Big problem with the mirror episodes is Bashir.

I will say that, especially back before the days of DVR, it wasn't just a matter of airing them in reruns.

Well, as someone else pointed out someplace around here, Voyager was mandated by the producers to be "TNG lite," making sure the characters entered and exited every episode as a sort of formless void so that the show could be aired out of order in reruns and people wouldn't feel intimidated.

I think even at this point they were pulling some of the writing staff off of these standalone episodes and were getting everything ready for the big push to the end. The last several episodes of this show are practically a miniseries, after all, and the connections between the episodes had to be tighter than usual.

Yeah, but they WANTED TO HAVE SEX. Jesus Christ, the way the characters on TNG carry on you'd think they were all Southern Baptists. Like wanting to have sex was an embarrassing physical need like bowel movements or something. Clearly Roddenberry also thought we'd evolve beyond wanting to get our rocks off.

Enterprise honestly learned a lot of lessons from Voyager, including:

Robert Beltran did an AMA on Reddit yesterday and it made me sad to remember how poorly Chakotay was utilized on that show.

Honestly, Worf's family is good like, 60% of the time. He has some culture-clash issues with his brother, but okay. And he was a shitty father to Alexander, but they do LOVE each other in their bad sort of way.

The Crushers were nice. Little creepy, but a lot of stuff on TNG comes off as a little creepy nowadays.

In a way, Jadzia is a character in this episode because she's inside Ezri somewhere, which is sort of neat.

Zack, I too have succumbed to the siren song of reading and re-reading both "IT" and "The Stand" when I'm feeling down.

"The Hill" is the name of a neighborhood in St. Louis that was, traditionally, settled by a lot of Italian-Americans. All the best Italian restaurants in town can still be found in like, a six-block radius over there.

To be fair, counseling like that would probably fuck up your fighting force pretty badly in the middle of combat. You want to wait until they're safe on a cushy starbase before you start poking at their defense mechanisms.

They could have come up with a technical limitation. You know, bullshit particles in the atmosphere. Then they could have introduced the gun from "Field of Fire" a few episodes early, and forced the Starfleet officers to use bullets.

One of the traits the Founders have in spades is extremism. It's nice to see how Odo has taken that concept in a different direction with the same intensity - first he was extreme about bottling up his love, and now that he's in a relationship he's extreme about being in a relationship.

One of the stated goals of this episode - and what I think they were hoping would make "Seige" less of a retread - was getting as many of the less-combatant characters embroiled in a war story as possible.

It's true that the Bajoran faith doesn't seem to be very well articulated… mostly seems to be concerned with collecting donations for war orphans a lot of the time. Though their attitude about sex and relationships is kind of cool, in that it seems to showcase a religion that's fairly chill about that sort of thing.

I always thought the Pah-Wraith/Emissary/Prophet stuff was nice, because by making them REAL living entities, we could explore the intersection of faith and politics and duty and science without making any of the players laughable.

That line always makes me tear up a little bit. It's weird, because nobody else on the show, none of Worf's supposed friends, seem to realize that Worf has kind of checked out at this point. His wife is dead, and with her the future they were going to have. They were going to have a baby! He was going to be a good…

"Likely" dodged a bullet? Look up Genivieve Bujold's performance as Janeway on YouTube.