DVD, DS9 S5 (In The Cards)
The lull before the storm, the deep breath before the plunge - call it what you will, I've probably used those lines before, but this is a case where they really are apposite, this being the last stab at playfulness before the seriousness of the Dominion War took over from Bajoran politics, Ferengi soap operas, romantic setups and mundane day to day problems on the station. Not that the series was ever mundane, or that those things would be forgotten for long, but things were going to get a whole lot more interesting (in the Chinese-proverb sense of the word), before long, making this the ideal time to give us a nostalgia boost and get the whole cast in there. Well, nearly the whole cast, for Jadzia was absent and it wasn't even commented on! Where is she, on a secret mission, on leave, or back in time? She's usually the lives and souls of the party, which answers the question, really - if Sisko and the others had had her to bolster their morale and cheer the mood, it wouldn't have become Jake's (and by extension, Nog's), personal mission. In my mind this is the only reason she wasn't written in, just as if there's a shapeshifter around you don't have Odo there to be able to point him out, or Bashir when there's a medical emergency - you take out the person most capable in a given field to make it more dramatic, and in this case the field was humour.
It doesn't start very humorously, a depressing dinner for the senior staff hosted (and cooked), by Sisko, continuing his tradition of dinner parties (maybe Eddington's reminder of this role recently, made him think of the idea, or maybe it's something he does more often than we're privy to). It's always a pleasure to get the cast together and have them bounce off each other, but this was no happy gathering, more like a duty to be borne - Mr. Worf's so bored he gets engrossed in Sisko's wall art and doesn't even realise everyone else has left! Equally, Sisko's so despondent he doesn't even pretend to believe Worf wanted to be there, telling him he's been paroled. The reason for the downer is news of yet another starship to go missing, meaning the Dominion are stepping up their cold war to another level, the peace slipping away at a rate of warp speed. This really is the calm before the storm, because everyone's going about their business, having meals, cataloguing storage bays, catching up on work. They're not scurrying around in a panic, because they're Starfleet.
When Jake decides to do something nice for his Father, he could never have foreseen that it would have been an uplifting experience for the whole station, sending a breeze of warmth through the creaky, cold place. It shows that if you do something beneficial to others you never know how far it will go, or how much good will trickle down. Not everyone was as susceptible to this optimism, many having already left. One of the most rarely heard about established alien race to have been invented in 'TOS,' is mentioned in Sisko's conversation with Kai Winn about the current situation: Coridan. This was a world that the episode 'Journey To Babel' revolved around, its admittance into the Federation the motivation for that 1960s story, and it's good to hear of it again, even if fleetingly (we'd later see a Coridanite, but not until the end of 'Enterprise'). And talking about things fleetingly heard about, and eventually seen… Kukalaka fits into that bracket, too! Bashir's teddy bear gets a starring role as one of the various bargaining chips the young pair use to progress towards their goal on the Great River of Commerce. Why didn't Nog mention that side of Ferengi beliefs? Probably because it wasn't invented until Season 7's 'Treachery, Faith and The Great River.' But back to the bear: Bashir takes it quite seriously, it being something he'd told Jadzia about (I think), in Season 4's 'The Quickening,' and though it wasn't a 'character' (if you can stretch to calling it that), on my Most Want To See list, Leeta's fluffed up fury and Nog's embarrassing position above his Stepmother-to-be during her slumber, made it all worthwhile!
This is another grand theatre for Jake Sisko, often the most underused cast member of the series, enabling Cirroc Lofton to show just how well he can raise a quizzical eyebrow in the best Spock tradition. Traditions become something of a problem for him at first when he needs Nog's money to buy the famed baseball card with which to raise his Father's spirits. As we heard in 'First Contact,' humans don't use money. Apparently they're 'better' than that. They don't need money. Except, Jake does, and Nog doesn't let him off easy. It's a great jibing moment for the series which often poked fun at its own legacy as much as it celebrated it, and having a Ferengi be the one who gets to ram home the point about the Trek universe's philosophical dichotomy gives it an added dimension - at the same time as they're pointing out the inconsistency of a system that doesn't use money, kind of needing it, they're also showing us a race that was ridiculous at first, but now we have a Ferengi who's been developed far enough that he's a person in his own right, not a caricature! If Jake doesn't have money, I wonder how he managed to acquire so many clothes - in this episode he goes through about three different changes. Initially I thought it was playing out over several days, but then Giger or someone talks of a twenty-two hour period. It must have been all the minor tasks making him sweat too much.
Nog is much more than just a Ferengi straight man, he's a good friend, but that doesn't stop Jake from digging in where it hurts and wistfully piling on the emotional blackmail about how his Father was the only one that believed in him, how he got him into Starfleet Academy, etc, and Nog can't deny it. A Ferengi that can give up his life's-savings for a friend is a Ferengi worth having as a friend indeed! We've seen this friendship develop over the years of the series, Nog and Jake both changing far more than we'd ever have had the right to expect. It wasn't just that Jake grew to be about twice Nog's size, it was that they both went down paths the other one was 'supposed' to have taken: Jake became a bit of a slob, Nog joined Starfleet. Jake's also blossomed into a writer and a journalist, and in this episode he gets to use both his literary talents: he speechifies to Nog to get him to share his money, (as well as trying to make Kira's speech funnier), and he takes the initiative in spinning a fictional reason as to why they might be after the baseball card when Weyoun disbelieves the true story, the Vorta seemingly having very little idea of the cultural void between them.
Weyoun gets to be the kind of Weyoun that we know from the War - he's less quirky, though he still plies his overwhelming friendliness when the situation is right (look out for Jones behind Sisko's left shoulder during Weyoun's smarm offensive), and he has a steelier side that befits an emissary of the harshest enemy to the Alpha Quadrant in forever, when dealing with suspicious circumstances. We feel we know him better here, he's away from Dukat or any other puppeteer or puppet and he takes on his own strength. He courts Kai Winn and becomes the recipient of her blunt forcefulness, (seeing Weyoun with nothing to say when she tells him they share nothing in common, is priceless!), but it's when he deals with Jake and Nog (and Giger), that he assumes a position of authority. He would do, being as he is, on his own Dominion battleship, so huge that it seems to almost envelop the lower pylon it's docked at (and making you think it would only take two or three of those to take out the station, they look so big and powerful, gleaming purple). I do worry about how easy it was for his ship to abduct Jake and Nog - we're not told for sure, but it seems likely the station didn't even detect the transport of two of its citizens from a turbolift, a frightening thought, as is the fact that Giger's assignment of his quarters wasn't on record, though this could have been the Doc's own paranoid measures to avoid the soulless minions.
Weyoun stalks into the interrogation room with the air of a headmaster coming to find out what happened with a prank from two of his pupils, and they respond in kind. Mind you, they'd had a lot of experience dealing with VIPs, since they'd just had a run in with Kai Winn to accuse her of kidnapping Dr. Giger, (cleverly left to our imagination for the actual detail), then an equally heated meeting with Sisko, furious at their audacity for confronting the Kai! As Weyoun sees it, they've also been meeting with the entire senior staff after the last few hours, in a twist of reality that would serve him (or his persona), well when Bashir's life and background comes into question in 'Inquisition.' The meeting between Weyoun and Jake was fortuitous for the young reporter-to-be - recognising him as wise and giving him respect, Weyoun responding by giving them the card, set the groundwork for Jake's time on the occupied station. From this, Weyoun had some understanding of Jake beyond the fact that he was Sisko's son, helping, more than anything else, ensure the man's safety in that den of enemies (and I also think it gave the Vorta pleasure to know he's helped to give the Captain a much appreciated gift without Sisko knowing it!). Weyoun's so suspicious and yet also shrewd in his role as mouthpiece for the Dominion that he sees plots all around - probably doesn't help that he's a clone who'd died before, something which might well add paranoia, and another reason why he should be so fascinated by Giger's work, going so far as to try out the crackpot's entertainment chamber, designed to keep the cells from betting bored to death, but only if you use it for a third of your day, the rest of your life!
Dr. Giger was a brilliant character with so much more for Brian Markinson to work with than the more basic Starfleet guy he played on 'Voyager' (though he got to be a Vidiian who stole the other's face, too!). Maybe if he'd had other roles he'd be better known as one of the top Trek guest stars, but whether it was because he was a balding, middle-aged human in both roles (never hurt Patrick Stewart!), or he wasn't available, I don't know why he never had more roles as so many did. Certainly his performance here, as the highly intelligent boffin who also has an edge of madness in his personality, was a strong one, keeping the recent penchant for top guest casts. He has a zany boredom to him, a flair for the dull, with extreme reactions to people (such as a refusal to shake hands which made me think of Dejaren in 'Revulsion'). He remains fairly inactive (though he does look like some kind of HG Wells character when he climbs out of his invention wearing a waistcoat), but his zeal is just below the surface. It's a zeal he can regurgitate any time someone shows an interest, though he considers most people to be members of the 'soulless minions of orthodoxy,' who he claims have hounded his work. He even gets some joy out of his association with Jake and Nog - aside from them saving him from being killed or made a prisoner for the rest of his life, he finds someone with a complete and willing interest in his life's work, something an inventor would cherish above anything. Maybe Weyoun sponsored his research from that time on? Someone should write a novel about it!
The auction at Quark's continued a proud tradition of such events, two that spring to mind being the one in 'Q'Less' in which the item being auctioned off was responsible for all the trouble caused on the station; the other being when Nog auctioned his personal belongings (I just remember Worf seeing the light when he finds the Ferengi's tooth sharpener, another social event at which Sisko had press-ganged him into going to!). Auctions were exactly the kind of thing Quark wanted to be doing, even if it was mostly junk (a Romulan washbasin from the 22nd Century, the time of 'Enterprise'; a pre-Surak Vulcan bracelet, etc), but it was the crowd who were most interesting - was that a green variation of a Benzite sitting there, or a similar-looking alien with reused prosthetics? We get another Bolian (the man with good shoes), and it seems my observation in the last review about most Bolians being fat, was incorrect. Now that I think about it, we've often seen thin Bolians in the background, so maybe the fat ones tend to have more personality and get themselves made part of the story? Another telling observation is that Quark's Ferengi waiters are back working for him again. Are they the same ones, and couldn't find better work during his time as a non-Ferengi, or different ones? I sometimes wonder if they were somehow related, if only distantly, to Quark, since we tend to see the same faces over the course of the series (e.g: Broik).
At his lowest ebb, just when Sisko thought the day couldn't get much worse, he's informed that his favourite enemy, the Kai, is coming to visit, but the news she brings soon takes his mind off their turbulent past when she informs him that the Dominion wants Bajor to sign a nonaggression pact. It's odd that the Dominion felt it could get away with sending a massive ship to a Starfleet-run station, even if it is Bajoran-owned. Probably another tactic at driving a wedge between them and the Federation, just as Sisko says of the pact. He counsels the Kai to be wary of Weyoun and his political deviousness, and she reminds him rather matter-of-factly, that she's had her own experience in that department! Something of an understatement when you think back to her schemes with Minister Jaro in Season 2, and the wily war she waged to secure the position of Kai for herself. But, as Sisko found himself doing, this new face of Winn can help us forget who she was. It's amazing that they could do what they did with the villains over the course of the series. Just as Dukat had had his period as a good guy; helpful, Fatherly, friendly, now it's the Kai's turn to be bathed in a positive light. It began with 'Rapture' earlier in the season, when she professed belief that Sisko was the true Emissary after he goes against Starfleet understanding to plead Bajor must stand alone.
The prophecies he saw at that time have begun to reach fruition: the image of locusts passing over Bajor and heading to Cardassia came to pass, and now his urgent warning in the face of all logic, has become a way to keep the planet's options open as the sides take shape. With hindsight, the hints about the future look like massive, honking dumbbells - the locusts heading to Cardassia was 'of course' going to be the Dominion. And now we hear about theft and insecurity on the station, just like it was moments before the Cardassians were forced to abandon it, exactly what was about to happen to the Starfleet contingent! If Bajor had become a Federation member world it would have been crushed under the Jem'Hadar boot, and as Winn pointedly reminds Sisko, they're alone thanks to his guidance and even if he promised to protect Bajor he couldn't truthfully say that he'd prevent a single enemy from setting foot on the planet, or that he'd put Bajor ahead of Earth's defence.
That Winn asks for his advice, the slight incline of the head, the tiniest twitch of an eyebrow, is practically grovelling before him in comparison to her usual attitude, but it isn't the time for Sisko to feel gratified, when such momentous, galaxy-changing events are happening around him. He advises stalling, keeping the options open a little longer, as much for his own interest as Bajor's. He doesn't know what's going to happen, and neither does the Kai. We get a hint of the future feud she'd have with the Prophets when she tells Sisko she consulted an Orb, but was given no guidance from it. The Prophets probably know she's not to be trusted and it proves true in the course of time. Less important in the grand scheme of things, but thanks to Winn, we get a mention of the Andorian homeworld. She calls it Andor, something I much prefer to the other name of Andoria. The difference is that the latter follows the standard naming style of most alien worlds, while the former sounds more alien, so I always wished they'd stuck with Andor. Not that a planet can't have more than one name, it's just my preference. The other thing is when Winn remembers a shop on the Promenade run by a Bajoran woman, now gone, and I was expecting it to be Chalan Aroya (the dropped love interest for Odo who made one appearance at the end of Season 4, then vanished for ever more, and for good). I thought it might be a little in-joke about how they dropped the ball, but it turned out to be someone else.
Michael Dorn became the next cast member to take the reins of an episode as Director, following in the footsteps of Avery Brooks, Rene Auberjonois, Alexander Siddig, and Andrew Robinson, as well as members of his previous cast on 'TNG.' It's strange he waited so long to do it, as he came up with a really good episode here, though it could be said to be one of those that you'd have to try hard to ruin. Like many Directors I didn't notice his style or many of the shots he chose, being too involved in the story, but the montage sequence at the end where happiness and optimism is shown rippling through the station is such an uplifting tapestry, and has excellent use of the camera circling a person: we start behind Kira at the conclusion of her speech, then move round until we see her smiling face, then the shot changes to Worf listening to his newly calibrated Klingon opera on the bridge of the Defiant, the camera continuing to flow, circling him. I also like the way he has the camera looking down at Jake as he expounds on how good Sisko's been to Nog, as if from a high moral stance, though it must have been almost on the ceiling considering Lofton's height!
What the success of the story really comes down to is giving us one more Jake and Nog buddy story, something that had been a staple of the first two seasons, but had been lost as they got older and went in different directions. This season that style had crept back in once Nog had come back to DS9, starting with 'The Ascent' and being the B-story of 'Blaze of Glory,' though that was more about Nog than the pair of them, and though it wasn't the last time, ('Valiant,' for example), it was probably the last innocent, happy escapade, before War filled everyone's lives. The process they go through to get their hands on the card by trading things from one person to the next, is a Japanese concept for which I can't remember the term. I first learnt about it playing 'The Legend of Zelda' games, but Jake and Nog had been through the same process in Season 1, with their famous self-sealing stembolts fiasco. Fitting in with the view of them as people that have changed around completely in their lives, the role reversal continues with Jake as the one scheming and plotting, getting him and his friend in trouble, while Nog's the voice of reason, the responsible one because he's trying to protect his newfound credibility and reputation as a Starfleet Cadet on the station. It's a beautiful play on the series' history and makes all the gags funnier and the happy ending more rewarding.
*****