The Quickening, Body Parts, Broken Link, Apocalypse Rising, The Ship, Looking for par'Mach in all the Wrong Places, ...Nor the Battle to the Strong

What a busy weekend but somehow I have managed to watch 7 episodes of Star Trek but only worked out to 2 of them. That is ok thought I have needed a little bit of Star Trek time in my life these days.

In Elk River, a town close to where I live there has been some crazy shit going down. Well ok one crazy thing but it has me pissed of beyond belief. There is a billboard on the highway with a contact for "reparative therapy" also known as anti-gay therapy. The advertisement suggests  that just because you have gay feelings doesn't mean you were "born gay." Reparative therapy has been banned in several states and formally discouraged by nearly every psychiatric and counseling agency in the world. This form of "therapy" is hateful and hurtful and has a history of destroying people. I am always appalled by this level of hatred and it makes me worry for the children that I work with at school each day. I found the hasthag today and it is perfect so lets all share it!

#BornPerfect



The Quickening
Bashir and Dax have beamed down to a planet with a distress signal for a medical emergency. The people of this planet have been suffering from "the blight" a disease that was given to the planet by the Dominion. Bashir sets himself to the task of curing this disease but finds road blocks in a society and culture that has started welcoming death and can't change their ways. In the end Bashir finds a way to inoculate but it only helps to make the newborn children healthy. The episode ends with Bashir on the station still working on a cure.

Body Parts

Quark finds out that he is about to die and in order to make some money he agrees to sell his dried remains on the open market. Brunt shows up and lets Quark know that he is not dying but that he has also bought Quark's remains and expects them to be delivered. Quark now must get himself out of the deal with Brunt before he gets killed. Luckily Quark survives the ordeal to swindle another day. The only problem is that now Quark is broke and exiled from the Ferengi Empire. 

Broken Link

Odo has taken ill and the only way to cure him is to take him home to the Founders. Once in the Gamma Quadrant the Founders find Odo and take him back to the great link to be judged. He is being judged because he killed a fellow changeling. He is taken into the link and judged; the verdict, guilty. His punishment is not death but that he is transformed into a solid person. While in the great link Odo did learn that Gowron the leader of the Klingon Empire is really a changeling. 

Season 5

Apocalypse Rising

Now that Starfleet knows that Gowron is a changeling, Odo, O'Brien, Worf and Sisko are off to the Klingon Empire to kill him. They are disguised as Klingons and set to the task of being initiated as special warriors but first must endure a party designed to weed out the weak ones. Through a series of events it turns out the General Martok is the changeling and he is killed. Relations with the Klingons are starting to get better by the end of the episode but it is not perfect yet. 

The Ship

Worf, Sisko, O'Brien, Dax and Muniz(a random officer) are on a remote Gamma Quadrant planet to survey the mining potential. A Jem'Hadar ship crashes and they decide to salvage it for intelligence research. Another ships shows up and the 5 are stranded in the ship under attack. The tensions raise and the Jem'Hadar and Vorta try to mess with the crew to get them out of the ship. Sisko figures that there is something special in the ship but they cannot locate it, eventually the find out that it is a Founder. The Founder dies and the Vorta appears to collect the remains of the dead "god". In the end Sisko struggles to weight the cost and benefit of the situation. 

Looking for par'Mach in all the Wrong Places

Quark's old wife of convenience Grilka shows up on the station and Worf is in love, but so is Quark. Worf spends the whole episode trying to help Quark bed this Klingon beatuy, with a little help from Dax too. In Addition Kira and O'Brien are feeling shall we say a little romantically heated and confused but nothing comes of this. In the end Quark and Grilka end up together and so do Worf and Dax. 

...Nor the Battle to the Strong

Jake Sisko is with Bashir on a mission while he is supposed to be writing an article. The two get a distress call from a near by planet that is under attack by the Klingons. Jake pursuades Bashir to go the planet to help out. He does this for selfish reasons because he wants a good story. While on the planet Jake works the hospital to help with patients. He becomes traumatized by a number of situations and in the end everything works out but he is very shaken and needs time to recover. 

Shattered Mirror, The Muse, For the Cause, To the Death

This week has very simply been extremely challenging and I really feel no need to talk about it any further. I know that makes for a very boring blog post but that is where I am at. This blog post will cover two workouts but four episodes of the show.

Workout:

Friday- Mini-Triathlon: swim ⅕ mile, bike 9 miles, run 1.5 miles

Sunday- Ran 3 miles

Shattered Mirror
Jennifer from the mirror universe has come to DS9 in hopes to meet Jake Sisko and spend some time with Sisko. The captain leaves them alone for just a little while and finds that Jennifer has kidnapped Jake to the other side. When Sisko arrives on the other side he is taken into custody. It turns out that the rebels have taken over the station and have built themselves their own Defiant. They need Sisko to get it up and working before the Alliance shows up to retake the station. In the end the rebels win, Jennifer is dead and Sisko ends back home where he belongs.

The Muse

Two stories for this show that really don’t relate at all which leaves this one a bit of a shaky episode. Jake Sisko meets a mysterious woman who helps him to unlock his talent. It turns out that she is some kind of alien that unlocks people’s brains but then it ends up killing them and she ends up living forever. In the other story Lwaxana Troi arrives on the station pregnant and running away from her husband who wants to take the child and raise him only with men, as is tradition on his homeworld. As a great friend Odo protects her and eventually marries her so that her child isn’t taken away from her. In the end all is well on DS9.

For the Cause
Some important technology is on its way to the Cardassian Empire but making their way through DS9. Odo and Eddington have suspicions about Cassidy Yates, Sisko’s girlfriend. She is followed and it turns out she is smuggling for the Maquis. Eddington sets up a plan to follow her but at the last minute changes the plan. Sisko goes out to catch Cassidy but they soon realize that they have been taken away from the station for a reason. Eddington reveals that he is a Maquis operative and that the whole thing was a plan to get ahold of the technology.

To the Death

The Defiant returns to the station to find that it has been attacked by the Jem’Hadar. Sisko, Odo, Worf and Dax leave to track the Jem’Hadar into the Gamma Quadrant. Them come across a damaged Jem’Hadar ship and find the crew alive. The two crews meet on the Defiant and the Vorta leader Weyoun reveals that they were tracking the rebel Jem’Hadar who had attacked the station. The two crews work together through much tension to eliminate these rebels. In the end they are eliminated but things seems tense as the Jem’Hadar kill their leader and the Federation crew leaves for home.

Hard Time

Any of my regular readers know that I really try not use curse language very often but to be completely blunt today things are kinda shitty at the moment. Sunday night/Monday morning I was awoken to the sounds of my 2 year old cat Tagg howling. I looked around for him thinking he was stuck in a closet, which surprisingly happens quite a bit. He was under the bed but couldn't get himself out so I pulled him out and into my arms. He began to walk away from me and I noticed that his back legs were not working. I called my amazing sister who is a vet tech and she said to get him to the emergency clinic and before I knew it I was on my. It was quite the long 40 minute car ride with an agitated cat, tears and a lot of howling. The second we entered the door they brought me into a room and really confirmed my worst fears. This was a terminal condition caused by a blood clot. His chances for recovery were less than 20% and his chances for a reoccurrence of the problem were well over 80%. It was a very tough step to take to put him down but I can only say that it was a very easy decision to make. It was best for him to be put to rest and I knew that, even though it sucked.

My home now is quiet. I still have my 10 year old female cat, Twitter, but it is incredible how much noise a 2 year old kitten can make. I'm sad and I know this will take time to recover from. I was asked by a few people "if I needed anything" and I only gave the truthful answer to one person. It has been very soon after and a family member so I don't feel so bad for this but the truthful answer to that question was "I need my cat back!"

Why do we keep animals in our lives when we know that there is a great deal of pain involved in the parting of ways. At the moment getting another cat seems like an impossible suggestions and I don't think I will get another cat. Who knows though maybe in the future a second cat or a puppy is in my future. But all I know right now is that Tagg will be missed and can never be replaced.

HARD TIME

Chief O'Brien has apparently committed a crime on a planet in the Gamma Quadrant and his penalty is 20 years in prison. The sentence is carried out as a series of mental implants to make him believe he has served the time but in reality only a few moments passed for him. O'Brien returns to the Deep Space Nine a broken man with a secret. He has a tough time readjusting to his life as a family man and chief of operations. He also has a secret that comes out during a moment with a phaser pointed at his own head. During his "virtual sentence' O'Brien killed his cell mate and once that secret is shared he is able to start moving past the events and get his life back in order. 

Accession & Rules of Engagement

And so the Star Trek marathon has continued throughout the weekend. I have watched a few more episodes of Deep Space Nine and now I'm watching Star Trek The Motion Picture. I know the motion picture is not great but as I've gotten a little older I appreciate it a bit more than when I was a child. It is by far one of the weakest entries in the series yes but the design of the picture, the casting, the effects and the score are all very strong elements. It is a bummer that the script could not have been a bit more action packed along with the cerebral nature of the story. Instead though we are left with a two hour film that feels closer to three hours in length. One would think that they would have learned their lesson after the TV series shaky start. The pilot episode "The Cage" is light on action and very heavy on the higher level thinking which works but is not a great way to start a show. In contrast the second pilot "Where no man has gone before" is much more action with a little thought placed in the story. In a similar fashion when Star Trek 2 came around the heady thinking was left out of the picture for a more straight forward sci-fi action picture, to great results I might add.

Gym workout: Swam 20 lengths of the pool, Biked for 30 minutes and elliptical for 15 minutes.

Accession
A man comes through the wormhole in a very old Bajoran light ship and it is found that he has lost about 200 years. He proclaims that he has met the prophets and is the Emissary. Sisko willingly steps aside but begins to feel uneasy about this man's plans for Bajor. Quickly he rushes to reintroduce an old caste system that was thrown off when the Cardassians occupied Bajor. Sisko warns the government that this will mean Bajor being denied Federation membership but no one seems to care. Sisko convinces the "emissary" to enter the wormhole where the prophets essentially say they sent this man to challenge and strengthen Sisko's role as the emissary. He resumes duty and all things are back to normal on Bajor.

Rules of Engagement 

Worf is under a hearing for destroying a Klingon freighter while on a convoy mission protecting Cardassian supply ships. The Klingon government is seeking to extradite Worf and try him on the Klingon home world for war crimes. The Klingon advocate seems to be doing a pretty good job of twisting everyone's truth and knowledge into pretty condemning evidence against Worf. Worf himself doesn't do any favors for his case when he engages in a fight with the advocate. Sisko feels something is up and with Odo, discovers that the Klingon government has set this up as a sham in order to weaken the Federation and Starfleet in the quadrant's eyes.