Show: Star Trek; Deep Space Nine
Episode
Particulars: S2EP17, “Playing God”
Standalone
Thoughts: Literally a day after mentioning that Dax hasn’t gotten any proper
character development, I get a Dax episode, one she actively gets to
participate in. This isn’t the first time I’ve had something similar happen
during this project, either. Maybe I subconsciously remember more about the
show than I thought.
Anyway, I wish I could say that this episode finally
starts to flesh Dax out, but…while she’s finally getting a clear personality,
the more we learn about her, the more she feels like a Mary Sue. I know this
word gets thrown around a lot in fandom, but just look at the evidence;
~Gained four science degrees before she even was joined
to a Trill, and before she turned 30.
~She’s one of only a select few who even managed to get
joined to a symbiont at all.
~Constantly beats the Ferengi at the game of Tongo, a
Ferengi game that most non-Ferengi don’t know how to play.
~Has two major characters in love with her.
~Is friends with the commander of the station, and plays
chess with him in his ready room.
~Has a hobby of collecting music by obscure or forgotten
composers, to the point where she taught a Klingon a Klingon song he’d never
heard before.
~Was really shy but also really smart, going through the
Trill joining program with no problems…until Curzon suggested she be kicked out
of the program. Then she suddenly “found her voice” and reapplied, going
through the program again and eventually becoming eligible for joining,
eventually requesting (and receiving) the symbiont of the very person who
rejected her.
All she needs is to be related to one of the main
characters and that’s basically Mary-Sue bingo.
The end result of all this is that it’s hard to get as
invested in her, because unlike the others, she doesn’t seem very flawed. Sure,
some of her attempts to fix problems on the station don’t work, but she doesn’t
have Kira’s temper, or Bashir’s awkwardness, or any other problem that might
interfere with her job or her relationships with other people. She seems to get
along with pretty much everybody, and she matches O’Brien in the “technobabble
solution” department. Thus, she winds up being very bland.
To be fair to the episode, it does try to give Dax some
depth. It suggests that she hates what happened to her during her testing phase
and that she doesn’t want to be the same strict person Curzon was. There’s also
a moment near the very end where she says that it can be difficult to be a
joined Trill with all the memories of past lives floating around and
influencing you. All of this could work
in making her more well-rounded—after all, the episode takes great pains to
point out that Jadzia is only a little older than Arjin—but it comes across
more as Dax telling a story from her past, instead of something she’s still
struggling with. And the funny thing is, the past she describes sounds a lot
like the Dax we saw in Season One, who ate alone a lot and told Bashir that
joined Trill try not to get involved in romantic entanglements. Somewhere along
the line, the writers/Terry Farrell decided to make her more extroverted and
playful, and while that gave her more to work with, it doesn’t wholly feel like
a natural progression from Point A to Point B. You can argue that she was still
feeling out who she was now that the symbiont was inside her, and once she
settled in to that and her role in the station, she started to open up, but we
never actually saw that; we just kind
of got snippets here and there. There’s a chance these new insights will allow
us to see more of that sort of progression, but based on my memories of the
show, I have my doubts. As always, though, I’ll try to keep an open mind.
Trying to focus on the rest of the episode isn’t much
better. Blake is trying to play Arjin as insecure and trying to suck up to Dax
to get a good recommendation, but instead he comes across as really wooden and
more than a little whiny. I can handle the whiny—it kind of fits with the
character—but the wooden part’s a little harder to forgive. Oh, and he also has some Mary-Sue (or Gary-Stu)
traits, like being an amazing pilot and a semi-tragic backstory. Just what this
episode needed.
And then we get to the conflict. First of all, the entire
concept of the proto-universe makes no sense. I know very little about physics
or space, but it just doesn’t seem like such a thing could even exist. How did
it even start forming, anyway? It’s not clear what Dax and Arjin ran into, so
how this thing came to be is never explained. Secondly, the conflict about
whether or not to destroy it just felt like drama for drama’s sake. I get the
conflict they were going for, but because we have no proof that the life in the
proto-universe is sentient, it just doesn’t feel like a big moral dilemma to
me. I’d rather destroy it than risk losing my life and everything I care about,
and I don’t think I’d lose that much sleep over it. Maybe that says bad things
about me, but as presented in this episode, it’s an easy choice to make, even
though the showrunners try very hard to make it difficult.
SMALL SPOILER
ALERT. Finally, there’s the resolution to the conflict. Dax and Arjin fly
the proto-universe back through the wormhole and…what? Just let it go? Where?
How do you know it’s not going to cause the same problems over there and take
out the entire Gamma Quadrant? But apparently that’s not our problem anymore,
so let’s get to the happy ending. No, episode, I won’t accept that. You can’t
just play catch-and-release with an entire universe. At least give me some
technobabble to explain why this isn’t going to come back and bite the crew in the
butt later.
END SPOILERS. I’ll
concede that this episode is watchable, and more low-level annoying than my two
page rant would suggest. But the supposed conflict, combined with lackluster
character development for Dax, just leads to a lot of frustration on my end. At
least it gave me more material to work with; I was a little worried my reviews
were heading in a shorter, curter direction.
How it Relates to
the Whole: Some of the things we hear about Trills makes things we learn
later that much more interesting, though since I learned in the DS9 Companion that they were flying by
the seat of their pants, I don’t think I can give them too much credit for
laying any groundwork. Other than that, I don’t think either Arjin or the
mini-universe ever returns, and while the vole problem isn’t solved at the end
of the episode, I’m not sure if that ever gets any real follow-up either
(though I feel like it should; there’s a comedic Chekov’s gun just waiting to
go off). So while the episode did at least offer up some character development
for Dax, it also doesn’t contribute that much
to the overarching plot.
Other: *Only
one thing of note today that I didn’t already cover. I’m a little baffled by
Arjin’s accent at the start of the episode. While he eventually slides into a
semi-whiny American register, there are moments in the opening scene where he
has traces of a British accent, or at least something European. I have no idea
if I was just hearing things, or if Blake was unconsciously parroting back Siddig’s
cadences. Either way, it left a weird first impression, and one that didn’t
really improve as the episode went on.
Best
Line/Exchange: Once again, I wind up going for the comedic more than the
serious. This time, at least, there’s an underlying darkness;
(O’Brien has
contacted the Cardassians to ask for help with their vole problem)
Cardassian (Richard
Poe): Oh, they are a nuisance, aren’t
they?
O’Brien: I was
hoping you’d found a way to deal with them.
Cardassian: Federation
technology isn’t up for the task, eh?
O’Brien: Look, I
just thought in the interests of good relations, you might…
Cardassian: You
got the station, you’ve got the voles. By the way, their mating season begins
in about six weeks.
O’Brien (sarcastically):
Thanks for your help.
Cardassian: Mmm.
The Federation could always withdraw from Ba…
(O’Brien terminates
the conversation just as Dax walks up and hands him a box.)
O’Brien: What’s
this?
Dax: Got me, it’s
from Julian. He called it “the solution you’ve been looking for.”
(O’Brien opens the
box and reads the note inside)
O’Brien: “It
worked in Hamelin.” (He pulls a flute out
of the box) Very funny.
First off, we get a bit of sass from Bashir, and that
amuses me. More importantly, though, the exchange between O’Brien and the
Cardassian shows that despite the various peace treaties, that doesn’t mean
that the Federation and the Cardassians are friends. The Cardassians (or at
least this Cardassian) are bitter
about the whole thing, and looking for any opportunity to take the Federation
down a peg, be it by insulting their technology, not offering help, and doing
everything they can to get the Federation out of Bajor. So while the exchange
itself is funny (and Poe’s line deliveries aid and abet that), you can read
more serious meaning into it, which is definitely pretty cool.
After the Fact
Update: While the DS9 Companion offers
no explanations, technobabble or otherwise, as to how that proto-universe
works, at least some of the writers recognize that they didn’t do as good a job
with it as they could have. Writer Jim Trombetta “says he can understand if
people didn’t feel the ethical problem on an emotional level” and Ira Steven
Behr says it was “a very difficult show”. I take comfort in knowing I’m not
alone in having issues with this, and that the writers are aware of their
limitations.
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