DS9 Reviews: "The Ship"

I guess I'll start all of these by commenting on the title. Very straightforward. Accurate, yet mysterious. Certainly less actively misleading than the previous one.

So anyway, once again the whole senior staff is flying into danger, aka the Gamma Quadrant, aka "the area of space that is an openly declared shooting gallery." And this time, they don't even take the Defiant, their cloakable ass-kicker ship. They take a runabout. Wonder if that will bite them.

So O'Brien plays amateur geologist with his buddy Muniz while Sisko walks around importantly, nods, and says that the Federation should start mining this planet for all its worth, despite the fact that "establishing a supply line will be difficult." Dude, you're in enemy territory on the other side of a wormhole, which is a tiny little chokepoint. This would be like Winston Churchill drilling for oil in Munich.

Suddenly, the runabout orbiting the planet (which is piloted exclusively by people we've never met before...bad sign) picks up an unidentified, damaged ship flying into the planet. By frankly amazing coincidence, Sisko and the others look up and see its contrail as it hits the atmosphere. At least he has the runabout beam them to the crash site...in Stargate it probably would have happened to crash within walking distance.

Anyway, the crashed ship is a series of unidentifiable gray boxes buried in a ridge. However, we are supposed to instantly identify it as a Jem'Hadar fighter! Shock! Awe! (Thankfully, Sisko breathlessly identifies it for us. But damn, was this a failure of the Art Department.)

The crew cautiously climbs aboard the wreck and finds everyone--the Jem'Hadar soldier-goons and their Vorta captain--dead.
BASHIR: Looks like he's suffered total osteonecrosis.
SISKO: Bwa?
BASHIR: All his bones are shattered.

Now I'm not a doctor, but "osteonecrosis" sounds like all of your bones have died, not *been pulverized.* In fact we soon find out that the crew has died of inertial dampener failure.

For the non-Trekheads in the audience, "inertial dampeners" are the magic boxes that allow the ship to accelerate from any speed to any other arbitrary speed without the crew feeling any G-forces. They started getting mentioned in scripts when a fan pointed out to the Next Generation production team that the crew should be "crushed into chunky salsa" every time the Enterprise executes a typical maneuver.

Usually, they "fail" to just enough of an extent to slam the crew around, dramatically but non-fatally, during action scenes. Really, the slightest hiccup should kill everyone. This is a rare case of a fatal malfunction in Star Trek. They don't show most of the bodies--that one Jem'Hadar is a little too intact, but hey, it's a prime time show.

So the idea of this ship being struck by dampener failure is interesting, but unfortunately it leaves the impression that these ships are REALLY unreliable, since it was apparently JUST a malfunction.

Anyway, digression over. Point is, they've lucked into an incredible find. The Dominion has all kinds of awesome tech they've been kicking the Feds around with, and now they've got a chance to crack it. Now personally, I'd have preferred that some redshirts discover the ship and then call in Sisko, as the contrivance is still pretty nuts. But then they'd have to explain why Sisko didn't just bring the Defiant.

But now is when things go wrong. Another fighter shows up and destroys the runabout in two shots. Then a bunch of screaming Jem'Hadar run towards our heroes as they retreat towards the wreck to take cover. One more redshirt is killed outright, and Muniz takes a glancing hit in the midsection, but they make it, and the attack stops.

Now, remember when I mentioned the crappy phaser effects in the last episode? I don't think it's memory playing tricks on me, they are AWFUL. Sisko doesn't hit a damn thing and the Jem'Hadar blasts look and sound incredibly cheesy. This scene is supposed to be unnerving and brutal and it's utterly ruined.

Anyway, Sisko occupies O'Brien with trying to make the ship flyable, as the Defiant won't be there for days. He's very determined to hold the ship as he's figured out that there has got to be a very compelling reason why the Dominion hasn't just blown them all to hell. A Vorta sends them a transmission asking to meet Sisko outside. She (and she's a cutie pie!) tenders him the extremely reasonable offer of removing all of his people and transporting them unharmed to DS9.

Sisko rather curtly rejects the offer, which is pretty generous considering that these two powers are basically fighting an undeclared war and, as the Vorta points out, he clearly has no claim to the ship. But from his perspective, he has no reason to trust the Vorta to keep her word, and he's figured out that there is something on this seemingly unremarkable ship that the Dominion are desperate enough to NOT kill them for.

Still, I would have liked to see O'Brien question Sisko's zealotry, considering that his friend is actually badly wounded.

Anyway, Ms. Vorta is not trustworthy after all. She's beamed a Jem'Hadar aboard the wreck, who turns invisible (they can do that) and stalks the crew. He attacks O'Brien and Dax with a knife. This seems rather dumb at first...first, cause he brought a knife to a gun fight, and second that he didn't manage to kill one despite being invisible. Of course, Muniz promptly shoots him dead with a phaser.

The soldier's lack of a rifle makes everyone even more suspicious, and sure that there is something awesome aboard the ship that they are afraid of damaging. O'Brien finds some minor alterations and irregularities from the standard Jem'Hadar fighter design, but this turns out to go nowhere. Then Muniz distracts everyone by starting to die in agony. Apparently Jem'Hadar energy weapons "leave an anticoagulant" in the wounds they cause. This line makes it sound like they are shooting rat poison beams, and really needed to be rephrased. However, the fact that a wounded crewman is bleeding out on the floor is so dark for Star Trek that it does make an impact. He raves, hallucinates...it is tough stuff to watch.

Sadly, this leads to an awful plotline for Worf as he assholes it up, telling O'Brien that Muniz is a goner and needs to be told cause of honor or something. The humans, being rather human, are doing the standard sort of "you're gonna make it" bedside manner thing, which goes as far as Sisko ordering him to stay alive. Of course Muniz is not an idiot and can tell he's a goner. So Worf is just an asshole for the sake of ramping up the tension. As if they didn't have enough to deal with.

The Vorta tries to negotiate again, apologizing (!) for beaming in her knife-wielding maniac and extending Sisko another sweetheart offer. He cuts her off again, and she beams up and suddenly these big white things start exploding in the atmosphere as Sisko hustles back.

The crew almost instantly figures out that these explosives would kill them instantly if the enemy fighter was actually trying to hit them, and that "they're just trying to rattle us." They proceed to get rattled. They try and fail to fly the ship off the planet. Oh, and Muniz dies during a shouting match. Go team.

However, the real reason for the Dominion's interest in the ship is shortly revealed. A console suddenly collapses into a pile of goo, which then solidifies into a pile of ash. A Founder just became a dead Founder. Its death cry is heard by the Vorta and her troops through an open vent in the side of the ship (yes kids, this spaceship HAS A SCREEN DOOR). I guess dampener failure kills goo-creatures too, just slower.

Sisko and the Vorta negotiate one more time. This is very close to being a good scene, but it's ruined by one line of dialogue. The Vorta's troops have all killed themselves for failing to save one of their gods. This is a logical and chilling extension of the Founders' genetically engineering both races for their needs. The Vorta is a bit smarter and less zealous, but she's still clearly shattered. She tells Sisko that her offer was genuine, and she didn't tell him about the Founder because they would have tortured it. Sisko says no, they would have let the Founder go because all they wanted was the ship. The Vorta says that they didn't care about the ship with the Founder's life in danger.

So we get the message; these two cultures have completely misjudged each other, leading to unnecessary death on both sides. But Sisko spells it out for the slow kids: "If only we'd been able to TRUST each other!"

Hello Sisko! This is an enemy power that killed your people. Of course you didn't trust her, what with all the lying she did. Gah, makes my skin crawl.

Anyway, they let her take some of the changeling's remains and book it. Personally, I would have stunned her and taken her to a nice cell on Earth. All her troops are dead and the Defiant is somehow going to get there before any Dominion aid. But whatever.

The scene that makes this episode truly great is after all the fireworks, back on DS9. Sisko is trying to write the families of the five crewmembers who died. Dax sits with him and the two of them reminisce about the lost...not just Muniz but the ones flying the runabout and the lineless extra cut down by the Jem'Hadar (who was apparently a great trumpet player). They actually sit down and talk about the five redshirts who bit the dust forty minutes ago. Dax tells Sisko that the successful retrieval of the Jem'Hadar ship was worth the five lives because it's likely to save five thousand, or five million. Then Worf joins O'Brien in a vigil for Muniz.

This episode isn't the best of DS9, but it shows off some of the things that made it really cool and unique. It's mostly just an action episode with some dark twists, but the mutual cultural incomprehension of the Feds and the Dominion soldiers was very interesting, and the general theme of presenting the nastier side of the typically-antiseptic conflicts the Federation gets into is really starting to come out. It is much more fully explored in "Nor the Battle to the Strong," a couple episodes down the line, but this episode really drives home the fact that the Dominion are coming for blood. And of course, the retrieval of the enemy ship is an important plot element in the series as a whole.

Runabout Tally: One destroyed by a Jem'Hadar fighter.