Yeah, I think the rape clause was a little much. I don't generally have a problem with Ferengi views on sexuality as they're usually presented on DS9; they're aliens after all, and fictional at that. But that still kind of pushes my envelope for suspension of disbelief.

Well, Quark does okay, relatively speaking. I mean, it's Quark, so we're obviously grading on a curve; but he's pretty much himself all through that thing.

Season 4 of Enterprise manages a reasonable explanation for why the Vulcans were such assholes. As good as those episodes were, it really doesn't excuse the couple dozen episodes that preceded it that made you actually sit through Vulcans being assholes.

@avclub-f3fcbcfe1af47947c70881914ea2bdab:disqus You're thinking of Season 3's "Explorers" and it's one of my favorites of that season, due in large part to the O'Brien/Bashir B-plot you speak of.

Actually, that one kind of comes down on the side of Sometimes Racism is Okay.

Good point, Yuri. The question of what Odo is is pretty central to how the series plays out, but it's entirely separate from the question of WHO he is. And that is fodder for some pretty good episodes, too.

That stuff often sucks, but it can yield some good stories. Odo is in full mysterious magic man mode in "Shadowplay" and I think that's a pretty good episode.

We already have a Morn and man, can that guy talk!

My problem with "Past Tense" is that none of it has anything to do with the rest of the show. It's almost distracting how little anything that happens stems from what was going on in the narrative at the time. You could drop Janeway and Paris in there and not miss a single beat. When DS9 stories become interchangeable…

Well, from what I can tell, they're bisexual…

As Damon Lindelof said on Twitter last week, the tagline for Man on a Ledge should be "It's not a metaphor."

"Big Stein can't be floppin' and twitchin'!" might be the best line of the entire show.

Your enjoyment of it is going to be based largely on how tolerable you find Trek books. But, judged with that in mind, I thought it was pretty good. There's nothing earth-shattering in Garak's backstory that we didn't already know, but Robinson is a half-decent writer, surprisingly.

Hew-monize.

"Profit and Lace" is a fucking hate crime. It's worse  than "Threshold" somehow.

I thought we were going to have to wait a couple more months! Prophets bless you, Zack!

During my mid-teens I sat through more shitty Showcase movies in the middle of the night than I care to admit. Based on anecdotal evidence from my peer group, their entire fucking audience must have been teenage boys.

My money's on Salt Vampire.

"The Constant" is actually a good episode to illustrate this point. If anyone saw this episode and thought "Yeah, there's going to be a real scientific explanation for all this" then they really have nobody to blame but themselves for their disappointment.

"The Storyteller" is pretty bad but even that's not totally disposable. It is, after all, the first O'Brien/Bashir episode. That aspect of it works well enough that you can see why they ran as far as they did with it later.