Star Trek 297: Move Along Home

297. Move Along Home

FORMULA: The Royale + fizzbin

WHY WE LIKE IT: Uhm... it made me think of fizzbin just now?

WHY WE DON'T: A totally arbitrary game. Annoying guest characters. Annoyed cast.

REVIEW: Ridiculous surrealism strikes DS9, and not in a good way. The episode starts off rather well, with Sisko worried Jake is getting the birds and the bees from the gender-issue-retarded Nog, and there are some good bits here and there, like Sisko's loyalty to Dax, or Quark's cheating tactics, ot the overhead camera shots. But the Wadi, as the second representatives of the Gamma Quadrant, are dreadfully annoying, and the game they eventually pull out, Chula, is one of the worst plot devices ever.

I mean look at it! We don't know the rules, and none of the characters are allowed to know the rules. Quark might make moves, roll dice, but then unbeknownst to him, the player, the characters inside the game meet whatever puzzle or danger. They might succeed or they might not, but still, the player cannot really see it, nor does he know which piece is which. You make a move which might as well be arbitrary, and you're told a result, which also seems arbitrary. There's absolutely no reason for Quark to ever think this would make a good game for the bar, or for comments like "I'm getting the hand of this". And from an SF standpoint, the damn thing is a magical artifact, arbitrary even in how it uses the rules of the Star Trek universe.

The cast is badly served by this story too. In the "real world", we have Quark and Odo making flying leaps of logic and figuring out the missing officers are trapped in the game. Quark's groveling is mildly amusing, but comes at a time when we're just annoyed at the proceedings. Inside the game, it's much worse. Kira has never seemed so strident in her anger (ooooh, you dropped a tray of fruit, please don't hurt me) and Bashir is a real idiot, screaming to wake himself. Dax and Sisko do better, but look at Avery Brooks' face when he has to do the Alamarain hopscotch. That is not a happy actor. There's even some stumbling over obvious styrofoam rocks that I haven't seen since TOS.

Oh but hey, it's Primmin's curtain call already. Ah well. He has a nice little scene, too bad we'll never see him again. (I guess losing four officers can get you shitcanned rather quickly.) If you must watch it, also keep your eyes peeled for the Wadi's backhanded applause which will be adapted for the Bajorans.

LESSON: Every race in the Gamma Quadrant has obsessively centered its culture around a single thing.

REWATCHABILITY - Low: Possibly the worst DS9 episode of all time.