DS9 s1e10 "Move Along Home"
Edit: Coincidentally put together last night before NegativeNull's Kiss post. Funny how that works.
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
149 points (96.9% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
3980 readers
907 users here now
/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Honorary Badbitch:
@jawa21@startrek.website for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To me, it felt like the episode mattered because you got character development. It's the first time we get to see exactly how Odo and Quark's relationship works, and we also get to see Quark's..."unorthodox" problem solving style, in contrast to how federation weenies go about things.
I guess, but those feel pretty minor things to me that could easily have been developed in other ways and don't really mean anything within the episode itself. Compare that to Kirk finally besting the academy bully who taunted him for four years and finding closure with a relationship he regretted ending. And even though those things did not echo through the series since they didn't do plot arcs back then, those are much bigger things in terms of just telling a story. On top of that, you see McCoy can be charming and gallant if he wants to and that Sulu is a capable fighter in hand-to-hand combat.
But with the DS9 episode, taken on its own as an episode with the show you saw up to that point, it really is a "zero consequences and zero effects" episode.
Hopefully I've explained why one works so much better than the other well enough.
Edit: I would also say that putting a 'this adventure never put anyone in real danger' episode right near the beginning of the show is just a bad move in terms of selling a show to an audience and episodes like that were why DS9's first couple of seasons were pretty weak. Even Enterprise had more of a sense of danger despite not a single crewmember dying in the first season. Because at least you knew by the end of the episode that they really could have died.
Not every character moment has to be climactic. You gotta mix in some slow-burn stuff there too. And also remember that early episodes like this had to do a lot of heavy lifting to reform the Ferengi from their disastrous TNG appearance.
I'm not sure how this reforms the Ferengi past the point they had already been reformed. It develops Quark's character a little, that's about it.
And I'm not talking about climactic moments, I'm talking about overcoming adversity, which is a major component to Star Trek stories in specific and Western fiction in general. When there are no consequences, you're not overcoming any actual adversity. Back to Shore Leave, it wasn't actually Finnegan Kirk beat up at the end of the fight, it was his own inner demons. It was a moment of adversity when he overcame what had been holding him back for so long. It's not about how he achieved it, it's that it happened.
I don't remember them being reformed at all in TNG, but I admit it's been awhile. I picture them as capering caricatures in TNG. But I'm thinking specifically of that moment where Quark argues with Odo that he can save them a bunch of small dangers by making one big gamble; it shows the Ferengi way of thinking about things as not just allegory, but as an actual culture that succeeds in some ways and fails in others.
Edit: Which I liked since the federation is ostensibly all about interacting with new and different cultures.
Edit edit: Not to say any of that invalidates your own feelings about it. I care about and find meaningful some stuff; you are under no obligation to feel the same way, nor are you wrong for not doing so. I only share because sometimes it's fun to hear other's perspectives, and I appreciate you sharing yours with me.