DS9 5x18-6x06
Jul. 22nd, 2010 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI've now seen through 6x06, "Sacrifice of Angels." And I know why attempting to watch just the first part of a seven-part megastory before bed is a bad idea (I was up until five o'clock in the morning).
I'm too busy due to my upcoming move to write up proper episode reviews, but here are a few thoughts.
As always, if you comment, please don't mention any spoilers (even minor ones) for anything past 6x06.
You know what I said about wanting to see Odo be more alien? I take it back.
At least, I never wanted him to become more like the Founders, even briefly. The whole hive-mind/group consciousness thing is a squick for me, as are (most of the time) permanent mind-melds, soul-bonds, and anything that results in loss of selfhood. I just don't see why it's supposed to be appealing, and unfortunately the show doesn't do a good job of showing it. We see Odo and female!Founder get all molten together again, and then suddenly Odo's a sociopath who thinks all the solids are lesser life forms. Until his love for Kira saves him (because nothing--not friendship, not morality [remember Odo's love of justice? I'm not sure the show does]--is significant compared to romantic love). *eyeroll* I'm also a little baffled by why Odo fell under the Founders' metaphorical spell at a time when he was closer to Kira than he'd ever been before and he knew she was relying on him.
Speaking of squicks, the scene where Odo and female!Founder had just had sex . . . *shudders*. Partly it's that she's still basing her form on Odo himself, and partly it's that there's something grandmotherly about her, so to me it had an incredibly creepy incestuous vibe. Which was perhaps the point, and her reaction was fairly amusing ("er, so solids find this enjoyable, do they?"), but I still kind of want brain bleach.
And all this happened at a point when I was really starting to like Odo/Kira as a ship. The only thing I enjoyed in 5x22, "Children of Time" was alt!Odo--older, sadder, wiser, a little more human but still Other, and unexpectedly sexy. And he totally made the right decision even if it was for the wrong reason (his love of Kira) rather than the right one (as he points out, it's not 49 people vs. 8000, it's 49 people, their lives and choices, their families, and all their possible descendents vs. 8000; also, as he didn't point out, doing something beneficial in itself that, as a side effect, will cause some people never to have been born is not the same thing as murdering them). That version of Odo suddenly made Odo/Kira a lot more plausible, although obviously real!Odo being such an idiot as to tell Kira what happened threw a spanner in the works.
Speaking of het pairings, I'm getting quite attached to Jadzia Dax/Worf. Worf on his own still annoys the hell out of me, but Dax seems more than able to keep him in line, and they have good chemistry together.
5x24, "Empok Nor," was a bleak little episode, wasn't it? Poor Garak. I suppose I should feel more sorry for the people Garak killed, and I do in theory, but considering we'd never seen them before and they were such obvious redshirts that anyone who's ever watched a movie or TV show would know not to get fond of them, it's sort of hard. Anyway, the story started out so cute, what with Garak bemoaning the fact that people trust him now and getting jealous of Bashir's friendship with O'Brian. (Yes, he's jealous. I see no other explanation for his line to O'Brien: "So when you and Dr. Bashir go into the holosuites for hours at a time, you're just repairing them?") And then suddenly it was dark and grim, and drugged!Garak was displaying dead bodies like a serial killer. I'm not sure I quite believed O'Brien's kindness to him at the end. O'Brien is a good man, but is anyone really that good?
I wish Garak had had a bit more of an arc in the seven-parter. It was nice that he was around at all, but I wanted a bit more than some snappy dialogue and then some concluding angst. The snappy dialogue was very snappy, though. I loved his line to Ziyal: "My dear, I find your blind adoration both flattering and disturbing" and this exchange with Bashir:
Ziyal . . . got fridged. She never really had a story of her own; she was just there to provide emotional color, and occasionally motivation, for Dukat, and then even for Garak at the end. Because the show very seldom does this, and it has plenty of female characters who are at the center of their own stories, I'm not as angry about it as I might be, but I still wish the writers had tried to do something with Ziyal rather than with Gul Dukat's daughter.
On the subject of minor characters, I find myself weirdly fond of Weyoun. Of course he's an agent of a hideously genocidal and repressive interstellar dictatorship, but in himself he's appealingly odd and funny. 5x25, "In the Cards" had me shipping Weyoun/Giger: true love 4-eva, perhaps literally! (Giger, incidentally, was a brilliant one-off character who I'm hoping will come back, especially if he has more lines like "the unwary victims of cellular ennui.") I think the show wants viewers to despise Weyoun (and the Vorta in general) because they're not soldierly, which makes me rather uncomfortable. Male Vorta tend to read as a bit camp, a bit feminine, and "male femininity = despicable, cowardly, untrustworthy shallowness" is a nasty trope that the show really shouldn't be reiterating. There are good reasons to dislike the Vorta, of course, but they're presented as figures of contempt in a way that no other villains--not the Cardassians, not the Founders--are.
And that's about all I have to say, except for a few random observations. 6x02, "Rocks and Shoals," had what may be the grimmest moment I've ever seen on U.S. broadcast television: Vedek Yassim's protest-by-suicide. I wasn't expecting it at all and was utterly shocked. Brilliant, but I'll bet the network got some letters about it when it aired.
On a much more cheerful note: the "rescue Bashir's teddy bear" subplot of "In the Cards" was sufficiently adorable to overcome the fact that I knew I was supposed to find it adorable. I dislike manipulative cuteness, but . . . Bashir. And his teddy bear. (I'm sure Garak has said some quite sarcastic things on the topic, but even he is secretly charmed.)
Finally, I noticed that O'Brien doesn't seem all that broken-hearted at spending so much time (doesn't the seven-parter take place over something like a year?) away from his family. Okay, it's probably just that those episodes were crammed full of incident and the show didn't have time to get into it. But I can't help thinking that even though the war was very serious, and even though O'Brien must have genuinely missed Keiko and the kids, there was a part of him that was overjoyed at the chance to Have Adventures With Julian all the time. That's why the first thing they do when they get back to DS9 is head for the holosuite to play Battle of Britain. *pets them*
I'm too busy due to my upcoming move to write up proper episode reviews, but here are a few thoughts.
As always, if you comment, please don't mention any spoilers (even minor ones) for anything past 6x06.
You know what I said about wanting to see Odo be more alien? I take it back.
At least, I never wanted him to become more like the Founders, even briefly. The whole hive-mind/group consciousness thing is a squick for me, as are (most of the time) permanent mind-melds, soul-bonds, and anything that results in loss of selfhood. I just don't see why it's supposed to be appealing, and unfortunately the show doesn't do a good job of showing it. We see Odo and female!Founder get all molten together again, and then suddenly Odo's a sociopath who thinks all the solids are lesser life forms. Until his love for Kira saves him (because nothing--not friendship, not morality [remember Odo's love of justice? I'm not sure the show does]--is significant compared to romantic love). *eyeroll* I'm also a little baffled by why Odo fell under the Founders' metaphorical spell at a time when he was closer to Kira than he'd ever been before and he knew she was relying on him.
Speaking of squicks, the scene where Odo and female!Founder had just had sex . . . *shudders*. Partly it's that she's still basing her form on Odo himself, and partly it's that there's something grandmotherly about her, so to me it had an incredibly creepy incestuous vibe. Which was perhaps the point, and her reaction was fairly amusing ("er, so solids find this enjoyable, do they?"), but I still kind of want brain bleach.
And all this happened at a point when I was really starting to like Odo/Kira as a ship. The only thing I enjoyed in 5x22, "Children of Time" was alt!Odo--older, sadder, wiser, a little more human but still Other, and unexpectedly sexy. And he totally made the right decision even if it was for the wrong reason (his love of Kira) rather than the right one (as he points out, it's not 49 people vs. 8000, it's 49 people, their lives and choices, their families, and all their possible descendents vs. 8000; also, as he didn't point out, doing something beneficial in itself that, as a side effect, will cause some people never to have been born is not the same thing as murdering them). That version of Odo suddenly made Odo/Kira a lot more plausible, although obviously real!Odo being such an idiot as to tell Kira what happened threw a spanner in the works.
Speaking of het pairings, I'm getting quite attached to Jadzia Dax/Worf. Worf on his own still annoys the hell out of me, but Dax seems more than able to keep him in line, and they have good chemistry together.
5x24, "Empok Nor," was a bleak little episode, wasn't it? Poor Garak. I suppose I should feel more sorry for the people Garak killed, and I do in theory, but considering we'd never seen them before and they were such obvious redshirts that anyone who's ever watched a movie or TV show would know not to get fond of them, it's sort of hard. Anyway, the story started out so cute, what with Garak bemoaning the fact that people trust him now and getting jealous of Bashir's friendship with O'Brian. (Yes, he's jealous. I see no other explanation for his line to O'Brien: "So when you and Dr. Bashir go into the holosuites for hours at a time, you're just repairing them?") And then suddenly it was dark and grim, and drugged!Garak was displaying dead bodies like a serial killer. I'm not sure I quite believed O'Brien's kindness to him at the end. O'Brien is a good man, but is anyone really that good?
I wish Garak had had a bit more of an arc in the seven-parter. It was nice that he was around at all, but I wanted a bit more than some snappy dialogue and then some concluding angst. The snappy dialogue was very snappy, though. I loved his line to Ziyal: "My dear, I find your blind adoration both flattering and disturbing" and this exchange with Bashir:
Bashir: If I'm a Vulcan, then how do you explain my boyish smile?He does seem quite hurt that Bashir didn't tell him about being genetically enhanced. Which is hypocritical of him considering he keeps everything secret and tells outright lies all the damn time. I get the sense that, despite his jokes about improving Bashir by making him more cynical, he really valued the idea of Bashir as an open, trusting innocent. That's also part of what drew him to Ziyal, I think. (Oh, and I should mention that Garak's rather rough-edged teasing of Bashir is perhaps not quite so rough as it appears to be--it is, after all, canon that Cardassians express romantic interest through feigned hostility.)
Garak: Not so boyish anymore, Doctor.
Ziyal . . . got fridged. She never really had a story of her own; she was just there to provide emotional color, and occasionally motivation, for Dukat, and then even for Garak at the end. Because the show very seldom does this, and it has plenty of female characters who are at the center of their own stories, I'm not as angry about it as I might be, but I still wish the writers had tried to do something with Ziyal rather than with Gul Dukat's daughter.
On the subject of minor characters, I find myself weirdly fond of Weyoun. Of course he's an agent of a hideously genocidal and repressive interstellar dictatorship, but in himself he's appealingly odd and funny. 5x25, "In the Cards" had me shipping Weyoun/Giger: true love 4-eva, perhaps literally! (Giger, incidentally, was a brilliant one-off character who I'm hoping will come back, especially if he has more lines like "the unwary victims of cellular ennui.") I think the show wants viewers to despise Weyoun (and the Vorta in general) because they're not soldierly, which makes me rather uncomfortable. Male Vorta tend to read as a bit camp, a bit feminine, and "male femininity = despicable, cowardly, untrustworthy shallowness" is a nasty trope that the show really shouldn't be reiterating. There are good reasons to dislike the Vorta, of course, but they're presented as figures of contempt in a way that no other villains--not the Cardassians, not the Founders--are.
And that's about all I have to say, except for a few random observations. 6x02, "Rocks and Shoals," had what may be the grimmest moment I've ever seen on U.S. broadcast television: Vedek Yassim's protest-by-suicide. I wasn't expecting it at all and was utterly shocked. Brilliant, but I'll bet the network got some letters about it when it aired.
On a much more cheerful note: the "rescue Bashir's teddy bear" subplot of "In the Cards" was sufficiently adorable to overcome the fact that I knew I was supposed to find it adorable. I dislike manipulative cuteness, but . . . Bashir. And his teddy bear. (I'm sure Garak has said some quite sarcastic things on the topic, but even he is secretly charmed.)
Finally, I noticed that O'Brien doesn't seem all that broken-hearted at spending so much time (doesn't the seven-parter take place over something like a year?) away from his family. Okay, it's probably just that those episodes were crammed full of incident and the show didn't have time to get into it. But I can't help thinking that even though the war was very serious, and even though O'Brien must have genuinely missed Keiko and the kids, there was a part of him that was overjoyed at the chance to Have Adventures With Julian all the time. That's why the first thing they do when they get back to DS9 is head for the holosuite to play Battle of Britain. *pets them*
no subject
Date: 2010-07-23 02:19 am (UTC)I'd have to do a rewatch to evaluate what you say about why the show sets us up to hate the Vorta. From what I remember it seemed more like the fact that they don't make an effort to rebel against the Founders, but instead accept their place in the system, but your impressions don't seem off either, at least initially. Thinking about it now, I think we also should evaluate Starfleet's reaction to Bashir in light of the fact that the Federation is at war with a polity that explicitly uses genetic engineering to create and maintain its totalitarian social structure. (Side note: I wish we'd seen more of life in the Gamma Quadrant.)
I think the entire "off the station" plot takes about eight or nine months or so, if I remember what I read in the novelizations correctly.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-23 03:20 am (UTC)But that's a behavior coded as feminine, right? Because it's "weak."
And good point about genetic engineering, although I do think the Federation's attitude is ridiculously un-nuanced. Almost any technology can be used in ways that are harmful/oppressive, and generally speaking the sensible response is not to ban the technology. Okay, the Federation does allow engineering in the case of "serious birth defects," but that's ultimately a social and cultural judgment that the Federation seems to be treating instead as a clear, hard-and-fast rule. From what we heard of little Jules, he would've been severely handicapped by his learning problems, but the Federation chooses not to see this as a serious birth defect. They've got a bad case of slippery slope mentality. (But to return to your point, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the war with the Founders resulted in a further hardening of Federation attitudes about genetic engineering.