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My latest wallpaper creation

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The 2025 Star Trek Winter Gift Exchange is here!

Q: What is the Star Trek Winter Gift Exchange?

A: It’s a fanworks exchange for any fandom within the Star Trek universe, from The Original Series to Strange New Worlds!

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Q: How does it work?

A: When you sign up, you’ll provide three options of gift ideas you’d like to receive, as well as gifts you’re open to making. Once sign-ups close, the mod will send you the url of the person you’ll make a fanwork for and their requests. You’ll have the month of January to fulfill one of the requests. Make sure your ask box is open so the mod or your Secret Santa can contact you!

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Q: Do I have to make fanart/fanfic for the exchange?

A: Nope! All types of fanworks are welcome :) Fics, art, edits, fanvids, playlists, moodboards, podfics, among other things! As long as you’re creating it, it’s welcome.

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Q: What are the important dates I should know?

A: January 17, 11:59 pm CST: sign-ups close

January 20: You’ll be notified who your recipient is.

February 10-28: Post your gifts!

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Q: Sounds awesome! How do I sign up?

A: Fill out this form!

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If you have other questions, send an ask. And don’t forget to spread the word!

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My AO3 Wrapped (graphic courtesy of @spicedrobot)

I wrote 54 fics and remember none of them. But apparently I gave two of those the exact same title. This will bother me forever. Anyways my stats kind of suck this year I didn't really do anything substantial.

OG Post

Mentioned Fics:

More Than a Good Team

The Weeds

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Hi!

I know this is very random, but I love your 2023 AO3 Wrapped graphic and was wondering if you were going to do one for 2024 because my friends and I love to play these sort of tag games (and one of my friends specifically asked me to tag her in any ao3 wrapped tags/games) and I would love to be able to share this with her and with my mutuals (with credit to you, obviously).

No pressure to answer, of course, I was just curious

Oh, I completely forgot about this!

Here's the 2024 version. Please @ if/when you use this version. I love to see everyone's stats. <3

For anyone else wanting to do this, to find your own stats:

Go to your ao3 dashboard

Select “Statistics”

Click on the “2024” button

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GYWO 2025 Pledging OPEN

Interested in committing yourself to writing in 2025? Come write with Get Your Words Out, a year-long writing challenge dedicated to helping you get your words out.

Choose one of our 13 pledge levels to track either your word count or your writing habit, and join a supportive community of writers who are available to celebrate your successes, vent your frustrations, and help you overcome roadblocks. GYWO also provides monthly challenges, prompts, discussions about writing, writing sprints, and more!

Our members include original writers, fan writers, published authors, and hobbyists. If you write, you’re welcome at GYWO.

Sign-up with your Dreamwidth or OpenID account.

Pledges & Requirements information is available on our Dreamwidth. More information is available on our website.

Sign-ups for 2025 are open through January 15, 2025.

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DS9 Season 5 Thoughts

So, last season ended on... pretty much the same note season 3 ended on, which was that the Changelings had infiltrated positions of power across the galaxy. Let's see if this season they actually do anything about that.

1. Apocalypse Rising: Sisko, O'Brien, and Odo get to cosplay Klingons as they infiltrate the Empire in order to expose Gowron as a Changeling. But it turns out they had the right place, wrong guy.

2. The Ship: Sisko finds a downed Jem'Hadar ship and says "finders keepers", but a Vorta shows up and asks for it back. It takes half the crews of both sides dying before they realize that the Vorta just wanted to retrieve a sick Changeling from the ship, making the entire stand-off pointless.

3. Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places: WTF is this title and WTF did I just watch? Worf wants to make the moves on Quark's Klingon ex-wife, so Dax sexually assaults him to take his mind off it. Meanwhile, O'Brien has to keep removing himself from situations where he could cheat on Keiko with Kira because he totally would if he could.

4. Nor the Battle to the Strong: Good lord, this series was even prescient about putting yourself in dangerous situations for social media clout and then quickly getting in way over your head. At least Jake was able to admit he was a dumbass.

5. The Assignment: Keiko trolls the shit out of O'Brien by pretending to be possessed by a wraith in order to finally get some goddamn respect. That's my interpretation of this episode and I'm sticking with it.

6. Trials and Tribble-ations: lol. To be fair, I did see this specific episode back in the 90's because a friend of mine taped it and insisted I see it, but at least now I have context for who all the DS9 characters are, and it made it even funnier.

7. Let He Who is Without Sin: Dax drags Worf to Pornworld against his will, then calls him "controlling" when she does her own thing without any regard for his feelings. Then she acts all surprised when he sides with the people protesting irresponsible self-indulgence.

8. Things Past: Odo, Sisko, Dax, and Garak get Quantum Leaped into some Bajoran slaves in the past, but it turns out Odo was just having an anxiety attack over a mistake he'd made and dragged everyone else into it.

9. The Ascent: Odo and Quark get jealous of Kira and Dukat having gotten two "mortal enemies go road-tripping" episodes, decide to go on one themselves. Meanwhile, Jake and Nog become roommates, but now ironically it's Jake who's the undisciplined one while Nog is more responsible.

10. Rapture: Everyone gets new uniforms, causing Sisko to see obelisks, make maps out of his mashed potatoes, and go on crazy rants that are enough to deny Bajor entry into the Federation, eventually forcing Bashir to lobotomize him.

11. The Darkness and the Light: Someone who wasn't even part of the Cardassian military manages to covertly murder most of Kira's former resistance members, putting the competence of the actual Cardassian military to shame.

12. The Begotten: Odo's a dad... again, and has to lose the child... again. But at least he got his shapeshifting back from it.

13. For the Uniform: The Maquis start using chemical warfare against Cardassian settlements, so Sisko uses chemical warfare right back at them. And everyone's just... okay with this?

14. In Purgatory's Shadow: The episode opens teasing a Garak/Bashir road-trip, only to bait-and-switch it to a Garak/Worf road trip, only to Uno-reverse-card it back to Garak/Bashir. Also, if Bashir's been replaced by a Changeling since before the uniform switch in episode 10, then which one got frisky on Risa?

15. By Inferno's Light: Dukat gets tired of being the butt-monkey for the past couple seasons and joins the Dominion. Meanwhile, Worf spends the entire episode getting beaten up, as Worf does.

16. Doctor Bashir, I Presume?: One episode after getting the real Bashir back, the Doctor from Voyager shows up to offer to make a new fake Bashir, but then Bashir's parents show up to reveal the real Bashir has been a fake Bashir all along, so they're already all good.

17. A Simple Investigation: Odo gets his cherry popped by a woman who turns out to be a bit of a Changeling herself: in that she's actually a completely different person living under an assumed identity, and also already married.

18. Business as Usual: Quark gets roped in with some weapons dealers and sabotages the deal after learning the weapons would be used for genocide, deciding that financial bankruptcy was better than moral bankruptcy.

19. Ties of Blood and Water: Kira decides to copy Garak from a couple episodes ago and has her Cardassian father figure show up just so he can die in front of her of medical complications.

20. Ferengi Love Songs: Quark goes back to his mother's house to help other Ferengi come out of the closet.

21. Soldiers of the Empire: Worf takes an assignment on a ship with the worst Klingons in the galaxy, and Dax invites herself along because she can't imagine Worf being able to function without her telling him what to do all the time.

22. Children of Time: The crew find a planet inhabited by their descendants, who inform them they they're going to get sent back in time and then have nothing better to do but breed like rabbits. But Future Odo realizes they've already hit their time-travel quota for the season and stops it from happening.

23. Blaze of Glory: Sisko and Eddington go road-tripping to stop some missiles that don't exist, because it was all a ruse to allow Eddington to go down fighting for... basically no reason.

24. Empok Nor: O'Brien and Garak take some gold-shirts with them to go exploring a seemingly abandoned Cardassian station, with predictable results for the gold-shirts. Garak also realizes there hasn't been an outbreak of crazypox for a few seasons and wants to have his go at it.

25. In the Cards: Jake really, really wants a Pokemon card.

26. Call to Arms: The Federation is forced to abandon the station after the Dominion and Cardassians attack, but Sisko swears he'll be back because they're not about to change the title of the series to "Terok Nor".

So, now that we've left on a cliffhanger of the station being abandoned to the Dominion, I'm curious how long into the next season that status is going to remain. Even Picard getting kidnapped by the Borg only lasted until the first episode of the next season. Plus things are going to get pretty cramped if they have too many episodes with only the Defiant set to work with.

Bashir is finally growing on me now that he's abandoned his bravado and womanizing and focusing on being a doctor. He was single-handedly ruining the series for me in the first season due to being such an insufferable creep. But it's also been revealed that he's genetically enhanced, so he's still kind of annoyingly The Special in some way, but at least he doesn't rub it in people's faces.

Dax is also starting to finally develop a personality of her own, which is conceptually a plus, it's just that her newly-developed personality is really annoying. She's basically just a troll and a gossip and doesn't seem to care about how she makes other people feel. She forced herself on Worf, then he entered into a relationship with her out of what seemed like obligation, at which point she's just been incredibly controlling and manipulative of him. Which, maybe that's a Klingon thing and they go for that, but from a human perspective, it's uncomfortable.

Also, I recently learned that Nog's actor was nearly 30 while playing him here. All this time I thought he was, like, 12, but no, he is just the ultimate short king.

Also impressed at Kira's actress being able to fit back into that jumpsuit so soon after having a baby. Hopefully she'll get more episodes next season, since her pregnancy this season limited what the story could do with her.

So with that, onto the next season of Terok Nor Deep Space Nine.

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DS9 Season 4 Thoughts

The Dominion is eeeeverywhere! No one knows who we can trust! So going into Season 4, our problem is...

the Klingons? Really? Guess old habits die hard WITH HONOR.

1-2. Way of the Warrior: New season, new intro! The Klingons show up to invade Cardassia under the pretext that the Cardassian government has been replaced by Changelings and they're simply "liberating" it. So Sisko gets his own Klingon in the form of Worf to stand against them. And unlike Riker last season who was just a one-off, Worf is here to stay.

3. The Visitor: Jake acts out the plot of several Doctor Who episodes where Sisko bounces through time while Jake takes the long way around, and upon Jake's death of old age, the timeline resets and it's like nothing ever happened.

4. Hippocratic Oath: O'Brien and Bashir get captured by the Jem'Hadar, but they decide not to kill them since neither one is a redshirt. Although O'Brien may not be a redshirt, he does seem to be increasingly red-pilled, as his sexism and xenophobia were on full display here.

5. Indiscretion: Kira and Dukat go road-tripping together, where the real treasure is the Cardassian asses we stabbed along the way.

6. Rejoined: Whoa, a same-sex kiss played completely, er, straight in an episode from 1995? Neat. Although, by the rules laid out in this episode, shouldn't Dax's continued friendship with Sisko be forbidden, too?

7. Starship Down: Sisko for some reason takes the entire senior staff with him just to renegotiate a trade deal between Quark and a Gamma Quadrant trader, and they once again all end up in deadly peril because he had the bright idea to fly the ship into a gas giant.

8. Little Green Men: Quark and Rom accidentally stumble upon yet another new method of time travel and get transported to post-WWII earth where they're mistaken for Martians. It's no wonder Starfleet offers a specific "So, you've found yourself displaced in time" course, with how seemingly easily and frequently this happens.

9. The Sword of Kahless: Worf gets invited on a treasure hunt, but ends up being a buzzkill. Though they rightfully conclude that returning a legendary artifact won't unite the empire, just cause it to devolve into chaos while everyone bickers over who gets to have it.

10. Our Man Bashir: Garak acts as the gatekeeper for spying while Bashir plays out a James Bond fantasy with the rest of the crew unwittingly cast in the supporting roles.

11. Homefront: Changelings have infiltrated Earth, with the aim of sowing enough distrust that people give up their freedoms willingly in the name of security. This episode is pre-9/11, by the way.

12. Paradise Lost: Sisko finds out that Starfleet had been lying about the caravan of Changelings crossing the border, bringing their murderers and rapists, eating the dogs and eating the cats of the people who live there, in order to justify declaring martial law.

13. Crossfire: Fresh off losing the hypotenuse in the last love triangle with Kira, Odo finds himself in another one, spending the entire episode hearing about how everyone appreciates him but nobody loves him. At least he got a hug.

14. Return to Grace: Dukat enjoyed his road trip with Kira 10 episodes ago so much they go on another one, and now he wants to be another leg in her love polygon.

15. Sons of Mogh: Worf gets in trouble for consensual acts between himself and his brother, so ends up non-consensually violating his brother's autonomy in order to not run afoul of regulations.

16. Bar Association: Rom forms a union and then goes on strike against Quark to protest for healthcare, paid vacation, and overtime pay. Americans watching are like, "Wait, those are things?"

17. Accession: A Bajoran pulled from 200 years in the past comes through the wormhole and Sisko is all too happy to hand over his "Emissary" title to someone more deserving. Until that guy starts trying to Make Bajor Great Again.

18. Rules of Engagement: The Klingons accuse Worf of going "It's Worfin' time!" all over a civilian transport, but it turned out the victims were all crisis actors. Alex Jones rejoices.

19. Hard Time: O'Brien commits a minor offense and is implanted with memories of spending 20 years in prison as punishment. Then he becomes a walking case study in why, if the end goal really is to stop crime, that mere incarceration is counterproductive.

20. Shattered Mirror: Sisko gets kidnapped by the Bad Fanfic Universe again, stuff happens to the Bad Fanfic versions of the characters, nobody cares.

21. The Muse: Jake gets entranced by a creepy woman who's after his braaaaains. And somehow in the future, people not only still know how to handwrite things, but write in cursive as well. Meanwhile, Odo and Lwaxana get married in order to give him paternity rights to her child, is now Dado.

22. For the Cause: Kasidy is suspected of being a Maquis infiltrator, but ♫it was Eddington all along♫. Meanwhile the show tries to set Garak up with a teenage love interest young enough to be his daughter, which for some reason they consider more appropriate than just letting him be gay.

23. To the Death: No! To the Pain. Anyway, the Jem'Hadar ransack DS9, and while on the way to kick their asses, they run into some other Jem'Hadar who have a beef with those Jem'Hadar, so they end up working with those Jem'Hadar to beat up the other Jem'Hadar. Jem'Hadar.

24. The Quickening: Bashir stays behind on a planet with a pledge to cure a planet-wide congenital plague in a week, but best he can do is make it so that no one in the future is born with it but everyone alive now is still screwed, so close enough.

25. Body Parts: Quark gets excommunicated from Ferengi commerce for not being enough of a predatory capitalist piece of shit. Meanwhile, the wrong cast member gets pregnant in real life so they need to BS a reason for Kira to be pregnant instead of Keiko.

26. Broken Link: The Founders infect Odo with "I'm melting, oh, what a world" disease, forcing him to go back home for treatment and receive punishment, which was the same punishment Q got for being a naughty boy: forced to become human and unceremoniously dropped naked in front of the Captain. #JusticeForOdo?

All right, halfway done with the series! Still pretty good so far, but some of the writing choices in this season kind of rubbed me the wrong way, particularly about O'Brien. Originally I liked O'Brien because I sympathized with him as the put-upon engineer who always has to clean up everything constantly breaking around him. But in this season he started getting... I dunno... kinda more generally mean-spirited and selfish. It almost felt like the writers were worried that the Bashir/Garak relationship was coming across as "too gay", so they performed some kind of "conversion therapy" for Bashir by making him hang out with O'Brien instead, and had O'Brien show off how a straight and manly man is supposed to act to a toxic level.

I'm not terribly fond of the new intro theme song. It sounds like the old intro theme song, just slowed to like 3/4 speed, so doesn't have as much "excitement", I guess.

There were also some cold opens that were "all the regulars are contractually obligated to a speaking part in every episode, but this episode isn't about them, so here's a random scene with them" to a distracting level. The one about Dax rearranging Odo's furniture was a particularly egregious one, because... what?

Other than that, the show continues to be scary prescient about current society, especially predicting security policy post-9/11 five years before it happened. And also the episode about the new Emissary who ran on regressing Bajoran society by 200 years for the benefit of a privileged few. In both cases, unlike reality, the ones advocating for those things eventually admitted they were wrong and stepped aside. If only.

But now, Changelings are everywhere! Infiltrating top levels of government and sowing chaos! And now that Odo isn't a Changeling anymore, does that mean his Putty Privilege is also revoked when it comes to dealing with the Dominion? We shall see in Season 5!

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DS9 Season 3 Thoughts

On to Season 3! Last time, the crew made contact with members of the Dominion who told them to stay off their lawn in the Gamma Quadrant. Will Sisko comply?

Probably not, so here we go.

1-2. The Search: Sisko gets a new ship to play with that's better than those wimpy runabouts. All simulations show them losing if the Dominion attacks them, so Sisko figures they can't fare any worse if he just takes the entire senior staff with him to go face the Dominion on their own turf. They all promptly get captured, while Odo has some slime time with his own people, only to discover that they're the Dominion's founders.

3. The House of Quark: Quark kills a guy, is sentenced to marriage.

4. Equilibrium: Dax gets a song stuck in her head, but unfortunately the Shazam servers in the future take a week to return a result. Also, when did they get the Defiant back? Two episodes ago it was trashed and adrift in the Gamma Quadrant. Did the Dominion really let them go back to get it?

5. Second Skin: Kira gets gaslit like a pilot light, ends up with a Car-dad-ssian.

6. The Abandoned: Odo adopts a baby Jem'Hadar, who quickly becomes a violent, angsty teenage Jem'Hadar with an enzyme addiction who runs off to join a gang. Also, is the series trying to set up an Odo/Kira relationship? Almost every episode this season has given them a "moment", and now she's bringing him flowers. Like, it's cute, but I'm still all for Ace Odo and the ability for a female and male-identifying character to have a platonic friendship (I don't count Sisko/Dax because Sisko has made clear that Dax being Curzon is all that's keeping him from hitting on her).

7. Civil Defense: O'Brien decides he wants to try out that "killing everyone by accidentally tripping a hidden deadly security protocol" bit from "Armageddon Game" for real. Gul Dukat tries to gloat, but ends up getting stuck there with them. We still cool, guys?

8. Meridian: An extremely creepy guy pursues Kira in order to make the moderately creepy guy pursuing Dax come across as less creepy by comparison.

9. Defiant: Holy crap, it's Riker! But not that Riker, the cheap transporter accident knockoff Riker from TNG. He's still got a complex about that and thinks stealing the Defiant and blowing up some Cardassians will make everything better.

10. Fascination: This season's bout of crazypox breaks out around the station, this time making everyone fall madly in love with each other. Odo is once again immune, but they seem to be setting up a love triangle between Odo, Kira, and Bareil, which is a damn shame because love triangle stories tend to be terrible and make me hate every character involved, which is extra sucky because Odo and Kira are my two favorites (just not together).

11-12. Past Tense: Sisko, Bashir, and Dax accidentally get transported to... (checks calendar) ... three weeks ago, and are forced to participate in a homeless riot in order to maintain the timeline. Unfortunately, someone had already messed up the timeline, which resulted in there being bulky CRT monitor computers, giant bricks of flip-phones, and shotguns being the terrorist weapon of choice in 2024 (though, to be fair, if they can just keep that last change and stop the proliferation of military-grade semi-automatic rifles to civilians, that would be great).

13. Life Support: Winn wanted to be Kai for the perks, not the responsibility, and literally works a mortally wounded Bareil to death in order to get a peace treaty she can take credit for. Otherwise a fairly poignant episode about when to stop treatment and just let someone go.

14. Heart of Stone: After the death of the hypotenuse of their love triangle last episode, Odo and Kira confess their feelings for each other. But, of course, since Odo is never allowed to have nice things, Kira turns out to be a Changeling who's just here to troll him. #JusticeForOdo.

15. Destiny: Goddamn I hate "prophecy" stories that end with, "Well, if you redefine the meaning of literally every word in that word salad, it ends up vaguely resembling what happened, therefore there must be something to it." No, it was not as the prophecy foretold. Shit just happens and you just twist your vague predictions to accommodate it and then give yourself a pat on the back and demand people take you seriously. Go away.

16. Prophet Motive: The wormhole entities turn the Grand Nagus into a communist, so Quark threatens to annoy them for eternity unless they turn him back.

17. Visionary: O'Brien starts jumping through time, and they figure out every component of his time-skips to the point they can trigger them at will and see the future. And then will likely never utilize this knowledge again. Though the episode really should have ended on O'Brien going to bed, yet another O'Brien popping up, and him just lamenting, "Oh god, NOW what?"

18. Distant Voices: Deep Space Nine presents Inside Out, starring Bashir as Sadness, Dax as Joy, O'Brien as Fear, Kira as Anger, Odo as Disgust, and Garak as Bing-Bong.

19. Through the Looking Glass: Mirror!O'Brien shows up and kidnaps Sisko and takes him back to the universe where everyone is horny all the time. Really hope this doesn't become a recurring thing, since "multiverse" stories that are merely "it's the same people, but they're different!" are rarely compelling.

20. Improbable Cause: Bashir's boyfriend is in trouble again, and this time it's Odo to the rescue. They track down Garak's old boss who offers to let them join a war against the Dominion, and Garak... accepts?

21. The Die is Cast: The Cardassians and Romulans launch an attack on the Dominion, but it was all a trap thanks to a Changeling replacing the Romulan commander. Makes me wonder how many other characters have or will become replaced by Changelings, or if they're going to even bother trying to come up with a way to detect it, since even Odo can't tell and has been fooled twice now.

22. Explorers: A pleasantly low-stakes episode in which Sisko can somehow build an entire functioning spaceship by hand in only three weeks, the flies it to Cardassia just to prove that he can.

23. Family Business: Quark goes home to teach us that the only thing a Ferengi values more than profit is oppressing women, even if doing so causes a massive loss of profit. Also, glad they finally gave a shout-out to how many runabouts they've trashed and the need to get new ones.

24: Shakaar: Winn continues to fail upwards by becoming the presumptive next president due to having no viable opponents and the Bajoran populace getting all their information from BOX News and not realizing she's a piece of shit. So Kira nominates a popular upstart last minute to run against her and actually make her work for it, and Winn cries "coup" and "rigged election" and good fucking god this episode is too prescient. They may have gotten the state of affairs of 2024 wrong in the episode that was literally about 2024, but then accurately predicted them in pretty much all of their Winn episodes.

25. Facets: Dax asks the people closest to her to host her previous lives so that she can talk to them. Including... random girl who had two lines a couple episodes ago who's now acting like she's part of the inner circle. And Odo, who has historically been immune to psychic shenanigans. But the episode continues to exemplify that Curzon was a piece of shit, and that Dax-centric episodes still manage to have nothing to do with Dax herself, but rather her previous incarnations or Trill customs, leaving Dax with still no solid personality or motives three seasons in.

26: The Adversary: Sisko gets promoted to Captain and decides to celebrate by almost starting a war and blowing up the entire senior staff due to bad intel from a Changeling imposter.

Three seasons down, four to go! Bashir is doing a lot better this season, since his womanizing and bragging have been toned way down and he can actually focus on being a doctor. Dax is still just a cardboard cutout there to remind people of the opinions and actions of her previous incarnations, but still have no identity of her own.

And then towards the end of the season they just awkwardly brought in a couple of women simply to be love interests to our crew members who are still lacking a heterosexual partner. At least, I'm assuming what's-her-face who had two lines and hit on Bashir at the beginning of one episode and then was suddenly chummy enough with the senior staff to participate in Dax's memory roulette ritual a few episodes later is supposed to be a love interest for Bashir. Go away, random lady, he already has Garak.

The choice of crew of the Defiant also reminds me of a really, really old Star Trek joke I read as a kid about the "Kirk Maneuver", which is "Kirk knows this is the most dangerous planet in the universe so takes his entire senior staff with him when he beams down". Like, shouldn't there be a separate operations crew for the Defiant so that you don't suddenly lose your entire station leadership if something were to go wrong? But, nope, The Main Characters Do Everything.

[space-dog-from-space]

DS9 Season 2 Thoughts

I've made it through the second season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine after missing out on it during its original run due to being too young to understand it at the time. Let's see how it holds up now!

1. The Homecoming: Kira goes to rescue a Bajoran prisoner who she hopes can unify the planet, but it turns out all the legends about him are just that, and he's just some guy who's not up to the task. But Sisko knows how religious people work, and insists he play the part anyway, since they won't be bothered about whether any claims about him are real or not.

2. The Circle: The plot continues to be too real as a government official conspires with the leader of a small but vocal conservative religious sect to use terrorism to overthrow the government and install themselves. Even the more liberal religious leader still has naughty fantasies.

3. The Siege: The three-parter misses the landing by naively believing that religious extremists attempting to overthrow the government would actually reconsider if shown proof that they're secretly being funded by an enemy power who wants to use them to destabilize the country.

4. Invasive Procedures: Okay, seriously, is Dax just utterly emotionally dissociated from her current body? She shrugs off constant sexual harassment and objectification, she was indifferent about being executed for a crime she didn't commit, she didn't treat Bashir's sexualized replica of her as any kind of violation, and now she's like, "Welp, this guy wants my liver squid. Oh well, bye, guys." Also, I get that Quark's an entertaining POS, but there are certain things he's done that he really should be facing consequences for.

5. Cardassians: Our fabulous Cardassian tailor returns! I'm not sure how I feel about sending the kid back with his bio dad, but if it had ended with him staying with his adoptive family, I'm not sure how I would have felt about that, either. It was a crap situation for that poor kid either way.

6. Melora: The station crew trip over themselves trying to improve the accessibility of the station for a new special needs crew member. Gosh, if only they were that worried about its accessibility for their permanent crew member who still has to contort himself into unnatural shapes on a daily basis in order to utilize its systems. #JusticeForOdo

7. Rules of Acquisition: Quark's new business partner starts hitting on him. His partner then turns out to be a woman, which actually ends up making it even more scandalous.

8. Necessary Evil: Oh, cool, a film noir episode that shows what the station was like under Cardassian rule. Quark finally gets some comeuppance but is saved by plot armor. Odo explores his inner Columbo. He was also apparently a lab subject and then a sideshow attraction before Gul Dukat hired him as security, so good lord, someone give this poor slime a break.

9. Second Sight: A woman in an unhappy marriage literally dreams up a self-insert OC to pair with Sisko.

10. Sanctuary: An entire nation of refugees comes through the wormhole and demands to settle on Bajor because it's their holy promised land. They get denied, then get pissy because one deeply religious group annexing territory from another deeply religious group and then having to live side-by-side has historically worked out so well in the past.

11. Rivals: Prince Humperdinck brings aboard a gatcha game that breaks the universe's RNG.

12. The Alternate: It's finally Odo's turn to get infected with the crazypox that he usually has to save everyone else from. Although, even without the crazypox as an excuse, I think he's earned the right to throw a violent temper tantrum after all the bullshit he's had to put up with. Also, "Wasn't that pillar over here before?" "It was in my way; I had it moved." is living rent-free in my brain due to how deliberate the inclusion of this exchange was yet how utterly pointless it ended up being. A red herring is one thing, but the entire pillar subplot simply vanished entirely following this scene and it left me so confused.

13. Armageddon Game: Aliens gift Sisko a deepfake video of how they would have killed O'Brien and Bashir if they were actually halfway competent about it.

14. Whispers: O'Brien becomes paranoid that everyone is conspiring against him, and it turns out he's right. Nice subtle touch to having him repeatedly order coffee throughout the episode, since his coffee habits in the previous episode were what initially clued them in that he was a fake.

15. Paradise: Sisko: "Excuse me, are y'all with the cult?" Alixus: "We're not a cult, we're an isolated commune that rejects technology and--" Sisko: "Yeah, this is it."

16. Shadowplay: Odo and Dax figure out everyone in the village is a hologram because the episode title gave it away. Also, I really hope that Odo remains aro-ace and the rest of the crew come to respect that, instead of constantly teasing him about his lack of a sex life and ultimately forcing him into thinking he needs a relationship to be happy. He already has to contort himself into uncomfortable shapes to conform. Don't force him to contort into conformity any further. #JusticeForOdo

17. Playing God: Huh. So there are rats on space stations. Also, Dax discovers a potentially universe-destroying proto-universe and decides to dump it in the Gamma Quadrant for them to deal with.

18. Profit and Loss: Quark teaches us that when a woman says "no", she really means "yes" if you hound and threaten her long enough.

19. Blood Oath: Curzon Dax continues to posthumously make me question Sisko's choice in friends, as Jadzia Dax now feels obligated to attend a Klingon murder party that Curzon RSVP'd to.

20-21. The Maquis: Humans set up colonies next to a known bear cave, whine that the Federation won't protect them from the bears, start an anti-bear movement.

22. The Wire: Bashir goes into a panic after his boyfriend ODs. Honestly, Bashir really needs to stop chasing women and recognize he has way more chemistry with Garak. He's always been annoyingly shallow and self-serving to the point that I wouldn't trust him as a doctor no matter how skilled he was. But this episode actually let him give a damn about someone without objectifying them, which is good progress. Hopefully it sticks. Also, Sisko's proclamation to keep Quark locked up "forever" in the previous episode didn't seem to last very long. But at least now I know where the "Especially the lies" meme comes from!

23. Crossover: Bashir learned nothing from the previous episode and goes right back to womanizing and talking incessantly about himself. Damn. Kira's meets her mirror universe counterpart who instantly falls in love with her, which... same.

24. The Collaborator: The liberals lose the election because they're more concerned with their candidate being 100% unproblematic than preventing the entire planet from falling under the rule of a goddamn religious tyrant. (throws table in a fit of "this is too real")

25. Tribunal: O'Brien goes on vacation to Planet Kangaroo Court, which is actually a bit more relaxing than what he usually has to put up with.

26. The Jem'Hadar: are truly truly truly outrageous. And really want to meet a Klingon, and I know we're getting Worf eventually because he's on the series splash screen. But until then, bring on the Dominion!

I found Season 2 generally a bit better than Season 1. I was really uncomfortable with Bashir in Season 1, and he was a bit more tolerable in Season 2. Downright redeemed in "The Wire", then he regressed immediately in the next episode, so I still have a fairly low opinion of him. Dax is another character I'm having trouble caring about since even after two seasons I still have no clear idea of "What would Dax do?" in any hypothetical situation.

Like, if a bunch of monkeys got loose on the station, I can imagine that Sisko would order a containment field and then go monkey-hunting with Kira, who would spend the whole time exasperated like, "Really?! Monkeys?!" O'Brien would technobabble together a monkey trap while grumbling about how this sort of thing always happens to him, Bashir would tell a long-winded story about how there was a similar incident with Emus back at the academy and how much of an adventure it was and he ended up saving the day and then a bunch of women were swooning all over him, Quark would stash a couple of monkeys away to sell later, and Odo would have grumpily already rounded them all up because he's the only competent crew member (and relieving Quark of his monkey stash). And Dax would just... kind of stand there I guess. Maybe quip about how one of her previous incarnations had a monkey. But she just doesn't have enough of a notable personality for me to go, "Yep, that's a Dax thing to do, all right." So far she still feels uncomfortably like a fetish character with little actual substance.

Also, the depiction of the Universal Translator analyzing a new language in "Sanctuary" made me even more perplexed as to how it even works. So, they started out speaking an unknown language, and over the course of the episode, the UT learned it and started translating it. Okay, cool. Except that implies that the aliens -- and probably everyone on the station -- are all actually still speaking their native languages and the UT is just real-time translating them all. But how does this work in a conversation? If Sisko speaks to Kira and Quark, how do they both hear something they can understand? Where even is the UT? They'll beam down to a planet and lose all their equipment but can still communicate with everyone fine. And how does the UT know to stop translating, like when someone will yell in Klingon for one sentence and then switch back to English?

I wonder if there's ever an episode where the Universal Translator malfunctions and everyone has to figure out how to communicate with each other. Heck, might be an opportunity for Dax to actually do something since she's the one most likely to be a polyglot.

Anyway, on to Season 3!

[space-dog-from-space]

I'm 30 years late, but...

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine originally aired when I was 10 years old. I loved Next Generation when I was a kid, so I gave DS9 a try back then... and immediately grew bored of it. They weren't going to new planets or having space battles, they were just sitting around in one place discussing space politics, and there wasn't even anyone funny like Data to hold my attention. So, I stopped watching after a couple episodes.

But, since I keep hearing it ended up being the best Trek seres, I've decided to go ahead and give it a full watch-through. Maybe now that I'm 40 and have more life experience under my belt, I can appreciate it more.

Turns out I do! I've finished the first season, so I'll give a run-down of what I thought of the S1 episodes below the cut:

1-2. Emissary: All right, I actually understand the premise this time which completely went over my head as a kid. The Bajorans were under Cardassian occupation for decades, the Federation showed up and drove them out, now the Federation is in control of the Cardassian space station DS9 to help the Bajorans rebuild and return to self-governance. But wait! Turns out there's a wormhole that goes to the other side of the galaxy here and it's suddenly become prime space real-estate! And the wormhole is inhabited by... mysterious non-temporal entities that spit out a magic orbs from time to time and the Bajorans worship them as prophets.

3. Past Prologue: Garak is queer-coded like whoa and gives Bashir a taste of his own medicine about not respecting boundaries. Is also possibly like a quadruple-agent. And tailors a fine suit. Also, Kira got a haircut. There's rats on spaceships?! Oh, that's just Odo. Okay. Still, the fact that he considered that a convincing disguise means there's rats on spaceships?!

4. A Man Alone: A guy backstabs himself and blames Odo for it.

5. Babel: Poor overworked O'Brien gets so stressed out he starts speaking in tongues. Then it turns out it's contagious. And it turns out that it's because someone sabotaged the station decades ago with a dyslexia virus and then just kind of forgot about it.

6. Captive Pursuit: This actually touches on a moral question I'd been wondering about if we ever end up with sentient AI: If something is bred/programmed to like being oppressed, is it more moral to remove it from its oppression even if that makes it miserable, or to return it to its oppression if that's what makes it happy? This episode chose the latter.

7. Q-Less: A surprisingly boring Q-centric episode whose only shenanigans involved a space stingray Vash was trying to sell off. Q really does miss Picard.

8. Dax: Oh, another philosophical thought-experiment: If you committed a crime and then get reincarnated in a traceable manner and retain all the memories of your previous incarnation, can your current incarnation be held liable for your previous incarnation's actions? This episode decides it doesn't want to answer this because she's not guilty, anyway.

9. The Passenger: Bashir becomes even more insufferable and nobody notices.

10. Move Along Home: Samurai hippies come through the wormhole and demand everyone LARP with them whether they like it or not.

11. The Nagus: Quark falls victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is "Never get involved in a land war with Asia". But only slightly less well-known is this: "Never get involved with a Ferengi when profit is on the line".

12. Vortex: So... Odo just lets a guy get away with murder because he has a sob story and claimed he knew others of his kind? Just because he was wanted unjustly on his home planet does not change the fact that he murdered a guy for hire. Also, Odo can get knocked out by a rock?

13. Battle Lines: Remember that "Great Divide" episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender that everyone hated? No reason.

14. The Storyteller: O'Brien goes down to Bajor to fix the pipes, becomes God.

15. Progress: Kira has to go convince a Boomer to leave his land because they need the resources to rebuild the planet, but he's all "I got mine, screw them." She humors his sexist behavior all episode, then burns his house down.

16. If Wishes Were Horses: Bashir wishes for his own personal side-piece Dax, and real Dax is weirdly okay with this because "boys will be boys". The conflict in this episode is literally solved by thinking happy thoughts.

17. The Forsaken: Odo gets sexually harassed so reports it to HR who just laughs him off because they think it would be good for him to get laid. Then he gets stuck in an elevator with his stalker and it's revealed just how physically strenuous it is for him to maintain his human form all day, and yet he has never been afforded any accommodations beyond a bucket to sleep in. This poor space slime, no wonder he's always so grumpy. #JusticeForOdo

18. Dramatis Personae: TNG's "The Inner Light", but stupid. Once again Odo has to save the day because he's immune to the humanoid crazypox that seems to infect the station every half-dozen episodes, and yet they still just can't find it in their effects budget to adjust station operations enough to allow him the minimal comfort of not having to contort himself into human form every day until he collapses just to do his job.

19. Duet: I am a sucker for "Did the janitors on the Death Star deserve to die?" sorts of moral discussions, and this episode delivered that very well. Also, I'm in lesbians with Kira.

20. In the Hands of the Prophets: Lady who doesn't even have kids at the school nevertheless takes issue that the children aren't being taught in accordance to her religious beliefs. It's been 30 years since this came out and nothing changes.

All in all, a decent season 1. It does show its age in places, especially in its treatment of female characters, and being written before the internet and smartphones caused seismic cultural shifts that its vision of the future failed to take into account. But still, I'm liking it now that I actually understand what's going on. On to season 2!

[space-dog-from-space]

the prophets are just waiting for you to forgive yourself

[space-dog-from-space]

I know Julian didn't get to be an Emergency Medical Holographic program himself because of that whole illegal genetic engineering thing but like. Can you imagine. Can you even imagine what that would be like Can you IMAGINE-

[space-dog-from-space]

This is maybe the funniest DS9 meme I've come across and I'd love to be proven wrong

[space-dog-from-space]

Kai Winn is so funny.

Imagine you’re The Pope and the second coming of Jesus happens and he Hates you.

[space-dog-from-space]

completely normal girl

[space-dog-from-space]

What characters captured your heart?

Well I started watching DS9 and I am obsessed with like, everyone on that show. Particularly Julian, Ziyal, Kira, Jake & Nog, the gay fashion lizard, and Rom (he was a union man!)

Thanks for the ask, @paulmescalsnose!

The ask game:

[space-dog-from-space]

Did you do anything special to celebrate finishing a fic?

I let out a victory screech every time I finish a fic. :3 It is good for the soul.

Thanks for the ask, anon!

The ask game: