Copyright 1993, Jennifer A. Hawthorne. All rights reserved,
but I'm not stuffy about it as long as you don't go overboard.

Synopsis: "Q-less"

Episode Number: 407
Air Date: 2/06/93

	As the show opens, Bashir is coming on to a comely young
Bajoran woman in the station's dining area, while O'Brien 
listens in at a nearby table, occasionally shooting glances 
of disbelief over at the doctor and his companion. Bashir 
is forced to abandon his advances when a call comes over 
the communicator asking him and O'Brien to report to Sisko 
at Landing Pad Five.
	At the Landing Pad, Sisko and Kira are trying to gain
access to the *Ganges*, which has apparently just returned 
from a trip through the wormhole with Lt. Dax and Ensign 
Pauli aboard. Something has gone wrong, however; the doors 
to the ship won't open, and the people inside are running 
out of oxygen. As O'Brien goes to work on the runabout's 
door, Bashir scans the craft and announces that there are 
*three* people inside, not two.
	O'Brien gets the doors open, and is quite surprised to
discover that the mysterious third passenger is none other 
than Vash. Dax says they found her in Gamma Quadrant, where 
she had been for two years. As the passengers are helped 
off to the infirmary, a crewman working on the runabout's 
doorturns his head as they walk by -- and is revealed as Q.

	Dr. Bashir checks out Vash in the infirmary and pronounces
her fit, then makes a not very subtle pass at her, which 
Vash neatly catches, departing with an inviting smile.
	Sisko discusses Vash with Dax; he is disturbed by her
inexplicable presence in the Gamma Quadrant. He tells Dax 
to run a background check on her.
	Vash takes some artifacts which she brought back from Gamma
Quadrant to a storage area on the station. Among them is a 
large, glowing, faceted crystalline object.
	On her way out she meets Sisko, and tells him she's leaving
the station as soon as possible. Sisko tries to question 
her, but Vash is very uninformative. They discuss Vash's 
history a bit, and Sisko offers to arrange passage for her 
back to Earth; Vash says that she'd like that.
	O'Brien checks out the *Ganges*,and finds that the ship is 
fine except for the unexplained power drain that caused its 
systems to fail. Sisko questions O'Brien about Vash, and 
O'Brien tells him of Vash's history with Picard. As they 
are talking, there is a brief power outage on the station.
	In Ops, the staff confers about the unexplained power loss;
Dax notes that it was accompanied by a graviton flux, 
which was the same thing she saw on the shuttle.
	O'Brien shows Vash to her quarters. She asks how Jean-Luc
is and is told that he's fine; she says she'll have to go 
look him up, now that she's back. O'Brien leaves and Vash 
starts to unpack, as Q appears. They argue. She wants him 
to go away and leave her alone; he doesn't believe she's 
serious and refuses to leave. They argue heatedly and 
exchange insults.
	Quark shows up at an inopportune moment and Q vanishes him,
angering Vash further. She makes Q bring him back, and Q 
does so, vanishing himself at the same time. Quark wants to 
bargain for Vash's items from Gamma Quadrant. They arrange 
a partnership to sell her items, while Vash gives Quark an 
ear massage.
	Q returns when Quark is gone and makes insulting comments.
The door to Vash's room chimes again; this time it's 
Bashir, with a dinner invitation for Vash which she 
accepts, while Q mocks Bashir behind his back. After Bashir 
leaves, Q makes more obnoxious comments, and Vash is less 
than pleased by his behavior.
	Bashir is waiting for Vash in the dining area when Q shows
up, dressed as a Bajoran waiter, and warns the doctor away 
from Vash. Bashir is affronted by Q's comments, and 
confronts him, at which point Q tells Bashir that he looks 
tired. Bashir has a bout of uncontrollable yawning, and 
leaves the dining area in confusion.
	O'Brien has noticed this activity and recognized Q. He
mutters "Bloody Hell!" and runs off to tell Sisko of the 
unwelcome visitor to DS9. The staff confer about Q, and 
O'Brien suggests that they speak to Vash about him. There 
is another inexplicable temporary power outage, which the 
staff concludes must be Q's fault.
	Quark and Vash are haggling over her loot. Sisko comes 
over to talk to Vash about Q, but Q is sitting nearby and 
joins the conversation on his own behalf. Q insults Sisko, 
and Sisko tells Q to leave the station, accusing him of 
causing the power problems. Q acts innocent and complains 
of being persecuted, then resumes needling Sisko. Sisko 
requests a private talk with Q, so Q makes everyone else 
vanish. Sisko is not amused. Q returns everyone, but 
changes the setting so the Quark's has become a boxing 
arena, with himself and Sisko dressed in old-fashioned 
boxing outfits. Q throws a few ineffectual punches at 
Sisko, whose patience abruptly snaps; he soundly nails Q 
with a one-two punch combination, sending him to the mat. 
Q: "You hit me! Picard never hit me!" Sisko: "I'm not 
Picard." Q: "Indeed not...you're much easier to provoke."
	Quark's buyers are arriving for the auction. There is
another power outage, accompanied by a series of minor 
hull breaches, caused by focussed graviton pulses, source 
unknown. Dax suggests that it might be time to negotiate 
with Q, but Sisko comments that he thinks the station's 
problems may not be Q's fault, as they are not Q's style of 
practical joke.
	Odo confronts Quark about the auction of the artifacts;
Quark is incensed at Odo's eavesdropping and Odo is smug. 
Quark says, "I have nothing to hide. I'm selling quality 
merchandise to select clientele." Odo asks, "What makes 
them so...select?", and Quark replies "They're all 
ridiculously wealthy...and not too bright."
	Odo makes a contemptuous speech about the humanoid penchant
for acquiring material goods; Quark then tries to tempt 
Odo with various types of luxuries, with very minor 
success.
	Vash is heading for the auction when Q arrives and taunts
her, then torments her by making her diseased and old. He 
restores her after telling her that she should reconsider 
his offer of friendship.
	Sisko tells the station log that the power is continuing to
be converted to gravitons, and life support will fail in 
fourteen hours.
	The staff confers, and comes up with a plan to trace the 
power drain. Q appears and is insulting. "Still chasing 
your own tail? Picard and his lackeys would have stopped 
all this technobabble hours ago. No wonder you're not 
commanding a starship!" After still more insults, Q tells 
the staff that Vash is the more dangerous one of the two of 
them.
	The graviton field is intensifying and the station is being
pulled out of position. The staff is unable to stop it -- 
and it is headed straight into the wormhole.
	Down in Quark's, the auction is proceeding on the
Promenade. Up in Ops, the staff is trying to track down 
the drain. They narrow it to the station core but can't get 
a more precise reading than that. It's eighteen minutes 
before the station will enter the wormhole and be torn to 
pieces.
	Q shows up at the auction and informs the bidders that the
station is doomed. Vash angrily confronts Q, who offers to 
save her if she asks. She declines his offer.
	Back in Ops, the staff takes a desperate risk, bringing the
reactors back on line to cause the power drain to become 
intense enough to be pinpointed accurately.
	The auction continues below. The faceted glowing crystal is
up for sale, and the bidding is heavy.
	In Ops, the drain has been pinpointed to the Promenade. The
staff rush down and find that it's the glowing crystal 
which is causing it, and Sisko orders O'Brien to beam it 
off of the station. O'Brien does so, and the crystal 
explodes in a flare of light, "hatching" into a glowing 
manta-like creature which sails through the wormhole, 
leaving the station safely behind.
	Vash and Quark discuss Vash's future plans; Quark tells her
of a new dig opening up on a distant planet. She professes 
not to be interested, preferring instead a nice quiet post 
on Earth. Quark is unconvinced. Q shows up and beings to 
harass Vash yet again; she again tells him to get lost and 
finally he agrees, regretfully, and leaves. Vash decides to 
check out the new dig after all.
	Bashir, just now waking up, shows up in Quark's and asks
Dax if he missed anything. Dax smiles.

Copyright 1993, Jennifer A. Hawthorne. All rights reserved,
but I'm not stuffy about it as long as you don't go overboard.


First Impressions Reviews: DS9, "Q-less"

One-line opinion summary: Plot? What plot? We don't need no
steenkin' plot. All we need is John De Lancie.

Rating: Well, the "station in danger" bits get a 5 or less,
but the Q bits get a 10+, so we'll average that to a 7.5 
and round up to an 8 out of 10 because I've handed out too 
many sevens recently.

Many spoilers below, and no ^L on this terminal, so it will
have to be blank lines.

A quick comment before I get started. It seems to be rather
dangerous to read the "upcoming episode" information that 
is posted on the Net if one is planning on writing episode 
reviews. A posting from a few weeks back had indicated that 
the plot of "Q-less" involved crew members having strange 
dreams which compelled them to steal an ancient artifact 
and take it through the wormhole. This turned out to be 
completely wrong. I am curious if this is due to a mixup on 
the poster's part, or if this script underwent a major 
rewrite between the time the poster obtained the 
information and the time it was actually filmed. Does 
anyone know? I can see where the plot outlined above could 
fit into this episode (and it might even have been better 
than the "station in danger" stuff they wound up using) so 
I'm wondering what exactly happened.

The danger in this for a reviewer is that for most of this
episode I was watching it and waiting for the advertised 
plot to show up, and it never did. I had to rewatch the 
episode a couple of times immediately afterward in order to 
feel like I was actually going to be reviewing the episode 
I saw, and not the episode I expected to see...Reviewers, 
beware the Net!

Now, onward...

Well, what we have here is really two episodes in one, a
problem that regularly dogs TNG; however, in DS9 the 
connection between the two plots is sufficiently strong 
that the seams are only mildly distracting. Plot one is a very 
generic and rather dull "mysterious artifact endangers the 
station" story; plot two is a riveting and very amusing 
character drama as Q interacts with the residents of DS9, 
especially Cmdr. Sisko. Plot two is several orders of 
magnitude better than plot one, and I rather wish they'd 
ditched plot one or replaced it with something less 
pedestrian so as to concentrate more on plot two. Still, I 
gave this episode a high score because the scenes with Q 
were worth the price of admission in and of themselves.

I'll deal with the lesser of the two plots first, just to
get it out of the way. The episode title was quite 
appropriate here, as I felt that the staff was in fact 
being clueless about the mysterious station problems. The 
one obvious fact that they seemed to be ignoring was that 
the power outage/graviton field problem first occurred on 
the runabout and then later transferred to the station; 
therefore, they should have been looking for people or 
objects that followed that pattern in order to find the 
cause. That is to say, I felt that it should have been 
blatantly obvious that either Vash or something Vash had 
was a likely source of the problem. Although it was perhaps 
understandable that they would blame Q, it really doesn't 
make much sense for Q to do things like drain the runabout 
of power...it's far too dull a crisis to be interesting to 
Q. If he wanted to amuse himself at the expense of the 
runabout's crew he'd have done something flashier and more 
humiliating, no question. And if he were responsible, you 
can bet he'd show up to gloat about it and make comments. I 
would say that whoever has been giving the Starfleet 
briefings about Q needs to start doing a better job; it 
should have been clear from the beginning that Q was not 
directly responsible for the station's problems (no matter 
how much he seemed to be enjoying them.) If the crew had 
begun at the obvious place and checked out Vash and her 
possessions, they'd have located the source of the trouble 
long before it became threatening to the station. Of 
course, then we wouldn't have the required "14 hours/18 
minutes until the station is destroyed" dramatic buildup, 
complete with the last minute locating and disposing of the 
threat. Pfeh!

One of my writing instructors was fond of referring to this
sort of thing as the "idiot plot" -- a plot which only 
works if the characters act like idiots. Okay, maybe it 
wasn't quite as bad as that, but come on, these people are 
sharper than they were portrayed here. Aren't they?

I had some other problems with the plot as well. First off,
the "it's an alien egg" thing has been *done* and *done* 
and done to death, and I was hoping for something more 
original. Second, I am very unclear on why the egg being 
aboard the station caused the station to start moving 
toward the wormhole...was the egg supposed to be pulling 
it?? Or what?? And where were these graviton pulses that 
were ripping holes in the station coming from anyway? From 
the egg? Wouldn't that be kind of obvious? The whole 
"station in danger" plot reeked of gratuitous hokey plot 
devices designed to build tension, and for me they just 
failed. The only positive thing I saw in it was that it was 
nice to see the team responding calmly and efficiently to 
the various crises as they happened, and working together 
well.

And why exactly was O'Brien surprised to see Q on the
station? Given that he knew that Vash left with Q (I'm 
assuming, since he seemed to know the rest of the plot of 
"Qpid"), why wasn't his first question to her something 
along the lines of "Where's that expletive deleted 
all-powerful being you ran off with?" I'd sure want to 
know, if I were him.

Now on to the good stuff -- namely, the character
interaction. I've never seen the TNG episode "Captain's 
Holiday", which introduced Vash; I have seen "Qpid", the 
one where she runs off with Q to see the universe. From 
that episode, I was left wondering what was supposed to be 
so interesting about Vash, as I was unimpressed with both 
the character and the actress playing her. Here, I warmed 
up significantly to both. Vash's scenes with Q were very 
sharp and well-done; credit goes to the scriptwriter for 
the lines, but to the actors for the delivery. Her scenes 
with the other characters were a notch below that, but 
still pretty good, with only one minor sour note: the "ear 
massage" scene with Quark didn't play very well (I thought 
it was silly.) I also was a bit puzzled by the scene where 
she tries to tell the auction bidders about the history of 
her items and is dismayed that they aren't interested; I 
thought this character was strictly profit-motivated, and 
not at all interested in the historical significance of the 
artifacts she stole and sold. It would be a stronger 
character if she actually had some appreciation for the 
significance of her loot, but this felt like it came out of 
left field.

I should also add that the scene where Vash put her stuff
away in storage and the scenes of the auction were slow 
and superfluous and could have been dealt with in a third 
or a quarter of the time. In retrospect I wonder if they 
were "padding" scenes; maybe there *was* a major 
last-minute script overhaul and they had to throw this 
stuff in to fill the time? The same could be said of the 
first half of the opening scene (but more about that bit of 
dreck in a few minutes.)

Now, on to my favorite part of the episode: the interaction
between Q and Sisko, and Q's commentary on DS9 versus TNG. 
BRILLIANT stuff! I'm unclear how to review it properly, as 
about all I can really do is pile superlatives one on top 
of the other. Q's nasty and perfectly on-target needling of 
Sisko; his unflattering comparisons of Sisko and Picard; 
and his priceless reaction when Sisko flattened him in the 
boxing match...what can I say? Beautiful. Simply beautiful. 
Kudos all around, to the scriptwriter, director, and of 
course John De Lancie and Avery Brooks. My favorite lines:

Q:      "You hit me! Picard never hit me!"
Sisko:  "I'm not Picard."
Q:      "Indeed not...you're much easier to provoke."

And:

	Q to Sisko: "Still chasing your own tail? Picard and his 
lackeys would have stopped all this technobabble hours ago. 
No wonder you're not commanding a starship!"

	I don't normally quote extensively in reviews, but I
thought these two were worth it.

	Q's interactions with the rest of the crew were nice, too,
though understandably briefer than his scenes with Sisko. 
Specific nice touches: on Kira: "She's after your job." 
O'Brien: "Go do something constructive and harass the 
Cardassians for awhile!" Q to O'Brien: "Do I know you? Oh 
yes, one of the little people." Q's interaction with Bashir 
was fun to watch because Bashir didn't have any idea who it 
was he was talking to, though frankly I thought Q wasn't as 
nasty to the doctor as I would have expected. I kept 
expecting Bashir to wind up as a dog or something less 
appealing...

	There was only one Q scene that I didn't like, and that
was the final one between Q and Vash, about him seeing the 
wonder of the universe through her eyes...I was fully 
expecting him to follow that up with something nastily 
biting before he finally left, but instead he seemed to be 
serious. Yuck!! What a hokey line, and totally out of 
character for Q. What exactly were the writers thinking of? 
ANd how could they have done such a great job up to that 
point only to fumble it in the final scene? (Maybe the film 
editor accidentally cut out Q's scathing followup to that 
"wonder" nonsense...yeah, that must be it...)
	Favorite Vash/Q quotes:

Vash:   "You act like you know everything!"
Q:      "But I *do* know everything!"
Vash:   "That makes it even worse!"

And:

Vash:   "And what did they call you? The God of Lies?"
Q:      "They meant it affectionately!"

	I really enjoyed the nicely effortless references to TNG
that kept popping up; on TNG, the references to the old 
series have always seemed strained, somehow, almost 
embarrassed, and that was definitely not the case here. The 
cross-show commentary solidified the feel that these two 
shows comprise a single universe, and I like that. It aids 
in the suspension of disbelief.


Short Takes
-----------

-- This may have gotten brought up on the Net when
Captain's Holiday was discussed, but I couldn't help but 
notice that the name Vash is quite close to the French word 
"vache", or "cow." An impolite commentary? At one point 
just after I noticed this, I heard a Monty-Pythonesque 
voice in my head saying "Fetchez la Vash!" and succumbed to 
a fit of giggling.

-- Character development in this show was basically limited
to defining how Sisko was different from Picard. No one 
else really got any time. Quark is the same as ever, and 
Odo gets in another "you inexplicable humanoids" speech, 
Kira gets to be hot-headed (trying to burn through the 
runabout door), and Bashir...sigh...gets to act like a 
twit. (See my next comment for details.) O'Brien is shown 
is his position of link between TNG and DS9, getting to 
explicate Vash's previous history as seen TNG, and making 
commentary on Q. Still no sign of Keiko, Jake, or Molly.

-- First we had James "T is for Tomcat" Kirk. Then we had
William "T is for Tomcat" Riker. Now we have Julian "I 
don't know what his middle initial is but I'll bet it's T" 
Bashir. Enough already! Just like the "alien egg" bit, this 
character bit has been done and done and done to death. Has 
someone at Paramount decided that it's not real Trek if 
there isn't a male character who is preoccupied with his 
hormones in the cast? If they were going to have a 
character like this, they should have done something mildly 
original -- like have it be one of the women who's into 
sexual adventuring. Like Kira, maybe, she's passionate -- 
let's see her making passes at the cute male extras 
instead.

I could deal with Bashir coming on to Vash -- especially
since he was actually pretty smooth about it -- but that 
"let me tell you about my Medical Finals" opener had me 
cringing and rolling up into a ball on the sofa to get away 
from it, it was so awful. No more, please. I want to like 
this character, not cringe whenever he shows up on the 
screen. (I continue to maintain, however, that El Fadil is 
doing the best possible job with the lines he has -- he's 
just still getting very little to work with.)

-- First Vash, then Q, fails to recognize O'Brien as having
been on the Enterprise. Gee, I guess everyone but the main 
cast really are invisible on that ship. One of the "little 
people" indeed. I liked it.

-- Was the Daystrom Institute mentioned in previous Vash
episodes? I can't recall. It was a nice bit of continuity 
with TOS, though, and I appreciated it (Remember Dr. 
Daystrom from TOS?)

-- This was a bit more of an ensemble show than Captive
Pursuit, which was good; in particular I really liked the 
way the team worked together trying to get the runabout 
open in time. Smooth and professional, and yet not losing 
the individuality of the characters. And the bit at the end 
where they were trying to decide whether or not to fire up 
the reactors was well done too; they had differences of 
opinion, which they stated, and then Sisko made the 
decision. It felt good; better than the sessions in the 
conference room in TNG.

-- We run into "Gold Pres Latinum" again. If they're going
to keep using it I wish they'd tell us what it is and why 
it's valuable -- or at least tell us how to spell it 
properly so we can write our reviews. (Minor peeve.)

-- We see that even Quark plays "Where's Odo?", and we
didn't see Odo morph this time, it was simply implied that 
he'd done so. Good! I liked this much better than the 
"Morph o' the week" because we, the views, are also left 
wondering where Odo was listening in from. I agree with Tim 
Lynch's stated point that there could be a really good 
episode in "Odo as big brother" if they ever get around to 
doing it. (I hope I have attributed that quote correctly; 
if not, apologies all around.)

-- We also get another "humanoids are funny people" speech
from Odo. I can't decide if I like this or not. As a 
character trait I can see how it could be amusing, but the 
two times we've seen in (here and in "A Man Alone") it's 
fallen flat...

-- Tritium? Did I hear that right? Are they talking about 
the radioactive isotope of Hydrogen? I sure hope not! If I 
remember correctly that stuff has a long half-life. 
Although why was O'Brien worried about everyone dying in 
four years when they were about to be dead in eighteen 
minutes...four years is better than nothing, no?

-- The makeup guys are having fun designing all sorts of
random alien faces. I wonder how much this show spends on 
latex per week.

-- I realized while listening to the opening credits that
the title music is growing on me. I never actually hated 
it, but thought it was dull; now I'm starting to enjoy it a 
little. Maybe it's just the positive association with the 
show that's doing it, I dunno.

-- For most of the show Q went around in his TNG uniform.
He was wearing it while pretending to work on the 
runabout's door. I wondered why no one noticed that -- 
though they were kind of busy at the time.

-- Why do they still have Cardassian mattresses on the
station if they're that uncomfortable? Fire up those 
replicators and get some Sealy Posturepedics.

-- A little more after-the-fact explanation of what the egg
what and how it was causing the graviton pulses and the 
dragging of the station to the wormhole might have been 
nice, though I can see why they left it out, as it wasn't 
all that relevant. (I just like to have loose ends tied 
up.) Did anyone else have a nasty flashback to the 
energy-jellyfish from Encounter at Farpoint when the 
energy-manta appeared?

-- A minor point: why, when they knew that the station was
in serious trouble, didn't they start to order an 
evacuation of as many personnel as possible? Granted, it 
might well have started a panic, but at least *some* people 
might have been saved. A throwaway line to the effect that 
the graviton field had trapped all of the ships currently 
docked to the station as well would have been nice.

-- I sort of expected Quark to make some more active
protest at Sisko taking the egg away -- like leap for it 
or something. He'd just been offered a million bars of GPL 
(gold pres latinum) for it, after all...something more than 
a weak verbal protest would be expected.

That's it for now. Next week on DS9: We get to see more of
Dax, and maybe get some more fuel for the "Trills are 
monsters" flamefest going on in r.a.s.current...

Jennifer Hawthorne

Copyright 1993, Jennifer A. Hawthorne. All rights reserved,
but I'm not stuffy about it as long as you don't go overboard.
