2x11 Rivals

[3.4/10] It remains churlish to complain about plausibility in Star Trek. This is a franchise where multiple god-like beings can make whatever they’d like appear at will. It’s a universe where time travel, alternate dimensions, and impossible phenomena appear on a weekly basis. Imagination is the name of the game. Reality need not apply.

God help me though, “a gambling toy that magically changes everyone’s luck” just feels silly. I wish I could tell you why. I wish I could explain why a mystical gem that gives you prophecies hits me fine, while a random trinket that gives you bad fortune seems cheesy, but I can’t. All I can tell you is that “Rivals” feels more like an episode of I Dream of Jeannie or some other old school supernatural sitcom than like an episode of Deep Space Nine, and I rolled my eyes through the whole damn thing.

Maybe it’s just because the episode doesn’t use that conceit for much of anything. The upshot of this terrible device is...some disgruntlement between O’Brien and Bashir over a game of space racquetball? Quark losing business to a competing establishment? Some guy we’ve never met before and will never meet again suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? A few niggling computer malfunctions and minor injuries? Who cares?

I’ve ragged on Star Trek’s need to inject something action-y or ominous no matter the tenor of the story (something I’ve seen attributed to producer Rick Berman), but normally that complaint stems from the fact that there’s a personal story far more interesting than the latest threat. Here, even the personal stakes are low. So some kind of station-threatening predicament, however contrived, would at least give the audience a reason to give a damn about what’s happening.

Worse yet, “Rivals” squanders the opportunity to introduce only the second El-Aurian we’ve ever seen in the series (after Guinan, of course). There’s intrigue to be had from a member of this species of “listeners” who uses his people’s empathetic ability to connect with strangers to run cons rather than to help friends and acquaintances with their problems. How those powers could be used for evil instead of good is a solid idea worth exploring.

Hell, I even like Chris Sarandon, who stars as Martus, the El-Aurian who flimflams his way around the station and comes into possession of the luck-changing device. Maybe it’s just the halo effect of Sarandon playing Jack Skellington in the misfit kid classic, A Nightmare Before Christmas, but he does a creditable job here. Martus seems appropriately sly or exasperated depending on how things are going. There’s a bit of overdoing it in places, but it’s a broad episode, and Sarandon’s in line with the tone.

It’s just a bad tone. I have no problem with Star Trek going for comedy and farce. (Here’s a dirty little secret -- William Shatner is much better at comedy than he is at drama, and his work on The Original Series bears that out.) The problem is that “Rivals” is such a cornball attempt at it. There’s a mugging, zany tone to people having a wave of good fortune or bad breaks, and no one, not even the great Armin Shimmerman, can rise above it.

About the only salvageable thing from the episode is that it’s a brick in the wall of the nascent friendship between O’Brien and Bashir. Things aren’t exactly friendly between them, but there’s long-been an odd couple routine between the two of them that’s endearing. Miles’ general grumpiness and Bashir superciliously begging off aren’t the best look for either of them, but it’s a means for the two to bounce off one another in these early seasons, so there’s something there to cling to for longtime fans of the series.

Otherwise, the center of the episode is Martus. We don’t know Martus. He has no inner life. He doesn’t do much of interest beyond con older ladies out of their fortunes. We don’t know what he wants, beyond money. We don’t know what makes him interesting, beyond his species. And capable though the performance may be, there’s just not enough to him on a scene-to-scene basis to really latch onto the guy as the anchor of an episode.

The same goes for the device that causes all the trouble. It’s never clear what the rules for the thing are, or why it gives some people good luck and some people back luck. The boons and misfortunes just happen at random, and people who aren’t playing the game at all are affected by it. Without any sense of cause and effect, let alone interesting consequences for people’s great or poor fortunes, the positive and negative spins the device spits out are meaningless.

I guess there’s something of a scientific angle on it that helps the slightest bit. Dax figuring out that neutrinos are all “spinning” in the same direction, when random chances says the direction should be closer to 50/50 gives the trouble the patina of realism. Likewise, her detecting Martus’ machines and figuring out that they change “probabilities” gives this the whiff of plausibility, but it’s just not enough.

A magic device that depends on luck or “probability” being some changeable independent force is absurd. The way it works is absurd. The only thing more absurd is the way the show chooses to have it impact our heroes and the guest star of the week. There’s little reason to care about the rivalry between Martus and Quark considering the lack of history between the two. O’Brien and Bashir getting bent out of shape over a racquetball game is the least substantial reason for the two of them to have grief. Even when the two stories collide over a competitive (but “charitable”) match, the prospect of blankets for Bajoran orphans and some guy we barely know going bankrupt isn’t enough to make any of it exciting.

Maybe this is just supposed to be light and funny. Maybe it’s supposed to be a wacky romp. Maybe we’re not supposed to think too hard about things like how this mystical machine would actually function or how and why the characters do what they do. If it were funny, or charming, or even a little clever, I could forgive it. Sadly, “Parallels” is just bad, a low-light in DS9’s second season which takes a silly premise and goes nowhere interesting quickly.