrous horror-movie nightmare of a trans woman, chasing a cis woman (Rosemary) through a dark and claustrophobic space and trying to murder her by filling her face full of ten penny nails. (And I doubt the players have forgotten Jennifer, as “Richard,” screaming at Rosemary that she is a “bitch,” a “cocksucker,” and a “cunt.”) So I suppose it’s an accomplishment that this game has managed to evoke terrible tropes about both trans women and trans men… because again, it’s not about whether a character is de facto a trans person, it’s about how the depiction will be conflated with and reinforce damaging cultural images of trans people.

As the game draws to a close, the last we see of Jennifer is her torture at the hands of and her death directed by another cis woman, Gloria. As Jennifer attempts to articulate what was done to her by her father, Gloria graphically cuts off her tongue with a pair of scissors; while the blood sprays and Rosemary screams at Gloria to stop, Jennifer becomes curiously silent. With her wig removed–another device that is often used in transphobic media to forcibly unmask trans women characters–Jennifer begins to cover herself with some sort of flammable liquid at Gloria’s orders, stumbling nightmarishly toward the captive Rosemary, who has become another proxy for the lost femininity she wants to violently extinguish. Rosemary sets Jennifer on fire with a lighter; the rest of the house is curiously non-flammable. The last we see of Jennifer is a burnt corpse, her lips bright red–lipstick or blood, it’s not clear–as Rosemary moves toward her final battle with Gloria.

Jennifer’s death is not a scene of particular empathy in its moment of occurence. Later, after Gloria has been defeated and lays dying, she and Rosemary do take some time in their curiously long conversation to talk about Jennifer. While at times Rosemary refers to her by her name and proper pronouns, there isn’t any consistency toward it; neither of the characters seem to grasp how they should talk about her. Gloria speaks of Jennifer as an object of disgust, a deviant. Rosemary brings her around to more empathy; at the end, even if they can’t stop misgendering her, they can at least agree that she was her father’s victim, now conveniently dead so that she can be safely pitied. She’s absent from the story of her own trauma, first rendered mute by Gloria’s scissors, then by death.

Jennifer fulfills in this way not only trans-person-as-monster, but also trans-person-as-victim. Her body became an instrument that others used to break her mind, making her into a creature incapable of existing outside of the darkened halls of her own home, a prisoner in the mansion as sure as a prisoner in the “masculine” body she did not want to have. Gloria and Rosemary pityingly speak of how Jennifer was forced to live as a man by her father… while often referring to her as a man. She is granted victimhood by acknowledgement of how terrible it must have been, to be forced to be someone she wasn’t. Yet this is the literal lived experience of countless trans, gender non-conforming, and other queer people throughout the world–none of whom spend their days chasing around cis women while wielding a nail gun, I dare say. Jennifer is ultimately a cis person’s image of the horror of “becoming” trans, and she’s equally obviously intended for a cis audience. She does not exist to challenge heteronormative culture, but rather serve as a warning of the madness that comes when someone is “forced” from their place in the binary. 

Taken by itself, I think an argument could be made that Remothered doesn’t deserve some of the criticism that I’m leveling at it. But this game doesn’t exist within a cultural or temporal vacuum. The main problem with “trans person as [pitiable] monster” is that it’s done so frequently, with any positive or even neutral depictions of trans people to balance it out nearly nonexistent. In horror, the lack of trans final girls and trans surviving heroes is incredibly pronounced. I am beyond tired of trans people only being the deviants that horror tells audiences they should fear.

Then there’s this:

I’m well aware that American cultural chauvanism is a thing, and I do want to be cautious about it. After reading that tweet, I spent about two hours trying different google search strings to figure out what the hell Mr. Darril was talking about, and I came up with nothing. I do want to be sensitive to cultural differences… however, this isn’t a case of me stomping into Italy, playing this game in its original language, and throwing an American temper tantrum that this doesn’t perfectly fit my experience. What my friends and I played is the official English-language localization of the game. At this point, if there is a cultural context or history that is fundamental to understanding the game that isn’t also readily available or internationally known, it behooves the creator to figure out how to communicate that–or risk being honestly misunderstood.

Which brings me back to those thoughts I mentioned I had as a writer. Envision me taking off my Video Game Player hat and replacing it with my Writer hat, which is rainbow-colored and dotted with cookie- and middle-finger-shaped LEDs.

When I saw Chris Darril’s tweets, my first reaction wasn’t anger or shock. It was a sort of laughing, “Does this man not have any friends?”

Maybe things are different in the video game world. But a conversation that constantly moves through the SFF writer world, and a thing that older writers always try to communicate to younger writers is: you don’t talk back when readers leave negative reviews. Except in vanishingly rare circumstances (e.g.: pushing back on some transphobic asshole is willfully misgendering your characters) you will end up showing your entire ass on the internet and it will not cover you in glory. Don’t be like Anne Rice. There’s nothing quite like a property creator, who is generally in a much higher position of power than a lowly reader (or in this case video game player) coming down on someone and effectively telling them that “you don’t know how to eat!” It’s just not a good look, ever.

And when the reader/player is saying, “Hey, I felt hurt by this”?

You as a creator do not get to control how someone will react to what you’ve made. It’s incredibly frustrating, I know. I’ve had a few moments like that myself, and the urge to argue can be strong… but thankfully I have friends who will materialize out of the ether and slap my phone out of my hands. As artists, once we’ve sent something we’ve made out into the world, it’s no longer ours. It’s in the hands of a multitude of other people, none of whom are us, and all of whom will experience it differently through the unique prism of their lives. If we did a really great job communicating what we’re trying to say, most people will get it. But sometimes that’s not the case. And because we don’t have universal experience, we might have made something that a person will find hurtful because we weren’t able to see it from their perspective. It’s a feature, not a bug, I swear.

And this is the important thing, here, the part where the empathy of being a writer has to extend beyond the characters we create and out to the readers (or players, in this case): When someone says they felt hurt by something you wrote, you don’t get to tell them they’re wrong. You listen. You say, “Hey, I really didn’t mean it that way, and I’m sorry.” (None of that, “sorry you feel that way” non-pology crap.) Then you’ve learned something for next time.

I get it. It sucks to realize something you made isn’t being received the way you wanted it to be, but that’s part of the responsibility of creating art and putting it out in the world. It’s tough. But that’s the job.

So Chris, if you’re reading this, I hope you’ve found it educational. I’m really not interested in getting in some kind of Twitter feud with you over it. I’m not the one who will come out looking like an asshole.

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deep space nine rewatch

DS9 Rewatch: Season 2, Episodes 4-7

After the short arc of the first three episodes, we’re back into more standalones. Invasive Procedures is about Deep Space Nine being taken over during a plasma storm because there’s only a skeleton crew left aboard. The mastermind of the takeover is an unjoined Trill named Verad, who has decided that he is entitled to the Dax symbiont. His love interest, Mareel, is a prostitute that he rescued from his former life; she acts as his second-in-command on the hired crew that Vared uses to invade the station.

There isn’t a b-plot to speak of; most of the episode is devoted to Sisko trying to convince Mareel that Vared, once he’s Vared Dax, is going to leave her because he’ll be a different person. There’s also some good interaction between Sisko and Vared Dax, where Sisko makes it clear that he doesn’t give a shit if Dax is in there… basically if that’s Dax, that’s someone who is no longer his friend.

Honestly, I wanted to like this episode more than I did. The biggest problem is, I think, that for all the conflict is about Dax and who is in possession of the symbiote, Dax as an entity seems curiously absent. Doesn’t Dax as a being have an opinion about being kidnapped, their previous host effectively murdered while in the prime of her life, and forciby joined with someone they didn’t choose? Apparently not. Dax is a little football that Vared and Sisko fight over, basically. Then because the episode is at its time limit, Jadzia gets the symbiote back and everything is fine.

Meh.

The next episode, Cardassians, is the moment we’ve all been waiting for: The triumphant return of the Totally Heterosexual Adventures of Elim Garak. A Bajoran couple bring their adopted Cardassian war orphan to the station and immediately there’s politics all over the place when it’s implied that the parents are somehow teaching the poor kid to hate himself. The situation is obviously more complicated than that–Rugal, the kid, knows he’s Cardassian, knows what the Cardassians did to the Bajorans, and isn’t really being accepted… but his adoptive parents really love him. But he’s also the thought-to-be-dead natural child of Pa’Dar, a political opponent of Gul Dukat.

Look, I’m just in it for Garak. My favorite moment of the episode is when he just casually lets himself in to Julian’s quarters to tell him they’re going to have an Extremely Straight Field Trip down to Bajor as soon as possible. Andrew J. Robinson, who plays Garak, is absolutely transfixing in the moment when a Cardassian child at the orphanage asks him if he’s come to take them home to Cardassia; the simple look he gives her speaks absolute volumes.

The one thing I didn’t like about this episode is how quickly Rugal’s story is tied up; it’s not very satisfying. Sisko decides to send him back to Cardassia with Pa’Dar, even though his Bajoran parents love him. Rugal doesn’t get a voice in any of this. He’s a plot puck, getting batted around.

But really, it’s all about Garak, telling Julian:

Truth is in the eye of the beholder, doctor. I never tell the truth because I don’t believe there is such a thing. That is why I prefer the straight line simplicity of cutting cloth.

Keep scattering those bread crumbs, Garak.

The next episode, Melora, is… bad. Real bad. It’s a Very Special DS9 Episode about an ensign coming to the station who is effectively disabled in normal gravity because she comes from a very low-gravity home planet. (The good ol’ “marginalized person as alien” Star Trek trope.) The station is obviously not accessible for someone who uses a wheelchair; that fact alone heavily applies that disabled humans (or Bajorans, etc) don’t exist in this future because they haven’t had to come up with any work arounds to the Space Asshole Construction before now.

Melora herself has some good moments, like when she says “The truth is there is no ‘Melora’ problem until people create one.” Her “disability” isn’t the problem; other people make it the problem. But all of her good points are met by the crew being uniformly patronizing in a really awful way. Julian is in total creeper form as well as being patronizing, which apparently is appealing to Melora?

There’s the dangling of a “cure” for Melora’s condition. She starts to pursue it, but then ultimately decides to not because she would lose a lot of her cultural connections and no longer feel like herself. I am not a disabled person myself, but I know this is a fraught topic, and not one where there should be an automatic assumption that a cure would be wanted… so maybe in this little bit, the episode gets it slightly of right?

But otherwise, the episode is real bad. It wants to make philosophical points about dependency versus independence in a way that totally elides that it Star Fleet as a society treated accessibility like a right, this wouldn’t even be a question.

The only bright light is the cook at the new Klingon restaurant, and he’s mvp when he’s serenading Julian and Melora.

Rules of Acquisition brings back DS9’s second best recurring character: The Grand Nagus, played as always with wicked delight by Wallace Shawn. He comes to the station to put Quark in charge of a big negotiation with people from the Gamma Quadrant… because if Quark is successful, the Nagus will reap the rewards, and if he fails, Quark will take the blame. A brilliant young Ferengi waiter on Quark’s staff  points that out and becomes Quark’s business consultant in the process.

Only the waiter is a Ferengi woman who is masquerading as a man. She has an absolutely brilliant mind for business and refuses to be hampered by her gender in their fundamentally misogynistic culture. Look, I’m a total sucker for “crossdressing to get around the stupid bullshit of my society to get what I want” stories.

And my favorite bit is where Jadzia figures out that Pel loves Quark, but not that she’s female–Jadzia thought she had her a gay Ferengi! (Also, this is a great way for Pel to reveal she’s female without having been “clocked” by anyone, which is a thing that happens way too often in stories like this.) This also really implies that Jadzia doesn’t think homosexuality is abnormal–and maybe that gay Ferengi are a thing. Which come on, this thing was made in the 90s. I’ll take it.

I think this episode also has the first mention of the Dominion? Quark and Pel find out about it when they go to the Gamma Quadrant. Right after Pel tries to kiss Quark. Which Quark immediately goes into denial about.

Rom, incredibly jealous about Pel, ransacks her room to find out her secret. The scene where Rom rats Pel out is so hilariously shot. We just see them in the distance, Rom and Quark talking, then Rom hauling Pel over, then… Quark just falling over like a log. It’s a delight. What it leads to is sad, though. Quark sending Pel away from the station, unable to handle that she’s wearing clothes and quoting Rules of Acquisition.

Pel: Then come with me! No one in the Gamma Quadrant would care if I wear clothes or not.

Quark: I care.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Pel decides to unmask herself in front of the Nagus… but all it does it screw Quark out of his cut of the profits from the Gamma Quadrant. The Nagus querelously saying, “Shame on you!” to her is lovely, though. He sounds so hurt about having been skunked.

Pel: It’s time you learned that women are as capable as men when it comes to acquiring profit.

Quark: Do me a favor and don’t tell anyone else.

Oh Pel. You were amazing.

Honestly, I wonder if that’s why Quark spends all his time creeping on non-Ferengi women, particularly Jadzia. Deep down, he wants someone who can be his equal (or outfox him) but he can’t mentally handle it when he meets his match in a Ferengi woman. Your loss, Quark.

Categories
deep space nine rewatch

DS9 Rewatch: Season 2, Episodes 1-3

The Homecoming starts out out with a Bajoran earring… and it’s enough to make me even more curious about them, since they’re apparently singular enough that Kira can look at one and know exactly who it belongs to. Which in this case is a war hero who everyone thought was dead. But the earring implies that he’s maybe still alive, and on Cardassia IV. She’s not just looking to rescue a fellow Bajoran, but hoping he can become a leader that her people need.

And then we introduce the Circle, a society of Bajoran anti-immigrant racists, basically, so this feels… nicely relevant to today. But that’s what gets Sisko to think maybe a little war hero rescue wouldn’t be a bad idea. This gives Kira and O’Brien a chance to have some time together; Kira seems a bit surprised when O’Brien just says “understood” after being told they’re either going to accomplish the rescue or die trying.

Kira and O’Brien rescue the guy they want and some additional prisoners. They get back just in time for Kira to walk in on Gul Dukat offering an apology for there still having been prisoners… which is… I don’t trust it. At all. And he says the rest of the prisoners are being sent back to Bajor. Also don’t trust it.

Frank Langella is a government dude that tells Kira to not pull crap like this again, but privately thanks her. He is just one hell of a politician character actor, isn’t he?

A bunch of masked assailants from the Circle come into Quark’s bar and brand him. Jake’s girlfriend can’t go out with him because he father says she can’t date someone who isn’t Bajoran. And Kira’s war hero (who doesn’t view himself as very heroic) is trying to run away from home by stowing away on a ship. Honestly, I can understand why a guy who’s been held prisoners and traumatized for years might not want to immediately launch himself into a racist garbage fire in an attempt to put it out with his own body.

And then Frank Langella comes back to let the war hero know he’s the “Navarch” and made the liaison to DS9. Which basically means they don’t want him messing with politics. And they’re putting Kira back on Bajor where they can watch her. Good place to end the episode…

The Circle starts with Langella totally shocked that Sisko isn’t happy to be getting rid of Kira. The Circle is attacking politicians (whew) and that’s Langella’s excuse to not want Li (the war hero, I’m tired of typing war hero) on Bajor. And there’s graffiti on Sisko’s door.

Odo’s mad as hell that Kira’s just quietly leaving.

Odo: You did fairly well at it once I smoothed your rough edges.

Kira: I thought you did well once I smoothed your rough edges.

And he’s just the first to the Kira room party. Then we get Dax, Julian, and O’Brien… and Quark. Followed by Vedek Bareil, the anti-Winn. Who has come to report that shit is tense and bad on Bajor, and invite her to hang out at his temple. And once she’s frustrated enough, she gets to stand in front of one of the orbs of the Prophets. (Apparently the way to hear what she needs to is naked sexy times with the hot Vedek. I mean. Okay. Glad to know the Prophets ship it.)

Vedek Winn: Stay as long as you like. Maybe a week if necessary.

Have I mentioned I hate Winn so, so much?

Also, I think I haven’t mentioned how hilarious it is that I find Odo’s widely varying density. Because he goes from being human-sized to very small things like glasses or a mouse. But mouse-snooping does reveal where the weapons are coming from.

And meanwhile, Kira gets kidnapped by the Circle…and they’re run by Frank Langella. It’s just the kind of behavior one would expect from a Frank Langella character! Thankfully she gets rescued by Sisko and crew before they beat her into a total pulp. And back on the station, Odo reveals that the Circle is getting its weapons secretly supplied by the Cardassians… because the Cardassians really want to force the Federation out so they can come back. Well played, Cardassians. (And my nemesis Winn is plotting with Frank Langella too, so there’s another reason to just hate them both.)

The Siege is the third and final episode of this little arc, and I’m really excited to see DS9 already dipping its toes into longer form storytelling. It wasn’t something I really got as a kid, particularly because this arc is so much about the internal politics of Bajor, but as an adult I could just roll around in this like a happy dog.

The start is an excellent moment for Sisko, reestablishing his unique command style with his spin on a pep talk. And going to the old device of slow-walking a transition of power to buy time. Classic, fun stuff.

Oh no Jake and Nog facing the prospect of being separated during the evacuation!

Nog: If our fathers couldn’t break us up, no [unable to pronounce coup d’etat] no stupid French thing can either.

MY HEART. BEST FRIENDS.

O’Brien calling the Cardassians the “Cardies” makes me think that Cardi B is going to take over that wormhole any fucking second now. But we see here where he sees his duty to Sisko specifically versus his duty to his family. “He needs me.” (Wondering how much fanfic launched off that line.)

Of course the Ferengi invented overbooking. Of course. Though Sisko trying to choke Quark seems kind of… I don’t like it. Doesn’t seem right. Sisko’s obviously willing to throw a punch or two when necessary, but that moment really rubbed me the wrong way. (Even if Quark kind of deserved it.)

The cat and mouse sequence between the bad Bajorans and the Federation resistance is wonderful. As Corina pointed out while we were watching, Li (the Bajoran war hero) is the king of this game of chess–and Odo is definitely the queen because he’s immensely maneuverable. And Meanwhile, the Kira and Jadzia adventure hour where they’re running around in a flying junk pile is just fun.

Sisko has to go all George Washington at Li, “Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder.”

Also, Winn turns on Jaro in the blink of an eye, which tells you everything that you need to know about Winn. Though boy, is this a series of the 90s, because Jaro is “fully willing to cooperate with the investigation.” Just imagine if this show was happening today.

It ends on a brief, but beautiful note about the difference between who our heroes actually were and who we need to remember them to be, because we need those stories. It’s such a solid little mini-arc.

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lgbt

For the first time in my life, I don’t give a shit what the science says.

It’s a thing that happens in the cess pit of social media every day. Some anti-trans dipshit pops up with a declaration: “Science says there are only two genders!” (What they really mean is that there are only two sexes, which is wrong according to current science, and then conflating sex with gender, which is… also wrong according to current science.) The argument gets joined, most often by people who don’t fall into the cis binary, though I appreciate it when cis binary allies step up and start on a deluge of papers and evidence about how that definitely is not what the current science says.

This has also left me increasingly disquieted, and I want to try to articulate why. I want you to keep in mind that I am saying this as someone with a graduate degree in science, who has a deep love and appreciation for the great collective human endeavor that is the search for truth via the scientific process. At its absolute best, engagement with science is a deeply humbling experience that reminds us how small we are in the grand scale of the universe, how little we actually know, and how far we have to go. It reminds us that people working together, with open minds and honest intentions, can expand our understanding of the world around us.

That said, I frankly do not give a shit what the science has to say about my gender.

There’s a deep desire out there for us to be able to run our lives algorithmically, as if we are computers. I understand how that would simplify dealing with an extremely complex world, where sometimes there aren’t actually right answers. I see that urge every time there’s another spasm of what about-ism about “cancel culture” or some pop culture figure being thrown down off their plinth and revealed as a really terrible person. People struggle to build universally applicable standards and revel in pointing the finger at each other and screaming about hypocrisy when that universality breaks up on the rocks of humans being human. There’s always an edge case around the corner, just waiting to twist your mental ankle to the breaking point as you stumble over it.

So I get why it’s comforting to reach for science as a source of firm truths that should define “all” judgment. But frankly, that does ill service to science, when within our various disciplines there are things that defy simple classification (talk to me some time about mineral classification of sedimentary rocks, for example) or when the whole point is that there is always a window of uncertainty… though even that wiggle room we give ourselves for uncertainty isn’t a cheap algorithm for humans to run our brains on either, by the way. There are things so well-established by science that we get to say flatly they are true. Like gravity. Like climate change.

There are a lot of reasons I don’t particularly like my existence being boiled down to a game of who can find the most peer-reviewed papers to support or deny my self-definition. To start with, again as much as I love science, this kind of argument elides the hideous history of particularly the life sciences as tools to aid in oppressive social structures and deny the personhood of minorities. Science is still a human endeavor. It still suffers from the prejudices and quirks of the humans conducting it, and the incredibly faulty premises they can use as research foundations. For example, if you start from the assumption that there must be a reason some races are better than others and you’re just going to quantify it with science, your evidence and experiments are going to be bullshit from the get-go. And yet. (Or let’s talk hysteria, perhaps.) And this is not something that’s in the dark past of science, long forgotten; we’re talking the last fifty years, here. That’s not even touching the way non-scientists will happily mis-apply scientific concepts or simply borrow the language of scientific authority to justify the status quo–Social Darwinism, anyone? The cringe-y corners of evo psych? What sort of motivated reasoning about queer people has happened in the past and is still going on today?

Secondarily, I hate these arguments becoming a sort of quasi-scientific debate because the whole point, if you’re doing science right, is that given sufficient, well-support evidence, you will reconsider your position. Now, I don’t think that anyone on any side slinging links to scientific papers on Twitter or Facebook is coming from a position of good faith that means they’re willing to do that. (See.) But there’s still that breath of uncertainty that creeps in like horror. My friend, if you’re defending the existence of trans and/or nonbinary people with sheer weight of science, if that produced science were to turn against us, would you change your mind? Is my personhood conferred only by a weightier stack of new papers on one side of the scale than what the transphobes can put down on the other? Is my presence in your reality that tenuous?

And why does there need to be outside confirmation of my own words? I may not have a PhD in Alex’s Gender, but neither does anyone else. The life within my own skin is viscerally unknowable to anyone but me, which makes me the sole authority on who Alex is from moment to moment. It doesn’t matter what research comes out; there is no mass of evidence in the world weightier than the daily experiment of my own life and no instrument that can explore my understanding of myself except for my own mind. And perhaps because I am a scientist and I understand the limitations of my own knowledge and abilities, I can freely admit that the interiority of every other person on this planet is as alien and unknowable to me as mine is to them–whether they admit it or not–and I just have to take their word for it.

So no. I don’t give even the tiniest fuck if science says my gender exists or not. It exists because I SAY IT DOES. I am a person. And because I live and breathe, I deserve the basic fucking respect from other humans that the fact of my existence confers on me.

And if you say that’s not enough? You’re the problem.

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deep space nine rewatch

DS9 Rewatch: Season 1, episode 13-19

The Storyteller was… look, I was drunk while I watched it. It was okay? You had parallel plots of the young Bajoran Tetrarch trying to figure out how to negotiate, and the Bajoran village figuring out how to name a new “storyteller” to keep it unified. The only real problem I have with the episode is the dude that wants to be the Sirah LITERALLY TRIES TO MURDER O’BRIEN and he’s SO INTO IT that Julian and O’Brien working together barely get his knife away. And then they’re like oh cool, you be the glue that holds this village together because O’Brien doesn’t want to be.

Cool cool cool cool cool.

Anyway, it’s okay. Nog and Jake are fucking adorable. Nog playing a joke on jake with some oatmeal and pretending it was Odo, also A+. Honestly, I would have liked a little more of the Tetrarch and a little less of O’Brien going Do Not Want.

Progress has Nog and Jake being friends and attempting to do deals, and eventually coming out ahead which is lovely. I mean, Nog and Jake trying to act like they Totally Know What a Self-Sealing Stem Bolt Is when talking to O’Brien is comedy gold.  The other half of the episode is a very old-school Star Trek ethical dilemma. The Bajorans want to do a thing to a moon, and there’s some people who don’t want to leave so that the thing can be done.

Though I could do with a lot less of “he’s being so patronizing, isn’t it charming?”

Kira not wanting to be like Cardassians versus weighing the needs of a lot of people is pretty rough. Particularly because it’s so clear that the people were victims of authoritarian violance more than once already. “Doing what has to be done.”

It’s another good episode for Kira, really. She’s gone from Fighting the Power to being and agent of The Power herself. I mean. That’s basically half the episode is getting to the point where Sisko just flat says that to Kira. And the ending is an ambiguous thing… Kira forces the last holdout to leave the moon, but she’s not happy about it, and the show isn’t trying to tell us it’s a good thing that peoples’ lives have to be destroyed for progress; utilitarian arguments aren’t the be-all and end-all.

It’s a good, grown-up episode.

Oh god, Julian awkwardly hitting on Dax again at the start of If Wishes Were Horses. Why this.

Julian: Stop. you’re driving a stake through my heart.

Please god.

Imaginary things are becoming reality! That’s the plot. (Julian does indeed end up with a sex kitten version of Dax, which is… yikes. And extra yikes when Sex Kitten Dax calls the real Dax a “cold fish.”) There’s a “rupture.” The last time it was reported, it blew up the system it was in. Ticking clock ahoy!

I mean, very classically Trek. A weird thing in space makes stuff happening. There’s a slight twist in that we find out there’s some kind of sentient force behind the weird space thing when all the “hallucinations” get together and have a cryptic conversation about the people who imagined them. The conclusion that the weird space thing is everyone’s imaginary fears made manifest is a bit too Sphere for me to be able to take, though.

According to Wikipedia, Rumplestiltskin was originally supposed to be a leprechaun and Colm Meaney nixed it. In which case, whew. I do think it’s super cool that the greatest baseball player ever, Buck Bokai, is Aisan. And the birds Odo spends most of the episode chasing around are the MVPs.

I really could have lived without this one.

Next up is The Forsaken. It’s a “disaster on the station” sort of episode, where some kind of entity gets downloaded into the computers and O’Brien has to figure out how to get it out… while that leaves Odo trapped in an elevator with Lwaxana Troi and Julian trapped in a hallway that’s on fire with a bunch of ambassadors he’s supposed to take care of.

It’s not a particularly deep episode, but it’s got Lwaxana being so very Lwaxana, and I’m a sucker for that. And she does get to have a nice, serious moment with Odo, which I liked. I want a recording of Majel Barrett saying, “I never cared to be ordinary,” that I can listen to every time I’m feeling small and sad. So I loved this episode, it’s fun, and O’Brien comes out of it with an alien computer dog that if I remember correctly, never gets mentioned again.

Dramatis Personae has everyone but Odo acting really fucking weird after a Klingon ship fresh from the Gamma quadrant blows up right outside the station. Odo gets to have a headache that literally splits his head in half and knocks him briefly unconscious instead. Honestly, I kind of loved seeing Quark being so concerned about his best frenemy when Odo gets struck.

You can tell Odo thinks something is very wrong, but the look he shoots Sisko when he says “I couldn’t care less what happened to a Klingon ship,” is absolute gold. And Quark is also unaffected, so that’s a great opportunity for some buddy cop moments. The crew starts splitting into factions between Kira and Sisko, with everyone way too into station politics.

Turns out there’s a doodad that’s recorded the way a species tore itself to shreds and that’s put a telepathic overprint on the people of DS9. Which is very, very Star Trek, looking at the sins of the past destroying the presence. Mostly, this episode is full of really solid acting work by all of the main cast. They are convincingly not themselves, down to the body language, and you can tell things are really, really wrong long before Odo reaches that conclusion.

The fact that the MacGuffin Kira’s so concerned about in this episode is “dolamine” fucked with me, because my brain kept hearing “dolomite” and getting very confused. Also, decision to name the place where the not-dolomite gets refined into weapons-grade MacGuffin, “Ultima Thule” is sure… something. (Though there were quite a few less Nazis running around publically in the early 90s than there are now, so who knows.)

This is a pretty good episode, but it gets 30 DKP minus for telepathic energy being a physical cloud that you can flush out a cargo bay.

Duet goes fast right out of the gate. A Cardassian with a rare illness that means he must have been at an infamous mining camp during the occupation comes to DS9 and Kira is on him immediately. The parallels to hunting down Nazi war criminals are conscious and stark. Kira interrogates Marritza through three phases, each becoming more claustrophobic and tense: first, Marritza claims to have been nothing but a file clerk, and even attempts to gaslight Kira with the claim that nothing so terrible happened at the work camp; it was just a rumor the Cardassians started to keep the Bajorans cowed. Then he claims to be Gul Darhe’el, the Butcher of Gallitep, and taunts Kira monstrously. Then it’s revealed that he in fact Marritza, who has cosmetically transformed himself into the appearance of Darhe’el in an effort to be tried and executed for the war crimes that Darhe’el died in order to escape. In this last moment, he becomes a broken, weeping man, someone tortured by being a “bug” who did nothing personally to cause the atrocities but was too morally weak to do anything to stop them.

Harris Yulin plays the Cardassian, Marritza, and he’s fucking amazing. Nana Visitor is intense and emotional and fucking amazing in this episode. I can see why it’s considered to be one of the best DS9 episodes; the fact that it’s a bottle episode just makes it all the more claustrophobic and inescapable. It’s a masterpiece that asks a lot of incredibly difficult questions and doesn’t offer any answers–because it admits it doesn’t have any. It’s an episode only DS9 could have done justice to because of DS9’s world build and the character work Kira already had in the rest of the season.

Here’s a really intense breakdown of the episode that’s a deeper dive than I can manage–and puts it in context of similar episodes in The Twilight Zone and Magnum, PI.

Anyway, Duet definitely earns its place as one of the best Trek episodes of all time.

Oh god here comes [Not yet] Kai Winn in In the Hands of the Prophets. I barely remember watching DS9 back in the day, but I remember how much I fucking hated Kai Winn. Her first appearance is showing up to shit all over Keiko’s school because the science of the wormhole is blasphemy. This is the first episode that really puts me at odds with Kira, because she’s of the opinion that science needs to have the right spiritual context, and all I can hear is “intelligent design” until I start seeing red.

(And Kira, do you really have a right to dictate the spiritual education of the non-Bajoran kids? Just. Argh.)

Winn: I feel your anger toward me and I forgive you for it.

ARGH I HATE HER SANCTIMONIOUS ASS SO MUCH.

This whole thing just gives me flashbacks to the Kansas evolution hearings, for all they happened over ten years later. It’s all about the conflict between secularism and fundamentalism, with Winn’s faction happy to do things like, say, bomb a school that teaches stuff they don’t like. (And the thing that really cheeses me off is it’s not like Keiko was telling the kids they couldn’t believe in the Prophets; she was just saying what the scientific understanding was.) Sisko rightfully lays the bombing at Winn’s feet; she’s made it clear that she won’t tolerate any beliefs that diverge from her own, and she’s a master of veiled threats. Hell, she uses their shared religion to convince one of the Bajorans on station to attempt to assassinate her opponent.

I mean, it’s a good episode in that it made me hate Winn with the firey passion of a thousand suns. It’s definitely speaking on relevant issues as well. Not a bad ending for the first season, because it hints at social conflicts to come.

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deep space nine rewatch

DS9 Rewatch: Season 1, episode 11 & 12

The Vortex has a pretty good hook to start. Shady dealings, half of a Miradorn pair getting murdered by a random other guy in a robbery gone wrong that Quark might have set up, the remaining half swearing vengeance. And the alien that did the murdering is from the gamma quadrant–and knows about Odo’s people, “changelings.”

The gamma quadrant alien, Croden (played by Cliff DeYoung) is the absolute backbone of this episode. He’s massively good as a grifter and a liar and a murderer on the run from his scary government. His dialog is absolutely A+ for someone who is basically trying to coldread Odo the entire time so he can get to the one thing that matters to him–his daughter. It’s just such a well put together set of interactions, and Croden masterfully manipulates Odo into doing the one thing he finds most important, which is taking his daughter back to DS9. And that moment where Croden goes back and forth between saving Odo and leaving him behind is incredibly well done.

It’s a great character episode for Odo, where you finally get a little more depth to him other than being just a hella grumpy security guy. He does feel lonely, and he does desperately want to know where he came from… but not quite desperately enough to compromise his principles for the bribe of information. What bends him is seeing and hearing enough truth about Croden’s circumstances–and then getting heavily guilted by Croden about the daughter. It’s interesting to see Odo make an emotional connection despite his best efforts, and be emotionally manipulated by someone while obviously understanding that’s what’s going on. And so he hands Croden and his daughter over to the Vulcans that happen to be in the area.

It’s a really good episode. And I agree with Corina, that you could sum it up as “Odo: I had an emotion once, and I hated it.”

Battle Lines has probably my favorite opener so far, with Lesbian Icon Kira Nerys furious that the files from the old Cardassian commander call her a minor operative. So disrespectful. It’s so lovely to see Kai Opaka again, some to collect the tour Sisko promises her–but she obviously wants to go through the wormhole. Kai Opaka gets killed almost immediately after the runabout gets attacked by a satellite and crashlands on a moon that’s basically Space Avernus. It’s not the first time Star Trek has done an “endless war” episode, but the wrinkle here is the dead being infinitely resurrected to continue fighting. It’s very clearly set up to be about the spiral into obsessive vengeance, where the reasons for a war have been forgotten and all that remains is a nightmare where negotiation is nearly impossible.

If the last episode was Odo’s, this one is Kira’s. Much of Star Trek has operated under the really problematic assumption that the enlightened future is basically atheist (sometimes quietly, sometimes not) and the deep spirituality of the Bajorans (and Kira, specifically, as a character who uses her religion as a source of hope and strength) is a major counterpoint to that. Kira’s moment of deep mourning for Kai Opaka is heart-wrenching. 

Kai Opaka: This is not your war, Kira.

DS9 has set up Kira as being the most combative of the command staff before, though it always seemed to lean more toward that just being the result of an aggressive personality. But the moment when Kira tries to throw herself into the endless war, frantically demanding organization and defense, makes it pretty clear that she’s been fighting all her life and that’s left a deep mark of paranoia on her. Things make the most sense in the context of war, and she seems both scared yet almost glad for it.

Kira: That’s over for me now. That’s… not who I am. I don’t want you to think that I’m this violent person without a soul, without a conscience. That’s not who I am.

Not gonna lie, I cried in this moment.

Kira: I’ve known nothing but violence since I was a child.

Kai Opaka: In the eyes of the Prophets, we are all children.

Kira: I’m afraid that the Prophets won’t forgive me.

Kai Opaka: They are waiting for you to forgive yourself.

Kira is just such a fantastic character, conflicted and flawed and still trying to figure out who she is and who she wants to be. This episode gives her such a good opportunity to be vulnerable and express those things with someone she trusts–Kai Opaka–because she’s still not willing to be anything but confident and totally badass around the Star Fleet staff.

Kai Opaka’s conclusion that she should stay and provide spiritual guidance comes in before Sisko and Julian have a chance to tell her that she can’t leave anyway. Which tells you everything you need to know about Kai Opaka. And I’d say Julian actually gets a good character moment too, if a brief one, when he mentions he could stop the aliens from being endlessly resurrected… and then immediately quietly withdraws the offer when the leader enthuses about what a great weapon that would be.

Oh, and there’s still time for a little Prime Directive noodling.

Basically, what a good fucking episode.

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deep space nine rewatch

DS9 Rewatch: Season 1, Episodes 7-10

Well, Dax is off to a strong start with another round of “Julian, take a fucking hint.” Extra annoying is Julian basically tells himself “well, she didn’t say no, so it still could be yes!” and follows Dax, so he’s there to at least see her being kidnapped. Dax, why so many creepers?

I love that there’s a “unilateral extradition” treaty with these people, because that ensures a dramatic kidnapping attempt. But I like the way this sets up to examine some of the strangeness of the Trill as a people, like the question of who Dax really is, and if Dax becomes a different person when the host changes–and the existence of the host as an entity who still has a life with meaning despite joining. And there’s some great moments of politics, about who is allied with who and why the Bajorans don’t have a treaty so they can say no extradition because it’s their station. The maneuvering is lovely, as is Odo playing hardball with Quark using the threat of building code violations; this kind of thing is Star Trek playing bureaucracy at its best.

Also, special love for Anne Haney as the arbiter who is Done With Everything Before The Trial Even Starts. As Trek trial episodes go, it’s not The Measure of a Man (if for no other reason than it lacks the special drama of Picard versus Riker); it leans more toward being a mystery episode, solving a thirty year old crime that goes full Long Black Veil, which cuts into the major ethical debate that’s rolled up in the question of who Dax is. But it’s solid, and fun watch.

Another episode, another setup with Julian being fucking insufferable, but this time he’s not creeping on any lady people so I’ll allow it. You know, I remember really liking him at some point, and I’m not sure if it’s because he gets some good character development in later seasons, or if I just gravitated toward him on my first watch because he was the youngest guy on the crew and he is as objectively cute as he is smug. The Passenger starts out with Julian getting lightly choked by a dangerous prisoner who then promptly dies, so my money was instantly on him getting possessed by the prisoner in some way.

I feel like episodes are taking turns with who is hitting grossly on Jadzia. Last episode was Julian. This one, it’s Quark’s turn.

Security Lieutenant: …if you want my opinion…

Sisko: Actually, I don’t.

This is why I love Sisko. And DS9 is working to make him such a distinct sort of command presence from the captains we knew before.

Instead we get a shipment of a MacGuffin going to a planet to help stop the people there from dying, on a collission course with a very bad man who is supposedly dead and was obsessed with immortality. Probably because I called it at the very beginning of the episode, so none of the “ooh, suspense! mystery!” stuff worked for me, this ended up feeling like the worst episode of what had been a fairly solid run. (And all love to Alexander Siddig, but him [over]acting as the criminal walking around in his Julian suit is just… not great.)

Move Along Home starts with the terrible revelation for Sisko that Jake’s gotten all his relationship advice from Nog. Y I K E S. And the first ever aliens coming in formally from the Gamma Quadrant are gamers. OH NOES. (Oh god they actually look like they got scraped up from the TTRPG tables at a fantasy convention and slapped in some horrible, cheap-looking costumes, which I feel terrible for even having written.)

Honestly what appalls me even more than the wigs in this episode is that the Ferengi are just so bad and obvious at cheating. And the bad, obvious cheating leads the main crew members to get trapped inside the game that Quark is playing as an apology, which is just… not a great concept, and especially not as executed, plastic 3D board and all. My face met my palm when the Head Gamer Alien showed up to cackle maniacally and shout his first cryptic message.

I mean, that’s basically the entire episode. Dude in a bad wig saying cryptic things while the command staff wander around in a maze and get given basic “puzzles,” salted liberally with some of the worst acting so far this season. Even Odo’s exasperated “Is it against Star Fleet policy to push a few buttons?” comes across flat. Quark’s decisions have the potential to be interesting; I mean, as Corina said while we were watching, if you’re going to pick one guy off the station to play a random game with lives at stake, it probably would be Quark. I’m not sure how, but this episode even makes the life or death choice uninteresting; Quark goes into a screaming begging fit and the exasperated Head Gamer Alien says they’ll just choose someone at random. Which leads to an interminable cave sequence. And in the end, it’s all dismissed as “only a game.”

(Also “a tectonic shift of two ground masses”??? WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT EVEN SUPPOSED TO MEAN?)

Apparently this one is considered to be one of the ten worst Star Trek episodes ever. Can’t say I disagree.

In fact, Move Along Home was so fucking awful, instead of going to bed I decided to watch another episode just so it wasn’t going to be the last thing in my brain before sleep.

Which puts us at The Nagus. And this episode, I do vaguely remember, mostly because the Grand Nagus is played by Wallace Shawn (you know… “Never trust a Sicilian when death is on the line!”) and he’s still an absolute delight even under seventy pounds of makeup.

I think the more important part of the episode is the expansion of Nog and Jake’s friendship, the tensions where you can tell that their respective parents would really rather prefer to tear them apart. It’s a great foundation for their later character development. And poor Nog getting told yet again that he can’t go to school when it’s something he actually wants to do, and that makes him get in a fight with his best friend. This poor kid in his unsupportive home environment. And then there’s Jake, who I love with all my heart, sad because he’s losing his best friend–and when his dad tells him that “these things happen sometimes” you can just hear him thinking this is bullshit. It’s a really great depiction of friendship between young men that I don’t feel like even gets a lot of play today.

That scene of Jake helping Nog read. My fucking heart.

Okay, yeah, there’s some other stuff going on too. Quark getting to play Mob Boss for a Day has its really fun moments, particularly if you can turn off the part of your brain that’s screaming about the horrible, racist stereotype they’re based on. There’s some spoofy nods to The Godfather and watching Quark go mad with power followed by paranoia definitely has its moments. The Grand Nagus popping back up from his faked death is pretty dang fun.

Definitely a worthy apology for the two episodes that preceded it.

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deep space nine rewatch

DS9 Rewatch: Season 1, Episodes 5 and 6

Captive Pursuit oh boy oh boy. Starting off the episode great with Quark apparently having a sexual harrassment clause in his contracts for the women that work at his bar. I think they’re trying to be funny, but hoo boy is it gross. It’s a relief when the alien ship comes through the wormhole and kicks off the A plot. Now, I get sending O’Brien by himself to not overwhelm a new alien, but he is not exactly the most diplomatic person on DS9. Also not exactly the most tight-lipped–or subtle. Watching him deal with the hunt aliens later is like watching a Barbarian in D&D desperately trying to make a deception check. (If only Garak knew, I’m sure he’d be facepalming mightily.)

Fun thing learned this episode that I’d forgotten: Odo doesn’t believe in using phasers.

But good lord do they make every effort to remind us that Quark is a creepy misogynist in this episode. Really leaves a yucky echo on an otherwise fun scene between him and O’Brien.

I think the developing friendship between O’Brien and Tosk (who has the thighs of a greek god, holy shit) could melt harder hearts than mine, and that’s what elevates the episode and keeps my absolute annoyance about Tosk’s “I cannot tell you about the mysterious thing, and by being terribly mysterious, we shall attempt to manufacture tension.” Which is one of my least favorite plot devices out there, and “well he’s an alien and he took an oath” only stretches so far for that. Once the douchey aliens show up, it becomes a very formulaic, classic Star Trek kind of standalone episode, complete with Prime Directive wrangling and a superior officer happily letting his subordinate get away with breaking the rules because it’s the emotionally correct thing to do.

Q-Less okay some background here. You need to realize that Q is literally my favorite semi-regular character of all time, at least once we got away from Encounter at Farpoint and he developed an actual personality. John de Lancie is a fucking TREASURE. So you are damn right I loved the shit out of this episode and still remember it to thise day.

Starting off with Julian hitting on a lady with a play by play of his medical finals is… a choice. The fact that this “gets them every time” is sure another choice; switching back from pure puppy to weird doctor who later flirst with his patients. Shush, Julian, we need to get to Q. Weirdly, I’d forgotten that Vash was actually involved in this episode–but there’s the strong start, with her saying a “friend dropped me off” in the gamma quadrant… and then zoom in to show Q, hanging out by the shuttle in his best creeper way.

Vash, Star Trek‘s answer to Maron Ravenwood, has the B-plot in her bag of tricks from the gamma quadrant–the beautiful gem. Mysterious power fluctuations (that seems to happen a lot in these shows) soon follow. The silliest part of this episode is probably Vash unpacking her bag when she’s only going to be staying in a room for one night–what person does that?

Q! Q! Q! Being obnoxious as only a god-like being who doesn’t understand the word no can. He’d obviously terribly bored and lonely, while he also can’t figure out why threatening people who are tired of his selfish bullshit isn’t a winning strategy to maintain friendships. One of Q’s greatest charms, which really comes into focus after Julian in this episode and Quark in the previous one, is utterly, delightfully awful he is without ever being massively creepy.

Vash: What did they call you, “the god of lies”?

Q: They meant it affectionately.

Oh no. Help. I love Q because he’s basically Loki with fewer daggers and even less impulse control.

O’Brien gets utilized so well in this episode as the link between DS9 and ST:TNG. He explains Vash, and he’s the one who notices Q and raises the alarm. And then Sisko and Q get together and we get to the true best part of the episode.

Q: You hit me! Picard never hit me!

Sisko: I’m not Picard!

Q: Indeed not. You’re much easier to provoke. How fortunate for me.

This episode feels fuller and faster than other episodes, probably because there’s always Q to throw into the scene for snarky dialog to keep things light and moving. And John de Lancie seems like he’s having a hell of a good time, going from annoying child to darkly threatening from one line to the next. The conclusion with the space egg and the beautiful alien creature that comes out of it feels beside the point; the real capstone moment is Q admitting that he keeps humans around because it’s a chance to experience wonder. A+, would watch again and again.

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deep space nine rewatch

DS9 Rewatch: Season 1, Episode 3 & 4

The rewatch continues!

Past Prolog is episode 3 according to Netflix. It’s the first appearance of one of my favorite characters, Garak, the simple tailor. And it probably says a lot that when I saw him as a kid, I did not notice how totally fucking gay he is–but this time around, hoo boy. I’m honestly still not sure why Garak was so bound and determined to make friends with Julian, other than Julian needed something to do, and his (thankfully not sex-pest-esque) puppyish innocence in this episode actually make him not a bad choice for Mr. Totally-Not-A-Spy to use as a conduit to get information to the Federation. Because one look at Julian’s face and you know dishonesty isn’t in his skill set.

Anyway, this isn’t entirely a Garak love fest, but that’s the A+ part of the episode for me and a strong start for his thematic constant of “gay, spy, or why not both?” The rest of the episode is about a terrorist from Kira’s past showing up, people double crossing each other, and Kira figuring out where she fits in with the new path of Bajor and what loyalty to her people actually means. It really is Kira’s episode; she also gets to develop her relationship with Odo a bit, and her still slightly antagonistic working relationship with Sisko. You know from the beginning that Tahna is bad news, but it’s not as heavy handed as it could have been. And I enjoyed the Klingon sisters and their anry boob windows showing up as a nice little tie to ST:TNG.

All-in-all, I’d also call this one as pretty solid.

Babel starts off going a bit lighter than the previous couple episodes, which makes sense. Everything is breaking on the station, O’Brien is overworked, and then shit just starts getting weirder as he gets sick. It’s time for a standard “mysterious illness” episode! Something weird is going on! It definitely doesn’t have anything to do with the replicators, promise.

But hey, another chance for Julian to do something, and it’s actual doctoring this time. He gets to explain aphasia to the audience twice. And then the virus becomes airborn! (Can’t blame this on The Hot Zone, which wasn’t published until 1994, by the way. But that’s probably why the virus is causing aphasia instead of explosions of blood.) And NGL, this is my favorite exchange of the episode:

Quark: I’m just here visiting my less fortunate customers to make sure they’re not faking their illness to avoid paying their bills.

Sisko: No one could be that devious.

Quark: Psht. I am.

I know Quark is problematic as hell, but I can’t help but love him at times all the same. (And his friendship with Security Chief Grumpy Pants.)

The fact that the virus is a Bajoran invention rather than a Cardassian one is a nice twist, but it ultimately feels like not quite enough story for the length of the episode, and there’s not much of a B plot. It feels incredibly slow-paced, even with lesbian icon Kira Nerys’s excellent turn at kidnapping. By the standard of random Star Trek episodes, it’s not bad; it certainly didn’t make me cringe. But compared to the previous three episodes, it’s fairly weak.

But let me tell you, this is not a great episode to watch with someone who has a biology degree.

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deep space nine rewatch

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the rewatch

Well, sort of a rewatch/first watch, because I don’t really remember watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine beyond the first couple of seasons. I was barely twelve years old when it started airing and a dedicated Star Trek: The Next Generation fan, but for some reason DS9 just never grabbed me. Maybe it’s because they didn’t subject Jake Sisko to the same series of ugly sweaters that Wesley Crusher had to endure. Who knows.

But in honor of Aron Eisenberg’s passing (way too young), I want to give DS9 the chance it deserved… which I’m much better prepared to deliver as an adult than a kid, I daresay. I mean, adult me came to love Babylon 5 and that’s one hell of a slog through the first season.

Night one: The Emmissary part 1 and 2 and A Man Alone

I’ll note that A Man Alone was listed as episode 2 on Netflix, but Google claims it’s actually episode 3? Who knows. I think at this point, it also deeply does not matter, because I do recall the first couple of seasons being extremely episodic, shooting at the ST:TNG formula that was working so well at the time.

So. The Emmissary. 

When I mentioned I’d be rewatching/watching the show on Twitter, I got a lot of cheerful warnings that the show really doesn’t get cooking until a couple of seasons in; be prepared to be as forgiving of DS9 as one has to be of the first couple mostly cringe-worthy seasons of ST:TNG. (And hoo boy, there is some cringe-y stuff in those seasons; I rewatched a bunch of ST:TNG while I was out of commission last year.)

But the thing is, I don’t think the warnings were really necessary. Particularly considering it’s a pilot, The Emmissaryis a solid two-ish hours of television. You get the dramatic start at Wolf 359 that sets up a lot about Commander Sisko’s issues, his traumas, his markedly strained relationship with Captain Picard. You get some good character moments with him interacting with Jake, and then he digs in with the rest of the main characters. Kira threatens to be a one-note aggressive lady-person with frizzy hair, but the pilot backs off that course just in time, letting her show her cunning and her absolute determination–and hinting at her deeply spiritual side. The central mysteries of the show get a good set up with the wormhole, and the entire concept of the show and its political tensions are broadcast from that. There’s a solid effort to indicate that the Ferengi are going to get to be more than their absolutely terrible origins as a gross stereotype. The only real weaknesses I’d accuse The Emmissary of having is that Julian Bashir is puppyish in a way that makes you feel like getting your Cruella DeVille on (if puppies were sex pests), and the bits with the aliens in the wormhole had me rolling my eyes at times.

Is it perfect? Wouldn’t say that. But when you compare it to other first episodes, like Encounter at Farpoint or Midnight on the Firing Line, it’s a damn strong first showing that I hope everyone involved was really proud of.

A Man Alone is equally solid as a second (or third, according to Google) episode. We get to learn a little bit more about Odo as a shapeshifter and the resident hardass security dude. We get to see a start of his really fascinating best frenemies relationship with Quark. We get to see the start of Jake and Nog’s enduring friendship (*raises a glass to Aron Eisenberg*). It’s a fun locked-room-mystery variant episode that only get a little silly in hindsight when it comes to wondering why the fuck they couldn’t figure out the whole clone thing without growing a whole new clone. (On the other hand, this gives us a window into clone ethics in the Star Trek universe and I definitely appreciated that!)

I also did find it kind of hilarious to see for the second time, Commander Sisko firing his phaser in the air like he’s an old west sherriff who thinks that’s the same as a gun. But anyway, the standout for me in this one was watching Keiko O’Brien get to upgrade her role from being a nice lamp on the chief’s desk–the scene where she convinces Rom to send Nog to her school did a lot of good work for her as a character and showed her being damn smart. (Which was necessary after her sort of airy handwaving about how she can totally put a curriculum together because she’s always wanted to be a teacher, I’m assuming written by someone who has literally never talked to a teacher in real life.)

Anyway, off to a really solid start. I’m looking forward to continuing my rewatch!