Veal Piccata Mundi

Today, following a funeral at which I served as the organist, I went out to lunch at a restaurant I have only visited once before. Armed with a gift certificate from Restaurant-dot-com, I went to the Laganini restaurant on Gravois Road in the extreme southern part of St. Louis City, about two blocks east of the Bevo Mill.

Those who know this neighborhood are aware of its strongly Balkan ethnic flavor. Within a few blocks of Laganini are a Bosnian newspaper, the excellent Grbic restaurant, several shops and pubs whose names suffer from an acute shortage of vowels, and--literally across the parking lot from Laganini itself--the not-so-excellent Bosnia Gold restaurant, which judging by the parking lot does a lot more business than Laganini. This is a terrible injustice that I would like to help set right.

Don't let the Italianate name fool you. Laganini is also a Bosnian restaurant. The waiter/bartender on duty at lunch today is avowedly Bosnian. He also appears to be the owner (as I noticed on my way out of the place, when I spotted his picture in a framed newspaper article near the door). When asked, he readily pointed out other people of Bosnian nationality present in the bar, which was a good trick because there weren't a lot of people there at the time.

Though one side of the two-sided, laminated lunch menu is all pizza and some of the other dishes (such as my main course today) are of Italian origin, Laganini also caters to the tastes of those who come from various former Yugoslavian republics. The bar stocks a beer imported from Slovenia (I had two bottles of this Laško brew, and it wasn't bad as lager goes). Songs crooned by the Croatian equivalent of Neil Diamond play in the background while you admire the very tasteful and stylish interior decor. The kitchen produces a very passable, if slightly burnt, spanakopita (an appetizer in which spinach is cooked inside a triangular pocket of flaky phyllo dough). Phyllo dough also plays a charming role in the warm "applepita" that I ordered for dessert, as it were an Adriaticized apple cobbler with a dollop of ice cream and Cool Whip on top, and that adds the perfect counterpoint of tart sweetness to the bitter double shot of espresso that I took with it.

In between these flaky delights, I enjoyed a nice salad of finely ripped lettuce, tomato, onion, and pepper topped with Italian dressing and crumbled feta cheese, and then my first-ever plate of veal piccata, served with a side of rigatoni in herbs, parmesan cheese, and olive oil. Heretofore veal has not been a major part of my diet. I'm not even sure that the handful of Wienerschnitzels I have eaten were really, at bottom, veal. But this restaurant has three veal dishes on its lunch menu, each for the temptingly reasonable price of $14 (which includes the salad, the side, and a basket of soft warm bread that really tastes nice when you dunk it in the sauce from the veal). After today's lunch I'm starting to see a more regular enjoyment of veal on the horizon.

I think the three veal dishes at Laganini are Wienerschnitzel (veal flattened with a tenderizer, then breaded, pan-fried and dressed with a brown sauce), veal parmesan (ditto up to the pan-fried part, then topped with marinara sauce and melted cheese), and today's winning candidate, veal piccata. Like the other two dishes, you can also enjoy this type of thing with chicken instead of veal, but the difference must be like night and day. This veal was tender, juicy, and full of its own distinctive flavor. Its savory sauce, which I take to be a concoction of olive oil, lemon juice, and maybe a touch of wine, is seasoned with garlic, herbs, and lots of plump capers ready to burst in your mouth. I've never had anything like it until now; so I feel a sense of loss for all the years I could have been enjoying this dish.

I could have had mixed vegetables or a roast potato on the side, but I went with the pasta. Wiki informs me that this starchy side-dish is a departure from the custom of Italy, where the dish originated, but it is absolutely in character for countries out of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is the grounds on which I rank Laganini a bit lower than Grbic, but significantly above Bosnia Gold, in the quality of their food. Grbic cares enough about even the least important detail of your meal--that starchy side-dish--to serve you a mess of wonky little homemade egg-noodles in a garlicky butter sauce; Bosnia Gold cares so little that they give you elbow macaroni, and not particularly well-cooked elbow macaroni at that. Laganini's entry in this bellwether category is cooked just right, palatably seasoned, lubricated but not drowned in a light sauce, and really quite unnecessary when you realize that you have a basketful of fresh-baked bread to dip in the even better-tasting sauce running off the meat.

Everything was marvelous. I am loath to complain even about the spanakopita being slightly burnt on one side; they were tasty in spite of the charring. Bottom line: You St. Louis-based readers need to help me do something about the empty parking lot at Laganini. It's a crying shame, especially when a decidedly inferior restaurant is doing swell business next door. If you're hesitant to try it out at full price, look it up here and bring a gift certificate with you. Remember not to be surprised to find out that it's not an Italian place--except insofar as Croatia's elbow comes Gulf-of-Trieste close to poking Italy's bottom, so there might be a bit of cultural overlap there. If you want some of the best Italian food in the south-city, there are many other places to discuss. But if you're open to trying a creditable Austro-Hungarian sally at a classic Italian dish--which you probably can't afford to eat at a real Italian place--this may be your best buy.

Stuffed Peppers Smackdown

When it comes to comfort food in my family, few dishes rise close to the level of Stuffed Peppers. I recently asked two reliable family informants to explain how they make the dish, and I got three (3) recipes. These are, to be sure, more riddle than recipe. Either they provide precise measurements but no oven temperature or baking time, or vice versa; many other details are left up to you to figure out for yourself. I reckon the real secret is to spend your whole adult life cooking for people until you're pretty good at playing it by ear... Or maybe it's just that, once you've unlocked all the secrets after years of painstaking experimentation, you don't want to give it all away!

Anyway, here are three "wish to the point of weeping that you were home for dinner" angles on the Riddle of the Stuffed Pepper. I would say "Choose your favorite," only by the time you do enough tests to get the recipe right, it will be your own. Best of luck, and try not to cry too hard!

STUFFED PEPPERS à la MOM
Bring 2 cups of white rice and 4 cups of water to a boil; turn off the heat and leave it covered for about 10-15 min. Peek at it occasionally so it doesn't overcook or scorch. The lid on the pan steams it done, so don't look too much!

Meanwhile, par-boil about 6-8 green and/or red peppers. In a separate pan, brown 1-lb of hamburger, half an onion minced, and 2 stalks of celery finely chopped. Keep breaking up the meat as it browns. After the meat is well cooked, add a can of diced tomatoes and a large can of tomato sauce.

Stir the rice into the hamburger-sauce mixture. Season to taste with seasoned salt and garlic powder. Stuff the peppers with the rice-meat mixture. Put them in a cake pan sprayed with Pam. Sprinkle parmesan cheese over the tops of the peppers. If you have leftover rice mixture, add some crumbled fried bacon to it and serve it as "Spanish Rice."

STUFFED PEPPERS à la STEPMOM
What my way-cool Stepmom lacks in theatricality (compared to Mom), she makes up in creativity and versatility. For example, she has not one but two recipes for this family fave. Though she holds the recipe cards close to her chest (I love the "etc."!), her rendition has always worked for me. Plus, it might fill in some of the gaps in Mom's account!

CLASSIC STYLE: Cook the rice. Add tomato sauce. Cut off the tops of the peppers and dice them into the rice along with browned hamburger, onion, chili powder, and garlic. Blanch the peppers, then stuff them with the rice mixture and stand them in a baking pan surrounded by extra rice mixture. Bake them about 45 minutes to an hour at 350 F.

DIABETIC STYLE: Blanch the peppers and stuff them with a mixture similar to meat loaf. Pour tomato sauce seasoned with onion, garlic, Worcestershire sauce etc. over them and bake.

14. All Saints' Day Hymn

Today my LCMS church in the city of St. Louis celebrated All Saints' Day, albeit transferred to the next available Sunday. Here is a hymn that came to me during the sermon at early service (forgive me, dear Pastor):

For those whom God has set apart
To serve the purpose of His heart
From ages past up to this day,
Henceforth till ages end, we pray:
May Christ be glorified!

For those who fought the fight and won;
Who bore the cross with God’s dear Son;
Who, cleansed in His baptismal flood,
Are robed in spotless, paschal blood:
May Christ be glorified!

For those who ran life's urgent race;
Who boxed the flesh with battered face;
Who bore the test of sin and death
Till God received their dying breath:
May Christ be glorified!

For those who, poor in spirit, grieve,
Thirst, hunger for God's just reprieve;
The meek; the merciful; the pure;
The peaceful, whose reward is sure:
May Christ be glorified!

By their confession, true and strong,
We know the faith of that blest throng.
Their fellowship we long to share
Here, now, and ever after, where
Christ shall be glorified.

And so through God's beloved Son,
With God the Father ever One,
Whose Spirit, blowing from the cross,
Makes death a sleep and all else loss,
We shall be glorified!

EDIT (Jan. 23, 2019): I was amazed to rediscover this hymn while scrolling through my own blog. I had forgotten that I posted it, and it never got into my 2015 book of "Useful Hymns." Nor did I get around to writing a tune for it until yesterday. So here, for inclusion in the work-in-progress "Edifying Hymns," is an original tune for this hymn, titled HOLY ONES.

The Fairy's Kiss

Mental notes from a Saturday night at the symphony...

The conductor is a tall young Finn named Hannu Lintu, who combines a huge yet precisely controlled energy with a unique conducting gesture. At times, I feared for his eyeballs. The way he hauls off with the baton over his right shoulder (and sometimes even his left) before whaling a huge, fortissimo beat left me praying that he wouldn't misjudge his aim and stab himself in the face. It could happen. I've seen a conductor fork his glasses off with a baton, and I'm sure he didn't mean to do that. Apart from this wince factor, I was intrigued by Lintu's style. There is something gravity-defying about his gesture, as if he was using a wand (Harry Potter style) to levitate the music above the stage.

The soloist in the second half of the program was pianist Emmanuel Ax: a living legend, a world authority on Brahms, and a kindly-old-professor type who shouldn't have the physical strength to play Brahms's First Piano Concerto. That's the one where the piano gets treated somewhat like a blacksmith's anvil for the better part of 40 minutes. Not only did Ax rise to the challenge of this physically strenuous masterpiece, but he also volunteered a lovely, lyrical encore in the midst of his enthusiastic ovation.

That ovation was an odd thing, though: After maybe one curtain call, Lintu never came out on stage again. I took it as slightly rude. He seems to have retired to his dressing-room while the crowd was still clapping and cheering, with no intention of basking in Ax's reflected glory. And then Ax, having come out on stage for one last bow after his encore, decided not to wait for the applause to end, but gave the musicians a sign to follow him off the stage and thus choked off the cheering. Maybe it was an issue about the hall's closing time, making sure the place cleared out before the ushers turned into mice and the timpani into pumpkins, etc. Still, while it was not the first encore I've heard at Powell Hall, it was the first time I have seen the performers turn their back on a crowd while it was still cheering.

My neighbors in the strangely sparse audience were an interesting lot. I made pleasant conversation with some of them during the intermission. A couple down the row to my right shared a mutual acquaintance with me. The gentleman to my left, whose insistence on using his seat side-saddle drove me farther down a (mercifully) otherwise empty row, hummed along with some of the tunes. The elderly gentleman in the row behind me said aloud, a heartbeat after the ending of Brahms's first movement, "That was a sensational performance." A couple who spent the whole intermission walking back and forth from one end of the gallery to the other recognized me (and I them) from earlier concerts, and asked after the book I was reading. People are getting to know me as the guy who doesn't go anywhere without a book, in case the prospect of boredom threatens. Several other people who chose to move around during the intermission stopped by the rail in front of me to make pleasant conversation. The evening was full of pleasures, even apart from the music.

The program opened with a concertized version of a Stravinsky ballet titled "The Fairy's Kiss." Actually it's been performed far more often as a concert piece than as an actual ballet; Stravinsky himself once conducted a shorter Divertimento based on the work right here in St. Louis. The scenario of the ballet, which is only slightly relevant to hearing it in concert, has to do with an Andersen fairy tale about a young man who falls under the spell of an evil ice fairy, who first puts her mark on him when he is but a baby, and finally drags him to his doom on the eve of his wedding. The music didn't sound a whole lot like Stravinsky. At times it actually sounded closer to Tchaikovsky. This shouldn't be surprising, though, when you consider that Stravinsky adapted themes by Tchaikovsky that had never been orchestrated before.

If it doesn't sound altogether Tchaikovskian, however, that too is to be expected. Stravinsky always put his own stamp on pieces adapted from other composers, be they Pergolesi (in "Pulcinella") or Bach (in the Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch"). And that doesn't just mean the stamp of his personality or his general approach to music, but even countermelodies, extra layers of counterpoint, added ostinato figures. In this instance Stravinsky did more than take a finished piece and add new layers to it; he actually organized Tchaikovsky's thematic material in a new way, and added wholly original bridge passages, so that it is hard to tell where one composer ends and the other begins.

"The Fairy's Kiss," for the most part, doesn't enter the music world of fairy-tale magic that fans of Tchaikovsky's ballets know and love. Instead, it conjures a distinctively northern and Russian world of sound, filled with a variety of emotional textures from serious to jubilant, from a warmly romantic love theme to the chilled serenity of the "Lullaby of Eternal Dwellings." It's got a touch of morbid melancholy in it, and I think it's significant that Stravinsky thought his fairy-tale scenario was a metaphor for the tragedy of Tchaikovsky's short life, cruelly cut off at the peak of his genius.

I really went to hear the Brahms. I have always gotten a thrill out of that concerto. What made Emmanuel Ax's performance especially thrilling was the fact that I didn't sleep through the tender slow movement. It is usually such a come-down between two such extroverted outer movements--the stormy first movement, almost symphonic, almost a whole concerto in itself, and the flashy contrasts of a finale that covers everything from gypsy dance to rigorous fugue--that I don't really even hear the middle movement, most times I sit down to listen to the whole work. This time I really heard it, because Ax really played it in all its nearly religious lyricism. Brahms's own statement that this movement was a portrait of Clara Schumann (a major crush at that youthful stage in his life) grapples with a note in the score suggesting that the inspiration came from the "Benedictus" portion of the Mass ("Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord"). You can hear a bit of both in this, a not-quite-churchly hymn interlarded with reflections of tender intimacy. Under Ax's hands, this movement was (for the first time in my life) the one I really cared about. But he played them all so well, and the whole concerto was so exciting!

A last mental note... I coughed up $10 for a parking space in one of Grand Center's secured lots. I haven't done this in a while. In fact, since Grand Center decided to extend the hours of its curbside parking meters from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., I hadn't paid to park in the cultural district, not once. Grand Center made this change last season on the rationale that allowing the theater- and concert-going public to park for free after 7:00 would mean fewer parking spots for patrons of the restaurants and other business in the area. The problem with this idea was that some of those restaurants' patrons included theater- and concert-goers, like me, who sometimes arrived an hour or two before showtime, fed the meter from 6:00 to 7:00, and dined in the district before going to the show. It was all part of one affordable and convenient entertainment package... until the meters' hours changed. Now the cost of curbside parking became four times as expensive and, what was worse, the only way to avoid a ticket was to feed four hours' worth of quarters into the meter. Nobody routinely carries that many quarters, and even if we did, it would be such a tedious chore that we would be open to any alternative... including parking two blocks farther away on an unmetered street, if one isn't up to paying $8 to $10 for a spot in a gated lot.

I'm sure I'm not alone in being so ticked off by it that I decided, out of pure spleen, not to patronize any Grand Center businesses before or after the concert. So not only did the district lose the money I would have happily put into their meters up to 7:00, but its tenants also lost my hunger and thirst, and the business opportunities therein. But now that Grand Center has repented of its big mistake and restored the meters' 7:00 closing time, I decided to reward their belated wisdom by going whole hog and blowing $10 on my parking space. Maybe next time I'll arrive early enough to visit the Best Steakhouse and give my order to St. Louis's nearest equivalent to the Soup Nazi--that guy who bellows "NEXT!" to the next person in line who hasn't shouted his or her order back at him....

DS9 Season 4

Season 4 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the year of my favorite Star Trek spinoff that aired from October 1995 to June 1996, roughly my undergraduate senior year. It is also the year that DS9 added a dynamic "new" character to its cast--amazingly, without losing an old one! For it was in the fourth year, following the cinematic release of Star Trek: Generations and the destruction of the Enterprise-D, that Michael Dorn's character of Worf came over to DS9. Not only does this make Worf (at 11 solid seasons of Trek) the franchise's longest-running regular character, but in fact it made what had been on TNG a relatively minor character far more important and better developed than he had been. In the ensuing four seasons, Worf would lose his family honor only to gain a new family; he would find par'mach (something like love, but with sharper teeth), get married, and become a widower; he would call out the chancellor of the Klingon Empire in mortal combat; and he would continually challenge the expectations of those of us brought up on "human" values.

The Way of the Warrior begins the season with a two-hour telefilm confronting the Federation with a new threat: a Klingon Empire no longer content to coexist peacefully under the Khitomer Accords, and now stirred up especially by the rumor that the Dominion were behind a recent shakedown in the Cardassian government. Now the Klingons are gunning for the Cardassians, and woe betide anyone who stands in their way... Anyone such as, for example, Bajor and DS9. Worf comes aboard at a crucial moment to help the station prepare tactically for the crossfire it is about to get caught in, and to serve as a local expert on the care and feeding of Klingons. This episode is notable for a scene in which Garak approaches Dukat with phase-pistol drawn, only to turn around and fall in beside him as a fellow defender against the invading Klingons; this was intended to be a clever fake, but in actuality it is one of DS9's most unintentionally hilarious moments, looking for a moment as though Marc Alaimo and Andrew Robinson are about to break into a song-and-dance number. Guest stars include J. G. Hertzler in his first of 24 appearances as Klingon General Martok (or rather, as we later find out, a changeling impersonating him); two-time Trek guest Obi Ndefo of "Dawson's Creek" and "Stargate SG-1" in his only apearance as Martok's belligerent son Drex; Christopher Darga (who also appeared on Voyager and played a Klingon on Enterprise) as the Klingon captain who gets his guts handed to him for failing to fire on the Defiant; and "Babylon 5" regular Patricia Tallman (then a Star Trek stuntperson) as the Defiant bridge officer who gets a faceful of exploding weapons console.

The Visitor shows us a very tragic possible future for Jake Sisko, beginning when he sees his father disintegrated by a surge of technobabble from the Defiant's warp core. As the young writer struggles to accept his father's death, he is tormented by visions of his still-living Dad, visions which turn out to be visitations. Sisko has, in fact, become trapped in subspace, where he exists outside of time in between increasingly infrequent dips into normal space. Since he always comes back close to wherever Jake is, it soon becomes evident that the phenomenon has linked father to son one some level that threatens to generate record levels of technobabble. Instead, thank God, it generates a moving, tear-jerking, father-son story in which the aging Jake is played by the same Tony Todd who also played Worf's brother Kurn. Two-time Trek guest Galyn Görg plays grown-up Jake's Bajoran wife; and Andrew Robinson's daughter Rachel Robinson plays the young woman who comes to Jake's house on a dark and stormy night to hear his story. How much Jake's actual future follows the course laid down in this episode (apart from his quest to save his Dad) is hard to tell, but eagle-eyed viewers may notice that the novel he writes later in this season bears the same title ("Anslem") as future-Jake's magnum opus....

Hippocratic Oath is the one where Bashir and O'Brien crash-land on the same planet with a crew of renegade Jem'Hadar who are trying to break free of the Dominion. Their "first," a Jem'Hadar named Goran'Agar who on a previous mission to the same world found himself cured of his enslavement to the drug Ketracel White, challenges Dr. Bashir to help him find a cure for the rest of his men before they run out of the drug and the subsequent rampage kills them all. While Bashir is perfectly content to do this, however, O'Brien considers it his duty to attempt an escape, leading to a strain in their friendship, a crisis of medical ethics, and tragic consequences at last. Goran'Agar is one of five characters played by Scott MacDonald in all four Trek spinoffs, including a previous DS9 appearance as Tosk in Season 1's "Captive Pursuit." Playing other Jem'Hadar characters are Stephen Davies (in one of his 3 roles in DS9 and Voyager), Marshall Teague (who also appeared on Voyager), and Jeremy Roberts, who played a member of Capt. Sulu's crew in Star Trek VI and reprised the role in Voyager's episode "Flashback."

Indiscretion throws Kira and Dukat together on a mission to rescue survivors of a Cardassian transport that disappeared years ago. Both of them have a personal stake in the adventure: Kira, because a personal friend was among several Bajoran prisoners on board; Dukat, because his Bajoran mistress and their half-breed daughter were also there, en route to a new life far from judgmental Cardassians and Bajorans. When they learn that Dukat's daughter Ziyal actually has survived, Kira has to work extra-hard to prevent him from killing the girl to save his career and his marriage. Ultimately, perversely, it is Ziyal saying that she wants her father to kill her that saves her. An episode marred by a banal B-story about a "big step" in the relationship between Sisko and Kasidy Yates, it features Cyia Batten as the first of three actresses to play Tora Ziyal. Roy Brocksmith, who also guested on TNG and B5, appears as the Bajoran scrap dealer who puts Kira and Dukat on the trail of the lost ship.

Rejoined is the one where Jadzia sucks face with another Trill chick, played by Susanna Thompson whose other Trek credits include a Romulan and an alien mental patient on TNG and the Borg Queen in three episodes of Voyager. Dr. Lenara Kahn's previous host was married to the hotshot pilot Torias Dax, whose death in a shuttle accident opened the way for Joran, then Curzon, and now Jadzia to host the Dax symbiont. And now, in defiance of a strict Trill taboo against "reassociation" with your previous host's significant other, the two momentarily surrender to their lingering feelings for each other. It is Dr. Khan, the apparent "bottom" in this gender-irrelevant relationship, who finally breaks off the liaison because she isn't willing to make the ultimate Trill sacrifice (i.e. dooming the symbiont to never being joined to another host) on the basis of her personal feelings. Buried under (mercifully) not too many layers of preachy social allegory is a movingly sad love story in which director Avery Brooks made every effort to make the gender issues appear totally irrelevant. What gets me about this story, however, is that in the last analysis, the short-sighted Trill taboo has it right, and an ardent couple in Dax and Kahn's situation would have to be very selfish and misguided to risk what I understand that they risk in the context of integrating one Trill symbiont with a succession of humanoid hosts. Simply from the standpoint of the sci-fi concept of the Trill, don't you think it would be harmful to let a past host's personality overwhelm the synthesis between the symbiont and its present host?

Starship Down is an exciting episode in which the Defiant plays a game of blind man's buff with two Jem'Hadar ships in the atmosphere of a gas giant. The suspenseful chase is reminiscent of an old submarine-warfare movie, complete with warnings about how much pressure the hull can take and the use of decoys to fool the enemy's sensors in an environment where nobody can see over much of a distance. Lending his distinctive talents to the show is Oscar-nominated actor James Cromwell, who had played two roles on TNG before starring as warp-drive inventor Zefram Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact, a feature-film role he reprised on Enterprise. Here Cromwell plays the Trade Minister of the Karemma, a minor Dominion race who have been doing business with the Ferengi. Due to Quark's sharp practices, the Karemma have rather soured on doing business with the Alpha Quadrant. The ordeal of disarming a live torpedo that has lodged itself in the ship's hull brings Quark and the Minister together in a particularly clever way. Among the other guest actors is F. J. Rio, making his first of three appearances as Crewman Muñiz; Rio also had roles on Voyager and Enterprise.

Little Green Men is the episode that brings the family of Quark, Rom, and Nog together on a time-travel adventure to mid-20th-century Earth. Who knew that the Roswell aliens were actually Ferengi? Along with Odo, the three little orange men make a hilarious object of study for a cigar-chomping General and a cigarette-puffing staff of scientists and MPs. The Ferengi have trouble at first with their Universal Translators, a never-seen and seldom-discussed device that (when functioning properly) allows everyone to appear to speak the same language; so, for the first time, we hear a bit of Ferengi lingo and some of what English sounds like to them. The General (pictured here) is played by Charles Napier, who had also guest starred as the ill-fated Adam in the TOS episode "The Way to Eden." The good-hearted scientists who help the aliens escape are played by Conor O'Farrell of "CSI" and Megan Gallagher of "Millennium," each a three-time Trek guest; the trigger-happy Capt. Wainwright is played by James G. MacDonald, who had played an Area 51 officer in the 1994 telefilm Roswell.

The Sword of Kahless brings back John Colicos for his second of three DS9 appearances as Klingon Dahar Master Kor (who also happened to be the first Klingon commander ever depicted, in TOS's "Errand of Mercy"). This time he recruits not only Jadzia but Worf as well for a quest to find the legendary bat'leth of Kahless, the Klingon leader who a thousand years ago established his race's warrior way. Their steps are dogged by an old Klingon enemy of Worf's and by one of those nasty-looking Letheans who cause so much psychic trouble (e.g. in Season 3's "Distant Voices"), but finally it turns out that the true enemy is within. Realizing that their own greed for power makes the sword too dangerous for them to hold, Worf and Kor beam it into outer space... Lame, perhaps, but inevitable, given the nature of the Klingon heart and the weakness, at that point, of their fatally flawed culture. But still, there is something chillingly lonely about the episode's closing image of that ancient, beautiful bat'leth spinning end-over-end through the empty cosmos.

Our Man Bashir brings a spoof of James Bond to DS9. While Julian and Garak are in the holosuite, trying out a program in which Bashir plays the role of a champagne-swilling, baccarat-hustling, seductress-seducing man of mystery, several of their friends have been beamed off an exploding runabout just on time. Unfortunately, something went wrong with the transporter, and until something can be done to fix it, the molecular patterns of Sisko, Dax, Kira, O'Brien, and Worf must be shunted to wherever the station's computer system has room for them. Which, for the time being, seems to be Julian's holoprogram. Now he's got to deal with a cast of bad guys who look exactly like, but act quite unlike, his closest friends and colleagues... and he has to keep their characters alive until something can be done about the transporter. Watching this episode made me laugh until it hurt. I don't know what's funnier: Nana Visitor (Kira) playing a vamp with an over-the-top Russian accent, Avery Brooks's turn as the diabolical Dr. Noah, or Garak's wry observations on the difference between his brand of spycraft and that depicted in Bashir's fantasy world.

Homefront begins a two-episode arc in which the bombing of a diplomatic conference, apparently carried out by a Dominion changeling, raises concerns about Earth's security. Sisko arrives on earth, together with Odo and Jake, to check in on his father (Brock Peters of To Kill a Mockingbird, etc., in his first of six appearances as New Orleans restauranteur Joseph Sisko) and to take command of Starfleet Security. While the changelings seem to delight in rubbing the Federation's nose in their ability to elude any and all security measures, paranoia and distrust build up to the point where armed security officers are patrolling the streets of Earth. Could this be exactly what the Dominion wants? Or is somebody else's agenda in play here? To find out the answer, stay tuned for...

Paradise Lost--the conclusion of the two-parter in which a Starfleet admiral's concern about security, in the perilous early days of the Federation's buildup to war with the Dominion, leads him to plot treason against the lawfully elected President of the Federation. And in spite of being directly under this very admiral's command, Sisko finds out about it and tries to stop it, risking his career as well as the lives of the Defiant's crew to bring evidence of the Admiral's duplicity before the Federation. Both of these episodes feature Robert Foxworth (late of "Falcon Crest") as Admiral Leyton; Foxworth also played a Vulcan leader in three episodes of Enterprise. Playing Capt. Benteen in both episodes is Susan Gibney, who appeared twice as starship designer Leah Brahms on TNG. Hugely tall character actor Herschel Sparber plays President Jaresh-Inyo in a sort of riff on JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Rudolph Willrich makes one of his three Trek appearances in this episode as the Bolian commandant of Starfleet Academy. David Drew Gallagher makes his first of two appearances as Cadet Shepard, who eventually snuffs it in Season 6's "Valiant."

Crossfire is a mostly character-driven show that will be a huge disappointment to fans expecting action-packed battle scenes. Though there is one somewhat thrilling attempt on the lives of Kira, Odo, and Bajoran First Minister Shakaar (previously seen in Season 3's "Shakaar"), the main conflict in this episode takes place in whatever region of Odo's gelatinous mass passes for a heart. Which gives me as good an excuse as any to ask: What were the creators of this series thinking? Don't life-forms have to eat, excrete, reproduce, etc? How seriously are we supposed to take this being who neither eats nor drinks nor breathes? Where does he get the energy to keep going? Surely resting in a bucket can't do that much for him? End of digression. Regardless of the improbability of the creature he portrays, Rene Auberjonois knocks one out of the park in this episode, delivering a lyrical performance that reveals the complex nuances in the character of DS9's most reserved and private officer. It all comes out for us to see, if for no one else, when Odo finds himself in charge of Shakaar's security detail during the First Minister's visit to DS9, and thus in a position to observe as his charge woos and wins the same Kira whom Odo secretly loves. His agony is exquisite!

Return to Grace finds Gul Dukat in command of a Cardassian freighter, his career and family life in shambles after the revelation (cf. "Indiscretion") that he sired a half-Bajoran daughter. Kira joins Dukat and Ziyal (played for the second and last time by Cyia Batten) en route to a joint Cardassian-Bajoran conference, but they arrive just in time to witness the outpost's destruction by a Klingon bird-of-prey. Working together, Dukat and Kira manage to turn the tables on the Klingons--to turn them so completely that the Cardassians end up on board the bird-of-prey, and the Klingons on the freighter, which Dukat then promptly destroys. Kira persuades Dukat to let her take Ziyal back to DS9 to watch over her while he carries on his anti-Klingon privateering. It is in this episode that Dukat utters the Sitting-Bullesque line: "What Cardassians? I am the only Cardassian left!" This episode also boasts the first of Casey Biggs's 23 appearances as Dukat's protege Damar (pictured here).

Sons of Mogh features Tony Todd, for the last time, as Worf's brother Kurn (previously seen in 3 TNG episodes). Humiliated by the dishonor Worf has brought on their house by defying Chancellor Gowron, Kurn comes to Worf with a stunning request: that his brother kill him in the Klingon ritual of mauk-to'vor, thus allowing Kurn to enter the afterlife with his honor intact. Even more amazing, perhaps, is the fact that Worf agrees to the request, and actually attempts to carry it out (as evidenced by the "mevak" blade pictured). Luckily for Kurn(?), Worf's Federation friends intervene with lifesaving medical care and an attempt to give Kurn a new purpose in life, as a member of the station's mostly Bajoran security force. But when Kurn slides deeper into depression, it becomes obvious that only a visit to Dr. Bashir's Chamber of Horrors can solve his problem. The ethically questionable solution this time is to wipe Kurn's memories and let a kindly old Klingon talk the amnesia victim into accepting a new identity as his son. Kurn's new father is played by Robert DoQui, late of the RoboCop films.

Bar Association is the one where the employees in Quark's bar rise up, form a union, and go on strike. This is newsworthy because it absolutely never happens in Ferengi society, where the 211th Rule of Aquisition applies: "Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them." You know, somebody actually put out a book of the Rules of Acquisition, featuring commentary by the character of Quark. He's not much of an example of conformity to Ferengi rules, however, given that he risks losing his business license to come to a mutual understanding with his workers. This ends up being the episode where Rom leaves Quark's service and becomes a member of DS9's engineering crew, a turning point that would lead him in interesting new directions.

Accession guest stars comedian and character actor Richard Libertini (Fletch, Awakeneings, Nell, etc.) as Akorem Laan, a Bajoran poet who emerges from the wormhole 300 years after his disappearance on a light-ship (cf. Season 3's "Explorers"). Having technically encountered the Wormhole Aliens-cum-Prophets before Sisko, Akorem claims to be the true Emissary and, at first, Sisko is not sorry to see the mantle pass to someone else. But then, Akorem starts to change things. Having missed out on the whole Cardassian occupation and its effect on Bajoran culture, he issues notice that Bajor must return to old ways--including a caste system under which Kira is supposed to be an artist, not a soldier, and in which others who work outside the callings proper to their "d'jarra" are violently persecuted. Sensing an impending disaster, Sisko decides to reassert his claim to be the Emissary, and appeals to the Prophets to decide. And what do you suppose they said? This wasn't the last episode they ever made, you know... This episode's guest cast includes Robert Symonds (late of The Exorcist) as a fanatically devout Vedek, and Camille Saviola in her last of four appearances as Kai Opaka.

Rules of Engagement features three-time Trek guest Ron Canada (late of "The West Wing") as Ch'Pok, a Klingon warrior of a decidedly different kind. His battlefield: the courtroom. His target: Worf. In a case that could seriously embarrass the Federation (cf. "Tribunal"), Worf is charged with destroying an unarmed Klingon transport that just happened to de-cloak in front of the Defiant in the middle of a battle. Of course it turns out that the Klingons falsified the records, but in the meantime Ch'Pok expertly takes apart every witness who attempts to testify in Worf's defense, and then--in a cross-examination that puts Worf in the unwinnable position of having to prove he is a true Klingon even though that is what could hang him--goads the defendant to committing assault and battery. The episode has an intriguing visual style, blending courtroom testimony with first-person reenactments of the crucial battle, but it ultimately suffers from too much talking about Worf and not enough of seeing him in action.

Hard Time is the season's obligatory "make O'Brian suffer" episode. This time he suffers so good that he comes within a hair-trigger of blowing his brains out with a phaser pistol. It begins when the Argrathi government finds O'Brien guilty of espionage and punishes him with 20 years in prison... which they administer instantaneously, by injecting the time-compressed experience of his detention into his memory. As O'Brien tries to fit back into his old life, he is increasingly plagued by disturbing memories of things that happened only in his head. It makes for an intriguing irony: sometimes the most humane punishment can be the most cruel. Guest-starring as the alien who administers O'Brien's punishment is Margot Rose, who played Picard's wife in the beloved TNG episode "The Inner Light."

Shattered Mirror is the final episode to feature Felicia Bell as Jennifer Sisko, or rather her mirror-universe counterpart. This time she lures Jake Sisko over to the parallel version of DS9 (Terok Nor), as bait to bring Benjamin after them. Once there, he finds out that the rebellion has taken Terok Nor, but the Alliance is coming to take it back. Their only chance to defend the station is to get their copy of the Defiant up and running, which they can only do with Sisko's ship-design know-how. Making his first appearance is bizarro-Worf, a.k.a. the Regent, an unreconstructed-Klingon psycho who, in one unforgettably delicious scene, stabs Garak on suspicion that the latter has stolen the key to his shackles, only to learn a moment later that his stupid henchman (played by 4-time Trek guest Carlos Carrasco) had dropped the key down his own boot. "If he dies, you die..."

The Muse is two episodes for the price of one. In one storyline, Odo agrees to protect a pregnant(!) Lwaxana Troi from her Tavnian husband, whose cultural mores dictate that a male child must be raised by men and not allowed to meet a female until he comes of age. In order to resolve the conflict, Odo must marry Lwaxana by making a speech that convinces Jeyal that he truly loves her. Meanwhile, Jake is having the life sucked out of him by an alien woman who, in return, stimulates his creativity so that his first novel positively pours out of him. The sexy-spooky alien chick is played by Meg Foster, she of the amazing eyes; Lwaxana's unhappily-wedded husband is played by Michael Ansara, who the year before had reprised his TOS role as Klingon Dahar Master Kang on both DS9 and Voyager. Incidentally, this was Majel Barrett's (Lwaxana) last on-screen appearance in Star Trek.

For the Cause is the one where Ziyal, played just this once by Tracy Middendorf, becomes romantically involved with Garak, though he is not only much older but also a mortal enemy of her father. It is also the one where Sisko faces the prospect of his girlfriend being a smuggler for the Maquis, leading to a touchingly Maltese Falcon-esque "You're going to prison, I'll wait for you" scene. And then, of course, there's the wee matter of Starfleet security officer Eddington turning out to be a Maquis traitor who, while everyone else is chasing red herrings, escapes with a shipment of industrial-grade replicators earmarked for Cardassia.

To the Death is the episode where the Defiant crew teams up with a party of Jem'Hadar to hunt down and destroy a common enemy: a bunch of renegade Jem'Hadar who have turned on their Dominion masters and attacked DS9. If they aren't stopped, these rebels will soon be able to use an Iconian gateway (cf. TNG's "Contagion") to attack and conquer any world they choose, if not the whole galaxy. Working alongside Jem'Hadar isn't easy, especially knowing that as soon as this mission is over, they will revert to being your mortal enemies. Clarence Williams III (late of "The Mod Squad," The General's Daughter, etc.) plays First Omet'iklan. His Second, Toman'torax, is one of five Trek characters played by Brian Thompson (cf. Season 2's "Rules of Acquisition"). Four-time Trek actor Scott Haven plays another Jem'Hadar named Virak'kara. But historically, this episode is most notable as the first of Jeffrey Combs's 24 appearances as the Vorta clone Weyoun, among his numerous other Trek roles (recurring and otherwise).

The Quickening is the name of a genetically engineered plague on a Gamma Quadrant world where Bashir, Dax, and Kira answer a distress beacon. Every man, woman, and child on this planet is condemned to die a horrible death, as punishment for resisting the Dominion. They carry marks of the disease on their bodies from birth, but when the disease "quickens," they become covered in agonizing sores. The only local doctor in the city where Julian sets up shop is one Trevean, who specializes in euthanasia--something Julian finds repugnant. Arrogantly sure of his ability to find a cure, Bashir at first makes things worse, then all but gives up, and is finally able to give these people a slender hope, if not an actual cure. Basically a story about good man who, in the pride of his power, is forced to face a situation out of his control, this is one of the series' most emotionally powerful, relentlessly thought-provoking episodes. It guest-stars Michael Sarrazin (late of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) and soap-opera maven Ellen Wheeler, and was directed by Rene Auberjonois.

Body Parts is the one where Quark learns that he has a terminal disease, so for a final act of avarice he auctions off vacuum-desiccated parts of his body as collectible items. Then he finds out that he isn't dying after all, and the winning bidder--who happens to be Quark's nemesis, Liquidator Brunt of the F.C.A.--refuses to back out of the deal. This forces Quark to choose between hiring Garak to kill him and reneging on a business deal. The first choice is no good because Quark is afraid to die. But choice #2 means losing his Ferengi business license and becoming, in the eyes of his own people, no longer a Ferengi. It's a tough choice, but if you think about the fact that Quark is still living at the end of Season 7, it's not hard to guess which way it goes. Pictured: The first Grand Nagus appearing to Quark in the Celestial Treasury--or rather, a dream about it, which explains why the Nagus looks like Rom...

Broken Link concludes the season with Odo, afflicted by a changeling disease that nothing but the Great Link can cure, crawling back to his own people to be judged for the unprecedented crime of killing one of their own (cf. Season 3's "The Adversary"). Their verdict is to turn him into a "solid," i.e. a human, albeit one with Odo's distinctive features. Nevertheless, while listening to a broadcast of Klingon Chancellor Gowron declaring war with the Federation at the cliffhanger conclusion of the episode, Odo remembers feeling that the Great Link was withholding certain names and faces from him--and one of those names or faces was Gowron. Odo's conclusion, contradicted the following season, is that Gowron himself is a changeling. Ta-dum! "TO BE CONTINUED!"

That was one sexy season of Star Trek, was it not? A few of the episodes were on the weak side, to be sure. "Rules of Engagement" didn't develop Worf's character as much as it should have, and "The Muse" is only watchable because of the charisma of Michael Ansara and Meg Foster. But as a whole, it is a powerhouse season, vastly furthering the development of the show's sci-fi conceits, alien cultures, and core issues. We glimpse the future, the past, and Ferengi afterlife; we discover interesting facets of Bajoran, Cardassian, and Klingon culture; we see the impact of the Dominion menace on Earth; and we meet several important recurring characters for the first time. The writers, albeit with a certain leftward slant, wrestled with such issues as sexual morality ("Rejoined"), AIDS ("The Quickening"), depression ("Sons of Mogh"), criminal justice ("Hard Time"), medical ethics ("Hippocratic Oath"), and the balance between liberty and security ("Home Front"/"Paradise Lost," episodes that seem prescient in the post-9/11 era). And with the addition of Worf, we saw a richer and more complex tapestry of character and story coming together.

Want to brush up on your Star Trek? See my reviews of TOS seasons one, two, and three; of TNG seasons one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven; of DS9 seasons one, two, three, six, and seven; of Voyager season one; and of Enterprise season one. As a control group, see also my review of Babylon 5 seasons one, two, three, and four.

Alarm Clock with Paws

Even when I'm half-awake, I can't help but notice a certain pattern in my cat's behavior.

Every morning, at around 0510 Central, my alarm clock goes off. Now and then, when I'm feeling particularly unrested, I hit the snooze button in hopes of getting another 9 minutes of shut-eye. But if I do this, within the next minute or two my 8-year-old feline friend Tyrone jumps on my bed. He paws at the top of the covers, asking to be let in. Once let in, he immediately asks to be let out; then he asks in again.

If, rather than letting him in, I elbow him off the bed, he jumps right back on. If I elbow him off a second time, he not only jumps back on the bed, but he walks right across my body, poking various parts of me as uncomfortably as a 12-pound cat balanced on four dainty paws can manage. Sometimes he gets into my face with his cold nose and his tickly whiskers. Sometimes he pounces on parts of my body that happen to move under the covers. Sometimes he meows.

There is no arguing with this cat. It is pointless to try to sleep in. Even when I feel tempted to call in and ask for a late start, my cat won't let me. If I really mean it, I have to throw him out of the room and close the door. But by then I'm up out of bed and there's no going back again--unless I'm actually sick.

So, I can thank my cat Tyrone, in part, for keeping me honest about getting to work on time every day.

The few mornings each month when I am actually free to sleep until "whenever," I simply have to put up with his nudgings until he settles down outside the covers to take a nap. And then, inevitably, my bladder pulls its own alarm...

DS9 Season 3

Season 3 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine aired in first-run syndication from September 1994 to June 1995. This was approximately my "second junior year" in college, a very stressful year during which I worked diligently on my studies in music and German. Nevertheless, I almost always had time to relax and watch an episode of my favorite Star Trek series. As a result, I don't think I missed a single one. Watching them again over this past month was like returning to visit well-remembered old friends.

Season 3 was also a sort of "second junior year" for DS9. Coming on the heels of the show's first mature, full-length season of innovative and high-quality Trek episodes, Season 3 carried that achievement even further. Now that Star Trek: The Next Generation had ended (or rather, shifted into feature-film gear), DS9 was, briefly, the only Trek series on television... during the first half of this season, in fact. Star Trek: Voyager started in January 1995 on the UPN network, giving the still-syndicated DS9 a bit of friendly competition. What with the TNG feature film Star Trek: Generations going into production, there were actually three different incarnations of Trek in production at one time, all on the same Paramount lot.

DS9's third year has some distinctives that don't require a familiarity with the timeline of multiple Trek series. This is the year that added a dynamic new element to the DS9 formula: the lean, mean Starship Defiant. Sure, the main focus of the series remained the strategically-situated way-station between Bajor and the wormhole. But when warp-speed is the need, it's nice to have something like the Defiant enabling you to go where no runabout has gone before. In Trek canon terms, the Defiant came about because of the threat of the Dominion coming through the wormhole to conquer the Alpha Quadrant (a piece of Trekbabble that gathers the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and sundry hangers-on into a single heap). In real-world terms, the arrival of the Defiant is a gift to DS9 made possible by the departure of TNG from first-run syndication, meaning that there was now room for one more starship on TV. Any way you cut it, a lot of exciting possibilities were opened up by this tough, tight vehicle with its overly souped-up engines, overly high-powered guns, and (gasp!) a Romulan cloaking device, on loan with strings attached.

So, if you want a quick rule of thumb to distinguish DS9's third season from the other six, it's this: It was the only year in which the series's original cast had the U.S.S. Defiant to fly around on. Season 4, after all, was the year that brought Worf into the ensemble. So Year 3 also holds the distinction of taking the original formula for the series as far as it ever went. I think it could have gone farther... though, in retrospect, I'm not complaining about what the Klingons added to this already complex canvas.

The Search, Part I & Part II After Season 2's slow buildup to revealing the Dominion, Season 3 begins with a two-part episode bringing this multi-layered new threat into sharper focus. We learn that the Vorta (pictured immediately below) are the carrot, the Jem'Hadar (pictured below, "The Abandoned") are the stick, and the hand holding them are the Founders, a.k.a. Changelings. In other words, Odo's people. Yes, folks, this is the episode in which the galaxy's most beloved grouch finds his way home and learns who his people are... and the knowledge doesn't make him happy. Who would be? Odo's entire life has been driven by what he thinks of as his sense of justice. Now he's supposed to accept that what he really has is a sense of order, an instinct that has led his people to impose totalitarian rule on almost a whole quadrant of the galaxy. Where trade and diplomacy (Vorta-style) don't work, the Founders send the Jem'Hadar to crush entire races into submission, and to utterly destroy those who do not submit.

Meanwhile, recognizing that "solids" (like you and me) tend not to trust shape-shifters, the Founders sequester themselves on a planet covered with the amber-colored ooze that is changelings in their natural state: the "Great Link" whose physical and spiritual communion is unlike anything known to humanoids. The location of their planet is hidden within secrets within secrets, and the chances of anyone finding it out are a deadly threat to the leaders of an Empire that has endured for thousands of years. So, obviously, they don't let the Defiant find them too easily. Odo and Kira only find the changelings' homeworld after jumping ship during a desperate battle with Jem'Hadar boarding parties. While Odo wrestles with the dilemma between his instinct to rejoin his people and his feelings toward his humanoid friends (particularly Kira), the other crewmen find themselves back on DS9, trying to stop the Federation from making a corrupt bargain with the Dominion. The guest cast of this two-parter includes John Fleck (later "Silik" on Enterprise) as the leader of a recurring, minor Dominion race called the Karemma; Martha Hackett (later "Seska" on Voyager) as the Romulan T'Rul, pictured above; Salome Jens in her first of fifteen appearances as the Female Founder; Kenneth Marshall in his first of nine appearances as Starfleet Security officer Michael Eddington; Natalia Nogulich in her last of six appearances, mostly on TNG, as Admiral Nechayev; and Dennis Christopher (who later wore Suliban makeup on Enterprise) as the Vorta pictured here.

The House of Quark is the one where Quark gets married to the matriarch of a noble Klingon family. It's sort of a shotgun wedding, actually--only they use these huge, curving swords called bat'leths instead of shotguns. It's also one of Star Trek's funniest fish-out-of-water stories, forcing a mercenary little Ferengi to pit his brains against the brawn of a Klingon warrior who covets milady Grilka's property. The whole mess starts when Grilka's husband makes a drunken lunge at Quark and accidentally stabs himself to death. Quark takes full credit for slaying the Klingon, which improves his business but puts him in a dilemma when Grilka comes calling. Now, in order to save her family's honor (and, perhaps more importantly, its assets), he has to face the leader of a rival house in mortal combat. What does Quark do? Not telling! This hilarious romp, charged by the vast potential for contrast and conflict between two alien races, features Mary Kay Adams as Grilka. Adams was credited as a regular cast member throughout Season 2 of Babylon 5, though she only appeared twice in the role of Na'Toth. Joseph Ruskin (who acted in all five flavors of Trek, if you count the TNG feature films) plays Grilka's counselor Tumek; both actors reprised their roles in Season 5. Robert O'Reilly here makes his first of seven DS9 appearances as Klingon Chancellor Gowron, a role he had played four times on TNG. Carlos Carrasco (who played the bus passenger "Ortiz" in the film Speed) plays D'Ghor, the first of two Klingons and a total of four Trek characters he played. And the Klingon whose accidental death started it all is played by John Lendale Bennett who, besides serving as Avery Brooks's stunt double, also played another Klingon in Season 5 and, later in this very season, the "real" Gabriel Bell of 21st-century Earth.

Equilibrium is one of DS9's "Trill episodes." I have a fondness for them, probably out of proportion to their merits, because I find the whole concept of the Trill race fascinating. In this one we learn a lot more about how Trill hosts are joined to the symbionts. It turns out that very few Trill are actually joined, though far more of them could be than is generally known. The result is a very rigorous program of training and selection, which is supposed to weed out unsuitable candidates. Unfortunately, someone really unsuitable--in fact, a murderer--seem to have slipped past the filters. This only gradually becomes apparent as Sisko and Bashir struggle to get to the bottom of why Jadzia's body is suddenly trying to reject the Dax host. If the two are separated, Jadzia will die--but, according to the ethics of Trill society, that could be a necessary sacrifice so that the symbiont may live on. There turns out to be a way to save both host and symbiont, however: allowing suppressed memories of Dax's killer host rise to the surface and be integrated into their composite personality. The role of Joran Dax, later played (in Season 7) by another actor, is here created by noted Las Vegas stage magician Jeff Magnus McBride. The "Trill Guardian," that nerdy guy who knows everything about the care and breeding of the symbionts, is played by Nicholas Cascone, who had played an Enterprise ensign on TNG. The elderly Trill who fondly recalls his brother's sociopathy is played by Harvey Vernon, late of the 1970's TV series "Carter Country."

Second Skin is the one where Kira wakes up one day in a strange bed, gets up to look in a mirror, and sees a Cardassian face staring back at her. Does this remind you of the TNG episode "Face of the Enemy"? So far, it should. What sets this story apart, however, is the possibility--originally intended to be left unresolved at the end of the episode--that Kira may actually be a Cardassian sleeper agent, surgically altered and implanted with false memories so that everyone, including herself, would believe she is Bajoran. Now she is asked to believe that the Obsidian Order has brought her home to be debriefed, and to return to her loving family. They even show her the body of a Bajoran terrorist, perserved in stasis, who looks just like Kira--supposedly the rightful owner of the identity her Cardassian self appropriated. It's all cruelly confusing for a Bajoran patriot who despises the Cardassians for what they did to her world. It's also, as she learns just in time, a plot to expose her Cardassian "father" as a leader in the revolutionary Cardassian Underground. Legate Ghemor, Kira's putative father, is played by Lawrence Pressman (late of "Doogie Howser, M.D." and other series), who went on to play the dual role of Admiral Krajensky and a menacing changeling in this season's final episode. Ghemor appears again in Season 5. Cindy Katz (here playing a Kobliad woman working with the Cardassians) also played a Cardassian on Voyager. The suspicious Bajoran character of Yeln is played by Tony Papenfuss, one of the brothers Darryl of "Newhart" fame. Gregory Sierra (pictured; late of "Barney Miller") plays the particularly memorable role of Cardassian intelligence officer Entek. Billy Burke (who plays Bella's father in the Twilight movies) appears here in his first TV role. And Christopher Carroll makes his first of two Trek appearances, playing a Cardassian Gul.

The Abandoned is the one where Quark discovers a live baby kicking and screaming in a pile of wreckage he bought for scrap. As the child grows to adulthood in a matter of days, it becomes evident that he is a Jem'Hadar. It would be a wonderful opportunity to study that species, if the kid would sit still and submit to being studied. What the DS9s do learn, however, is that the Jem'Hadar are bred to fight, to kill, and to submit to no one except the Founders--of whom, fortunately, Odo happens to be one. Odo hopes that he can teach the boy that there's more to life than violence and thuggery, but that doesn't work out any better than Sisko's orders to bring the kid to Starfleet for further study. Ultimately, Odo realizes the only thing to do is let the young Jem'Hadar go back to his people. This episode features former child star turned voice actor Bumper Robinson (pictured; late of Enemy Mine) as the Jem'Hadar teen, and Leslie Bevis in one of her three appearances as Quark's sultry, purple-haired business associate.

Civil Defense is the one where somebody accidentally trips an automated security program dating back to when DS9 was a Cardassian ore-processing facility. Recorded messages by Gul Dukat begin playing on all the monitors, warning of successive steps being taken to put down what the station interprets as a slave uprising. Every time the crew eludes certain death from one security measure, the station takes its programmed response up a notch. Soon deadly disruptor rays are shooting all over Ops, nerve gas is creeping up ore chutes, and a countdown to self-destruct proves resistant even to the command codes of an intolerably smug Gul Dukat. It's one of Trek's most intense "bottle shows," using the regular cast and existing sets to the max in an hour of danger, action, tests of resourcefulness, and laugh-aloud irony.

Meridian is basically "Star Trek does Brigadoon." I am surprised to read that many of the series' staffers consider it one of the worst episodes of the show. I've always liked it. First, there's a delicious B-story featuring Jeffrey Combs in his first of many, many Trek appearances. Here Combs plays Tiron (pictured), a loathesome alien with upward-pointing nostrils and a jones for an erotic holoprogram featuring Kira. Quark tries to oblige him, but he gets a cruel yet funny comeuppance. Meanwhile, in the A-story, Jadzia falls hard for a good-looking alien whose planet phases back and forth between normal space and a non-corporeal plane of existence. Their "solid spells" are getting shorter and farther between, so that eventually their world will cease to exist altogether. The Defiants offer to help them stabilize whatever solar technobabble is causing the effect. Tragically, just when Jadzia is ready to put her Starfleet career on hold so that she can be with her beloved Deral, it turns out that her presence on the planet as it phases out of physical space threatens to rip the whole world to pieces. The Defiant rescues her in time to permit Meridian to phase out of existence, leaving a heartbroken Trill who, even more sadly when you think about it, won't live to see Deral again (pace the Season 6 finale). Deral is played by Brett Cullen, late of "Falcon Crest," "Young Riders," and From the Earth to the Moon.

Defiant is the episode where the eponymous starship gets stolen by what looks like TNG's Commander Riker gone rogue. He actually turns out to be "Tom Riker," the transporter-glitch-generated double of our Will, previously seen in TNG's "Second Chances." Here, after stealing the Defiant on behalf of the Maquis and attempting to use it against a secret Cardassian base, he gives Kira a big wet kiss and goes stoically to his fate in a Cardassian work camp. I guess this is as good a place as any to admit that I've never thought much of Jonathan Frakes as an actor, though he did a fine job directing three of this season's episodes. By virtue of his appearance in this episode, Voyager's "Death Wish" and Enterprise's series finale, he is also the only actor to play the same character (or one who looks just like him) in all four Trek spinoffs--unless you count Majel Barrett, who was credited as "computer voice" in all five Trek series, plus the animated series and the feature films. Plus, two-time TNG guest Tricia O'Neal appears here as an agent of Cardassia's Obsidian Order; Shannon Cochran, who would later play both a Klingon and a Romulan, reprises her TNG role as a Maquis guerilla; and Michael Canavan, in his first of three Trek guest roles, as another Maquis. Cochran and Canavan, who met while filming this episode, are now married. Isn't that romantic?

Fascination--speaking of romantic--is the episode in which Lwaxana Troi's feelings toward Odo trigger an epidemic of infatuation on DS9, thanks in part to a geriatric disease that affects the Betazoid ambassador's control over her telepathy. So Vedek Bareil, on board for the Bajoran gratitude festival, throws himself at Jadzia; Jadzia offers herself to Sisko; Quark declares his love to Keiko; Jake makes puppy-eyes at Kira; and... well, you can see the picture! All this happens while the O'Briens are quietly having another marital crisis. Perhaps it's appropriate that Kira and Bashir turn out to be the only pair mutually affected by Lwaxana's "Zanthi fever," since actors Visitor and Siddig were actually the parents of the child whose advent became a plot thread in Seasons 4 and 5.

Past Tense, Part I & Part II Is the mid-season two-parter in which Sisko, Dax, and Bashir beam down to Earth and, due to some technobabble or other, materialize in the year 2024, at a climax of mankind's dystopian phase, just before problems like poverty and social injustice started to be solved. (Hey, this is Star Trek.) It's a time when the homeless are herded into ghetto-like "sanctuary districts," honest people fallen on hard times ("gimmies") thrown together with creeps and crazies ("dims"), so that the wealthy and privileged don't have to look at them. Sisko and Bashir get lumped in with the dims and gimmies in Sanctuary District A, where (Sisko realizes) the historic Bell riots are due to break out in a few days' time--a deadly uprising which would serve as a "wake-up call" to a lot of people. Dax, meanwhile, comes under the protection of a kindly media magnate who agrees to help her find her friends, though he fears the repercussions of defying the rules that keep his class separate from the folks in the ghetto. As the tension builds, Sisko's presence inadvertently leads to a crucial change: Gabriel Bell, who heroically gave his life to save the hostages taken during the riots, is killed before the crisis even begins.

Meanwhile, back in the future, the stakes go up when some sort of temporal paradox causes the entire Federation, except the Defiant and its crew, to be erased from existence. Evidently, whatever happened as a result of Sisko & Co. going back in time has changed Earth's history so that warp flight was never invented, etc. O'Brien and Kira (the latter sporting a bandage across the bridge of her nose, to conceal her Bajoran identity) beam down to San Francisco at a variety of points in history, hoping to find signs that their lost crewmates are there. (Their brief visit to the 1960s is simply hilarious). The stranded officers, for their part, ride out the storm as best they can, with Sisko taking over the identity of Gabriel Bell and trying to repair the damage to history. It's a perhaps needlessly talky, yea, preachy episode which combines a shrill, hyperbolic depiction of present-day America's supposed class warfare with an understandable effort to harmonize Trek's vision of mankind's future with present reality. Bear in mind that in the Trek universe, something called the "eugenics wars" was supposed to happen by the 1990s, followed I presume by the "post-atomic horror" referenced in TNG's pilot episode.

The guest cast for this two-parter is so extensive that it needs a paragraph of its own! First, there's Jim Metzler (pictured here; late of Tex and North and South) as Jadzia's wealthy protector; TV producer-writer Frank Military (pictured next above) as the hair-trigger dim named B.C.; familiar-face character actor Dick Miller (who had previously guested on TNG) as one of the cops taken hostage; and Bill Smitrovich (late of "Life Goes On" and "Millennium") as sympathetic gimmie Michael Webb. Webb's teenage son is played by Richard Lee Jackson of "Saved by the Bell: The New Class." Social worker Lee (pictured second above) is played by Tina Lifford, whose credits include the voice of one of the sheep in Babe. Detective Preston is played by Deborah Van Valkenburgh, late of The Warriors and TV's "Too Close for Comfort." And finally, the "dim" who steals Jadzia's combadge is played by Ron Howard's brother Clint, whose other Trek appearances included a Ferengi on Enterprise and the childlike alien Balok in one of TOS's earliest episodes.

Life Support is the episode that casts Dr. Bashir in the role of the gruesome reanimator who extends Bareil's life, during a series of crucial negotiations between Cardassia and Bajor, by turning him into something between Darth Vader and Frankenstein's monster. By the end Bareil is, as one may say, "more machine than man." All this puts Kira through an emotional wringer, especially given the confusing circumstance that she wants the same thing as Kai Winn but for different reasons. I originally hated this episode because it scorched one of my favorite recurring characters to oblivion, but from the perspective of so many years further on, it now comes across as one of DS9's movingest tear-jerkers. Andrew Prine, late of Gettysburg, Gods and Generals and TV's "Weird Science" who had also guested on TNG, plays the Cardassian negotiator. Jake's would-be girlfriend Leanne is played by Lark Voorhies, late of "Saved by the Bell."

Heart of Stone is one of those unfortunate episodes in which the B-story comes across more strongly than the A-story. The main plot has to do with Kira getting her foot stuck in a crystal that gradually grows to envelop her entire body, while Odo hopelessly looks on. The two of them had followed a Maquis raider into the caves below the surface of some god-forsaken piece of space rock, and as Odo exhausts every possible way of getting Kira free, he finally opens up to her and says, "I love you." It's when she replies, "I love you too," that he realizes he's dealing not with the real Kira, but with a fellow changeling who is testing him to learn what makes him tick. Actors Visitor and Auberjonois go to heroic lengths to redeem this essentially pointless story, in spite of the physical constraints limiting the visible interest in most of their scenes. Meanwhile, back on DS9, Nog saves the episode by attempting to purchase an apprenticeship for himself... from Sisko! While the commander squirms at the idea of a Ferengi joining Starfleet, it soon becomes clear that young Nog is serious about his application--in spite of all the cultural and family obstacles. So this episode is about as "bottle-show" as they come, with mixed results.

Destiny is the one in which a fundamentalist Bajoran cleric (pictured) demands that Sisko pull out of a planned joint experiment with Cardassian scientists because of an ancient prophecy that, in his interpretation, foretells the doom of Bajor's prophets (a.k.a. "wormhole aliens"). What ultimately happens, while quite exciting, is not so disastrous and yet equally susceptible of being interpreted as fulfillment of the prophecy. It's an unusual episode for its approach to religious issues. Vedek Yarka is played by three-time Trek guest Erick Avari, late of Stargate, Planet of the Apes, and The Mummy. Two of the three Cardassian chicks are played by B5's Tracy Scoggins and Wendy Robie of "Twin Peaks." A funny story has it that, while playing her role in this episode, Scoggins liked to wander around the Paramount lot in full makeup, scaring children until studio security ordered DS9 staff to "keep your aliens contained."

Prophet Motive is the one where Bashir finds out that his name has been put in the hat for the Carrington Award, a prestigious medical honor usually reserved for very old and accomplished doctors. He is deliciously torn between hoping to win and refusing to count on it. Meanwhile, Quark and Rom are horrified to read the new edition of the Rules of Aquisition that Nagus Zek brings with him to the station. Zek offers them the honor of being the first to read the new guiding principles that will change Ferengi society forever. But though Rom happily joins Zek in his sudden philanthropic crusade, Quark smells a rat. He follows that smell straight to the wormhole, where an orb encounter convinces him that the Bajoran Prophets have done something funny to Zek's head. They agree to undo it when Quark tells them that if they keep reverting every Ferengi they meet to an earlier, gentler stage of evolution, they will have no peace from Ferengi visitors coming to find out what happened to their friends. What a sales pitch! It's always fun to see the inverted cultural responses of Quark and his race, such as his horror on reading a new Rule that says "Virtue is its own reward." The alien shown here giviing Quark oo-mox is played by Juliana Donald, who also appeared on TNG.

Visionary is an atypical DS9 episode, heavily driven by a sci-fi concept: some type of radiation poisoning is causing O'Brien to jump forward in time by a few hours, then back again, usually after witnessing his own death and/or a scene of mass destruction. While each successive jump comes closer to killing O'Brien, the foreknowledge he gains saves his and everyone else's bacon time after time. Finally O'Brien has to sacrifice himself so that a future version of himself can... Ugh. To quote a remark O'Brien makes to O'Brien: "I hate temporal mechanics." Meanwhile, the Romulans come over to visit their cloaking device which, you may remember, is on loan to the Defiant. Lots of little clues about the weird stuff going on around the station add up, in the end, to a Romulan plot to blow DS9 and the wormhole out of the sky, ending the Dominion threat once and for all. Once that's cleared up, life returns to normal... except, perhaps, for O'Brien? One of the Romulans is played by Jack Shearer, who previously played a Bolian on DS9 and later played two different Starfleet Admirals on Voyager. The other Romulan is played by Annette Helde, who also played three other Trek roles.

Distant Voices opens with Julian refusing to sell a highly controlled substance to a scary-looking alien named Altovar. A little later, he gets a nasty shock. Literally. Altovar, who happens to be a Lethean, grabs the doctor's head and zaps him with some type of psychic attack which, in almost all cases, eventually leads to death. Now in a coma, the doctor finds himself inside a weirded-out version of DS9, which is actually his mind's way of visualizing itself. Other characters Bashir encounters during his coma are actually aspects of his own personality, which the Lethean invader is viciously destroying one at a time. As he gets nearer and nearer to death, Julian's mental self appears to grow older and more feeble--a world-class make-up job that (finally!) brought out the best in actor Siddig. The Lethean, who at first serves as nothing but a scary monster, later develops a more interesting personality--which is perhaps why we see his race again in Season 4. Another thing that develops in this episode is the backstory, previously mentioned in Season 1, about how Bashir lost his valedictorian standing at Starfleet Medical--a step toward revealing, in Season 5, a secret Bashir has kept since he was a child. Appearing as Altovar is former Miami Dolphin and current anti-domestic violence spokesman Victor Rivers.

Through the Looking Glass reunites Sisko with his late wife Jennifer, last seen being killed in DS9's pilot episode. She turns out to be alive and well... in the mirror universe. While Sisko's Jennifer has been killed, mirror-Jennifer's husband Ben is the dead one, killed fighting for the rebellion against the Klingon-Cardassian-Bajoran "Alliance." But only Smiley (i.e., mirror-Miles O'Brien) knows this for sure. So Smiley kidnaps Sisko in a daring strike on DS9's ops center, crosses over with him to his own universe, and blackmails him into helping him "rescue" Jennifer from the Alliance-run station, which at that point is still the ore-processing facility Terok Nor. Actually it's more a choice between persuading mirror-Jennifer not to help the Alliance develop a sensor device that can flush the rebellion out of the Badlands, and killing her if that's what it takes to stop it. In the course of carrying out his dangerous mission, Sisko is forced to (a) bloody mirror-Bashir's nose, (b) make sweet love to mirror-Dax, (c) look upon the corpse of mirror-Rom (the crossover world isn't kind to Ferengi), and (d) avoid being upstaged by the Indendant, a.k.a. bizarro Kira, a bisexual sociopath who oozes disturbing chemistry with practically every character who crosses her scenery-chewing path. Felicia M. Bell here makes her first of two appearances as mirror-Jennifer Sisko, having played the real Jennifer in Season 1's "Emissary."

Improbable Cause begins a two-episode arc (distinguished from a two-part episode mainly by the fact that the episodes have different titles) in which Odo helps Garak solve the mystery of who bombed the Cardassian's tailor shop. The clues put them on the trail of a Flaxian assassin who, just as they are about to follow him to see who hired him, gets blown up by the Romulan covert-ops agency, the Tal Shiar. Even the duplicitous Garak seems intrigued to know why the Tal Shiar would want to kill him. Long story short, it was Garak who blew up his own shop, just to put Odo on the trail of what turns out to be a joint Romulan-Cardassian (or rather, Tal Shiar-Obsidian Order) invasion of the Dominion. Commanding the attack is Garak's old mentor Enabran Tain (Paul Dooley reprising the role he created in Season 2), who now that Odo and Garak are onto him, chucks the one into a cell and invites the other to join him. TO BE CONTINUED... But before we go on, let me note that this episode features Julianna McCarthy, late of "The Frighteners," in her first of three appearances as Tain's old housekeeper Mila. Carlos LaCamera (late of "Close to Home" and "Nurses") plays the Flaxian merchant/assassin.

The Die Is Cast takes its name from the words Julius Caesar spoke when he crossed the Rubicon. In this episode, completing the arc begun in "Improbable Cause," the die is cast not by a Roman general but by a joint operation of the most covert intelligence branch of both the Romulan and Cardassian governments. Garak is allowed to accompany his old mentor Tain, as long as he demonstrates his old zest for torturing information out of people. In this case, the subject of his interrogation is Odo. There turns out to be a way to torture changelings after all: surround them with an energy field that prevents them from reverting to their gelatinous state. While Odo goes through hell and Garak starts to worry that he might be growing a conscience, the Romulan-Cardassian fleet gets closer to the deadly trap the Dominion have set for it. Sisko, meanwhile, demonstrates a staggering level of hypocrisy when, first, he defies his Starfleet orders and pursues the invasion fleet into the Gamma Quadrant in hopes of saving Odo and Garak; and, then, he gives Eddington a dressing-down for violating the chain of command by (of all things) following his own orders from Starfleet command to sabotage the Defiant's mission. Between its outrageous treatment of military discipline and its blithe dismissal of the fact that Garak tortured Odo, this episode made me so angry I could spit. Truly not writer Ronald D. Moore's finest hour! Character actor Leon Russom, who in one of the Trek feature films played the commander-in-chief of the Federation, here takes a demotion to Vice Admiral, while four-time Trek guest Leland Orser plays the Romulan captain who is actually a changeling.

Explorers is the episode that won the 1995 "Best Vision of the Future" award from the Space Frontier Foundation, recognizing its imaginative portrayal of a space vehicle. The vehicle in question is a replica of a Bajoran light-ship built by Ben and Jake Sisko as a father-son bonding project. Though it's not really a plausible design for a solar sailing vessel, the Siskos' ship is really a remarkable work of art. And when the Siskos take it out to test ancient Bajoran legends about flying all the way to Cardassia, they find out that it somehow flies not on solar rays, but on some type of technobabble found abundantly in that sector of space. It's really a cool episode, and I haven't even gotten to the part where Bashir, depressed about not being recognized by his closest academic rival at Starfleet Medical, gets blind drunk with O'Brien and the pair of them sing "Jerusalem," before and after the following exchange:

O'BRIEN: You're not an in-between kind of guy. People either love you or hate you.

BASHIR: Really?

O'BRIEN: I mean, I hated you when we first met.

BASHIR: I remember.

O'BRIEN: And now...

BASHIR: And now?

O'BRIEN: Well... Now, I don't.

BASHIR: That means a lot to me, chief, it really does.

O'BRIEN: And that is from the heart! I really do... not hate you anymore.

Three-time Trek guest Bari Hochwald appears as Bashir's medical-school rival. And Chase Masterson makes her first of 16 appearances as Bajoran dabo-girl Leeta, who at first seems attracted to Bashir before going on to become Mrs. Rom. The role of Leeta was reportedly written with Masterson in mind after she unsuccessfully auditioned for a different guest role. When one door closes...

Family Business introduces the character of Ishka, the ne'er-do-well mother of Quark and Rom. In this first appearance, she was played by Tony award-winning comedienne Andrea Martin (late of "SCTV" and My Big Fat Greek Wedding), who declined to return to the role because of the punishingly heavy prosthetics. In four subsequent episodes, Ishka (a.k.a. "Moogie") was played by the late Cecily Adams. Besides introducing Moogie, this episode is also noteworthy for the first appearance of Jeffrey Combs in the recurring character of FCA Liquidator Brunt, and of Penny Johnson as Sisko's love-interest Kasidy Yates. It is a hilarious, heartwarming episode revealing the climate, customs, and family values of the planet Ferenginar, and just how out-of-step with the latter Quark and his family are. Ishka is charged with earning profit, which for a female is a horrendous crime in Ferengi law, though wearing clothes and speaking to males outside her family are nearly as scandalous. Jake, meanwhile, has set his Dad up with an attractive freighter captain who, in time, will become his wife and the mother of his child. (By the way, I really think we're about due for a TV movie showing what happened to all these characters. Don't you?)

Shakaar is the name of a Bajoran resistance-cell leader much mentioned in reference to Kira's backstory, but never seen until now. At last he appears, played for the first of three DS9 appearances by the same Duncan Regehr who, on TNG, once made passionate love to Beverly Crusher in the barking-mad episode "Sub Rosa." In his first appearance, Shakaar isn't presented as a romantic match for Kira. Rather, he's an old brother-in-arms whom Kira must talk down from his high horse, on the orders of Kai (and now also First Minister) Winn. But as it grows increasingly clear that Winn will not hold back from taking high-handed measures against her own people, Kira joins with Shakaar and his fellow freedom-fighters. The result is a chase, an anxious standoff, and finally a political turnabout that ends Winn's hardline administration. I always enjoy seeing Louise "what a piece of work" Fletcher playing that nasty woman. I can't think of anybody who does a better job of saying gut-wrenchingly vicious things with an air of sincere friendliness. Diane Salinger here makes her first of two appearances as Lupaza, and William Lucking his first of three as Furel, both members of Shakaar's cell; Lucking later played a green-skinned Orion pirate on "Enterprise." Three-time Trek guest Sherman Howard plays O'Brien's Vulcan dart-playing rival. And John Doman (late of HBO's "The Wire") played his first TV guest role in this episode, as the Bajoran officer sent to arrest Shakaar.

Facets is this season's second fascinating Trill episode. In it Jadzia and her friends participate in the Trill ritual of zhian'tara, in which the memory of each of her past hosts is telepathically transferred to someone else and allowed to speak with her as an individual. Kira embodies the senior politician Lela, O'Brien the nervous Tobin, Leta (who already, in only her second appearance, seems to qualify as one of Jadzia's best friends) as the gymnast Emony, Quark(!) as the motherly Audrid, Bashir as hotshot pilot Torias whose life was tragically cut short, a prudently restrained Sisko as the dangerous Joran, and finally Odo as the outrageous Curzon. One would think that, force-field or no, Joran would be the real threat. But once Curzon's appearance and consciousness meld with those of Odo, Dax's most recent host shows no desire ever to go back to being a mere note in Jadzia's personality. The fun-loving Trill-changeling mix claims that both he and Odo are happier this way. When Jadzia demands that Curzon go back where he belongs, he at first cruelly dismisses her. It isn't until he admits that he was in love with Jadzia that Curzon finally agrees to go back. The late Jefrey Alan Chandler, who had already guested on Voyager, here plays the Trill Guardian in charge of the telepathic transfers. It's "Star Trek does Sybil," and I, for one, think it's great!

The Adversary begins with Sisko finally receiving the pip on his collar that makes him a Starfleet Captain, equivalent in rank (if not in seniority) with the commanding officers of the other Trek spinoffs. One almost forgets that he was a mere Commander up to this point! Once that ceremony is over, Sisko leads his command officers on board the Defiant to escort Admiral Krajensky to the Tzenkethi frontier, as a show of force to the new leaders of that warlike race. Before they get there, however, the Defiant receives a transmission indicating that the Tzenkethi have attacked a Federation colony. It soon becomes evident, however, that a Dominion changeling has infiltrated the ship. Presently the crew finds itself locked out of the Defiant's command functions, the ship set on a course that will most certainly trigger all-out war with the Tzenkethi. While O'Brien sweats over how to regain control of the ship, the rest of the crew gets carried away in a paranoid nightmare in which anybody, at any time, could be the changeling. At the end it comes down to a hand-to-hand battle between Odo and one of his own people, who have (we are told) never, ever harmed each other. Until now. The evil changeling's dying words: "We are everywhere." Cue scary music: That's your Season 3 cliffhanger! Besides Lawrence Pressman (whom I already mentioned), this show's guest cast includes Jeff Austin (who also appeared on Voyager as well as Babylon 5) as the Bolian security officer who lets his suspicions run away with him.

Season 3 brought a lot of great stuff to the Trek table. I'm not just talking about Sisko's goatee. It's the year that gave DS9 the Defiant, Eddington, Leeta, Kasidy Yates, Brunt, Ishka, and several other recurring characters. It killed off Bareil (though we would see him again) and brought Jennifer Sisko back from the dead. It added the creepy Joran to the list of previous Dax hosts, and gave us a look at each of Jadzia's predecessors. It set Nog on the path toward becoming Starfleet's first Ferengi officer. It gave the triple-layered Dominion threat time to heat up to a nice sizzle. It risked revealing the mystery of Odo's origins (which could easily have destroyed all that was interesting about him) and deftly turned the solution into a whole new set of fascinating problems. It gave us heady sci-fi (e.g. "Visionary"), mysteries ("Improbable Cause"), battles ("The Die Is Cast"), paranormal thrillers ("Destiny"), romantic heartbreak ("Meridian," "Life Support"), outrageous comedy ("The House of Quark," "Family Business"), family bonding road-trips ("Explorers"), a couple of TNG touches (Lwaxana in "Fascination" and Tom Riker in "Defiant"), and a brain-bending tale of espionage and intrigue ("Second Skin") which would, by the way, pay off in Voyager's Seska plot-arc. Some of the episodes are less than great; a few of them even irritate me ("Past Tense" and "The Die Is Cast," for reasons stated above). But it remains a consistently good year in a forget-it GREAT show.

Want to brush up on your Star Trek? See my reviews of TOS seasons one, two, and three; of TNG seasons one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven; of DS9 seasons one, two, six, and seven; of Voyager season one; and of Enterprise season one. As a control group, see also my review of Babylon 5 seasons one, two, three, and four.