The least disliked episode of DS9 - Season Four

[BlueStuff]

This is a game that we play every few years, and it's generally a lot of fun, providing a chance to mentally revisit those episodes you may not have thought about in a while. With that in mind, why not play again?

So, here's the game. The basic idea is your standard elimination game. I'll provide a list of the episodes for each season and you need to eliminate your least favorite or the one you deem the 'worst.' Please provide an EXPLANATION for why you are eliminating your choice and be sure to copy and paste the list with your choice removed. Finally, please leave at least 2 eliminations by other posters before you eliminate another episode.

No tactical voting! You cannot remove an episode just because you feel they would threaten your preferred episode's chance to win. Pretty simple. Enjoy!

Hall of Champions
2011 - In the Pale Moonlight
2013 - In the Pale Moonlight
2017 - Improbable Cause
2019 -

Season Four

The Way of the Warrior
The Visitor
Hippocratic Oath
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Little Green Men
The Sword of Kahless
Our Man Bashir
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Sons of Mogh
Bar Association
Accession
Rules of Engagement
Hard Time
Shattered Mirror
The Muse
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Sakonna]

I think this is the best season of any Star Trek show ever produced.

I'll start with eliminating "Sons Of Mogh", for it's very jarring ending. They needed to spend more time on that resolution in order to have it land correctly.

The Way of the Warrior
The Visitor
Hippocratic Oath
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Little Green Men
The Sword of Kahless
Our Man Bashir
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Bar Association
Accession
Rules of Engagement
Hard Time
Shattered Mirror
The Muse
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[BlueStuff]

The Muse is no more. In a great season like this, weird filler stands out like a sore thumb.

The Way of the Warrior
The Visitor
Hippocratic Oath
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Little Green Men
The Sword of Kahless
Our Man Bashir
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Bar Association
Accession
Rules of Engagement
Hard Time
Shattered Mirror
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Farscape One]

The Way of the Warrior
The Visitor
Hippocratic Oath
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Little Green Men
The Sword of Kahless
Our Man Bashir
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Bar Association
Accession
Rules of Engagement
Hard Time
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

This is a tough season to eliminate episodes. To me, this was the closest to a perfect season in the entire franchise... maybe of ALL the shows I have ever watched, which numbers in the hundreds. (The only other season of a show that comes this close to perfection is season 3 of FARSCAPE. But this is a STAR TREK thread, so I will not divert the topic.)

The ONLY misstep, for me, this season was "THE MUSE", and only the 'Creativity Vampire' part, which was a great idea, and perfectly cast, but just didn't work for some reason. I don't quite know why. But that has already been taken out, so I will pick... "SHATTERED MIRROR".

A fun episode, and some great Ben/Jake scenes as always, and my FAVORITE beauty shots of the Defiant circling around the station. James L. Conway knew how to get the best shots of her in the episodes he directed.

But ultimately, the weakest of the rest. But with a season this massively strong, it really isn't a failure of the episode.

 

[NovaStar]

Tough choice since most of these are really good episodes. I'm not sure if Season 4 really had any bad episodes at all. Honestly, I'll take out Our Man Bashir for being just a holosuite episode. Fun but weak compared to the rest.

The Way of the Warrior
The Visitor
Hippocratic Oath
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Little Green Men
The Sword of Kahless
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Bar Association
Accession
Rules of Engagement
Hard Time
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Seven of Five]

I'll eliminate The Sword of Kahless. Its fault in this awesome season, was that it was average. Well, Kor was brilliant.

The Way of the Warrior
The Visitor
Hippocratic Oath
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Little Green Men
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Bar Association
Accession
Rules of Engagement
Hard Time
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Sakonna]

I've always found "Little Green Men" overrated. I like it all right, but I never loved it the way many do. There is one thing I HATE about it, though, and that's the ending. They're escaping the past, and then -- hard cut back to Quark & Rom on the station.

THE LAST SCENE NEEDS TO BE QUARK AND ROM ACTUALLY DROPPING NOG OFF AT THE ACADEMY!

That's the setup of the episode! That's the emotional thruline we're on here! The Quark/Rom relationship is not the one that needs to be capped at the end of this story! I want to see the poignancy of Rom actually making the first-day-of-college drop off and Nog actually arriving at his dream school, which are such powerful life moments! It could have been so funny and so touching. What a missed opportunity.

The Way of the Warrior
The Visitor
Hippocratic Oath
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Bar Association
Accession
Rules of Engagement
Hard Time
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[BigDaveX]

Hippocratic Oath. The subplot with Worf is actually pretty decent, but the main plot with Bashir ends up going nowhere, and the wrap-up and resulting tension between him and O'Brien just seems to be swept under the rug.

The Way of the Warrior
The Visitor
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Bar Association
Accession
Rules of Engagement
Hard Time
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Farscape One]

The Way of the Warrior
The Visitor
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Bar Association
Accession
Hard Time
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

Eliminating "RULES OF ENGAGEMENT". Again, a good episode, and great touch gaving the actors talk directly to the camera, but a little less memorable than the rest here.

 

[Takeru]

The Visitor is out, I'll just quote myself from years ago:

I really didn't like that I watched a guest star taking over the role of Jake Sisko and most of the episode. I didn't like that Ben popped in and out of Jake's life and was just like "Oh, so you did this and that ... I love you, bye!" pretty much every time. Maybe I remember it wrong, but from Sisko's perspective no time passed between his appearances, so shouldn't he be a little bit more shocked that in a matter of hours Jake ages to an old man and he misses decades?

The entire episode was about Jake whining how he failed at saving his dad, illustrated by flashbacks featuring guest appearances by the main cast and then he presses a big, fat reset button and *poof*, all events that we saw just disappear from the timeline.

The episode is pointless, the emotional scenes are super annoying, it's unbelievably overrated.


The Way of the Warrior
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Bar Association
Accession
Hard Time
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Seven of Five]

So I'll vote for Bar Association, an episode that isn't as good as The Visitor. Not bad, but not great either.

The Way of the Warrior
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Crossfire
Return to Grace
Accession
Hard Time
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Bad Thoughts]

Well, it's now meaningless. Bye, all.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Eliminating Crossfire. All the bad episodes are out so next is the average boring ones.

The Way of the Warrior
Indiscretion
Rejoined
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Return to Grace
Accession
Hard Time
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Farscape One]

The Way of the Warrior
Indiscretion
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Return to Grace
Accession
Hard Time
For the Cause
To the Death
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

It's so hard to eliminate episodes of this season. I will take out "REJOINED" only because there really isn't any follow up to the creation of artificial wormholes idea. It would have made a nice thing to revisit during the Dominion War. (Which a couple books DID do.)

 

[BigDaveX]

To the Death. Did the important job of introducing Weyoun, and fleshed out the Jem'Hadar a little further, but it's hard to overlook the fact that it's 40 minutes of build-up, capped off with a short, anticlimactic battle sequence.

The Way of the Warrior
Indiscretion
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Return to Grace
Accession
Hard Time
For the Cause
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Sakonna]

@Takeru, I thought maybe this time we'd manage to race to the end of season 4 before you noticed...
(to be clear, not a complaint, despite "Visitor" being one of my top 5 Trek eps from all series -- after all, I'm the one who axed "Measure Of A Man" and I think some other sacred ep in the TNG rounds we just did...)

The Way of the Warrior
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Return to Grace
Accession
Hard Time
For the Cause
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

I will get rid of "Indiscretion." I do like that DS9 experiments with leaning into Dukat's good side mid-series (though I have really come around to thinking returning him to villainy at the end was EXACTLY the right move, though my initial response was "but what a waste of all his great character development", etc.)

But my complaint here is that this script has too many moments that lose sight of the fact that Dukat is Actual Hitler to Kira. It's fine for the show to entertain exploring his good side, but not Kira.

 

[Seven of Five]

I'll take off For the Cause now. There are better episodes left, and whilst it's decent enough, just not memorable.

The Way of the Warrior
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Return to Grace
Accession
Hard Time
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Armus]

So many good shows left from one of DS9's best seasons. I think I'll sit this one out.

 

[Starflight]

Going to go for Hard Time, but only because it's getting tougher to eliminate episodes.

The Way of the Warrior
Starship Down
Homefront
Paradise Lost
Return to Grace
Accession
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link

 

[Sakonna]

Well, I'm happy to ax more... I have work that needs to be procrastinated on!

I'll ax "Paradise Lost." I essentially like it, but it is the let-down Trek Part II for me (move over, BOBW!) The resolution of it all is just too easy.

The Way of the Warrior
Starship Down
Homefront
Return to Grace
Accession
The Quickening
Body Parts
Broken Link