Yeah, he chose that mantle. He should be responsible for the clerical work. If he's good, we'll get him an intern and a fifth of scotch.

Yeah, as a baseball geek I'm interested in the future history of the game. And since it seems to have died out in the twenty-first century, it's odd that the "greatest" hitter would have come right at the end of the sport's popularity. Wouldn't there be fewer and fewer talented athletes taking up the game by then, as…

Mood's a thing for cattle, and love-play!

"The Assignment." That episode is hardcore. Great Tormented O'Brien stuff. Legitimate Hitchcock-type suspense.

Yeah, I've been saying this for a while. He needs to know. From what I've seen of the guy, he'd find it damned amusing. Somebody would have to make a "Best of Frakes" compilation, though.

It would've been funnier if he'd said "snakle."

…or WHAT IF PICARD HAD GROWN A BEARD???

Yeah, but it's completely undermined. Because, well, if you find ANYBODY ELSE'S severed head, well, it's pretty clear that they're dead. But as we find out, it just doesn't work that way with Data.

Yeah, it came from a mystical Imaginary Baseball Player. Shrug.

You guys are both absolutely right. Season 4 did in fact save that show, even if it wasn't what they had planned. Without Worf, it would have been completely different. And Martok accidentally turned into an unforgettable character, though it took a while.

Damn it, Cid. Are you trolling or not? I'm trying to meet you halfway, here.

Well done, James. If you don't have your artistic integrity, what do you have?

Aw, c'mon, you crazy unregistered kids! This is silly. Of course we don't agree about this, but why get worked up?

I had to look up "Battle Lines" and "The Storyteller." And, well, those weren't THAT bad. "If Wishes Were Horses," though? (*shudder*) THAT was the episode that put me off DS9 for a decade. I didn't know any better!

Now, wait just a damned minute, Peel. You said you hadn't watched DS9. How do you know about latinum?

I wonder how he feels about Excalibur now? If I were him, I'd be flattered. It'd be an honor to be associated with that BatshitCrazyFest. Between that and Dune, Stewart was well-positioned in the late eighties to become a king of oddball genre shit — like a highbrow Lance Henriksen, or something.

And we've discussed the hell out of "Hard Time" on earlier threads. But you get the point very well. I always thought that O'Brien got over that horrific experience way too quickly, but somebody pointed out that the episode presents it in such a way that a fair amount of time might actually pass before he really…

Yeah, Zack, it's a shame. It was a clever conceit, but it just went over like a rock. I was confused, too—I sort of got what you were going for, but I didn't get the parentheses. I don't fault you for trying, though. Keep us guessing.

I answered this last week. But this time, I'll go with a "Space Seed"/"Wrath of Khan" double feature, followed by "Darmok." Then maybe a great DS9 episode like "Duet." (With appropriate commentary to fill in the backstory.) This would sum up a lot of the things that are great about the franchise.

Indeed. I've said it before, but I made a big deal of being indifferent to DS9 for over a decade. I caught a couple of sub-par episodes and wrote it off as "that Trek soap opera with a bunch of dumb Ferengi in it." I was epically, world-historically wrong, and I acknowledge that, now. Others should do the same.