"Babel"

DEEP SPACE NINE: Season One
Originally Aired January 24, 1993

I'm already behind after starting Deep Space Nine in February- I'm a little behind, just like Miles O'Brien says he's behind on repairs aboard the DS9 space station. It's more O'Brien and I'll take any scenes with him that I can get. Although just as it seemed like we'd be getting an O'Brien-centric episode (following Sisko, Odo, and Kira), it turned out that he's actually the cause of the episode's plot. I was telling a friend who's familiar with this series about O'Brien and he informed me that there's a TV trope, "O'Brien Must Suffer." I guess this could be the genesis of that, since just as he's about to get his own featured episode, he's taken to sick bay. The condition O'Brien suffers from is "aphasia"- where everything he says is jibberish, but to me it out sounded more like "word salad" from an episode of Boston Legal.

I've considered altering the format of these "reviews" from being just an overview of each episode into an actual perspective, and this could've been a great time to do it. I'm a huge fan of Quark, so my reviews could be retooled as "The Ferengi Perspective", which turns out that "Babel" was a big episode for the little guy. This could actually be a Quark-centric episode, with his greed back-firing on the entire crew of the space station. His replicators that create food and drinks for his bar were on the fritz, so he accessed command-level replicators, which unwittingly spread a "disease" like wild fire. It's only right that he also saved the day, too. I wonder if that's somewhere in the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: "if one's prospering causes another to suffer, he must repay his debt." Nah, I doubt any Ferengi know the meaning of the word, "repay." It did lead to more quotables from Odo, too, as he is suspicious of Quark and follows him because he said Rom was able to fix the bar's replicators. Odo's line of the episode: "You claimed Rom fixed your replicators; Rom's an idiot. He couldn't fix a straw if it were bent."

He really NEEDS to grow that goatee.

My other possible angle for these reviews was "Better Know A Bajoran", which also comes into play here in "Babel." It seems as the aphasia virus was a biological weapon created by the Bajorans and placed aboard the station. Kira managed to get a healthy chunk of the episode to herself too, as she embarked on a solo mission to get the doctor back to DS9 to cure everyone aboard the station. She got a little tricky too, infecting the doctor so he had no choice but to create a cure. Combined with Quark beaming Odo onto another ship to rescue a hairy-faced alien, this made for an intense conclusion to "Babel." I actually thought "Babel" was going to be referencing the Tower of Babel, instead it was a play on the word "babble." All in all, a fun episode with a great balance of all the cast members for once.