If Wishes Were Horses
The episode that claims to celebrate human imagination, but doesn’t bother displaying any itself.
“It’s Easy If You Try”
Not that I’m in much of a position to complain, I suppose, given I’m about to take the most obvious route possible and hold this episode up against “Shore Leave”. It’s not my fault both shows used their fifteenth story to show other stories coming to life, admittedly. Even if they weren’t sharing a slot, though, I doubt I could have avoided the comparison. My verdict here is almost as unsurprising as my method, too – “Shore Leave” is effortlessly the better of the two. Even if you’re not persuaded by my reading of that story, as an exploration of the dialogue between fiction, history and memory, it has obvious advantages over what we have here. It puts effort into giving Kirk’s encounters some deeper meaning for him – both Finnegan and Ruth open up old wounds, and thereby telling us what sort of man Kirk is when he’s bleeding.
It also makes at least a little sense. A theme park where you can make your fantasies reality? I get why that exists – the franchise’s first holodeck (and holodeck malfunction) episode. The idea that a group of aliens on an exploration mission have never encountered people that can imagine things, in contrast, is much harder to credit – especially as this episode shows that not just humans but Bajorans, Trills, Ferengi and Changelings are all perfectly capable of thinking about something that doesn’t immediately exist in front of them. Hell, if these aliens can’t imagine anything, then how did they come up with their plan in the first place? “Hey SpaceDave, we’ve not seen this phenomenon before. Any ideas on how to study it?” “DAMMIT SPACESTEVE, you know as well as I do that if we don’t already have a plan IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO COME UP WITH ONE!”.
And even if you don’t buy my noodling on the dialogue between history and fiction (and fair enough, I’m not anywhere near qualified on the subject), and you don’t care about how the youth inside Kirk is crying himself dry, and you don’t see any useful difference in plausibility between two admittedly impossible scenarios, then “Shore Leave” at least tries to throw as much at the screen as it possibly can to keep things interesting. What we’re offered here is almost ridiculously banal. Imagine having the chance to summon Jennifer Sisko from Ben and/or Jake’s memory, and instead opt for Buck Bokai, a fictional character from the show’s fictional history, and from our fictional future.
Just what are we supposed to hang on that? Even the baseball cap is a fake. Sisko is talking to someone who died around 250 years earlier. Who last played the game he’s obsessed with more than three centuries ago. That’s like a contemporary boxing aficionado chatting with James Figg. Who? Exactly. But it’s even weirder than that. From the perspective of the audience watching when this episode was broadcast (and now) Ben is nostalgic for a game that was a) still going great guns and b) being predicted to die out within the next few decades. So I don’t even see what baseball fans – who I guess have as much right to be occasionally pandered to by Trek as anyone else – are getting anything out of this. Bokai is neither indicative of some glorious future, nor close enough to the contemporary game for the ending 55he represents to land emotionally. I’m happy to accept I love no sport as much as the average baseball fan loves baseball. That said, if I watched a sci-fi show that predicted, say, the last Crucible snooker final would be in 2069, I wouldn’t need too much blue chalk dust to dry my tears. Nor would I particularly give a damn what some writer imagined 2064 champion Alan McTrickshot might have to say on the subject.
“Shore Leave” doesn’t contain any specific historical characters, fictional or otherwise, but we can reach here instead for “The Savage Curtain”. That’s hardly a well-regarded TOS episode, but it does at least have the sense to give Kirk an actual historic figure to idolise (and mourn), and makes sure the fictional equivalent given to Spock at least further fleshes out the culture he comes from and the relationship he has to it. Bokai just reminds me of boring dinner parties sat stuck between two people with a shared obsession I had no knowledge of or interest in. Here, as then, my imagination is mainly engaged with pretending I’m literally almost anywhere else.
I have no problem with people who are super-into their hobbies. I mean, obviously; witness this blog series. The issue is the idea you can fashion that into compelling television. There are occasional hits of sweetness, in fairness. It’s interesting watching someone reminisce about a history he was born too late to experience in a way that’s free of the problematic assumptions which so often accompany the idea. There’s also a brief moment where it looks like Bokai’s absence of imagination means he’s going to fail to grasp metaphor as well, with potentially interesting results (this idea, naturally, is immediately dropped). That’s not much, but it’s something.
Certainly, it’s better than anything we say about Rumpelstiltskin.
Fairy Fails
There are precisely two good things to say about Molly’s visitor. Firstly, Michael J Anderson is playing him, and, despite his later issues, it’s always a good day when he shows up on a TV show. Second, and this is about as faint as praise can get, at least this is a completely rote description of a not particularly interesting fairy tale character, and not the leprechaun the production team originally had in mind.
It’s hardly surprising that Colm Meaney nixed that idea as soon as he heard about it. He was absolutely right, too – literally the best television leprechaun that I’ve ever seen is Mad Sweeney from American Gods, and the joke there is that he’s still an obvious and objectionable Irish stereotype, but also really tall.
At any time, then, a leprechaun showing up in Trek would be a terrible idea. It would have been particularly depressing development in this episode, though. It’s hardly their biggest problem, but stereotypes are anathema to imagination. They’re the refusal to even conceive of the ways those that differ from you can differ from each other, a reduction of infinite diversity in infinite combinations to waterlogged lists of uncharitable assumptions. It’s the bigotry of the cookie-cutter. I’ve talked above about how difficult it is to take seriously the idea of sentient life-forms that are incapable of imagination, but somebody who runs entirely on stereotypes they’ve been handed by others is probably the closest a human being could come to so sorry a state.
It’s definitely for the best that Meaney (quantum) torpedoed the idea, then, the fact it was floated at all demonstrates how completely the construction of this episode is at odds with its supposed goal. It’s literally offensively lazy. And while changing a leprechaun into Rumpelstiltskin dealt with the anti-Irish angle, it didn’t completely purge the problematic elements. Not when the production team decided the episode still needed a mischievous little person. Not when Trek fails to include little people at all, unless it’s to scare a child or bang a gong. When O’Brien asks why they still tell tales about “evil dwarves”, it’s difficult to miss how good a question this is, and to wonder why nobody asked themselves whether they had a duty to actually think about the answer.
The episode might at least have been able to mitigate some of this if it did something actually interesting with Rumpelstiltskin. It doesn’t [1]. The episode plays the character completely straight. The reasons for this are explicit in the text, sure; this isn’t an actual, it’s O’Brien’s half-formed conception of a literary character. That just shifts the problem from execution to context, though. When you’re writing a script which requires you to be derivative throughout, it’s probably time to go looking for a new story idea.
It’s not hard to generalise the point. Everything here feels dull and washed-out. A copy of a copy of a copy, like Rumpelstiltskin himself. Let’s take another look at “Shore Leave”. We’ve compared Bokai to Finnegan and Ruth already, but there’s more. Kirk faced a tiger; Odo shoos an emu. McCoy takes a lance to the chest; Kira briefly thinks she’ll be on fire. Martine and Rodriguez face a hail of bullets; the Promenade gets a snowstorm. Whether an idea is intended to evoke wonder, danger, or nostalgic reflection, “If Wishes Were Horses” seems determined to dilute and disappoint. About the only aspect this episode turns up to eleven is the male-gaze eye-candy, which does nothing to help matters.
We’ve talked before about The Animated Series having failed to realise that once you can create anything on screen, there’s no longer any value in visual spectacle. There’s a similar problem one can come across when considering narrative. Once your story allows for anything to happen, you can’t just rely on the fact weird things are showing up to carry your story.
And yet that seems to be what’s been done here, almost across the board. Thank the Prophets for Dax, then. Both of them.
DoubleDax
The obvious first, as usual. More Terry Farrell = More Good. Farrell is easily the most under-served member of the main cast at this point – only Meaney comes close, and that’s because he was off for weeks finishing making a film. Whatever its other faults, it’s nice to see this episode start to redress the balance, by not only giving Farrell more to do, but letting her do it twice.
To no-one’s surprise, Farrell has no problem rising to the occasion. She’s brilliant both as Bashir’s fantasy version of herself, and as herself playing against Bashir’s fantasy version of herself. She’s helped in this by some solid direction, and the SFX team being on top of their game, but it’s Farrell who makes the whole thing click – particularly in how she balances Dax being annoyed at Bashir’s apparent preferences for her behaviour, with the knowledge that it’s simple bad luck that Bashir is the one whose private fantasies are being splashed around the station. She’s fully aware that this situation is akin to Bashir’s diary being narrated over the Promenade tanoy.
Finally, we reach the first of the two genuinely interesting ideas “If Wishes Were Horses” contains. It would have been easy for the episode to focus entirely on Dax being outraged at learning Bashir wishes she were a docile sex-kitten. And yes, that’s addressed, because you can’t really let it completely slide by when internalised sexism is allowed to slip out, even when it clearly wasn’t intended to. But there’s more going on here – there’s an understanding and an acceptance that people have the right to their fantasies and desires. The way we express our wants (consciously or otherwise) can be problematic, but fundamentally the act of wanting in itself is not for anyone else to judge. Don’t kink shame, in short.
This is a rather nice line for the show to take. True, it’s also rather undercut by the production team not allowing Andrew Robinson to play Garak as pansexual, resulting in the unfortunate implication that there exists nothing problematic in desire as long as its heteronormative. Clearly a man obsessing over his desire to score with a beautiful woman who’s made it clear she’s not interested is much more palatable than that man being chatted up by a bloke. I don’t want to use “Past Prologue” as a stick to beat this episode with, though. It clearly has enough problems of its own. Let’s just take the commitment to the validity and even healthiness of private fantasies at face value, and move on.
On to where? How about the spatial anomaly? Everyone loves those, or so Discovery keeps trying to tell me. The particular iteration in this episode underlines the idea that what you dream up in your own head is your own business, up to the point where it leaks out into the world. A lot of ink has been spilled over the ages about the power of our minds to affect our reality. Much is hokum, and much more is well-meaning platitude. But there are ways in which it’s true, and terrible, and Dax’s fixation on the Hanoli anomaly demonstrates this very well. Dax – our Dax – imagines the worst, and so the worst ends up being true. There’s any number of real-world analogies you can map onto this, from paranoia about a relationship failing causing it to shake itself apart, to nations spending so much time undermining today’s allies in case they become tomorrow’s enemies that that’s exactly what happens.
Dax is helped in this by Kira, of course, whose life of suffering and misery and managing disaster seems to have – entirely understandably – led to a tendency towards catastrophising (see also her imagining an inferno inside the space station). Dax’s knowledge of what spatial anomalies are capable intertwines with Kira’s terror that her homeworld can never truly be safe, and the results are more or less literally explosive.
On this occasion, then, our heroes are proving their own worst enemies (including O’Brien, sidestepping the issue of it only being women’s imaginations causing issues). Thank the Prophets for Sisko, then. More specifically, thank the Prophets for him being able to demonstrate his leadership skills in a way that doesn’t involve resolve, or combat skills, or any kind of opposition or antagonism at all. Sisko saves the day here through his simple refusal to panic, and by projecting a calmness that spreads to everyone around him.
This is a rather fitting resolution for a Trek episode – sometimes all we have to fight is our own worse instincts. It also feels particularly right for Sisko. For all that the idea has been barely mentioned after the pilot episode, this feels like a reminder of why the Prophets chose Sisko as their Emissary. He has the strength he needs to save the day simply by believing he can.
This concludes the list of all possible positive comments to make about this episode. “If Wishes Were Horses” isn’t an out-and-out disaster, like “Move Along Home”, or “The Passenger”. It’s not even the worst example of a Trek story in this cycle – the nothing-burger of “The Eye Of The Beholder” and the authoritarian croque-monsieur of “Learning Curve” are both less palatable. What it is, though, is unforgivably lazy, and worse, unforgivably lazy while trying to extol the virtues of the human mind. Creators, imagine thyselves. Imagine, in particular, coming up with something less boring than this.
Ordering
1. Shore Leave
3. If Wishes Were Horses
[1] Fun fact, though: one translation of “Rumpelstiltskin” is literally “kin of the Rumpelstilts”, i.e. related to a specific form of annoying German goblin. The dude who banks on nobody ever being able to figure out his handle is literally named after the people he most looks like.
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