409. In the CardsFORMULA: José Chung's "From Outer Space" + Progress + Life Support
WHY WE LIKE IT: It's damn funny.
WHY WE DON'T: "Lions. Gigers. Bears." "Oh my."
REVIEW: A nice comedy piece just before the big dramatic season closer may be just what the doctor ordered, especially given the low spirits of the crew in this one. Not everything has to be monumental and universe-altering. Sometimes the dilemma before you is just cheering up your dad. The beauty of this episode is that Jake and Nog wind up cheering everyone up without really meaning to. What would normally be the subplot takes center stage leaving Winn and Weyoun's political maneuverings mostly backstage.
Does the comedy work? I dare say it does. Instead of the broad caricatures many Ferengi comedies have given us, we get a light-hearted story with lots of amusing lines (including the one I quoted in WHY WE DON'T - I don't personally dislike it). Who fails to be charmed by "sold to the blue man in the good shoes", or Jake trying to justify Picard's First Contact lines about 24th-century economics? The comedy grows out of the characters and doesn't feel forced.
The broadest the episode ever gets is with Giger and his cellular entertainment machine, which I think works as a parody of technobabble. He's obviously off his nut in trying to keep people from dying of boredom, but haven't we seen more ludicrous science on the show over the years? Giger's fate is to actually fall in with the soulless minions of orthodoxy (is there a better description of the Dominion?), which just shows how clueless he really is. Jake's story about Willie Mays the time traveler is likewise a parody of the usual Star Trek plotting. The show so rarely takes pokes at itself that all of this is as refreshing to us as it is to the show's characters.
And this isn't to say the Winn-Weyoun story isn't memorable as well. The always enthusiastic Weyoun twisting Sisko's insults into compliments, Jake and Nog ambushing Winn with accusations of wrong-doing, and the seed of a Dominion-Bajor non-aggression pact first heralded in Rapture is sown.
LESSON: "Matador on velvet" will be worth something one day.
REWATCHABILITY - High: A great change of pace and a last character piece before we have to abandon the status quo for a while. One of the better comedies Star Trek has produced.
Comments
Actually this was the second DS9 episode to remind me of MASH, the first being the one where Jake chickens out a near a Starfleet, er, MASH, and features a character I always think of as "Bolian Hawkeye".
This is not a knock or accusation of ripoff, mind you; I always considered DS9 the best of the 24th century-set Treks.
Nog definitely turns out to be the procurement officer, doesn't he?
And almost justifies the whole episode.
For light episode it works surprisingly well without disrupting the overall arc too much.
It even manages to advance it a bit.