I remember watching
Captive Pursuit when it first aired here and thinking that the uniforms were tacky, but I was also kind of excited to see the uniforms because I imaged we'd be seeing more of these aliens in the future. I guess it wasn't to be.
Q-Less (*)
Some of you may remember that I made
this video about Q during the dying days of my Voyager review thread, which has recently become a popular hang-out spot for bronies. The point I was trying to make with the video was that Q was at his best when he was using his powers to teach Picard an important lesson, and that Q's arc on Voyager was so poor because those episodes had Q learning important lessons from Janeway. It turns out that there's one thing worse than the way Voyager used Q and that is the way that DS9 used Q. He spends most of the episode hounding Vash for some inexplicable reason, and when he's not doing that he's shooting the breeze and pestering people. He's just there, he barely does anything. I guess you could say that I'm Q-less as to why Q is in this episode.
(Tee hee, I'm so witty.
)
This episode loses a point for being TNG-lite. Not because it has the structure of a TNG episode, or because they didn't use some unique aspect of the show, but because this pretty much is a TNG episode. The two central characters in this one are Vash and Q, both of whom are TNG characters that never show their face on DS9 again, praise be to Zeus. DS9's characters feel like they've been relegated to a side plot, and a boring one at that, about technobabble. The weird thing is that the episode is self aware enough to reference the use of technobabble but not enough to realise how dramatically uninteresting it all is. In the end, Jadzia uses <tech> to find the cause of the <tech> which is revealed to be <tech> that turns into a glowing manta ray. I wish I was joking, but no, that's the plot.
The episode has two good scenes. The most obvious is the "
I'm not Picard" scene, which is the only time when the "real" Sisko is apparent in this episode, the rest of the time he acts like a bored Avery Brooks. The other one is at the very beginning of the episode when Julian is hitting on the Bajoran woman at the replimat with his heroic story about his Starfleet medical exam. By itself, this scene would be obnoxious, what makes it memorable is O'Brien sitting in the background rolling his eyes at just how insufferable Bashir is being.
Sykonee's Counter: 8 (Q and Vash)
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