Month: September 2012

The battle for DS9 at last. A pretty good first half followed by a second half that rests on a [deus ex machina](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina) so pure I’m tempted to write it in to the Wikipedia article as an example. Using the wormhole aliens in this way might make sense, but it cheapens events, and makes everything…

Aliens experiment on the Voyager crew. A lot of this felt an awful lot like things that we’ve seen before. Most recently [Displaced](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2012/08/trekathon-474-displaced-voy/). The ‘inscrutable aliens do stuff to the crew’ hasn’t generally been interesting before. And we spend a lot of time with Janeway being cranky, people becoming sick mysteriously, and then the Doctor…

The Federation finally decides to take the offensive. Well, clearly we’re headed back to the status quo. Or, at least, I’ll be very surprised if we don’t end up with the crew back on the station within another couple of episodes or two. Once again the DS9-side plot is a lot more interesting, following on…

The station resistance hits a few snags. Wow do things get worse here. Rom arrested, Odo (apparently) changing sides to the Founders. It’s really just a fairly standard cliffhanger, but it’s more effective given the buildup. And the buildups of Kira and Odo’s relationship really pays off, as there is a genuine sense of betrayal.…

Worf deals with his son, Dukat with his daughter. Gee, I wonder what the name might mean? If you’d told me a few episodes ago that we’d have a Klingon story with a Bajoran politics B-plot, and the Klingon story was the better part, I’d have thought you crazy. But here we see the continuation…

Seven of Nine has a bit of a relapse in the whole ‘Borg’ thing. Overall, I thought this was an inevitable story told too early, and not told well enough. I think the show would have benefited from taking a leaf from DS9’s books, and stretching some of the memories of her youth out over…

Sisko and crew crash on a remote planet. I felt like we’d seen the Sisko half of this episode before – fighting the Jem’Hadar, betraying the Vorta, we’ve all been there before. It’s all well done, but it does nothing interesting and adds little to the development of the characters. The Kira bit was a…

The Doctor and B’Elanna transport into a horror movie, while Ensign Kim is in a… different genre. I’ve discussed the problem of the horror movie tone in Star Trek before. It’s pulled off here, but mainly by cheating. We know that the alien hologram is bad from almost the first moment we see him on…

Sisko heads off to war. Yikes this is a big change for Star Trek. Firstly, there’s the tone. They capture a pretty good war feel (albeit not exactly as gritty as *Nor Battle to the Strong*). Then, there’s the story telling – this is now almost completely serial story telling, with the story being told…

Chakotay falls in with an alien militia when he crashes on a planet. Clever and bold. While I spent most of the episode expecting a twist (in particular, that Voyager would have contacted the other side), I was expecting something more along the lines of ‘war is hell, both sides are terrible’. Instead we get…