Standard note: Picard meets Vash late in season three, which hasn’t happened yet in Larp Trek canon so it hasn’t happened. Which makes this all really, really weird, and that’s before the other surprise guest star even shows up.

Poor ol’ Tosk. In the actual episode, he gets to live, of course, but Geordi’s not having any of that; I guess he’s channeling his Straczynski instead of his Roddenberry at the moment.

Because that feels like the difference between Star Trek and Babylon 5, a lot of the time: this episode would have ended about ten minutes sooner, with the station crew simply miserable at the revelation that their good intentions had, instead of bearing fruit for themselves and their culturally mysterious “guest”, led to a situation more ignoble and unhappy than the one they might have thought they were helping avoid. Like that one time that Dr. Franklin secretly gave some alien kid surgery and his parents found out and they euthanized the kid because that’s how they roll, dawg.

Although to be fair to DS9, that’s a bit more how some of these stories go later in the series too.

But here, what we got was some sort of feelgood escapist fantasy resolution — literally an escape, in fact, with O’Brien conspiring with Tosk to make a break for it in the station and even explicitly (if slightly indirectly) assaulting the alien hunters while he’s at it. Which Sisko just sort of winks at, which, hey, Sisko, he’s kinda great specifically for that reason but still. It’s a bit, I dunno. It’s a bit easy.

Because Tosk is still just going to be hunted down and killed, is the implication. The Niners get to feel a bit better about the whole thing but it was no skin off their backs in the first place, and Tosk is still living a monomaniacal existence as a sentient being bred solely to be hunted and slain by a group of beings that have him outgunned and outnumbered. That’s pretty fucking grim, basically, but the episode doesn’t land grim, it tries to land on sort of a wistful “attaboy” note.

Geordi ain’t havin’ it.

Wesley Crusher, you dumb little genius.

There are so many things that bother me about the Universal Translator, and I think I’ve talked about some of this before (probably specifically in the context of Darmok, but it applies more generally), so I won’t go on at length about it again and will just suffice to say that I understand that making workable TV that is not about the realities of translation is a fair explanation for why it’s so goddam dumb. But still: so goddam dumb, and worse, they basically never do anything interesting with it. Which is central to the classic argument that Star Trek isn’t so much science fiction as it is fiction in science drag; it’s a show about society and morality more than it is about warp drives or alien worlds, and fine.

But the UT, both as specified in the handwavey technical justifications for it that exist and as presented subjectively to the viewer, is this incredible, powerful, slick-as-shit, galaxy-changing technology. Why don’t people mess around with it more? Why not just adopt a new accent that you feel like people would enjoy? Or do stupid translator tricks and stunts? Or play a game of enforced Telephone where thanks to a quick twiddle of the UT’s settings what you say is by definition not quite what the next person hears?

We see people do random stuff (though not random enough IMHO) on the holodeck all the time, because it’s obviously intended as spectacle and the stuff of fantasy. But the UT is no less powerful in theory; in practice, they’ve just sublimated it in the presentation of the show to where it’s simultaneously miraculous and wholly unworthy of mention or notice.

In other news, one of you has clearly been busy. I was delighted to see this when someone pointed it out to me the other day; I’m not sure if it’s healthy in an inevitable-death-by-recursion sort of way to have something of mine written up on TV Tropes, but I’m willing to take that risk.

Somebody’s in trouble. I’m betting there’ll be more details on Friday, based on some rumors I heard from the guy who writes this thing, though I also hear you’re welcome to speculate.

Also I sort of got to writing more on Monday about what I mentioned in that strip’s commentary, about what was sort of disappointing about “Babel” not tackling the language vs. communication aspects of the dilemma. So you can go read that if you want as well!

Also also, as a periodic mention sort of thing, we’re five episodes in now to that nutty Hellraiser film review/rebuke/regret podcast I’ve been doing, We Have Such Films To Show You, and the films have started getting properly and truly bad at this point in the series, so if you hunger for schadenfreude or feel like mapping the bridges between cinematic pleasure and pain, go give it a listen.

Also also also, butt striding.

(The very brief synopsis, if you don’t remember this one: back when DS9 was a Cardassian station as part of the decades-long occupation of Bajor, a brilliant Bajoran scientist/rebel planted a language-virus device intended to fuck with the Cardassians by rendering them mutually unintelligible. Instead, it stayed dormant until the Federation showed up, and first Miles O’Brien and then a bunch of other folks started getting sick; first some flu-like symptoms, and then aphasia, and then apparently death not long after which makes you wonder why the aphasia was even part of it but okay. It’s a race against time as many main cast members also start speaking nonsense! Kira saves the day by finding and infecting a guy who helped design the virus, who finds the antidote even as Kira herself succumbs! End.)

And, so, I get that that’s just the story they were writing — it’s an epidemic plot, first one person gets sick and then another and then it’s everybody and OH GOSH RACE AGAINST TIME FOR THE CURE — and I can totally understand that accordingly they were focusing on the narrative through-line from infection to discovery to urgent race for a solution. I’m not saying it’s an inherently problematic plot or anything.

But at the same time, what if they’d actually tackled the idea of a clever, headstrong motley command staff reacting to being struck effectively dumb by this virus by working around the verbal barrier? I mean, when, in any good Star Trek story, has a core crew’s reaction to adversity been “oh well, I suppose I’ll lie down now and wait for someone else to come up with a solution”?

If Bashir can’t keep working on his attempt to cure the virus in his usual way because speaking to the computer is out, why not try and work with a still-able assistant via drawings or touch? If Sisko can’t give commands verbally or read console text, you think he wouldn’t try and work off visuals on the dozens of displays in Ops? And so on. These people do not accede willingly to affliction or roadblock.

Considering how beloved Darmok turned out to be, it feels conspicuous in retrospect that an episode from the same period of Star Trek production and one similarly premised off a linguistic conceit (however deeply hazily presented) didn’t do more to engage with the communicative consequences of that conceit. It could have easily been a far more interesting episode of television had they gone in that direction.

Oh my god, I think they’re actually role-playing again.

We’re gonna pay a quick visit to Babel, because I can’t really pass on the chance to make characters talk funny.

And I get the feeling the DS9 writers couldn’t either, is how this happened. But it ends up being an episode with like two minutes of funny dialogue peppered through a mostly sort of tedious mystery that doesn’t really do anything great with the “language virus” idea it introduces; we get mild character notes (O’Brien works harder than is good for him, Kira’s willing to be a bit ruthless to convince someone, the legacy of Bajoran resistance is complex, Bashir’s a smart doctor guy) and sort of plodding story with a rushed ending and no really surprising, tense problems brought on by the aphasia problem on the ship. (What if Bashir had been in mid-surgery when he’d gotten nonsensical? Etc.)

And one of my complaints there is that we don’t get to see any characters coping in an active, engaging way with their loss of verbal communication; when a character gets all babbly, they’re just done. Or at least the episode is done with them. There’s a weird failure of imagination there; Star Trek’s exactly the sort of show that loves to tackle things like how unjustified it is to lapse into casual ableism instead of crediting people for their resilience and adaptability, but we get basically none of that here.

Still, flame the dark true salt, so.

This really does seem like it could be a problem for Miles. Keiko’s job on the show was mostly to be sort of unhappy on the station when she wasn’t off on a botany expedition or being sent away by Miles because everything was dangerous.

I was happy with my Nog joke but then I panicked and got worried that I’d actually tossed his name out fifty eight strips ago and pre-ruined my own joke. Thankfully, no! “I should not say his name now so I can make a joke about it later”, I am willing to believe I said to myself at the time for specifically this reason.

Planning ahead by like four months for a single throwaway joke: totally a worthwhile use of energy.

I am going to admit that it’s more logistical difficulty than actual disinterest that prevents me from putting everyone in character-appropriate costume. I just don’t have the patience to photoshop that many heads onto that many uniforms at this point, it’s enough work to just mask the actual screenshots.

I like to think that Picard’s sort of a conflicted mess about actual uniform changes; on the one hand I think he enjoys embracing the pomp of military dress and living military history and so is excited when new uniform issues or dress uniform events roll around, but at the same time he has a fundamental conservatism and desire for personal autonomy that makes change of any kind an anxiety-inducing imposition. But I’m one of those people who doesn’t like getting new clothes until I actually start wearing e.g. that new shirt and then I end up never wanting to take it off, so I might be projecting some personal issues here.

This was an easy strip to write (it’s been half-written in my head since they first stormed out, really), but boy are these a lot of new screenshots! The trickiest part was actually figuring out which episodes to grab them from; Keiko here’s from the DS9 first season finale, and Miles is from the DS9 season four episode where he finds out, SURPRISE, that Keiko’s pregnant with kid number two. (Hope there’s room for two more indeeeeed, lady.)

And then the cropping and masking and oh, what a world. But I’ve got a lot more to work with for these two now, so yay. Onward!

Possibly I am staring a mostly blank page and it’s just not clicking this morning.