DS9 Spoiler: Lynch's Spoiler Review: "Melora"
Tim Lynch
Review by Tim Lynch <tly...@juliet.caltech.edu>
===============================================
WARNING: This article contains large amounts of spoilers for DS9's "Melora",
bouncing around all over the place. Brace yourself.
In brief: I'd say "stop it, that's too silly", but often when I say that I'm
amused. This was pretty much a waste.
Given the high quality of DS9 (excluding "Invasive Procedures"), I suppose
they were due for a clunker -- and boy, was this it in spades.
Just for starters, I didn't buy the premise *at all*. While this was clearly
meant to be a show about dealing with disabilities, the choice they made for
an "SF twist" was nonsensical.
If Melora is used to a low-grav environment, then returning to that low-grav
environment means that she could walk around normally. If she can fly
around, it's not low gravity -- it's zero-gravity, and there's no way she
grew up on a planet with no gravity. (First of all, the planet has mass, and
second of all there's no way she'd have a humanoid shape if her race evolved
somewhere with microgravity.) So, the entire "I need to live in a low-grav
environment -- wanna come fly with me?" premise was silly.
Second, having Bashir marvel so much at a zero-g environment isn't
inspirational and gee-whiz, it's stupid. The man lives and works in *space*,
and the gravity on whatever ship or station he works on is *artificial*.
It's possible (and easy, as shown in the episode itself) for that gravity to
fail -- if Starfleet doesn't have some sort of zero-gravity training ground
as standard procedure for all its cadets, then it's incompetent. It may have
made for a cute scene, but it flies in the face of every single bit of common
sense imaginable.
Okay, enough of the premise. Taking the premise as a given, how did the rest
of the show work?
Well, its heart was more or less in the right place, but "clunky" comes to
mind as the right adjective. The way in which the two plots (completely
unconnected -- usually a bad sign) combined was completely contrived, for
instance, and served to simply finish the job of snapping my suspenders-of-
disbelief clean off.
Almost everything here was delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Want to show Melora's independent? Have her and everyone else around her
remark on just how determined she is to be independent, and have her bite off
everybody's head. Want to have her warm to Bashir? Have her jump him about
twenty-four hours after they've first met, then talk to Dax about making
romance work in a scene that doesn't connect to anything else. Want to
demonstrate that "curing" a disability is sometimes the wrong choice? Have
Bashir use Melora for a guinea pig. And so on, and so on.
>From the writing credits, it seems the script for this show went through two
full rewrites. It needed at least one more.
I think Daphne Ashbrook did the best job she could under the circumstances,
but those circumstances were pretty atrocious. With lines like "No one can
understand until they sit in the chair" and her whole speech about how
absolutely committed she was to leaving her homeworld, "Ensign Exposition"
would have been a more apt name. The one scene where she absolutely shone
was in the first exchange with the Klingon chef (which I loved), but for most
of the rest she was trying to play a character that was little more than a
message-of-the-week. Characters like that simply don't work, ninety-nine
times out of a hundred.
As a Bashir story, "Melora" was mixed. The bits revealed about Bashir's past
were a little offputting (or maybe it was just the delivery that seemed a bit
off), but certainly seemed to fit the Bashir we already knew. His approach
to befriending Melora was unsubtle even for him, which I disliked. His
attitude towards the treatments was pretty in character, but his final
reaction to Melora's rejection of them was *not*. He wasn't taking things in
stride there, he was being a zombie. As I said, pretty mixed.
As for the Quark plot -- also mixed. I might have enjoyed it more had this
show taken place _before_ "Invasive Procedures". As it is, it's obvious that
Quark's actions in that show have had precisely zero effect on his status on
the station (just as I feared), and that took away a lot of the enjoyment the
plot might otherwise have given.
One highlight of the Quark plot, though, had to be the scene when he reports
his fears to Odo. Odo's smirk when Quark says Fallit wants to kill him is
absolutely priceless. That, combined with the line about how Odo would buy a
piece of Quark if he were killed, pretty much made up the highlight of the
storyline.
As I've said before, it's a little disheartening when a good point to a show
is "well, it didn't make THIS mistake." Unfortunately, such is the case
here. There are two mistakes I'm glad the show didn't make:
-- It recognized that an effect of Bashir's treatment would be to exile
Melora from home, and
-- Given that, it at least gave Melora an actual choice to make.
Other than that, though, there's not much left to recommend this show. It
was so single-minded and silly as to be almost intrusive about it, which is
something I haven't seen in DS9 except in a very few cases ("Q-Less", for
instance). Even "The Passenger" had more panache about it than this one.
So, a few short takes and then I'm gone:
-- Quark's servility was amusing at first ("what better way to molli -- er --
satisfy...), but got old very quickly. Also, while his not-very-veiled offer
of prostitutes to Fallit made a lot of sense, I thought the gratuitous
"Breasts-R-Us" closeup in the dinner scene was a trifle ... tacky.
-- The necessity for the old-fashioned wheelchair and for not using
transporters on Melora was explained adequately, if lacking a certain style.
-- The "side-effect" of making Melora phaser-proof was the biggest
deus-ex-machina bit of hogwash I've seen from Trek in a long, long time. It
made no sense, and will never be brought up again (I hope). What were they
thinking?
-- I trust everyone else thought of the same "playing doctor" jokes we did...
That pretty much takes care of that. I was, to put it mildly, not impressed.
So, to sum up:
Plot: Bare-bones and made to drive home Every Point Very Very Strongly.
"The Outcast", only less subtle.
Plot Handling: Aside from a couple of chair's-eye shots, nothing to speak
of at all in the direction.
Characterization: Iffy Bashir, good Odo, everyone else uninspired, and
Melora the Plot Device.
OVERALL: A 2.5. Distressingly bad -- avoid unless you're a completist or a
big Bashir fan.
NEXT WEEK:
The Grand Nagus returns, and Quark is apparently accosted by a giant mutant
Oompa-Loompa.
Tim Lynch (Harvard-Westlake School, Science Dept.)
BITNET: tlynch@citjulie
INTERNET: tly...@juliet.caltech.edu
UUCP: ...!ucbvax!tlynch%juliet.ca...@hamlet.caltech.edu
"Am I missing a choice here, Fallit?"
-- Quark
--
Copyright 1993, Timothy W. Lynch. All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...