Melora (*½)
What is love? Baby don't hurt me. Don't hurt me no more.
What is love? Is it a deep emotional connection? Is it something spiritual? Is it a biological force intended to facilitate procreation? Is it a reaction to seeing the biggest tits in the world?
What is love? I can't tell you because I don't know, the only emotion I can experience anymore is fanboy rage. But if I wasn't so unfeeling I'd probably tell you that love is the most complex and powerful of all emotions and it can impact our lives in major ways. So I find these romance-of-the-week episodes annoying, they come from nowhere and they go nowhere, at best they are a temporary infatuation. This episode is one of the worst offenders, Melora shows up on DS9, two days later she has dinner and 0.01G sex with Bashir, and suddenly the two of them are in love. I don't buy it, and for once it's not because I'm being cynical, it's because the episode is being cynical and I'm not standing for it. (Edit: Poor choice of words there.)
I suppose the main point of the episode is that disabled people don't want special treatment and that they don't need to be "fixed" to be normal, or something. I'm not going to quibble about that, the episode was written by a disabled guy (well, the first draft was) and I'm sure he knows what he's talking about. The thing is that for a character who doesn't want to be known as the woman in the wheelchair, that's what this episode is, it's about a woman in a wheelchair. She'll be forever remembered as that Star Trek character that was in a wheelchair. The only reason why I can remember her name is that it's also the title of the episode, and I remember the title of the episode because I'm a huge nerd. I suppose that if she had been a recurring character the gimmick would would have faded away and I would remember her as an actual character, like how I think of Geordi as Geordi and not as the blind guy.
There's a b-story about Quark and some guy that wants to murder him that doesn't really work, and it brought us this line from Odo:
ODO: I always say you can tell a man's intentions by the way he walks.
You've never said that before. You'll never say that again. I hate this sort of thing, it's almost as bad as Janeway's comm-badge fiddling.
Anyway, the b-story unnecessarily ties in with the a-story so that we can have some boring suspense, and Melora gets shot but doesn't die because of the magic spells Bashir has been experimenting with on her. I can't be the only one thinking that Dr Bashir has just come up with a technique to create superheroes. I mean, if a human underwent that procedure they'd get super-strength, and they could get shot at point-blank range and still survive. Starfleet should have used the procedure to create super-marines during the war, they would have had the Jem'hadar running in terror.
MELORA: I want to remember all of this.
I hope you do, because Bashir sure wont.
