303. If Wishes Were HorsesFORMULA: Imaginary Friend + The Savage Curtain + Where No One Has Gone Before
WHY WE LIKE IT: Odo guiding emus. Snowing on the Promenade.
WHY WE DON'T: "Please refrain from using your imaginations." (But that's the only thing making me think of something else!)
REVIEW: Incorporeal aliens from the Gamma Quadrant show up and makes everyone's imagination come alive somehow. That's the fuzzy premise (fuzzy in that some people's imagination is used to give the aliens cover identities they can assume perfectly - without actually understanding humanoid psyche - while others' produces non-character effects like winning latinum or great big sucking wounds in the sky). I've also never liked aliens who don't understand a concept that is otherwise common to everyone we've ever met on Star Trek. Never heard of imagination? How could you even think up your first contact strategy without it?
Now if at least the people and things imagined revealed something about the characters, but no, it's al pretty ordinary stuff. Jake and Sisko like baseball. Yes, we knew that. Bashir lusts after Dax. O'Brien is protective of his daughter. Dax is used to thinking about technobabble all day. Quark likes showgirls, and Odo would like nothing better than to see Quark behind bars. There's no surprise here, except maybe Dax's maturity at Bashir's nymph version of her. It's true that she has been a young man.
In fact, small character moments do help this episode go down smoothly. Dax calling Bashir on his bull. Odo dealing with flightless birds. Sisko having programmed all the great games into the computer. And the Promenade gets a little surreal for a minute. But we never learn enough about these aliens to make them a worthy science mystery.
LESSON: Forget about 1996's Eugenics Wars, the minute someone other than Buck Bokai breaks DiMaggio's record is the real moment our history diverges from Star Trek's.
REWATCHABILITY - Low: Look, it's not unbearable, but it is wholly unnecessary and easily skipped.
Comments
Very disappointed.
Also, is it me or does Buck NOT look like a baseball player? My image of them are tall and lean. This guy is short and squat. He kinda takes me out of the story every time he appears.