Star Trek (DS9): The Quickening

[Naldiin]

To clarify: the scoring isn't measuring a nebulous quality of "good" so much as a ranking in how they compare to each other as far as their enjoyment goes. The idea of using "re-watch" as a criteria was more of a "well, if I was going to watch an episode of this, which would I be more likely to want to watch?" That's why it seemed the best way to score this was to consider that here. Also, it's important to remember that in such a system, some HAVE to be below 5 to balance out, and on DS9, there's simply not enough "not good" episodes to fill out that large of a list. If everything that was fine was listed at 5, the scale would eventually be meaningless, it would be "which 5's are more 5's than other 5's" after a while.

But thank you to everyone for having such a great discussion on this episode.

I'm curious - is there any chance we'd ever get a rough concordance between the series in terms of the number ratings? Like a sense of where, say, a Voyager 5/10 would go relative to *all* of Trek. Or would that have to wait until basically all of the episodes have been done?

I might almost calibrate it as "where is the 'OK, but not necessarily good or bad' line" for each series. It seems like, "Ok-yawn" gets you a 3/4 on DS9, a 4 on TNG or TOS, a 5/6 on Voy, and a 6 on ENT, but that may be my own bias coming through.

[Asvarduil]

I have a feeling this will be my most controversial rating. I really struggled with how to describe something that is as best as it could be on every technical level while at the same time, ultimately failing to make me enjoy watching it. I know this is also making me ask for it, since those who don't care about the episode don't care what the score is, while those who do care will understandably take issue.

SFDebris - I understand exactly how you feel, and I think that the rating you gave it is entirely fair. It's hard to apply a one-dimensional rating to a work with various qualities (in this case, an interesting subversion of Trek tropes, but not one that's fun to watch, a two-dimensional perspective of the work.)

As for those who want a purely objective review of...well, anything, there's always Jim Sterling's 100% Objective Game Review, which I think should count as a cautionary tale against that sort of thing.

You will like Final Fantasy 13, if you like Final Fantasy 13.

...In short? Don't sweat the small details. Keep on keeping on!

[SuccubusYuri]

As for those who want a purely objective review of...well, anything, there's always Jim Sterling's 100% Objective Game Review, which I think should count as a cautionary tale against that sort of thing.

I vaguely remember early days Jimquisition videos...did not know he went on to style himself as Jim Jones at a Nazi rally. A peculiar target demographic he's courting but I suppose until last year he had it cornered..?

[RobbyB1982]

A big problem with any early Bashir episode is, retroactively, you know he really was actually a super genius the entire time and hiding it the entire time. And while the pieces for that ultimately fit and don't contradict anything that came before... since the *writers* didn't know that they weren't playing around the fact or dropping seeds.... which means when rewatching the series with that knowledge, any episode with Bashir is going to be handicapped by *us* knowing his secret, but not even the character did at that point.

this same episode post-genius reveal could have much better played on his*actual* ego, his *actual* intelligence, his need to prove things. Which obviously idn't hurt the episode at all when it first aired where you can say "who is this guy to think he's so smart he could do this, he has way too much ego and Dax is right"... but it does now. Now, in the back of our minds as viewers (on rewatch) we can say to ourselves "well yeah but he is kind of a secret genius... maybe he's right to think he can do this."

It'd be like watching a Superman tv show and Lois doesn't know Clark is Superman.... and then they put Clark in a dangerous life threatening situation. It actually means nothing to Clark at all, but Lois didn't know that. Except it's even worse, because in that case the writers are hiding the truth from Lois and not the audience, the drama then becomes instead "how does Clark not reveal he's Superman." Except, what if neither the audience or the writers (somehow) knew Clark was actually Superman for the first four seasons and were legitimately putting Clark in what they thought were dangerous situations? On rewatch after the audience found out the truth of the reveal any earlier dangers or testing of his skills would seem silly.

(Disney's Gargoyles has a particularly bad case of this actually, who I don't use as example because it is a legitimate thingI don't want to spoil.)

[Asvarduil]

As for those who want a purely objective review of...well, anything, there's always Jim Sterling's 100% Objective Game Review, which I think should count as a cautionary tale against that sort of thing.

I vaguely remember early days Jimquisition videos...did not know he went on to style himself as Jim Jones at a Nazi rally. A peculiar target demographic he's courting but I suppose until last year he had it cornered..?

To be fair, he's a peculiar guy - supposedly, the whole dictator thing was him being the hugest possible ham, in figurative and empirical terms both. After a certain orange-tinted human won an election, however, pretty sure he wouldn't want be associated with that. So...he's dialed that back, at least.

[RobbyB1982]

I'm curious - is there any chance we'd ever get a rough concordance between the series in terms of the number ratings? Like a sense of where, say, a Voyager 5/10 would go relative to *all* of Trek. Or would that have to wait until basically all of the episodes have been done?

I might almost calibrate it as "where is the 'OK, but not necessarily good or bad' line" for each series. It seems like, "Ok-yawn" gets you a 3/4 on DS9, a 4 on TNG or TOS, a 5/6 on Voy, and a 6 on ENT, but that may be my own bias coming through.

Well, you HAVE to force yourself to put at least some mental filter in place or else differences of era and budget are just going to overwhelm any story quality.

I don't think it'd be fair to have a universal for-every-episode scale translation, since it'd be unfair to say DS9 is allowed to go to 12 but the very best episodes of Voyager or TNG still have to top out at 10. You'd have to allow for scores of 0,1, 9, and 10 being basically equivalent between shows. I think.

That aside, your scale seems about right, I think you could generally at least say maybe that DS9's actual baseline average is a 7 rather than a 5, and some things are rated lower mostly to pull it down to a fair scale... and that perhaps Enterprise's baseline is a 4. ..but ToS and the animated show you really have to seperately filter.

[RobbyB1982]

I have a feeling this will be my most controversial rating.

More controversial than Relics or the fourth movie?

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I'm curious - is there any chance we'd ever get a rough concordance between the series in terms of the number ratings? Like a sense of where, say, a Voyager 5/10 would go relative to *all* of Trek. Or would that have to wait until basically all of the episodes have been done?

I might almost calibrate it as "where is the 'OK, but not necessarily good or bad' line" for each series. It seems like, "Ok-yawn" gets you a 3/4 on DS9, a 4 on TNG or TOS, a 5/6 on Voy, and a 6 on ENT, but that may be my own bias coming through.

That's pretty much agrees with my impression of how the different series would relate to each other in Chuck's estimation (if he were to do such a comparison). One issue that complicates those comparisons is that each series has different types of problems.

I think the best of TNG could hold up pretty well against the best of DS9, so that a DS9 10 and a TNG 10 are close to equivalent. On the other hand, I think a TNG 1 or 2 may be even worse (or less watchable) than a Voyager 1 or 2.

With TOS, there's a lot of historical context that might make comparison more difficult- like whether a TOS episode should be blamed if a concept it pioneered eventually becomes stale and over-used, or how much extra credit should be given for original concepts in the first place. This came up recently in his review of Arena. With that said, I believe TOS' best episodes easily hold up on character, thematic, and story levels, while its worst episodes probably fare better than TNG but worse than DS9 (generally).

The easiest comparison to me is DS9 to Voyager, since DS9 seems to be two points better pretty consistently. I could easily see Sacrifice of Angels being a Voyager 10, for example.

[T-L]

Makes me wonder, which would be the absolute most average episodes from each show? The episodes which comes in the middle on each shows internal score, and how would the absolute mediocre episodes compare from each show?

[Linkara]

As for those who want a purely objective review of...well, anything, there's always Jim Sterling's 100% Objective Game Review, which I think should count as a cautionary tale against that sort of thing.

I vaguely remember early days Jimquisition videos...did not know he went on to style himself as Jim Jones at a Nazi rally. A peculiar target demographic he's courting but I suppose until last year he had it cornered..?

To be fair, he's a peculiar guy - supposedly, the whole dictator thing was him being the hugest possible ham, in figurative and empirical terms both. After a certain orange-tinted human won an election, however, pretty sure he wouldn't want be associated with that. So...he's dialed that back, at least.

Oh, yeah, definitely. While I'm a more recent follower of the Jimquisition, Jim has patently dialed back on the imagery to instead rebrand himself as a carnival/circus showman, from the theme song now having more of a carnival look to the visuals, the costume alterations, and of course calling himself "the greatest showman in games media." And the guy is as progressive and anti-corporate culture as they come, so he's definitely not trying to court a certain target demographic.