Two Hundred A Day - Episode 68: Star Trek DS9 - Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

Welcome to Twenty Dollars a Day, the podcast where we explore our favorite fictional characters in the Star Trek universe! Nathan and Eppy discuss the holodeck-hosted heist in S7E15 Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang. Vic Fontaine's lounge is suddenly taken over by a hidden variable in his always-on program, the bridge crew has to pull together to help out their holographic buddy. A loving homage to films like Ocean's Eleven, we really enjoyed both watching our friends make and execute on a plan, and the opportunity to talk about a holodeck episode that doesn't stem from technological disaster. Happy April, everyone! We're happy to take our third annual look at Star Trek holodeck episodes that follow on the themes of our first love, The Rockford FIles. Hope you enjoy it! We now have a second, patron-exclusive, podcast - Plus Expenses. Covering our non-Rockford media, games and life chatter, Plus Expenses is available via our Patreon at ALL levels of support. Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files! Support the podcast by subscribing at patreon.com/twohundredaday. Big thanks to our Gumshoe patrons! Check them out: Richard Hatem Brian Perrera Eric Antener Bill Anderson Jim Crocker - keep an eye out for Jim selling our games east of the Mississippi, and follow him on twitter @jimlikesgames Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app Jay Adan's Miniature Painting And thank you to Dael Norwood, Dylan Winslow, Dave P, and Dale Church! Thanks to: fireside.fm for hosting us Audio Hijack for helping us record and capture clips from the show spoileralerts.org for the adding machine audio clip Freesound.org for other audio clips Two Hundred a Day is a podcast by game and narrative designers Nathan D. Paoletta and Epidiah Ravachol. In each episode we pick an episode of The Rockford Files, recap and review it as fans of the show, and tease out specific elements from that episode that hold lessons for writers, gamers and anyone else interested in making better narratives.

welcome to 20 a day where we explore all the fun holodeck episodes and holographic characters from the star trek franchise at this point in our show we are going a field of our original inspiration which was the uh some of the next generation episodes where captain picard gets to play his PI persona and uses the line 20 a day plus expenses. But in this episode, we're going forward to, I mean, Next Generation always holds a special place in my heart, but in terms of a television show, probably the best one and probably my favorite as a show, an episode from deep space nine yeah i'm excited about it wait um should we say who we are oh yes i suppose uh i'm nathan paletta i'm epidae ravish and uh yeah we are here to talk about season 7 episode 15 bada bing bada bang bada

bang this was a i think different in many ways from our last uh from from our typical coverage first of all not a something terrible has gone wrong on the holodeck episode which is i think the standard uh the standard fare for what we look at uh in this show also coming in the last season of d space nine even though this is a mostly a standalone ish episode um it really benefits from watching previous episodes and kind of knowing the ongoing storylines in the show yeah uh which as it turns out uh i am not entirely familiar with so i may be asking some questions that some of our viewers may be also asking. Our viewers, viewers and listeners in our hollow. Yes.

Hollow audio future. Yeah, I did a DS9 rewatch a couple of years ago. I actually I mean, I never saw it while it was on the air other than random episodes here and there. But at some point in the last five years, i watched the entire series front to back and then did a rewatch so so and i haven't watched it in a while so coming back for this episode was actually really fun because it was like oh look at all these look at all these characters that i like i will say uh not not having watched many uh deep space nine episodes i really enjoyed myself uh watching i i wasn't sure if i would i mean i'm i

don't think you would have led me astray i'm not saying that but uh um i definitely was like okay let's let's let's see what we got here what's going on there were some characters that i remember from uh like wharf well wharf is only in it briefly. But O'Brien. I do remember them from my next-gen years. This was still an entertaining piece to television. One of the things that makes the DS9 in particular fun to talk about is kind of how much long-term storytelling they did and how interesting the characters ended up. So generally, there's going to be backstory like anything, which is kind of nice.

So I'll try not to get too nerdy about it. Get a little dirty though, right? And I'm no, by no means like an expert or whatever. I just like the show a lot, but I will try to limit my responses to your questions. Ah, yeah. Okay. I see what you're saying. Is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah. So this is kind of towards the end of the last season. I believe it's noted as kind of the last standalone episode before the story arc that kind of wraps up the entire show that kind of kicks in with the next episode. In the arc of the season, it's very much a little beat, like a little rest beat between some pretty serious um story story lines that involve the dominion war and characters being traumatized and you know galactic space fights and and all the all the craziness um gold ducat becoming a proto-evil god anyway uh it's a little refresher little spritz of of something light and fun uh to break up all of that serious stuff uh this episode is written by uh ira stephen bear and hans bimler um bimler

not sure how to say that name ira stephen bear is basically the showrunner at this point um he took over the show i think in the third season, and wrote a number of the episodes, was producing the show, et cetera, et cetera. He got his start in television on a little show in the early 80s called Brett Maverick. Hey! Featuring friend of 20 a day, James Garner. Yeah.

Which is great. The Memory Alpha entry notes that this is a idea that he'd had for a long time and kind of wanted to get into the show somewhere, somehow, and it kind of finally all came together. The director is Michael Vejar, who directed a lot of Deep Space Nine episodes, but also, again, earlier credits starting off in the 80s, directed episodes of both The Incredible Hulk and Magnum P.I.

Yay. My overall statement for this show, for this particular episode, is it is clearly made by a bunch of people who are just having as much fun as they can. Yeah. And that's the actors. And it's also, I think, in the production because there's some stuff that's very celebratory about the heist that we're going to get to see. If I might, and this is a theme I probably will keep coming back to as I'm doing this, because it reminds me in many ways of kind of like a traditional role playing game gone right. Yeah. You know, and I'm apologizing right now to our listeners who don't have the context of that. I'll try to put that in context as we talk about it. But there are several hallmarks here of what's going on, especially when we start talking about who Felix is. Yeah, I need to know. Okay, I'm sorry. I just wanted to like, put that out there as a prelude to where I'm going to go with all this.

to where I'm going to go with all this. podcast where we talk about movies we're watching, books we're reading, and games we're playing. $200 a day will remain free to all for as long as we do it. But if you want to help support us and get access to the new Plus Expenses audio feed, you can become a patron for just $1 an episode. Each episode, we extend a special thanks to our Gumshoe-level patrons. This time, we say thank you to Jim Crocker. In addition to supporting the show, he also sells our games at conventions east of the Mississippi. See where to find him at JimLikesGames on Twitter. Shane Liebling, if you play games online, you know you should check out his free dice rolling app, Roll For Your Party, at RollForYour.Party.

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Bill Anderson, at BillAnd88, and of course, Richard Haddam, at Richard Haddam. We follow them, too, at 200Pod. Help out the show by leaving a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts, tell a friend who you think would like it, and check out patreon.com slash 200ADay to see if becoming a patron is review wherever you get your podcasts. Tell a friend who you think would like it, and check out patreon.com slash 200 a day to see if becoming a patron is right for you. As all of our episodes do, we start with

our cold open, um, where we have Dr. Julian Bashir and we all know O'Brien. Um, so we have Bashir and O'Brien. Uh, they're in the holosuite in, uh, the Vic Fontaine program. so hanging out with vic fontaine our 60s lounge singer in vegas they're showing him a davy crockett hat and offering to

transfer him into their favorite program of the moment their defense of the alamo that they hair off to whenever they want to blow off some steam now this will be touched upon a little bit later but i just want to say uh it is astounding to me how much a united federation of planets is obsessed with not just earth culture but western culture and not just western culture but american history and not just american history but the sort of american history we learned through our popular culture in the late 80s and early 90s. I just want to like. That's a weird coincidence, isn't it? Yeah, it's just weird.

Vic isn't a big fan of that idea, but he sings a song to get them in the mood. Alamo. Standing around by the Alamo. Walking around by the Alamo. Walking around in San Antonio. Which apparently was composed for this intro. This isn't like a jazz standard or anything, apparently. I mean, it certainly is the most Texas song I've ever heard. Suddenly the lounge turns into a crowded casino floor uh the three of them look confused

and there's a parade of showgirls and the crowd starts catcalling and telling vic to get off the stage because obviously he's not who they're there to see um o'brien posits that perhaps there's a pointer error in the hollow suites parameter file wonderful uh and then we have an appearance from frankie eyes which is big goon of an enforcer cheech i just want to point out here that uh frankie eyes and cheech are amazing goons just the look of them is perfect yeah they show up and it's like oh look at these goons yeah uh i know che from like, I guess probably from a thousand things looking at his IMDb. Yeah. But like I immediately had a reaction to him when I saw him.

I was like, oh yeah, I know who he's going to be. And of course, Frankie Eyes is exactly Frankie Eyes. Now these are well cast characters here. Apparently Frankie Eyes and Vic know each other. Frankie Eyes has bought the hotel, and he doesn't want Vic to be hanging around anymore. He kicks him out, makes it clear that he's going to be blackballed from performing if he has anything to say about it. Yeah. O'Brien, of course, won't stand for this and tries to delete them from the program.

So, it's a good sign. To no avail. The program also will not freeze uh frankie eyes is uh done with them has tells teach to throw them out and we go to the credits with uh teach picking up vic by the lapels in a very threatening manner and then we go to our opening deep space nine credits yes so yeah this is uh so welcome to the far future. Nothing feels more realistic than O'Brien's reactions to these holodeck things. This is me dealing with like a window that won't open or, you know, like it felt very real. And considering when these were made and filmed filmed that was when things that were supposed

to be realistic computer interactions were displayed as these weird futuristic things and for some reason i just there's like oh okay i'll just stop the program okay it won't stop all right freeze everything okay wait that's not working like something is clearly wrong here yeah it aired in early 99 so yeah yeah, probably. So shot in 98. Yeah. It just, it really, it really hit home. It felt real. Yeah.

There's nothing more real than the frustration of an electronic device that won't do what you thought it was going to do. Exactly. All right. Well, we come back from our credits to O'Brien, Beshear, and Vic Fontaine figuring out what's going on. Vic says there's nothing they can do to stop Frankie Eyes. He's a made man, so he has mafia connections. O'Brien says that they can restart the program, which will reset everything, but that'll also wipe Vic's memory, and Vic does not want that to happen.

Bashir apparently has the ability to talk to the guy who designed the program, someone named, was it Phoenix? Felix. So he's going to talk to him and Vic will stay out of Frankie Eyes' way while our Starfleet officers try to solve this problem. This is the scene where I first realized that we are dealing with a role-playing game. I first realized that we're dealing with a role-playing game. So I'm going to take the point of view that the Deep Space Nine crew are the player characters.

And I'll make an argument for this, aside from just the fact that they probably should be because they're the main cast. And I'll make that argument a little bit later. But this is a scene that happens in a lot of these games where a problem has shown up and there is a straightforward solution to the problem that they can't do and they need to talk their way through why they can't do it and set the parameters the sort of the boundaries of how they can solve the problem because i think this is the scene where they realize they can't just shoot them with a phaser yeah they say that in the next scene but yeah i was having flashbacks while watching this to like a thousand gaming sessions right that's like we pcs are having a discussion

in front of the gm who occasionally jumps in as an npc to explain to us why that solution wasn't going to work yeah and sort of lay out the boundaries of the puzzle we're about to solve. And, um, I appreciated it on, on the screen here. Yeah.

And that plays out through the next scene. Also all part of this one sequence. Um, there is a thing here where, uh, one of those things that is from an earlier episode. Uh, so O'Brien,

Beshear and Vic are all talking on the same level because vick fontaine is a self-aware hologram right and that's something that came about earlier in the season so this is differentiating him uh from you know from like professor moriarty who became self-aware yeah that was a problem vick fontaine is like kind of self-aware because it makes him more fun to interact with my question about that is was there an episode where he kind of self-aware because it makes him more fun to interact with. My question about that is, was there an episode where he was made self-aware or is that just been the nature of his program since the beginning? Off the top of my head, I don't remember that being an episode. was designed to be self-aware because like the guy felix who designed him like beshir asked him to make a very uh advanced hologram or whatever um but there is an earlier episode which i assigned you as homework um but our our listeners you know may also be familiar earlier in the season there's

an episode where um or nog who we'll meet in a second, comes back from combat with an injury. He had to have his leg replaced with a prosthetic. And he has some terrible PTSD, and he ends up kind of getting through that through hanging out in this hologram, in this holographic suite with Vic, with it running all the time. And so there's a plot point from that episode is that

they end up leaving vick's world running constantly unlike other hollow suite programs where they only come on when you go onto the holodeck he goes to sleep he has downtime he like lives a real-time life and so that's another reason why this is going to be such a problem right and why there's a time pressure on uh the people who want to help vick here right uh and i i do want to point out that constantly is 26 hours 26 hours yes yes yeah so over uh our next scene we kind of meet more of our standard our ensemble cast that is going to be in this episode so nog who's the ferengi ensign um who is now back on duty after having his terrible injury uh he is not going to let this stand um anyone who hurts vick is going to answer to nog because he owes him a lot and that's from that earlier episode

we have a brief wharf appearance um who has no patience for holograms don't you like vick as a singer i find him entertaining but beyond that i neither like him nor dislike him he is a hologram and therefore he does not exist get that paycheck uh wharf we will not see you in the rest of the episode uh bashir did talk to felix so uh the gm got back to us about this particular point, which is that the program has this, they call it a jack-in-the-box, programmed into it. So a

unforeseen wrench that is thrown into the works to keep it from getting boring for people interacting with it. So it's meant to be there. Therefore, it's not an anomaly that can be solved technologically. It has to be solved within the fiction of the simulation. And that's what they talk about.

They can't just shoot him with a phaser because that isn't part of the 1960s reality that Vic and Frankie Eyes and everyone is living in. Yeah. And same with anything happens to Vic, it's going to be permanent because his program is running in real time. So there's real danger to their friend. We have a drive-by from Captain Sisko to see what's up and be like, hey, why are you all worried about this hologram? Get back to work. But O'Brien and Bashir are trying to figure out what's, you know,

how to solve this problem. Nog definitely wants to be in because he wants to help. Kira is also in. Major Kira, who kind of, you know of runs the day-to-day of the station and is the Bajoran liaison or whatever her position is at this point. She has a line where she

says that she and Odo both owe a lot to Vic, and that's from another earlier episode. Kira and Odo had this long-simmering romantic tension. Odo's the security chief of the station. He's the changeling. He's played by Rene Gauvernet, RIP, who's one of his more memorable roles.

Part of their delicate dance was ignoring the fact that they both felt that way. But they both told Vic because he's like a safe friend. friend and so he yeah engineered them talking to each other when they thought they were on like training dates with like a hologram of the other one to like practice how they could tell them how they feel oh i'm in for that episode um so yeah so he essentially got them together so this this characterizes some things because okay when i watched this episode i did not know that they were together and we're gonna have a scene coming up where i'm like what is happening here and then there's a scene later or it is mentioned that they're together later and that's when i go oh okay all of this is making sense now but uh this is good this is like my notes are like everyone. Yes. And it's good to know some of this history here.

Not that I will point out that the show does a great job of just telling you that. Like, it's not like you need to know that to enjoy the episode because it's just very clear that everyone loves Vic. And also Vic is played by James Darren. Yeah. Who just like, he's just likable. He's a charismatic actor. Yeah. Who just like he's just likable. He's a charismatic actor. Yeah. You just want to be like, oh, yeah, I hang out with him in his lounge, which I otherwise would have no urge to hang out.

Vic seems like a nice enough guy and he's got a lovely voice. We have a brief scene with Cisco and Cassidy. They are together. I don't think they're married at this point. Doesn't matter. Long term stuff. They're currently romantic partners on the station. She's not in Starfleet. She's a civilian. Again, I don't know if it really matters other than just she has a lot of candor with him. She makes it into Starfleet by the time the Orville comes around i have not seen the orville is she in that yeah she is she she plays a doctor in there uh she's a great character actually um i like the orville it scratches a star trek next generation it sure that i've been like looking for uh i do i am aware of who makes it and there is a little bit of that all throughout it but um she was also on castle i don't know if you've ever watched castle i've heard of it i've not watched it she was the captain of the police there anyways i like i like this actress a lot

like she plays roles where i'm like oh i like this character so when i saw her i was immediately like oh this is great she's great and, this relationship is very interesting and goes through lots of twists and turns over the course of the series. Nice. As with all of these things. The scene is here both to show us that Cassidy is also friends with Vic. Yeah. She's telling Cisco about all the problem and what everyone's trying to think of to

help. He doesn't seem very enthused. He does say that it does sound a little silly to him because he's just a hologram he's like well he's more of a friend he's not just a program but we established that while she considers vick a sympathetic figure uh captain cisco just doesn't like going to vicks right and he doesn't want to talk about it I do want to talk a little bit about this. He's just a hologram or is he a friend in the context of a universe that also has data? Yeah. Right.

And I think Voyager takes place after Deep Space Nine, right? They're kind of contemporaneous. Okay. They overlapped when they were airing. I forget exactly how the time the in fiction timeline works out but we also have um the uh doctor uh and i understand making an argument for the audience's sake and whatnot but i think it feels to me firmly established in star trek that programmed entities are entities i i feel like there may have needed to be some sort of classification

or something where she could say oh no he is on this level the same level where we treat data the same level you know um and not the same level that we treat say the uh computer that responds to voice commands right uh it's it's an interesting thing to dive into because it is so completely constructed and yet there's examples of creatures and people throughout uh star trek that that fit in that category that you have to consider actual entities there's there's a strain of that in voyager in the later seasons where there's a whole kind of plot movement around holographic rights, the way that they present it as an issue is kind of exposing this human bias kind of thing. Where it's like, okay, you have no problem at some point accepting that Data is a person he like walks around and has a body and can interact on that level but when you get to entities that are created out of photons you don't even

seem to realize how biased you're being because we are self-aware right and then that's complicated by the fact that some aren't self-aware and some are so then there's this whole thing it's like so does that mean that some holograms are slaves? Like, and that becomes an issue in Voyager that is handled, you know, better or worse, depending on the episode and,

and, and whatnot. Here, apparently this is my, my memory alpha research, but apparently Cisco is, is here kind of as the voice of the, of the audience segment that didn't like vic fontaine as a

character oh because that was apparently controversial at the time to like introduce this character as a recurring presence on the show it's pretty late in the series for that yeah it's like in like the sixth season or whatever and it's like you know don't mix your weird next generation ish 20th century culture worship with my fantasy space you know war show yeah so some audience members really didn't like that character and didn't like that he was on the show and so something that i think is a little subtle and kind of and and clearly here as intentional is to at least have someone on the in the show being like channeling that counter narrative a little bit

of like you know is this really a big deal of course then he gets swept up in it by the end spoiler alert but um yeah that's an interesting little piece of the writing i think that is and i think it's necessary for us to mention it here because our viewer our listeners obviously are here for the holodeck right uh episodes like why else would you be listening to 20 a day that would not occur to me that someone would not like fig fontaine right exactly yeah all right so back in the hollow suite uh vick's been all beat up he got thrown out and busted up a little bit by uh frankie eyes's boys cheech one would imagine best year being the doctor checks him out he has some bruised ribs and a sprained wrist. You know, he has a big

bruise around his eye, which is kind of the physical signifier of his issues here. Frankie sent Cheech to encourage him to move along. They apparently go way back, ever since Vic beat Frankie at stickball back in the old neighborhood. They've been rivals ever since. O'Brien and Bashir want Vic to lay

low while they make a plan. Kira and Odo are down in the casino figuring out if Frankie Eyes has a weak spot. But they have to be careful because if they're not, Vic's the one who's going to end up buried in the desert. I think this is the scene where Vic just like dumps, to my surprise, how much he knows about the going on to the ship. What you've said so far has now explained a whole hell of a lot of that to me. Apparently they just all go to him with their problems. Yeah. And I shouldn't say ship.

It's a station. Excuse you. Yes. But Vic is a security liability. I'm just going to put that out there. Technically, he's in a hollow suite, which is a right, you know, in which Cork owns or whatever. And Cork is a right you know in which quark owns or whatever and quark is a civilian it gets this gets into the very like weird relationship uh like the rabbit hole of like wait how does this all work because like the federation doesn't have money but quark pays rent

and so instead of taking physical money from quark uh cisco and others just like lean on him for things every so often. Or like, you know, we could just be charging you rent, but instead hook us up with this holosuite that runs all the time. So our friend Vic Fontaine can have a real time, you know, life. It's wild once you start going down the rabbit hole. So is this the first like, wait a minute moment that you were talking about with Kira and Odo? Where Odo's like yes

i'm gonna hang out here and ogle the show girls okay so there's a number of wait a minutes going on here uh the first one is just i'm just gonna hand wave star trek nonsense uh because star trek is of the era that it is uh and it has this weird thing of, again, about the very current culture in which it's filmed. Yeah. I know Odo enough to know that he's a shapeshifter of some sort. Right. First of all. Oh,

okay. So Odo's into that. That's a surprise. And then the way Akira is, is teasing him. I was like, wait, there's more to that than just a friend teasing someone about it

yeah what is happening like and i did not know that the two of them yeah they're they are an item odo's job is to scope out cheech and and you know all the enforcers and so he kind of hangs out on their periphery while they're swapping stories apparently the the problem is there's just too many too many people in this business named Polly. Yes. Kira goes over to the casino side is, is playing blackjack by herself and through the magic of narrative convenience,

because we were only 45 minutes to tell the story. Frankie eyes, of course is attracted to her and comes over to her table. Now I'm going to say it's not narrative convenience or rather it's not i'm going to say it's narrative convenience on the felix design level oh okay this is the this the the central point of my argument that the crew are the player characters because you'll note throughout they get all the npcs attention whenever they want it or need it and now that can be seen as in a television show it's just oh that's just the convenience or whatever but that's literally how role-playing games or

specifically computer role-playing games work right like yeah there's this sort of engagement people are going to dump their information on you people are going to be attracted to you because you need them to be, you know, like they all have their eyes on these player characters in a way that probably from the point of view of Frankie Eyes, it might not even be explicable to him. I mean, and that is kind of a like holodeck feature thing, right? Like the whole idea is that it's there for you. So like the real people are the ones who get the attention. I mean, it's fine.

It works on all the levels. Yeah. It is there for that moment where he comes over and has this whole thing showing his character where he's making the dealer keep dealing out cards until she, you know, gets blackjack. And he's yelling at the dealer for dealing out the wrong cards. And they have banter about breaking the rules. Very sure of yourself. No doubt it doubt is for losers and quite a philosopher well i'm thinking of writing a book what's the title well maybe you could help me think one up my talents lie in other direction good title mind if i use it let's say you already paid for it so what do you say we hit the bullet table and see if i can't buy chapter one we see kira letting herself be you know talked into spending more time with this guy

while on the other side over there odo is using his changeling abilities to do close-up magic and impress the impress the the goons which also feels like a very role-playing-y thing to me. Like, all right, what do I have? I don't have anything on my sheet to... Well, all right, I'm going to use my shapeshifting ability to impress them with a magic trick. It's like, all right, roll for it. All right, it works. Great.

Yay. They love you. You're from Bajor in Jersey. All right. We get the whole crew back in vick's place now we are joined by uh esri dax um as the final member of our uh of our squad she is the uh station's counselor she is the new dax uh this is after jadzia dax had an unfortunate end, who was on the show through the first six seasons. Oh, okay.

So she's really new. And that's one of the, like, I think in DS9 conversation, like, Esri Dax as a character is kind of like, eh, kind of could have been handled better because she just didn't have that much time to, like, get into the show. It doesn't matter for this episode. But the whole deal is, though, she's a Trill. There there's like the worm creature and that's in a host yeah and so the worm creature is like is the dax and so the dax creature has all these lifetimes including an earlier lifetime where he was like in a body that was buddies with cisco and then he was in jet zia dax and then jet zia ended up getting together with wharf and then jet zadzia dies, and then Dax survives and now is in Esri. And so now she has all these complicated relationships because she has all these memories.

Right. It doesn't matter for this episode. She's another member of the crew. I knew probably Jadzia Dax, and a little bit about that it was a symbiote and had other lives and whatnot. that it was a symbiote and had other lives and whatnot. During the homework episode that I watched, we were like, wait a minute, what? Who is this person?

And then it just kind of fell into place. Now, was Jadzia Dax also the, like, counselor? The space station's counselor? No, she was like a science, more of like a science officer. Okay. So she was more in a science officer. Okay. So she was more in the command structure. So that's part of the character drama is that Esri has a different career. So once she becomes Esri Dax, she doesn't just fit back in to the social structure.

She's also the therapist, and then she's the one who's had the most trauma. So that is a difficult thing for her. Sci-fi. Sci-fi. Anyway, she's going to be part of our crew as we go along. We get more parameters from talking to the GM. Frankie Eyes was sent to buy this casino by Carl Zemo, who's a big, big, important mob guy. He's the one backing the venture. He's the one who has the cash. And so it's a simple operation. Frankie Eyes runs it. It brings in a cool million a month and he sends a couple hundred thousand back to Zemo tax free.

Zemo is going to be coming to the hotel in six days to pick up that first payment and make sure that everything is going well. O'Brien asks what would happen if Zemo didn't get his skim. Of course, that would not go well for Frankie Eyes. So if you're thinking what I'm thinking, Beshir says that they just need to keep him from seeing that money. So Vic lays out all the obstacles that are going to make this difficult. Right. In addition to stealing from the mob is just a bad idea uh in a very uh uh rockfordian move if you're familiar with the 1970s detective show the rockford files um stealing from the mob is a bad idea the money's in a safe in the count room uh it's a locked safe there's a guard outside the count room all day and then there's the two count men inside when

they're actually counting the money and the crew's like well we will figure this out we are a bunch of capable starfleet officers and you've given us a problem right like let us assemble our skills and knowledge and figure out a solution my notes at this point are include do these people have a day job and then uh m's contribution which is this episode should have been called deep space 11 yes i mean it is very much a oceans 11 homage yeah pre the remake so this is an homage to the original oceans 11 yeah which is very not like the remake oh i watched it sometime earlier like in the last year it's worth watching it is not the same i have to check it out actually yeah i think it was on netflix when i watched it but yes so

yeah let me get this straight you're going to knock over the casino and steal a cool million from the mob you want your lounge back or not deal me in. dot com and search for at Epidae, E-P-I-D-I-A-H. I'm usually responsive there. Otherwise, you can go to worldswithoutmaster.com where you can find my sword and sorcery fiction and role-playing games. And if you like role-playing games, maybe you want to check out digathousandholes.com where I publish all my other role-playing games. Oh no, I dropped my calculator. Nathan, while I go pick up a spare, why don't you tell the good folks where they can find you on the internet?

In addition to this podcast, I also design and publish role-playing games, including the Worldwide Wrestling, Pro Wrestling role-playing game, among many others. You can find links to all of my games and other projects at ndpdesign.com and of course

you can find me on twitter.com at ndpayoleta. Looks like you're back. You ready to continue the arithmetic analysis for this episode there, Eppie? I'm back. I have my DM-42 with me and I'm ready to dig down into Rockford's books again. Alright, well

I'm done with this delicious avocado taco. Well, let's get back to the show then. Cut to Frankie Eyes pouring out a bunch of cash for the Count Men. Kira is with him. She has now apparently gotten into the position of being his lady companion. Oh, my God, is she vamping. It's amazing. She is having so much fun.

Yeah, yes. god is she vamping it's amazing she is having so much fun yeah yes i mean like probably the actors are having fun but you can see that the characters are having fun doing this right like this is they're not calling it this but they're like we're going to lark yeah we're going to take a little time and we're just going to larp this zany situation here uh where there's something like a friend's life on the line it's not that there aren't stakes because there are but there is a little bit of a sense of like the worst case scenario here is that like our hologram friend is gonna get into trouble is gonna like have something terrible happen right if that happens we could just reset the program like yeah his

memory's gone but we'll have him back right like there's stakes but they're not at the level of like dominion war like the station's gonna get destroyed changelings are infiltrating our government like those are the stakes this crew usually is dealing with so i feel like this is a little bit like yeah we can have a little fun with this um frankie eyes is trying to really uh coming on strong to kira telling her there's more of that cash, more cash where that came from, etc. Cassidy is outside the count room playing the slots and making friends with the guard who hangs out there. Telling him that, you know, clearly he must have played football and trying to, you know, connect with him on his fictional background level. Then we cut to Cheech hitting a hapless employee in the face with a cheesesteak, which cracked

me up. You call this a cheesesteak? I wouldn't feed this to my parole officer. Yes. Odo interrupts introducing Esri as a friend of his that needs a job. And Cheech, who clearly is taken with her cuteness, agrees that sure, she can go ahead and be gainfully employed there as a waitress. Calls Odo Stretch. Yeah.

Okay. So let's talk about this line of dialogue for a second. I don't know if I've recorded this exactly. Thanks, Cheech. I owe you one. I don't mention it, Stretch. Maybe one of these days you'll show me that. Show him what?

I think I felt filled in, at least in my head, like show me one of those tricks. Maybe. That could be. But it felt to me like a weird sexual innuendo that I was like, what is going on here? But go on. Then Vic interrupts. He wants to see Frankie. He's coming to him on bended knee.

I can't get a job in this town. You know, how can we talk this out? How can I make it right? Frankie wants nothing to do with him, but he says that he knows some high rollers. He can bring in some big, you know, some big players to come drop money at the casino. Kira helps this along by kind of encouraging Frankie to be like, hey, just, you know, tired of listening to this. Just let him say what he has to say and get out of here. Helping his story by playing him off. Right.

And Frankie's like, all right, fine. If you bring in a couple of plebs, then we'll talk. Vic offers to buy him a drink. He says, I don't drink with losers. This is another moment where, again, I think that it's shown that the programs are designed to find the crew at least interesting, if not attractive, throughout. Right. Like that's just the situation you're going to have if you walk into a holodeck, whoever you are.

You don't have to be command crew. This whole thing could have been solved by non-command crew, but we'll get into that in, like, the next scene, I think. So our next scene is Cassidy and Sisko again, where Cassidy's kind of explaining this plan and talking about all the things they're doing. And Sisko's still kind of incredulous. He's like, so my entire senior staff is part of, quote, this nonsense. And Cassidy comes back with, well, he's still a friend, and you help your friends. And we finally kind of get to the nut of why Sisko is not into this.

It's not about Vic Fontaine as a person, as a character. You really want to know what my problem is? I'll tell you. Las Vegas, 1962, that's my problem. In 1962, black people weren't very welcome there. Oh, sure, they could be performers or janitors, but customers never. Maybe that's the way it was in the real Vegas, but that is not the way it is at Vic's. I have never felt uncomfortable there, and neither has Jake.

But don't you see? That's the lie. In 1962, the civil rights movement was still in its infancy. It wasn't an easy time for our people, and I'm not going to pretend that it was. Baby, I know that VIX isn't a totally accurate representation of the way things were, but it is meant to be. It shows us the way things could have been, the way they should have been. We cannot ignore the truth about the past going to vix isn't going to make us forget who we are or where we came from what it does is

reminds us that we are no longer bound by any limitations except the ones we impose on ourselves so this is another thing that deep space nine cared about which was the relationship that people in the future would have with the past that they have transcended right so cisco and cassidy as black people in a future that theoretically has transcended racial issues have different relationships with the past for their people and that's super interesting and something i had completely forgotten was in this episode yeah it's just like it's the smallest bit of this episode, which it sort of has to be because the episode is is like you were talking about earlier. It's a beat between the heavy stuff, but it doesn't just let it drop. It doesn't just be like we're just we're going to ignore it.

No, I really enjoyed this bit here as a let's acknowledge the problem here that this is not this is a historical and it's and it's still relevant to you know stuff that we like that we do right like this is a relevant conversation continually where it's like when you're doing stuff that's set in the past that's about issues that are still relevant what's the responsibility of the creator in portraying how things quote actually were in heightening certain things or in presenting as cassidy says a version that it should have been right there's different values of presenting uh historical material in those different ways and uh it's's something that we all have to grapple with if we're interested in making those kinds of fictions.

So I'm glad it was here to put a little like, to put, if nothing else, a little flag here saying, hey, as writers of a show that have now written a setting that is in the recent past, and that's flagged here as like something that is um a choice that was made and not just a thoughtless piece of dressing i guess i don't know it's the show does a lot of that so it's nice to see that in this later episode and then i think plot wise this is important because we see cisco listening to cassidy and thinking about what, about her version of why this is important.

Yeah. So we then get back to the caper where the crew blackboard with the plan chalked on it in Vic's apartment. They're talking about how they just need one more role. Worf's not going to do it. Corkit wouldn't do it. He sees Vic as competition. We need someone to command attention at the craps table.

It'll be a big distraction or the whole plan's going to fall apart. And of course, then we enter Captain Sisko. Captain on deck. So we now get the classic, all right, let's go over the plan one more time. Yeah. With a great line, far be it from me to tell Starfleet officers how to do their job. Yeah. Yeah. There's something I really love about this version of the self-war hologram where it's not about him striving to transcend the holodeck. It's him being like, no, this is my life. This is my world and my life and my concerns. And I understand that you have your world with your concerns and they're different.

But when you're here, I need you to understand certain things. It really did feel like something a dad would say to a bunch of kids who are like, well, we're playing at being Starfleet officers, right? Like, OK, yeah, sure. Out there, that's important. But those rules don't apply here. All right. So the plan as such is Kira keeps Frankie Eyes away from the casino so that he's not gonna interfere with anything uh cisco and vick will lay down the heavy bread at the craps table to draw a crowd and keep attention away from the counting room uh one of the count men always takes a break at the same

time every night to make a phone call uh and the other order is martini so esri is going to bring him in that martini she's going to swing by by Julian's table where he's playing poker so that he can put Ipecac in the martini. Why she can't just put it in before she brings it to him. Don't. It's important that Julian's at that table for other reasons. Yeah. For the plot. But yes, in this moment, it's like, okay.

And a little bit of it's like, all right, everyone needs to be involved. Every PC needs something here.'s the yeah if if julian's player hadn't showed up that week it would have been fine but uh esri drops the martini with the other guy she leaves cassidy then goes to her guard friend to accuse o'brien of stealing her chips and have this argument to distract the guard so the guard doesn't see the ipcac dosed guy run out to go to the bathroom. That's when Nog, who is dressed as a custodian, slips in. He uses his special skill of extra Ferengi hearing to crack the safe, listening to the tumblers and figuring out how to open it that way.

And then Odo was shapeshifted as the drink tray. So since he's already in the room, he then gets to transform into the bag man and have a giant briefcase to carry the million dollars in cash out of the casino, dump it in the trash cans

outside. Zemo comes, there's no money. All of our problems are over. So I got a quick question is the briefcase in that room odo makes the briefcase he can do that yes all right all right i wasn't quite because i he clearly makes clothes that is the that is the polite fiction of all shapeshifters that even though they're clothed anytime you touch them you're touching their naked bodies. All right.

That was the thing that I was just like a little bit like, if the briefcase is there, why can't Nog just, but again, everyone has to have a thing. Yeah. He grows the briefcase as part of him. And then,

yeah. Yeah. Cause my notes are like, Odo could have done all of this. I know. Yeah. Odo is the GMPC who can do it all. Zemo is scheduled to come in two days, so they're going to go tomorrow night. So now we have a brief little montage of everyone practicing their parts, which is delightful.

Including Nog doing trial runs on the, I assumed just in my head, because I'm a Star Trek nerd, I'm like, okay, so he's in a holosuite and he's doing it. And then it zooms out and it's like, no, they like built a physical one, I guess. Like out in the play, they like replicated one from the practice on,

which I don't see as superior to doing a holographic one because it is a holographic one, but you know, I'm no Starfleet officer. Maybe they couldn't get enough time in the hollow suites. It was easier just to replicate one. Um,

and then this, uh, concludes with, uh, I think I mentioned there's some like really celebratory bits, this slightly slow motion March of all the crew, all dressed through Quark. And that's the real Ocean's Eleven-y.

Yeah. All right, we got everyone together. Everyone knows their role. Now we're going to see them get to work. I'm telling you, Morn, something's going on in Vix that we don't know about. I just switched back to my notes, and I should point out, there's scenes of Sis Cisco practicing rolling dice. Yes.

Which I love. So that he can show off as a high roller. And then this slow walk in. Correct me if I'm wrong. Are they playing a jazzy Star Trek theme? Like, I don't know the Deep Space Nine theme well enough to know if that was what was going on. I'm not very good with music. Like it was jazzy, but it certainly felt that like hopeful Star Trek exploration style that I was

like, yeah, I'm digging this. I would dig a whole show based on this theme. All right. Our caper begins. Of course, everything goes according to plan, right? Yes, of course. I do like, so there's two things about this before going through it. One is I really like the escalation of how it starts off with things not going quite right, but they can handle it. And then each of the next thing that doesn't go quite right is just a little harder to handle. So it's not like a big crisis and then they have to scramble and change everything. Like my note, again, I'm following this theory that this is a role-playing game right and uh this is exactly how this style of role-playing game plays out where okay we've we've now discussed in front of the gm our entire plan and then the gm just makes a little something go wrong every step of the way so that we have to roll to overcome it.

But we sort of just overcome it the moment it happens. Yeah. Or inserts moments where it's like, all right, let's make the roll. And then there's a lot of failing forward here, right? None of these roles stop the action, but they do complicate things so that someone else has to step up and do either do something they hadn't already planned or step into someone else's role to fix a problem quite often i feel like in these sorts of games these things happen and then we're just waiting for a thing to happen to feel like it's big enough to have said we did it and that thing happens in this but clearly,

you know, this is a written thing. So it was, they were leading to it, but it still follows that same pattern. Like we're like, we're just going to make these things go wrong until we feel like we've done enough things going wrong. And the solution,

some solution to one of them is, is just the right note to end it all. And also it's where everyone's had a chance to do a thing. Yes. Yes. We're going to take turns. Yeah. We're going around the table.

Everyone has a chance to do a thing. Then we wrap it up. So yeah. So the caper begins. Oh, another thing I was going to say is there's a moment where I'm like, like in a longer form thing, like if this was a movie or if we were starting the episode kind of without a bunch of setup and we're just like in it at the very beginning like already kind of almost here there there is an opportunity for the big

twist where now they have to come up with a completely new solution that i kind of was looking for and then it doesn't happen i'm like all right because there's only five minutes left in this episode like yeah yeah if you're watching the clock you know why it doesn't happen but yeah so uh you know things start off as they planned. But then the first problem is that someone runs into Esri and spills the martinis that she's bringing over to Bashir's table. There's a beat while they both go, oh, no. But then Bashir thinks on his feet and grabs martinis off of a different waitress's tray and drops the ipecac into one of them. So everything's still good.

She goes in, but oh no, the normal guy who's in there who orders the martini, he's out with the flu. And there's a new guy who is having none of it with this cocktail waitress coming in. But then she, I refer to in my notes as reverse psychologies him into drinking it anyway. It's good. Like this is a, i was i was hoping for some fast talk in this episode and this this is the one that hits it where she just is like okay all right yeah you mind if i drink this yeah and it's great because it fits her skill set too

it's just that's what she is and so yeah um so he uh you know has the requisite reaction to said Ipecac. So Nog slips in. Odo reforms. But oh no, the safe is not the same as what they thought. It has an auto-relock tumbler. And it's not going to be as easy to crack as he had practiced. And so now this is going to create the drama where they're on a timetable. And then things aren't happening when they're supposed to.

And everyone has to start throwing in delays to buy him time. Kira's hanging out with Frankie Eyes. He's waxing about Bugsy Seagull not having a not having a statue in Vegas. She keeps on telling him that she just wants to have a drink and talk. She doesn't want to go to the casino, etc. At the craps table, Vic is stressing out. It's taking too long. They're starting to get into the high roller thing.

Back to Kira and Frankie eyes. And what is this? Mr. Zemo has come early. Yes. Dun, dun, dun. He also is amazingly cast. Yeah, I don't really recognize any of the stuff he's been in. I mean, he's an older guy, right? Yeah. Yeah, I was, I don't really recognize any of the stuff he's been in. I mean, he's an older guy, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I recognize the stuff. I just don't recognize him. He's not someone that you would be like, oh, I know him as an actor, but just like his face and his demeanor. I think I remember him best as Spike the Bank Robber on Mr. Ed. Mark Lawrence is his name.

Yeah. Yeah. He's been acting since the 30s. So. Yeah. When was this episode? Because this guy was born in 1910. Yeah. This episode was aired in 99. Yeah. So.

88, 89 years old. Oh, and he was in Newsies. So. There you go. Anyway, Carl Zemo, he doesn't want to drink. He wants his money. Yeah. Kira tries to distract him with her feminine wiles and is totally shot down, which is kind of amazing. It's a great honor to meet you.

I know. Frankie has told me so much about you. Frankie. Yeah. The money, Frankie. Frankie. Yeah. The money, Frankie. Right this way. Let's go. Come on. Yes. Running out of time, Bashir sees the count man

leaving the phone to head back to the counting room. So a couple things here. First of all, I think this was in the run-through, but he orders his martini stirred and not shaken and that is a in joke reference because he's obsessed with james bond and spy things so he has spy programs where he is cast as the bond figure he orders his martini stirred not shaken yes okay um also i really appreciate this, that when we go back to him, we see his poker hand, which is a full house.

And then he folds on it because he has to go intercept the guy. And it's like, aw. Queens over eight. Queens over eight. Yeah. It tells him that Frankie Eyes wants to see him out back. And if he didn't do anything wrong, then he doesn't have anything to worry about. So that gets him from going back to the count room.

Then Vic goes to intercept Zemo and delay them. But his play is that he goes to the woman that's with him and is like, hey, remember that great time we had in Miami or whatever? So he's just playing for time. So this is one of my favorite tropes. And that is the desperate drawing of a punch for a distraction right like he is he's putting himself in harm's way trying to make it so that they have to take time to beat him up uh now that ultimately that doesn't happen to him but that's his play here right like i'm going to make myself such an annoyance that yeah i'm willing to take take a punch if i need to to

yeah buy time yeah nog still can't get the combination uh cheech grabs uh vic to haul him out of the way and cisco in an act of desperation to start yelling everyone's a winner and throwing stacks of cash into the air this of course causes a commotion with all of the holographic casino patrons crawling all over each other to collect all this free money that's raining all over the place. And this does buy enough time for Nog to finally get the combination. And Odo starts shoveling money into his skin. Yeah. His Odo box.

Yeah, his Odo box. So this whole time, Cassidy has been distracting the guard by calling him over, you know, by accusing O'Brien of stealing her chips. So his back has been turned while Nog went in and everything. He's finally had enough. He's like, all right, I can't leave my post. Charlie, strip search. This is another in a long line of indignities that poor Miles O'brien is subjected to over the course of his tenure in starfleet um cassie turns on the waterworks to keep the guard looking at her while odo and nog slip out of the count room fulfilling a line earlier in the episode

where it's like turn on the waterworks if you have to yeah kira sees them and it's like all right frankie just show them the, you know, show Mr. Zemo the cat room already. Yeah. Uh, which is great. Um, there's a,

it's a bit buried in the mix, but he has a line of, he says something as they're going like, I tell you, Mr. Zemo, this place is making money hand over fist. And of course we cut to opening the safe and it's totally empty.

And Zemo goes, where's my money? Then we have the celebratory ending shot where Frankie and Cheech are being walked out of the casino by Mr. Zemo's goons with hands on their guns. Obviously taking them out to execute them. Yeah. Seems rough. And all of our crew is posted up at the bar. So they all turn to watch them one by one.

So we see each of their faces turn to watch the slow-mo procession of doom. And then as they walk out the front door, the hall suite resets. The casino's gone. And they're just back to Vic's lounge. There's a fun moment in there where you see the dancers, whatever they're doing, they're making finger guns. I missed that. Just to let you know that somebody's going to get executed here. Poor Frankie.

Thankfully, it resets before I think they have time to actually perform said executions. So, yeah. So the crew is there. They are victorious. They toast. Vic's toast is to the best friends Hologram ever had. And then he invites Captain Sisko up

to join him in a duet of The Best Is Yet To Come. This is what I was waiting for. Some Avery Brooks vocals here. Out of the tree of life I just picked me a plum You came along and everything started

to hum and that's the end of the episode yeah I think my last note here is ending on a musical number now that's classy the best is yet to come and babe won't it be far so that yeah that was a lot of fun The best is yet to come and babe, won't it be fun?

So that, yeah, that was a lot of fun. I'm definitely going to, I mean, now that I've got the time, I'm going to put some Deep Space Nine in the rotation. Oh, no, now I remember. I was going to do it when I reached a certain season of Voyager next gen. I was going to wait until a certain season of next gen when Deep Space Nine was contemporaneous with it. But yeah, that was a lot of fun.

Yeah, so this was our heist episode. Yes. So distinct from our PI and our, like, gaining self-awareness monster that we've considered in the past. So you got Vic Fontaine. And you also have a ship's counselor. He's one of them redundant. Well, as we learned in that earlier

episode with Nog, Esri outranks him. Outranks Fontaine, so she has authority vested by Starfleet. Yes. Yeah, I mean, obviously they're filling different roles, I mean, obviously they are filling different roles, I would say, as Vic

is more of an entertainer and more of a shoulder to cry on versus a mental health professional. But yeah, I mean, when you get right down to it, this episode is a story of friendship. Yeah, it's good. We made jokes about their scheme, their plan,

being like, you you know just in line with how that would happen in a role-playing game where you wanted to make sure every player character had a chance to do something and had their moment to shine and and all of that uh but not like too thought out uh as far as like no it absolutely has to be this at this moment. Otherwise, you know, the, the, there's like layers of constraints here. There's the 1960s lounge act dealing with the mob layer of constraint. There's the worst Starfleet. Yeah. Like there's all these things that just kind of distract you as the audience

from really caring too much about how well it fit together that way and you don't really have the sense of like oh this could all go terribly wrong right right i mean like with most star trek episodes you don't really have the sense of like something bad is going to happen to these characters yeah deep space nine does do that more than other series does but you usually can tell from the tone of an episode and this clearly is not one of those episodes uh i was going to say the thing that i've i mentioned there's like a moment for like a big twist uh and so something that i was thinking about was how that could go down which is this whole thing where like if nod can't open the safe right right they have to uh do some kind of twist where like they need frankie eyes to open the safe and then do something to like distract him

or do something to the money inside the safe so when he opens it like it's all on fire or something. Swap the safe with Odo and let Odo be the safe. Odo could just get into the safe, right? He's liquid. Yeah.

So he could just like go in through the cracks and do that but whatever it's fine we need a nog to do nog's thing um yeah it furthers my understanding of holodeck uh not technology because you'll never understand that culture i guess is what i'm thinking of i think we've talked about this in previous episodes of 20 a day okay so there's kira and odo they show up and kira has this like oh okay i see what you're here for or whatever but then kira is totally vamping i don't for a moment think that frankie eyes is is her type but like she is in it to seduce him yeah you get the feeling that that is probably the game that's played

with a holodeck right well i think there is every so often there's a reference to like oh you do you want to spend some time in my holosuites or whatever but like yeah on deep space nine and quarks privately run holosuites clearly they are there for adult entertainment in addition to all the other things that people do in hollow suites. And it's kind of a polite fiction that people like go there to best year. And, and O'Brien are kind of weird in the fact that they have these like really elaborate, like fantasy war scenarios that they like go like defend the Alamo or they go like,

yeah, sail with the Vikings and stuff like that. Or they, they're a world war two pilots. and stuff like that. Or they, they're World War II pilots. It's like, yeah, well you two are, are,

have the free time to build these elaborate things and go do them because you're buds and this is what you do with your downtime. People who are paying by the hour for these things, they use the hollow suites for something else. And it's like, it's not even always just sexy time. I think it's like just the kind of connection that Vic is offering here, right? I feel like previous Star Trek holodeck stuff has sort of not acknowledged that and created a fiction of this is where Worf goes to train.

And this is where we go to play out classic novels and this is just like no we go to vix because that's a play now i think about it i think voyager had they had a weird tropical paradise that they would often go to and that became a center point for a few episodes of like an alien species invading that but uh so i guess there is like that you go to like you just go to enjoy some scenery uh but this is the first one where it's like it made it kind of clear to me that you might be very attached to characters in a holodeck it's virtual reality right like it's a fully 3d version of um how people get super attached to like their world of warcraft guild yeah yeah there are other individual people there that you can connect with but there's also

npcs and and and critters and the world and the lore and stuff that you can get immersed in and then you have this shared language with other people and that's like a social bonding and vix is like that or he's very intentionally a space for people to like go bond in a different way than they do as officers on a station i wonder if there's uh vick fanfic i mean not now not currently on the internet i mean in the world of uh uh deep space nine where it's not even a phenomenon right vick is a bespoke program for bashir right originally you wouldn't encounter vic on the enterprise right in their holodeck yeah or like back on earth nobody is running their vic program it is just as far as we know just on deep space nine yeah i mean

and i at the end of the day that's all it. It's great because it gives us this fun heist episode of our future space show. And I can't complain about that. Nope, cannot. from other holodeck episodes in addition to all the things we've ever already mentioned is that uh because it's not a problem with the holodeck the problem solving is not technical right so they're able to move in and out of the space they're not trapped and there's no like confusion about levels of reality which is another aspect of a lot of the holodeck ones um so it feels more just like a day in the life this isn't a i mean it's abnormal in the sense that every episode isn't abnormal because it's a unique plot but yeah it's just kind of like oh yeah sometimes we just hang out with vick and we deal with stuff

in the holosuites it's not like oh my god everything the computer is corrupted and all the safety things are off it's like no we we have to take this problem within the constraints that is presented to us. There's fictional constraints. Yes. And we have to operate within them or we cannot solve the problem. And, yeah. And let's use our abilities within this bounded box. And that's a fun way to think about it.

That resonates so much with role-playing games. Right. That's why that connection exactly. That connection worked. And, uh, yeah. Yeah. All right.

Well, I think that is probably about all we have to say about this episode of deep space nine, which brings us to the end of 20 a day. Thank you for joining us. And we will be back next time to talk about another holodeck episode in the Star Trek universe. I just want to go