DS9 Flashback: If Wishes Were Horses

"If Wishes Were Horses" is not quite the worst episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's first season, but if my memory is correct, it's the last truly bad one.

The imaginations of the crew are running wild! Different things are coming to life, ripped from the imaginations of the people on the station: Jake and Ben Sisko's favorite baseball player, a doppleganger of Dax ready to succumb to Dr. Bashir's advances, a child-stealing Rumplestiltskin from the bedtime story O'Brien read to his daughter, and more. What begins as a whimsical diversion soon becomes deadly as more and more things manifest.

"If Wishes Were Horses" might represent the moment where Deep Space Nine reached peak "this feels like a Next Generation episode." Even setting aside the fact that the Enterprise crew was briefly threatened by imagination in a subplot of an early episode, this is ultimately an episode about "seeking out new life" and making first contact with it -- it's just that the life happens to come to the station instead of being "sought out."

It would have been even more of a Next Generation episode if they'd stuck to the story originally pitched by outside writers Nell McCue Crawford and William L. Crawford. They came in with a "holodeck malfunction" story in which characters were emerging into the real world. Because The Next Generation was almost at the same time mounting a "return of Moriarty" episode, the staff shunted the holodeck aspect to a small red herring (Buck Bokai following Jake home from the holosuite) and leaned into a new ending -- aliens were studying our heroes by embodying their imagination.

The loose collection of what's imagined works better for some characters than others. Bashir's creepy obsession with Dax is thrown back in his face to great effect -- first by the real Dax (who notes that he's chasing plenty of other women while claiming to have eyes only for her), and then by the demeaning "sex kitten" version that everyone gets to see. (Though Dax is perhaps a bit too magnanimous in saying she feels like Julian's privacy is the one more invaded.)

Sisko's relationship with his son is explored a bit more through their shared interest in baseball. It's interesting to hear baseball referred as a dying game at the time their favorite player was a star, because it casts both of them as fans of the underdog. (Or it makes them both hipsters, if you're less charitable.) It also says something interesting about Kira that her imagination doesn't conjure anything nice -- she only encounters a deadly fireball in a hallway.

But the rest of the characters don't really benefit from the episode premise. We already know Quark is sleazy and can't think long term, so it's hardly illuminating to see his conjured arm candy and his failure to anticipate the consequences of his costumers all winning non-stop. Odo gets a brief moment of joy in imagining a captured Quark, but spends most of the episode chasing a "Gunji jackdaw" around the promenade.

Perhaps most awkward is Rumplestiltskin, inflicted on O'Brien. Genre actor Michael John Anderson gives a game performance of what's on the page, but the character doesn't really pick enough at the core fear of losing one's family. Yet it could have been worse. In the original script draft, O'Brien was tormented by a leprechaun. Colm Meaney objected strongly to trodding out an Irish stereotype, and all but refused to do the script. (This shows the value of diverse viewpoints in a writers' room -- I can't say I would have realized myself how deeply offensive the stereotype might be taken.) At the last minute, a rewrite was done to substitute a fairy tale character, but I don't think the change was really baked in deep enough to resonate.

The ideas here may be scattershot and shallow, but it also seems like most of the actors had fun. Armin Shimerman acknowledged in interviews the thrill of having two beautiful women on his arms. Terry Farrell had fun playing the imagined Dax, so much so that Siddig el Fadil reportedly ruined a dozen takes with his laughter.

On the other hand, you know the Hollywood cliche: don't work with kids or animals. This episode had both. The emu playing the "Gunji jackdaw" wouldn't perform, so they costumed its trainer as a Bajoran to prod it around on camera. (Even then, Rene Auberjonois has to pretty much just stare at it in one scene.) Meanwhile, young Hana Hatae (playing Molly O'Brien) was reportedly sick and had to be bribed with toys from the set to perform. (Later, as an adult, Hatae said she was terrified of Rumplestiltskin when making this episode, thinking he'd actually steal her.)

Other observations:

• Odo says here that he has no sense of smell. I wonder if that detail will ever be contradicted.

• The episode takes advantage of the old 4:3 television ratio it was broadcast in to cheat on visual effects. It was prohibitively expensive at the time to do "split screen" (duplicating an actor) without locking down the camera so it couldn't move. Some of the shots of two Daxes are achieved by filming the scene in a wide aspect ratio, then pan-and-scanning across the static shot to create the illusion of motion.

• There's an avalanche of technobabble near the end of this episode as the crew struggles to close a mysterious rift in space (before realizing that it too is imagined). Kira's take on the technobabble is fantastic: "Perimeter sensors are picking up a subspace oscillation. What the hell does that mean?"

• The baseball that would remain on Sisko's desk for the rest of the series arrives here -- it's apparently the one imagined thing that remains permanently real, a gift from "Buck Bokai."

There are some fun moments scattered throughout this episode, but it's frankly a mess overall. I give "If Wishes Were Horses" a C-.