Jake certainly doesn't undersell his dad in Valiant, but he does cap all of that praise for his father with "…and he wouldn't do this." So no matter how much he looks up to his father, he knows he can't pull off anything he wants, at least not on his own.

"Satan start in your face."

Leaving aside That Which Will Not Be Discussed By me, I really like Valiant. It's not a top 10 episode, but I like that you get to see how far Nog and Jake have diverged from where they were as kids, and it all makes sense because of the time they've been given. It's also interesting that outside of size, Nog is…

Well, that was a horrible thing to do to you. I'm sorry.

"We cut out Marceline the vampire queen due to certain….uncomfortable…scenes we witnessed with our male toy beta testers."

The flip side is that the holodeck is presented as new, barely tested technology when it first appears on TNG, whereas DS9 presents it as proven to the point of being commercial. Maybe the safety protocols on the Enterprise would appear horribly inadequate to a commercial vendor by the time DS9 is starting.

I ascribe so much of that sidestepping to the Holosuites being a commercial enterprise rather than a military/technological plaything. Quark just cannot afford to let the safety protocols be a regular issue like the Enterprise could. Not that they could afford to either, to be honest.

Jinx! And yes. But I forgive "Our Man Bashir" because it involved deliberate interference with the program for the purpose of saving the senior staff's butts, rather than random wacky hijinks.

I think you have to give a little forgiveness to TNG being inconsistent with AI-often they're dealing with alien forms of it, or unplanned creations, rather than a deliberate step towards creating an artificial but living being. That and there was a lot less serialization than DS9 had by the time Vic comes around.

I'll state it here for the record-I'm okay with Vic Fontaine, self-awareness and all. It does raise questions of holographic rights and the implications of consciousness, but at the same time, he's doing a job he likes in a setting he's comfortable in, so a lot of those rights get pretty abstract. And at least he can…

I do love the moment where someone (I forget who, unfortunately) points out that if the Prophet wins, Jake will die, and Sisko yells "Don't you think I know that?!?" I mean, yes, he's counting on the Prophet to protect his son…but he knows that might not happen. it's a hell of a leap of faith to know his only child…

The flipside is that the Vulcan might have quickly calculated the odds that his opinion would make any impact on a bunch of young, hormonal human cadets, and decided it wasn't high enough to be worth jostling the boat.

True, the bomb wasn't some panicked bit of improvisation on Garak's part. He even mentions his hope that the datarod would be successful. But he was also smart enough not to rely solely on the high technology solution, like Sisko expected him to.

I do give Sisko (and Dax) credit, though-their mock debate was a good moment for Dax to actually play a role as Sisko's old friend and sounding board.

What I love here is that Sisko did this among all these virtuous, high minded people. He didn't take these steps on some criminal hellhole; he's on his own station. Even the technological solution they tried failed, so Garak had to fall back on a bomb to succeed.

I completely forgot that episode. I don't know if that says more about me or the episode. Or the image of Odo having sex…

Well, they SHOULD, but this is a Vorta assigned to a backwater planet to work with the Mob. He might be pretty low in the ranks as far as Vorta go.

Having O'Brien as an informant on the mob could have also worked better if we'd had a better sense of what the Orion Syndicate was like beforehand, even if it had just been offhand mentions. I'm sure there have been a few, but it still seemed to come out of nowhere for this episode, and I would like more detail than…

And it works so well because it's only ridiculous to one group. Dax, O'Brien and Bashir are serious, but they can't help but realize how weird this whole situation is. No one else, though is going "Honey, I lost the runabout," because they have Jem'Hadar threatening to kill them. Like Zack said, it's all played just…

Well, he is pretty open about pursuing every woman he lays eyes on, so…