*star trek

DS9 had its moments, mostly involving Garak. But they'd usually bring it back down the very next week with holosuite episodes, baseball or the whole prophecy BS.

Every Garak episode was gold, especially In the Pale Moonlight.

I have a soft spot for Magnificent Ferengi due to Iggy Pop the Vorta.

Garak in Pale Moonlight alone justified the entire run of Deep Space 9.

I also really liked that speech he made at the end of the last episode, about how generations of artists and progressive minds had been lost forever, that they had lost something that could never been found again.

The pecking order of irredeemably stupid Star Trek scenes goes in order, 1 being infinite amounts of awful stupid:

1. Voyager
2. Star Trek: TNG
3. Enterprise
4. Original Series
5. Deep Space Nine

Deep Space Nine had tons of golden moments, including but not limited to:

* Garak and Bashir and Garak's complete character as a whole developing to be complex beyond what anyone thought or assumed he would evolve into.

* Bashir having been genetically engineered due to being born mentally retarded and the moral pangs over what his parents did to him on all sides

* Odo's unselfish love for Kira, which ended in a bittersweet farewell when he went back to be the leader for his people.

* Nog's development from common thief to decorated veteran and the emotional torment he underwent over losing a leg

* Quark and Odo literally trying to kill each other when they are stranded on a planet together, only to reach an understanding and later a grudging friendship

* Sisko being tortured in a hot shed ala Bridge on the River Kwai by the cult planet leader who purposefully crashed her own ship so that people would wind up dependent on her for survival

* Kai Winn, who at first you think is a religious zealot but it turns out she's just miserable and power hungry because revenge against everyone is all she has left

* Ziyal being murdered by her father's best friend, and Gul Dukat's eventual fall into insanity

* the episode where Jake time travels to prevent his father's death

* all of the genocide stuff, which was exceedingly well handled for science fiction

* Worf's loser son

* ITS! LIKE! BASE! BALL!

The only thing I can't forgive is the fucking idiotic episode where O'Brian's kid goes through a time portal and winds up an out of control cave woman. It was more like a plot to Futurama.

Garak is the only reason to rewatch DS9. All of his dialog is gold. He's the Data of DS9, in a constant struggle to become less human.

The sad thing about Enterprise was the last season, which was actually pretty good, writing-wise, apart from the finale. They let Berman & Braga ruin that completely.

The season was a bunch of pretty interesting 2 to 3 episode arcs that were actually dealing with stories of the early Federation. The next problem they couldn't overcome was how awful the cast was.

A couple more good things about DS9 that RoUS left out:

- Rom's growth from aspiring to own his brother's bar like a good Ferengi, to realizing he could be something more (all very reminiscent of Nog's arc).

- Major Kira as a religious person who honestly tried to use her faith to become a better person. This set her up as an excellent contrast with Kai Winn.

- Gul Dukat: argue all you want whether he was a good guy or a bad guy, he was ultimately a servant of the Cardassian Empire. From that perspective he was Winston Churchill: beloved if you are an Englishman or an American, hated if you are a German or an Iraqi. He was also the Michael Scott of Cardassians, making lots of bad calls because he wanted to be loved by the people he was ruling over.

- Sisko as the contrast to Gul Dukat: Sisko didn't want to be anything more than a quiet administrative force who helped the Bajorans get on their feet again, forces outside his control made him a central Bajoran figure, and the Bajoran people eventually showered him with more love than he ever wanted for not abusing his power. Gul Dukat never forgave him for it.

- General Martok was adorable as the Al Bundy-like head of the Klingon Fleet, always having to deal with some new indignity, many of them revolving around his wife.

- Sisko in general. If you've watched the show at all you have your own opinions, but as far as I'm concerned, he was aces.

Oh yeah, and Dax totally makes out with another chick.

Let's not forget that one episode that was basically Brigadoon except with a whole planet instead of a village and no musical numbers.

If I may also add to ROUS's and Bort's lists of genuinely good DS9 Moments:

-The episode where Chief O'Brien commits treason on an alien world and is sentenced to 30 years in prison, but then serves it condensed into 30 minute in his mind and then has to rejoin his actual reality.

-The first and only episode when you feel a shred of empathy for L'Waxanna Troy.

-Any scene with Jeffrey Combs as Weyoun.

Enterprise better than TNG? whaaaaaa?


PINEAPPLE CAKE SUBPLOT

That is all you need to know.

For me, DS-9 was shaping up to be an interesting analogue for the Israel/Palestine situation in the Middle East, but then they had the episode where they lost Kai Opaka (whichever Bajoran pope was the fat one) to a planet where if you got killed, nanites would revive you and you could get killed again. It was a punishment for some warring types left there.

She had been shaping up as an interesting character, then a stupid MacGuffin took her out of the picture. Then DS-9 decided it wanted to be Babylon-5, and kind of shoved the whole Bajor/Cardassia stuff into the background so they could blow stuff up when they weren't just making crap up as they went along.

I don't know, I thought Kai Opaka was created to be destroyed: she lent Sisko the credibility he needed to be tolerated at all, and once he was in the door, they needed to get rid of her to force Sisko to have to weather the shit himself.

Really, the entire "rebuild Bajor" arc had to play itself out: if they just maintained the status quo where Bajor never got any better, it would mean that the Federation's mission there was a failure. About halfway through the second season it was starting to feel that way, so I'm glad Bajor got its shit together before the series even hit its halfway point.

There was only one episode with space Palestinians, the Skrreea. These folks:

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Skrreea

Seconded. Although I like to imagine that Star Trek is in fact an insanely repressive dystopian future where everybody is forced to act a certain way all the time, because it's more fair and civilized, and any kind of genuine enthusiasm or excitement has become completely alien to them.

Like, for example, I imagine that men can only get an erection through use of an insane ballet of mental escapism and complete physical detatchment, terrified that they might ever even once outwardly imply that they consider an object of affection in any way that was not absolutely even-handed and politically correct.

Indeed, the REAL Dominion War is the internal one raging within them all, against an unquenchable, fearsome, unstoppable Jem Hardar assault armada of FEELINGS

"Captain, to ensure our success with this endeavor may I suggest that we eliminate the human child? She may be a threat to the completion of our mission!"

"Stand down, Mr. Worf."

"*pouts*"

I liked Kira because they finally did a tough woman character right.

Did you really want to see that?

... come to think of it, there must be someone, somewhere, who masturbates furiously to this scene and only wishes it had gone on longer.

Stargate ages better, and they paid a LOT more attention to their continuity.

Also, to its credit, Stargate never did episodes inspired by movies that were popular at the time. DS-9 decided Bashir would be a James Bond fan after Goldeneye got big, and Voyager tried to do a dinosaur episode when Jurassic Park 2 was about to be released.

They did do at least a couple episodes based on the movie "Stargate".