In 1996,Star Trek reached its 30th anniversary.Deep Space Nine celebrated this occasion with an episode called “Trials and Tribble-ations,” which was a direct crossover with “The Trouble with Tribbles.” With the DS9 Rewatch having reached that point, we’re celebrating by doing a redux of “Tribbles Week,” previously celebrated when the Star Trek Rewatch by Eugene Myers & Torie Atkinson got to “The Trouble with Tribbles” back in 2010. We began yesterday with a special rewatch of the episode that started it all, and we follow it with the actual DS9 episode today…
“Trials and Tribble-ations”
Written by Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler & Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Ronald D. Moore & Rene Echevarria
Directed by Jonathan West
Based on “The Trouble with Tribbles,” written by David Gerrold, directed by Joseph Pevney
Season 5, Episode 6
Production episode 40510-503
Original air date: November 4, 1996
Stardate: unknown
Station log: A ship containing two investigators from the Department of Temporal Investigations, Dulmur and Lucsly, arrives at the station. The pair of them talk to Sisko about their recent mission. Sisko assures them that his journey back in time on the Defiant was an accident, not a predestination paradox or a time loop or something that was meant to be. Dulmur and Lucsly are relieved to hear that. “We hate those.”
Two weeks ago, the Cardassian government contacted Sisko to give back one of the Orbs of the Prophets. This one turned out to be the Orb of Time—though they didn’t know that at first. They also took on a passenger on Cardassia: Barry Waddle, a human merchant in gemstones, kivas, and trillium. He was stuck on Cardassia when the Klingons invaded, and now can finally get home.
En route back to Bajoran space, O’Brien detects an increase in chroniton radiation, and then the ship is enveloped in the same glow we’ve seen during Orb experiences. When it settles, the ship has dropped out of warp, and is now two hundred light-years from their original position. The cloak is deactivated long enough for someone to beam off. O’Brien gets the viewscreen working, and they’re ridiculously close to another ship—which turns out to be the Enterprise, NCC-1701.
Dulmur and Lucsly shake their heads in dismay, as DTI views Kirk as a menace. He committed seventeen separate temporal violations, the biggest file on record. Sisko verifies that they went back about 105 years in time.
“Barry Waddle” is missing, and the guard on the Orb has been rendered unconscious, so it’s clear who’s responsible. Worf and Odo soon put it together: he’s Arne Darvin, a Klingon spy who was sent to sabotage Federation colonization efforts a century ago—or, rather, now. Eighteen hours from when the Defiant is, Kirk will expose him (as we saw in “The Trouble with Tribbles”). They don’t know if Darvin beamed to the ship or the station, so they have to check both without polluting the timelines. (Sisko comments that the last thing he wants is a visit from DTI when they get home.)
Sisko, Dax, Bashir, and O’Brien change into Starfleet uniforms of the era (and Bashir, O’Brien, and Dax change their hairstyles to blend in as well), while Odo and Worf dress in civilian clothes. The former foursome will try to find Darvin on the Enterprise, while the latter two will search the station. Kira, meanwhile, is tasked with figuring out how to use the Orb to get them home.
Bashir and O’Brien beam into a turbolift and try to get it to move, but it doesn’t respond to voice commands. A lieutenant enters and grabs a handle and calls for a deck, and then it moves. Bashir says he won’t tell anyone that they didn’t know how to operate the turbolift.
Meanwhile, Sisko pretends to do maintenance while Dax checks her tricorder for Darvin. She waxes nostalgic on the subject of the black-and-silver tricorder—she used to have one.
Odo enters the bar just as Cyrano Jones is bargaining with the bartender while Chekov and Uhura look on. Odo orders a raktajino, but the waitress doesn’t recognize the Klingon coffee—and he’s the second person to order it that day. The waitress says an older human ordered it, and he said he’d be back.
O’Brien and Bashir are doing the same pretend-to-do-maintenance-while-scanning-for-Darvin trick, but O’Brien’s afraid to touch anything. Then another engineer shows up, and Bashir pretends he’s conducting a survey regarding stress in the workplace.
Worf joins Odo in the bar and is disgusted to see that Odo has procured a tribble—which reacts very violently to Worf. Worf explains that tribbles were a great enemy of the Klingon Empire, an ecological menace that consumed food and bred uncontrollably. An armada wiped out the tribble homeworld, and by the end of the 23rd century, they were eradicated as a species.
The I.K.S. Gr’oth arrives at the station. Dax recognizes it as Koloth’s ship, and she remembers him telling her (well, him, since she was Curzon at the time) about trading insults with Kirk on a space station near the Federation border.
Dax wants to beam over to the station to keep an eye on Koloth, but Sisko thinks she’ll be too overwhelmed by nostalgia, so he sends Bashir and O’Brien instead. While Dax and Sisko do another sweep for Darvin, Kirk and Spock come by as Baris contacts him. Dax talks about how sexy he is in person, and Sisko thinks she means Kirk, but she’s actually talking about Spock. Dax admits that she’s nostalgic because she was actually alive in this time, and she remembers it well.
Bashir and O’Brien arrive at the bar, where Odo and Worf have been sitting waiting for Darvin to come back. The former two are envious of their cushy-tushy assignment, since they’ve been crawling through conduits.
As they talk, Scotty, Chekov, and Freeman enter. Korax starts trash-talking, and the bar fight starts. Odo’s protestations notwithstanding, Bashir, O’Brien, and Worf get in on the fight. Darvin walks by the bar, and Odo and Worf spot him, while Bashir and O’Brien are rounded up with the rest of the Enterprise crew. They’re all brought before Kirk, and Kirk asks O’Brien who started it, and the chief says, “I don’t know, sir.” After Kirk dismisses everyone and confines them to quarters, O’Brien is giddy that he lied to Kirk’s face and wishes Keiko were there to see it.
Worf and Odo bring Darvin back to the Defiant, but he’s already performed his sabotage: he put a bomb in a tribble, which will kill Kirk and give him his revenge. When they return to the 24th century, he’ll be a hero of the empire.
Dax and Sisko risk going to the bridge to use the internal sensors to try to see if the bomb is on one of the tribbles on the ship (they don’t find anything). Bashir, O’Brien, and Odo go to K-7 to search the tribbles there. (Worf doesn’t go, given the tribbles’ adverse reaction to Klingons.)
Since the tribble isn’t on the Enterprise, it must be on the station. Odo, Bashir, and O’Brien keep searching, while Sisko and Dax stick close to Kirk, since Darvin would have planted the bomb where he knew Kirk would be at a particular time. When Kirk and Spock deduce that the tribbles might be in the storage compartments, Sisko and Dax overhear and immediately beam directly to the compartments. They find a lot of gorged dead tribbles, and poisoned grain. Dax also detects a tricobalt signature, so the bomb is definitely in one of the tribbles there. As they search, Kirk opens the compartment door and is inundated by tribbles. Sisko eventually finds the bomb and has Kira beam it into space, where it explodes harmlessly. History resumes as normal—though Sisko does indulge himself and, under the guise of being a junior officer handing over a report for signature, gets Kirk’s autograph.
Dulmur and Lucsly say that they’ll send a report in about a month, but they’re pretty sure there was no wrongdoing. Dulmur even admits that he might have done the same thing Sisko did asking for an autograph, which Lucsly is a little perturbed by.
After they leave, Sisko, Kira, and Dax head to the Promenade, which is overrun by tribbles. The one Odo procured has reproduced…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Both Sisko and O’Brien get to pretend to effect repairs while scanning for Darvin. Sisko whistles in appreciation of the old tech, while O’Brien is utterly intimidated by it, as he has no idea what to even touch—and when he does start “working” for the benefit of the engineer who catches him and Bashir, he kills power on the whole deck.
The crew is able to transport back and forth by taking advantage of a three-second window in the Enterprise’s old-fashioned duotronic scan cycle and transporting folks during those intervals.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko has to play killjoy for Dax, who wants to talk to Kirk and Spock and see Koloth in his prime. She says it’d be fun, and he rebukes, “Too much fun.” His focus is on the mission. Of course, once the mission’s over, then he indulges himself to get Kirk’s autograph…
Sisko also gets one of the funnier bits in an episode filled with them, as he taps his combadge to contact the Defiant, before remembering he needs to use a communicator.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira stays behind on the Defiant, since a pregnant Bajoran is a bit hard to camouflage in the 23rd century Federation. Her job is to coordinate everyone’s movements, beaming folks back and forth, and also identifying Koloth’s ship when it arrives. She’s the one who dopes out how to manipulate the Orb of Time to get them back home.
The slug in your belly: Dax gets to be the proxy for all the fans who grew up watching the original series by geeking out over everything, since she was the one who actually lived in this time period.
There is no honor in being pummeled: Early on, Darvin (as Barry Waddle) complains about how bad Klingons smell. To make him feel better and tease him at the same time, O’Brien and Bashir deadpan that Worf has a nice smell that’s peaty and earthy, with just a hint of lilac. O’Brien tries to get Dax and Sisko to go along with the gag.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo gets his very own tribble, and then gets to snark off Worf when the latter explains about how the cute little fuzzy creatures are blood enemies of the Klingon Empire, concluding with a delightfully sardonic query, “Tell me, do they still sing songs of the Great Tribble Hunt?”
Rules of Acquisition: Quark doesn’t appear until the very end, where he, like the bartender on K-7, is chest-deep in tribbles, plus one on his head.
For Cardassia! The Detapa Council has found another Orb of the Prophets, and chosen to give it back to Bajor. It turns out to be the Orb of Time, which you kinda wish they’d said up front.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Emony Dax slept with McCoy when he was a student at Ole Miss. (Dax says he had the hands of a surgeon, wah hey!) Meanwhile, Bashir is convinced that he’s meant to sleep with Lieutenant Watley after she flirts with him, since his great grandmother was named Watley, she was in Starfleet, and nobody knew his great grandfather, which has to be the most tortured logic ever created to justify sleeping with someone ever.
Tough little ship: The Defiant cloak keeps them safe from Klingon raiding parties when they’re en route from Cardassia, and also from the sensors of either K-7 or the Enterprise or the Gr’oth. That whole only-use-it-in-the-Gamma-Quadrant thing seems to be a total nonfactor at this point.
Keep your ears open: “Wait a minute, aren’t you two wearing the wrong color?”
“Don’t you know anything about this period in time?”
“I’m a doctor, not an historian.”
“In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold—”
“—and women wore less.”
Bashir confused as to why Sisko and O’Brien are wearing gold and red, respectively, instead of the other way ’round, O’Brien being snarky, Bashir channeling McCoy, Sisko explaining, and Dax showing up in her miniskirt.
Welcome aboard: In terms of present-day guests, we’ve got Jack Blessing and James W. Jansen as Dulmur and Lucsly. Jansen previously appeared as a Bajoran in “The Storyteller.” Deirdre Imershein played Watley; she last was seen as a Risan greeter on TNG’s “Captain’s Holiday.” Charles Chun and Leslie Ackerman played the engineer and the waitress, respectively. In addition, David Gerrold, the writer of the original episode, makes two cameos as an Enterprise crew member.
In the footage from “The Trouble with Tribbles,” we’ve got William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, and Walter Koenig as six of the big seven (George Takei was filming The Green Berets, and so didn’t appear in the episode; to make up for it, he was in Voyager’s “Flashback,” the sister show’s 30th anniversary episode, which we’ll cover tomorrow), as well as Stanley Adams, Whit Bissell, William Schallert, Michael Pataki, Paul Baxley, Guy Raymond, and David Ross.
And of course Charlie Brill shows up in both as Darvin.
Trivial matters: Obviously, this episode melds with footage from “The Trouble with Tribbles.”
The decision as to which episode of the original series to tie into was not made right away—both “Charlie X” and “A Piece of the Action” were considered—but they settled on “Tribbles” for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the writing staff bumping into Charlie Brill in a pizza parlor in Los Angeles, which made everyone decide it was kismet. (Ira Steven Behr joked that it proved that God was a DS9 fan, while Brill said he was just glad he didn’t go for Chinese that day.) The technique for inserting people into footage so seamlessly was pioneered only two years earlier in the film Forrest Gump.
The scene where Sisko fangoobers Kirk was taken, not from “Tribbles,” but rather “Mirror, Mirror,” specifically the scene where Kirk meets the mainline version of Marlena Moreau—Sisko was substituted in for Moreau. (That explains the look of shock on Uhura’s face, which doesn’t make much sense in the new scene, unless she’s totally checking Sisko out…)
The Department of Temporal Investigations is never seen or mentioned again onscreen, but they are seen in the tie-in fiction, most notably in two novels (Watching the Clock and Forgotten History) and an upcoming eBook (The Collectors) by regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett.
The DVD menu for this episode has tribble noises instead of the usual sounds.
Emony Dax’s encounter with McCoy at Ole Miss is chronicled in the short story “Old Souls” by Michael Jan Freidman in The Lives of Dax anthology.
This is the first time the disparity between the smooth-headed Klingons of the original series and the bumpy-headed ones of the movie era and the 24th century (and later the 22nd century) was addressed onscreen, though they addressed it by not addressing it, with Worf’s curt, “We do not discuss it with outsiders.” An explanation—one that actually makes both O’Brien’s and Bashir’s suggestions that it was either a viral mutation or genetic engineering correct—was finally provided in the Enterprise two-parter “Affliction” and “Divergence.”
Amusingly, especially given his relationship with Dax and that he appeared in “Blood Oath,” no footage of William Campbell is used in this episode, so Koloth doesn’t actually appear despite being discussed quite a bit.
Sisko mentions that he’d love to ask Kirk about his facing the Gorn on Cestus III, a reference to the episode “Arena.”
Dulmur asks Sisko to specify which Enterprise he’s talking about, as there have been five. Lucsly points out that it’s actually six, a reference to the Enterprise-E, which would debut one month hence in the movie First Contact.
“Barry Waddle” is a dealer in, among other things, kivas and trillium, the same goods that Spock claimed to be a dealer in when he was disguised as a merchant in “Errrand of Mercy.”
Dax finding Spock sexier than Kirk, to Sisko’s surprise, is a nice play on the fact that the producers were caught off-guard by Spock being the bigger sex symbol than Kirk. (History would repeat itself on TNG, where Riker would be cast as the stud, but Sir Patrick Stewart would be the one to be voted TV’s Sexiest Man in TV Guide.)
In a similar vein, Bashir mistaking Freeman for Kirk is an in-joke to the fact that Paul Baxley, who played Freeman, was also William Shatner’s stunt double.
Director Jonathan West, whose background is in cinematography (which is why he was tapped for this one), filmed the episode as if it was 1967, using older-style lenses, lighting, and film stock.
Several lines from the original episode are repeated. Odo’s comment that humanoids like small furry animals that make pleasing sounds matches McCoy’s. Both Sisko and Kirk say, “Storage compartments? Storage compartments?” Dax comes to the same estimate as to the number of tribbles on K-7 that Spock does: 1,771,561.
The designation of the Klingon battle cruisers as being “D-7” was something that was assumed in fan circles for a long time, and used in several technical manuals and games, but this was the first time the designation was used on screen.
Dulmur and Lucscly are (more or less) anagrams of Mulder and Scully, the names of the two leads in The X-Files, which was a hit series on FOX at the time. The scripters managed to resist the urge to have one of them utter that show’s tagline, “The truth is out there” to Sisko.
This episode was novelized by Diane Carey, which also served as a de facto novelization of “The Trouble with Tribbles.” The book also had an introduction by Gerrold and an afterword by Ronald D. Moore.
In one of those weird connection things, Charlie Brill was in the midst of starring as the acerbic Captain Harry Lipshitz in the USA Network series Silk Stalkings when this episode was produced. One of his co-stars, starting in the 1996/97 season, was Janet Gunn, who is an old friend of Michael Dorn’s. As a favor to Gunn, Dorn will appear on an episode of Silk Stalkings the following season.
Darvin’s backstory was told in the second issue of the Blood Will Tell comic book miniseries written by Scott & David Tipton. In a nice touch, at one point when Darvin is walking through a corridor, you can see Sisko walking the other way.
Walk with the Prophets: “I think I’m going to like history.” Every single person who worked on this episode should have received some kind of award. It really is a textbook example of how to do an anniversary episode, how to do fan-service, and how to do it all while still telling a good (if not great) story.
What impressed me most watching it now is how well the SFX hold up. I watched it on DVD on a wide-screen TV, and you could only see the seams occasionally (mostly in the bar fight). You really felt like the crew was right there on the sets from 1967.
So many delightful touches here. The newly solid Odo falling under the same tribble spell that Uhura did. Dax being just as scientifically awesome as Spock while also spending half the episode geebling with nostalgia. Worf’s story of the Great Tribble Hunt, complete with Odo’s obnoxious commentary. The Bashir-O’Brien double-act, which is in rare form from the turbolift confusion to the stress test to Worf smelling like lilac to “your flap is open” to Bashir’s desperate attempt to get laid by his great grandmother to razzing Worf and Odo for spending three hours sitting in a bar. Worf’s non-explanation for the smooth-headed Klingons (which was way more satisfying than the overly complicated one provided in Enterprise’s fourth season). Sisko being all business when necessary and self-indulgent only when the crisis is passed. Odo, ever the detective, seeing the bar fight coming a mile off and refusing to participate.
The glue that ties it together, of course, is Charlie Brill, who plays a surprisingly small role here, but his main function is to be the catalyst, and he serves that function well. His entry to the Defiant is hysterical, gleefully crying, “Humans!” and bitching about Cardassians drinking hot fish juice in the morning. And then he goes full Klingon when Worf and Odo capture him, reveling in finally getting revenge after a century. (Though it’s really hilarious hearing him refer to the Hall of Warriors with his Brooklyn accent.)
That’s not even including the framing sequence, which includes one of the single best additions to the Trek universe: the Department of Temporal Investigations. Because of course there’d be such a thing, given how common time travel is in the Trek universe (Kirk’s crew alone traveled in time on more than half a dozen occasions). And Dulmur and Lucsly are the perfect bureaucrats.
There are flaws, of course, but as with the episode it’s spun off of, complaining about the doors being too slow or the turbolift lights not moving right or the sound effects not tracking a hundred percent, or the fact that we never see Chekov leave the lineup behind Bashir and O’Brien, is churlish. This is a fun episode, it’s good nostalgia, and the characters still are very much like themselves. Great great stuff.
Warp factor rating: 10
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be appearing at Balticon 48 this weekend. When he isn’t doing panels or readings or autographings, he’ll be in the dealer’s room at the Dark Quest Books table, peddling his books (and he’ll have a few copies of The Klingon Art of War for sale, too!). His schedule is here.
Speaking of uniform colors, this is a question that’s always bugged me: Does anyone know why Roddenberry switched the colors for the Operations and Command divisions when TNG got started? I’ve never been able to find a satisfactory explanation.
Prof. Farnsworth: What the hell have you done, Fry?Fry: Relax! She can’t be my grandmother. I figured it all out.Prof. Farnsworth: Of course she’s your grandmother, you perverted dope! Look!Mildred: Come back to bed, deary.Fry: It’s impossible! I mean, if she’s my grandmother, who’s my grandfather?Prof. Farnsworth: Isn’t it obvious?Prof. Farnsworth: You are! – Roswell that ends (futurama), it applies to bashir in this episode
Dax’s legs.
@2, I still crack up at how they later refered to the events of that episode as Fry doing the “Nasty in the Pasty.”
I hope it’s OK that I have nothing substantial to add except to say that I loved this episode.
— Michael A. Burstein
Just an incredible episode…
The number 1,771,561 is not just a random estimate. It happens to be 11 to the 6th power. (A litter of 11 over a period of time sufficient to produce 6 generations.) The space in the storage compartment and the amount of grain consumed might well have been irrelevant.
“Does anyone know why Roddenberry switched the colors for the Operations and Command divisions when TNG got started?”
One answer I heard was that when the cast was being fitted for their uniforms, it was decided that Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes looked better in red than yellow/gold.
I’m glad David Gerrold finally got on-screen. In the book made from his script of the TOS episode, he explains that he wrote the scene with Kirk dresssing down the barfighters just to provide an opportunity for him to be an extra. But the producers decided that he was too scrawny to be a convincing Starfleet ensign.
Sherman’s planet was named after Gerrold’s then-girlfriend.
That’s a wonderful book, by the way, an excellent introduction to the TV scriptwriting of the period.
Some other prose followups:
“The Tribbles’ Pagh” by Ryan M. Williams in Strange New Worlds 09 follows up on the tribble infestation on the station (which spreads to Bajor before a solution is found).
There have been two different novel references to Lt. Watley. A Choice of Catastrophes by Michael Schuster and Steve Mollman alluded to her as Elaine Watley, ship’s historian, though she didn’t appear “onscreen” in the book. However, by the time I read that book, I’d already written her into Forgotten History as science officer Dierdre Watley. So I reconciled things by assuming that Dierdre was the character we saw in “Tribble-ations,” and the unseen Elaine was her sister. (Anyway, both of the 23rd-century starship historians we’ve seen, McGivers and Erickson, wore red for some reason, while Watley was in blue.)
Lucsly and Dulmur also appeared in two stories in Strange New Worlds II, “Gods, Fate and Fractals” by William Leisner and “Almost . . . But Not Quite” by Dayton Ward. There’s also a chapter featuring a version of them in Star Trek Online: The Needs of the Many by Michael A. Martin. All of those works spelled Dulmur’s name “Dulmer,” and TNotM basically portrays the characters as an extended Mulder/Scully homage, even though that’s not how they were actually played onscreen. Bill Leisner correctly discerned that Lucsly and Dulmur are basically Joe Friday and Bill Gannon as time cops, and that strongly informed my own characterization.
This is a fun episode and all, but it does have some flaws. For one thing, there were only 430 people on the Enterprise, so the sudden arrival of four unfamiliar faces should’ve attracted suspicion right away. Also, it doesn’t make sense that Dax never met Spock in person before, considering that Curzon and Spock were in the Federation diplomatic corps together for decades. (Then again, this is the first time Jadzia Dax has met him, so maybe she just means that her memories of Spock filtered through Curzon’s point of view didn’t convey his attractiveness.)
Not to mention the casual treatment of the rather shocking revelation that the Bajorans have an Orb capable of time travel. I mean, TIME TRAVEL!!! That’s a huge, huge deal! And yet DS9 never uses the Orb of Time as anything more than a plot convenience.
And the final shot of Sisko meeting Kirk bugs me, since Avery Brooks is put in place of the rather shorter Barbara Luna, so he’s kind of unnaturally shrunken there.
I also kind of wish the change in the Klingon makeup hadn’t been made explicit. Up until this point, the official position pretty much seemed to be that Klingons had always been ridged despite what TOS depicted. Roddenberry even explicitly said on occasion that what we’d seen on TV had just been a rough approximation and it wasn’t until TMP that they were able to show us what Klingons “really” looked like. “Blood Oath” changing the makeup for Kor, Kang, and Koloth without explanation certainly supported that theory. But they couldn’t do this episode without showing old-style Klingons, so they had to canonize the change, and at that point things started to get kind of fanwanky.
Still, I’m grateful to this episode for introducing Lucsly, Dulmur, and the DTI, and to Jansen and Blessing for creating such memorably deadpan characterizations for me to build on in my DTI books.
Also, Charlie Brill was much, much more interesting here than he was in “The Trouble With Tribbles.” He was a standout among the cast this time. And the compositing FX and the recreations of the sets, costumes, and props were superb.
I love this episode, but I kind of wish they’d never bothered with the DTI (or the framing device, for that matter). I mean, what could they do? If the time travel has already happened, and history has already changed (or not), then they’d never even know there was a “first place” in the first place. It’d just be history. Also, the Mulder/Scully anagram only works in print. I honestly never realized it until reading it here today, despite being a fan of both shows. Still a great episode, though.
I never watched more than the occasional episode of Enterprise, so I’ve not seen that explanation (I really should get round to watching them sometime), but I loved the way the different Klingon makeup was dealt with here. It was essentially an in-universe way of saying “yes, we know, just accept it, okay?”
A fantastic episode to say the least. And correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it this episode that slyly revealed a new Enterprise was being built after the D was destroyed? I remember smiling from ear to ear at that line.
@11: “I kind of wish they’d never bothered with the DTI (or the framing device, for that matter). I mean, what could they do? If the time travel has already happened, and history has already changed (or not), then they’d never even know there was a “first place” in the first place. It’d just be history.”
Well, the returning time travelers would remember the original history, and it’s worth determining if history has, in fact, been changed and if there’s an opportunity or a need to fix it. But as I’ve explored in the books, a lot of the DTI’s work is just an attempt to get a bureaucratic handle on something beyond our control, just as an attempt to feel useful. We may not be able to prevent or understand all of these temporal anomalies and changes, but by gosh, we can at least file thorough reports about them! It’s an attempt to grasp at some semblance of order and control in a mutable and chaotic reality, and that’s just what I find intriguing about it.
Although a lot of what the DTI does, as I’ve defined it in the books, is to try to prevent time travels from occurring in the first place — to regulate temporal research (not banning the pure research, but restricting its practical application, like with nuclear materials/weapons today), to monitor and guard natural time warps, to secure or confiscate time machines that ancient aliens left lying around, etc. Also, Peter David’s New Frontier series established the Temporal Displacement Division, in charge of counseling temporal refugees and helping them adjust to their new era when returning home is not an option.
It doesn’t get better than Terry Farrell in a classic Trek uniform.
I, too, preferred the non-explanation of the Klingons, but I would have liked a non-acknowledgment even better. They could have lampshaded it by having Bashir ask why the Klingons look so strange, and Worf and the experienced humans reply “because clothes were different in those days, silly!”. And Worf could boggle at the 60s hairstyles: “you don’t look like the same species“…
@12 My theory at the time, re the Klingon “smooth vs bumpy,” was that the “smooth” forehead was at the time done surgically as a fashion thing, rather like African-Americans straightening their hair in the 1940s-50s, and which had fallen out of style, and which “modern” Klingons now found deeply embarrassing.
Really, really enjoyed this episode… but I have to go on a rant against the writers for the DS9 folks not recognizing TOS-style Klingons as Klingons.
The episode specifically says that the Dax symbiote was alive at the time, so its then-host surely must have seen Space Mongol Klingons–but either Dax is hiding these memories from Jadzia, or Jadzia doesn’t think to tip off her crewmates about the differences.
While I can buy Worf not wanting to explain the whys of TOS and TNG Klingon differences, I can’t buy that the ultra-honorable warrior wouldn’t have warned his comrades about the differences.
And apparently we have to believe that every official Federation/Star Fleet historical record about Federation-Klingon relations has been edited to retroactively make TOS-era Klingons look like TNG-era Klingons.
/rant
@10, Yeah, the Orb of Time has always bugged me, too. Logically, why didn’t the Bajorans attempt to use it to go back and stop the Occupation. I assume the Vedek Assembly had a similiar Temporal Prime Directive policy.
I like to imagine that at one point in the Trek universe, the DTI was not a part of the timeline, and only appeared as one of the changes to history that the department itself was taxed with documenting.
The only thing that keeps this from being the perfect Star Trek comedy is that it relies somewhat on viewer familiarity with the original episode. But that really only leaves it tiny fractions of a percent behind the original.
Of all the anniversary episodes, this is unquestionably the best. “Relics” was okay, but nothing special. Voyager’s episode was completely unmemorable.
I wouldn’t have minded them using “A Piece of the Action” for the fan service. It would have let Avery Brooks let out his inner Hawk again and Dax would have flaunted a gun moll look in a slinky dress with a slit up to the hip instead of the miniskirt. But they kind of already covered that territory in some of the Dixon Hill episodes on TNG. This, though, was exactly right and exactly what fan service is supposed to be.
Also, it never bothered me that the Bajorans would not use the orb of time to change anything. The Bajoran spiritual relationship to the orbs and the prophets always seemed like it would have prevented that kind of use to me. I always felt the Bajorans treated the orbs as though the artifacts determined their own use, and that forcing a particular use on the orbs would be a massive spiritual violation.
There’s probably canon that proves me wrong, but it’s always been a satisfying explanation for me.
There was a Trill on Earth when McCoy was in college? I had the impression that Trills were new to the Federation when TNG encountered them. This must be explained in those tie-in books, so I suppose I should go look at Memory Beta, but does someone here want to explain? Did they hide their dual nature from the Federation?
Also on the uniform issue: Are the colors mostly arbitrary? I mean in voyager, Tom Paris gets busted down to ensign but remains in red. Warf wears both red and gold at different times IIRC and Tuvok, despite being a liutenent wears gold where paris wore red at the same rank. I dunno because star trek?? In probably missing something.
Hmmmm? Doesn’t know who his great grandfather was?
Attractive single woman on the Enterprise, doesn’t take too many guesses really.
Such a fun episode. I love it.
Bobby
WORF: “We do not discuss it with outsiders.”
Very clever, Mr. “I’ve been discommended twice from the Klingon Empire” Worf! He says that line as if he’s somehow not an outsider himself.
Seriously, this is the best homage ever produced in Trek history. Voyager’s Flashback didn’t even get close.
Hard to say any praise that hasn’t already been said. Everyone was at their A-game for this one: Ira, Robert, Hans, Ron, René, West. and pretty much every single actor.
However, I’m wondering if Kira showing up on the station would have really disturbed the timeline at all. There’s at least one mention of the Federation knowing the Cardassians as far back as Kirk’s era, at least on the J.J. Abrams timeline.
Then again, the Cardassian occupation of Bajor was still a few decades away from this episode (an occupation that lasted 60 years, and ended on TNG’s Chain of Command). So, unless the Bajorans used solar sails, I guess it makes sense to keep Nerys hidden.
I’ve attributed the UFP knowing about the Cardassians in the Alternate Reality to be one of the ripple effects of Nero’s temporal shenenigans, bit that’s just my theory.
I remember at one point reading someone’s theory that, for this episode, the best way of dealing with the whole 60s Klingons/90s Klingons would have been just to put Michael Dorn in the 60s-style makeup and then have no one mention it.
@23,
The color scheme wasn’t related to rank but to department: red for navigation/command, gold for security/engineering, and blue for science/medical. Thus, Paris wore red whether he was a Lieutenant or an Ensign because he was in navigation. Worf wore gold on TNG, where he was Chief of Security, but red on DS9, where he was in the command staff.
I remember being 16 and geeking out over the previews for this episode, so always some good laughs and memories watching this one. Krad, I’m glad you did this and “The Trouble with Tribbles” as a double-feature, as each episode compliments the other perfectly, and its how I would watch the episodes myself. Great to be able to share this experience.
benji21: the colors have absolutely nothing to do with rank, they have to do with which of the three sections you work in: command (gold in the 23rd century, red in the 24th), sciences (blue), or operations (red in the 23rd, gold in the 24th).
Ranks are indicated in other ways, either by the braids on your cuff (23rd) or the pips on your collar (24th).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As for “Flashback” tomorrow, it may be the only Voyager episode krad does a rewatch for here, and since I’ve been watching DS9 and Voyager the way they aired originally, even better. “Flashback”, I admit, doesn’t compare to this, but it will be great to cover it in this rewatch regardless.
@22: TNG’s “The Host” established that the Trill had been known to the Federation for decades but had kept their nature secret. But then, DS9 pretty much ignored everything “The Host” established about the Trill anyway, including the idea that the Trill’s joined nature had ever been secret. They didn’t explicitly contradict that, but they didn’t acknowledge it either.
@27: According to DS9: “Destiny,” Tobin Dax, who lived in the 22nd century (and is a character in my Enterprise novels), met the exiled Cardassian poet Iloja of Prim on Vulcan. So Federation members were aware of the Cardassian species in the 22nd century, presumably through far-ranging spacefarers, although formal contact with the Cardassian government doesn’t seem to have begun until the late 23rd century.
There you go about the Cardassians; never mind.
As to “Flashback”, yeah, it doesn’t hold a candle to this, but I still count it among my Top 10 VOY episodes given TUC is my favorite Trek film.
So, even with the continuity errors, it was still a fun interquel and a chance to see more of what was going happening on Sulu’s end.
@10 hints at another reason for Uhura’s shocked expression; maybe she’s the only one who immediately realized that Sisko is not on the crew (it amuses me to think that Kirk himself can’t recognize most of the Little People).
IIRC, one of the Shatnerverse novels mentions “the mystery of the disappearing Lieutenant” which vexed the Enterprise crew (and was solved when resurrected-Kirk found out about this adventure).
@10 & 18, I always assumed that the Orbs worked like Avalon’s magic in Gargoyles –it doesn’t take you where you want to go, it sends you where you need to be.
I’m sure someone has tried to use the Orb of Time to prevent the Occupation, but it just refuses to activate for them.
Incidentally, this episode has my favorite line (or at least favorite Odo line) of the entire series:
“Tell me, do they still sing songs of The Great Tribble Hunt?”
It’s the way Rene Auberjonois delivered that line which cracks me up every time.
34, Yes, the ressurected Kirk recognizes Sisko (and figures out what happened) from a Dominion War newscast during Spectre.
This is one of my favorite DS9 episodes and one of the best anniversary homages I’ve seen. It’s great fun and makes me smile because you know TRIBBLES YEAH! Just think now DS9 has a “new” secret weapon to use if the Klingons attack the station.
Gold became Engineering department color by the “Wrath of Khan” uniform designs while Command was white since TMP. They had also broken out a number a number of subdepartments into their own colors in the movie uniforms. I suppose you explain as when Starfleet simplified the uniforms just prior to the TNG era red had been so associated with the look of the fleet that it was made the Command department color and gold was retained for Engineering.
Starfleet’s Uniform Bureau needed to justify their existence somehow, so they would change uniform styles and colors every so often and make some ca$h (or whatever when all hands had to buy another complete set.
Something similar has to be the explanation for the current USN adopting Aquaflage.
@39: I’d just like to point out the logical extension to all this uniform weirdness.
In Star Trek Online, which takes place in the main Trek universe sometime after Spock departed for timelines unknown, players can clothe their avatars in whatever Star Trek uniform they want to, all the way from Enterprise to new designs invented after the last TNG-era series was over. In the real world, this would be functionally equivalent to US Army soldiers showing up for work dressed as Revolutionary or Civil War reenactors just because they felt like it.
So, sometime after all the shows are over, the Starfleet Uniform Bureau effectively throws up their hands and says, “Who gives a shit?”
@34,
Uhura was temporarily assigned to the Lexington in the novel “The Disinherited” so she’s probably wondering why she never met one of the command lieutenants over there.
When this episode aired, I was in graduate school and a bunch of us watched it together. I will never forget it since it was just such a fun night. We all were so amazed at how well they integrated DS9 into the old episode.. Of course this was before we did much with the internet so we all geeked out over the Dax and Klingon references etc… I watched it again last night, and I am glad it still holds up so well.
This episode is utterly fantastic even if you’ve never seen the original. I mean, I had seen a few eps of the original series, but it wasn’t until watching this one once that I tracked down the original. Super job.
On the other hand, I have watched Voyager, probably twice and their 30 years show doesn’t twig in my memory at all.
I’m pretty sure that I read a novelization of “The Trouble with Tribbles” as a teenager from one of the volumes done by James Blish.
Someday, I hope to see my dream come true:
The image of a Borg Tribble.
Could the Borg assimilate them fast enough?
@17 I never thought about all the reasons why 24th century characters should be aware of the appearance of the 23rd century Klingons, perhaps because I enjoy Worf’s “We don’t discuss it with outsiders” line so much! You’re right of course, everyone should be familiar with the change.
Anyway, I much prefer DS9’s solution to Enterprise’s explanation of the inconsistency.
I loved this episode. Kirks snark at the station administrator was a lot of fun, as was Dax’s longing for Spock. The whole show was a lot of fun, and I’m not much of a TOS fan.
@46 My knowledge of how late 19th and early 20th century people dressed is very limited, and comes from TV/movies. I couldn’t begin to tell you how turn of the 20th century French or Scandinavian or Aisan people dressed, or what their military uniforms look like. It’s not far fetched that the Defiant crew would have a very limited idea of what other cultures looked like a hundred years ago.
Minor nitpick: wouldn’t the enterprise notice the exploding tribble and start asking questions??
I have yet to see this episode of DS9. I have read the book, checked out clips on You Tube, and I guess I’ll have to buy the complete series if I want to catch up with the rest of the world (18 years later), sigh!!
@48: Actually, check out http://www.cbs.com/shows/star_trek_deep_space_9/ …
@20:
Actually, Demetrios, had they gone with “A Piece of the Action” as the reference point for this episode there wouldn’t have been any of the 1920s mobster motifs in use. The idea was that the Defiant would visit Sigma Iota II, the “Gangster Planet” from the original series. There they would discover that the native Iotians, who were such an imitative culture that they completely made over the entire world to resemble a single book, Chicago Mobs of the Twenties (left behind by the starship Horizon) had, in the century since the Enterprise’s visit, transformed again – this time to totally mimic Kirk and company in dress, behavior and technology. Essentially it was a contrivance to have the “DS9” crew encounter a planet full of TOS Trekkies.
I don’t know what they had in mind for “Charlie X”.
@50: And a story very much like that, but with the TNG crew visiting Iotia instead, was published as the final issue of Marvel Comics’ Star Trek Unlimited in July 1998. I wonder if writers Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels were influenced by the unused DS9 anniversary idea.
I first saw this episode a few years ago when going through the Time Travel DVD collective; so it was fun to watch it again now that I am more familiar with the characters. I have never actually seen the original episode (and to be honest, I don’t plan to after reading the summary – it doesn’t actually sound that funny to me) but this is still a fun episode. I am still impressed with how well they are incoropriated into the footage, and despite the various inconsistencies (I also had a hard time buying that nobody would wonder who all these new people are), it’s fun, and an improvement on the original episode (in my opinion).
Yes a million times to Odo’s ‘Great Tribble Hunt’ line, which is even funnier now with the character backstory.
I wonder what they will do with all those tribbles? I wonder if they would have a soothing influence on Founders (I’m assuming they worked on Odo because he’s human). Or better yet, the Borg. Maybe assimilating Tribbles would be good for them ;)
Okay, I hate to be the negative one, but Bashir’s ‘I’m going to like history’ line really kind of bugged me. It’s such a Bashir-y thing to say. I know that it’s just intended to pay homage to the uniform (and she absolutely looks cute in it), and probably in the original series it was meant to indicate that society had progressed enough that women could wear whatever they wanted without being shamed or harmed (or maybe Roddenberry was just a bit of a lech…). But living in the society we do now, it just came off as “I’m going to like a period of time when women pranced around in clothes tailored for my gaze”. It’s possible I have this kind of thing on my mind given recent events and discussions I’ve been in and projecting based on that.
@52: In the sixties, miniskirts were seen as an empowering and progressive attire for women. Previously, they’d been expected to be modest and inhibited and to faint dead away at the mere mention of anything sexual — which ceded all control of sexual interactions to men. So for women to acknowledge and embrace their sexuality openly gave them a degree of control over it they hadn’t had before, let them use it on their own terms for a change.
I believe it was actually Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman Rand and was effectively the female lead in the first 1/3 of the first season, who requested to wear a miniskirt rather than pants.
But yes, Roddenberry was more than a bit of a lech. He was always very concerned with, umm, saving money on women’s costuming by reducing the amount of fabric required to make it. So it may have been Whitney’s suggestion, but I doubt she had to twist his arm.
Interesting how such things can be a double edged sword…kind of sad that we aren’t even there yet in terms of how we can express our femininity…either we’re not feminine enough, or it’s too much.
As I said, recent events/discussions (elsewhere, not on Tor) have me a bit upset/touchy on this subject…
I just watched this episode for the third or fourth time. I first saw it when it originally aired, clutching a tribble that I’d been handed in a giveaway at a transit station as part of the promotion for the show. My then-spouse and a friend watched with me, and we all held our breath to see how Worf would explain why the other Klingons in the bar didn’t look like him. As we waited, we imagined all other fans simultaneously on the edge of their seats waiting for the big reveal. (As much as I appreciate on-demand television – as I now get all of my TV from Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube – there’s something to be said for everyone watching the same episode at the same time.)
I thought Worf’s response was perfect. As for Entrerprise’s final answer, I only watched a few episodes of that series before getting sick of it, but I do plan to watch all of it for completionist purposes when I’m done with my DS9 and Voyager rewatches. I doubt from what I’ve read that I’ll be more impressed with the Augment virus than Worf’s “We do not discuss it with outsiders.”
Watching this episode midway through my DS9 rewatch made me appreciate all of the character moments even more, especially the interactions between O’Brien and Bashir. Just a perfect piece of television; definitely in my top five for the series. (The original Trouble with Tribbles was my favorite episode of TOS.)
Actually, you do see Chekov leave the room behind Bashir and O’Brien, but it’s a double who can’t enter the hallway directly with the DS9 cast members or he would be very obviously a double. So, he enters the hallway a few moments later ensuring he is out of focus and sharply turns the corner away from camera as the door closes behind him. Technical decision.
As for the gimmickry of splicing the TOG footage with DS9, well done. And not overdone. Hit it just right.
For those insiders among the commenters, I’m wondering if anything in particular occurred with Terry Farrell or the concept of the Dax character sometime earlier during this season. In a way I can’t quite define, the Dax character seems so much “more” this season. Whether it’s being sciency, or aggressive and tough-minded, or sexy and flirtatious, Farrell punched it up without going over the top – the little gesture to raise her eyebrows and give that mischievous wistful little look when she recalled McCoy’s hands was just perfect. And there are a lot of those little moments this season. The character has been steadily evolving over the seasons, but just in the last few episodes I can’t keep my eyes off her, and not just because she’s lovely.
TOS not TOG. :(
A pity they couldn’t squeeze in my favourite line from The Trouble With Tribbles, that Kirk is a swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood, which is a much better insult than being called a Debebian slime devil. Would this incident with the Tribbles count as another of Kirk’s temporal violations? It’s a bit vague how the Orb of Time was used to get to the 23rd Century and back again. Why did the exploding Tribble go unnoticed? Dulmer and Lucsley don’t say the truth is out there but they do say they want the truth.
1: Maybe they felt red was a more commanding colour than gold? 2: It was called Roswell That Ends Well. 8: We don’t get to see Riker in gold until Second Chances but Jonathan Frakes does suit the red uniform better. 26: Worf and Darvin are both dressed like civilians and they’re both outcasts in the Empire which is probably the point. Before Robert Zemeckis made Forrest Gump, he did similar things with splicing actors into pre-existing footage on Back to the Future II which Trials and Tribble-ations reminded me a lot more of.
@59/David Sim: Sisko, on the other hand, looks really good in gold.
A nice retrospective bit of trivia since then: during the episode, Dax is very open to Sisko about finding Spock attractive. Terry Farrell has since married Adam Nimoy, who has at least some resemblance to his late father.
I’m still watching this episode, but I guess it’s safe to say that THIS is how you do a crossover episode with the first Enterprise show. This is genius! And I’m loving every minute of it so far! :D
Lockdown Rewatch. I must admit I have watched this episode a few times since I saw it originally along With a couple of episodes in season six which I will get to at a later point. This is my third favourite episode of DS9. In my top 10 episodes of all Trek. Just an absolute joy from start to finish every performance is sublime and not a scene or line wasted. (My other two favourite episodes are to say the least somewhat darker than this one.) This is the perfect comedic episode of DS9. Superb.
The only nitpick I have with this episode is how young Darvin still looks. I know medical technology is fantastic in the 24th century but the dude should be at least 130 by this time.
@64/kradeiz: He’s a 130-ish Klingon, though. Like Kor, Kang, and Koloth in “Blood Oath.” Just because he was surgically altered to look human (or was QuchHa’ to begin with) doesn’t mean he was given a human life expectancy.
@65/CLB: True, though it makes me curious for more details in exactly what Klingon life cycles are like. Between Alexander becoming a young adult in ten years and the TOS Klingons able to break 120 and still kick ass.
@66/kradeiz: There’s no reason why rapid maturation is inconsistent with prolonged maturity or slow senescence. To oversimplify greatly, there are two opposite processes involved, cell growth and cell decay/death. In childhood, growth dominates; in maturity, the two are roughly balanced; and in senescence, decay dominates. So it kind of stands to reason (at least by the loose standards of a universe where humanoid aliens exist at all) that if you shift the balance in favor of growth, it could lead to both faster maturation and slower/later deterioration.
@67/CLB: Fair point. The idea of aliens with different growth rates offers a variety of different perspectives, even if Trek usually used it to handwave a baby or small child growing into an older (and more potentially interesting) child or a character who should have died of old age long ago still being around.
One piece of homage that hasn’t been mentioned is that the image of Quark with his chin resting on his right hand looking bemused looks a lot like Kelly Freas’ classic cover for Martians, Go Home
I believe it was intentional similarity.
Just rewatched this. One thing I found particularly amusing was Dax chucking a tribble over her shoulder, then the scene cutting to Kirk standing engulfed by tribbles and having one (ostensibly Dax’s) come out of the bin and bonk him on the head :D
PS when this episode was wrapping up it said Kirk was able to uncover Darvin. He has McCoy go scan Darvin, and it goes from “Bones?” to his scan and McCoy saying “Jim, this man is a Klingon!”. I said to my wife heyyyyy they cut him mumbling about stuff being wrong and jumped right to that line! That stood out to me even though I haven’t seen the original episode in God only knows how long. She just rolled her eyes and called me a nerd lol
An interesting question that occurred to me is how drastic would setting a new trend in hairstyles affect the timeline 105 years hence. If Sisko’s crew hadn’t bothered to adopt contemporary hairdos and somehow a new trend developed, how messed up would things be when they got back. Actually, upon further thought, it’d be hilarious if when they returned to the 24th century, every Starfleet officer on the station had their heads shaved!