Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

This week, Miles and Keiko struggle to work out how to react when their daughter ruins a perfectly pleasant family picnic by plummeting accidentally into an high-concept science fiction premise. Meanwhile, back on the station, their son falls foul of a sudden sitcom outbreak, banging his head on a table in what seems, in context, to be a comparatively sensible and comprehensible accident. It’s all a lot of nonsense, of course, but the people are nice, and everything turns out for the best.

It’s an epic start to Deep Space Nine’s final season. Miles, Julian and Quark join Worf on a mission to honour Jadzia by blowing up a cartoon shipyard. Ben and Jake meet a (completly adorable) new Dax, drag Brock Peters through the desert for some reason, and then dig up a box. And Kira sits in a tiny spaceship waiting steadfastly for something to come along and resolve her part of the plot. And all the time, Joe and Nathan are cheering from the sidelines, enjoying a solid 90 minutes of getting to know these people again, and watching them set things up for a glorious final year.

When passive-aggressive Vulcan racist Captain Solok arrives on Deep Space Nine and challenges Sisko to some kind of sportsball game, a series of hilarious training montages ensues, followed by a Very Important Lesson about how utterly adorable Rom is. Bless.

It’s all about faith this week on Deep Space Nine — Weyoun’s faith in Odo and the Founders, Nog’s faith that the genre rules of the comedy B-plot will lead inevitably to a happy ending, and the writers’ faith that wonderful, charming actors like Aron and René can make it all land from underneath a kilogram of latex.

This week, it’s time to ruin everyone’s fun, as Nathan declares that a Deep Space Nine fan favourite is an artistic failure, and compares it unfavourably to Take Me Out to the Holosuite. Is he crazy, or is it the whole damn system that’s crazy?