Misdirected Mark Forums

Everyone is talking about not being happy about living on the station. It’s tricky to make meta-commentaries like how bad a place, because that might lodge in the viewers consciousness. That puts a lot of burdon on the people to be the draw for the show.

Gamma Quadrant traffic picked up QUICK from episode one. It makes me wonder how much time elapsed between the two episodes.

Dax’s transition in the modern parlance takes on a lot more meaning. The distance from any relationship is something that is going to be an interesting thing to watch develop. Julian is so much of a nuisance to her at this point. Just when did Sisko and Curzon meet up with those twins? Sisko met Jennifer almost right out of Starfleet Academy.

Odo’s comment about not “coupling” is really interesting in light of what we learn about his species later.

It’s really interesting the direction they let Jake develop, versus Wesley. Wesley had to live in the adults’ world right from the start, while Jake got to be more of a young man dealing the problems of a child his age moving to a new home.

The “frenimies” vibe between Odo and Quark started quicker than I remembered. In my mind I was thinking that they were 100% adversarial longer, but the shift back and forth between having a “friendly” talk and being at odds started a lot faster than I remembered. Quark even defends Odo’s reputation.

I selected this episode because it does a better introduction of Nog.

Nog is going to be a really important DS9 minor character and has one of the best story arcs. So I wanted to make sure you get to see him from the start.

This episode does a bunch to show that DS9 is not the Enterprise. I think that compared to the idyllic Enterprise, DS9 is a pretty rough place. The writers were still trying to establish that Frontier setting and they used a lot of Western tropes in this episode to make that point.

The mystery is a pretty ok science problem for Julian and Dax to work on.

I watched DS9 in first run. When I rewatched DS9 a few years ago, it was surprising to see how much this episode stuck in my head over 25 years. The murder mystery is so much fun and has a wonderful Trek solution. We start to see Bashir's brilliance, even though he's absolutely annoying in the opening of the episode.

The friction between the O'Briens is an interesting evolution of Star Trek relationship portrayals. Things were never outright contentious between people on the Enterprise. We're seeing quickly that the DS9 writers aren't writing with rose-tinted glasses the way previous shows were.