Quodo in Every Episode discussion: "Playing God"

[chacusha]

Hi everyone, this is the last episode we'll discuss before we go on a mid-season break, probably a bit of a longer one (~1 month or so unless people have different opinions).This week we're discussing... episode 2x17 "Playing God"!

Episode synopsis: While hosting a Trill initiate, Arjin, Dax's runabout hits a piece of space debris that turns out to be a miniature universe that keeps on growing in size. While trying to figure out what to do with the proto-universe, Dax also struggles with finding her own path for being a joined Trill mentor that doesn't repeat Curzon's mistakes. Meanwhile, Kira and O'Brien struggle with a Cardassian vole infestation.

What The Boys are up to in this episode: Quark appears several times -- in the opening playing a late-night game of tongo with Dax, later bringing a dead vole up to Ops, and then giving Arjin some tough life advice in his bar. Odo has a voice line and then one scene in Ops where he is among the senior officers debating what to do about the proto-universe.

One screencap from this episode:


Transcript: http://chakoteya.net/DS9/437.htm

Quodo fics tagged with this episode: None (https://archiveofourown.org/works?work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=Episode%3A+s02e17+Playing+God+%28Star+Trek%3A+Deep+Space+Nine%29&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&commit=Sort+and+Filter&tag_id=Star+Trek%3A+Deep+Space+Nine)

Tell us:
- What did you think about this episode?
- Have you written a fic set during/after this episode?
- Do you know of any other fics set in or that build off this episode that weren't linked above?
- What do you see as the Quodo potential for this episode?

Anonymous comments are on, so feel free to chime in even if you don't have a Dreamwidth account! If you prefer, we are also available on Discord:
https://discord.gg/VaCnMYvKu6 (18+ proship Quodo Discord - there is a dedicated channel for this event)
https://discord.gg/Htz4crCdCt (general Quodo Discord)
Event info & rules
Fic masterlist

Comments

[chacusha]

Random thoughts:

- Apparently, "Quark's" is in level 7 section 5 of the station.

- Arjin is so square lmao.

- The B plot (or maybe C plot? the vole infestation one) in this episode is ridiculous, but I do like that we get to see what Cardassian voles look like.

-

Quark: Listen, son. When I was a young man, no older than you, I had an apprentice position with the District Sub-Nagus. I licked his boots like you couldn't believe. He loved me. I was his golden boy. I was on the high road to the top of the Ferengi business world, and then it all fell apart.
Arjin: How?
Quark: Rule of Acquisition 112: Never have sex with the boss's sister. I was fired, broke. It was quite a setback to my ambitions.
Arjin: How'd you recover?
Quark: Never did. Look at me, tending bar out here in Wormhole Junction while the big boys fly past me at warp speed. You only get one shot at the latinum stairway. If you miss it, you miss it. Welcome to the club, son.

Quark backstory drop lol. I do enjoy Quark being all "son" and washed-up-middle-aged-man here. It's a side we don't really get of him that often because he mostly seems to be enjoying his life of petty crime lol. And when it does come up in other places on the show, it's often when he's interacting with Ferengi society rather than random non-Ferengi bar customers.

- It's rare to see Odo disagreeing with Kira to take the Starfleet perspective on things lol. But I'm with Kira on this one. I feel like no one else in this episode seems to be responding sensibly to the presence of an ever-expanding universe that destroys/displaces physical matter in this one(???).

- This episode has yet another random scene developing the relationship between Ben and Jake. They keep having a long-running plotline happening in the background of other episodes.

- Yeah so the main thing that bugs me about this episode is that the main scientific problem/dilemma they're facing just doesn't seem to match with the climactic scientific solution that they end up implementing. Like, they have this *universe* that keeps on expanding and has the potential to wipe out this *whole universe* if it keeps growing and the solution is to... drop it off where they found it in the Gamma Quadrant? Like... am I missing something? How is that a solution? They could have written any plot/information here but it seems like they set it up so that this specifically isn't the kind of problem you can solve by moving it into another part of the same galaxy (let alone the *universe*). Is it predicted to just stop growing and contract after some point and they just need a large enough empty space for that to happen or something?

- That said, even though this episode is a bit dull, I like the backstory of pre-joining Jadzia we get here, and also Jadzia going through a difficult maturing moment where she has to be someone who is in an incredibly powerful position (having the power to determine if someone will be wiped out of the Trill joining program), and struggling to deal with someone who is behaving in a very cautious way because he's aware of that dynamic while Jadzia is reluctant to admit it's at play just because she doesn't want to repeat Curzon's/previous Dax hosts mistakes where they exercised that power so frequently that Dax got a reputation for it.

- Another minor complaint but another thing I've never really liked is the title of this episode. It's always hard to figure out which episode it is from the title. I get what they're going for -- trying to decide what the fate of a universe is is like "playing god," and this also matches on a smaller scale the way Jadzia holds Arjin's future in her hands too. But my mind never makes a connection between that title and this episode. I kind of wish it was just called "Arjin" or "The Initiate" or even "Holding the Whole World in the Palm of Your Hands" if you want the other type of Star Trek episode name (because I don't think anyone here is *playing* god in this episode, compared to a lot of Star Trek episodes where characters actually do play god).

Thoughts on Quodo potential:

I feel like Quark and Odo are both in the background of this one so you could easily write them getting up to something. Odo reacting to the vole in Quark's bar (heck, Odo *being* the vole in Quark's bar lol) or gossiping about the Trill initiate or something.

Maybe Odo overhears Quark's conversation with Arjin and starts up a conversation about it with Quark later.

Or (established relationship) Odo gives Quark an ear massage after he's deafened by O'Brien's sonic generator lol.