Odo: "Hmmm. Sisko's father eh? You look a lot like infamous Starfleet conspirator Admiral Cartwright." Daddy Sisko: "And you look a lot like infamous assassin Colonel West." Odo: "Touché."
That Sisko/Odo bit about regretting tfinding Odo's people really hit hard for me. You could FEEL the anguish and the sincereity from both. They respect each other enough to be honest, even when that honesty is so devestatingly deep.
My favorite thing about the Layton-Odo scene is that it's the first time you see Odo and him interact without Sisko there, so you buy Layton just hates him until the twist is revealed.
Refreshing to hear this POV in the polarized climate. You make a good point about being able to empathize with others veiws without having to release your own
I think what makes this episode so much stronger is that there were already instances of this kind of thing happening prior to 9/11. IRA terrorists often planted bombs into public bins so you could not find a public bin in any London train station until the Year 2000 or so. I remember being really annoyed with that as a kid.
I do wonder how many Americans know about the IRA (probably more during the DS9 run than nowadays)? Even in the UK, people seem to have forgotten: after the Brexit-referendum, none of my English colleagues cared about what this could mean for Northern Ireland and all of them had actually lived through the Troubles!
The London Transport Museum depot has various artifacts from the past. Including a collection of bins. There's a strange feeling going to a museum and seeing dustbins. Just normal bins.
@@alfje5492 You noticed that people completely forgot that Northern Ireland was a tense zone as thick as caramel during the referendum too? The lack of discussion on it was deafening...
I massively, highly recommend the relatively recent Autobiography of Ben Sisko book if you really wanna get into the weeds of early pre-DS9 Ben. Does an excellent job in digging deeper into the stories established in Homefront/Paradise Lost such as his upbringing, the Sisko family, and Leyton.
I would say that there's a calculus that is ignored here. In Star Trek, they are dealing with literal threats to the world. Adjusting your definition of freedom vs security in the face of that kind of threat is a lot easier pill to swallow. As opposed to doing so to prevent tragic, yet non-world threatening, terrorist attacks.
It'll never cease to be amusing to me how the actor who played the admiral here, has a very similar, if somewhat mirrored role in Babylon 5. Here his good intentions lead him to taking bad actions against a good government, while in Babylon 5 his good intentions lead him to take "good" actions against an evil government, to massively oversimplify both settings. ^^
Funny enough, Robert Foxworth was originally set to reprise his role on Babylon 5, but his agent double-booked him and Foxworth decided to film "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost" instead of his prior commitment. J. Michael Straczynski said he could have tried to force him to stick to his earlier contract, but decided having an unhappy actor wouldn't result in a good performance. So, he killed off Foxworth's B5 character offscreen, preventing him from having any future appearances. There's a blooper in that episode that references it.
You know, Daddy Sisko might have quite the point. How many times did the blood test actually catch a chngeling? And we have one test, that later turned out to be fake.
Yeah. There's a line in the episode when Sisko says various measures have been effective against Changeling infiltrators on the station. Since they never caught one, how do they know that?
The Star Trek captains and their relationships with their fathers: 1. Picard has a horrible alcoholic for a father who insults his dreams of going into Starfleet from a young age. 2. Sisko’s dad is unreasonably stubborn and insults his son in front of his coworkers 3. Archer’s dad dies of a neuro-degenerative disease when his son is a teenager, leading to his lifelong daddy issues
Pike it seems also had issues with his father, similar to Picard. Prime Kirk as far as we know didnt have anything, but Kelvin Kirk is another story. Janeway had her dad die as well, but it seems like it made her stronger.
Picard’s father wasn’t an alcoholic. I don’t care what the hack writers put in that abomination, Picard. It’s not canon. We learned from TNG that his father didn’t approve of him joining Starfleet, but there was never any hint that he was an alcoholic abuser. It’s just that modern writers are so terrible that that pathetic trope is all they have to fall back on.
"The enemy might figure out ways around our tests." "Yeah hey, let's not do anything at all then! Let's sit back with our thumbs up our asses. Splendid plan!"
Well, there is the issue that if they adapt fast enough, you're only inflicting hassle and false hope. Like if TSA screenings were even less effective and more tedious.
I don’t mean to get political, but that sounds a lot like what opponents of Trump said about his wall. “Eh, a wall never kept anyone out.” Okay, geniuses. I guess we just do nothing then, right?
@@danieljohnson2005 There's a massive swath of options between 'nothing' and useless cruel wastes of time. People who wanted the wall just have no attention span for ideas more complex than 3 words.
IIRC, this episode and ithe subsequent one made me uncomfortable in all the right ways. Tough questions are tough because there's no right answer. Or because they involve long division.
Authoritarianism becomes an issue only because the modern Man thinks that to be 'free' means to be free to pursue one's own whims, no matter how degenerate, harmful, or dangerous to oneself or to the cohesion of the social unit. In the classical understanding of the concept of freedom, it isn't any issue at all to compel good behavior.
Indeed, the classical view is less “freedom to do something” and more “freedom from something”. That said, it does tend to favor collective freedom over individual freedom, which is great until you find yourself at odds with the majority.
Red from overly sarcastic productions: " Wharf could you also tell us about your gods like some of their names?" Wharf: " their names have been lost to history but one of them was known to be around lots and lots of people much much love making and many children which made it very hard to kill all the gods." Red:" did he by chance throw lightning?" Wharf: " yes."
Where everybody else sees 9/11, I see COVID-19 regulations that naysayers fought. I shouldn't have to wear a mask, stand apart, stay home, and/or have my life inconvenienced.
I think the "how much can we sacrifice before life is not worth living" point is a little dramatic. It's possible for security to be excessive long before "life is not worth living." Realistically, most security measures are at best slightly effective. They slightly reduce the risk of something that is probably unlikely to begin with, and we do something of minor consequence to put up with it. The real risk of asking for random screenings and stop-and-ID is that it gives an unsafe amount of power in the hands of the police. It makes it very easy to arbitrarily arrest people, to push trumped-up charges, and to hold people awaiting ID. And it will allow them to catch people for all sorts of innocuous minor crimes while they're at it. It's a police state. Nobody is complaining that life is not worth living if we have to give a milliliter of blood one time. The concern is that the state will exert increasing power in the face of an increasingly dangerous threat. (And also, they're totally going to record the DNA of the white blood cells in every sample they take, don't tell me they won't.)
The only scenes I really hated were those of Sisko's dad. He just comes off as an annoying idiotic old crank. One moment he's, "I'll die before I let you test my blood!", and the next he's, "Yeah sure, take my blood, idgaf". Real "old man yells at cloud" vibes. Ok gramps. I think it's time for the home...
I'm guessing in credits. In a post-scarcity society, energy is the only remotely limited resource. Sisko mentioned going through his allotment of transporter credits while he was at the academy because he kept beaming home for dinner. Food, drink, housing, clothing, medical care and education are all free, so I'm thinking plenty of people work a couple days a week at jobs like waiter for extra credits to beam long distance or run personal holodecks or industrial size replicators or book passage off-world or other energy intensive activities.
@@dupersuper1938 Lois McMaster Bujold did a good description of a moneyless peaceful society that runs on social credits to allot extra resources (beyond the base "we live comfortably") in her Scifi novel "Ethan of Athos", despite the planet in the novel not being a "post-scarcity society". But that was an autonomous colony world out in ther sticks, with a carefully managed population size and population growth to keep pace with availabel resources, and while they had fruitful soils and had high tech, they didn't have anything that would neccessitate them having an army because no-one was interested enough in them to annex or invade.
I always assumed Sisko’s limited transporter usage was just Starfleet enforcing discipline, rather than a scarcity. After all, cadets need to get used to the fact that when they are on a starship, they can’t just beam home for dinner whenever they want.
I remember watching DS9 when they suggested doing the blood tests and immediatelly thought about the changelings just storing fake blood in their own bodies for the tests. I was amused that that's exactly what ended up happening in the later episodes!
This goes deeper than 9/11. These themes are always relevant. Everywhere in the world. Past, Present, and Future. Not just dealing with terrorist threats. Dealing with anything the state will use to clamp down on citizens.
The mandatory blood tests remind me of the mandatory Covid tests I had to take every week when I worked for a major government contractor. As a matter of fact, the blood tests in DS9 are less invasive and inconvenient than the Covid tests were.
The state will also happily hurt citizens for the greater good. Just look up alcohol poisoning in prohibition, the Tuskegee experiments, the actual events behind the viper militia, Ruby ridge, and Waco texas, the Gretchen whitmer kidnapping and so many more times that the government has done more for itself than for the citizens, at the expense of the citizens.
Oh, so you are just paranoid in general. That'S as stupid as being always gullible. You are just gullible in another way because you seek out and fall for any scaremongering conspiracy story.
As a European, I would interject here: This episode isn't an effective 9/11 analogy. No. It's an analogy how the West ignored Putin's doing for years for fear of desrtoying the "paradise" of post-Cold-War peace with Russia. 9/11 which was a single terrorist act used to justify the follow-up "security measures" already written up by members of the Project for the New American Century think tank (who included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others behind George W. Bush) founded in 1997 with the stated goal of "regime change in the Middle East" for American interests. Odo brought proof the Changelings are already on Earth. Whereas after 9/11 North America was not crawling with bearded Jihadists dastardly pushing over trashbins in rural Americans towns, as Fox News viewers believed. We now know Putin has been at work destabilizing Europe since 2012, but we didn't realize we were already under attack. We tried to appease Putin in 2014 when he annexed Crimea. Russian desinformation and propaganda campaigns had been at work to push the Brexit narrative, all of which we have evidence for now, but when in 2016 the UK referendum vote was for Brexit, we slept through it. Putin had Donald Trump in his pay since Trump visited Moscow for that money-laundering beauty pageant spectacle and to try and get permission to build a Trump Tower there; after Trump returned he started talking about one day becoming President. We know now that every single Russian Twitterbot & Facebook bot who posted pro-Brexit narratives was also used to push pro-Trump talking points on Social Media in 2016 during Trump's candidacy. Timothy Snyder published a whole book about it in 2018 giving a painstakingly researched account of how it was done... but people ignored it. Peaceful Paradise is not under threat from "authoritarianism" if the citizens of Paradise decide to take off their pink glasses and implement security measures (instead of having them imposed from "above" indefinitely to keep a certain group in power by stoking fears), as long as these security measures are put away again once the threat is over. If Paradise _is_ under a very real threat because you have enemies actively working to destroy it, then it's self-defense. The enemies don't give a crap about your "principles of freedom"... they will in fact encourage you to feel victimized for having to "submit" to anything that shatters your illusion of being perfectly safe.
The point was never about how many google results mentioned DS9 (because of course a google search for two episode titles would result in the show). It was more to show that any discussion of these two episodes will bring up 9/11.
Odo: "Hmmm. Sisko's father eh? You look a lot like infamous Starfleet conspirator Admiral Cartwright."
Daddy Sisko: "And you look a lot like infamous assassin Colonel West."
Odo: "Touché."
I always suspected Odo looked a bit too much like Alar, leader of the Eurondans from Stargate...
@@twokool4skool129 He looked like a guy in Enterprise as well...
I thought a time traveled Odo got stucked in 1950's Korea
I think he was on Skull Island.
@@Deadxman616then worked at Crane, Poole, and Schmidt
That Sisko/Odo bit about regretting tfinding Odo's people really hit hard for me. You could FEEL the anguish and the sincereity from both. They respect each other enough to be honest, even when that honesty is so devestatingly deep.
My favorite thing about the Layton-Odo scene is that it's the first time you see Odo and him interact without Sisko there, so you buy Layton just hates him until the twist is revealed.
Refreshing to hear this POV in the polarized climate. You make a good point about being able to empathize with others veiws without having to release your own
I think what makes this episode so much stronger is that there were already instances of this kind of thing happening prior to 9/11. IRA terrorists often planted bombs into public bins so you could not find a public bin in any London train station until the Year 2000 or so. I remember being really annoyed with that as a kid.
I do wonder how many Americans know about the IRA (probably more during the DS9 run than nowadays)? Even in the UK, people seem to have forgotten: after the Brexit-referendum, none of my English colleagues cared about what this could mean for Northern Ireland and all of them had actually lived through the Troubles!
The London Transport Museum depot has various artifacts from the past. Including a collection of bins.
There's a strange feeling going to a museum and seeing dustbins. Just normal bins.
@@alfje5492 You noticed that people completely forgot that Northern Ireland was a tense zone as thick as caramel during the referendum too? The lack of discussion on it was deafening...
We were not allowed to put a Toys for Tots collection box in our newstand in the train station in the US post 9/11
I find it funny how you're more annoyed at the lack of trash cans then, well, the bombs.
I massively, highly recommend the relatively recent Autobiography of Ben Sisko book if you really wanna get into the weeds of early pre-DS9 Ben. Does an excellent job in digging deeper into the stories established in Homefront/Paradise Lost such as his upbringing, the Sisko family, and Leyton.
Does he day anything about his sister at all?
@@GrayvornYes it goes into all of his siblings.
I would say that there's a calculus that is ignored here. In Star Trek, they are dealing with literal threats to the world. Adjusting your definition of freedom vs security in the face of that kind of threat is a lot easier pill to swallow. As opposed to doing so to prevent tragic, yet non-world threatening, terrorist attacks.
Except Earth _isn't_ 'the world.' It's merely a prosperous and important piece of it.
This is definitely one of the strongest DS9 episodes. A true example of what Star Trek could do.
I always love the Leg Heart recurring joke. Something about it always makes me chuckle.
It'll never cease to be amusing to me how the actor who played the admiral here, has a very similar, if somewhat mirrored role in Babylon 5. Here his good intentions lead him to taking bad actions against a good government, while in Babylon 5 his good intentions lead him to take "good" actions against an evil government, to massively oversimplify both settings. ^^
Funny enough, Robert Foxworth was originally set to reprise his role on Babylon 5, but his agent double-booked him and Foxworth decided to film "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost" instead of his prior commitment. J. Michael Straczynski said he could have tried to force him to stick to his earlier contract, but decided having an unhappy actor wouldn't result in a good performance. So, he killed off Foxworth's B5 character offscreen, preventing him from having any future appearances. There's a blooper in that episode that references it.
You know, Daddy Sisko might have quite the point. How many times did the blood test actually catch a chngeling? And we have one test, that later turned out to be fake.
Yeah. There's a line in the episode when Sisko says various measures have been effective against Changeling infiltrators on the station. Since they never caught one, how do they know that?
@@MaxDoll I mean, they caught Odo. They knew where he was all the time!
It's apparently revealed that the Klingon who introduced that test had already been replaced by a Changeling, implying the test was never valid.
@@boobah5643 That´s what I was thinking of, also makes sense then why the victims are still alive, in case someone makes a DNA test maybe?
Especially when you remember that the person who suggested the blood test WAS a changling in the first place!
The Star Trek captains and their relationships with their fathers:
1. Picard has a horrible alcoholic for a father who insults his dreams of going into Starfleet from a young age.
2. Sisko’s dad is unreasonably stubborn and insults his son in front of his coworkers
3. Archer’s dad dies of a neuro-degenerative disease when his son is a teenager, leading to his lifelong daddy issues
Pike it seems also had issues with his father, similar to Picard.
Prime Kirk as far as we know didnt have anything, but Kelvin Kirk is another story.
Janeway had her dad die as well, but it seems like it made her stronger.
@@myriadmediamusings "Janeway had her dad die as well, but it seems like it made her stronger." That might be because she got away with it. 😀
@@barryon8706 She wanted the inheritance but after the fact realized that she lived in a moneyless society.
Picard’s father wasn’t an alcoholic. I don’t care what the hack writers put in that abomination, Picard. It’s not canon. We learned from TNG that his father didn’t approve of him joining Starfleet, but there was never any hint that he was an alcoholic abuser. It’s just that modern writers are so terrible that that pathetic trope is all they have to fall back on.
weird how when Worf tells the computer to start playback it's at 'time index 911'
"Well, how does the blood test work?"
"We stick a hot needle into the blood, and if there's a reaction, we'll know who's a changling."
"The enemy might figure out ways around our tests."
"Yeah hey, let's not do anything at all then! Let's sit back with our thumbs up our asses. Splendid plan!"
Well, there is the issue that if they adapt fast enough, you're only inflicting hassle and false hope. Like if TSA screenings were even less effective and more tedious.
I don’t mean to get political, but that sounds a lot like what opponents of Trump said about his wall. “Eh, a wall never kept anyone out.” Okay, geniuses. I guess we just do nothing then, right?
@@danieljohnson2005 Or like the Repuplicans blocking the Democrates Border security Bill in May on Trumps orders. Lets just do nothing, right?
@@danieljohnson2005 There's a massive swath of options between 'nothing' and useless cruel wastes of time. People who wanted the wall just have no attention span for ideas more complex than 3 words.
IIRC, this episode and ithe subsequent one made me uncomfortable in all the right ways. Tough questions are tough because there's no right answer. Or because they involve long division.
Long division. Short division. Thick division. People were divided in all sorts of ways!
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself... And Watery aliens who can shape shift. Sonsovbitches."
- Abraham Lincoln
You know that quote is from FDR, right?
@@noblehelium3794 That's right. Everybody knows Lincoln fought vampires, not shapeshifting aliens.
Authoritarianism becomes an issue only because the modern Man thinks that to be 'free' means to be free to pursue one's own whims, no matter how degenerate, harmful, or dangerous to oneself or to the cohesion of the social unit.
In the classical understanding of the concept of freedom, it isn't any issue at all to compel good behavior.
Indeed, the classical view is less “freedom to do something”
and more “freedom from something”. That said, it does tend to favor collective freedom over individual freedom, which is great until you find yourself at odds with the majority.
If this was released in the aftermath of 9/11, this would hit close to home.
Red from overly sarcastic productions: " Wharf could you also tell us about your gods like some of their names?"
Wharf: " their names have been lost to history but one of them was known to be around lots and lots of people much much love making and many children which made it very hard to kill all the gods."
Red:" did he by chance throw lightning?"
Wharf: " yes."
Brock Peters is still Darth Vader for me, thanks to the Radio Drama I listened to incessantly as a kid.
And nowadays. EVERYTHING has to run parallel to current politics. Except when it doesn't, but that's ironically rarer.
Where everybody else sees 9/11, I see COVID-19 regulations that naysayers fought. I shouldn't have to wear a mask, stand apart, stay home, and/or have my life inconvenienced.
Then you helped contribute to deaths.
Sisko's dad is supposed to be from New Orleans and yet he calls them 'crayfish' instead of 'crawdads'
Damn chuck I was just having this argument with some idiot who thinks you need to have you r ID on you at all times 12:41
I think the "how much can we sacrifice before life is not worth living" point is a little dramatic. It's possible for security to be excessive long before "life is not worth living." Realistically, most security measures are at best slightly effective. They slightly reduce the risk of something that is probably unlikely to begin with, and we do something of minor consequence to put up with it.
The real risk of asking for random screenings and stop-and-ID is that it gives an unsafe amount of power in the hands of the police. It makes it very easy to arbitrarily arrest people, to push trumped-up charges, and to hold people awaiting ID. And it will allow them to catch people for all sorts of innocuous minor crimes while they're at it. It's a police state.
Nobody is complaining that life is not worth living if we have to give a milliliter of blood one time. The concern is that the state will exert increasing power in the face of an increasingly dangerous threat. (And also, they're totally going to record the DNA of the white blood cells in every sample they take, don't tell me they won't.)
Replace mandatory blood screening for starfleet and families with mediatory vaccines for military and you got a nice allegory for current year.
The only scenes I really hated were those of Sisko's dad. He just comes off as an annoying idiotic old crank. One moment he's, "I'll die before I let you test my blood!", and the next he's, "Yeah sure, take my blood, idgaf". Real "old man yells at cloud" vibes. Ok gramps. I think it's time for the home...
When was this review first recorded (approximately)? I remember watching it before.
Are you Steve?
How do restaurants work in paradise? Do they pay him in pretty smiles?
That´s tips, you generally pay by showing up and eating the food without spitting it out again.
I'm guessing in credits. In a post-scarcity society, energy is the only remotely limited resource. Sisko mentioned going through his allotment of transporter credits while he was at the academy because he kept beaming home for dinner. Food, drink, housing, clothing, medical care and education are all free, so I'm thinking plenty of people work a couple days a week at jobs like waiter for extra credits to beam long distance or run personal holodecks or industrial size replicators or book passage off-world or other energy intensive activities.
@@dupersuper1938 Lois McMaster Bujold did a good description of a moneyless peaceful society that runs on social credits to allot extra resources (beyond the base "we live comfortably") in her Scifi novel "Ethan of Athos", despite the planet in the novel not being a "post-scarcity society". But that was an autonomous colony world out in ther sticks, with a carefully managed population size and population growth to keep pace with availabel resources, and while they had fruitful soils and had high tech, they didn't have anything that would neccessitate them having an army because no-one was interested enough in them to annex or invade.
I always assumed Sisko’s limited transporter usage was just Starfleet enforcing discipline, rather than a scarcity. After all, cadets need to get used to the fact that when they are on a starship, they can’t just beam home for dinner whenever they want.
I remember watching DS9 when they suggested doing the blood tests and immediatelly thought about the changelings just storing fake blood in their own bodies for the tests. I was amused that that's exactly what ended up happening in the later episodes!
This goes deeper than 9/11. These themes are always relevant. Everywhere in the world. Past, Present, and Future. Not just dealing with terrorist threats. Dealing with anything the state will use to clamp down on citizens.
The mandatory blood tests remind me of the mandatory Covid tests I had to take every week when I worked for a major government contractor. As a matter of fact, the blood tests in DS9 are less invasive and inconvenient than the Covid tests were.
@@markbelew1376 That is my point, a little fear and people will lose their minds. And authorizes will use that to crack down and gain power.
The state will also happily hurt citizens for the greater good.
Just look up alcohol poisoning in prohibition, the Tuskegee experiments, the actual events behind the viper militia, Ruby ridge, and Waco texas, the Gretchen whitmer kidnapping and so many more times that the government has done more for itself than for the citizens, at the expense of the citizens.
*Looks at what the courts and alphabet agencies are doing.*
I'm not voting for the current ones in power, that's for sure.
Oh, so you are just paranoid in general. That'S as stupid as being always gullible. You are just gullible in another way because you seek out and fall for any scaremongering conspiracy story.
As a European, I would interject here: This episode isn't an effective 9/11 analogy. No. It's an analogy how the West ignored Putin's doing for years for fear of desrtoying the "paradise" of post-Cold-War peace with Russia.
9/11 which was a single terrorist act used to justify the follow-up "security measures" already written up by members of the Project for the New American Century think tank (who included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others behind George W. Bush) founded in 1997 with the stated goal of "regime change in the Middle East" for American interests.
Odo brought proof the Changelings are already on Earth. Whereas after 9/11 North America was not crawling with bearded Jihadists dastardly pushing over trashbins in rural Americans towns, as Fox News viewers believed.
We now know Putin has been at work destabilizing Europe since 2012, but we didn't realize we were already under attack. We tried to appease Putin in 2014 when he annexed Crimea. Russian desinformation and propaganda campaigns had been at work to push the Brexit narrative, all of which we have evidence for now, but when in 2016 the UK referendum vote was for Brexit, we slept through it.
Putin had Donald Trump in his pay since Trump visited Moscow for that money-laundering beauty pageant spectacle and to try and get permission to build a Trump Tower there; after Trump returned he started talking about one day becoming President. We know now that every single Russian Twitterbot & Facebook bot who posted pro-Brexit narratives was also used to push pro-Trump talking points on Social Media in 2016 during Trump's candidacy. Timothy Snyder published a whole book about it in 2018 giving a painstakingly researched account of how it was done... but people ignored it.
Peaceful Paradise is not under threat from "authoritarianism" if the citizens of Paradise decide to take off their pink glasses and implement security measures (instead of having them imposed from "above" indefinitely to keep a certain group in power by stoking fears), as long as these security measures are put away again once the threat is over. If Paradise _is_ under a very real threat because you have enemies actively working to destroy it, then it's self-defense. The enemies don't give a crap about your "principles of freedom"... they will in fact encourage you to feel victimized for having to "submit" to anything that shatters your illusion of being perfectly safe.
Dang now all of it is now DS9 on a google search
The point was never about how many google results mentioned DS9 (because of course a google search for two episode titles would result in the show). It was more to show that any discussion of these two episodes will bring up 9/11.
09:36 Undiscovered County informed us that yes, the heart is indeed located in the leg. More specifically, the knees. 🫠😂