Well we both said "more or less" :) The problem with the concept of progress is that it applies a teleological frame to history. We have wristwatches, cars, and thermonuclear war, and by presuming a priori that these are necessary developments, even good ones, it's easy to leap to the extrapolation ("..I think over…

Dax is Sisko's rationalistic sounding board throughout the episode, though. Giving her too much to do emotionally would take the story away from him.

Valiant is… not good. It is DS9 meets Earth Star Voyager, with the deficiencies of both multiplied.

"Centurion, take the disruptor and shoot the corporal"

On 5, It's been observed that a good way to get exposition past the audience is to get your characters angry at each other. When people are angry they often restate things that both already know, and the emotions tend to put the audience off balance.

I like the World War I parallel better. Cardassia is Germany, the Federation is the Entente Cordiale, the Klingons are Russia, and the Romulans are the US. The Dominion declares war, fights the allies to a draw, coopts an erstwhile ally to join it against its own best interests, and employs all manner of subterfuge…

And upon revealing the PJs, he remarks, "I picked a bad week to stop taking amphetamines."

Voyager would never allow decades of canon to interfere with the discovery of ever more obnoxious Particles Of The Week.

I like the able on how this episode essentially retells a story from World War I, namely the story of how the British intercepted the Zimmerman Telegram, which was essentially the German plan for sneak-attacking the US, and then how the British used various subterfuges to convince the US that it was real, and…

Cut to five-foot tall angry humanoid chicken, looking askance. Orchestra sting.

I like the biomimetic gel angle, but crap Sisko took a lot of it. He got, what, 150 liters? In TNG Riker once traded hundreds of tons of metal ore for something like one milliliter of gel. A little BMG goes a long way.

"while we learn in our coursework that the Whiggish view of history as eternal forward progress is not invariably true, I think over the medium-long run it has more or less been the case."

The screen grab at the top says: Avery Brooks is Johnny in Tommy Wiseau's "The Room".

People also have a pretty clear idea of how far away Vulcan is from Earth— Vulcan orbits 40 Eridani, about 16 light-years away from Sol, basically less than a day at a reasonable warp factor. It's implied Betazed is close to the Earth, but not that close.

I hope that isn't where Gene got the idea that *men* didn't have to wear pants in TNG :O

"Hey, who's leg do you gotta gagooch in order to get an amaretto around here?"

"O'Brien's shoulder healed like John Doe"

Laura Roslin is a bit more like a Kai Winn, with the evil removed but the guile, ambition and personal rectitude left perfectly intact.

So Ashley Judd was Section 31?

Wait, so Sloan is Bashir's father?