Eruditorum Press

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Myriad Universes: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine The Next Generation Part 3: Encounter with The Othersiders!

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Commander Riker orders the ship to turn around immediately, but of course we can’t do that. If they go back through the Wormhole too quickly, the circuitry that allowed the Runabout safe passage in the first place might be damaged. So Will thinks fast, has the crew divert all power to shields and beam over to the other Runabout (the one that carried the admirals’ party). This shouldn’t be possible because transporters famously can’t penetrate shields, but whatever. And naturally, this plan doesn’t work either as the Evil Aliens soon catch onto it and beam everyone aboard themselves in a stasis field. Because captures and escapes are just how serials work.

So after that bit of padding, we get some exposition. Because, again, serials. These Aliens, hereafter the titular Othersiders, explain to the team that they are pissed off at people from the Alpha Quadrant intruding on space they claim is theirs, and they’re determined to strike back. Back on our side, Captain Picard suggests that he and Commander Sisko pass the time waiting for word from the away team by helping out with a humanitarian mission on Bajor. Because this team can’t have the DS9 commander appear too competent or confident, an anxious and uncertain Sisko asks if that’s wise, but eventually comes around to the idea. In the infirmary, Doctor Bashir is still trying to ask Doctor Crusher out, but he stresses he only wanted to ask her for help about what to say to Jadzia Dax, given Beverly’s prior experience with Trills. Julian tries to dance out of it, of course, playing it up that Beverly was attracted to him, but she just snarks and rolls her eyes.

On the Promenade, Miles O’Brien is worried about everyone on Bajor. Keiko thinks Miles should ask for a transfer back to the Enterprise, and Miles says he’ll do it for her and Molly. But Keiko thought Miles wanted to go back because he wasn’t happy working on Deep Space 9; Miles counters that he’s never been happier in his life because of the challenge. As they reconcile, this makes Quark happy, because in his experience “young people in love” always spend money freely. On Bajor, Vedek Bariel meets with Commander Sisko and Captain Picard, asking Ben if he’s heard from the away team, specifically Nerys, while Doctors Crusher and Bashir tend to the Bajoran sick and wounded. After, Picard and Sisko offer to help Worf lift some sandbags to build a flood barrier. The two COs playfully tease each other about manual labour, but then Worf dives into an overflowing river to rescue a child caught in the floodwaters. Captain Picard has Geordi, in command of the Enterprise once again, to beam Worf up immediately, then use a phaser blast to stem the flood…somehow. Now I personally think this is something Geordi probably could have monitored and resolved himself without being told to do so…and the very next panel shows Worf and the kid back on Bajor. So that makes sense.…

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Homecoming

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You know, before you start reading this, I have a favor to ask.  Go get a glass of water before you settle in.  If you haven’t already?  It can be cold or warm, with ice or bubbles or neat.  Place it anywhere within arm’s reach — next to your keyboard, or on the coffee table, even in your lap if you want.  But it has to be water – not coffee, not beer, not a soda.  Just water. 

I mean it.  I’m serious.  Go ahead, I’ll wait. 

Thank you.  You know who you are.

 

Bridge

Let’s start with something that might seem very subtle at first, and yet upon reflection is blatantly obvious – the Bridge.  The very first scene of The_OA begins on a bridge, where we see OA jump off the side.  She’s not to trying to kill herself, she later says; rather, she’s trying to go back and find Homer, someone she left behind.  This is apparently to be accomplished by falling into the Mississippi River. 

This jump off a bridge is bookended by the great scene at the end of “Homecoming,” where a van full of children catapults off the side of another bridge and plunges into icy waters.  It’s here that OA, known as Nina at that point in her life, has her first Near Death Experience.  Where she has an experience of The Other Side.

So of course The Bridge is a symbol, or a metaphor, for “crossing over” from the realm of the living to the realm of those who’ve passed on.  This makes sense.  Bridges are liminal spaces – they are the place “in between” two different distinct places that are otherwise separated by an impassible boundary which we traverse – like a gorge, or a river, or a channel, often at a great height.  But no one really spends time on the bridge itself – it’s a means to an end, not a destination in of itself, generally speaking. (Nor do we usually consider the waters rushing below as being a destination – that’s generally what we’re trying to avoid in the first place, but we’ll get to that.)

The conversations that take place on the bridges, by the way, are rather telling of The_OA‘s sensibilities.  In the opening scene, a boy is recording on his phone, through which we see OA run across the bridge, practically bouncing off the cars.

BOY: Mom, Mom!  That lady—
MOM:  She’s fine. See?  She’s okay.

OA cuts across the oncoming traffic to the side of the bridge.

BOY:  She’s going to the other side.
MOM:  No, no—don’t!   Oh God—Don’t look!
BOY:  She let go.

And she falls.  Which is very surprising, of course, but it should make at least basic sense now to anyone who’s seen the whole series.  So let’s pay attention to the conversation instead, because that is something that I believe has been overlooked.

Two distinctly different experiences are occurring here.  First, there’s the Mother, who doesn’t want to pay attention at first, she’s trying to ignore what she probably thinks is a homeless person. …

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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

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With Revenge of the Sith, our approach runs into trouble. A constant tension in reading both The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones was the fact that they were, in pragmatic reality, designed to be watched by people who had already seen the original trilogy. In practice both films were designed – with more intelligence than Lucas usually gets credit for – to still communicate their main ideas to an unspoiled audience. Indeed, in both cases you can plausibly argue that an unspoiled reading produces a clearer account of the films, revealing a more coherent (if still exceedingly unorthodox) logic for both.

That simply does not work for Revenge of the Sith. There’s no way around the fact that once Order 66 is activated, the film by and large stops being concerned with resolving the story that began with The Phantom Menace and turns its attention fully towards setting up A New Hope. The notion that what it’s doing might meaningfully be called storytelling limps along for a bit longer, its closing minutes don’t even pretend anymore. Yoda’s declaration that he will go into exile seems motivated by literally nothing save for lining up with The Empire Strikes Back – “oh, I failed in one combat with Darth Sidious, might as well give up and let him take over the galaxy.” Once Padme starts delivering her twins the film seems visibly impatient for her to finally die. And let’s not even start with the shoehorned in “Qui-Gon has discovered the secret to immortality” line, which seems to exist for no other reason than that Lucas fucked up two films earlier and forgot to have Qui-Gon’s body disappear.

No, actually, I changed my mind; let’s talk about that after all. After all, it cuts to the heart of the other very big problem this film has. It’s true that the sort of immortality Qui-Gon has obtained – a quasi-disembodied life inside the Force – is definitely not what Anakin is desperately seeking throughout the film and what ends up turning him to the dark side. Nevertheless, the primary plot of the movie is nominally “Anakin turns to the dark side because of his fears of Padme’s death,” and it’s specifically the fact that Palpatine says the dark side can save her that turns him, so the revelation that the Jedi have a form of immortality really ought to be treated as a weighty part of the plot instead of as a throwaway bit of continuity wank.

But this gets at what is probably Revenge of the Sith’s most fundamental problem: it’s structured and conceived as a classical tragedy about Anakin’s downfall. In some ways this is inevitable – at some point the story about a guy falling to the dark side was always going to revert into classically tragic structures. Apparently in revisions and editing the reasons for Anakin’s fall were steadily focused to their final form of being mostly about Padme, which is a fact that’s mostly striking for how sloppy it still is save for in the Darth Plagueis scene, which is notable first for being the bit of the film Tom Stoppard most obviously worked on and second for the name “Darth Plagueis,” which is very possibly the best thing in the entire saga.…

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Rebel Gothic

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Welcome back to Eruditorum Press: A Star Wars Blog (apparently).

Some notes before we start.

Firstly, I still have a Patreon, and I send life-changing good vibrations through the ether to all those people who contribute to it.

Secondly, episode 2 of Wrong With Authority is still downloadable, here.

Thirdly, this post coincides (purely accidentally) with an excellent piece about Rogue One posted yesterday at Storming the Ivory Tower by Sam Keeper.  Here.  I strongly recommend it.  

Fourthly, I may be dishing up something more substantial about Rogue One myself soon.  It’s an interesting movie.

Finally, please forgive me if what follows is a bit sub-par.  I’m really quite ill at the moment.

Oh, and SPOILERS

 

The alt-Right and MRAs and MGTOWs etc have a point about Star Wars these days.  They say all the new Star Wars films are part of the cultural Marxist/white genocide/misandrist conspiracy against straight white men and the Right.  They’re wrong about that, of course… though it certainly is nice of them to admit – in the manner of Fox News labelling some wallscrawl reading “NO FASCIST USA” as ‘anti-Trump graffiti’ – that they, and the version of straight white maleness they prize, are essentially identical with “the evil GALACTIC EMPIRE” (as the opening crawl from Star Wars describes it).  But yeah, I for one certainly walked out of Rogue One wanting to go and kill fascists.  Of course, I feel like that most of the time, so that makes it hard to judge how much of it was down to the movie. 

But there’s no denying that the film at least clearly thinks, and openly says, it’s about a brave, multi-ethnic band of rebels, some of them explicitly the denizens of a world occupied and looted by foreign imperialism, led by a woman, killing loads of space fascists and giving their lives to help destroy space fascism.  It doesn’t just think and say it’s about this… unlike many fantasy films which are under the impression that they have an uncompromisingly anti-fascist message, this one makes a good case for itself.  It’s claims for itself are fairly convincing. 

Rogue One is, of course, a massive exercise in nostalgia and pastiche.  It is as much a ‘structre’ (the spectre of a structure) as The Force Awakens (see here).  I won’t go into this in huge detail.  There is something interesting in the way Rogue One deliberately gets everything slightly ‘off’.  Even as it slavishly aims for aesthetic continuity with Star Wars, to the point of designing itself to be satisfyingly watched immediately before Star Wars, it nevertheless deliberately leaves out all sorts of key elements.  There’s no opening crawl; there are no wipes.  The film is very consciously not positioning itself as fantasy, as a pastiche of Flash Gordon the way the original did.  Instead, Rogue One is self-consciously Star Wars as a war movie, very specifically a World War II spy movie.  In its original form, the heroic group of titular rebels would all be played by Richard Burton and Richard Harris, etc, and Krennic would report to Donald Pleasance’s Himmler instead of a CGI Cushing as Tarkin. …

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Myriad Universes: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine The Next Generation Part 2: The Wormhole Trap!

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A fearsome storm rages on Bajor. Vedek Bareil surveys the fury from a balcony outside his temple. An attendant acolyte (who looks a hell of a lot like Vedek Winn but isn’t cited as being her) fears for his health, but Bareil only asks if everyone who has lost their homes due to the storm has been given sanctuary within, stressing that no-one must be turned away. The acolyte hopes the Prophets stop the storm, but Bareil hopes they grant them their wisdom on how to act.

On Deep Space 9, Kira, Worf and Odo confront the Cardassian saboteurs. One of the assailants tries to gas the security team, but Worf is a quicker shot, and Odo turns into a praying mantis tentacle monster to subdue them. Not to be outdone, Kira swings from the rafters and kicks some dudes in the fucking face. But before they can arrest them, the intruders activate an emergency transport. Jadzia Dax couldn’t catch them in time, but Data has found some technobabble that allows him to nullify the cloaking device used on their ship. Unfirtunately, neither Dax nor Data is able to snare the ship in a tractor beam before it escapes into the Wormhole, and they decide to meet face-to-face to figure things out. In sickbay, Captain Picard asks for a diagnosis of the security team involved in the brawl, but Beverly turns things over to Doctor Bashir instead. Julian says there were no casualties, but Captain Picard is concerned about blood on Major Kira’s arm. Kira reassures Jean-Luc that it’s Cardassian blood, not hers, though Beverly is unsure because of an unusual variation in the blood’s genomic structure. They decide to run some further tests, and Julian jokes that their dinner plans will have to be rescheduled.

Meanwhile, Geordi and Miles are having a look at the console the Cardassians were trying to access, and Commander Sisko goes to check on them. Geordi has a hard time making it through the uniquely stringy wiring in Cardassian circuitry, but Miles figures they might have been trying to access a backdoor into the station’s computer banks. Ben has them seal off all possible external uplinks. The two engineers talk about how rough working the operational systems on Deep Space 9 is, but Miles happily admits hew views it as a challenge that keeps him going. In Ops, Captain Picard and Commander Sisko ask Data and Dax to work together to find out how the ship went through the supposedly impassable Wormhole (which is kinda weird as they already suggested doing that to each other on their own, but whatever). Jean-Luc comments on the intimacy Ben and Jadzia seem to share, namely, how they’re on a first-name basis with each other despite the difference in rank.

This is, unfortunately, the first sign this series might be in a bit of trouble because this scene can be a bit of a sour note depending on how you read it. See, in explaining Dax’s status as a Trill to Captain Picard, Commander Sisko mixes up pronouns, saying “I’ve known him…her for years now”.…

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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode II – Attack of the Clones

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Middle parts of trilogies are famously hard. Ironically, this fact largely benefits Attack of the Clones. Freed both from the obligation to try to be the first Star Wars movie in sixteen years and the obligation to portray long-mythologized events in a definitive way, it is allowed to simply reflect George Lucas’s vision in a fairly undiluted way. There are countless snarky sentences that follow well from that, but there’s enough that’s at least interesting in that vision to make Attack of the Clones a compelling experience. To praise with faint damnation, it’s a hot mess instead of merely a bad movie.

Where The Phantom Menace was structured around a single protagonist, Attack of the Clones splits its attention between two plots and protagonists. The first of these is relatively expected: The Phantom Menace fairly explicitly set up a progression from Qui-Gon to Obi-Wan such that, just on the basic sense of structure and the Jedi/padawan relationship, you’d expect the mantle to pass on to him. What’s less straightforwardly set up is the ascension of Anakin to the role of co-protagonist. Obi-Wan, after all, was firmly a supporting character, and given the estrangement in the way Anakin was presented in the first film it was entirely plausible that he would simply move to fill that role, with whatever story surrounded him playing out at a slight remove.

Once again we’re in a position where the practically intended audience (i.e. people buying tickets to a Star Wars movie in 2002) and the nominally intended “unspoiled” audience diverge, in that the actual audience recognizes the prequel trilogy as primarily a story about Anakin. But the difference between the positions isn’t as big as it might appear. After all, The Phantom Menace already trained the audience to maintain a certain degree of distance from protagonists, with Qui-Gon never really becoming an audience identification figure. So it’s entirely possible for Attack of the Clones to structurally elevate Anakin to the role of protagonist even as he remains a figure we warily observe instead of investing in. And indeed, for audience members who know that he’s eventually going to fall to the dark side, this is basically where the situation will naturally default.

Which brings us to Hayden Christensen. Like Jar Jar Binks, he is a near universally despised aspect of the prequels. This is certainly understandable, but the fact is that he does an excellent job of playing Anakin as the script presents him. It’s just that the script does not so much go for the default of audience suspicion towards Anakin as it does unambiguously making it clear that Anakin is an absolutely terrible person. Indeed, for all that it’s easy to see why Natalie Portman has a career and Hayden Christensen does not, in Attack of the Clones it’s largely Christensen who has the more successful time of it, simply because all he’s asked to do is to play an abusive and manipulative jerk who spouts fascist rhetoric and literally “m’ladies” his way through his efforts at getting into Padme’s pants, whereas Natalie Portman is given the flatly impossible job of convincingly falling in love with someone who is self-evidently human garbage.…

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Xenomorph’s Paradox: John Hurt

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Bit of business to take care of…

Firstly, yes I’m the Friday guy now.

Secondly, I have a Patreon now, so if you like my stuff, and have some cash to spare, then you know what to do.  Now.  A few discerning people have already done it, or promised to, and you should copy them if you want to look cool and hard and clever.  My patrons already have exclusive access to two pieces of my fiction-writing.  Form an orderly queue, fans.

Thirdly, Episode 2 of Wrong With Authority is up.  It’s a new(ish) podcast about movies that claim to be based on real history, and features myself, the laconic James Murphy, the leonine Kit Power, and Daniel Harper, who possesses no qualities beginning with ‘L’.  We take it in turn to pick films and host episodes.  This episode is Daniel’s, and it’s about two Oscarbait biopics of mathematicians, A Beautiful Mind and The Imitation Game. 

Finally, ‘Xenomorph’s Paradox’ is a series about Alien and its various progenitors, progeny, parasites, predators, paratexts, para-phenomena, and paraphernalia.  As some of you will know, I’ve been planning it for a long time.  This post doesn’t necessarily mean the series is about to kick-off in full.  But recent events prompted at least one installment.  Things that have now retroactively become part of the series may be found here and here.

Harry Potter actor John Hurt has died.  That’s how some news sources announced it.  And that’s fine.  I’m not here to sneer at that.  For a generation, John Hurt was, first and foremost, Ollivander the wand-maker.  And it’s not hard to see why.  Hurt’s cameo is one of the most interesting spots in that first Potter film. 

There’s a very real sense in which the film treats Hurt like its trump card.  His appearance is given great weight.  Harry walks into a mysterious, empty shop.  There’s nobody about.  He calls out.  No answer.  Then Ollivander slides into shot from nowhere on a rolling library ladder.  The ladder is attached to shelves full of boxes of wands, immediately likening wands to books. 

Ollivander is, from the start, the guardian of hidden knowledge. 

Ollivander is one of the most interesting characters in the first book, because – unlike almost everyone else in it – he is allowed ambiguity.  His ambiguity, moreover, is not connected to any plot point.  It doesn’t mean anything in Rowling’s whodunnit structure.  It has no payoff.  It’s just there to be an interesting ambiguity.  Ollivander is genial, amiable, helpful, and Harry is not sure he likes him.  Harry, who normally strongly likes or dislikes people immediately, and is almost always proved right, isn’t sure about Ollivander.  And this is left open, until Rowling retrofits some more content onto it in later books.  But even this retrofitting doesn’t resolve Ollivander one way or the other.

Ollivander’s view of things is one that is not known about, shared, believed, or understood by almost anyone else.  Without getting bogged-down in details, Ollivander turns out to be a devotee of occult knowledge, of hidden knowledge about wands, and of lore and myth and legend about a secret, counter-history of magic.…

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Spirit Tracks: The Elder Scrolls Chapter II

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It is with great pleasure that I am joined again by Ben Knaak for the second part of our examination of The Elder Scrolls series of video games. You may want to check out part 1 first, if you haven’t already heard it. In that podcast, we did a brief (ish) rundown of the history of the franchise from our own personal perspectives. But tonight, we’re diving headfirst into the infamous Elder Scrolls lore, for some arguably the series’ signature standout component.

 
The Elder Scrolls has a collection of in-game (and frequently out-of-game) lore and worldbuilding that is unparalleled in video games. The scope and detail of its worldbuilding, in particular the heavy emphasis on metaphysics, cosmology and spirituality, is without compare anywhere else in the medium and raises unbelievably provocative implications. Comparisons can be drawn with Eastern mysticism, Blakean mythology, Gnostic heresy and ancient oral traditions and myth systems from all over the world. In fact, The Elder Scrolls has itself been influenced by all of these perspectives and more, and syncretizes them into an utterly unique high fantasy setting. It has the shape of magick, and is a metaphor for ourselves. And yet while The Elder Scrolls uses this to create something no other video game ever has, ironically it does so in such a way that only a video game ever could.
 
The Elder Scrolls, in particular its lore, has had an immense impact on the lives of Ben and I both. It’s caused us to see ourselves and the world around us in an entirely new light time and time again. While this is not something we can share with you directly, we can at least try to explain a little bit about how The Elder Scrolls has managed to do this. To that end, we look in depth at three influential in-game texts (two of which aren’t technically even in-game texts, because that’s just how The Elder Scrolls works) as case study examples of what makes The Elder Scrolls’ approach to worldbuilding, and its idea of narrative fiction itself, so unique. Check it out here, over at the Pex Lives Libsyn site.
 
And now, the liner notes…

 

…

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I Pilfer: The Newsletter of the Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front

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Hey all – just a heads up that I’ve started a newsletter for the Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front. It’ll mail out eight times a year. You can sign up for it here. The first installment of it is below if you want to get a sense of what it’ll be like.

Oh, and Jack’s on Fridays now, so do check back tomorrow.

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Hello. We are the Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front. This is our cross-quarterly newsletter, coming out eight times a year to give you the latest news on the struggle to liberate Ithaca from a variety of nebulously defined forces. You’re subscribed to it either because you asked to be or because you downloaded Articles of Secession, our debut release. If occasionally being treated to our deranged musings was not something you meant to sign up for, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom which you can use to depart our newly liberated Ithaca in favor of the frozen wastelands of reality. Careful though: there are wolves out there.

CONTENTS

Your Cross-Quarterly Manifesto
Articles of Secession Update
Introducing Ithaca
State of the City
What Would Be Next for the IPLF if We Were Bound by Linear Time
What’s Actually Next for the IPLF
Follow Us On Instagram
Other Projects
Closing Thoughts
 

YOUR CROSS-QUARTERLY MANIFESTO 

“Beneath the paving stones, the beach” graffitied the Situationists in 1968. But more than that, beneath the paving stones are a vast kingdom of histories and memories. This is the domain of psychogeography, which attempts to understand physical spaces primarily through human experiences of them. To psychogeography, a street corner is not primarily understood as the intersection of two stretches of pavement, but rather as the accumulated intersections of decades or centuries worth of individual journeys along those roads, all the shops and apartments to have been built up and torn down, and entire philosophies of urban design and trajectories of history that led the roads’ existence in the first place. The Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front will not rest until the physical Ithaca has been entirely supplanted by this imaginative dimension.

 

ARTICLES OF SECESSION UPDATE

The IPLF’s inaugural release, Articles of Secession, has been a solid success, raising more than $300. We’re waiting for the last few Bandcamp payments to process and for the money to come in from selling the last zine edition on eBay, but we’ll be donating that money to Ithaca Welcomes Refugees in the next couple of weeks. Thanks to everybody who supported the release. If for some reason you missed either the video or the single, here are those links.

Single: ithacapsychogeographicliberationfront.bandcamp.com

Video: youtube.com/watch?v=8hzB6D1gBwU

 

INTRODUCING ITHACA

We know a lot of our followers aren’t actually from Ithaca, so we thought a super-quick overview of the city might be in order. First, the Finger Lakes – a set of ten oblong lakes cut in the middle of what’s now New York by glaciers. Ithaca sits at the southernmost tip of Cayuga Lake, one of the two biggest. As the famed slogan goes, “Ithaca is gorges,” which is to say that it’s a ridiculously hilly city defined by the gorges cut by three north-flowing creeks: Fall Creek, Cascadilla Creek, and Six Mile Creek, and by the frankly preposterous number of waterfalls in and around town.…

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Myriad Universes: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine The Next Generation Part 1: Prophets and Losses

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Rom is grousing to himself about how underappreciated he is at the bar and how things would run much smoother if he was in charge when his pity party is interrupted by an irate customer. A Starfleet officer, on scheduled shore-leave, is upset that all the Dabo tables seem to be rigged to favour the house (well, more then gambling machines already are I suppose). Rom goes to fetch Quark, eager at the chance to buck responsibility higher up the managerial chain. This sort of thing would slip by most people unnoticed, but then again, most people aren’t Geordi La Forge, who, thanks to his remarkable VISOR, can see things most people can’t.

Geordi is joined by Doctor Beverly Crusher and Commander Deanna Troi, and all three question an evasive Quark. The barkeep denies all responsibility and threatens to call station security, “A close, personal friend” of his to escort the bothersome Starfleet officers out before Odo himself shows up and sternly asks Quark if “that Dabo table” was still “giving [him] trouble”. Geordi tries to thank Odo, but Odo actually agrees with Quark: He’s not happy the commander and his two associates are here, claiming that Starfleet crews “always seem to cause [him] the biggest problems”. The constable does express a familiarity with Deanna Troi, and asks the counselor if they’ve met before. Deanna denies that they have, but confesses to Beverly in private after Odo leaves that she does know of him, but didn’t want to bring it up.

After Deanna and Geordi leave, Doctor Crusher suddenly runs into Doctor Bashir, who is flattered she remembers him and promptly asks her to dinner. But they are soon interrupted by the ill-timed (or perhaps perfectly timed, depending on your perspective) arrival of Jadzia Dax, who promptly invites herself to dinner with Julian. But Jadzia seems altogether more interested in Beverly, who admits she once met another Trill like her once years before, and asks the science officer to remind her to tell her the story sometime.

Later in Ops, Commander Sisko, Major Kira and Dax are entertaining a party of Starfleet bureaucrats being escorted by Captain Picard and Commander Riker. The admirals want a tour of the Gamma Quadrant, and the crew prepares a Runabout for launch. Commander Riker takes the opportunity to catch up with Chief Miles O’Brien, who tells the exec all about his new life on Deep Space 9, including the school his wife Keiko recently started. Just then, the station loses contact with the Runabout, and Jadzia tells Commander Sisko that the Bajoran Wormhole seems to be behaving abnormally and erratically. But before any of them can do anything, the Wormhole seems to “reach out and grab” the admirals’ Runabout, and it’s gone.

The two crews discuss options in Ops, but Kira and Riker start to butt heads over whether or not to send a probe in after the ship. Commander Sisko and Captain Picard seem to have a more amicable relationship, however, and the Enterprise captain goes off to placate Starfleet Command.…

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