Orgastic Bev Crusher vs Allamarain 3rd Shap

[Oddish]

None of those episodes were horrible to me. The "Of course not; it's just a game!" ending in Move Along Home was great, Masks and Spock's Brain were cheesy fun, Shades of Grey was just a clip show (something sitcom fans at the time were very used to), and Sub Rosa...came out when I was a teenage boy and thus able to appreciate Gates MacFadden's...performance.

None are likely even in my top 100 (150? 200?) Star trek episodes, but they're fine. I'd certainly watch any of them over Dear Doctor or Author Author or Code of Honor or Threshold or Profit & Lace or Homeward or...

Move Along Home: If this was DS9's worst "growing pains" episode, it held together pretty well.
Masks: This one was pretty good, I thought. Especially Brent Spiner getting to stretch.
Spock's Brain: Ok, pretty dumb. Plus the fact that unless there really was a Cerritos type ship following Kirk around and cleaning up his messes, the women on the planet would be dead for sure.
Shades of Gray: The clips were good. And the episode itself had its moments.
Dear Doctor: An effort to map out why Starfleet needed a prime directive, but miscalculated.
Author Author: Had its moments.
Threshold: Would still have been bad without the salamanders.
Code of Honor: Would still have been bad if the planet dwellers had been white.
Homeward: When not character assassinating Picard, this one's Ok.

I'll take any of the bunch over Half a Life.

 

[Ragitsu]

Paradise

Ah, yes...the autocratic Luddite. That episode has a horrid ending.

I'll take any of the bunch over Half a Life.

I'll bite: what's your bugaboo?

 

[Oddish]

The Nazi holocaust did not begin with Jews, gays, or Romani. It began with the termination of "defectives", people whose physical or mental condition made them a burden to society. A society that involuntary euthanizes its elderly (and despite being self-inflicted, this WAS an involuntary action), its "obsoletes", travels the same despicable road. And it sickens and saddens me that any Trek, especially my favorite series, chose to condone this.

 

[Ragitsu]

That wouldn't be the first or last time extreme cultural practices - extreme relative to twentieth/twenty-first century United States culture in general, anyhow - are viewed both positively and negatively within the same episode: in Ethics, Riker is vehemently opposed to Worf's ritualized suicide whereas Picard is basically the Klingon's advocate on the sly.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

why didn't they tell Quark no one was in danger when he was almost shitting his pants halfway through the game?

They wanted to watch him squirm after he'd (if I remember right) tried to swindle them.

SR is not my favorite episode. Too soapy for my taste. But I certainly don't hate it. I don't even loathe it, the way I loathe the gratuitous invocations of the "eye-scream" trope in DSC and PIC.

I still recall something Gates said about SR, when lecturing at a convention. Something to the general effect that she'd have at least slipped on a pair of thongs before running out into the middle of the forest, in the middle of the night.

 

[Oddish]

That wouldn't be the first or last time extreme cultural practices - extreme relative to twentieth/twenty-first century United States culture in general, anyhow - are viewed both positively and negatively within the same episode: in Ethics, Riker is vehemently opposed to Worf's ritualized suicide whereas Picard is basically the Klingon's advocate on the sly.

No one was pressuring Worf to take his own life, though. Lwaxana's new boyfriend (name escapes me, and no intention of rewatching the episode) was pressured so hard, he felt that he had to request asylum to stay alive.

 

[at Quark's]

Never understood the hate for Move Along Home.

It may not be a top tier episode, but it's no horse crap either. There are far worse and more offensive episodes both within DS9 and in other Star Trek series. It's merely a bit silly perhaps. And I also like that here, we se the first shimmering of a conscience in Quark.

I like "Move Along Home" more as an additional introduction to Gamma Quadrant technology early in the series. If some species' games were this advanced, what was the rest of their technology like? Tosk and his hunters had already made an impressive splash, and this added to it nicely to eventually show what a formidable force the Dominion had to be. "Sub Rosa," on the other hand, was just a bad romance novel with Trek characters.

I never took it as being so much more advanced, just being very different from known AQ technology. Had it been truly more advanced, the Federation wouldn't have been able to level up so easily during the Dominion War (from a few Jem' Hadar fighters destroying the Odyssey to the Defiant going through those fighters like a knife through hot butter in the late stages of the war, and the Dominion only still seemed superior because of superior ship building capacity and their Jem' Hadar cloning facilities).

 

[Lynx]

I don't hate either episode as much as some people but if I had to pick I'd watch Sub Rosa again, it had a nice, creepy atmosphere. Move Along Home's "it was all just a dream game" ending was a bit silly, why didn't they tell Quark no one was in danger when he was almost shitting his pants halfway through the game?

Because the whole thing with this game was to punish Quark for trying to cheat them.

As for Move Along Home or Sub Rosa, I find Move Along Home much better. In fact it's one of my favorites among the DS9 episodes. A bit spooky and exciting actually.

But Sub Rosa isn't that bad. In fact, there were TNG episodes which was much worse, like Shades Of Gray, Half A Life, Sarek and Lessons which are episodes I mostly avoid when I do a TNG rewatch.

 

[at Quark's]

The scheme of punishing Quark with that game only works if Quark isn't ruthless. What if he had shrugged his shoulders, laughed and said: 'who cares about their lives, I just want those gems!'

Which means that if this was actually the Wadi's intent, they must have read Quark a lot better than he read them - they only just met him, after all, so they couldn't have known his character.

 

[Arpy]

The Nazi holocaust did not begin with Jews, gays, or Romani. It began with the termination of "defectives", people whose physical or mental condition made them a burden to society. A society that involuntary euthanizes its elderly (and despite being self-inflicted, this WAS an involuntary action), its "obsoletes", travels the same despicable road. And it sickens and saddens me that any Trek, especially my favorite series, chose to condone this.

I don’t remember them condoning it. It was just a bad situation they couldn’t do anything about. You’re supposed to be upset by it.

 

[Oddish]

A guy who was healthy, productive, and could have had many more years left basically is forced to commit suicide because his daughter wants his corpse to rot in a certain spot. And we're supposed to be OK with this because it's their culture. No. I'm not Ok with it. And I hope I never am.

 

[Arpy]

They weren’t part of the Federation. And Timicin was given asylum by Picard to continue his work and save his planet.

But his world wasn’t having it. And his heart wasn’t in being a progressive trailblazer.

What was the Federation to do — invade his planet?

Again, as the viewer you’re supposed to “never be okay with it” and hope that one day they will learn the err of their ways. In the meantime, Lwaxana had to be brave and send him off.

it was just a bad situation. Things things happen in life that we are powerless to do anything about. The challenge is what we realistically do or don’t do about it. Lwaxana was as brave as could be in my humble opinion.

 

[Oddish]

I didn't say anyone on the Enterprise did anything wrong. I'm just saying I hate that @$#*!-ing episode.

 

[CRM-114]

"Move Along Home" really isn't that bad; the problem is that it didn't really fit the tone DS9 was already establishing for itself. It felt like it could've been a TOS episode with little rewriting.