The Delta Flyers - Q-Less

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

The Delta Flyers is a weekly podcast hosted by Garrett Wang, Robert Duncan McNeill, Terry Farrell & Armin Shimerman. In each podcast release they will recap and discuss an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This week’s episode is Q-Less.Q-Less: Vash arrives at Deep Space Nine after traveling with Q in the Gamma Quadrant for some time, trying to avoid Q and sell artifacts including a mysterious alien crystal.We want to thank everyone who makes this podcast possible, starting with our Production Managers Megan Elise & Rebecca McNeillAdditionally we could not make this podcast available without our Executive Producers:Stephanie Baker, Jason M Okun, Marie Burgoyne, Kris Hansen, Janet K Harlow, Brian Barrow, Heidi Mclellan, Rich Gross, Mike Gu, Tara Polen, Vikki Williams, AJC, Nicholaus Russell, Lisa Robinson, Alex Mednis, James H. Morrow, Roxane Ray, Andrew Duncan, David Buck, Feroza Mehta, Jonathan Brooks, Gemma Laidler, Matt Norris, & Izzy JafferOur Co-Executive Producers:Liz Scott, Eve England, Sab Ewell, Sarah A Gubbins, Luz R., Chris Knapp, Dannielle Kaminski, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Courtney Lucas,  Matthew Gravens, Captain Jeremiah Brown, Mary Jac Greer, E & John, Deike Hoffmann, Anna Post, Shannyn Bourke, Tom Paynter, Jenna Appleton, Lee Lisle, Sarah Thompson, Holly Smith, Amy Tudor, Mark G Hamilton, KMB, Dominic Burgess, Mary Burch, Sandra Stengel, Normandy Madden, Joseph Michael Kuhlman, Darryl Cheng, Elizabeth Stanton, Kayla Knilans, Tim Beach, Victor Ling, Shambhavi Kadam, Holly Schmitt, Christopher Arzeberger, Tae Phoenix, Donna Runyon, Nicholas Albano, Daniel O’Brien, Danie Crofoot, Ian Ramsey, Steven Lugo, Rob Traverse, Penny Liu, Mars DeVore, Stephanie Lee, & David SmithAnd our Producers:Philipp Havrilla, James Amey, Patrick Carlin, Richard Banaski, Ann Harding, Meredith Hudes-Lowder, Trip Lives, Samantha Weddle, Chloe E, Paul Johnston, Carole Patterson, Warren Stine, Jocelyn Pina, Mike Fillmon, Chad Awkerman, Mike Schaible, AJ Provance, Captain Nancy Stout, Claire Deans, Maxine Soloway, Barbara Beck, Species 2571, Dat Cao, Stephen Riegner, Debra Defelice, Cindy Ring, Alicia Kulp, Kelly Brown, Jason Wang, Gabriel Dominic Girgis, Samantha Hunter, Jamason Isenburg, Ashley Stokey, Rob Johnson, Maria Rosell, Heather Choe, Michael Bucklin, Lisa Klink, Dominique Weidle, Jennifer Jelf, Justin Weir, Mike Chow, Kevin Hooker, Matt Edmonds, Ryan Benoit, John Richardson, Rachel Shapiro, Clark Ochikubo, David J Manske, Seth Carlson, Amy Rambacher, Jessica B, E.G. Galano, Tim Neumark, Will Forg, Ryan Tomei-Siguroarson, Charlie Faulkner, Estelle Keller, James Lyszczek, Russell Nemhauser, Lawrence Green, Greg Kenzo Wickstrom, Lisa Gunn, Lauren Rivers, Shane Pike, Jennifer B, Dean Chew, Akash Patel, Linda Daireaux, Jennifer Vaughn, Walkerius Logos, PJ Pick, Preston Meyer, Lisa Hill, Stacy Davis, Ryan Mahieu, Andrew Cook-Feltz, Karen Galleski, Pamela Miller, Rik Moran, Jan Hanford, Constance, Loretta ReyesThank you for your support!“Our creations are protected by copyright, trademark and trade secret laws. Some examples of our creations are the text we use, artwork we create, audio, and video we produce and post. You may not use, reproduce, distribute our creations unless we give you permission. If you have any questions, you can email us at [e-mail].”Our Sponsors:* Check out Mint Mobile: https://mintmobile.com/TDFSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-delta-flyers/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the Delta Flyers Journey Through the Wormhole with Dax, Cork, Tom, and Harry. Your host for today are my fellow Trek actors, Armand Schumerman, and Robert Duncan McNeil, and of course myself, Garrett Wong, for the complete and stupendous version of this podcast, check out patreon.com forward slash the Delta Flyers and sign up to become a patron today. Hello, gentlemen. Hello. Well, hello there. Oh, my goodness. We're all here. You guys, did you guys call each other beforehand saying I want a DS9 background and I'm

going to have a DS9 background? No. No, I think I've mentioned this. I am all in on this show, DS9. I've never watched it before. You love it. I'm Team Bashir so far. I am definitely Team Bashir. But I'm all in. I love the way the characters are.

The stories connect and continuous and build in a way that I haven't seen them on any, you know, any of this generation of Star Trek shows. Yeah. So I love it. I'm stoked that you love it. And I'm very proud that you love it. Thank you very much. There you go. There you go.

All right. It's time for Robbie and my poetry synopsis of the end. episode, QLess. So, Robbie, why don't you... I'll start with my limerick. Start with my limerick for QLess. Is that like Clueless? Is that what it was...

Is it a play on... Because that was a very popular movie TV show back in the day. That was being filmed right next to Star Trek. Yeah, which was right down the... Yes, across from DS9 and directly next to Voyagers, soundstages. So Q less, here's my Limerick. Vosch brings artifacts from the gamma quadrant onto the station. Q arrives to and causes quite a sensation.

The station's going to be destroyed. Cisco's getting really annoyed. And the glowing crystal returns to its proper location. Nice. It's, you know, the rhythm of the limerick I play with a little. But the fact that I could get sensation, location station. I felt very proud of that.

I'm pretty proud of myself. Got all the shuns in there. Yes. Okay, here's my haiku for QLUS. Vash back from Gamma. Quark drops down to 22. Last sale was life form. Nice.

Very nice. Thank you. All right, Armin, with your etymology of Q-Less, how will you attack this? Not very well. So Q is the 12th letter of the English alphabet and the first letter of my character's name. Nice.

So this is really a quirk episode then. It is indeed a quirk episode, although it's certainly a Q and Vosha episode as well. Yes, it is. Yeah. It's a good quark episode, actually. There's some elements of it that I'm very fond of, and there's one particular thing later on that we'll talk about

that is a speech that Q makes that I just find delicious. Oh, good. Oh, good. I can't wait. All right, gentlemen, let's dive right into this. This is a story by Hannah-Louis Shearer and teleplayed by Robert Hewitt Wolf. This episode was directed by Paul Teddy Bear, Lovin Lynch. How does Paul Lynch direct?

I feel like he's directed every episode so far. It seems like it. He's like the Rick Colby. He's like the Rick Colby of Dave's line in the way. He did in the beginning. He did in the beginning, and then he faded away. Yeah, that sounds like Rick Colby. We had Rick Colby a lot in the beginning,

and then he faded away at the very end. We had Rick, too, and he too faded away. It may be that so many of our actors on our regular series regulars wanted to become directors that they had to make room for those guys. And there were the directors from TNG as well, the actor directors. Oh, wow. I will say, as a fellow DGA, director of some of those names. I have seen a pattern where a lot of times directors are heroes for a while

until they're not. And if there's an episode that for whatever reason was not beloved by the studio or network, it's easy to take that director and go, yep, put them on a list. We're not going to hire them anymore. It's harder to look at the script that the network approved, the studio approve the the producers wrote and kind of find flaws in that or to look at casting you know a weak actor in this role or something or you know the directors often get the glory when they don't deserve it sometimes they also are thrown under the bus so i wouldn't be surprised if paul lynch at some point delivered an episode i'm just guessing that they were like somebody at the studio network or somebody said oh no that was that was not good who directed it paul lynch okay no more no more

paul that that wouldn't surprise me one bit okay yeah and to add to that there's always the possibility that one of the series regulars on a show will say i don't like him or her yes oh yeah their career on the show yeah absolutely the inner workings of hollywood ladies gentlemen. Okay. Let's start right off in the reprimat. Bashir is tooting his own horn, telling his Bajoran date about how he finished second in his class, salutatorian, due to a trick question on the Starfleet medical oral part of the finals there. So otherwise, he would have been valedictorian. So he's just boasting left and right. And she is hanging onto every word coming forth from his mouth. While O'Brien is sitting fairly close. We talk about close talking on Voyager. This is

close sitting. O'Brien is sitting fairly close and he looks on and rolls his eyes during this entire beach. I love him, his background acting, his work and the, the woman that, uh, whatever this woman's name. Did she have a name? I don't think so. I don't think so. She must have in the script, but certainly she was a Bajoran and might have been a Dabo girl. Oh, okay. That would explain her being on the station, but, um, yes, can't tell for sure. Yeah. All right. I love, I love, love Miles O'Brien in the background. Yeah. It was subtle. It was perfectly

timed. The kind of questioning looks. I also loved when Bashir is telling the story and he builds to this climactic moment where he says, I finally found the answer I was looking for the paracardiomebrane. And he's so excited.

It's just it made me laugh. It's infectious. And poor Sid, all he ever got was those medical techno babble. words. Oh, yeah. And he memorized them brilliantly. Yeah, he did a great. He did a good job. And if I may once again say how wonderful Colomini is as an actor. Yeah, he was so good. Those reaction shots are the hardest to do because when it finally the camera's on you and you're doing your close-up, you've heard it before and you have to react

as though you're hearing it for the first time. Really lovely word. Yeah. Yeah, it felt totally spontaneous and authentic and yeah, I agree. I also thought about in this scene, I'm going to talk about me, turn this into me for a minute. So Bashir's flirting, this is early in your series, he's flirting with another woman. And all of a sudden I went, oh, Tom Paris, my character was written that way early on. But something about Bashir's, he's naive, he's kind of boyish, he's non-threatening. I think it works great with him. I hated the way they did it for my character.

My character was like, airman. and slimyer, yes. But I love Bashir doing it. He just seems so innocent, totally the opposite of Tom's approach. For me, the way Sid was, this is an entomologist speaking. He was very l-o-u-c-h-e. And it fit him like a glove. He was very good at those sort of things.

He was good at many things. But he was very good at being swab and sophisticated. Getting back to the story, before he can finish courting this Bajoran lady, both O'Brien and Bashir are hailed by Cisco to report to Landing Pad 5. Now, that is our next scene. We had the landing pad five. We see Cisco and Kura trying their hardest to make this hatch open. It will not budge. Dax and the ensign are stuck inside.

I don't even know who this ensign is. They give a name to this ensign with this ensign that never ever speaks. Well, they think there's two people inside, right? They do. They do. And then they do run scans and they detect three life forms. That's correct. That they don't expect so. Yes. But what's going on here is this this runabout has just come back from the gamma quadrant through the wormhole. It barely made it through the wormhole. There's very little power left in the runabout. So little power, they can't even open. Like the doors won't even open. The clamping locks won't release. There's all kinds of problems because there's not enough power. Life support is failing. And as Robbie said, Bashir does read not two, but three passengers on the. the Ganges. Chief does fix the issue with a device called an EPI capacitor, which I've never seen on Voyager. I have a question about this. So Cisco and Kira are there with this mission that's just come back to the station. Yes. And it's urgent. They're going to die. And it's literally

the commander and a first officer. Yeah, why are they doing this? Why isn't there like a dozen people trying to, it seems like they would be the team at the landing pad. It just seems like their rank is much higher than this action. They could be bossing them around. I agree. Or they shouldn't even be in this scene. It should just be a bunch of lower deckers trying to open it, you know, while they're being directed or whatever from ops.

So it's a little odd. You're right. Just two people. This episode always felt to me like a bottle show. So maybe they're saving on money by keeping anybody else out. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't cost money to put extras in there. It felt like there's the two of them, two series regulars at command level, and they're doing the work of specialists that would know how to do all this stuff, you know.

Yeah. They open up the doors. They rush in and, you know, everyone's still alive. And O'Brien ends up turning towards the third passenger, who we don't know who it is until she turns into frame and we see. It's Vash, who Miles says Vash, which, again, throughout. out this episode, it's Vash and Vosch back and forth between various characters. And sometimes I even tracked one character saying both pronunciations. So it's very, very confusing. But as they all walk out, we see a Starfleet officer kind of hunched down working on a panel right there.

And as he turns to camera, we reveal that it is Q himself. Q. John Delancey is there. Well, I have another question about this moment before Q is revealed. O'Brien asks Vosch, You know, how did you get to the gamma quadrant? It makes no sense. Like, we just discovered this wormhole. How did you get there? And her answer is, a friend dropped me off. Yeah.

And nobody seems to question that. Like, I immediately would be like, why are you being evasive? This is a big deal that you were in the gamma quadrant and you're being evasive. What are you hiding? Yeah. Like, it seems like they don't call her on this answer. Well, Brian doesn't call her on it. Cisco doesn't call her on her later.

The bat, but later they do, you know, but not off the bat. But they kind of let her give that coy answer quite a few times where I'm like, that should be a red flag. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. We now jump over to the infirmary where Bashir is given Vash. See, I'm saying it wrong now too.

Vash. Bashir has given Vash a clean bill of help. He manages to flirt with her at the same time that he gives her this clean bill of help. Oh, he's flirting. My goodness. He flirts with everybody. This is what I'm saying. Like, if Tom had done this, people would have said, what a slime ball.

But I love Bashir. He does it so beautifully. Yeah. He's so effortless with it and is charming and he's great. Yeah. I do want to say one thing. Did you notice that Vosch is the first one that gets flirty back with Bashir? I feel like in all the episodes I've seen so far, he keeps failing and failing and failing.

And suddenly Vosch is kind of flirting with her. Yes. All right. Next up, we have the Commanders Office. Dax reports to Cisco about Vosch, and there are far more questions than answers in this scene. Because Cisco wants, he wants to know, what is this woman doing on this station, right? How did she get here? I did feel like Dax and Cisco have really good chemistry.

I think Avery and Terry, their scenes together are starting to feel like these two have a history in a nice way. And I wonder if, you know, Armin, if you have any memories of like how people's relationships kind of developed and bonded. Well, it was a natural thing. As you worked more and more with the people, when you got to know them better and that bleeds over into the acting. Certainly, that's what happened to Renee and I. But I think if I remember correctly, and I wasn't present in any of these obscenes, I think Avery took it upon himself to nurtured Terry along. Not the territory.

He needed any nurturing. She didn't. But he wanted to form a relationship similar to what the characters had in the script. Interesting. I felt it in this scene. This scene to me was not the first time that I felt, you know, these two had a history. But it's the first time I felt like the actors were right in the pocket of that. That they were both in this on the same page.

And I felt this short scene, you know, not a big. not a critically important scene honestly but what my takeaway was like yeah these actors are starting to really feel comfortable with each other the two of them are connecting on some real level that felt good yeah yeah after six episodes we're we're about a quarter the way through the season yeah and uh i think six episodes so that would be what i would say three months or three months yeah you're probably um yeah they're they're getting familiar and and it's no longer oh my god we're on a tv show but rather okay now we have to do the episodes yeah yeah oh this is real life this is what i do for a living oh i get it okay

time to work yeah all right next up we're in the assay office now i have to say i've never even heard this word assay office what does it even mean can you can you define that for me An assay office is where you determine, certainly in this context, what's inside something. So what is the makeup minerally of a particular thing? When an assay office originally in Westerns, you brought a chunk of something in and you assayed it to find out whether there was any gold in it or... Oh. I wonder, because assay office and the word assess as an etymologist, you can...

Yes. Yes. I wouldn't venture to say the same root word, same. etymology yeah i i just don't like the word assay it sounds silly to me i would like assessment office that sounds better to me just so you know that's my opinion okay talk to robert hewood wolf and rewrite it i will i'm gonna talk to r hw i would like them to call it a bank's safety deposit room because that's what it felt like that's what it is that is exactly what it is well vash does secure her gamma quadrant artifacts and cubicle 19 ending with a retina scan

which I might add is very commonplace today. It's interesting because I'm sure when this episode was filmed, you couldn't, that wasn't being used, really. I mean, maybe it's CIA or FBI, but maybe that was an Andre Bormonis touch. Maybe he knew it was happening ahead of time. Because this would be 19, what, 92 or so when they were shooting it? Correct. Armin, this actor that plays the clerk, I think his name is Van Epperson.

Do you know this actor? No, I don't. I loved him. I just got to say. Like his voice, he was just, he was arrogant and annoying. And he also seemed to have like an internal, he could just figure out the size. He had like a measuring stick and a scale internally because he just looked at it and he knew how much it weighed, how big it was.

I thought he was hilarious. He's very reminiscent of the, there's a character in the Schwarzenegger film Total Recall. that is also very similar to this Epperson's character in same kind of boisterous and this and that and very knowledgeable and also very similar in physicality too. So I don't know the name of that character or the actor in Total Recall, but anyone listening and knowing,

that knows Total Recall will know exactly what I'm talking, who I'm talking about. In this assay office, I just want to say it with some emphasis, because I know you love that word, in the assay office, the last thing she shows is this very large crystal. Yes. This glowing and clearly it's going to be part of our story.

I sort of forgot about it, honestly. I forgot she locked this thing away. But at the moment when she shows this thing, I was like, oh, this is going to be the key to the thing. And then I forgot about it. I wish I'd remembered. But yeah, this glowing orange crystal, very. mysterious, very important, pretty cool. It looked like clear Lego.

It was like made of clear Lego to me with a little light inside, you know. It might have been. It might have been. Props built some Legos, sprayed some goo on it, and it's a prop. Good to go. The other thing I loved is that Vosch, when she's putting in her code, did you see her?

She put her hand, like you would in an ATM or something. She's like hiding the code from the clerk. doesn't want him to see. It was a very nice choice. I agree. It was a very nice choice. Yeah. And I'm sorry that the, that actor never, as far as I know,

showed up on our show again or had the character come back because he was intriguing, very intriguing. Yeah, he was. Yeah. He made the most of his screen time. He's exactly right. He felt like an old school, like from the old studio days, like old 40s, like, good call. So I, you're here to deposit some stuff.

fire. I see. It's great. He pulled it off. Just looking at my notes and we bypassed something that I wanted to just briefly touch on. Let's talk about it. Back to the ops scene. O'Brien says the captain likes a good challenge when talking about Picard. There were a lot of head nods to TNG Next Generation. A lot. In this, you've got two characters from Next Generation but there's a lot of references to Next Generation. So, Brian telling us that Vosha is going, we know that Q is going to be a challenge, but we're also reminded that Vash is going to be a challenge as well. To piggyback off of your comment there, Armin, all of these nods to TNG and obviously that show was a big hit. They were in season six when you guys premiered, I think. They're season

six, your first season, something like that. Big hit, very successful. The studio and the writers were all aware of that. How did you guys feel with those kind of nods as the new kids did you feel like oh you don't think we're strong enough to stand on our own you got to bring cue you got to i don't know i'm making this up but is that you're not well it's a very good question i don't know what i thought at the time most of these lines that i'm going to be referencing that are the nods weren't necessarily made in my presence so i didn't i didn't necessarily think about i read it in the script certainly but once having read this script i then focused on the scenes that I was part of. That's what actors do. But in hindsight, I find it

offensive. That's what I'm saying. I find it offensive. I find it and I'll talk about that more later. It's as though, okay, we're in our sixth episode and already somebody it needs, yeah, saying that our show needs help. Now, we understood that even by that point that people were not watching us to the extent that they were watching that they had watched next generation but um there's just too many nods and i'm and i do want to talk about this in a particular scene in ops later on yeah yeah i felt that a little bit as well i felt like why do they need to lean on the other show so early i'm in this show i love these characters i'm all in i've said it a million in time but i'm all in you don't need to bring and i love john delancy um i think vash is a very

interesting character um this this archaeologist explorer very kind of raiders of the lost arc vibe indiana jones i get all of that but you didn't need to do that like i want to get to know quark better i want to get to know odo i want to i want to see more scenes with dachs and cisco because I'm seeing the bonding happening. Give me more of that. I don't want to give anything away, but I think it's the fault of this episode. I think it's a major fault

that the episode really doesn't start until Act 4. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, thank you for sharing that comment because I felt the same way

with the TNG influence. It was already starting to feel like, yeah. All right. So she says that she's going to pick up her items to the next day and then she's going to head off in a transport

She exits, as she's exiting the assay office, she runs into Cisco, who helps carry her bag, which to me looks like a canvas bag that a postal service worker in our current day would use, which really kind of, it bummed me out because I thought, why doesn't she have a futuristic looking bag? Like, why is she lugging that thing around? I think it was the Indiana Jones of it all. Is that what you think it was? I think it was, yeah, I was trying to be. Archaeologists, vintage, yes, vintage. I'll go with that. I'll go with that. They're in the promenade as they have a walk and talk, and Cisco tells her that the Daystrom Institute really wants to interview her regarding her Gamma Quadrant experience. And this absolutely...

Another nod to next generation. There you go. The Daystrom Institute. Oh, I didn't catch that, but it would have bugged me if I knew that that was a reference, but now it bugs me. Okay. Continuing. This amuses Vash since her membership to the Institute's Archaeological Council was suspended

did twice. But Vos, in the end, takes up Cisco's offer of helping her return to Earth and meet up with the Daystrom Institute people. One thing in that scene, I just do want to mention that I think it's important. She walks by Quarks and Quark notices, and you can tell that it's triggering a thought for him. So he's going to do something with noticing Vosch. The wheels are turning, is what you're saying at that point. Okay. We are now in the runabout Ganges interior. O'Brien has checked all the systems and he can't find anything out of order. He has no idea why the power was drained. So at this point, they just need to recharge the runabout and everything will be fine.

So as O'Brien exits with Cisco from the Ganges, they walk through the airlock and Cisco starts to ask O'Brien about Vosch. The chief doesn't know much, but he volunteers what he knows. Picard met Vosch at Riza, and they started a relationship. Is Riza the pleasure planet? The pleasure planet, correct. Yeah. Okay.

The power in the station drops for a quick second in powers back up. But as they're walking through the corridor, this is where that line came up, Armin, about the captain's a challenge or, you know, he likes a challenge. That's exactly the point. It's O'Brien to Cisco as they exit the Ganges and the airlock, and now they're in the corridor where that line happens. Thank you. Yeah.

So now we're in ops, and Cisco asked for a status report. Dax says it was a broad spectrum power drain. And she asked O'Brien if he's reading any graviton flux around the transfer systems. O'Brien surprisingly says, yes, how do you even know that, Dax? And she says, well, that's exactly what happened to us when we were on the runabout. When we lost power, exactly the same system, the same system, the same graviton flux, everything. I will say that, again, I'm noticing Dax is the smarty. She seems to often, right?

Yeah, she should be the science officer. Yeah. But she's always, and I love this. I love that at the time, it was a bit of countercasting, I would judge that, hey, we're going to have this science officer, the smarty, the one that always often comes up with solutions, but we're not going to go for the nerdier type of actress. We're going to go for someone who was a model, a fashion model. we're going to countercast or something i give her credit i give them credit for thinking outside of

the box and not just going with a character type who's going to be you know just the brainy nerdy kind of character because she does solve a lot of so far in these episodes she's often coming up with the perfect question the perfect connection at the right time well she's not only the science officer but she's arguably the oldest person on this that's right in the cast So she has experience, he has experience of life as well to draw upon. Now we are in the corridor of the living quarters. O'Brien escorts Vash to her quarters, which used to be Cardassian living quarters. And right before she enters her quarters, she does ask about Jean-Luc and mentions that maybe

she should look him up. There's another reference right there to TNG with Jean-Luc Picard's name. now we're in the interior of Vosha's quarters and the bed doesn't look so bad because O'Brien was talking about how Cardassian soap mattresses are horrible but looks fine and she starts unpacking her bag

as she's unpacking Q appears and tries to convince her to leave with him so that he can continue to show her all the sights and sounds of the universe and the funny part about this scene I felt was that he keeps repacking her bag for her it ends up and pack on her shoulder and then she starts unpacking.

And this just continues where she gets more and more frustrated. I had a couple of quick thoughts in this scene. When she first walks in, she's looking at this giant sculpture. Do you remember that? It's sitting on like a table. And at first, I was like, why is she so interested in this sculpture? And then I thought later on in the episode, was that Odo? Or was that?

Doesn't doesn't somebody. say like were you in there you must have been in there were you a I forget what he's accused of being you know a wine bottle or something but I think he was the sculpture that was the point of her no I think I think you're seeing too much it oh okay first of all where is Odo in this episode but that's neither here nor there I thought when she looked at the artifact was that as an archaeologist she was looking to see if it had any value and I thought that was a good choice by Jennifer to evaluate things as she came across them. Yeah.

That's what she does as an archaeologist. Yeah. And I don't think she's even met Odo yet. So I don't even think she knows that he's a shape. Yeah, maybe I was just trying to put too much. I was like, what is that? That's part of the mystery. I'm so used to like piecing together.

But that puts the idea in my head that Odo could be in any female a person's room, walking at them while they're doing it. The other thing I was going to say about the scene, it's a very long scene. very long and I felt a little bit I didn't particularly like the staging or the direction in the scene I feel like there were a lot of moments that were missed in performance of the comedy of it all and I felt like the busy work was just too busy for me it would have been fine for them just to sit and talk and listen and react more authentically it felt a little over busy to me And because it was so long, if I may, it's a credit to my good friend, our good friend, John Delancey.

John has the talent to rat-a-tat-tat his lines out at a very quick pace. And why I'm applauding him for this, because I don't think it's a deep, dark secret. John has a problem memorizing lines. And so his ability to not only memorize, but his ability to spit them out at a rapid speed is to be applauded, considering how difficult it is for him to memorize. I did not know that, that he had issues with memorizing lines. That's new information for me. Wow.

That's... I think John is pretty open about this. Yeah. I'm not giving anything away. Okay. But you'd never guess it. I agree with you. The way that he seems so confident with the words and is rattling them off, as you said,

you'd never guess. It's perhaps the Juilliard training that he had. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So Q is basically trying to cajole her, trying to get her to come along with him to re, you know, partner up basically. And she's just, she's not having any of it. And so he finally relents and asks her, where would she like to explore? And she says she doesn't want to go anywhere with him. And then he asked her, well, what do you really want? And she says, I want you out of my life. And I want the life back that I had before I met you. As they continue to bicker the bell, the doorbell rings. And it's, quark and i love armin armin just says i and then he's gone it's just so comical to see that q basically shoes him away um and i i love the line that that cue says he says what business could you possibly have with that disgusting little troll which is an horrible description of

cork i'm going to say right now but not horrible not horrible i've heard it before okay so not totally horrible he does comply because You know, Vosch once Cork brought back and Cork appears. And I love how you played the disorientation for a second and, and Q's no longer there. But it's a great scene. And you introduce yourself to Vash and basically you say that you know about her gamma quadrant artifacts and suggest that you can help her make a nice profit by auctioning them off. You want 50%. Vash says you're taking advantage.

And that's when as you're reaching down to pour some wine to sort of smooth it. you know, like, you know, make her feel a little more comfortable and maybe get to your 50%. She grabs your ears and starts massaging them. Yeah. All of a sudden, the show turns into an X-rated project. Um-Mox. So, um-ox, which is what I alluded to you the last time we were talking to. In time, you will find out about the sensitivity of a Ferengi's earlobes.

Mm-hmm. And obviously, it has a great connection to their regenerative process. So, Umox is, uh, uh, we had that during several shows. Yeah. And, uh, if I may, uh, take credit for the fact that I'm, I'm behaving as though this is the greatest sensation in the world. And understandably, everyone can understand that it's just a piece of rubber attached to my head, which I cannot feel anything at all. Yeah. I can't even feel. I can't feel her fingers. I can't, I don't even know when she's rubbing really.

Right. And the sound that you hear, the crackling of the cartilage, that's all put in in post, because there's no sound. There's no sound. It's just someone fondling the, you know, Halloween mask. Yeah, prosthetic. How did you time that out then? You knew you had to react in timing with a touch. Did you? I don't remember timing it out. I only remember that it was a fortuitous reaction. So everything worked exactly as it should, but could I feel anything? No, not a thing. Okay. So, yeah, Yeah, so she grabs her ears and starts massaged them. His ears.

His ears. His ears. Excuse me. She grabs his ears and starts massaging them and he melts instantly and says she performs good umaks. Umox. Umax. Yes.

He keeps lowering the percentage until she finally accepts the offer at 22%. What is the agreed upon result is 22% and keep going? That's what he was. And keep going. What does she immediately do? She stops. She stops. So she broke.

the contractor ready right there she broke the contract i yeah i noticed that she sees you to the door and as soon as you're gone as cork is gone cue reappears but is quickly interrupted by yet another door chime guess who it's bashear who has come to pay vasha visit this is the longest scene in star trek history it goes on and on and it has nothing to do with our show no no nothing to do with our show it doesn't promote the plot any it's just a tip of the hat to next generation yeah yeah i agree with you yeah i didn't i didn't love that no well bashear's there to continue flirting and to ask her to dinner she agrees to meet him in about 20 minutes when she can get herself prepared for dinner and cue reappears and she dismisses him get out of here we have a exterior space shot at the station and we're back in the replemate with

Bashir sitting at a table, waiting for Vash to arrive for dinner. The waiter, aka Q, walks up to the table. Bashir orders mint tea, and Q basically tells him to stay away from Vash. Bashir argues that it's none of his business. And Q tells him that he looks tired. Bashir says he feels fine, but then Q yons, which then causes Bashir to do the same. Now Bashir is exhausted and leave to go take a nap. A very funny scene.

I love his exit, the physical comedy. that Sid can play when he was walking backwards and kind of stumbling. And it's just he's, yeah, he's really funny. Did you catch Robbie that little under the breath comment from Q when he says, he says, Bashir goes, I think I'm going to go lie down for a minute. And then Q goes, hopefully by yourself for a change.

So saying that he's lied down with many, many, a alien. He's a lover. Bashir's a lover. He really is. He's just a lover. Okay. So that doesn't bother you at all, right?

You're okay with him saying that? Compared to the Umok scene? I think it's easy. And O'Brien's there at the end. Yeah, O'Brien sees the end of this interchange. And he's like, oh, holy, holy proof. He recognizes Q from the Enterprise. Yep.

And he heads over, he hightails it to Ops. And in Ops, he informs Cisco that Q is on the station. I think it's Cura that's like, whoa, who's a Q? What's the Q? She doesn't know what Q is. is Cisco's been to a conference on Q, so he knows. Dax asked what Q wants with them, and O'Brien suggests that it might have something to do with Vosch

since Q and Vosch met on the Enterprise. Now, while they're talking, the power in the station drops again. More power problems. Yeah. O'Brien says all systems are functionally normally, but he thinks Q is the reason why the power fluctuations are happening. And I would say that all of us think that, ever since the beginning of the episode all the power fluctuations i always thought was because of

q of q yeah we will find out what it really is but um but i i agree that the mcuffin that they put into this episode that's very clever actually that's the that's one of the things i did like about the okay yeah good i wish they had tied that misdirect though the the everyone thinks it's q i wish they had tied it more specifically in some of the scenes like that it appeared specifically why he might be doing this because I was with you I thought it was Q that's it was you know coming from him but I couldn't figure out for the life of me why why would he be doing so it's it's not helping him get Vosch it's not helping him with anything he says he's here to do and I thought that it was going to be revealed to us later on in the episode yeah why he was doing that and but it was

as you say, a misdirection. Yeah. All right. So now we're in Quarks. Quark and Vosch are planning for the auction. Vosch wants the orange glowing orb to be the last item auctioned. And Quark basically says, you know what? This thing has no intrinsic value, but I'm going to do you a favor.

Take it off your hands, seven bars of platinum. And she says, no, it's worth way more than that. He keeps up in the price. He says, nope, it's going to be in the auction. It'll be the last item. And it will start at the bid. of 200 bars of gold press latinum, 200. Cisco arrived to interrogate Vosch about Q,

and right when he asked the question, Q's there at the bar, turned away from camera, he turns around and says, well, I'm right here to answer your questions. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love that shot with Quark and Vash in the foreground and Cisco popping in between them. Yeah.

It's a great shot with Cisco in the middle. It is that, and I ask myself as I watch, that scene why do i leave why yeah this cisco has no hold over me it's my place i'm having a business conversation with a colleague um and and not only does he ask me to leave but the look on his face is like you know i smell something horrible uh he's he thinks i smells that i smell badly that's what i'm trying to say does he actually ask you to leave i think he just says he needs to interrupt and talk to her and he's like i'm busy right And he goes, well, it can wait.

He's saying it can wait. That's right. He says, it can wait. And I go and I leave and I don't know why I leave. But that's neither here or there. You should have said there. I should have given him some sort of retort to say, this is my bar or whatever. I'm going to business meeting or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. He has no hold on me. Yeah. Agreed. There's an axe break with Q revealing himself to Cisco. and we come back in the same spot, and Cisco wants Q basically off the station, and Q taunts Cisco.

Cisco demands that these power outages stop immediately, and Cisco also wants to talk in private. So Q, he asks Q to talk in private, and then Q makes everybody disappear in Quarks, just the two of them. And Cisco's starting to get mad, and Q brings everybody back, but now it's like this old-fashioned boxing match,

and we see, you know, Q's starting to punch Cisco and he just takes the punches and Quark makes a bet that Cisco's going to win this fight, which you would never expect Q to lose a fight like this. But Q punches a few times, Cisco blocks a punch and knocks Q down. And I must say, thank you, writers, for allowing Quark to actually win one.

Yes. It rarely happened. It's very nice. I actually won one. Yeah, you did. I want a bet. I want to bet. And it was a bet that I was surprised because I thought, oh, there's no way this scene is going

to turn to Cisco beating Q. No one ever beats Q. He always has the upper hand. So that was one of the few times in this episode where we say Deep Space 9, our captain is better than Picard. Our captain, you know. Yeah. McCart never hit me.

I think it's the retort that Q did. Yeah, Q says you hit me. Picard never hit me. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, our captain is very different than Picard. Yeah. And by the way, he's not a captain. He's a commander. For me, the first punch thrown was Q on Cisco.

It was like a right cross. And I just started laughing. It was so common. I don't know why, but it was a very comical moment for me to see Cisco getting punched by Q. The first one, after that. It doesn't look like a real punch. It doesn't look like a real reaction. Why did Paul Lynch go for that?

I have no idea. Did he not think it was a serious scene? Did he think this was a comic moment? I don't know why it was shot that way. It felt absurd to me. It felt like a dream. Like this whole thing is a dream. So a quick punch, which where there was no reaction was warranted,

but to me, it was funny. I laughed at it, you know, so. Yeah. Okay, the next scene is on the promenade, these rolling doors that I love by the docking bay. open up and out comes out of this rolling door comes a big well-dressed alien and a farangie is with him and then these three other aliens come out with blue bags or something over their heads i've never seen save on makeup just cover up their faces just put bags over

their head that maybe you're right it was a it was a bottle show that's what they were saving money everywhere but odo sees this watches uh from his office doorway and then the lights dim again, and Oda reacts. He can't believe this is still happening. We go to Ops next, and the lights are out in Ops when we come in, but they come back on soon. So this pattern of these energy surges is repeating. Suddenly, this wind starts blowing on the bridge, or Ops, the command center, this giant wind, and we find out they're losing compression, and they have to raise shields to stop the air from

escaping and they assess that there's damage. The damage includes one whole breach and multiple whole fractures. So this wind bit, it felt underwhelming to me. It felt like they had a big Ritter fan. Like if you really lose compression, people would be off their feet. They would be sucked across the room. It wouldn't just be your hair being blown back. Yeah.

It was a little underwhelming. I think they were saving money. It's a bottle show, guys. You're right. It is. They have one Ritter fan. So the fans that they use for that kind of wind effect so that people listening know, it's a very old-fashioned Hollywood fan.

It's probably about six feet high. It has like what looks like an airplane propeller or something in it. And they turn this motor on and that fan just blows a ton of, it's called a Ritter fan. And so that's probably what they used here. Yeah. Yeah, it was a little underwhelming. It was a little comical, I guess I would say, to me. Again, not knowing what the tone of the show was about.

Somehow the writers hadn't told Paul Lynch, the director, you know, what the tone was. Yeah, it seemed a little all over the place to me. And with Vash, especially those scenes, I found her to be kind of cavalier at times in ways that didn't feel connected to the specific words that they were saying, which could have been swashbuckling Indiana Jones tone. Maybe they generally were going for that, but I felt like Vosh was a little all over the place for me. Okay. We go to the corridor next, Dax and Cisco inspect the hole breach. So there's a hole. You can see a force field holding our atmosphere, you know, keeping them safe. You can see that. It looked like

the fritzing of an old TV to me. It looked like that. What is it? You called it? snow on, you know, old televisions when they didn't get good reception. You played with the antenna on the top. It looked like snow to me, this man-sized hole that was there. But Dax wants to negotiate with Q, and Cisco basically says, I don't think it's Q. I don't think this is him. It's not his style to be doing this. And how the hell would he know that? How would he know? He's heard a little bit about this Q guy. He had a seminar. At a seminar. At a seminar yeah what his style is unless the whole seminar was about Q's style then maybe yeah it's to me it's just hilarious that he went to this seminar like he went to Vegas you know like every

every industry in the world goes to Vegas it has a convention they had a Q convention to discuss Q very funny yeah uh we go to the security office next and Odo and Quark are there Odo lets Quirk know that he is aware of this auction totally legal auction totally legal auction and this is where quark thinks he was a wine bottle or he was how did you know unless you were hiding out in the room when we negotiated this no privacy no privacy from this man whatsoever for your umlotte or whatever what is ummox did you call it umlotte? Did you call it umlotte and umlotte's a different thing but it was yeah it's what goes over the umox umox is a oh with the umlout over it there you go uh but quark thought maybe he was the wine bottle

Odo thinks that And this is a great speech And I wonder if this is the speech We're talking about This speech about Odo Talking about material possessions And he basically thinks they're worthless And he doesn't get why everybody

spends so much energy collecting possessions Right And then Quark makes an offer Of a few things Odo might desire But nothing interests him Until the very last thing Quark offers There's a latinum-plated bucket to sleep in

and Renee. That gives him pause. That actually gives him pause. And then he's like, because it is his only possession. That's it. Right. It's his only, he has a bucket that he sleeps in to regenerate in.

Yeah. So it's his only possession. And it might go back one half a step. Yeah. One of the things I've loved about Star Trek all through my life is occasionally they write these wonderful speeches given by aliens, started with Spock talking about humans. and then was passed on to others in Deep Space Nine, and I'm sure they did it on your show as well,

where an alien is able to make judgments, to give it overall critique of human behavior so that the audience can go, you know what? Yes, yes, we do do that. We do that. I love that when it happens on the show. And this is one of those occasions. They gave this kind of speech to an alien, and to Odo to make and he's not talking so much about the people on the station i think the writers

are talking about humanity yeah yes great yeah and it's it's a great sentiment it's a great sentiment of all the time we spend collecting things and you know none of it really matters ultimately it's a great sentiment yeah it's a great sentiment i don't know that quark would agree no no he wouldn't Acquisition, after all, is the highlight of their ethos of acquiring things. So, yes, he wouldn't agree. But it wasn't really meant for quark. It was meant for the audience. Yeah, right, yeah.

Great. We go to the promenade next. Vos exits the assay office with her sack of items to auction. And Q tries to convince her to stick with him again, but she says, no, it's over. He tells her, actually, that the galaxy can be very dangerous. And if she doesn't have him to protect her, she could get hurt. And he slowly starts changing her appearance. So first, her hair starts falling out.

She's going bald or getting aging. She gets boils on her face until finally she's so old and frail that she's on the ground with, you know, bald, no hair and boils. He tells her at the end, just think about it. And then he's gone and she returns back to normal. That was a lot of makeup changes. or a very short scene to me. Which made up for the fact of those guys who had no faces

who were covered with cloth. The money that they saved on that, they put it into Jennifer's... They put into hers, yeah. I feel like he could have just jumped to the end, like, I don't know. And then they could have used that money for the other makeup looks on her

for some blue-bagged aliens having a face. Or two fans in ops. Yes. We're two fan, two Ritter fans in ops. We have a station log. The station's power is continuing to be drained, Cisco says. And now the episode starts for me. Yes.

Now the episodes, now we say, oh, this is the problem. This is the danger. This is the conflict that needs to be resolved. Right. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Cisco says at this rate, our life support systems will fail in 14 hours. That's bad news.

That's the whole station. life support going out. They're in trouble. We go to ops. The team is trying to figure out how to stay safe with all this power drained. Q appears, he tells them that Vosch is much more dangerous than he is. That's basically his news. Knowing the end of the episode, another good misdirection. We tend not to believe Q, but in this case, he's absolutely right. But for not the reason that we all think he is. Yeah. Right. And again, by this point, I had forgotten about the bank safety deposit room or the assay office assay office yes i'd forgotten about that so i'm not down that track so the ending is a big surprise to me because i've completely spaced out next we go to quarks

and quarks shows a small-mouthed alien i just noticed this alien had the tiniest little square opening for a mouth which was very rare that we saw that kind of makeup where the mouth is because the actor can't eat if you do it's uh very small mouth very small mouth the alien is looking at some auction items. The alien says that these better be real and authentic, and then he leaves. Quark's very happy. He tells Vash, they make a great team. They should partner up. She says she's done with sleeping and tents and going on these adventures looking for archaeological objects. She just wants her money, and she wants to go back to Earth and have a quiet life. And then there's this big shipshake. I keep calling it a shipshake, but it's not a ship.

it's a station there's a station shake yes i know this is going to be hard for me to to get off of the mindset of bridge ship shake you have a docking bay not a shuttle it was hard for millions of people who watched our show to get over that as well interesting it took several decades for people to get over that yeah we were not a ship we were a station we weren't wagon train we we were gunsmoke. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect analogy.

Yeah, big station shake. I got it right. We go to ops and we learn that Graviton field is increasing and Dax's plan won't be ready for another seven or eight minutes. So her plan to use these, what were they called? Tridium, tridium. Tridium levels, right? Pridium levels. Yeah.

It's not going to be ready for seven or eight minutes and the ship is being. suddenly pulled out of positions. They try their thrusters, which Armin, you didn't remember that you had thrusters until you rewatch the show. But they try their thrusters, and that doesn't work, and they're heading straight towards the wormhole.

I love that space shot, where we see those thrusters come on, those around the ring, and we see it's trying to push the station in one direction, but it's being tractored, I guess, or they don't use that word tractor, but it feels like it's being pulled or drawn in the opposite direction.

And it's being drawn towards the wormhole. Bad news. Now we finally get to our auction. We're at Quarks. The auction that we've all been waiting for is finally happening. I love the opening of this

where Vosch is starting to give this academic history lesson about these objects and quirks like, wait, no, no, no, what are you doing? Stop. And he simply gets up and says, this thing is rare. beautiful and it's a gamma quadrant original and that gets everybody excited yeah so quark knows

how to run an auction yeah it was very fun uh any any memories of this auction arman that you recall of this doing this these scenes because it's a sequence here no no no no memories no memories yeah isn't that amazing like all of us we Garrett and i had the same experience as we watch voyager there were scenes i did not remember There were episodes. Yeah, that we didn't remember filming, Armand. We were like, when did this even happen? Like, we had no recollection that that scene even existed until we watched the show.

I have had that experience over the course of the years. Kitty tends to watch Deep Space Nine on occasion, and I walk into the room and I look and go, I don't remember that scene at all. So yes, I totally agree with it. Now, this scene I do remember. I do remember doing it. Yeah. I remember having a good time with Jennifer, but, but I, I don't know, nothing specific. Nothing specific. Yeah, just a vague memory of doing it. I think it, it may have been one of the

first times where I wasn't doing anything nefarious. I was simply doing what any businessman would do. Right. You know, and, and I was grateful for that at that moment. That, that's the sort of vague memory that I have. Nice. Okay, so we go back to Ops. The auction has started. It's in progress. We go back.

Dax's plan for using the Tridium gas is finally ready. The levels are at the right place. And Miles, O'Brien, isolates the source somewhere near the core of the station. So they can't pinpoint the exact spot, but they know generally it's by the core. Kira says they're going to be at the wormhole, drawn into the wormhole, in 18 minutes now. And Cisco in the scene just can't figure out who would pull them into this wormhole. So, you know, the stakes are escalating here, but they are getting a little warm about where this is coming from. But the stakes are super high because O'Brien at this point gives the audience the knowledge that this station will not survive.

The wormhole journey, it's going to break into a billion pieces. So this is the end of everybody if this happens. Yeah, this is where that explicitly is said. like we have 18 minutes we're going to be drawn into this wormhole and we will be yeah crushed so no one will survive right so that's bad yeah that's very bad very bad uh we go back to the auction uh the auction continues cue is there now sitting in the back uh as sales go on cue interrupts and informs them that they're all going to die basically that the station is hurtling towards their doom and uh Then Vos starts to panic a bit. She goes to Q, blames him, which is what we all did. We all thought this was Q. But he says, no, it's not me.

And he says, look, if you'll just agree to stay with me, come back and, you know, do this thing we've been doing together. I'll save you. And she declined. I love how Cork tries to calm down all the auction attendees by saying everything's under control, drinks, free drinks for everyone, free use in the hollow suites at the conclusion of the auction. He's just he's a businessman after it's over.

Yeah, business man and trying to control things. Yeah. Yeah. I do remember liking doing that. Yeah. Okay. Here's a question for you, Armand. At the very end of this scene, Cork says,

sold to my cousin stole for 105 dollars of gold press latinum. Now, the shot on your cousin, he's missing his front teeth and he sticks his tongue out. He does this very, it's sort of like a Hannibal Lecter kind of a, you know, thing where it's just, it's creepy. I just, anyway, any comments on that? You guys didn't have to, but those of us who played aliens, we learned over a period of time.

And it easier for us who had done it a number of times as opposed to those who were just thrown in to make him is to stop playing being an alien. Don't be an alien. Michael Westmore takes care of that. You don't have to play an alien. And I think that's what was happening. there was this actor wanted to show you that he was an alien and did some alien-like behavior. Okay.

What we all learned relatively quickly was don't have to do that. The makeup is enough. The makeup says it all. We don't need to add to that. Don't gill the lily. There you go. This scene reminded me a bit of like a Titanic moment, I have to say.

From the feature film? It was just like Q. Pew says you're all hurtling toward your doom, but he playing the music. The band must play on. And nobody pays attention to him. Nobody says, really, except for Vash. It's kind of wonderful that here's this God telling you the truth.

And it's like Cassandra, for those of you who are familiar with Greek mythology. Cassandra knew the truth, but nobody believed her. And here, a cue is telling you the truth and nobody's paying any attention. No. Well, there's cool objects in front of them. They have to put all their ends. you know, put all their energy as, as Odo said, that that matters more than anything if they can own, you know, more objects. We go to ops, uh, Dax comes up with a plan. She says, bring the

reactors back online at full power. And that will help kind of, I guess, amplify this, you know, this gas that she'd put in or whatever. And that will show them precisely the source of where this problem is. Where the power drains have. Yeah. very dangerous because this bringing the reactors back at full power could also increase the speed at which they're drawn back in so very dangerous but cisco says do it and there were super close-ups like extra close close-ups in this which this is something tonally that was weird to me it's like wait we're we're a little all over the map here like usually a close-up like this is in the most tense you've built to this over a sequence of time.

And it's like this scene, we sort of jump to these super tight close-ups very quickly. Yeah, so we go back to Quarks. The auctions continuing. Prices are going up. We cut to the end, basically this glowing crystal, which I had forgotten about, gets bid up to 600 bars of gold press latinum at this moment. Did you see whose hand came? Do you see the hand coming up on the 600?

No, who was it? It's one of the attendees, but it's a six-figured hand. So I thought, six-fingered hand, and I was like, wait a minute. Is this an homage to Princess Bride, the six-fingered man? Oh, that's funny. I didn't know. Yeah, yeah, six fingers on that hand. Yeah, so in this scene, it's the price is going up to 600, which is much higher than anything

previously. Yeah. We go back to ops, Dax, you know, the Smarty. again, Dax, she's figuring it all out. She isolates the source of this. It's on the promenade, she says, but they only have a few minutes now until they're sucked into the wormhole.

Three minutes, 14 seconds, I think. And they're picking up speed. So this is bad, bad news. Back to quarks in the auction. The numbers go up to 2,500. 2,5001, Q says. So now he's bidding against, I guess, the six-fingered man?

Yeah. maybe after the bidding goes up we come back to the promenade the team's coming out of a lift dax is using her tricorder to scan for the source back to quarks wait wait wait before you go back to quarks yes the most egregious uh moment for me in the episode there's three minutes left before utter destruction they get out of this thing and they calmly are walking down the promenon they're not running not running not concerned just waving these wooden blocks around and um and and there's three minutes to go i go didn't anybody read the script there's got to be more energy you know urgency to this it was totally wrong wrong

urgency's in ops it's not at the auction it's just an off exactly so these guys they found out us on the promenade and they're just calmly looking around yeah they went from these close-ups in the end of the world to a five shot and they're all walking slowly down the Down the promenade. I wonder if we can find a Christmas tree anywhere on the promenade. Is that a Christmas tree or is that Odo? I don't know. Yes, it could be Odo.

But Dax does pick up the signal on her tricorder and they gently and calmly walk down the promenone. We're back to the quarks. Now the bidding is up to a three thousand bars of latinum. Q offers, yes, a million. A million, yeah. A million bars. That's when the team arrives. They scan.

It turns out it's this glowing crystal that was locked away in the bank's safe deposit room. They call for a transport very quickly. We cut out to space. We see this thing go out to space. And it turns into this little glowing crystal transforms into some kind of organic ship or something. It looked like a ship or a being. I think it was a being. I think it was a being.

It was an embryonic. life form is what they that's right they referred to it so my take was that orb was the was the egg and it was about to hatch and when it hatched that's when it went back to it went back home right it went back to find the mom so that's the way i looked at it and it really looked to me it looked like the deep sea aliens from the movie the abyss yes it did with that really sort of flowing kind of glowing looking it looked like a manterey right and so that's kind of what those aliens look like in that feature film and that's what i what i thank you garren i didn't quite get that but you're absolutely right. Oh, absolutely right. Okay. Great. Yeah. This, this creature hatches out in space,

heads off to the wormhole. Yeah. And we have a station log with the embryonic, here it is, the embryonic life form. So it wasn't a ship. It was a, it was a being. With the embryonic life form off our station, Graviton levels have returned to normal. And we've used those controlled thrusters that Armand forgot you had to return the station back to its original position. Armand, I want to commend you for your, the scene, the last part of the auction there, because you really played that well in terms of when it got to a million, like, you could just see that you were, oh, you were so pleased with the result of that.

Dreams come true. Like, every time that thing went higher, you, you played the stake of. I could see acquiring a moon sometime very soon, very soon. You were about to be the ruler of your very own moon. And, yeah, exactly. Exactly. It was delicious watching you do that. Thank you. Thank you. You know, we're going to die a million bars of Latin.

I'm reminded of the Jack Benny quote, which is your money or your life. And Benny says, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it. There you go. Our final scene here is back in Quarks, where Quarks trying to convince Vos that her life back on Earth is just going to, at the Daystrom Institute is just going to be super boring. he tries to tempt her with some rumors of some ruins that she could explore but she declines then cue appears and he tries one last time to have her stay with him but she's determined to go

home uh he says that he'll miss what she gave him which was seeing things through her eyes her wonder her curiosity and then he disappears and a little tag at the end vash goes back to cork and ask, what's the quickest way to Tataris 5? She's just too curious. She's an explorer. She's an adventurer. Now that she's gotten Q off of her tail, she goes back. It seems like she's going to go back to exploring and being up in our call. Robbie, you didn't make a note about close talking with Q and Vash at the end there? My gosh, they were close. Were they close talking? His face was in her hair practically. It was like, good Lord, just the way that that was angled. It was, to me, it was way too close.

Classic Star Trek close talking. I don't see it in other shows like this, like this franchise. No. In this era of Trek, they would, it was the, and maybe that was a Marvin Rush thing. Maybe he would encourage actors to sort of. It might also be, if I remember correctly, and you guys would know better, that if you're at the end of the day and there's really no time left and you have a lot of shot, you can do it, you know, one behind the other so that we don't have to have two setups for,

for two people's reaction shots. So you can just do it one. It's a time saver for sure, yeah. But it looks awkward as hell, though, I think. It does. Sometimes it works, but often it doesn't. And, you know, yeah, it's two people standing right next to each other or leaning in really close in ways that human beings just wouldn't be normal.

Would never do it in a million years. And Bashir enters, and he's yawning, and he asks, what did he miss? He just woke up. I had forgotten about my favorite Bashir, but he's been sleeping. Quark put him to sleep. I actually don't think he's been sleeping. Knowing Sid, I'm quite sure he was in his trailer playing video games. I'm quite sure that's what was.

Oh, wow. New knowledge. Yeah, but Dax just smiles. And that is the end of our Q-less episode. Wala. If I may, there's a scene in Ops where Q is addressing Cisco. Kira, O'Brien, and he says, you have a, Q says to Cisco, you've got a motley crew here, and then says to him something like, this, Picard would never put up with this.

I guess this is why you don't have your own starship. Oh, yeah. Then he talks to Kira and she says something defiant to him. And he calls her, you know, some sort of misogynistic citation of some sort of. And then he turns to O'Brien and says, oh, yes, you were one of the little people, which was a double insult as far as I was concerned. These are all insults, which is a double insult. One, he's accusing Cullum of being from the lower decks, if we may make that analogy.

And two, we all know that Cullum is Irish and the little people is a reference to the leprechauns. So it's a double insult. Now what I found infuriating about this is really the powers that be decided that we had in the sixth episode of our first season to disparage by making comparison with the other show. I don't know about your show, but our show always lived in the shadow of Next Generation. And this particular sequence of speeches by Q is indicative of what we were all frightened of, that we would, when compared between the other, of the two shows, we would come out lacking. And yes, they put it in the mouth of Q, so you can't take it too seriously. I found that particular edition in the script insulting.

Wow. That totally makes sense. I didn't put it in the context that you just did. So to me, it was just typical cue being rude and offensive. But at that time, we were suffering a lack of audience. This seemed to be addressing that in my mind anyway. So I may have been the only person thinking that, perhaps no one else was, but that's the way I saw it.

Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Offensive for you, definitely, when you're watching that. Offensive. Yeah. All right. My moral, my theme, my lesson from this episode is make sure that you understand what you're dealing with before you let your curiosity take you too far. So to me, I don't think

they knew, I don't think Vash knew, I don't think anybody knew what this glowing thing was. They just wanted to possess it. And people sometimes can start getting ahead of themselves before they understand what they're getting into so to me that was the that was the lesson um mine is is going to be everything in moderation because clearly when you obsess over materialism it can really pull you down so i just think everything in moderation and and be aware of materialism because it can rule your life and i would sort of echo what robbie said um don't jump to conclusions I spent most of the episode thinking that Q was responsible

and I jumped to conclusions because I thought I knew the character Q well enough to make that assumption but I was wrong and I think the theme of the show is don't jump to conclusions. Yeah, great. Okay, everybody, thank you for joining us

for Q-less or Clueless or Um-Laut as some of us call this episode. Um-Ox, I know, it's Um-Ox. No, but we should just start calling it um-Lau from me. now on, just for your sake, Robbie. Please do.

That person gave good umlaut, okay? So there you go. Well, thank you all for listening to our recap and discussion. For our Patreon patrons, please stick around for your bonus material. We'll see you next week. So, BATBOR, BOR,

BOR, BOR, BADD I don't know.