Hello fellow TV-lovers!! It's been a while since Jason and I have done a blog post, but worry not, we've been watching plenty of TV ;)
To motivate us to get our blogging butts in gear, our fabulous friend Andrew suggested the three of us recap an episode together, and so we did! Here we go...
“The Ship”
DS9 Season 5 Episode 2
H: Sisko, O’Brien, Dax, and Worf, along with some other officers, are on a planet conducting a survey mission. Episode opens with O’Brien talking to crewman Enrique Muniz - they seem to be friendly and have a nice work comradery. Obviously this is bad news for Muniz, as anytime you have a random character with a speaking part there’s a good chance their days are numbered.
Extras with speaking roles are the new red shirt.
J: Jadzia and Worf conclude that the planet would be a great place to set up a mining operation, despite its proximity to Dominion Space, when suddenly their runabout (the Defiant is back at the station) picks up a Dominion ship coming in hot. It crashes on the ship, and the runabout reports that it’s still intact. So Sisko and company set off to check it out. Because, you know, they can totally handle it.
H: Everyone goes to check out the ship and it’s hella spooky. All the Jem’Hadar have died because all their bones shattered. Whoa. The ship would obviously be an intelligence gold mine, so Sisko wants to get it back to the Federation. It’s too big for the runabout to tow, so they’ve got to get it in working order, i.e. time for the Chief to kick some ass!
J: The chief is hard at work when the runabout calls them again. While speaking to Sisko, O’Brien mentions how he cannot make heads or tales of the ship, e.g. he cannot tell if the ship has a warp drive. Surprise, surprise, there is another Jem’Hadar warship in route. It blows the runabout away, and then Jem’Hadar beam down and start assaulting the away team, trying to retake their crashed ship. One redshirt wearing a blue shirt gets killed, and Muniz takes a nasty hit to the abdomen. The away team ducks inside the crashed ship and takes cover, and the Jem’Hadar do not follow.
RIP Benzite lady
H: O’Brien fixes Muniz up and reassures him that everything will be okay, even though the Defiant won’t arrive for another two and a half days. Meanwhile, a Vorta contacts them and Sisko heads off the ship to meet with her. The Vorta wants her ship back, but Sisko says by the old Earth tradition of “salvage rights” that the ship belongs to them.
Finders keepers, bitch.
A: The Vorta offers our heroes a ride to DS9 as they do not recognize this tradition. It’s a TRAP!
H: While they are meeting, a lone Jem’Hadar transports onto the ship. Dax and O’Brien end up getting attacked by him, and it’s not looking good, until Muniz stumbles in, shoots the Jem’Hadar, and saves the day.
A: Everyone discusses why O'Brien and Dax are still alive as the Jem’Hadar did not have a rifle just a knife. They realize that something on the ship is too important and they have to find it. They begin by making a blueprint of the ship.
J: The effort of saving everyone’s bacon has Muniz feeling quite out of it, but he keeps the mood light with some unoriginal humor about O’Brian being a lousy nurse with a grating bedside manner. It seems that Jem’Hadar weapons have an anti-coagulant effect, so Muniz is going to keep declining until they find him some medical facilities. So, there’s nothing to do but try their best to get the ship working before Muniz dies, and before the Jem’Hadar finally decide it’s no longer in their interest to keep waiting.
If he doesn’t die soon, his jokes will kill everyone else.
A: The tension in the ship is starting to rise as O’Brien and Worf have a culture clash with respect to treating the wounded. Luckily we have Dax to help by whisking Worf away and explaining the merits of diplomacy to him.
H: I’m definitely feeling the Jadzia/Worf vibes here. Makes sense cause they get together in the next episode. Jadzia and Worf forever! <3
A: Our weekly Vorta apologizes for the deception and offers another meeting. She recognizes Sisko’s needs to protect his people, and states she is just protecting the Dominion’s… property.
H: It’s obvious that the Vorta doesn’t care about the ship, but just wants whatever is on it. Sisko doesn’t trust her to come on the ship without any shenanigans, and the Vorta doesn’t trust Sisko to bring out the mysterious item unharmed. At an impasse, the negotiations end and the Vorta start to bomb the area, intentionally missing the ship so as to protect the “item”.
J: The siege starts to wear on them all. O’Brien manages to get one of the ship’s weapons working, but they can’t aim it. Jadzia finds some data crystals that may have information on the ‘item’ that the Vorta wants, but they seem to be blank. Worf finds a Vorta’s computer terminal, but he rips it off the wall and Jadzia makes fun of him. Everyone is at their wits end, and when Worf suggests euthanizing Muniz, O’Brien loses it and tries to sock him in the fu manchu.
A: Worf, in non-typical fashion, does not get knocked on his ass. He easily takes care of O’Brien’s haymaker and puts him into a headlock.
J: Sisko does what Sisko does best and gets everyone to shut up, and rallies them around their duty.
H: By the next morning, the Chief has fixed up the ship enough to try for a take off. Everyone braces
A: Luckily all of our heros are now well versed in Jem’Hadar technology, symbology, writing, and lines as all of them are able to operate the ship with proficiency.
H: They also manage to do this with all the consoles upside-down.
A: It’s a broken ship, so their efforts are for naught.
H: In the excitement of trying to get the ship off the ground, Muniz dies :(
Everyone is looking down in sadness when they notice something dripping from the ceiling...turns out it’s a Founder! That’s what the Vorta wanted so badly, and why they wouldn’t directly attack the ship. The Founder is sick and dies almost immediately, turning into a big ol’ pile of ash.
A: I know the Founders are really good at avoiding scans, Odo as a guinea pig in one episode highlights this, but this one is seriously injured and yet it hides perfectly from scans.
There are mornings where this is how I feel too.
J: Immediately after the changeling dies, the Vorta beams aboard, alone and unarmed. She explains that all she wanted was to save the founder, and now that it is dead, her Jem’Hadar have committed ritual suicide. It’s a tragic end to a grueling conflict. Sisko and the Vorta together commiserate the fact that they couldn’t bring themselves to trust each other earlier, in which case many lives could have been spared. However, the Federation and the Dominion are at war, and war means killing the enemy and sacrificing your own. Later on, in the mess hall, Sisko admits that if he had to, he would have made all the same choices all over again. Yet the weight of the lives lost weighs heavy over him throughout the episode.
H: I get that this episode is about the challenge of trusting your adversaries, and how this can make diplomacy difficult, especially in wartime. A valid point, but overall this episode wasn’t a favorite. There were a lot of random aspects that had no real relevance to the story (how/why all the Jem’Hadar on the ship died in the first place, the scanning device, Worf finding the computer console, etc) and I felt that diluted the story too much.
A: This episode has its ups and downs. The major downside is that I liked it a lot more the last time I watched it. But now not so much, and it turns out Jason and Hannah don’t like it that much either. And it was my suggestion to watch for our first joint watch & blog. Sorry, Hannah and Jason. So, I still like it for some reasons and dislike it for other reasons.
I still like it for two reasons; it shows the cost of war which is a darker side of Star Trek and it foreshadows my favorite episode of all of Star Trek. The first is the slow death of Muniz as a result of holding on to the Jem’Hadar ship. This entwines with the foreshadowing. Sisko must make the choices that every commander must make during a time of war and live with them. In this episode, he sacrifices his five officers to gain control of the Jem’Hadar ship and says he would do it again. This foreshadows his actions and more significant sacrifice in the episode In the Pale Moonlight.
Now why do I not enjoy this episode as much now? The darker side of Star Trek is shown better in other episodes, and this episode has too many plot holes to ignore when you think about it for two seconds. That’s what I get for putting on my thinking cap to bring you this review. Well, the darker side of Star Trek and the reality of war is better viewed in episodes like Nor the Battle to the Strong and In the Pale Moonlight.
The plot holes alone are just too large to place it on the same tier as the aforementioned episodes. The elite Starfleet officers cannot cope with a 10 hour bombardment, which they know is a pure psychological ploy knowing they will never be hit. They even say this when the bombardment starts. This is just one of many examples that show that Starfleet is perhaps the worse military organization there is. The second major plot hole is how the Vorta and Jem’Hadar attempt to rescue the changeling. They never transport it off the ship, they only send one Jem’Hadar in secretly to get it; why not two, when our Jem’Hadar did transport on board he beamed to a random hallway, and not the bridge where our changeling is. Ok, I admit there are some decent explanations for those examples, but the worse offending plot hole is simply ridiculous though a completely minor issue that has no effect on the plot. Why did the Vorta not transport the changeling’s ashes to her ship? Oh, wait I know why. It’s so that we can have Sisko ask why the Dominion and Federation cannot trust each other. Excuse me, but didn’t the Dominion just kill how many of your people Sisko, and isn’t the Federation basically in a non-declared war with the Dominion? So, being enemies is the problem basically, thanks for letting me know. There are more plot holes, and the three I mentioned just bother me the most.
