Star Trek - Deep Space 9:
I'm a good ways into season 2, and there have been a couple episodes so far that have REALLY dropped the ball, but mostly it's good stuff. But oh man, when it's bad, IT IS SO BAD.
Season 2 Episode 15, "Paradise," in particular, with the woman who secretly forced her colony to become a luddite cult was utter shit. There'd been a couple stinkers so far, but this one takes the cake.
"Let's both of us beam down to this planet where we've detected radiation that interferes with comm signals" - Sisko and O'Brien
WHY
Putting aside for the second the COMMANDER and CHIEF OF OPS are apparently off gallavanting through the wormhole ALONE (when this kind of exploration should REALLY be being done by a full blown survey ship instead of two command officers with MUCH more pressing duties), because that just seems to be the crazy shit that goes on around DS9 when adventure isn't finding the station fast enough.
WHY would you BOTH beam down, leaving the runabout EMPTY in orbit, instead of just one guy beaming down with the guy staying on the ship under direction to beam him back up in 3 minutes? Why not LAND the runabout outside the affected area? WHY NOT SEND A SUBSPACE MESSAGE BACK TO DS9 TO TELL THEM WHAT IS GOING ON, OR BETTER YET, CALL FOR AN ACTUAL STARSHIP TO COME INVESTIGATE.
"Durr, nope, we both beam down, and Ohhh, suddenly that interference we detected means we can't call the ship to beam us up again! Darn, we'll have to wait for rescue!" /headdesk
"We've been here ten years" - Colonists
HOW.
The wormhole was discovered, at most, TWO years ago, and you don't even mention it in your origin story anyway. Are you saying you flew the LONG way to the gamma quadrant?
"Your runabout isn't there any more, I set it to fly into the sun (and missed)!" - Luddite Leader
HOW.
Federation ships don't just let anybody "do the thing." Hell, it's been a plot device that the computer routinely countermands O'Brien's orders because what he wants to do is "not recommended." IS FLYING INTO THE SUN RECOMMENDED? But even if you managed to get past that... HOW DID YOU *MISS* the sun?! Do you know how big a star is? Do you know how hard you'd have to TRY to miss?!
"Hmm, two command level officers are missing. We better send the only two remaining command officers, by themselves, to go look for them!" - Dax and Kira
/headdesk
"A Romulan ship said they saw a runabout over here" - Dax
It seems a lesser sin by comparison, but I have a hard time believing a Romulan would be on helpful speaking terms with starfleet at this point. In fact, I'm having a hard time understanding what a Romulan vessel is doing in that area at all. Going through the wormhole would require not only crossing through the neutral zone, but Bajor (being on the edge of Cardassian territory) is on the exact opposite end of Federation space from the Romulan Star Empire - the Romulans would have had to sneak across literally the entirety of Federation Territory. Furthermore, the RSE is also on the wrong side of the Federation to fly the "long" way into the gamma quadrant - it'd be less unlikely for them to be in the Delta quadrant, if anything. Map
here - notice the RSE is on the "right hand" side of the federation, and Deep Space 9 is on the "left," right next to Cardassia itself. Side note, I had no idea that Cardassia was so damn close to DS9/Bajor. I would have thought it'd have been a little deeper into Cardassian territory than that.
"Since there's nobody at the helm, we're gonna have to tractor beam the other runabout at warp and drag it to a stop, imperiling both ships" - Dax
I'm pretty sure it's been well established in canon that someone with command codes can remotely log into a federation vessel and get it to stop/shut down. Hell, I know they did it in TNG, and I'm pretty sure it happened even once or twice in TOS. Did the writers of this episode ever even watch Star Trek?
(Chief O'Brien builds a MacGuffin detector by banging rocks together)
/ThrowsUpArmsInHopelessDismay
(Chief O'Brien is discovered banging his rocks together by a vacillating Luddite, who allows O'Brien to knock him unconscious so he'll have an alibi for not turning him in)
WHAT.
Knocking someone unconscious by a blow to the back of the head is NOT HARMLESS. And in case you didn't notice, these guys don't even have electric lights, much less neurologists to check for damage when he wakes up. Would not a large bruise on the luddite's face from a regular punch, followed by him lying down on the ground for a while, have accomplished the same thing WITHOUT RISKING PERMANENT BRAIN DAMAGE?
And the final insult to the viewer's intelligence -
When the anti-technology field is disabled and Sisko and O'Brien arrest the Luddite leader for essentially sabotage and murder, ALL THE OTHER COLONISTS DECIDE THEY WANT TO STAY AND BE LUDDITES. A child LITERALLY DIED within the last 24 hours for lack of medical supplies that were (to the best of their knowledge) just sitting on a Runabout in orbit, that the leader could have allowed them access to at any time if she just decided that human lives were more important than imposing her philisophical - almost religious - ideals on everyone. In fact, they've starved, frozen, and buried so many friends and family over the last 10 years that Sisko and O'Brien SHOULD have been having to protect the leader from THEM wanting to string the leader up on the spot - or at least put her in the "hotbox" she used to punish others. But no, they just decide "you know, this is just who we're gonna be from now on, the leader was right - life is better without electricity or medicine or toilet paper."
And, as is so typical in too many DS9 episodes, there's no closure. The episode ends with the beamup. TOS, TNG, hell, even Voyager and Enterprise would always have a little "epilogue" scene at the end of an episode saying something to the effect of "well, she was found guilty and she was given this particularly ironic yet humane punishment, haven't we all learned something" etc etc. But I've noticed a distressing tendency for DS9 episodes to end before addressing the consequences of the events of the episode.
If this wasn't 2017 and I wasn't able to immediately watch the next episode because I have them all downloaded... if this had been a weekly real-time broadcast, I think this episode would have been enough for me to write off DS9 as utterly stupid and not worth watching. It's only because it was sandwiched between
a good episode and
a REALLY good episode that I'm able to keep going.
