Q-Less (⭑)

Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. An episode written by Hannah Louise Shearer (who penned a number of terrible TNG episodes in its first few years, including “Pen Pals” and “The Price”), and starting from a deeply misguided TNG-copycat premise (“let’s bring Q—and Vash—to DS9!”), was bound to be terrible—but somehow, the end result is actually even worse than one might have expected. Alas, in “Q-Less” we have DS9’s first total bomb…though honestly, it hardly even feels like it is a DS9 episode.

Where to even begin? Well, with Q, I suppose. Before even getting to the more specific criticisms (of which there are many), there’s the general fact that, as far as I’m concerned, Q should never have appeared on any other Trek show than TNG. Look, crossovers and guest appearances can be fun, and I’m certainly not against them, but they need to a) make sense, and b) serve a meaningful narrative purpose—and if they don’t do both of these things, then they shouldn’t happen. Q is an enigmatic, quasi-all-powerful entity from some “out there” plane of existence who does not spend most of his time hanging around with ordinary humanoid life forms, or even in our galaxy. Among his (presumably many and varied) interests/pastimes/pet projects, he chanced to develop an interest in toying with and/or helping/guiding Jean-Luc Picard, and thus became an occasionally recurring visitor to the Enterprise. This, however, does not justify having him show up on other Starfleet installations. To depict him as doing so diminishes him, and makes him—a character who is already a bit much to buy into—strain plausibility even further. And of course, the meta-coincidence of him only popping in on those Starfleet personnel who happen to be the focus of a TV show (after all, he’ll eventually show up on Voyager (barf) as well) is dumber still. Interestingly, teleplay writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe (who would go on to become one of DS9’s most prolific episode writers) seems to recognize some of these points. In the DS9 Companion‘s write-up of “Q-Less,” Wolfe is described as relating that he found it hard to work Q, who was “so TNG-oriented, and so Picard-specific,” into DS9, and have him relate meaningfully to the show’s characters. So why even attempt it? Well, in that same write-up, eventual DS9 executive producer/showrunner Ira Stephen Behr (whose role on the show at this early stage was as yet smaller) explains that “At the beginning of the series, we were directed to ‘show that we’re still part of the Star Trek universe’ by bringing over people from the other series.” He doesn’t specify who did this “directing,” but I would have to go with Rick Berman as the most likely candidate. (That said, I hesitate to absolve Behr of blame for this episode; he’s not credited as a writer on it, but as the writer who is responsible for the existence of Vash as a character, I strongly suspect that he played some role here.) So, in any case, I strongly feel that bringing Q onto DS9 (as much as I do love him as a character) was a stupid idea from the get-go.

I mean, okay…they did actually come up with a rationale for his visit that makes more sense than just “he decided to drop in on the new show,” or whatever. Because, of course, the starting point for the story is that Dax finds Vash in the gamma quadrant and brings her back to the station; Q then shows up not because of any interest in our people, but because Vash has washed up here. But this is its own kind of terrible, and doesn’t actually make his presence any better. Again, Q is supposed to be an enigmatic and almost godlike figure who is “above the fray” of ordinary humanoid foibles and mundane interpersonal drama; he exists to challenge, provoke, and surreptitiously guide our people (well, Picard), and, as I’ve said before, he works best when his motives are kept somewhat ambiguous. What does not work at all is turning him into a sniveling whiner, reduced to doggedly pursuing some random human who wants nothing to do with him and begging her to be his companion for reasons that aren’t at all clear. I mean, what the hell? Q seems all too human, and frankly like a petulant loser, in this episode; properly characterized, he is so far above the kind of behavior he exhibits in it. (Incidentally, this was not lost on John de Lancie, who is described in the DS9 Companion as questioning the basis of Q’s interest in Vash, and even remarking “I think that Q is best used when he deals with large philosophical issues, and skirt-chasing just isn’t one of them.” Amen to that!)¹ Plus…did we really need to watch Q and Vash engage in the exact same back-and-forth exchange of bickering something like four separate times throughout the episode? And if we had to have this story thread about Vash wanting to part ways with Q and Q pursuing her, couldn’t we at least have heard something from Vash about why she’s so fed up with Q, and what exactly made her decide to call an end to her time with him? As it is, she just keeps repeating the same generic cliches ad nauseam (“It’s over, Q! I can take care of myself!” etc.), while Q, for his part, persists in trying to tempt, cajole, or bully her into changing her mind. It’s repetitive, vacuous, and intolerable.

In between all of this drivel, the episode does, of course, also devote some time to having Q interact with the show’s regular characters, and in particular with Sisko. Unfortunately, this material is also terrible. As I mentioned, Robert Hewitt Wolfe acknowledged finding it difficult to play Q off of DS9’s characters. His “solution,” again according to the DS9 Companion, was to try to use Q to underline the differences between Sisko and Picard. But even aside from the fact that this pushes the motif of Q flirting with breaking the fourth wall too far for my tastes (again, creating the impression that the real reason he came to DS9 was to check out the new show and our new commander), it just completely falls flat. To be sure, the one bit of this episode that lodged itself in my memory from my first viewing of it (and I do think I saw this one when it originally aired, which is only true of a handful of this season’s episodes) was Sisko punching Q, Q exclaiming “Picard never hit me!”, and Sisko retorting “I’m not Picard.” The writers, and even de Lancie, seem to think this exchange clever, and to imagine that it conveys something meaningful about the differences between the two characters. But I don’t! I’ll grant that Sisko is a less “cerebral” character than Picard, but I think it’s wildly unfair to Sisko to characterize him as being more inclined to haul off and punch someone than to match wits with them. And notice how egregiously the episode cheats in order to set this alleged contrast up? Because it’s not as though Sisko just up and punches Q out of the blue, because his temper gets the better of him. For chrissake, Q conjures the two of them into a makeshift boxing ring, and then he punches Sisko no fewer than four times, all while taunting him and urging him to fight back…and only then, in self-defense and because it doesn’t appear as though Q is going to cut the crap otherwise, does Sisko eventually slug him. This context kind of matters, no? Or are we to imagine that Picard, in this same scenario, would have just stood there trying to speechify while Q pummeled him? What a fucking stupid scene. And most of the other Q/Sisko interactions similarly strike a discordant tone, for me. Yes, Q typically needles Picard, and hurls insulting remarks at the other TNG characters (“Eat any good books lately?” to Worf, etc.), but the barbs that he aims at Sisko land differently, to my ears. It’s partly that they seem gratuitous; he’s just indulging in this for the hell of it, as opposed to his usual TNG shtick of acting like he’s merely jerking the characters around, but doing so in a way that might be cover for a more benign agenda. But I think the difference also has something to do with the actual differences between the two shows. It’s one thing for a Q figure to show up and poke fun at the “best and brightest” officers of Starfleet’s flagship, who are all happy to be where they are; they can take a bit of deflation of their noble images. But to poke fun at Sisko over his assignment to DS9 (an assignment that he himself was none too sure about, at first), or to quip that “Picard and his lackeys would have solved all this technobabble hours ago,” and even add the stinger “No wonder you’re not commanding a starship”—all of this just feels cruel, in a way that isn’t really any fun. Honestly, it almost reads as the writers dissing their own show. It certainly doesn’t serve any worthwhile purpose, and I really don’t like it.

And then, you know what else doesn’t really work in this episode? Almost everything else, that’s what. For instance, the minute we learn that Vash has turned up in the gamma quadrant, any regular watcher of TNG ought to be able to guess that Q is going to show up—and even if not, the episode goes ahead and shows its hand by having him appear at the end of the teaser. But the regular characters don’t become aware of Q’s presence until about twenty minutes into the episode. To what end? None, other than to allow the writers to fill up time by having the characters spin their wheels wondering how some random human managed to end up in the gamma quadrant without going through the wormhole, while the audience already knows the (boring) answer the whole time. From a plot perspective, it seems like O’Brien should have been able to figure it out sooner; at first, you tell yourself “well, maybe he doesn’t know the details of what went down in “Qpid,” but then after he sees Q, he tells Sisko and the others about Vash meeting Q on the Enterprise (or rather, in Sherwood Forest). And sure, we can still fall back on “okay, but maybe he didn’t know that she went off with Q at the end”—but however any of that may be, from a storytelling perspective this is all just dumb and inept. The characters think they have a mystery to solve, but it’s actually just filler…and this ends up being the second consecutive episode to tease the idea of our beginning to learn about the gamma quadrant, only for this to amount to nothing. Then there’s Vash herself, who has always been a problematic character: a regular-ass Federation human who, for some reason, is kind of unscrupulous and is motivated primarily by the prospect of financial gain, despite living in a society in which (supposedly) this doesn’t really make sense. I experience actual embarrassment on Picard’s behalf in this episode when O’Brien tells Sisko (whose feelings toward the Enterprise‘s captain are already not the most charitable) about Vash and Picard having a romantic history—but Sisko’s response shows him to somehow be a good deal more perceptive than either O’Brien or the writers (well, Ira Stephen Behr, anyway), since he, at least, recognizes immediately that she hardly seems “his type.” I also never liked the idea of her going off with Q, as I talked about in my “Qpid” review. I will say, though, that one character that she actually does play reasonably well against is Quark. I always find “oo-mox” scenes to be uncomfortable and in poor taste, but apart from those bits, I don’t hate the parts of this episode that feature Vash and Quark dealing and scheming together (apart, that is, from my objections to the whole idea of Vash being such a profit-chaser in the first place). Still, when this is as close as an episode comes to having an engaging narrative thread in it, we’re not doing well. Q is weirdly incidental to the episode’s story, and the station-in-jeopardy plot that eventually materializes is lame as shit (endless dithering with sensors that for some reason suck too much to be able to pinpoint the problem, but wait, what if we do technobabble thing x, etc., all just to manufacture the moment whewre Sisko and Dax show up to the artifact auction and beam the thingamajig away right after someone has promised to pay Quark a fortune for it), so “Vash and Quark team up for mutual profit” is about as much actual story as the episode has to offer. That the artifact turns out to be some kind of life form comes out of nowhere and immediately goes right back there, narratively; it’s all a bit “so what?” (Also, shouldn’t there be sensors or security filters or whatever that notice when objects as dangerous as this one are brought aboard?) And in the end, even Vash’s basic motivations (I hesitate to go so far as to use the term “arc”) resist analysis. She spends most of the episode rebuffing Q’s constant efforts to tempt her into this or that adventure, and then, at the end, turns down a similar proposition from Quark…only to, just a moment later, reverse course and show interest in what Quark was laying down. Why? What changed, to make her uninterested one minute and pulled in the next? Who is Vash? What’s the story here? None of these questions have satisfactory answers.

There’s also a sort of tedious and un-funny thread with Bashir trying to woo Vash, and Q shooing him away and making him really sleepy, so that he apparently sleeps through most of the episode’s events. Whatever. On the other hand…I definitely did not remember that it was this, of all episodes, in which we first hear of the doctor’s having missed making valedictorian due to mistaking a preganglionic fiber for a postganglionic nerve—a bit of lore that, if memory serves, will resurface more than once down the road. So…there’s that, I guess?

1. It’s wild that TNG’s “Tapestry” aired just one week after this piece of trash. The contrast between these two episodes, in terms of both Q’s characterization and the sorts of narrative purposes that he serves in each, could not be more stark. ↩︎