What strikes me more is how much of a missed opportunity Prodigal Daughter is for Ezri. Zck completely gets how thinly sketched everyone is in this episode, including Ezri, really. Outside of her clearly joining Starfleet to get out from under the thumb of her mother, there’s not much more backstory here. How was her…

Between Troi’s, Bashir’s, Quark’s, Riker’s, Spock’s, Data’s, Picard’s, Kira's, Garak's, Odo's, and now Ezri’s families, it seems pretty clear that the only functioning, loving family unit in the 24th Century are the Siskos, and even they had mysterious secret prophet mother thing going on.

I hate how this retroactively screws up Honor Among Thieves. Why make Bilby’s good and decent wife, that he sacrifices his life for in a heartbreaking scene, a greedy widow who ends up murdered by Ezri’s brother? Did we really need to go there? There was such great humanity in that episode, and it ends up in soap…

I can’t talk about “It’s Only a Paper Moon” without talking about “The Bonding.” That was the spec script that ended up being Ron Moore’s first ever Star Trek script. But what ended up on TV wasn’t quite Moore’s initial pitch. In Moore’s original story the orphaned kid was so overwhelmed by grief for his mom that he…

Next week, on Mad Space Nine…

Despite a great theme, "Taft" was clearly the inferior blaxploitation film based on a progressive-era President.

Man, if it was an ABC adaptation of a musical in the late 90s / early 00s, it featured Victor Garber.

A universe where Daddy Warbucks is also The Kingpin is both strangely plausible and would be completely awesome.

Gandhi did it first: http://www.youtube.com/watc…

I will say one place where The Ship beats AR-558, even though the latter is more stylish, is that the former shows our experienced regulars (Worf, O'Brien, and Dax) coming under stress and nearly breaking while in character, rather than just chewing up our more naive ones (Ezri and Nog) or guest stars.

I think the pylon explosion one had something to do with an Iconian gateway raid, though they also say there was a Jem Hadar ship that fled through the wormhole (hence the Defiant following them) so really, who knows?

If this is anyone but Steve Allen, you're stealing my bit!

So not only did the Prophets control Sisko's life from moment one, they went back in time to make Picard and the rest of the Enterprise crew such insufferable pricks that Q sent the Borg after them just to shut them up! Pretty sneaky, guys…

To be fair, they also pulled that trick in their very first appearance where Eris beams away into nowheresville after Quark and co. deduced she was a spy.

My favorite part of Covenant is imagining what happened when the cult first arrived on Empok Nor, and if there was a slowly rotting Vorta corpse continually walking into a bulkhead.

Next week, on Mad Space Nine…

And intimated in "Tears of the Prophets" that it was a perpetual thing keeping reinforcements from reaching the Alpha Quadrant.

"The Riker is my penis." - Frakes

So much of wrapping Dukat as a Pah Wraith ‘Emissary’ is about setting up for a good vs. evil standoff with Sisko. Waltz set him up as Dukat vs. Sisko & Bajor, and this now clearly throws in the pah wraiths and Prophets as well. I believed the former conflict, but in throwing that in the show is struggling too hard to…

You know who might have been really helpful for a whole lot of traumatized, PTSD ridden soldiers who've been too long on the front lines? A counselor!But nope, she has to tech the tech and explain the morals for the slow children in the back."Gee, these mines are these horrible, vicious weapons that only the evil,…