S06.E16: Change of Heart

[John Potts]

Quote

On a mission to meet a Cardassian double agent in the Badlands, Dax is critically wounded by the Jem'Hadar, causing Worf to make a life-altering decision.

Does Starfleet have NO training for its officers? For a start, 20km is NOTHING - a reasonably fit person should be able to cover that in an afternoon (yes, I know they said it was rough terrain, but it looked pretty easy going to me - almost like they were walking through a studio set!). Secondly, for a 200 year old, Jadzia manages to do just about everything wrong. Not getting injured (that happens), but then insisting she can carry on while injured (Great! Not only are you making your injury worse, you're compromising Worf's ability to protect himself because he's too busy looking after you. And if that's not bad enough, you keep shrugging off Worf's attempts to help you up to show how tough you are!). You have to wonder if Starfleet shouldn't have some sort of test to see whether you will, if necessary, put the mission ahead of your personal feelings. In fact, we know it does, because we saw that (in NextGen's Thine Own Self) part of the test is exactly that. But hey, it's not like this was an important mission or anything. I'm sure the millions of people that died as a result of this mission failure (or at least their heirs) will be content to know they died in the cause of true love. I get the impression that the episode wants me to see Worf as making the right choice, but for me, it was completely the wrong one. In fact, given [Spoilers!] what happens at the end of the Season, it would have made sense to have Jadzia die here rather than in the Finale.

Which is odd, because for the first half of the episode, I was actually starting to like Mr & Mrs Rozenko as a couple. Too often, they've demonstrated that they are a terrible pairing, but I found their interactions at the start not just tolerable, but actually romantic to hear Worf saying he'd rather lose betting on his wife than win betting against her. I even thought Worf's jokes were funny!

I quite liked the B Plot, too. I guess Julian learned what many a poker player finds out: it's not about playing the cards, or even playing the odds (or at a  guess, whatever effect that Tongo wheel thing has on play) so much as playing the players. It was so obvious Julian was getting played that I was half hoping that he was going to conclude by going, "Yes, it's sad about Jadzia - but I can console myself with the fact that your Monopoly loses to my MARKET CRASH! I win!" Also, why does O'Brien want a bottle of Scotch whisky if he wins his bet? The guy's Irish! He should insist on Irish Whiskey!

Edited June 30, 2017 by John Potts

[iMonrey]

First of all, the entire Tongo subplot seemed pointless to me. I kept expecting to find out Quark had been cheating to have won 28 times in a row. In the second place, does anyone think Tongo is even a real thing? Did the writers actually make up the entire game with rules and everything or is it just a fake game for the show? Like Dabo?

As for Jadzia and Worf . . . yeah, what "federation" in the universe would allow a married team to go off on a mission like that together? And I know I keep harping on this, but the inconsistency with Trill biology drives me batty. Jadzia says she has "changed bodies six times," as though the entirety of her consciousness is the symbiont and the body is nothing more than a suit to wear. Meaning Worf is married to a slug named Dax and all Jadzia is is a vehicle to get around in.

I did laugh, though, when the Cardassian asked if Jadzia was joking and she said "No, (Worf's) the funny one."

[rmontro]

On 6/30/2017 at 5:52 AM, John Potts said:

I quite liked the B Plot, too. I guess Julian learned what many a poker player finds out: it's not about playing the cards, or even playing the odds (or at a  guess, whatever effect that Tongo wheel thing has on play) so much as playing the players.

This hearkens back to the Statistical Probabilities episode (and quite a few other things I've watched lately).  In that episode, the genetically augmented folks made predictions, but it was demonstrated that they didn't take emotions into account.  Here Julian does the same thing, he's purely focused on the rules and odds, but doesn't take his emotions into account and he gets sidetracked by him.  O'Brien at least could see what's going on.

This seems to be a popular theme these days:  Someone makes cold statistical analyses, but fails to take emotion into account.  The current season of The Flash (with DeVoe, the Thinker, as the villain), to name one.

On 7/27/2017 at 1:04 PM, iMonrey said:

Meaning Worf is married to a slug named Dax and all Jadzia is is a vehicle to get around in.

Well, Klingons like to eat gagh (which looks like a plate of squirming worms), so it's not that much stretch that they would want to make love to a slug.