Untitled Star Trek Project

Basically nothing happens on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this week, as Nathan undergoes a religious experience which inspires him to be terribly nice to people for a change, while Joe anticipates failing to win a major podcasting award. Still, sometimes it’s just nice to hang out with the people you love, isn’t it?

A return to the realm of cheap Saturday-morning-cartoon Trek, where the only person apparently putting in any effort is Master of Dialect, Jimmy Doohan. This week, we find ourselves in a universe where space is white, stars are black, people age backwards, women give birth to large old men, and the Enterprise crew are listless, lifeless and dull.

This week, we watch an dreadful hour of Star Trek — cheap, mawkish and absolutely absurd — but we end up enjoying ourselves enormously. Have we found a fatal flaw at the entire heart of the Untitled Star Trek Project?

A few tense moments this week, as a fragrant dikironium vampire kills a bunch of redshirts before threatening some characters with names and ultimately the Enterprise itself. But the real suspense comes from an entirely different direction: Will this episode teeter over the edge of camp into baffling semicompetence? Will Kirk’s obsession turn him from a jovial and beloved authority figure into a massive idiot? Will any cue from the Star Trek music library go unused? (No, no and no, fortunately.)

It’s four weeks until the Deep Space Nine finale, and so it’s time for a momentous and operatic episode, an episode full of subtext and thoughtful performances, and an episode that deals a killing blow to two crumbling empires and changes the status quo forever. In short: an episode that exemplifies everything that makes us love Deep Space Nine.