Sfdebris.net

Solid review pointing out the influences on the story, the weaknesses in the script, and the early installment weirdness of season 1 DS9.

New video player works 100x's better than Vidme ever did.

Good stuff.

One of the better season 1 episodes, and that's saying something...

I enjoy it just fine, I'm not fond of the early installment weirdness either or the rather forced attempts at establishing a quirky, futuristic, alien sci-fi world (that's in an already established universe and mythos) that's not too different from ours, Babylon 5 suffered from similar issues with its early episodes. However the story works well enough and I enjoy the character stuff with Quark and Odo although like most people I found Dax rather dull at first (although I didn't like her much better later on) and Bashir is incredibly annoying (he got a lot better.)

I never understood the Keiko sub-plot in all of this. They just discovered a portal to a completely unexplored portion of the galaxy. How is having a Botanist on staff to study the plant life of all these new planets not incredibly important? Even if they had nothing tangible for her to do then and there, she should've been setting up a laboratory/arboretum so she can do these studies.

Also, what qualifies her to run a primary education school? Especially such a school where the bulk of the student body comes from more then one completely alien (no pun intended) culture then her own?

And considering how important the school seemed to be in the early episodes, it actually always surprised me how casually it was written out of the show. If I remember correctly Jake just mentioned its closing in passing and nobody seemed to care all that much.

Yeah, this was always an episode that bothered me in retrospective. Odo was seen as the one beam of light during the Cardassian administration, an official who stood up to Cardassian authority in the name of justice, to the degree that they were happy to keep him in his position after the Cardassian authority was overthrown. I'll grant that all of that characterization came later, but it's still not a good mark on this episode that they had no idea what they were doing with this character when it was written.

BlackoutCreature2 wrote:I never understood the Keiko sub-plot in all of this. They just discovered a portal to a completely unexplored portion of the galaxy. How is having a Botanist on staff to study the plant life of all these new planets not incredibly important? Even if they had nothing tangible for her to do then and there, she should've been setting up a laboratory/arboretum so she can do these studies.

I always thought that too. If you can justify the Enterprise having an arboretum where Keiko is a researcher, it should be easy to justify an arboretum on DS9. It is THE closest station to the frontier of the gamma quadrant where ships are popping in and out to explore-this whole station should be full of laboratories and archives. The early seasons instead treat it like it's an oversized gas station. The only real justification is that the Starfleet was afraid that Bajorans might revolt and try to seize everything on the station, so they didn't want to risk having too much of value there.

I thought that the anger towards Odo was decent foreshadowing of the motivations of the Founders.

I think it kinda makes a bit of sense that the crowd would turn on Odo. He might have been the one impartial man working for the Cardassians, but he was still working for the Cardassians and must have arrested Bajorans and turned them over. No matter how impartial, in a world where killing a Cardassian is legal because they all needed a-killing then there must have been at least some dissatisfaction ready boil over. Bajor is still at a place in its history where emotions of all sorts are running high post-Cardassian withdrawal. The idea that the man who worked for the Cardassians killed a man who killed Cardassians and supplied the resistance (no matter in how self-serving a way), that has gotta cause some ructions.

Just gonna let "Departing Alderaan Spaceport" itinerary line item pass without comment then, Chuck?

Yes? Alright, you are dealing with a lot again right now.

The bit about Westerns is nice to hear about.

Have Gun Will Travel, the show Roddenberry wrote for and really got his start at before Star Trek (and the failed Lieutenant series) is a very interesting show to watch looking at it as Roddenberry's genesis. It has a very different feel from other Westerns embodied by the main character, Paladin, a gun for hire that is also a principled philosopher and intellectual. The show is more mythological and symbolic at times than the usual Western fare going into a lot of mulling over of the ideas presented in an episode as the show goes on, and no surprise, all the more so in the ones Roddenberry wrote (alongside the pitfall in that of the main character lecturing everyone, audience included, in a tired haranguing way just like Star Trek would become infamous for in it's moments of self-righteousness).

Anyway, it's a good show and going through it, as you see the show develop you sense how Roddenberry developed. It very much is the primordial pool from which his style emerged despite the fact his episodes are very distinct in their own right to the point that I could tell he had a hand in them by how much they felt like TOS as I watched my first episode he wrote before I knew of his role on the show.

The one episode I find amusing is the irony within Marshal of Sweetwater, where Paladin confronts an old friend that has become a dictator of a town after having saved it from the anarchy of a gang. He's micromanaging everything in it right down to how many drinks the bars can serve per costumer and unilaterally parceling out and giving other poeple's land away to others, since they're not using all of it right.

The irony to me is all that coming from Roddenberry, the creator of the Federation and the contradictions within the man, how he loved the spirit of American style liberty, and yet was obsessed with people doing things the way he felt they should that led the Federation to be both a nation of liberty and a socialist command state.

The contradiction is revealed I think in his approach to people within Star Trek, that they wouldn't do certain things he didn't want because they'd "eovled beyond that" which now gets a smirk from me thinking about how the Marshall could have turned things around on Paladin saying much something similar "I'm not a dictator telling everyone want to do! I'm just creating circumstances for them to do the right thing, which is what I want them to anyway!".

New video player works 100x's better than Vidme ever did.

I'm something of a Luddite and have gotten used to listening to videos from YouTube on my Ipod when away from the comp when in bed. Drove me nuts that I couldn't do that with the videos here because the Vidme ones just would not play (and I refuse to update/reformat my ancient ipod to possibly let it happen), but now I can with Vimeo.

Beastro wrote:

The irony to me is all that coming from Roddenberry, the creator of the Federation and the contradictions within the man, how he loved the spirit of American style liberty, and yet was obsessed with people doing things the way he felt they should that led the Federation to be both a nation of liberty and a socialist command state.

Within the Federation you can be the macho manly man living in abject poverty to prove you are a manly man. There are options for capitalism, we've seen that, unfettered and for homesteading on remote colonies. The Federation will let you do that. It will also provide for the people that don't want that and want to live in communities where scraping for existence prevents them living happier and more comfortable lives too. Where, since they have all the energy to supply basic needs, there is no need to maintain an artificial scarcity. The Federation will allow people to choose that too. What the Federation will not do is force people into either mould, if someone living on a frontier homestead says "yeah, I don't want to do this anymore; then the Federation will come pick them up and help them find something else to do too. I think that is what peeves Radical-Libertarians off, that their lifestyle only works if everyone is compelled to be part of it. As soon as there is an element of choice, people start choosing to not be part of it. And that is far more controlling and top down in its directive than anything else. Still, if you were in the Federation, you'd be allowed to be a capitalist frontiersman, forswearing all aid, until you grew tired of it.

CrypticMirror wrote: There are options for capitalism, we've seen that, unfettered and for homesteading on remote colonies. The Federation will let you do that.

Better hope you don't end up in one of the Federation boarder colonies that get handed over to the Cardassians. Interesting that people that have frontier mindsets with potential capitalistic tendencies end up in those places, and the Federation does not seem to care about their safety all that much.