Untitled Star Trek Project

This week, a seminal moment in the history of television appears to be taking place at 0.5× speed.

“Terrible beyond terrible.”

“Here lies a colossal mess of a show, mixing serious (albeit unrealized) science fiction with broad, less-than-funny comedy.”

“Sometimes you just have to bow to the absurd.”

“That was fun.”

“Yeah, I thought that was great.”

This week on Deep Space Nine, Dukat (Kathy Bates) and Sisko (James Caan) crash land on one of Star Trek’s less convincing standing sets, and then have a proper talk about their Feelings and Values. (Antipathy, and for one of them, Racism.)

This week in Star Trek: Slow-Witted White Men, no one turns into a salamander, gets trapped in a board game or has sex with a ghost. In fact, no one does much of anything at all — at least not anything that anyone will remember 23 years later.

This week, we are properly introduced to Voyager’s latest Intransigent Alien Antagonist, in preparation for a thrilling two-part epic in a couple of weeks’ time. And things go pretty well, on the whole, despite (or perhaps because of) some interpersonal conflict between two important cast members and their characters.