DS9 Stories/News: Learning to Love Star Trek, Part 48: “The Passenger”

Source: http://scifiblock.com/features/blog/learning-to-love-star-trek-part-48-the-passenger.htm

By Robert Ring, Mon, 01/31/2011 – 18:04

“Learning to Love Star Trek” is a weekly blog series by Sci-Fi Block Editor in Chief Robert Ring, begun January 1, 2010. In this series of blog posts, Robert is endeavoring to determine whether he can make a Star Trek fan out of himself through an exposure to a combination of episodes from Star Trek the Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation (Update: TNG has now been replaced with Deep Space Nine). Click here to read his introduction to the experiment.

It’s been a long time, but I’m back with a little more Star Trek under my belt, so let’s pick up where we left off two months ago. For this LTLST entry, I watched Deep Space Nine’s “The Passenger.” I found this one to be not a great episode but a good one. It moves away from the Next Generation-fan-pandering of recent previous episodes like “Q-Less” and “Captive Pursuit” and goes back to how this particular Star Trek series started — confronting relevant hypothetical scenarios. Works for me.

In this one, a Kobliad named Ty Kajada shows up near Deep Space Nine with her ship essentially falling apart, as her prisoner, a Kobliad by the name of Rao Vantika, started a fire on the ship in order to escape. Vantika seemingly dies in the fire, but Kajada is not convinced of his death.

It is pretty clear after the first few minutes of the episode that we’re not going to learn, “Oh, he really was dead after all. Case closed,” because this is Star Trek, and how boring would that be? Instead, we’re left pondering for a while, If Vantika is truly clinically dead, and if all tests reveal the dead body definitively to be that of Vantika’s, and if all scans of Kajada’s ship turn up no signs of life, then how could Vantika possibly still be alive? One of the episode’s merits in this regard is Kajada’s persistence as to the likelihood of Vantika still being alive, knowing that he has become a master of faking his death. In most situations, such a character either would say, “Yeah, I guess he must really be dead this time,” or would have some kind of theory about how he is still alive, but Kajada demonstrates that she’s smart enough to realize she doesn’t have all the answers. She just knows the history of her subject and, based on that knowledge, admits to herself that there is probably more going on than she would understand. She would make a horrible politician.

Of course, the key element of this episode is the answer to how Vantika has kept himself alive — by transferring his consciousness into another body, namely that of Bashir. This brings rise to that classic question of what makes us who we are. If it is truly only one’s psychological and moral traits that defines them as a person, then we have to deem Vantika as being fully himself when he is in control of what we understand to be Bashir’s body. But does a copy of one’s consciousness constitute the same person as the original consciousness? If we maintain that a copy is only a copy — a duplicate of the original but not the original — then we also have to believe that one’s physical makeup does in fact influence who they are. For the purposes of their investigation, Kajada, Sisko, etc., do treat the copy as the true Vantika, but there is plenty of room left for speculation as they never really approach the matter philosophically, only practically.

One thing that very, very, very (very) slightly irked me in this episode is the ending, in which they capture Vantika’s conscious into an electronic device and hand it over to Kajada, who immediately vaporizes it. I thought it would have been much more interesting if she had held onto the device, especially given that earlier in the episode someone had mentioned that Vantika and Kajada, due to their endless rivalry, were essentially as close as any two lovers. How crazy would it be to know that you had your worst enemy’s living conscious trapped inside a device in your pocket, or on your desk, day in and day out? Plus, I would have liked to see if, years later, the DS9 writers could come up with a way for Vantika to beat that “death,” somehow resurrecting himself out of the device. The ending is not bad as it is, but I think it could have been opened to some cool possibilities down the line.

Regardless of my preference as to how it could have ended, this is not a bad episode at all. The characters and their dilemma are interesting, and there are some intriguing philosophical matters at play. I haven’t cared for the past several episodes of this series, but I have a feeling this is the beginning of it picking up again. Tell me if I’m wrong.

Observations:

1. Alexander Siddig (Bashir) plays a horrible villain.
2. Kobliads are ugly.

Next week: DS9 – “Move Along Home”

DS9 Stories/News: Learning to Love Star Trek, Part 45: “Q-Less”

Source: http://scifiblock.com/features/blog/learning-to-love-star-trek-part-45-q-less.htm

By Robert Ring, Mon, 11/15/2010 – 20:43

“Learning to Love Star Trek” is a weekly blog series by Sci-Fi Block Editor in Chief Robert Ring, begun January 1, 2010. In this series of blog posts, Robert is endeavoring to determine whether he can make a Star Trek fan out of himself through an exposure to a combination of episodes from Star Trek the Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation (Update: TNG has now been replaced with Deep Space Nine). Click here to read his introduction to the experiment.

Coming off two disappointing episodes, I sat down to watch “Q-Less” this week, and I have to say I view it as another disappointment. This episode is slightly famous simply for having Q in it, but I find the story to be scattered and pointless. When it ended, I caught myself wondering what had just happened.

The archeologist Vash shows up on Deep Space Nine after a two-year stint acquiring artifacts from the Gamma Quadrant. One of these artifacts is a mysterious and very valuable crystal, which, unbeknownst to everyone, begins draining the station’s power. Also unbeknownst to everyone (except Vash), Q has followed Vash back to the station, as he seems to be in love with her — or something like love, at least. Vash finds him annoying, though (don’t we all?), and will have nothing to do with him. Eventually these elements lead to Vash and Quark auctioning off her artifacts, and Q playing his trademark pranks on the crew of DS9 while the increasingly powerless station drifts toward the wormhole.

An invaluable energy-sucking crystal, or a beehive from the year 5000?

I hardly know what to say about this one. There’s almost nothing interesting or dramatic about it whatsoever. We know the station isn’t going to be swallowed by the wormhole, so we just watch the crew run around nearly mindless trying to figure out what to do. Q presents something of a dilemma, but he hardly does anything other than pester Vash and force Sisko to box him. Usually you at least have the question of, “How do we keep this omnipotent being from causing us problems?” but the problems here are minor, so if we just go along with it, we come out okay. As far as the “Deep Space Nine might be destroyed!” plot, we can’t find excitement in trying to figure what the characters should do because it’s all crew members trying to do things that we can hardly even understand, and we know it’s going to turn out alright anyway. It’s pretty much wasted time.

Incidentally, there are two things I find interesting in this episode. Both are small. I like how when Odo tries proving to Quark how little he cares for material items, Odo is caught off-guard by Quark asking him how he would like a latiunum-plated bucket to sleep in. It is as if the writers are saying, “Yes, Quark’s extreme materialism may not be healthy, but we all value material items to some extent. ” Second, Q’s explanation as to why he is so infatuated with Vash is thought-provoking. You’d think a godlike entity would have little need for a human companion, but through her, he explains, he is able to experience feelings like wonder — things he can’t experience himself as an all-knowing being. I had to stop and give some thought to the concept of an omnipotent being lacking the ability to understand something that is uniquely human (or, in the terms of a world populated with hundreds of intelligent species, uniquely mortal).

Unfortunately, for the other forty-four minutes of the episode (commercial-less), I’m left with one question: What’s the point? Some bad stuff happens, they figure out what the problem is at the last second, and everybody comes out safely. Q isn’t the only similarity this episode shares with what I’ve seen of The Next Generation.