297. Move Along HomeFORMULA: The Royale + fizzbin
WHY WE LIKE IT: Uhm... it made me think of fizzbin just now?
WHY WE DON'T: A totally arbitrary game. Annoying guest characters. Annoyed cast.
REVIEW: Ridiculous surrealism strikes DS9, and not in a good way. The episode starts off rather well, with Sisko worried Jake is getting the birds and the bees from the gender-issue-retarded Nog, and there are some good bits here and there, like Sisko's loyalty to Dax, or Quark's cheating tactics, ot the overhead camera shots. But the Wadi, as the second representatives of the Gamma Quadrant, are dreadfully annoying, and the game they eventually pull out, Chula, is one of the worst plot devices ever.
I mean look at it! We don't know the rules, and none of the characters are allowed to know the rules. Quark might make moves, roll dice, but then unbeknownst to him, the player, the characters inside the game meet whatever puzzle or danger. They might succeed or they might not, but still, the player cannot really see it, nor does he know which piece is which. You make a move which might as well be arbitrary, and you're told a result, which also seems arbitrary. There's absolutely no reason for Quark to ever think this would make a good game for the bar, or for comments like "I'm getting the hand of this". And from an SF standpoint, the damn thing is a magical artifact, arbitrary even in how it uses the rules of the Star Trek universe.
The cast is badly served by this story too. In the "real world", we have Quark and Odo making flying leaps of logic and figuring out the missing officers are trapped in the game. Quark's groveling is mildly amusing, but comes at a time when we're just annoyed at the proceedings. Inside the game, it's much worse. Kira has never seemed so strident in her anger (ooooh, you dropped a tray of fruit, please don't hurt me) and Bashir is a real idiot, screaming to wake himself. Dax and Sisko do better, but look at Avery Brooks' face when he has to do the Alamarain hopscotch. That is not a happy actor. There's even some stumbling over obvious styrofoam rocks that I haven't seen since TOS.
Oh but hey, it's Primmin's curtain call already. Ah well. He has a nice little scene, too bad we'll never see him again. (I guess losing four officers can get you shitcanned rather quickly.) If you must watch it, also keep your eyes peeled for the Wadi's backhanded applause which will be adapted for the Bajorans.
LESSON: Every race in the Gamma Quadrant has obsessively centered its culture around a single thing.
REWATCHABILITY - Low: Possibly the worst DS9 episode of all time.
Comments
I do remember thinking it was fun at the time, though.
Matt: Guilty as charged! ;)
Anonymous: It would have been at home in TOS, I'm sure.
And the cross-dressing Quark episode was not the best but certainly better then this episode or the Risa episode in season 5 (i think)after all it was a ferengi episode which on DS9 you can't go too wrong with.
It's not DULL, which is the worst sin an episode can commit. It's just stupid.
I'm now solidly in the "DS9 is the best Trek (at least 24th-century set Trek) camp, but it took me quite a while.
One of the reasons was that in my area this episode was one of "those" episodes: the bad or just mediocre episode that inexplicably gets re-run more than any other episode of the season, so that each time you try to give the show another chance, there's that damn episode again. This also seems to happen when you pester a friend into watching a show; it's a guarantee that when they finally give it a try, the worst episode will be on, and will be rerun each subsequent time they tune in.
In the second season I had the same problem with the one about the Bad Skin Condition People who thought Bajor was their prophesied home.
There was something very right about "Move Along Home", though: at the end, when the aliens are confronted about the risk to the (unwilling) participants, they respond with "Nobody was actually at any risk ... dude, it's just a game". That neatly deflated the less plausible aspects of the episode as well as explained the "miraculous" survival of the participants.
It's pretty bad, but I still think The Passenger or A Man Alone are worse, just because the stories were stupider.