Good point. Could be my pov is skewed, because I've made a lot of use of the OG XBox's ability to do LAN games even after the servers have gone away (mostly Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds), and can do no such thing with the DC.

OLS has enough cool stuff going on that I almost thought of the shrunken ship as an unusually well-integrated comical B-plot.

*DOUBLE SPOILERS* Yeah, if you polled 100 people who saw these episodes, and asked whether the Alphas/Gammas concept in "One Little Ship" or the "Benny Russell created DS9" concept in "Far Beyond The Stars" would be the one to get revisited, I'm pretty sure either 99 or 100 would have guessed wrong.

I'm guessing Jake, after he had to give up the @DS9slasthuman account.

Well, the Joel/Mike thing was AMICABLE…

going strong IN EIGHT DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS!

I agree to a point (and spent many hours on Power Stone, Marvel Vs. Capcom, Soul Calibur, and others), but I think the decision to include a modem rather than a ethernet jack has to be one of the great "on the right track, but got off at the wrong stop" decisions in the history of technology.

The important thing is that they laugh at their children too.

I had problems with The Reader, but I have many more problems with the continuing AVC campaign of offhandedly fragging films in reviews without taking the time to back it up (almost as if they didn't want to devote space to it because they knew that said remarks had nothing to do with what they were writing).

Favorite bit from the commentary to that: "It turns out that if you make up Geoffrey Rush to look more like Vincent Price you get John Waters."

Good point about Cmdr Sisko. Although they almost make up for it by having O'Brien toast: "To the newest captain in Starfleet…And the best". Take that, Picard!

I definitely got a Bradbury vibe off of him, but I wonder if he would fit better as someone less destined for super-fame, like Mervyn Peake or Hope Mirrlees (and more British in the bargain).

If I must…but I would find the trip much smoother with one of your exquisite double olive gaghatinis

Exactly this. And here I had this relatively complex theory that Sisko was taking an interest in Jimmy because he reminded him of Jake, without thinking for a second that Benny had just invented Jake in order to show the life Jimmy should have had.

Maybe one who had seemingly appeared in America around 1945, and might be some sort of war criminal or might be exactly what he said he was (but more likely something in between).

I assume Benny Russell.

I can attest that I like it a lot more now, in context of the season, then I did watching it after a long break when it first came out. The connection to the overplot may be thin, but I think it's vital for giving the political stuff a little structure.

Very good point. As I recall even the cops are careful never to use direct racial referencing; it's all in their behavior. This makes it feel much more true (even if it did probably exaggerate how circumspect they would be when there was no one around).

I always assumed that Sisko's attitude in BBBB is partly based on the fact that he'd seen 1950's America firsthand in FBtS.

That is too bad. But to the limited extent of saying "maybe the series could have done innovative episodes more often", I'd say that's exactly right.