As Worf arrives on temporary assignment to Deep Space Nine, the Klingons and the Federation come into conflict over the Dominion menace. Plot Summary: General Martok arrives with a fleet of Klingon ships, causing chaos for Starfleet and for DS9 as the Klingons cause trouble on the Promenade, particularly Martok’s son Drex, who violently attacks [...] More...
This is Deep Space Nine: The Motion Picture. Worf kind of sums up the podcast for the last 3 seasons. He misses the Enterprise. Those were good years... and this station is kind of boring. So based on faulty intelligence, the Klingons launch a full out invasion of Cardassia. Their pretense is that the Cardassian government has been taken over by The Founders but even after that is proved false, Gowron says it doesn’t matter and that the Alpha Quadrant is better off with the them in charge of Cardassia. So it appears Worf is right. Ever since Khitomoer and Narenda 3, the Klingon Empire has been at peace. An fear of the Dominion and the destruction of the Obsidian Order they smell blood in the water. This is a major shift from the Romulan-Conspiring back room dealing politically motivated opportunists who use accounting loopholes to get their way, to full fledged battle-raged soldiers that want to fight and are not really picky about their targets. These are the Original Series Klingons. This is back to officers who screw up get killed like when Kruge vaporized his weapons officer in Star Trek 3 for accidentally destroying the Grissom. The buildup to the invasion is very well done. Worf’s investigation leading to a very poignant scene with Odo about walking the line between duty to Starfleet and loyalty to your own people. The crew knows that the Klingons aren’t going to stop with Cardassia. That if they conquer Cardassia they will have a staging ground to attack Bajor and secure the wormhole from the Dominion. Celestial Temple or no, there have got to be people at Starfleet Command who know that this stupid wormhole is far more trouble than its worth. Collapse it and be done with it. The dilemma about what to do plays out wonderfully, slipping the information into Garak’s ear under false pretenses is yet another great example of Sisko using Garak. I love how Dukat flip flopped to the winning side. The Cardassian dissidents first mentioned way back in Profit and Loss and Second Skin have finally managed to overthrow the Central Command and install a pseudo-democratic civilian government on Cardassia Prime. And Dukat, being the survivor he is, becomes Chief Military Advisor to that government pledging to serve the ruling body of the Empire “whoever that may be.” Worf’s longing for the ‘good years’ aboard the Enterprise hits home with me too. This episode aired a year and a half after TNG ended. Generations had come and petered out and First Contact was on the horizon. Worf even made clear that the Enterprise-E would not be the same. And it’s nice to know even O’Brien thought the holodecks were death traps. The battle with the Defiant, the Klingons and the Cardassian ship is great. I loved how Sisko put Worf at the engineering station. In the novelization (yes I own the novelization.), SIsko put him there so that Worf wouldn’t be forced to fire on a Klingon ship, but the instant the redshirt goes down, Worf makes a beeline for the tactical station. For seven years Worf stood at tactical and constantly offered Picard advice that was shot down. “recommend we raise shields.” “No, Mister Worf, let’s see what they do to us first.” In this episode Worf takes over the weapons and tells SIsko that the restraint they are showing by only firing to disable the Klingon ships isn’t working. SIsko tells him to fire at his discretion and Worf proceeds to vaporize a bird of prey in one shot. A scene that was thrown together at the last minute because the episode was running short was the conversation between Garak and Quark about how the Federation really is vile to them, but after getting used to it, how they have learned to like it and in the end are relying on it for their very survival. And yes root beer is vile. The station battle holds a special place in my nerd heart. I was 14 when this episode premiered. When the station opened up with their new torpedoes and phasers I was in geek heaven. The hand to hand combat was even pretty good, everybody got their hats handed to them. Kira stabbed, O’Brien knocked on his face, bunch of no-names killed. Only Sisko, Dax and Worf managed to survive the assault. But Sisko’s speech about fighting each other was only helping the Dominion only rang true to Gowron after the battle had stalemated? I suppose he thought he had the upper hand when Martok told him that Sisko was bluffing about the new weapons, a nice throw back to the series premiere when Kira WAS in fact using thoron fields and duranium shadows to fake the appearance of a massive weapons array. In the end the Klingons aren’t going anywhere. They are digging in and fortifying their holdings within the Cardassian Union and are in fact here to stay. Some quick thoughts: -Hail Martok, Leader of Destiny -In best Comic Book Guy Voice: Worf states that he has never served aboard a Federation starship with a cloaking device. Perhaps he’s forgotten TNG Episode 163 “The Pegasus” in which the Enterprise used a phase-cloaking device to escape an asteroid. -And its nice to know we can just ignore agreements with Romulus about using the cloak as long as they don’t find out about it. -Apparently Dax has been promoted to Lieutenant Commander. I guess if anyone deserves a promotion its someone who can abandon their post and run of with some old Klingons and murder an albino. -Strategic Operations Officer? Really? Is this the Starfleet version of Assistant to the Regional Manager. Just call him what he becomes: Captain of the Defiant. -O’Brien’s bootlicking is on full display at the end of this episode. In The Wounded he told Picard that between Picard and Maxwell he’d served with the two best captains in Starfleet. In the Adversary he toasted Sisko the “newest and best captain in Starfleet.” When Worf shows up in his red command uniform and says he has much to learn about command, O’Brien tells him he couldn’t ask for a better teacher. There you have it. One of the greatest episodes of Star Trek of all time. Now I’ll sit back and have my heart broken by hearing how you hated it.