A strange anomaly appears near the station and at the same time, members of the crew begin inadvertently conjuring people and objects from their imaginations. The crew must discover the link between the two phenomena and find a solution before the expanding anomaly destroys the station...and the entire Bajoran system.
This is a whimsical and mostly entertaining episode with a ton of technobabble but not much story. It’s more lighthearted and fun than your typical DS9 episode, but ultimately inconsequential and pointless.
THE GOOD
- It’s fun to see the different encounters that the crew imagines. Odo fantasizing about Quark being in jail is perfect.
- ”Commander is there something you’d like to tell me?” “I don’t have time for games, Odo.” Sisko is the best.
- Buck Bokai is strangely charismatic, even if he is the most unathletic-looking professional athlete imaginable. I’m glad they bring him back for other eps.
THE BAD
- The plot is silly and pointless.
- The imaginary Dax draping herself all over Bashir is...yeesh. Tough to watch.
THE UGLY
- Buck Bokai is the baseball player referenced by Data in the TNG season 1 episode “The Big Goodbye.” Data says that he broke Joe DiMaggio’s streak of consecutive games with a hit, which Buck also references himself doing.
- It’s a dangerous gamble that Sisko takes when he refuses to consider the deal with Rumplestiltskin. He says the system is in no danger, but everything in the ep indicates that the imagined objects became completely real. If the rift was real too, the system was actually in great danger. But if the aliens had the power to create an anomaly like that, they must be extremely powerful, almost Q-like. One would hope that they wouldn’t allow their power to be used to arbitrarily wipe out an entire system, but their enigmatic nature makes it impossible to say one way or the other.
- Thoron is an isotope of the radioactive noble gas radon. It occurs naturally as part of the reaction chain of certain isotopes of thorium decaying into lead. Why the aliens would be emitting thoron I can’t even begin to guess.
- Going off the above point, there is a lot of technobabble in this ep and frankly none of it makes sense. Even though I have good deal of basic knowledge in many different science disciplines, I couldn’t find much, if any, real science behind the technobabble and I’m pretty sure it was all gibberish.
- The aliens tease returning “next year” but they never appear again. Probably for the best.
