Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 2-10: Sanctuary

Episode:

30

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Writer:

Frederick Rappaport

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Air Date:

28-Nov-1993

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'd like to apologise for my inability to stick to my long-term plans for the site. I didn't actually tell anyone I was planning to get a Deep Space Nine episode review posted on January 3rd in time for the 25th anniversary, but I was. Also the plan was to have reached a good episode by then, so that I could celebrate the series, and instead I've ended up with... Sanctuary. By the writer of Move Along Home. I'm so sorry.

Not that I'm saying that Sanctuary's a bad episode. No, it would make much more sense to save that bombshell until later in the review.

By the way, every time I start writing about a DS9 episode I check the episode's air date to put in the box above, and then I invariably add '1993' to the post's labels because every single episode I've rewatched and reviewed so far was first aired during the same 12 months. That's 30 episodes in one year, how is that even possible? Well 29 really, seeing as Emissary aired as one feature-length story. But Sanctuary was the penultimate Star Trek episode of 1993, with Next Gen's Parallels bringing the franchise's busiest ever year of television to an end a day later. There will never be more episodes of Trek airing in a year ever again. Unless Discovery gets three spin-offs and they're all released simultaneously.

I'd also planned to make this one of my quick reviews, without the long recap, but it didn't work out. I ended up with a long rant about a four-minute scene that happens in the fourth act and barely mentioned anything else. So I've gone and rewritten the whole thing, to give you more SPOILERS and to give me just a little more reason to resent watching it.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 2-04: Invasive Procedures

Episode:

24

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Writer:

John Whelpley and Robert Hewitt Wolfe

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Air Date:

17-Oct-1993

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about more Deep Space Nine. Season 2, episode 4: Invasive Procedures, to be precise.

The series' second season kicked off with a big flashy three-parter with a phaser fight every episode, plus location shoots, Odo morphs, an elaborate dogfight sequence, stuntmen falling off cliffs... it was basically a two-hour apology for season one. But those kinds of episodes come at a cost, and in this case, the cost was money, so I expect these next few stories are going to be on the cheap side. Though they did pay to put a smokey space-fog background behind the station this week, which is cool.

We're also done with serialisation for a while, probably because certain people in certain positions of authority wanted to keep everything contained to single episodes that could be watched in any order. To be fair though this was still a fair few years before DVD season box sets and Netflix, and the ridiculously expensive VHS tapes only had 2 episodes on.

Anyway, I'm going to sharing screencaps of the whole episode and writing down my thoughts underneath, so there's going to be massive SPOILERS past this point. Plus I'll probably end up spoiling something from an earlier episode of Trek along the way, but nothing from anything that came after this. As far as I'm concerned it's October 1993 right now, and I don't even know what a DVD or a Netflix even is.