Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Invasive Procedures   Rewatch 
July 12, 2015 2:11 PM - Season 2, Episode 4 - Subscribe

The station is down to a skeleton crew due to a huge plasma storm, when some refugees arrive.
posted by Solomon (7 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh, John Glover. Is there anything he can't do? I walked past him on the street in NYC sometime this summer, and I was strongly tempted to go geek out at him over how much I loved him in Brimstone.

Loved Quark's keening wails over his faked ear lobe injury. Kind of hard to believe that he'd be allowed to stay on the station after such a serious breach no matter how useful he was in fixing the problem he created, but, whatever, I'll suspend my disbelief for whatever keeps Shimerman in the cast.
posted by oh yeah! at 3:12 PM on July 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, Kira seemed pretty adamant that he'd gone too far. I sometimes wonder if that's why he tried to help, instead of just looking out for his own skin.
posted by Solomon at 3:29 PM on July 12, 2015


Glover really sells the transformation, which sells the conceit. We get Sisko's astonishment that (Curzon) Dax isn't like (Jadzia) Dax, so I guess the transformation works both ways.

Memory Alpha has more on the Trill.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:31 PM on July 12, 2015


This was one of those "Why don't they kick Quark off the station?" episodes for me, too. And Glover's performance raises this episode significantly higher for me than it would be otherwise. (The contortions the writers go through so that Verad is able to take over the station with a handful of Klingons seemed completely contrived to me).

The thing that really bugged me about the episode is that they really didn't address whether the Dax symbiont was amoral enough to run away to the Gamma Quadrant with the person that planned to kill Jadzia, or whether Verad was driving all of that.

The joined Trill system wouldn't work if symbionts were overly sentimental about their hosts, but going along with a forced joining / murder of the previous host is different from the usual mode of transfer. But we don't get any indication in the story how the symbiont feels about this. Verad has Curzon's and Jadzia's memories, so at least some part of the symbiont is active.

I think it would be a tremendously difficult thing to bring back the symbiont after the attempted murder, and Dax having mixed feelings about having it return / her depending on it to live would be a far more interesting ending than her just feeling sorry for Verad. It's another Dax episode that kind of avoids being about Dax as much as it can.
posted by creepygirl at 8:59 PM on July 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


I caught this episode in reruns a few years back, and I remember liking it but feeling like we didn't see enough of Jadzia given how much this episode concerned her. IIRC we only get little glimpses of her, and without her worm she's sickly, scared and helpless. We spend the whole episode dealing with everybody BUT Jadzia. It would have been more interesting to me if losing her worm made her go nuts, if she became super aggressive or she was experiencing wild mood swings or manifesting flashes of former hosts or something. Terry Farrell wasn't the best actor on the show, but she probably could have had some fun as a madwoman. This could have been episode that really gave Jadzia something to do. She gets more active and interesting as the show goes on, but at this point her default state was rather passive.

Despite all that, it's a good episode as it stands. With John Glover! And Megan Gallagher! Gallagher seemed to be everywhere on genre TV in the 1990s. (Nowhere Man, Millennium, the various Treks... not a bad run!) I haven't seen her in anything for a while, but a quick look at the IMDB shows she's only slightly less ubiquitous than she used to be and somehow I've just missed her in everything.

Me, my girlfriend and oh yeah! may be the only people on Earth who remember Brimstone. Glover did indeed make for a splendid Satan. His characters are just so slithery, and the man was born to play the devil. That show should've had a much longer run. I don't know how well it'd hold up today, but it was great fun back in 1990-whatever.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:20 AM on July 13, 2015


I agree that the plot was ridiculously contrived. Quark isn't dumb enough to think that those Klingons wanted to get onto the station during a terrible storm just to buy his illicit merchandise.

I'm enjoying seeing Bashir's development. I don't feel like they always did a great job with his character but he has gone from someone who has to have duplicity explained to him to someone who gets what's going on much faster, as when Quark was pretending to be injured.

(Count me as another person who loved Brimstone. Checked to see if it had been released on DVD after I watched this episode. Still no luck.)
posted by chaiminda at 8:20 AM on July 14, 2015


(Count me as another person who loved Brimstone. Checked to see if it had been released on DVD after I watched this episode. Still no luck.)

An official DVD or digital release for Brimstone is sadly unlikely - I actually put it on a list years ago of unreleased genre shows for someone in acquisitions to investigate, and the music clearance costs were too much for the company I work for to ever make a profit on. I think it's only ever going to be on sf convention DVD bootleg tables & on torrent sites. (Didn't Peter Gabriel have something to do with the score? I think there was a possibility of replacing the broadcast music for cheaper substitutes, but it still would have been iffy on whether the costs could ever be recouped, and I HATE music replacement anyway, so I was glad we didn't take it any further than researching)
posted by oh yeah! at 10:59 AM on July 14, 2015


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