“One Little Ship”
Written by Bradley Thompson & David Weddle
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 6, Episode 14
Production episode 40510-537
Original air date: February 14, 1998
Stardate: 51474.2
Station log: The Defiant is investigating a subspace compression phenomenon. Dax, O’Brien, and Bashir take the Rubicon into the phenomenon, tethered to the Defiant via a tractor beam. The runabout shrinks when it hits the accretion disc, which makes O’Brien more than a little nervous.
A Jem’Hadar ship attacks the Defiant, using the phenomenon to mask their arrival. They trash the Defiant and board it, while the Rubicon goes hurtling into the phenomenon once the tractor beam is lost in battle.
First Kudak’etan is part of a new race of Jem’Hadar bred in the Alpha Quadrant. His Second is an honored elder from the Gamma Quadrant, Ixtana’rax, and Kudak’etan takes great pleasure in lording his superiority over Ixtana’rax. Their Vorta, Gelnon, charges them with proceeding to the nearest Dominion outpost, while he continues to the Coridan system.
Sisko, Kira, Worf, and Nog have been imprisoned in the mess hall, and Ixtana’rax takes Sisko to the bridge on Kudak’etan’s order. Kudak’etan needs Sisko to repair the warp drive, which Sisko agrees to, if Kira, Worf, and Nog assist him. Ixtana’rax thinks this is a mistake, but Kudak’etan overrides him.
The Rubicon is badly damaged, but they do manage to escape the phenomenon. Unfortunately, because they didn’t leave via the same trajectory, they didn’t revert to their proper size. They’re still a teeny-tiny little ship. The only way for them to get back into the phenomenon is with the Defiant’s help. Communications are down, so they go in via a plasma vent—which is fine until Kudak’etan orders the ship to impulse and the vent they’re in fills with superheated plasma. They barely escape to the engine room, where the Jem’Hadar are supervising Sisko, Worf, Kira, and Nog effecting repairs. Ixtana’rax tells Kira to show one of the other Jem’Hadar how she is making her repair.
Hiding in engineering, Dax and O’Brien observe what the crew are doing. They quickly deduce that Kira’s the only one actually fixing the warp drive. Sisko is working to transfer command of the ship’s functions to engineering, while Worf covers their tracks, sending false signals to make it look to the Jem’Hadar like the repairs are proceeding, and Nog is trying to eliminate the bridge lockout of the command codes.
The Rubicon crew try to help by getting to the bridge and releasing the bridge to engineering from there. They leave after Kudak’etan enters engineering to ask what’s taking so long. Sisko accuses Ixtana’rax of slowing him down. Kudak’etan orders Ixtana’rax to just observe, not interfere—but also tells Sisko that he has thirty minutes to fix the warp drive, or crew members start dying, beginning with Kira. Sisko agrees. He also tells Worf that Plan B is a computer virus that will cause the warp core to overload once they reach a certain speed.
Dax trails Kudak’etan to the bridge. The only way to help Sisko with his plan is for O’Brien to manually rewrite the encryption. The problem is, none of them can leave the runabout because the air molecules outside the runabout are too large for them to be able to breathe. But the circuit housings are airtight—Dax can beam compressed air into it, and it would last for about twenty minutes. She beams O’Brien and Bashir in. The chief has trouble at first—the different perspective is disorienting—but Bashir talks him off the ledge, and he does it.
In engineering, Nog thinks he’s transferred the command codes (it was really O’Brien and Bashir, but he has no way of knowing that), but just then Ixtana’rax has discovered that the warp drive has been online for an hour. Kudak’etan thinks it’s Ixtana’rax’s failure to notice that, but Ixtana’rax points out that he was told not to interfere. The First orders warp speed, which means Worf’s computer virus will kick in and destroy the ship soon.
However, Dax flies the Rubicon back to engineering and fires on the Jem’Hadar. That creates enough of a distraction for Sisko to transfer control while Kira, Worf, and the Rubicon take out the Jem’Hadar. Worf himself kills Kudak’etan, and Kira shoots Ixtana’rax, and Sisko floods the rest of the ship with anesthezine gas.
They manage to bring the Rubicon back to normal size, finish repairs, and head back to the station. The Jem’Hadar are sent to a POW camp.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? A subspace compression phenomenon can shrink anything that enters it, but it might also provide a method of quick transport between distant parts of the galaxy. That’s the excuse for exploring it, anyhow, and no reason is given why it must shrink things or really much of anything. It’s just there do to the shrunken-runabout plot.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko plays Kudak’etan like a two-dollar banjo, playing him against Ixtana’rax. Ixtana’rax sees through it, but can do nothing because Kudak’etan is the First. Obedience leads to victory, and victory is life, which are actually Ixtana’rax’s last words….
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira gets to stand in for the audience who likely think the whole idea of a shrinking runabout is high-larious by giggling almost uncontrollably at the very idea in the teaser.
There is no honor in being pummeled: Dax asked Worf to compose a poem in honor of this particular occasion. As of the end of the episode he only got as far as “There once was a little ship that took a little trip.”
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: While Bashir and O’Brien are celebrating in the bar, telling the story of their grand exploits to M’Pella and Morn, Odo tells them that he thinks they’re both about a centimeter or two shorter than the last time he saw them. When Quark backs him up, the two of them rush to the infirmary. Quark turns to Odo. “And they say you don’t have a sense of humor.”
Rules of Acquisition: Nog reports something about the runabout, interrupting Worf’s awkward explanation of his poem. Kira speculates that Nog was covering for Worf, and Sisko agrees.
Victory is life: This episode establishes that the Dominion has been breeding Jem’Hadar in the Alpha Quadrant. The rivalry between “Alphas” and “Gammas” was only ever referenced in this episode, but it displays itself in the Alphas being dismissive of Gammas, of foregoing the verbal part of the white-renewal ritual, and valuing initiative.
Tough little ship: The Jem’Hadar put the Defiant’s “bridge crew” in the mess hall, but it’s only Sisko, Kira, Worf, and Nog. It’s never made clear what’s done with the rest of the crew.
Keep your ears open: “This conduit is filthy, Chief. Don’t you ever clean up in here?”
“All right, all right, let’s not badger the chief.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sorry. It was very small of me.”
Bashir making fun of O’Brien, Dax chastising him, O’Brien expressing gratitude, and Bashir coming back with the inevitable pun.
Welcome aboard: Leland Crooke makes the first of two appearances as Gelnon; he’ll be back in “Honor Among Thieves.” Scott Thompson Baker, Fritz Sperberg, and Christian Zimmerman play the Jem’Hadar, while Aron Eisenberg returns as Nog.
Trivial matters: This episode—which had the nickname of “Honey, I Shrunk the Runabout” in the production office—was filmed prior to “Far Beyond the Stars” but aired afterward, probably due to the great postproduction work required for this episode.
The episode was based on a notion Rene Echevarria first pitched when he was on staff at TNG, but Jeri Taylor didn’t go for it. He pitched it again on DS9, but Michael Piller didn’t go for it. Neither did Ira Steven Behr, at first, but eventually Echevarria wore him down.
Science advisor André Bormanis had been dreading that someday they would do a shrinking episode, thus forcing him to have to come up with a scientific justification for it.
The animated series did a similar riff in the episode “The Terratin Incident,” and of course the Enterprise was also shrunk to tiny size in the original series episode “Catspaw.”
Coridan was first established in “Journey to Babel,” where its admittance into the Federation was under discussion. The world itself also appears in the Enterprise episodes “Shadows of P’Jem” and “Demons.”
Walk with the Prophets: “I don’t feel any smaller.” There’s really nothing to say about this episode. I mean, it’s the one where they shrink. Ever since Fantastic Voyage first was released, the shrinking episode has been a staple of genre on the screen. The Star Trek animated series did it in the 1970s, and Doctor Who did it just a few weeks ago.
And it’s cute and all, and I appreciated Kira lampshading it in the teaser (not to mention Nog taking offense at finding small things humorous), and it’s fun to see the banter among Dax, Bashir, and O’Brien, plus I liked the attempts to keep the science real. I especially liked Bashir pointing out that they can’t actually breathe outside the runabout because the air molecules would be too big, though they lose points by having Bashir refer to “oxygen molecules.” First of all, it would be oxygen atoms, not oxygen molecules, secondly, we don’t breathe oxygen, we breathe air. Our cells extract oxygen, but it isn’t pure oxygen we’re breathing.
But ultimately the biggest problem is that the Jem’Hadar are portrayed here as total bloody morons. The whole Alpha-Gamma rivalry feels constructed and silly, as evidenced by the fact that we never saw it again, and is the kind of stupid thing that I can’t see the Dominion actually doing. Kudak’etan does things, not because it’s smart, but because he’s enjoying snarking off Ixtana’rax—exactly the kind of petty stupidity that the Jem’Hadar have been mostly free of.
Sisko’s plan hinges on a number of things, starting with the tiresome tendency of bad guys on television to not have surveillance in their cells, whether electronic or in the form of guards—seriously, why isn’t there a Jem’Hadar inside the mess hall with Sisko and the others? It also relies on the Jem’Hadar not knowing Starfleet engineering—but we already know that the Jem’Hadar have captured lots of Starfleet ships, and they’re allied with the Cardassians, who must know something about Federation engineering from their own captured ships from prior wars. It makes no sense, none, that the Jem’Hadar would be as totally ignorant of Starfleet systems as they are in this episode. The Dominion has never been shown as being this stupid before, and if they were, they would never have been considered a threat ever.
The episode has its moments, but ultimately the plot is just there in service of doing the shrinking-runabout gag, and it’s not enough.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s newest novel is Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution, based on the FOX show that just started its second season. The book will be published next week, and you can order it from Sleepy Reads or find in your local bookstore.
Ahh, but oxygen, in its free state, exists as O2 molecules, generally, not individual oxygen atoms… so “molecules” is correct. :)
@1 Yap. I was just about to point that out.
From wikipedia:
“At standard temperature and pressure, oxygen is a colorless, odorless gas with the molecular formula O 2, in which the two oxygen atoms are chemically bonded to each other with a spin triplet electron configuration.”
Though Keith is right, that technically Bashier and O’Brien would be breathing “air” rather then pure Oxygen
If Bashir had said “air molecules”, Keith would be snarking about how there’s no such thing. I don’t really see a way for the writers to win that line.
Actually, Doctor Who has done it twice. The first time being in The Invisible Enemy when the Fourth Doctor creates a clone of himself and Leela and shrink them to be injected into his own head to destroy the nucleus of an intelligent virus which is using him as a host. And yes, that is almost as dumb as this episode!
We breath oxygen molecules. O2. Oxygen ions (atoms of oxygen) are kinda dangerous (and highly reactive).
https://acswebcontent.acs.org/prfar/2010/reports/P11141.html
As i said with Doctor Who’s Robot of Sherwood, I couldn’t watch it week in and week out, but if you have no room in your heart for a bit of cheezy, campy, fun every so often then you have a soul of stone and flint. I liked it at the time, and I like it now.
It isn’t, dark, gritty, “real”, grim, “serious”, weighty, or any of the other words that tend to get deployed by people worried that their scifi isn’t being given enough respect; it is simply fun for fun’s sake. It probably came at the right point in the series too after the very ^all those words^ Far Beyond the Stars, a little bit of a mental palate cleanser before moving onto another dark “O’Brien Must Suffer” episode.
Bashir and O’Brien only need tiny O2 and maybe some tiny CO2 (CO2 helps the brain regulate respiration). The rest of the air molecules can be normal size. Of course, they will beath out tiny CO2.
I’m becoming oddly charmed by the idea of mini-molecules…
@@.-@ No, Doctor Who has done it 4 times now. We had Planet of the Giants in the Hartnell era, then in the Pertwee era there was Carnival of Monsters, then Invisible Enemy, then Into the Dalek.
Yes, every sci-fi show does the ‘shrinking’ episode, but Doctor Who did it before Trek Animated, in the 1964 three-part story ‘Planet of Giants’. With a much better rationale behind it than in either Trek episode.
@8 – Wow, how did I forget those two??? (To be fair, Planet of the Giants is fairly forgettable. But Carnival of Monsters is great fun, despite making almost no sense whatsoever!)
Agreed that oxygen molecules does make sense (even if that’s not the only thing we breathe).
On one hand, I did enjoy the episode despite the ludicrous premise because it’s kind of silly and fun (also, I think Worf’s “poem” and Odo/Quark’s joke was the best part of the episode, so it seems wrong that you left the Odo/Quark thing out of the summary, hah. For the record, Data is still the best poet!). But ultimately, I was so irritated by it because so much of it depends on the Jem’hadar holding the biggest idiot ball in existance and acting totally out of character.
It’s just silly. Shrinking premises tend to push my suspension of disbelief beyond the breaking point. And to top it all off, the story isn’t all that different from “Rascals”.
I would say they wanted something light to break up a long tense stretch, but we’re coming off of “The Magnificent Ferengi” and “Who Mourns for Morn?” Really, the only redeeming feature is the Odo/Quark tag team at the end.
KRAD, I’m pretty sure they said they put the rest of the crew in the cargo bay.
The thing I’m confused by is if it’s even reasonable for them to expect to establish communications or read the Defiant’s transponder at all. If the space between their atoms also shrinks, wouldn’t the wavelength/frequency of the transmissions that the runabout can actually process also get smaller? Maybe they could still pick up the signal but it would be distorted. I don’t actually know very much about radio waves and the like. CLB or someone else can clarify this for me.
I used to rewatch this one just to see the Defiant–the views of engineering, the inside of the turbolift, the giant isolinear chips, and inside the plasma vent. I think that’s pretty much all this episode has going for it.
I alluded to this episode in my very first piece of Trek literature, SCE: Aftermath (which Keith edited). That was another story involving miniaturization through subspace phenomena, and O’Brien guest-starred in the tale, so there were some references to his discomfort at being shrunken yet again.
I like this one because of the attention they paid to making the science relatively plausible. It reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s novelization of Fantastic Voyage, a book that I always figured Bormanis must’ve been familiar with, since he arrived at many of the same solutions as Asimov. The film treated shrinking in a very fanciful way, but this was an era when novelizers were far freer to take liberties with a film’s story than they are today, so Asimov heavily rewrote the story to make it more scientifically plausible, and it’s always been one of my favorites of his novels — although his essay about the rewriting process and the scientific issues involved is as fascinating as the book itself.
And I love it that this episode handles shrinking so well, and doesn’t make the usual mistakes. For instance, the shrinking by a subspace compression phenomenon. That actually kind of makes sense. The normal explanations for shrinking don’t work, as Asimov explained in his book and essay: decreasing the space between the atoms/particles in an object would make it unmanageably dense and would probably alter its internal chemistry, while removing atoms would leave too few particles in the brain for it to sustain conscious thought (as far as we know). Having it be more of a geometric/dimensional change avoids those problems. It’s more the sort of difference in perceived dimension that you see in relativity when a fast-moving object seems compressed along the axis of motion, except in three dimensions and without the movement. Okay, that is pretty fanciful, but less so than the alternatives. It’s basically the same conclusion Asimov reached.
And the need to shrink air molecules was another consideration that Asimov added to the scene in the movie where the crew siphoned air from the patient’s lungs to refill the sub’s tanks. Asimov had them extend the shrinking field around the air hose.
So it’s a lightweight episode and an implausible premise, but it’s a fun premise and I respect the effort to make it as believable as it could possibly get. Plus it’s neat to watch the little runabout swoop around, and to see the people walking around on oversized sets like in Land of the Giants.
If nothing else, it’s light-years better than “The Terratin Incident,” which offered one of the stupidest, most nonsensical explanations for shrinking I’ve ever heard. The claim there was that the radiation was causing spiral molecules like DNA to wind tighter, thus causing organic materials to shrink. But organic matter isn’t made exclusively of DNA! That’s found only in the chromosomes in the cell nuclei. If it shrank, everything else in the body would stay the same size. And changing the geometry of DNA would make it impossible for enzymes and proteins to interact with it, so cell machinery would break down. The result would be death, not shrinkage.
(The best rationale I’ve been able to come up with for “Terratin” is that the radiation actually generated a subspace compression effect when it resonated with spiral molecules.)
As for Doctor Who‘s “Planet of Giants,” apologies to #9, but the rationale there was quite silly — that the “space pressure” let into the TARDIS when the doors popped open during rematerialization forcibly shrunk them. Surely that would’ve killed them, not miniaturized them — and by all rights should’ve affected only the occupants, not the entire TARDIS. Although I suppose that “space pressure” doesn’t sound too dissimilar to “subspace compression,” so it could perhaps be rationalized as being the same kind of dimensional alteration.
@13: Yes, the radio waves received and transmitted by the runabout would be proportionally altered, though since they were aware they had shrunk and by how much, it would’ve been easy enough to retune their transmitters and receivers. However, there should’ve been effects on how they perceived light frequencies and the passage of time, due to relativistic effects; for an explanation, I refer you to Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage novelization.
I can’t believe I actually used to like DS9. What utter dreck.
I’m so happy they released Star Trek TOS on Blu-Ray. The first and always BEST Star Trek.
I don’t think I like one single thing Ron Moore has done. DS9 is garbage. His TNG episodes were garbage. Battlestar Galactica would have been great if he hadn’t ruined everything with Seasons 3 and 4.
Helix is unwatchable. And let’s not go into “Outlander”.
Ron Moore = Damon Lindelof = Michael Bay. The horror
You can enjoy this episode.
If you have the will.
It’s another silly hour of Star Trek.
It’s Honey, I Shrunk the Trill.
Comment #17 unpublished by moderator in accordance with Tor.com’s moderation policy.
The shrinking plot gimmick would have worked a lot better in the early seasons of DS9, the pre-Dominion years, when they were just tooling around the Gamma Quadrant, checking out stuff. It still would have been dumb, but it would have just been a light filler episode. Setting it in the middle of the Dominion War is completely inappropriate in terms of tone.
And what kills me is they wasted a B-plot that could have been AMAZING. The idea of social conflict between Alphas and Gammas within the Jem Hadar has so much freaking potential, and could have been a great overaching theme of the war and the remaining episodes of the show. But it was handled so poorly here, and then it never came up again. KRAD was being extremely generous with his score of three — I was expecting him to rate it even lower than that.
This episode is one giant face palm, but that would be giving it too much credit.
So maybe just a small face palm.
…
I’ll show myself out now.
My favorite shrinking episode has to be from Farscape, where Sikozu gives a detailed explanation for why it’s impossible (either their atoms shrunk, in which case they should be incredibly dense and unable to breathe the air, or they lost mass, in which case their brains should be too small to retain consciousness) and Rygel tells her to shut up, it obviously isn’t impossible because it’s happened.
You’d think that after having that idea rejected by Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor that Echevarria would give it up already. Fantastic Voyager was fun and all, but it’s too out there for Star Trek (which has its share of out there moments), and Piller probably asked: What’s it about? I mean, what’s in it for the characters? Where’s the heart of the story?
That’s the main issue. It’s not about anything. Of course, Ira approved it, so he’s to blame (and assigned the least qualified writers on staff to make it happen). It feels manufactured. At least they tried to make it plausible and still poke fun at it. Even the show’s best director couldn’t salvage this.
I think the Hallmark Star Trek Holiday Trinket that year was (going to be at the time of airing) the Runabout and Star Trek had a way of dropping a teaser sometime during the season. I remember that the line in a Q episode when the report is given on the bridge “We seem to be tethered to a large tree.” was the first such tease. Could that tease tradition be the reason why this episode had been given the green light?
Odo and Quark have the best lines in this entire episode. It can be fun if you just go with it’s the shrinking episode and enjoy the ship tour stuff. I also thought the Alpha and Gamma fueding by the Jem’Hedar should have been used more instead of here and just one other episode but we haven’t seen it yet.
KRAD summed it up perfectly: there’s not much to say.
I’m with everybody that’s saying Quark/Odo’s closer was the best part. But then again, I’m consistently a sucker for any moment where these two characters’ reluctant friendship shines through.
Any writer who gave up on pitching an idea after just a couple of rejections would never make it past the wannabe stage. Perseverance is how you become a professional in the first place. If you really feel an idea has value, then you cling to it and keep trying until you finally make it work. Heck, I’ve got a story coming up in Buzzy Mag in November that I’ve been trying to sell, in one form or another, on and off since 1998. I finally sold it on my 19th attempt (after 16 rejections and two non-responses, one due to the cancellation of the magazine I’d submitted it to).
As forgettable as this episode was on the whole, I love the very end. Auberjonois responds beautifully to “And they say you don’t have a sense of humor.” There’s this quiet, silent moment where he’s just staring, stoic, and for a moment I thought he just might turn to Quark and deliver some sort of “I wasn’t joking” line.
And then that quiet little smile finds its way onto his face and I pretty much lost it giggling.
I swear, Auberjonois and Shimerman have the most amazing chemistry as frienemies. They have been one of my favorite things about DS9 pretty much from the get-go.
@26
You have a good point there. Pushing your idea matters, even if the end result isn’t as satisfying. At least, he gave it a good try and got it made (and more importantly, everyone else went along with it).
I’ll also give props to another aspect of this episode. It’s one of the few season 6 entries that actually uses most of the cast, having them work together to solve the plot. More often than not, season 6 had the main characters too segregated in their own stories, rather going against the spirit of Trek, where everyone works together.
Personally, the biggest bit of stupidity was not on the part of Jem’hadar but on the part of their Vorta who, having captured one of the most powerful ships in the Federation fleet and one of the most important figures in the Federation war effort, leaves both in the care of his knucklehead minions while he swans off. At the very least deliver Sisko into custody yourself, I’m sure that would more than make up for deviating from his orders.
@16, @20 – Perfect.
The problem I had with this last Doctor Who season was how much focus it put on Clara I didn’t feel that….Oh this is still Star Trek! Sorry this episode is such a small thing I generally forget about it.
I should go.
I wonder what the Federation did to keep any Jem’Hadar POWs alive. Did they somehow develop their own stores of ketracel white to give the POWs or did they keep them all in stasis?
This is the 6th gimmicky episode in a row that left me vaguely annoyed when it was over, and it’s seriously slowing down my binge-watching because I can’t get through more than 2 at a time. I’m told that it gets worse before it gets better, and that Season 7 isn’t all that. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m interested enough in these characters to see it through….. since Sisko got his baseball back the episodes are either hamfisted, trivial, or oh-so-self-important.
True, Doctor Who did it long before Trek, but there were plenty of older “incredible shinking” stories. Heck, when Mork and Mindy did it in the 70’s, even pre-teen me recognized it as a classic sci fi premise. Outer Limits and Twilight Zone had done it repeatedly, not to mention some movies.
Here’s a fun but incomplete list of some: http://www.heroesandiconstv.com/lists/13-spectacular-tv-shows-and-episodes-about-shrinking-people (One obvious omission: the 1957 film “Incredible Shrinking Man”.)
Like #12/DemetriosX mentioned, this episode is very similar to “Rascals” on TNG. Super gimmicky sci-fi concept (turned into kids then vs. being shrunk in size here), the starship gets taken over by an aggressive force (the Enterprise by Ferengi the vs. the Defiant by Jem’Hadar here), and then it’s the affected crew members who save the day over the inept alien invaders. But a key difference, and something that was important to Michael Piller, is that the story be about something. And “Rascals”, while far from my classic, was at least about something. In that case we had the introspection from the affected crew members having to deal with their new situation and if it was possibly permanent. Those were the best parts of that episode. This episode is all gimmick and while it had fun moments and was visually cool, ultimately it is empty. And the whole Alpha/Gamma Jem’Hedar conflict felt forced and was silly for reasoning that Krad mentioned. Coincidentally, Worf allowed both the Ferengi and Jem’Hedar to take over his ship. Bad Worf!
I just watched this episode very recently, and the Jem’hadar didn’t really seem inept.
I thought the Jem’Hadar were inept in that they could have executed Sisko and any number of the senior officers/kept them separated so they couldn’t conspire on how to take back the ship or at least better monitor their conversations with each other.
They specifically state that the Bridge Crew are in the Mess Hall and the rest of the crew are in the cargo hold. Given that they deliver this as essentially one line in the episode, it’s strange to me that you could have missed it.
I wouldn’t rate this episode quite as low as you have, though it’s clearly not the best and suffers quite a bit from following on the heels of “Far Beyond The Stars”. I liked seeing the Defiant from the perspective of the shrunken Rubicon and the fight sequence was pretty awesome. I’d give this a 5 because of the humor throughout the episode, especially the Odo/Quark bit at the end.
22: it’s Fantastic Voyage. 23: “we seem to be tethered to a large plant”.27: it’s frenemies.
Having just watched this last night, I believe Bashir says that there is no way that the oxygen molecules could bond with O’Brien’s tiny hemoglobin, which seems like an accurate enough statement given the situation.
If the oxygen will be so scant in the circuit housing that O’Brien will only be able to breathe for 20 minutes, doesn’t beaming in two people cut that time down to 10 minutes? Seems rather risky.
Lastly, one of my favorite Lost in Space episodes as a kid is the one where the Robot grows to giant size overnight and Will Robinson and Dr. Smith have to go inside the Robot to save him and reverse the process. It was all I could think of throughout this episode. That is all.
I would have loved this episode so much more if they had used a comedic character like “Harry Mudd,” which Ira Behr regretted not doing. I also hated this episode because of how stupid the Jem Hadar are. As much as I love our heroes, I felt great sympathy for Ixtana’rax and wanted to smack Kudak’etan and also the Vorta in the head. I would have felt much better if Kudak’etan and Gelnon got to wallow in regret and realize “What were we thinking? We had this 20-year-old elder we could have trusted, but no, we threw away this great opportunity. What were we thinking? What is the female changeling going to say?” But no. Kudak’etan simply dies, and Gelnon makes no further mention of this incident. And Ixtana’rax’s last words also made me mad, though that’s just the icing on the tough-as-nails fruit cake,
Lockdown rewatch. I guess after the drama of Far beyond the stars they decided to go with a lighter more fun episode, unfortunately this just about fails on every level, it’s not as funny as it should be, even the pairing of O’Brien and Bashir normally a great aspect of the show for some reason comes across as slightly irritating here.The only good thing is the animosity between the Jem Hadar which also in the end fails as it presents the idea the Alpha’s are a bunch of idiots and therefore a much less threatening enemy.
I never get why the Rubicon didn’t just phaser all the Jem’Hadar when they got to the bridge. With the element of surprise (which they’d definitely have had), they could have easily taken them all out before they could even alert their comrades elsewhere on the ship.Then they could go do the same in engineering, and Bob’s your uncle: Sisko et al. have the ship back.
@43/terracinque: Remember all those B-movies where someone is turned into a giant and they just swat away bullets as minor annoyances? This is probably the same deal. Jem’Hadar are pretty tough; a miniaturized runabout phaser bank might not do more than sting them a little. In the episode, the runabout did kill a couple of Jem’Hadar with torpedoes, but that probably risked damage to the Defiant‘s systems, so it probably wasn’t something they’d do as a first resort.
I thought this episode was fun. Sure, it’s stupid fun, but fun nonetheless, and not nearly as stupid as it could have been.
An observation on watching this again: they transport Miles and Julian into the circuit system, with the caveat that they will transport some compressed air in first, but it will only last 20 minutes. (As 40 points out above, since that was for just Miles, it should be 10 now, but fine–we don’t know how long they were in there.) And, indeed, the hypoxia causes them problems. Is there a reason Jadzia couldn’t beam them some more air? The runabout obviously has (or can make) plenty. Even if it wasn’t safe to beam the air in while they’re in there, you could beam them out and repeat the process as necessary.
Nothing to add except for noting a couple more examples of shrinking people in Doctor Who – the Teselecta from “Let’s Kill Hitler” & “The Wedding of River Song”.
Never mind hover boards I want a toy runabout with working antigrav system (and photon torpedoes)