The crew is back on Deep Space Nine and it’s time to get some serious war stories! So, what we get instead is a kind of disappointing episode about Dax and Worf’s wedding preparations in “You Are Cordially Invited”, and the kind of return of a dead character that no one liked and everyone kind of forgot existed, in “Resurrection”. Oh, Star Trek. You can be a cruel thing to love sometimes.
Trekabout Episode 214: You Are Cordially Invited/Resurrection
Seth
-As a straight man, I love getting your different perspectives. But in this case, we don’t differ. Everything about this episode was just tired cliches and predictable predictableness (totally a word). Maybe if they’d managed to do something surprising, Eric wouldn’t have found the hetero stuff as tiresome.
Eric Brasure
-I think that’s right!
Harry
-I never used to like You Are Cordially Invited but I re-watched it recently in preparation for this podcast episode, and found myself liking it a lot more! It definitely has unsatisfying flaws (I can’t belive that both Kira/Odo’s and Jadzia/Sirella’s reconciliations happened off screen!) but I think the episode can definitely be informed from where you’re coming from.
Case in point: since I last watched the show I got married (I think it was literally the day after my first anniversary that I re-watched this episode) so, to me at least, fretting over a wedding was very fresh in my memory and emotions.
Maybe it’s because I’m soppy, but I had to stop watching and take a break after Martok’s speech below, as I was getting tearful:
“We are not accorded the luxury of choosing the women we fall in love with. Do you think Sirella is anything like the woman I thought that I’d marry? She is a prideful, arrogant, mercurial woman who shares my bed far too infrequently for my taste. And yet… I love her deeply. We Klingons often tout our prowess in battle, our desire for glory and honor above all else… but how hollow is the sound of victory without someone to share it with? Honor gives little comfort to a man alone in his home… and in his heart.”
So, it’s not a *great* episode, and handles relationships as clunkily as Star Trek always has, but it spoke to me more this time around.
Eric Brasure
-And that’s fair! I hate relationships and I’m dead inside so I probably hate this kind of stuff MORE than I used to. 😉
Lev
-I was really happy to hear this episode. “You Are Cordially Invited” is one of those “fan favorite” episodes that I’ve always loathed. A lot of good points in the episode about the problematic gender stereotypes but the most offensive element to me is that the episode is the most painful thing of all–failed comedy. You have two main plotlines here – Worf and the guys preparing for the wedding, and Jadzia and Sirella having their drama. These are, respectively, one-joke (you think Klingons are going to have a lot of debauchery before a wedding but instead they’re really austere!) and no-joke stories, and the Jadzia-Sirella stuff a lot of times seems uncertain as to what it’s trying to accomplish. (It could well be that the guest star torpedoes the material, as she has a very serious and anti-humorous take on the character.) But the whole thing is rough. Lots of narrative shortcuts and sloppiness as well, between the Kira/Odo material and the swift repair of the Jadzia/Sirella rift, all offscreen, because why would we want to see character material when we could see minute after minute of stupid cat dancing? And this was mentioned, but it is utterly hilarious that they thought the way to tone down the sexism of Klingon society was to put women in charge of the household, which is the exact opposite of that. Plenty of heavily patriarchal societies have this sort of arrangement–in Japanese society (which is perhaps not the most patriarchal in the world but it sure ain’t Norway), it’s common for stay at home wives to have total authority over domestic matters, even to the point of putting their breadwinner husbands on allowance. It’s all just sort of facile. I love DS9 so much, it’s my favorite Star Trek series, but man alive did they need more (any?) women in the writer’s room. Could have really helped on this and other episodes.
Also, was DS9 The Replacements of Star Trek shows or what: every time they got a little bit of momentum, they immediately just pissed on it. The tribble episode was great and got a lot of favorable attention from Trekkies, and then the next one they put out was “Let He Who Is Without Sin,” which put a halt to that. Then they build something with the exceptional Terok Nor arc and then the next volleys are this and Mirror Bariel. Jesus. I get that there are 26 episodes per season etc. but it’s a reminder that this being a cult show wasn’t ENTIRELY Rick Berman’s fault.
Eric Brasure
-Yeah, I don’t quite remember such schizophrenic turns from episode-to-episode in TNG–then again, the highs on TNG were never quite as high as they were on DS9, and they were two different shows doing very different things. I think DS9 in general really in aided by binge-watching it (which we’re not doing, of course, but two episodes per week with no breaks is a lot different than even watching it when it was first on.)