DS9 Flashback: A Simple Investigation

Many TV series have episodes that match a series regular with a one-time love interest, and Star Trek is certainly no exception. But on Deep Space Nine, Odo's secret love for Kira kept him from ever exploring another relationship... until "A Simple Investigation."

Arissa is a woman fleeing from Orion Syndicate assassins, and that takes her to Deep Space Nine. Odo's personal interest in her protection soon becomes a personal interest in her, and the two begin a romance. But Arissa has a secret unknown even to her, and alien assassins won't stop coming for her until she's dead.

This episode was inspired by a 1952 movie called The Narrow Margin, which show runner Ira Steven Behr says many TV series have cribbed. (It involves a cop protecting a witness that he doesn't know is also a cop posing as a decoy to deflect attention from a real witness.) Behr also commented that Deep Space Nine never really did romance very well; discounting the long-term ones (Sisko and Kasidy Yates, Dax and Worf), he's probably right. But at least this romance has a reason to come and go all in the span of one hour of television.

It's nice to give Odo some dating experience here, before getting him into a relationship with Kira later in the series -- though perhaps that wasn't the plan. (Rene Auberjonois in fact thought at the time that this episode was moving Odo and Kira apart for good.) Odo needs that experience, because he's simply not equipped for a relationship. He has to go to his friends for advice -- a pretty big exposure of his normally bottled-up feelings. Those friends are warmly supportive. Kira and Bashir both tell Odo to go for it. Sisko and Dax expressly state how happy they are to see him happy.

What doesn't come up (because no one was really thinking about such things in the 1990s) is the extreme power imbalance in this scenario. The alien Arissa is a woman on the run -- quite capable, but in a truly desperate situation. She's fleeing a form of prostitution, which the episode is a bit coded about, but which seems to involve letting men intrude into her data-port-modded mind for money. Odo has offered to help her, but then makes advances on her. She is really not in a position where she can refuse, unless she's willing to risk losing his help. Thankfully, at the end of the episode, once Arissa's true memories are restored, she makes clear that her alter ego really did love Odo, removing the quite unfortunate possibility that she was acting against her true wishes.

Assuming that rather dark interpretation of the story doesn't cross your mind, what we do see is the life cycle of a fairly sweet relationship. Arissa impresses Odo at first by how she handles Quark -- and indeed she handles Odo in the same moment, flustering him by commenting on his "bedroom eyes." Their relationship grows in a way unique to them: it's built on lying to each other at first (a lot!), but with each knowing the other is doing it. In very clever but subtle camera work by director John Kretchmer, the two are rarely shown together in a single shot until their "morning after" in bed -- and that shot is a gently floating, minutes-long, uninterrupted take.

The romance can't last more than a single episode for a reason that makes sense: Arissa isn't who she thinks she is. She has a husband she didn't know about. (It would have been fun if the daughter she'd pretended to have early in the episode turned out to be real, too.) In a way, Rene Auberjonois has a greater acting challenge in not being able to cry to show his emotion. Odo physically can't shed tears, but Auberjonois makes his sadness and sense of loss clear to us all the same.

What doesn't work so well is the threat to Odo and Arissa's relationship. The Orion Syndicate is a menacing mafia in the abstract, but Star Trek hasn't put in the work to show us much of it by this point in the franchise. And the Syndicate's representatives in this episode are a cliche "smart one / dumb one" pairing that are played for comic relief at least as much as for peril.

The episode didn't really need that comic relief either, as it gets enough from the tiny subplot about another "Julian Bashir, Secret Agent" holo-adventure. After the the events of "Our Man Bashir," Julian's friends are now playing spy with him for fun. (And after legal threats from MGM, it's kept largely off-screen, and is not so explicitly a parody of James Bond.) It's especially fun to see O'Brien complain about having to be the bad guy again, then throwing into the role with relish all the same -- and tossing off a casual "hi Odo" as he gets the drop on Julian.

Other observations:

• Kira mentions how "perceptive" Arissa is to note Odo's bedroom eyes. This is ironically an unperceptive moment for her, in that she's never picked up on any of the clues to Odo's interest in her.

• Arissa later proves not as perceptive as advertised, when she fails to recognize the purpose of Odo's "furniture," something Lwaxana Troi picked up on immediately.

• Worf gets grouchy when everyone gossips about Odo's relationship. Oh, so now Worf disapproves of sticking your nose into other people's romantic business? (Maybe he's learned a lesson?)

• In his first draft script, writer Rene Echevarria reportedly included a scene visiting a holographic night-club singer -- very much the character who would later become Vic Fontaine. It was cut here in part for length and in part because they'd hoped to cast either Frank Sinatra Jr. or Steve Lawrence, but couldn't get either.

"A Simple Investigation" isn't really a bad episode. But it certainly isn't memorable in the grand scheme of things. Add in the awkwardness at the margins (the power dynamic, the misfired comedy with the assassins), and I'd say it's a B- at best.

Island Escape

There's plenty of talk about the separation between real "Euro games" and the sorts of mass market games everyone has heard of. That line is rather blurry now, considering how many crossover games you can now find in a Target store -- games like Catan, Ticket to Ride, and Carcassonne. But it's always been a bit of a blurry line. I remember falling in love with Scotland Yard when I was younger, and though it was a game stocked in mass market stores, it certainly wasn't a game I'd ever find, say, at my grandma's house next to Yahtzee or Monopoly.

Fond memories of Scotland Yard always make me open to try new "1 vs many" games. Recently, that saw me playing Treasure Island. One player takes on the role of Long John Silver, hiding his treasure somewhere on the island game board. The other players move around trying to find and dig up the treasure, using LJS's cryptic clues to narrow the search.

There are actually a lot of common elements between Treasure Island and Scotland Yard. LJS is always required to reveal a clue to the other players on his turn, but he has a built-in mechanism for obscuring the clue in moments where he's feeling cornered. Geographic process of elimination is the general shape of both games.

But there are a lot of differences between the games, too. The board and many other components are made of a material that works with dry-erase markers, so the gameplay involves lots of plotting and drawing on maps. There's an actual compass you attach a pen to for drawing arcs, and rulers for drawing crisp and straight lines. Also, the other players aren't totally working as a team against Long John Silver. Only one person can win the game -- the player who finds the treasure (or LJS, if he escapes) -- so players have incentives not to always share every piece of information they gather in secret.

A particularly engaging mechanic in the game is the way Long John Silver can bluff the players. He's required to give open information to the players once each round, in the form of a card. Each of those cards gets marked with a face down token. In most cases, LJS must tell the truth. In two instances during the game, he may place a token instead that indicates the information provided may have been a lie. There are ways for the players to look at the tokens and ferret out a possible bluff... but then, the competition between the players makes it so that you can't necessarily take another player at their word. It's a healthy portion of "social deduction game" mixed in with the rest of the system.

These twists are clever, but have some issues in implementation. First, each player has a unique marker color -- but two of them are terribly chosen. Those color markers blend into the board easily, making the gameplay overly difficult in a way the designers surely didn't intend.

Second, the concealment of secret information is actually rather awkward. Each player has a personal map to record things they know that the other players don't. But obviously, not everyone can have their own sprawling game board. So the game includes smaller mini-maps for personal info, and in-scale versions of the compass and rule tools so that players can draw on their personal maps accurately. In theory, anyway. There's enough room for lack of precision here that it's not hard to imagine it affecting the game every now and then. The rules are explicit: Long John Silver is always supposed to resolve any ambiguous case in favor of the players... but a slightly misdrawn line here or there might result in a case where different players have different takes on whether something is ambiguous.

Balance is also very tricky with this game. Of course, BoardGameGeek is full of gamers who, after just one or two plays of a game that was likely playtested dozens or hundreds of times, are certain that they know better than a game's designer what the balance of the game is. But the game doesn't really offer any rules that help scale for familiarity (or lack of it) with the system. And it seems like the game will be inevitably lop-sided until you get several plays under your belt.

It being open-ended in how much players cooperate with each other is tricky too. On the one hand, it's nice that the game leaves some agency with the players on this. On the other hand, it does seem balanced for a group of players more willing to share information freely with each other for the sake of beating Long John Silver, even though only one player can win. With more competitive players reluctant to sacrifice themselves for "the greater good," it feels like LJS will just win every time. And this feels like a bit too strong a social aspect that's at odds with the larger, deductive tone of the game.

I would play Treasure Island again -- in particular as I've yet to experience it as the Long John Silver player. But it didn't capture my imagination as fully as other 1-vs-many games, or even the quirky 1-vs-many-yet-also-fully-cooperative Mysterium. I give Treasure Island a B-.

Children of Mars

The final installment of the newest Short Treks season, "Children of Mars," served as a prelude to Star Trek: Picard.

Two young girls, Kima and Lil, are engaged in a rivalry at school. Each of them bullies and teases the other in a series of escalating confrontations. But they have in common that a parent works a world away, on Mars. And when Mars is brutally attacked by rogue synths, each must face the loss of their loved one.

Although we're now halfway through the first season of Star Trek: Picard, I watched "Children of Mars" before the season premiere. It would have been easy to scour the short for hints of the Picard story, but all would be revealed soon enough. I took the episode more as an island unto itself, and I found it a profound and emotional enough story that I had little desire to pick at it for clues.

A while back, I wrote about Deep Space Nine's fourth season two-parter: "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost." It was very much a product of its time; between the limitations of 90s television, the series' budget, and the lack of experience the writers had with terrorism, the story's depiction of the aftermath of a terror attack seemed rather quaint. "Children of Mars" has none of those issues working against it. Television (especially streaming television) is willing to risk more, the budget and visual effects capabilities of modern Star Trek have grown, and we now live in a world where violence and terror threats have hit very close to home. And because of all this, this Short Treks episode is very effective at conjuring the numb emptiness at the core of a profound loss suffered by many people at once.

It all unfolds largely without dialogue. After some brief opening scenes to establish the two young girls and their parents, the action unfolds in a series of quick vignettes that show their growing rivalry. Some of the moments are taken from school bully cliches, but they're often twisted just enough to freshen things up -- for example, passing a note in class becomes sending a message via computer. But it does feel quite real. When an all-out fight finally erupts between Kima and Lil, they go for it with an aggressively choreographed sequence in which it seems the characters truly mean to hurt each other.

The episode can pull off all this dialogue-free storytelling for two main reasons. The first is the great casting of the young actors playing Kima and Lil, Ilamaria Ebrahim and Sadie Munroe. Good child actors are hard to find, and child actors who can perform without dialogue rarer still. These two are great, with Ebrahim in particular having the extra degree of difficulty in performing through alien makeup (even if it is one that does not significantly impair her face).

The other smart choice here is to bridge the wordless montage with song rather than score. Using existing real world music is rare for Star Trek, with music not by a classical composer exceptionally so. I do have a small reservation about the choice of Peter Gabriel's cover of David Bowie's "Heroes": it's rather prominently associated with Stranger Things (which has used it twice, including in its most recent season finale). But perhaps the risk that it's "played out" is worth it? The story of two lovers from opposite sides coming together maps to "Children of Mars" reasonably well, and Peter Gabriel's atmospheric take on the song builds to a crescendo that effectively tugs at the heartstrings as the action unfolds.

Only "The Trouble With Edward" gives this episode any competition as my favorite Short Treks of this batch. It's a stirring and impactful slice of the off-starship part of the Star Trek universe, and the way it teased Star Trek: Picard was quite skillful. I give it an A-.

Just Deserts

At some point, way back in high school, I read Frank Herbert's classic science fiction novel, Dune. I'd long since forgotten the particulars of the book; all that remained was a general sense of "it was alright, I guess." My husband, on the other hand, has read all six of Herbert's original books and a good number of the continuations written by his son Brian with Kevin J. Anderson. So I figured at some point, I've give the original another chance.

This would be the part of a typical review where I'd put a summary paragraph explaining the narrative. I surely don't need me to do that for Dune, right? Maybe you've never read it, or maybe like me, you read it once and forgot the particulars -- but Dune is one of those things that has pervaded pop culture like spice in a Fremen diet. You know the gist, right?

It would be hard to overstate Frank Herbert's accomplishment in the world building of Dune. It's as sweeping an effort as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, perhaps not as widely appreciated only because science fiction was more well established a genre at the time Herbert wrote Dune than fantasy was when Tolkien burst onto the scene. Dune is a template for taking a "what if?" scenario and building everything around it with thoughtful, honest logic. Herbert thinks of everything: technology, religion, politics, history, commerce, and more. It's a world that has captured many readers' imaginations because it's created with such integrity.

Herbert also peppered a good deal of real world research into his fiction. Many of the customs and terms are inspired by Middle Eastern cultures -- which far fewer people would have been aware of when the book was first published in 1965. This far future is made more intriguing for the ways it projects from non-Western influences, and it hints at how much research Herbert did before sitting down to write.

All that said, the universe of Dune impresses me far more than other aspects of the book. The pacing of the narrative is slow to support all that world building, and often at the expense of any driving action. Dune is divided into three sections, the first as long as the other two combined -- and the story doesn't really "get going" until near the end of that first, sprawling section. Key aspects of the story transpire "off screen," both at a character level (uh... 50-year-old spoilers: Paul Atriedes has and loses a son we never actually meet in person) and at a broader narrative level (when the much-anticipated battle to retake the city finally comes, we skip over everything after the opening volley).

Characters don't seem to have nearly the amount of thought behind them as the setting does. Much is made of the moment Paul kills for the "first time"... ignoring the fact that he killed someone several chapters earlier in the novel. Baron Harkonnen's evil scheming, meant to show a wheels-within-wheels level of sophistication, doesn't really stand up to even the slightest bit of analytical thinking. Character motivations are rarely revealed subtly, through their actions; everyone instead voices their inner thoughts in pervasive italicized sentences (which inspired the unintentionally humorous voice-overs of the David Lynch film adaptation).

It's possible here that I'm looking for a level of sophistication in the writing here that simply didn't exist in 1965. Without question, writers have improved a lot in the last few decades -- many of them by building on what giants before them, like Herbert, set up. But I suppose I feel conditioned to expect great writing in this case, because the world building that underpins it is at a level that still holds up completely today.

Dune leaves me with two quite different and distinct reactions. Reconciling them together somehow is tricky -- but if I had to reduce it all to a single grade, it would be a B-. Dune is well worth reading, but it's a slog at times. I feel like I understand why it keeps getting adapted every 20 years or so: there's great material to work with here, and plenty of room to think that a skillful interpretation could improve it immensely. Hopefully they will pull that off with the film version coming at the end of this year.

Stardust City Rag

If you thought season one of Star Trek: Picard would be a slow march to the "always just past the horizon" Bruce Maddox, think again. In the latest episode, "Stardust City Rag," expectations were thoroughly upended.

Upon learning that Bruce Maddox is being held prisoner on Freecloud by local crime boss Bjayzl, the crew of La Sirena need a plan to get him out. Seven of Nine is only too happy to help, looking to settle an old score.

I found this to be the strongest episode of the series yet, and I have only a couple of the smallest of quibbles with it. For one, Bjayzl is a quite goofy name for someone meant to be a quite intimidating criminal mastermind. For the other, this episode made me realize that I'm a good deal less engaged in the Soji/Narek story line than I knew; those characters didn't appear at all in this episode, and I didn't miss them for a moment, or even realize they hadn't been shown until the end credits were rolling.

Much of this week was pure fun, light and breezy. Patrick Stewart got to chew the scenery with a eye patch and a ridiculous accent. The character of Rios also got to cut loose and have fun. And after a super-serious introduction last episode, Elnor became the comic relief this time out. He displayed a Data-like naivete, but with the intense, joyful emotion of someone discovering something for the first time that he couldn't even imagine before. That he found lying so mind-blowing and fun was fun for the rest of us too.

But it was the heavier moments, packing a powerful punch, that made me really enjoy the episode. Raffi's personal reason for joining Picard on this wild ride turned out to be quite intense. One might imagine that on Earth in the future of no poverty, no one would ever suffer from addiction. But as with addiction in the real world, a person has to want help first. In just the few episodes we've known her, it's been made clear that Raffi would rather escape reality than deal with it as she knew it to be.

Of course, there's a long and proud Star Trek tradition of characters having strained relationships with their parents. This time, though, it was not a fracture destined to be healed in the course of a single episode with just the right words. That honesty and realism was refreshing, and I look forward to seeing Raffi throw herself into another cause now that her own has hit a wall.

This was a fantastic episode for Seven of Nine, and actress Jeri Ryan. It also felt to me like a great subversion of a Hollywood trope. Time and again, we've seen the love interest killed off in the opening act to motivate the vengeance story of a male protagonist. This time, not only has the gender been changed, but the nature of the love was changed to something other than romantic. Fans of Star Trek: Voyager might be sad to see Icheb again after two decades only to be "fridged" before the teaser, but it did make a powerful story arc for Seven of Nine.

And intriguingly, that arc ended with only a minor change. Seven steered away from her thirst for vengeance only long enough to give Picard "hope." But then she did what one would imagine someone working for a group called the "Fernis rangers" would do: she went back and killed in cold blood. One could mourn that loss of morality for Seven, but it's clear she lost herself long ago. Her powerful exchange with Picard about their lost humanity -- one of the most human moments in the show so far -- was enough to make us understand the choice.

But the dramatic punch we ended on was the big twist: Jurati is on the opposite side. She murdered Maddox almost as soon as we found him, leaving us to speculate what has happened to her. My guess: the reason for that highly unusual visual of a Vulcan in sunglasses from a few episodes ago was crafted to be deliberately memorable -- that's the moment when Commodore Oh persuaded or brainwashed Jurati to the anti-synth cause.

It now seems especially brilliant casting to put Alison Pill in the role of Jurati. Between her quirky innocence and the early revelation this episode that she had a deeper relationship with Bruce Maddox, it seems impossible to me that anyone could have anticipated this twist coming. The show could be so confident in the surprise, in fact, that director Jonathan Frakes did some none-too-subtle camera work in the scene without giving it away. Closeups on Jurati during the conversation between Maddox and Picard seemed meant to indicate her concern at Maddox's health. In retrospect, we recognize an entirely different purpose there.

That wasn't the only great directorial work from Frakes this episode. Besides getting great performances from all the actors, he once again shows how to put the money on the screen. The bar at Freecloud was a fantastic environment, and astounding in comparison to past Star Trek. I found myself thinking of a Next Generation episode where Riker waltzes into a bar the size of my living room, with perhaps three patrons. This massive space was filled with at least 30 extras, many in full alien makeup. (And speaking of aliens, the super-sniffer goon was a fun creation.) The production crew made all this possible, and Frakes staged it all in a way that made sure to highlight the effort.

I give "Stardust City Rag" an A-. It's sad to think we're already halfway through this first season of Star Trek: Picard, but it sure showed that a lot is going to be packed into the time we have.

DS9 Flashback: Doctor Bashir, I Presume

The Julian Bashir of season one of Deep Space Nine was an abrasive, off-putting character whose icky infatuation with Jadzia Dax has aged poorly in the subsequent 25+ years. But the writers did a slow and steady rehabilitation of his personality that over the years brought him more harmoniously into the mix of the series' interesting characters. And then, with "Doctor Bashir, I Presume," a massive revelation pushed Julian into entirely new and interesting places.

Doctor Lewis Zimmerman, creator of the Emergency Medical Hologram, is now looking to create a new version of his program intended for long term use -- and Julian Bashir is to be the template for its appearance and personality. He comes to Deep Space Nine for extensive interviews and research about Bashir... which puts the doctor in an awkward place, because he and his family are hiding a dark secret. Meanwhile, Zimmerman's flirtation with Leeta brings her to a tough decision: should she stay on Deep Space Nine, hoping for a deeper relationship with Rom? Or should she leave with Zimmerman when his project is over, succumbing to his sweet flattery?

Freelance writer Jimmy Diggs had sold a few ideas to Star Trek: Voyager, and would sell a few more before that series concluded. But he also pitched this one idea to Deep Space Nine, a crossover about the creator of Voyager's holographic doctor building a version 2.0. Staff writer Ronald D. Moore was tasked with building out the story, and he felt sure that the inherently comedic premise needed a dramatic twist: Zimmerman should discover some dark secret in Bashir's past. But what?

A conversation with another staff writer, René Echevarria, zeroed in on the observation that genetic engineering was one of the few science fiction tropes largely missing in the Star Trek universe. Well, other than Khan, of course. But what if Khan, and the hinted-at backstory of the Eugenics Wars, was the reason there was no genetic engineering on Star Trek? And what if that was Bashir's secret, that he was genetically engineered?

This revelation initially didn't sit well at first with actor Alexander Siddig, for two reasons. One was the suddenness; as he put it, "I didn't know about it on Tuesday, and on Thursday the script arrived – we started shooting on Friday." This was an out of the blue character change he wished he could have known in advance, and it came right on the heels of him finding out that he'd secretly been a changeling for several episodes without knowing it.

Secondly, Siddig didn't like the episode's ending. It involved Bashir and O'Brien learning that Zimmerman had been deliberately adding bugs to the new "LMH" so that his preexisting EMH (which looked like him) would not be replaced. With this information, they'd blackmail Zimmerman to keep the secret of Bashir's genetic engineering, allowing everything to go back to normal. Siddig felt that this revelation about his character would permanently alter his conception of how to play him, yet this ending made it a secret only for Bashir, O'Brien, and the audience. How could this knowledge inform every acting choice he made, but in a way that never tipped the secret for other characters on the show? He pushed back at the writers, and in this rare instance, they agreed to rewrite the script at the last minute.

The resulting episode is better for the changes, with a great arc for both character and script. It starts off as comedy -- and a decent one at that, thanks in large part to guest star Robert Picardo as Zimmerman. He needles Bashir at every opportunity, being drawn to Leeta upon hearing she broke up with him, pursuing contact with Bashir's parents the moment it's clear that's a sore subject, and conducting a fun series of to-camera interviews with various characters on the show (including the ever-silent Morn). Along the way, there's a fun scene with two Picardos and two Siddigs, and plenty of friendly ribbing from O'Brien.

But the turn to the dramatic is even better. Bashir is nursing a big resentment for his father, who he sees as having given up on him as a child, the way he gives up on everything else in life. Both his parents infantilize him, calling him "Jules" when he's chosen to be known as "Julian." With the revelation of his secret, the drama grows stronger still. O'Brien stands by his friend, assuring him that nothing has changed in how he sees him, and that he will fight for Bashir to stay in Starfleet. His mother confesses after decades that she's always wondered if they were to blame for their son's deficiencies, telling him they did what they did out of love, not shame.

The idea that Julian Bashir is genetically engineered may not have been planned for, but it largely winds up making sense with what we've seen before this. His painful awkwardness in early seasons could have been a cover to hide his brilliance. His deliberate exam failure, costing him valedictorian at school, certainly fits. So does his parents' disapproval of his interest in a career as a tennis pro -- an apparent waste of his vast intellect. It all fortuitously lines up. And it sets the stage for interesting future episodes for the character.

Unfortunately, the B plot can't keep pace. Rom and Leeta as a couple is a cute idea, but the execution in this episode leaves much to be desired. Rom's tongue-tied demeanor is quite hammy (especially when you think to compare it to the more realistic awkwardness of Odo around Kira). Quark's constant negging of both Rom and Leeta (to a point where neither thinks they deserve happiness) may be accurate to that character, but it's tough to watch.

Zimmerman's flattery of Leeta seems pretty genuine... until he ultimately gets dumped and then promptly hits on literally the next woman to walk by. Worse by far: given what we know about the erogenous nature of Ferengi ears, seeing Rom stroke his (to act as an eavesdropping parabolic microphone, no less!) is pretty gross. But perhaps more socially regressive than any of that is this simple fact: if Leeta loves Rom, why can't she ask him out? She'd sooner move across the galaxy than do that?

Other observations:

• The salacious holosuite program "Vulcan Love Slave" gets a "Part 2: The Revenge."

• The holocommunicator appears for the last time on Deep Space Nine, an idea that came before its time.

• What perhaps doesn't fit about Julian's secret is that it had never been discovered before this. The galaxy is full of telepathic species, for example, and you'd think an encounter with one would expose the secret. But then, he did have an encounter with one, and it didn't. (Maybe he has such extreme mental discipline resulting from his modifications that he can hide parts of his thoughts even from a mental probe?)

• We get a fun sense of what criminal justice is like in a more utopian future. For breaking a rather serious law, Bashir's father gets two years, which Julian sees as "harsh."

• Bashir's father is played by working actor Brian George (famous for playing Babu Bhatt on Seinfeld). For his mother, the production said that at the time, they could not find a working actress of Arab descent. (I realize casting was less diverse in the 1990s, but at the very least, was Shohreh Aghdashloo not available?) They hired Fadwa El Guindi, a social anthropology professor at the University of Southern California, to play the role -- and she does well enough that it's not obvious she isn't a full-time actor.

While the Rom-Leeta story doesn't hold up so well today, the rest of this episode really does, as a moving look at the burden of hiding a secret from friends for years on end. Plus, it's a great springboard for all new kinds of stories for Julian Bashir. I give the episode a B+.

Half Man, Half DeLorean?

We're now months past the internet blowing up over "Baby Yoda," but I've finally caught up and watched all eight episodes in season 1 of The Mandalorian. (AKA "The only reason to get Disney+ right now if you don't have kids?") I'm now ready to nod knowingly at the "I have spoken"s and "This is the way"s and tea-drinking memes that no one is actually sharing anymore. Yeah, me!

There's an old cliche that television is just "radio with faces." That's ever less apt in this new age of television, but perhaps farther off the mark than its ever been when it comes to The Mandalorian. This show might have less dialogue on average than any other show being made. From its taciturn protagonist to its emphasis on action, there are episodes of this show where so little is said, I wonder if the script even tops 10 pages. You have to watch The Mandalorian; it's not a show for people who like to put something on in the background while they do something else.

In many ways, the show reminded me of another series that started around the same time: The Witcher. That show is literally based on a video game (and book series), but The Mandalorian ticks many of the same video game-like boxes. It has an action-oriented protagonist of few words. He bounces from side quest to side quest, getting into fights. He gets paid for these adventurers, then goes back somewhere to level up his armor for the next fight. He meets "NPCs" that eventually come back around into his story, which is ultimately building toward a reckoning with a "big boss." Fortunately, The Mandalorian is a good deal more fun than watching someone else play a video game. (I can't say the same for The Witcher, which I gave up after one episode that left me thoroughly bored.)

If the video game analogy doesn't do it for you, here's another comparison: The Mandalorian is definitely using The X-Files formula. It has "mythology" episodes that further the ongoing story, and other "monster of the week" style episodes that don't obviously play into a larger narrative. For me, at least, the formula is reversed: I generally found the plot arc episodes of The Mandalorian to be more engaging than the stand-alone tales.

The series absolutely nails the feeling of the Star Wars universe. Some of this is in the creators making the obvious smart choices from the very beginning. It's presented in the same aspect ratio as the Star Wars movies. The camera moves with smooth steadiness. It's unafraid to use pre-existing designs for droids, aliens, and gadgets that were established in the film franchise. It heavily draws on the films' vast sound library. But new material the series invents is created with care for consistency. Things have that beat-up, garage sale feel of Star Wars

It's so Star Wars, in fact, that it took me a while to get on board with the one element that is conspicuously different: the score. This is not the first time someone other that John Williams has written Star Wars music; we have two films and multiple animated series before this. But this does seem to me like the first time a composer has made the choice not to mimic John Williams' style. Ludwig Göransson has cobbled together a sound that feels like a Spaghetti Western with dashes of "Skyrim soundtrack" sprinkled in. I loved the music itself right away, its main anthem instantly sticking in my head. It took me more than half the season to accept that music being paired with Star Wars visuals. I just didn't think it fit at first... until finally I appreciated that Göransson had probably done more than anyone else working on this show to expand the notion of what Star Wars can be.

The Mandalorian isn't the best "live action Star Wars" we've gotten since The Force Awakens arrived and jump-started the franchise. But neither is it the worst. (Your mileage may vary, but for me, the best and worst would be Rogue One and Solo, respectively.) I'm not exactly riveted or eager for season two to arrive later this year... but I expect to make the time for it when it does arrive. Despite a weaker episode or two, I'd say season one overall comes out about a B.

The Girl Who Made the Stars

"Ephraim and Dot" was just one of two animated Short Treks in the latest season. The other was "The Girl Who Made the Stars."

A young Michael Burnham is having trouble going to sleep, afraid of the dark. So her father tells her a story of long, long ago, about a brave young girl whose fateful encounter brought stars to the night sky and pushed back the darkness for all humankind.

"Ephraim and Dot" was borderline slapstick entertainment. "The Girl Who Made the Stars" is a short parable using the Star Trek universe as little more than a framing device. The two have very different animation styles. Collectively, they're an example of how Short Treks is a place to push the limits of what can be done in the Star Trek universe.

It is a bit of a clash for me in this case, though. It's tricky to juxtapose mysticism and fantasy up against the science that is the core of Star Trek. It's not unthinkable, though. Deep Space Nine did it regularly with Bajoran religion (though, notably, some fans resisted that). It's all about how it's handled.

It's well worth remembering that no one is representing the story in "The Girl Who Made the Stars" as objective truth. The bedtime story framing device makes it clear that this is just a fable. And it's a fable that is well in keeping with Star Trek ideals. It's a story about overcoming fear and venturing into the unknown. It's about an encounter with a stranger (new life, a new civilization) and forging a friendship. It's really about as Star Trek as you can get. And yet, from the actual narrative... if they didn't name drop Michael Burnham into this, would you ever imagine this was a Star Trek story?

As a small treat for Star Trek: Discovery fans, this episode shows Michael Burnham in a happy time before she was separated from her biological parents. Voicing her father is Kenric Green, Sonequa Martin-Green's real-life partner and the actor who briefly played the same role in live-action during Discovery's second season. He does a good job here, telling this story within the story.

The animation itself seems hit-and-miss. Some of it looks very sophisticated and polished, like the snake creature and alien space ship. Other elements look unfinished. The humans are a bit waxy. Their faces seem to move a bit unnaturally when they speak, and when they do, you can see inside their mouths and it doesn't look like there's anything solid in there. I found the animation pretty distracting, actually; it regularly pulled me out of the flow of the story.

I appreciate the impulse to do something different here, but this was not among my favorite Short Treks. I give "The Girl Who Made the Stars" a B-.

Oh, Captain! My Captain!

Cooperative board games have enjoyed a bit of an uptick among my circle of friends. But as we try more of them, the ones we play need to pack a bit more punch to stay in the mix at our gaming table. One game that may come up short is The Captain Is Dead.

Players are all crew members of a futuristic starship -- mostly evocative of Star Trek, but with perhaps a few other sci-fi tropes stirred in. As the title succinctly puts it, your captain is dead. But that's hardly the worst of your problems. Alien ships are attacking outside as their soldiers board your ship for hand to hand combat. As interstellar phenomena drift by, they're causing malfunctions all over your ship. Oh, and the engines are offline. But if you can get them working and jump to light speed, you'll leave all these troubles behind (and win the game).

The Captain Is Dead does have some things going for it. Its icon-driven system for addressing the various crises thrown at the players is easy to grasp. There's a bit more too it than that, but the upshot of it is that the game is fairly simple to teach compared to some cooperative games. Each player takes a character, each having both a special power and a favored icon type -- more than enough to give you something you are good at and that the other players may not be. This sort of specialization allows everyone to work toward the victory, and helps the group "divide and conquer." Also, the game purports to take up to 7 players; we haven't put that to the test, but if that works smoothly, that definitely sets the game apart from other cooperative games (most of which are limited to 4 or 5).

But for my tastes, the game was too reactive. It tosses problems at you with little or no warning, and gives you very few tools to look ahead. You may know which player's character is good at a particular problem, but that doesn't mean you'll have them in the right place at the right time. You can't easily plan good moves in advance, or take precautions against possible disasters. You're mostly just running around the board, putting out fires. Sometimes, there are enough fires going that you do make strategic choices in who you send where, but that isn't generally as satisfying as proactive planning. To a large extent, the game plays you.

There's a fair amount of variance in the mix here that could make future playthroughs very different. Each of the 7 player colors has multiple characters you can play, each with a different power. Then there's the randomness inherent in this sort of "avert disaster" cooperative game. It's not supposed to be easy to win. So I suppose I'd be open to trying it again some time and seeing if we get better results.

And yet, the game didn't make enough of an impression on me that I'd necessarily want to try it again when there are so many others in our library to be played. I might have rated the game a B- shortly after we played it, but the fact that it hasn't come back to the table in a while now makes me feel like a C+ might be a more accurate mark. I'd certainly welcome a second opinion from those who have played it more and think more highly of it, though I wouldn't recommend anyone pick up a copy just to give me that second opinion.

Absolute Candor

For the fourth episode of Star Trek: Picard, our title character injected a side quest into the mix, needing one more person to round out his heist team.

Now that Jean-Luc Picard is back on a ship, he wants to return the planet Vashti, where 14 years earlier, he abandoned a group of resettled Romulans upon his resignation from Starfleet. In part, he hopes to make amends. But moreover, he hopes to persuade one of the warriors of the Qowat Milat to join his cause.

If this episode admittedly is a bit of a distraction from the main story line that had been set up already, there are at least two consolations: we are still adding new main characters to the cast (judging by the opening credits), and it was actually quite good. This episode continues to flesh out the Romulans in more detail, the Star Trek franchise finally giving them their due like the Klingons or Vulcans, or other races who've been around since the beginning. Here, we get the clever conceit of a group that is in many ways the opposite of Vulcans: instead of repressing and concealing emotion, they celebrate emotion as something to be laid bare, always.

We've fallen into a bit of a pattern when it comes to episode structure, but it's one that is serving the show very well. The teasers tend to jump back 14 years in time, to the days around the Mars synth attack. Here, it's to show us Picard in better times, and it's delightful. We see a wonderful blend of classic Picard character and evolution. He's bringing all his diplomatic skill to bear with the group of Romulans, and is very much in his element -- that's all familiar. But he's less rigid than in The Next Generation years, more relaxed with himself, more comfortable around children (which is called out specifically, assuming you didn't notice it yourself right away), and embracing a journey of self-discovery.

This isn't just fan service, though. This is to set up how deeply Picard has broken these people's trust. One can debate how much of this was truly his fault, but the point is that it really doesn't matter to the Romulans of Vashti. (Side note: are Vashti and Zhat Vash meant to share some implied Romulan root word? Or do the writers just really like the sound of "Vash?" Is Picard's old archaeologist love interest going to show up at some point?) Even in his diplomatic, smooth-talking prime, there's nothing Picard could say to these people to apologize enough, to earn their forgiveness. Only the enlightened Qowat Milat, who can assume he speaks with "absolute candor" when he says he's sorry, can take him at his word.

That brings us to our new character, Elnor. He seems like he can bring a lot to the mix. Like Musiker, he's a character who has a history with Picard. He also has a built-in naivete to him that might give us Data-like moments: his nature is to be completely honest in all things, he's never really traveled off-world, and he's been raised the only male in a group of females. All of these seem conceived to give him a different perspective and demeanor that the show can use. Also, of course, he's a lethal warrior with a hair trigger that Picard must keep on a tight leash. (The real-world, cultivated cliche of the pit bull dog that Picard has back at his vineyard.)

Over on the Borg cube, things didn't progress too much. It was nice, though, to see that Soji isn't without guile, developing a bit of mistrust of Narek. That he could answer that and spin her back to his intended path is a credit to his skills, but I like that he had to use those skills. Elnor is our most naive character on the show, not Soji.

The episode served up other treats too. We got to see a classic-style Romulan warbird, lifted from the original series episode "Balance of Terror." There was great expense in the Vashti village set; though it wasn't large, it was convincing, and filmed in a way that added a sense of scale to it. (Credit director Jonathan Frakes!) Still more holograms that look like Rios were introduced to fun effect, each with a new accent (or even a new language -- thanks again, universal translator, for knowing when not to translate to English for the sake of drama). And then, of course, the big final moment: the return of Seven of Nine (who has never actually interacted with Jean-Luc Picard before, that an audience has gotten to see).

In all, I think this episode was a very strong B+. It may have been a side quest (hell, Picard's even using the word "quest" to describe what he's doing!), but I was with it the whole way.

DS9 Flashback: By Inferno's Light

The back half of Deep Space Nine's mid-season five two-parter, "By Inferno's Light," was crammed full of plot twists, action, and lasting changes for the series.

Trapped in a Dominion prison camp, Worf is made to face increasingly fierce Jem'Hadar warriors in a combat arena. Garak must overcome claustrophobia to crawl inside the facility walls and modify equipment to trigger a transporter rescue. Meanwhile, Dukat has taken control of Cardassia and allied it with the Dominion. Now, a fleet is bearing down on the station. But not all is as it seems, and the changeling who has replaced Dr. Bashir is hatching a nefarious plan.

It's a shame that a bit more of a balance couldn't be achieved between part one of this story and this half; where that episode was sparse setup, this episode is almost too crowded to fit in all the excitement. Still, each plot thread does play well, providing strong moments for different characters.

Worf's journey is the most expected -- a tale of the proverbial unstoppable force colliding with the proverbial immovable object. Over on Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was something of a trope that when they wanted to show how tough some alien threat was, they had it beat up Worf. So we've seen him take a beating before. Still, he comes out looking strong here, despite being punished more than we've ever seen.

There's a nice arc to Worf's battles. He's boastful and taunting after defeating his first opponent -- the "youngest and least experienced" of the Jem'Hadar, as it turns out. Then Martok is the devoted "corner man" who helps Worf through fight after fight, ready to compose a song of his glory, and holding him up even when his resolve begins to waver. Finally, even when Martok says honor has been satisfied and it's time to give up, Worf finds new strength and continues to fight. "Game respects game," and the Jem'Hadar First, Ikat'ika, yields to the indomitable Klingon.

Because the episode does such a good job of building up Worf, it matters a lot when Worf in turn praises Garak for the battle he is fighting. Picking up on a hint of a detail from a past episode, it's revealed that Garak suffers from claustrophobia. The episode is quite ahead of its time in its attitude toward the fear; there's no stigma as Bashir treats it just like a physical condition to be cared for, while Worf and Martok note that there is no greater enemy than overcoming one's fears. Only Garak himself voices the more common view of a phobia: "just get over it."

The episode does a great job of putting you in Garak's head space. We're shown in meticulous detail how long it takes to open up the wall to let him in and out, so we know there's no easy escape. The camera gets right up in his face while he's inside, with harsh light and shadows intensifying the closeness. Garak starts a conversation with himself as a distraction, and actor Andrew Robinson does a great job with the scene. To hear Robinson tell it, "I didn't have to act. I was there." That's because not only does he have claustrophobia in real life ("The very first time I put on the Garak makeup and the wet suit that they build the Cardassian costume on, I thought that I was going to die."), but he had the flu on the day they filmed the scene. He clearly poured overcoming these real world challenges into the story.

Alexander Siddig gives two fun performances in this episode. The real Bashir only rarely shows his backbone on the series, and then usually when in his element in a medical situation. Here, we see him throw sass at his Jem'Hadar captors to the point of endangering his own life, and it's quite striking. Meanwhile, Siddig shades the changeling version of Bashir with less humanity. It's fun to guess at what this character's evil plot will be, and watch how brazenly he acts while still avoiding detection.

There's another villain with an interesting character arc here: Dukat. Though recent Dukat episodes had been showing a softer side (something the writers insist was never meant to be long term), he makes a sharp turn here into a full authoritarian dictator. Episode co-writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe says this was all deliberately modeled on Germany between the two World Wars: the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the Anschluss capitulation of Austria to Nazi Germany.

For Dukat specifically, regaining any measure of power brings back his true character. There's mocking humor, when he quips that it was never right that he and Kira were on the same side. There's pettiness, when he specifically orders Garak to be kept in detention when all other Cardassian prisoners are being released. There's fascist rhetoric as he pledges to eradicate unwanted foreigners from Cardassian space and swears to "make Cardassia strong again." There's casting himself as the hero even as he does evil, urging Sisko (almost as though he's saying this as a "favor") to join the Dominion. He disowns his daughter Ziyal, and she for her part finally admits to seeing what he truly is. Dukat has gone full villain now, and Kira pledges to kill him the next time she sees him. (She doesn't... though she won't be the last person in the series to express a similar sentiment.)

Amid all these personal stakes are big, galactic changes for the larger story. The Klingons and Federation finally and formally make peace. The Dominion now have a real presence in the Alpha Quadrant. And massive fleets are now looking to be a mainstay on the show -- the arriving Dominion fleet and the combined Federation, Klingon, and Romulan armada are both truly impressive displays of visual effects for the time.

Other observations:

• Kira totally "captainspreads" when she takes command of the Defiant.

• There's a great exchange between Quark and Ziyal, with Quark despairing for his business since neither Jem'Hadar nor Founders "eat," "drink," or "have sex." Ziyal notes that perhaps the Vorta are "gluttonous, alcoholic sex maniacs."

• In the Bashir changeling's final moment, it looks like an artificial (post-production) zoom is used to close in on his face. It's the one really goofy-looking effect in an otherwise outstanding episode for visuals.

"By Inferno's Light" is the strong episode of this two-parter, setting the stage for the Dominion War at the end of the season. I give it an A-.

The Role of the Dice

There are worker placement games aplenty out there, but that's a big umbrella under which a lot of clever new innovations can be added. One that I'm beginning to see more frequently is using dice as the workers to be placed. The latest example I got to play is Coimbra, from designers Flaminia Brasini and Virginio Gigli.

Coimbra is set in ~16th century Portugal, and is about cultivating prestige around the country to capitalize on New World opportunities. It's likely more thought was put into theme than this, but the game presents in a fairly crunchy, mechanical way (which is a-okay with me): go here to do this, go there to do that, etc.

The mechanism for taking actions takes some getting used to, but provides some great decision making in a novel way. A pool of colored dice is rolled at the start of a round. Then play proceeds with each player drafting one die, snapping it into a plastic base of their own player color, and placing that as a worker. Color and value of the chosen die each play a role in what happens with each placement, and scarcity of either will affect your choices, limit your options, and increase competition with your opponents.

I won't go into all the things you can do with these dice workers, nor venture into the weeds of exactly how color and value affect things. Suffice it to say, there is a lot here. In fact, when the game was first explained to us, the sheer volume of everything prompted my husband to compare the game to the complex Teotihuacan: City of Gods. It's not that involved, though there is the similarity that both games use dice as workers -- and it is true that until you grow familiar with the system, you may forget aspects of your turn each time you take one. (That never cleared up for us with Teotihuacan; it mostly did in Coimbra.)

What I found tricky about Coimbra is knowing how well you're doing. It's easy to see what any one action you take does, understand what it gives you, and imagine that it'll probably be good for you overall. But it's much harder to tell if choice A or choice B really gives you more long-term benefit. The murky relationships between game elements, and the potential for what opponents can do to "mess things up" between your turns, are great enough that you really just can't know. That probably bodes well for the replayability of the game, but it does make the on-ramp steep... and with that comes the risk that you might not play it enough for that replayability to matter.

Another nod to replayability gives me similarly mixed feelings. The game has a lot of customizable, randomly selected elements in its setup. In each playthrough, different endgame conditions will be worth points. Also, four "king of the hill" reward tracks will be worth different benefits. Also, a shuffled deck of special abilities will change what you have access to and when (and though that deck is made up of shuffled stacks placed in the same order, the variance within a stack feels significant). Again, all of this feels great for replayability; this is not a game you'd be able to approach with the same strategy each time. But it also feels like there are so many levers that can be set in so many ways that not every combination could be fairly balanced or equally fun.

I would absolutely play Coimbra again. There is novelty in it that I am curious to explore further. But I also remain cautiously skeptical of the game. I feel like someone else in our gaming group would have to push playing it again to make that happen. I give it a B-.

Ephraim and Dot

When Star Trek: Lower Decks launches later this year, it will be the first animated Star Trek series in over four decades. But it won't be the first animated Star Trek episode in that time frame. That's because two of the episodes in season two of Short Treks were animated -- the first being "Ephraim and Dot."

The tardigrade Ephraim is cruising the mycelial network when it encounters the starship Enterprise. After laying its eggs near the ship's warp core, it proceeds to have a series of harrowing encounters with one the Enterprise's worker robots. Their struggle sprawls across the years as famous missions carry on in the background.

Most people classify animation as a genre. I think it's a common mistake; animation is a medium, and this episode is excellent proof. The 1970s animated Star Trek show was entirely serious, like a fourth season of the original series told in half-hour segments rather than hour-long segments. "Ephraim and Dot" is more like a Looney Tunes installment, or a Tom and Jerry cartoon. It's deliberately light, even goofy in moments, and probably can't be taken literally as an actual thing that ever took place in the Star Trek universe.

I say this because I at least can't make it fit. It's bookended by odd narration in the style of a 1950s educational film. Someone is speaking in a strange mid-Atlantic accent (that's dated even today, much less in the future), and it certainly has no anchor in any incarnation of Star Trek we've seen before. It's even black-and-white in the introduction, before transitioning to color. So... is this a whimsical lesson for school children?

If it is a depiction of real events, then is it deliberately deepening the mystery of tardigrades, is it taking artistic license, or does it simply have some continuity errors? In less than 10 minutes, Ephraim the tardigrade and Dot the robot fight in front of scenes taken from all three seasons of the original Star Trek and two of the movies. This happens in rapid succession with no implied down time... so do tardigrades experience time at a different rate than we do? Do they even experience time in linear order? (Some of the original episodes referenced did not happen in the order they're shown here.)

Best perhaps to ignore all that and just treat is as a super-concentrated dose of nostalgia. In that, "Ephraim and Dot" is mainlining the good stuff. We hear audio actually lifted from classic episodes, see moments from some of the most beloved stories, get a few delightfully hokey 1960s visuals recreated in animation, and generally follow the Enterprise almost from the first moment we ever saw it to the last. It's falling face first into a big ol' bowl of Member Berries: it may be empty calories, but it's freaking delicious.

Curiously, this episode is directed by composer Michael Giacchino. But I'm more interested in the work he also did here in his more traditional role -- stepping beyond his great work in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek films, this is his first time composing for the television side of the franchise. It's a marvelous melange of a score, quoting bars of music from classic Star Trek music from the main title to the famous fist fight cue originally composed for "Amok Time." It's also heavily influenced by the playful music Carl Stalling composed for Looney Tunes -- and it runs non-stop for the entire episode, in the way of those classic cartoons.

I'm not sure "Ephraim and Dot" is good. It definitely doesn't make a lot of sense. But it certainly is fun. I'd say it's perhaps a B in the grand scheme of things. It's far from my favorite of the Short Treks, but I still appreciate the sense of experimentation.

Beautiful Disaster

It's been quite some time since the HBO miniseries Chernobyl captured audience attention (and then captured several awards). It took me a while to get around to it, to be in the frame of mind to watch that intense a story. But indeed, it was as good as everyone said, and I feel compelled to add my voice to the chorus: if you haven't watched the series, you should.

Chernobyl tells the story of the 1986 nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, chronicling the aftermath in the hours, then days, then weeks and months after the accident -- before ultimately going back to the beginning to show us exactly what went wrong. It's a five episode series, each installment roughly an hour in length... and that turns out to be a powerful way to tell this tale. By not compressing the story into the run time of a movie, the mini-series can explore many different aspects of the disaster.

In particular, it can give a lot of attention to the human cost. While a great deal of Chernobyl is focused on the way the Soviet government responded to the crisis, much of it is not. It follows a firefighter who responded unknowingly to the explosion, and what he and his wife endure as a result. It follows a young man conscripted to kill pets in the affected zone (lest they spread radioactivity), and the toll of that duty on his soul. It follows the workers who attempt to contain the resulting meltdown in various ways, despite knowing the effect it will have on their lives.

It is, as you would imagine, quite a bleak story -- even though there are moments of heroism throughout that might instill you with some hope. It's not an easy watch. With an unflinching script by Craig Mazin, moving direction by Johan Renck, and unsettling music by now-Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, each part will make you feel things deeply: horror at the literal and figurative fallout, disgust at the mistakes and arrogance that led to it all, and chills at just how close it all came to being far, far worse.

The performances throughout are strong, though three in particular stand out. Jared Harris is Valery Legasov, cast in this story in the familiar role of the wise man struggling to speak truth to power. His performance isn't drenched in typical Hollywood sanctimony, though; it's an often restrained take on the archetype, more engaging for its control and precision. Stellan Skarsgård plays Boris Shcherbina, a government adversary-turned-ally who serves up most of what little humor there is here through his expected Soviet stoicism (which crumbles in light of this unthinkable calamity). Emily Watson is great as a composite character created for the mini-series, Ulana Khomyuk, weaving around in different story arcs as the most moral character of the piece.

Chernobyl did receive some criticisms for its accuracy. Some say it ascribed more to malice than is fair, others say it ginned old Cold War fears that reflected paranoia more than reality, and still others nitpicked minor inaccuracies. But by and large, the story hews to the truth enough to be an effective introduction to those who don't know (or remember) the real events. It stands as a powerful drama on its own, and made me want to read up more on the actual history.

If you're looking for escapism in entertainment -- which is a totally fair thing to want -- then obviously, Chernobyl is not for you. But it's one of the most moving dramas I've seen in some time. I give the mini-series an A. If you're an intermittent HBO subscriber who, say, might pick it up again for the new season of Westworld, find some time to watch this too if you haven't already.

The End Is the Beginning

The title of the third episode of Star Trek: Picard was "The End Is the Beginning." But it might also have been called "The End of the Beginning," as it got Picard back out in the stars and off on his mission.

Picard tries to persuade his former XO, Raffi Musiker, to help him procure a ship to search for Dahj's sister -- but there's a bitter history between them after Picard's resignation from Starfleet. Meanwhile, Romulan operatives continue their attempt to cover up operations on Earth... and continue their efforts to extract information from Soji Asha. Soji is after information of her own, working with former Borg drone Hugh to question an ex-Borg Romulan aboard the Romulan Reclamation Site.

As with the prior episode, "Maps and Legends," there was quite a lot of exposition in this episode. But the writers of the series have some clever ways of getting the audience through it. They've spread it out a bit through these first three episodes, treating them almost as a single unit to launch this new story. (And, appropriately, having the three all directed by one person, Hanelle M. Culpepper.) They often intercut two different scenes together to draw in your attention when either scene on its own might run too long and dry.

They're also very good at sketching a strong character in just a few quick lines of dialogue. I'm already sad that Laris and Zhaban aren't going with Picard on this adventure, because their banter with each other and "the Admiral" have been a real highlight of these first three episodes. On the other hand, we've been introduced to two equally compelling characters -- actual main characters on the series -- to fill the gap.

Raffi Musiker is interesting in a number of ways. It's interesting to see another XO who served under Picard besides Riker, one with whom his relationship really decayed. There might also be some subtle stuff about her character conveyed in the fact that she was so down and out. We've been repeatedly told on Star Trek that no one on Earth wants for anything, that there's no money, no scarcity of resources. Yet Musiker was living in relative squalor. (At Star Trek famous Vasquez Rocks -- actually identified as such for the first time!) This suggests that to some extent, she chose this... right? Or that a distinctly un-Starfleet like faction with the organization worked to push her down? However this all happened, Mussiker seems a much more broken character than we're used to seeing among Star Trek humans, and I'm looking forward to more.

Cristóbal Rios is another intriguing character, a roguish loner that feels more in tune with the Star Wars universe than with Star Trek. The death that drove him to leave Starfleet seems like back story we're surely going to get more of at some point, and feels sure to be interesting when it comes. In the meantime, we know he's vain enough to make all the holograms who operate his ship look like him. And we know there's some connection between him and Musiker we have yet to learn.

Rounding out Picard's collection of broken people is the freshly broken Doctor Jurati, who has just killed someone for the first time. I appreciate how, thus far, Jurati hasn't been written as too much of the scientist cliche. She is socially awkward, and is often meant as comic relief, but her mannerisms aren't dialed up to maximum to achieve either of those goals.

Another character added to the mix this episode was Hugh, reintroduced to us from The Next Generation. I'd love to know all the details about how he got to where he is now, but I appreciate the restraint of not overloading the fan service here. The focus instead was on showing us another form of bigotry rearing its ugly head: just a few episodes into Picard, we've seen anti-Romulan racism and anti-synth bias. Now, Hugh shares with us discrimination against ex-Borgs. And actor Jonathan Del Arco is able to imbue this with an extra bit of venom, likely drawing on his own experiences as an openly gay actor and outspoken LGBT activist.

The story seems to be fully spun up now, with Picard actually off on a ship. (He said "engage." How long until we get a "make it so?") Meanwhile, Soji inches closer to learning her true nature. And plenty of other compelling irons are in the fire. Why did the Borg sever their link with this cube? Did it have anything to do with what they learned of "the Destroyer" from these Romulans? Will we be catching up with Bruce Maddox soon, or is the quest to find him going to last longer?

Star Trek: Picard remains the show I'd most like to binge right now. Since we can't, it'll be the show I most look forward to each week. I give "The End Is the Beginning" a B+.

DS9 Flashback: In Purgatory's Shadow

By season five of Deep Space Nine, it had become customary to do a mid-season two-part episode. They upheld the tradition with "In Purgatory's Shadow" and "By Inferno's Light."

Garak and Worf are sent to investigate a signal from the Gamma Quadrant that suggests there might be survivors from the failed attack on the Dominion by the Cardassians and Romulans. They're quickly captured and imprisoned, joining Enabran Tain, General Martok, and... Julian Bashir, who has been replaced on Deep Space Nine by a changeling infiltrator. As evidence mounts that a Dominion fleet will soon invade the Alpha Quadrant, the station makes defensive preparations -- and Dukat tries to convince his daughter Ziyal to leave with him.

The genesis of this episode came from a desire to do a Star Trek take on "The Great Escape." The writers considered telling a prison break story from the perspective of Michael Eddington, but decided the audience might not fully get behind him. Eventually, they hit on pairing Worf and Garak, who had clashed in an interesting way in the fourth season finale. From there, they continued to find this episode a good home for ideas they'd long wanted to try -- revealing that Enabran Tain was Garak's father, bringing the real General Martok onto the show (after killing his changeling doppelganger), and trying again to convey changeling paranoia by having infiltrators not on Earth, but in our heroes' very midst.

While these are all good ideas, this episode is a whole lot of setup without much payoff -- even more so than is usual for the first half of a two-part episode. The one story arc that plays to completion here is between Garak and Tain. The moment of revelation between them -- and Tain's death -- is a great performance from both Andrew Robinson and Paul Dooley. It's well written too, with Tain refusing even at the last moment to directly give Garak what he's looking for; he must cloak his admission of fatherly pride in a story from Garak's youth. And that's only after Tain is a withholding scold throughout the episode, up until his final scene. Garak has to cobble together closure from scraps. (Or tailor it, as it were.)

There's another story arc at play for Garak in this episode, though I find it an awkward one. A romantic relationship is played between him and Ziyal. It's hard to know the degree to which Garak is pursuing this just to dig at Dukat -- but that seems the most likely possibility here, given how far Garak goes just to manufacture entertainment for himself. In this episode alone, he tries to talk Bashir into stealing a runabout with him, toys with Worf about wanting to join Starfleet, gets quippy with a Jem'Hadar soldier just for kicks (getting a camera-eye view rifle to the face for his trouble). His questionable flirting with Ziyal is of a piece.

Perhaps knowing that the age difference between Garak and Ziyal is a bit icky, Ziyal is recast yet again, with Melanie Smith being the third actress to play her. (But who knows the real reason for the change. Show runner Ira Steven Behr once joked that they should have changed the performer "every single time.") The fact that this Ziyal looks older helps the optics a bit... but it makes all the bickering about her look worse. Her father wants to basically order her back to Cardassia. Kira is arguing that she's better off away from him. All the while, Ziyal definitely looks old enough to be making that kind of decision for herself.

Fortunately, Garak/Ziyal is not the only romantic relationship at play in the episode. Dax and Worf share a meaningful goodbye as he heads off on a dangerous mission. And even though there's been an interrim episode since Odo regained his shifting abilities, the opening between him and Kira is still nice to see. He's putting his old room back together; she catches him reading a book on dating and encourages him in that pursuit.

The reveal that Julian Bashir has been replaced by a changeling is a great idea. It would have been better still if the writers had thought it up far enough ahead of time to seed earlier episodes with clues -- though I have noted a couple of occasions where the coincidental ramifications are interesting. There's fun suspense played throughout the episode in just what the changeling might do -- is he making poisoned sandwiches? His sabotage of the plans to collapse the wormhole make for a great cliffhanger ending as the Dominion fleet pours from the wormhole.

Other observations:

• Dukat is very on brand when casually dunking on Bajoran religion as "backwards superstition." Kira responds in kind by noting, after Dukat calls Garak a killer, that "yes, he's a Cardassian."

• It's nice that the episode makes room to bring up the spiritual implications of collapsing the wormhole. To assuage Kira's concerns, Sisko notes that the Prophets have always found a way to speak to the Bajorans.

• In a nice bit of continuity, it's mentioned that the theory on how to close the wormhole comes from Lenara Kahn.

• Detail-minded fans have noted that while this episode makes mention of the Borg attack in First Contact, the stardate here places this before the events of that movie. Staff writer Ronald D. Moore gave an amusing, self-depracating explanation: "I am not at liberty to reveal the secret messages contained within the seemingly 'mistaken' stardates, but rest assured that it is another brilliantly conceived and skillfully executed Star Trek moment brought to you by the people who wrote 'Meridian.'"

Even though this episode sets up a lot of hugely important story for the series, it is mostly just that -- setup. Between that and the uncomfortable ways Ziyal is woven into the story, I think "In Puragtory's Shadow" comes out a B-. Fortunately, though, part two was much stronger.

Hey! Mister!

Although I didn't make a point of blogging about it from week to week, I watched all four seasons of the TV series Mr. Robot more or less as it aired. It was a series that both rewarded and tested its audience. I've also learned, from various conversations over the weeks since its finale, that it was a series not enough people I know were watching.

Over four seasons (of varying length, between 10 and 13 episodes), Mr. Robot told the story of anarchist hacker Elliot Alderson as he plotted against a powerful corporation, fought against his own depression and anxiety disorder, and attracted the wrath of very powerful enemies. It was a series full of wild plot twists that reset the narrative with regularity -- so much so that to discuss anything more than the first few episodes in any detail would be spoiling the fun.

I can say that the show was willing to try a lot of bold departures from its normal formula. Over the course of four years, there was an episode set mostly inside a sitcom, another designed to look like a single take (1917 style), still another with only two lines of spoken dialogue, another designed like a stage play with limited characters and a single location, and other odd and experimental ideas. This was all on top of a normal narrative structure that played a lot with perspectives on reality.

It was also the most visually distinctive show on television. Creator Sam Esmail, who wrote and/or directed most of the episodes, pushed the stylistic envelope with camera work that would be considered a mistake anywhere else. Characters were often tiny in frame, or off-center in the wrong direction for how TV dialogue is usually filmed. Ceilings were often visible. Strange editing techniques would end scenes unexpectedly, or bridge "previously on" recaps straight into new action without warning. Show any given freeze frame of Mr. Robot, and you'd be able to tell what you're watching -- even if you didn't recognize any of the actors.

But you will recognize many of the actors. Rami Malek was best known before this series for a supporting role in the Night at the Museum films, but of course he has gone on to win the Oscar for his performance in Bohemian Rhapsody. He's always compelling here as the highly strung but often reserved Elliot, internalizing a lot while still letting the audience in (even when not giving one of the show's numerous, snide voice-overs). Christian Slater plays the mysterious Mr. Robot, who holds powerful sway over Elliot. He perfectly captures a charismatic but dangerous figure.

Watch enough television, and you're sure to also recognize BD Wong (as an intriguing villain that emerges as the show continues), Grace Gummer as an FBI agent (who's almost as much a misfit as the man she's hunting), and Bobby Cannavale (who appears in later seasons as a "fixer" with a chillingly happy demeanor). And breaking out in this show are Carly Chaikin, Portia Doubleday, Martin Wallström, and acclaimed theater actor Michael Cristofer. All of them have a way of selling Sam Esmail's heightened world as a realistic one. And they were expertly supported by a fantastic  score by Mac Quayle.

Mr. Robot isn't perfect throughout. After a stellar first season, the show gets a little bogged down in its own cleverness (and less compelling side plots) for parts of seasons two and three. But I thought it worth blogging about because of how excellent season four is. There's a stretch of episodes through the middle of that final season that reminded me of Breaking Bad in its prime -- each episode felt to me like "the best ever episode of the series"... until the next episode would top it. And it all has a strong ending too. Weird, but strong. Which is Mr. Robot to a T.

If you've never watched Mr. Robot, and all that sounds like your brand of strange, you really should check it out. The beauty of recommending this show is that I really don't have to tell you "hang in there; it gets good." Mr. Robot knew itself right out of the gate, and only went on from there to expand its horizons. You'll know in one episode if it's for you.

Ask Not

The third episode in the newest crop of Short Treks was "Ask Not," a character study of a fresh-faced young Starfleet officer thrust into a high stakes interaction with one of our heroes.

When her starbase comes under attack, Cadet Sidhu finds herself with an unexpected assignment: keeping guard over Captain Pike, who has been arrested on charges of mutiny. As Tholians pummel the starbase, Pike works to convince Sidhu that she must release him. The young cadet finds herself in a pressure cooker situation that tests her sense of duty.

It turns out that this whole scenario is cooked up to test Sidhu's readiness to become a member of the Enterprise crew. It's a development I feel you kinda-sorta see coming before it's actually revealed... but later than you would if the story actually played fair with the audience.

A great deal about what we see just doesn't make sense. The script, by Kalinda Vasquez, tries to hang a lantern on it by mentioning some of the issues -- yet it doesn't really provide answers to help you reconcile them. How many cadets applying for the Enterprise are undergoing tests that Pike is personally taking part in? It doesn't seem like the best use of his time. Did they give Sidhu a working phaser?

Those questions are actually asked (but not answered) in the episode. But let me add these: Sidhu is nearly injured in an explosion and knocked unconscious at the start of this story. So, are they really injuring people for the sake of a training scenario? How is this all accomplished in this pre-holodeck era? Do they go into Sidhu's work space on the starbase before her shift and rig it with explosives and room shakers and stuff?

Yes, I had a hard time suspending my disbelief here. I also wasn't crazy about the desired outcome of the test. The question being posed to Cadet Sidhu is whether context matters, or you're supposed to follow orders no matter the situation. It turns out that Pike is looking for someone who will ignore context, set aside all evidence and arguments, and follow the chain of command. So I guess this is one of those reminders we get from time to time that Starfleet is a military organization, despite the relaxed structure we see every week. I understand the military generally works this way. But I still find it hard to stand up and cheer for a protagonist who is "just following orders."

I don't think that's the primary message the writer was trying to send here, though. That's because, notably, this is a scenario of power imbalance in which gender plays a major role. This isn't a #MeToo story in the text, but the subtext is very much that of a man used to getting his way trying to dominate a woman into giving him what he wants. That she stands up to him and is rewarded is the message I suspect they were going for.

And as essentially a "two-hander scene," the episode is pretty good. Amrit Kaur as Cadet Sidhu manages to hold the screen with Anson Mount as Pike. The two have a great back-and-forth that really covers a lot of ground in what's actually just a few minutes. (This is a very short Short Trek.) Pike tries pleading and ordering, appeals to ambition and emotion and more, and Sidhu parries it all. Get past the implausibility of the scenario, and it certainly does turn out to test a lot.

Still, it's just not my favorite overall. It's another installment making the case for a regular "Captain Pike's Enterprise" series (yep, he's charismatic; let's see more of him), but beyond that, I'd say it's just a B-.