Plot Summary: A Klingon vessel comes through the wormhole and explodes just as one of its officers beams himself to Deep Space Nine, proclaims victory, and dies of his injuries. Sisko, who is already perturbed because of Kira’s protests that Valerian ships should not be allowed to dock at the station until Bajor can investigate whether the Valerians are providing weapons material to the Cardassians, orders Dax and O’Brien to find out what happened to the Klingons. Quark tells Odo he heard that the Klingon scientists had discovered something to make enemies of the Empire tremble, but before Odo can report on this, his head appears to split in two and he screams in pain. Bashir is able to revive him but Odo finds that the doctor has suddenly become obsessed with tensions between Starfleet officers and Bajorans, particularly between Sisko and Kira. Meanwhile, O’Brien tells a distracted, nostalgic Dax that she had better remember her loyalties to Starfleet. They find the Klingon log recordings, which suggest that there was a mutiny aboard the ship. Meanwhile Kira approaches first Odo, then Dax, behaving in an unusually seductive manner, telling them she expects their support when she displaces Sisko over the Valerian situation. Quark overhears and, despite Kira’s threats, goes to warn Odo, who in turn seeks out Sisko. But the commander is hiding in his quarters, building a clock. Kira prevents the Valerian ship from leaving the station and cuts off all contact with Starfleet; O’Brien in turn cuts off contact with Bajor and sets out to sabotage Kira’s plans. In the Klingon logs, Odo learns that an ancient telepathic race left energy spheres discovered by the now-destroyed ship. He asks Bashir for help controlling the energy from the spheres brought to the station by the dead Klingon, convincing Bashir that this is the key to dominating whoever wins the station’s power struggle. Kira launches her plan against Sisko but Odo helps him and O’Brien to escape, convincing Kira all the while that they are heading into a trap. When he has the entire command crew in a cargo bay, Odo activates Bashir’s field to drive out the telepathic energy, restoring the crew to normal. Sisko agrees to overlook Kira’s attempted mutiny.

Analysis: I’ve never been much of a fan of “aliens alter the crew’s brains” episodes unless they’re played for humor – you know, the sort like “The Naked Now” where everyone wants to have sex with everybody else, which every sci-fi series does at least once, a cliche so memorable that it gets parodied in Galaxy Quest. Sadly, “Dramatis Personae” is not only deadly earnest, it’s also painfully reminiscent of The Next Generation‘s “Power Play.” (Is O’Brien always such a crankypants when he gets possessed? Couldn’t he be more like flirty Kira or dreamy Dax?) Yet again we see a story that could have happened on any Star Trek series – indeed, that has happened on other Star Trek series – and since it’s so early in the show’s run, it looks like the writers have so little confidence in the personalities they’ve created for the main cast that they’re already looking for excuses to warp them. We’ve already suffered through the aphasia virus with the crew, another instance in which Odo had to save the station. Admittedly “Dramatis Personae” is more fun than “Babel” because personality upheavals are more entertaining to watch than communication failures, but it feels like cheap, unoriginal gimmickry in place of storytelling and parodies of characters instead of characterization. Flaky Sisko, angry O’Brien, ditzy Dax, and let-me-try-your-drink-lieutenant Kira might be a refreshing break two seasons in, not when we’re getting to know the real things.

What’s fun about watching “Dramatis Personae” after the series’ run is the realization that the writers became so infatuated with some of these characters, they created an entire alternate universe for them. The ambitious Bashir and emotional Dax who will turn up over there make appearances here, and we see shades of the Intendant – a woman not afraid to use her charm and sexuality to get what she wants – in mutineer Kira. I love how she tests her charm on Odo, whom she already considers an ally, before prancing into the Promenade and hitting on Dax. There’s really no other word for it: she swipes a sip of Dax’s drink, finds excuses to touch Dax, gives Dax personal reasons for supporting her rebellion even as Dax is saying she thinks of Sisko as a son or a nephew or some other close relative, and only then does Kira get around to making threats. (Apparently it works, since Dax calls to warn Kira from Ops when Sisko is attacked and plans to kill Kira in retaliation.) It’s curious that Dax indeed is so easily swayed by Kira given that long history with Sisko, much less surprising that O’Brien becomes a jingoistic Starfleet defender through and through, and Bashir’s calculated refusal to commit until he can see which side will win makes me think he’s been studying Garak quite closely already.

It’s no surprise whatsoever that Odo can convince Kira she’s won him over even as he’s manipulating her and Sisko so he can remove the alien influence. When I first saw this episode, I was writing occasional reviews for Nana Visitor’s fan club newsletter, and I noted that I thought Odo had a bit of a crush on Kira. That turned out to be the understatement of the decade, but at the time I had little hope that the DS9 writers would do any better with potential series relationships than had TNG’s writers. Who knew that by the finale there would be four committed couples among the major crewmembers? It’s a pity we’re led to believe that the personality changes are random, rather than emphasizing either polar opposites in everyone or consistently bringing out traits that people have tried to suppress. I have no trouble believing that Dax could spend hours wallowing in nostalgia for her past lives and that Sisko wishes he could chuck all his responsibility and go build a clock while someone else runs the station (he keeps the clock, it appears throughout the rest of the series). But we’re not supposed to believe that Kira really wants violent insurrection, even though the source of her anger at Sisko exists before the Klingon arrives and apparently other Bajorans on the station are affected by the same concerns.

Kira’s personality changes the most dramatically, apparently to clue us in to the fact that while the source of the conflict may be the same, this is not the Kira we know. But how much more interesting if it were the Kira we know, just without filters! What if the writers had had the courage not to split her into Good Kira and Bad Kira the Intendant, but to let her embody all those elements as a single person. And what a cop-out that the Klingons are absolved of all responsibility since they supposedly found the telepathic energy spheres by accident, even though Quark has heard rumors that they tracked down and intend to use a powerful weapon. If this had been a test of the Klingon discovery – or better yet, if the Cardassians had found the spheres – it would add a far more interesting layer of conflict to what ends up being a meaningless crisis from a Gamma Quadrant species we will never get to know. On a first viewing I thought they’d be connected somehow to the Valerians and the weapons trade with the Cardassians, a situation that it never resolved, which I suppose means Sisko gets his way and Kira does not get to bring up the Bajoran concerns even though we get evidence that the aliens truly are providing materials for Cardassian weapons. The fun of watching Sisko call for Kira’s head and Kira hit on Dax can’t make up for the weaknesses in the story.

Plot Summary: A group of Federation ambassadors comes to Deep Space Nine to see the wormhole for themselves, but they all have complaints, ranging from the uncomfortable Cardassian beds on the station to the fact that Sisko has asked Bashir to look after the guests while he is busy in Ops. When Odo recovers Lwaxana Troi’s latinum brooch from a thief, the Betazoid ambassador becomes intrigued with the shapeshifter, whom she says is the first man she doesn’t have to mold and shape herself. Odo tries to avoid her. The ambassadors watch as the wormhole opens and an alien probe passes near the station, but when O’Brien and Dax try to download its data, the series of minor computer malfunctions that has been plaguing the station grows exponentially worse. Lights fail on the Promenade, the transporters refuse to work though there is no apparent malfunction, and Odo is trapped in a turbolift with Lwaxana shortly before he needs to regenerate. O’Brien finds that the computer is now more cooperative when he gives it orders yet it refuses to accept commands that would allow him to leave it running on its own, as if it had developed the personality of an eager-to-please child. He and Dax theorize that they may have downloaded an intelligent entity from the probe. Though Odo is at first annoyed to have to listen to Lwaxana’s nonstop chatter, he is relieved to find her sympathetic when he can no longer hold his shape. O’Brien tries to return the entity to the probe, but it resists, causing explosions and trapping Bashir with several ambassadors in a burning corridor. Guessing that the entity wishes to stay, O’Brien designs a subroutine to contain it and restores power to the station. The ambassadors consider Bashir a hero for protecting them during the fire and Lwaxana accepts Odo’s thanks for her discretion about his change of form, suggesting that she would like to see him again. Sisko is a bit alarmed to learn that O’Brien has adopted the alien entity in the computer but O’Brien assures him that it will be busy with his subroutines from now on.

Analysis: I’m of an entirely split mind about “The Forsaken.” It’s really not a good episode: the stories are disjointed and never really mesh, the Bashir plot feels entirely contrived to improve our opinion of him and smells a bit like a Wesley Crusher drama, and Sisko and Kira seem to have little to do despite the fact that there are ambassadors visiting their station and an alien entity controlling the computer. It’s rather boring and not very memorable. On the other hand, as far as I’m concerned, the final scenes with Lwaxana and Odo make up for pretty much all the rest – not only in this installment, in fact, but for a number of misdeeds committed by the writers against Lwaxana Troi, both before and after. The writers (of both DS9 and TNG) seem to believe that there is something innately hilarious about a middle-aged woman who believes that she’s attractive, has no inhibitions about expressing her sexuality, and expects men to be as interested in her as she is in them. They set Lwaxana up as the butt of jokes over and over, and the only saving grace is that Majel Barrett plays her as utterly unconcerned with what anyone thinks of her. As far as Lwaxana is concerned, the fact that she’s the Daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed – oh, and apparently an accomplished Federation ambassador, though it’s all too rare that we actually get to see her in that capacity – should far outweigh anyone’s prejudices about her age and flamboyant behavior. I keep expecting her to burst out singing “I Am What I Am” from Jerry Herman’s musical version of La Cage Aux Folles.

As Lwaxana demonstrates when she pulls off her wig to show Odo, she isn’t afraid of her age, being perceived as outrageous in her manner of dress (which Deanna has suggested is extreme for a Betazoid), nor the fact that even colleagues are put off by her pushiness. She loves being different. She doesn’t care if most of the people she encounters would find it absurd for a woman of her stature to be girlishly flirting with a security professional and she doesn’t seem to consider that for someone as different from herself as Odo, her behavior might border on harassment, which I might find more troubling if we didn’t have so many examples in Trek of male aliens assuming their advances will be welcomed by every physically compatible female in the galaxy. She claims that her interest in Odo is based on the erotic possibilities of being with a shapeshifter, along with a misguided guess that a man who can change his form must have a perspective on life’s joys that’s as flexible as her own, but she often seems as lonely as he does – her ongoing efforts to find a mate, whether it be Jean-Luc Picard or Minister Campio or the scientist Timicin, make it obvious that she’s not as self-sufficient as she likes to claim. We’ve seen her pull stunts that aren’t that different from the rambunctiousness of the alien who gets into the station’s computer, creating inadvertent jeopardy when all she wants is a little attention and fun.

It’s not a strong enough connection to make the episode gel – I suppose “The Forsaken” is supposed to refer to Odo, Lwaxana, and the probe entity, though it doesn’t really apply to any of the above – but it keeps the episode from being entirely forgettable or annoying. I like what character development we get for Odo; we already knew that he protested too much about humanoid romantic connections, though he’s quite funny he doesn’t get what cut flowers and bad poetry have to do with procreation, but to see how different and self-conscious he feels about his need to revert to a vulnerable liquid form is very moving (and it’s rather erotic when he literally melts into Lwaxana’s lap). Sisko seems a bit amused at first that Odo won’t even try humanoid romance, laughing about the fact that Odo is more comfortable around thieves and killers than a woman, but when Odo uses the phrase “diplomatic incident” it brings Sisko to his senses. Interesting that Lwaxana has such calm recollections of being kidnapped with Deanna aboard a Ferengi cargo ship and that Sisko can recall wryly how he once hit an ambassador who was annoying him…I guess diplomacy isn’t what I thought it was. No wonder humanoid behavior confounds Odo. I’m also surprised that he goes to Sisko rather than Kira for help with Lwaxana, both because Kira is a better friend and because, since Sisko’s preoccupation is the reason the Federation ambassadors have been dropped onto the rest of the senior officers, I would think she’d be in a better position to get Odo off Lwaxana Watch. My personal theory is that, whatever he may claim, Odo already knows that he has romantic feelings for Kira and is therefore already buying into humanoid binary gender expectations, though sadly we will never really learn how reproduction works for the Founders, let alone sexual desire. Again, no wonder Odo is confused.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s Avery Brooks ran into a bit of trouble last weekend.

The police had received a complaint regarding a person “driving erratically near the intersection of Belden Hill and Seir Hill Road” in Wilton, Connecticut. That person turned out to be Avery Brooks.

The actor was arrested on Sunday in Connecticut on suspicion of driving under the influence after failing a sobriety test administered by the police. After being booked, the actor was released, with a court date set for February 9.

Thanks to James G. for the tip!

Star Trek Director Cliff Bole didn’t start working right away on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine due to philosophical differences between Michael Piller and him.

Piller believed that Bole was not creative enough. “Mr. Piller and I were not in sync,” said Bole. “He thought I was a studio man and not creative, and I’d keep telling him, ‘Go back and look at The Best of Both Worlds.’”

Bole’s working hours were also an issue with Piller, who seemed to think that Bole wasn’t putting in enough effort. “He said, ‘Well, you don’t work late,’” said Bole.” I said, ‘I do my best not to because I don’t want to burn out the crew or my actors and, by the way, I know what I’m doing and I come in prepared.’ I was trained as a script clerk and an assistant. I’m a set rat, and have been on sets my whole life. When I was a kid I lived in the San Fernando Valley, and on Saturdays we’d go sneak onto all the back lots, roll around and watch what they were doing. So all that added up to I was very, very prepared. I’d had a couple of directors that I’d worked with over the years that I admired – John Huston and people like that – and I picked up a lot of experience. Michael Piller thought just because I wasn’t there for fourteen and fifteen hours a day that I was ducking creativity.”

Obviously, Bole’s work proved to be acceptable to Piller as Bole returned to direct more Deep Space Nine episodes, including Cardassians, The Collaborator, Equilibrium, Defiant, Explorers and Facets.

Bole went on to direct ten episodes of Star Trek: Voyager after his work on Deep Space Nine.

Plot Summary: While Bashir flirts with Dax and Odo warns Quark not to let Jake spend too much time in the holosuites, Sisko and Kira discover unusually high thoron emissions. A bit later, O’Brien tells Molly the story of Rumpelstiltskin, and shortly afterward the fairy tale creature takes solid form in her bedroom. O’Brien tries to summon Sisko, but just then Jake tells his father that the baseball player Buck Bokai somehow escaped from a holosuite program and is now in their quarters. Elsewhere on the station, Bashir is awoken by an amorous Dax, but when the two are called to Ops to analyze the strange events, a second Dax appears, revealing the first to be a fantasy of Bashir’s. The real Dax discovers that the thoron emissions are coming from a subspace rupture, and Odo’s warning of a snowstorm on the Promenade alerts Sisko that their visitors – whose bioscans reveal them to be alive, even the “holographic” Bokai – may not be as benign as they seem. Dax finds that the rupture is being amplified by the wormhole and warns that it could encompass Bajor if it doesn’t stop growing. Rumpelstiltskin offers to rescue everyone in exchange for Molly O’Brien, but Sisko realizes that the reluctance of himself, Bashir, and O’Brien to embrace fully the Bokai, Dax, and dwarf from their imaginations is confusing the entities and tells Miles to refuse. The command crew prepares a torpedo to try to seal the rupture, which is expanding at an alarming rate. The torpedo is unsuccessful and the station begins to shake apart, but from watching Rumpelstiltskin, Sisko guesses that the rift itself is a product of their imaginations and orders the crew to stop believing in it. The rift disappears and Bokai explains that they are members of a species traveling through space who are fascinated by the concept of imagination. Before disappearing along with “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Dax,” he suggests that they may return again.

Analysis: My family can’t be the only one that quotes Ghostbusters throughout this episode – “Don’t think about anything!” “It’s the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man!” Though, in fairness, we could just as easily be quoting the original series thoughts-are-real dramas “Shore Leave” and “Spectre of the Gun,” one of The Next Generation‘s fantasies-gone-wrong episodes, or the original holodeck story from the animated series, “The Practical Joker.” There are a couple of entertaining bits of ongoing canon in “If Wishes Were Horses” regarding Sisko’s love of baseball and Bashir’s not-so-secret desire to date Dax, but otherwise it’s one of the most derivative, least memorable episodes of Deep Space Nine. There’s not much to make it DS9-specific; the crisis could easily have happened on Picard’s Enterprise, with O’Brien’s concerns about Molly being exactly the same and Riker’s long-simmering feelings for Troi substituting for Bashir’s for Dax. Though Bajor appears to be threatened, Kira is more worried about evacuating the space station than warning her home planet; if she has so little faith that the scientists there could be of use in solving the crisis, wouldn’t this be a good moment to think about alerting the Prophets that their Celestial Temple may be contributing to the subspace rupture? It all feels very slapdash and poorly integrated into the series as a whole, even granting that this is the first season and we don’t know all that much about Quark except that he’d wish for more Dabo girls and more profit.

I’ve been trying to keep my rants about sexism in Star Trek to a minimum, mostly because this series has some of the best female characters in the history of television and the moments of misogyny are few and far between. But “If Wishes Were Horses” is one of the more egregious offenders. Dax is indignant to realize that what Bashir really wants is a version of herself who’s more submissive and needy, but she doesn’t nail him for the really unforgivable characteristic of the fantasy, which is that Duplicate Dax is stupid – that’s how everyone in Ops realizes she’s not the real thing just before the real thing arrives, because she can’t answer a technical question they’re all certain the real Dax would know. Yes, it’s delightful that we all take Dax’s intelligence for granted, but what does it say about educated 24th century men that they still feel safer around bimbos, or at least want versions of their women who aren’t very bright? Then there’s Quark, who in real life has Dabo girls depending on him for jobs, dreaming of…more Dabo girls! More appreciative Dabo girls! More erotically demonstrative Dabo girls! I understand that respecting the cultures of others might stop Sisko and Kira from telling Quark off about this on a regular basis, but the fact that scantily clothed women in service professions remain a staple of his bar’s environment – and we never see the male equivalent, though we know from Dax’s holosuite programs that she’s quite capable of enjoying a hunky male masseur – suggests that it’s still acceptable for humanoid males to demand female eye candy, whether they’re human or Ferengi or Bajoran or whatever.

The moral of most wish-fulfillment stories is that you don’t really want whatever it is you think you’d give anything to have, anyway, and “If Wishes Were Horses” fits that theme fairly well, though I’m not clear why the first fantasy creature to appear is one who’s intimidating to both O’Brien and his young daughter – Sisko is much luckier getting to meet a longtime sports hero, and Bashir, though embarrassed, finally gets the closest thing to a passionate kiss from Jadzia that he’ll ever receive. If only someone had had a truly unexpected fantasy, rather than things right out of the series bible that we already knew about them…if Odo really had wanted the encounter with a female shapeshifter that Quark offered in a holosuite, if Kira dreamed up an invading force of Cardassians just so she could break their necks one by one, if Dax realized that her Inner Curzon always wanted to grab command from Sisko, if Quark pictured himself being a hero and saving lives instead of making money, if Bashir’s forbidden fantasies were not about Dax but about Garak. I can’t even imagine what Garak’s naughtiest fantasy might be but it would by definition be more creative than anything we got to see in “If Wishes Were Horses,” even if the spy really wishes he’d moved into his mother’s basement and watched the Cardassian equivalent of television through the entire war instead of being involved in espionage and winding up in exile. Odo’s pathetic order, “Please refrain from using your imaginations” – and Sisko’s follow-up, which, absurdly, works though Spock had to use a mind-meld to get the same results – might as well have been directed at the writers of this episode.

Cliff Bole directed forty-two episodes of Star Trek; from Star Trek: The Next Generation through Star Trek: Voyager and he had an alien race named after him too.

Most of Bole’s Star Trek directing experience was with The Next Generation, where he directed twenty-five episodes, including the acclaimed The Best of Both Worlds: Parts I and II, and Unification Part II, in which Leonard Nimoy reprised his role of Spock.

Bole’s first job on Trek came courtesy of a Paramount connection. “I had a couple of guys up in management at Paramount who I knew and one of them, a fellow named Jeff Hayes, made a suggestion to Rick Berman that Rick use me,” said Bole. “I knew Rick from when he was over at Warner Bros. He’d seen some of my film and that’s how it happened. I went in for one and I stayed for almost twenty years.”

Being new to Star Trek meant not knowing about various characteristics of the Trek alien races, and Bole found out once that Vulcans don’t laugh, courtesy of Gene Roddenberry. “I did one episode with a Spock-like character in it, and this character laughed,” said Bole. “Roddenberry saw the dailies and said, ‘That was the biggest mistake you ever made.’ I said, ‘Well, I was only following the script, because it was written.’ Vulcans don’t laugh or smile, but it got by everybody. This laugh was kind of a broad laugh, but it was written. Anyway, we did a retake of it and it was fine, and it never happened again, I can assure you. But that was Roddenberry who picked it out.”

Bole knew that the two episodes of The Best of Both Worlds were “going to be great episodes. I knew it from the get-go, from the script, and I put everything I had into them. Everything. I remember that I had my wife read the script to me as I’m driving back from our place in Mt. Shasta, and then I said, ‘Do you mind driving?’ It was a joy and it was a fish-out-of-water story as far as Patrick [Stewart] was concerned, and he was into it. So it all gelled. I’m not surprised it’s well regarded because of all the work that was put into it.”

And what of that race named after Bole, the Bolians? “When it first happened I thought someone was pulling my leg, maybe Berman or someone else,” he said. “Then it became an iten. I was proud of it. To hear your name constructed into the name of an alien race, I thought it was great — and I still do. It comes up all the time. People ask me about it all the time. I’m amazed that people still follow the show enough to ask about it.”

Kira is ordered to evacuate an old man from his lunar home so the Bajorans can use the moon for an energy transfer to fuel their planet.

Plot Summary: The Bajoran government has decided to tap energy from the molten core of its inhabited moon Jeraddo, which will produce energy to fuel all of Bajor but will destroy Jeraddo’s atmosphere. While confirming that all residents have been evacuated, Kira discovers an elderly farmer and two middle-aged workers who are in no hurry to leave the surface. Insisting that Kira help make dinner, the older man, Mullibok, explains that he and his friends escaped to Jeraddo during the Occupation and they have no intention of letting the Bajoran government bully him the way the Cardassians did. Kira tries to explain that Bajor is now peaceful and the energy from Jeraddo’s core will make it prosperous, but Mullibok will not leave his home. When Kira suggests to Minister Toran that perhaps the destruction of Jeraddo is too hasty, the Minister refuses to hold back Bajoran progress for a few backward people and orders Kira to evacuate Mullibok. Returning to Jeraddo with a security team, Kira is able to take the two younger workers, but a furious Mullibok attacks the guards and is shot with a phaser. Kira summons Bashir for medical assistance and goes to work repairing Mullibok’s farm, but after Sisko visits and reminds her that the moon’s fate has already been decided – all that she can control is her own fate – she destroys Mullibok’s cottage so that he will have nothing left on Jeraddo. Meanwhile, on the station, Nog makes a deal to trade Quark’s massive supply of Cardassian yamok sauce for an equally massive supply of self-sealing stem bolts, which Jake then convinces him to trade for land on Bajor. Nog is angry that Jake didn’t hold out for latinum, but soon the pair overhear Odo telling Quark that the Bajoran government wants to buy their land, so Nog decides to let Quark make a deal with the Bajorans for the land in exchange for five bars of gold pressed latinum.

Analysis: One of several terrific Kira episodes from Deep Space Nine‘s first season, “Progress” picks up the themes from “Past Prologue” of Kira’s difficulties in being part of the establishment rather than a rebel and having trouble punishing fellow Bajorans when the stubbornness that enabled them to survive the Occupation now threatens Bajor’s wider interests. Kira very much wants to do what’s right for Bajor as a whole, but she has little confidence that the provisional government can make the best decisions and she loathes the way individuals who have fought their whole lives for what peace they could snatch from the Cardassians are now forced to bend to a Bajoran bureaucracy that can call in Starfleet’s firepower when necessary. I’m sorry that so much of the episode is taken up with the Jake-and-Nog storyline, which while cute has much in common with the one in “The Storyteller” and takes valuable time away from the Bajoran situation, particularly since the two plots never converge; when Jake made the deal for the Bajoran land and the government then expressed an interest, I felt certain that somehow the land was going to end up being farmed by the people evacuated from Jeraddo, but instead it seems to be yet another mysterious project of the government. Had there been more time, I would have expected to hear environmental arguments against tapping the moon’s core – isn’t that just what the Klingons were doing at the start of The Undiscovered Country that led to the pollution of the Klingon homeworld, which inspired the Khitomer Conference? Mullibok may not need a larger social reason to stop the moon’s destruction, but I’m a bit shocked that Kira didn’t use such an argument with Toran.

I suppose any sort of politics or real-world allegory isn’t the point here, but I think it would have strengthened Kira’s position to give her a practical as well as emotional reason to become invested in Mullibok’s situation. As it is, we’re getting a sense that she craves a strong parental figure in her life; her deep attachment first to the much older Kai Opaka and now to this stranger, not to mention the way she responds to Sisko’s gently paternal warning, all hint that while she may have had to be self-reliant for many years, she never learned to prefer it. Despite the prickliness to which Sisko alludes, telling her that he thought she was hostile and arrogant at first, Kira has shown real pride in being a team player and in working with the Starfleet officers she initially claimed to resent. It’s interesting therefore that she feels kinship with this man who has for all practical purposes rejected Bajor and the Bajorans; his scars may have been left by the Cardassians, but arguments that removing a few settlers from Jeraddo for the greater good of Bajor merely make him roll his eyes. We know from recent episodes that Bajor still has agrarian societies, so this isn’t a situation like Voyager‘s “Remember” where those who prefer the old way of life are being shipped off to their extermination. It truly is about the wishes of these three Bajorans against what their planet’s presumably democratic government has chosen for the good of thousands.

Up against these complex conflicts with no easy solutions, the Jake and Nog story feels entirely trivial, like a waste of time since it never hooks in to the crisis of the episode. We already know that the two boys work well together and are becoming fast friends as they teach each other about their different cultural values, we already know that Nog is as clever as his uncle, we aren’t learning anything important from their trading, and the triumphant conclusion seems to support the idea that latinum is a prize in itself – something that Star Trek has always seemed to oppose, given that we never really learn how goods are exchanged in the Federation and we’re told several times that there is no money on Earth. The first time I saw this episode, I thought Kira was going to learn that Jake and Nog had acquired land on Bajor and persuade them to give it to Mullibok, teaching them that some things have greater value than latinum and showing Mullibok that not only Bajorans but even strangers from space can be welcoming and generous. Would that have seemed awfully simple and reductive? Perhaps, but it would be more in fitting with the values of the show as a whole and with the emphasis of “Progress” in particular. Maybe it’s better that there’s no happy ending for Mullibok or for Kira, who beams away from Jeraddo feeling guilty and unforgiven, but Jake and Nog deserve to be more than the comic relief.

As for Sisko, it’s touching to see him protecting his second in command, but I’d love to have heard his personal take on the situation, perhaps in a conversation with Jake. Kira’s split loyalties to Mullibok and to Bajor aren’t so much about technological progress as they are about the treatment of veterans, but Sisko could look back on centuries of “progress” on Earth in which people were forced from their homes, their rights trampled in the name of a projected greater good that often didn’t work out that way. There’s a lovely moment when Sisko asks Bashir to lie about the reasons for Kira remaining on Jeraddo with Mullibok, when Bashir first cites his obligation to the truth then allows himself to be persuaded that the integrity of the command team is more important. Clearly Sisko does understand all the moral uncertainties with which Kira is faced. He’s already seen her face breaking points with the Kohn-Ma and with Opaka’s death, and those are less personal than the crises she will face with Bareil and later Shakaar. As sorry as he may have felt for himself when he arrived on Deep Space Nine, he must see by now how lucky he’s been compared to so many of the Bajorans who consider him their Emissary.

In this latest installment of Life After Trek, the topics will include: Shimerman’s beginnings in Hollywood, the stage, and his work – past, present and future. Shimerman’s present work includes a new film, The Sublime and Beautiful, which will begin filming this month.

To download the episode, head to the link located here. Earlier episodes of Life After Trek may be downloaded from this page.

February is Black History Month, and Deep Space Nine‘s Avery Brooks will be appearing in Savannah, Georgia at a Black Heritage Festival in a play celebrating the life of a nineteenth century African-American Shakespearean actor.

Brooks will be appearing in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius, at 7 PM on February 18 at the Armstrong Atlantic State University Fine Arts Center. The play is open to the public and free of charge.

In Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius, the life and times of Ira Aldridge is explored. Born in 1805, Aldridge was forced to emigrate to Europe in the early 1800s so that he could perform and escape the discrimination he faced in the U.S.

Aldridge performed on the stage for over forty years, and received multiple awards, honors and official decorations. He died in 1867, leaving behind his second wife and four children. Three of his children became opera singers.

Brooks is no stranger to the stage or to Shakespeare, having performed in Othello and King Lear. His other stage performances include: Paul Robeson. Fences, The Oedipus Plays and Tamburlaine.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s Chase Masterson and director James Kerwin have a new science fiction project in the works, a remake of R.U.R., a Czech play originally written by Karel Capek.

Kerwin had been interested in the play since taking a college literature course. “I had studied the play in a college lit course, and was even in a production of it in Dallas years ago,” he said. “The story always stuck with me: a play which Karel Capek started writing in 1919, set fifty years from then, which predicted advances in biotechnology and served as an inspiration for masterpieces like Blade Runner and Metropolis. R.U.R. contains an important sociopolitical message, one which is as valid today as it was back in the early 20th century, and I was surprised that it had never been turned into a proper feature film.”

Masterson will be playing the lead role in the film. “…the role of Sulla, which I play in R.U.R., is a gem,” said Masterson. “She’s smart and resourceful and crafty and cunning, oozing sex appeal at all times, and entirely taken for granted because of her status as a working class person.

“Whereas this film is set to be a highly conceptual, eye-candy-style piece of art, there is a real backbone to it; it’s a piece about classism, prejudice, [and] the plight of working people. In different ways at different times, the role of Sulla emphasizes a throughline of conscience in the film, and that’s my favorite part about it. But it’s hard to know where Sulla stands at some points. She’s mercurial…you never know quite what’s up her sleeve. And that’s a challenging, very exciting element to get to play onscreen.”