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Extreme Measures Review by Steve Perry Airdate: Week of May 17, 1999 Written by: David Weddle and Bradley Thompson Directed by: Steve Posey Short Take: Too many cooks, but the broth was spoiled from the start Brief Summary: Julian and the Chief have to get Sloane! Note:I am sorry for the delay in my reviews. My computer thanks to Windows 98 and EZ-BIOS is near death, and I've been busy saving it. I'm almost there. Voyager reviews are facing a massive delay, for a different reason - I have to wait for the tapes to the last four episodes, since I don't get Voyager at my home away from home... Review:Apparently this went through a mess of rewrites. I can see why. Unfortunately, this episode was in deep trouble from the start. A lot of good ideas floated through it, but fundamentally this episode had problems a hundred rewrites couldn't correct. In the middle of this great war, the writers tried to throw us a curveball, a little trip down Surrealist Avenue. A bold idea. They should be commended for trying. But it's all or nothing. It's either going to be brilliant or a complete mess. Remember Distant Voices, the episode where Bashir fought for his life in his mind? Didn't quite work. It didn't work because it's essentially impossible to create all the little twitches of one's mind on a TV screen. Those tennis balls falling to the floor just didn't work. Plus, Star Trek has a long and proud history of flat directors who would never do anything imaginative. Giving a Trek director a psychological episode, to paraphrase Lyle Lanley from the monorail episode of The Simpsons, is like giving a mule a bicycle - he don't know how he got, and he sure doesn't know how to use it. (Homer: "Heh. Mule.") Those corridors of Sloane's mind just didn't work. It just didn't make me think I was in his mind. The episode didn't have any touches to make me think I was experiencing someone's personality quirks. The only twist we did get was the done-to-death waking-up-to-a-fake-reality-bit. I didn't buy it and how it was discovered wasn't horribly exciting. They could have at least used another book besides A Tale of Two Cities, which was already used, much better I might add, in Wrath of Khan. It was a scattershot effort, all over the place, perhaps appropriate given what they were doing, but it makes for bad TV. One minute we've got good Sloane saying bye to his family. This is a good idea. It shows he has regrets. But then we've got Julian and the Chief saying who they like and who they love. A little clumsy, not completely bad, but it's such a bizarre shift! Each of these had their moments, but in an episode about saving Odo and supposedly bringing down Section 31, they seem very, very out of place. Really, in the end, this episode just forgot what it was about. It should have been about what Section 31 is about and why it did what it did. It seems almost painfully obvious that Julian should have done a lot more than what he did to get Sloane, adding irony to the title "Extreme Measures." Doing a plot where Julian simply outsmarts Sloane in a spy game may seemed tried after Inter Arma, but it would have been the logical conclusion to the story. And it would have afforded for Section 31 to be attacked in public, because now, with Sloane dead, they have nothing to go on. Given the changes the writers just gave to the Klingons, the failure to do that here with the Federation is troubling. I say this not just because I didn't like the surrealist approach. Certainly this cutesy approach takes away from a certain cleverness that any spy episode should have. But it's also because what we got had massive, massive plot holes. Like Sloane coming to DS9 to get caught. Boy was that easy. The whole episode should have been about catching Sloane! Frankly, Section 31 came off looking pretty poor thanks to Sloane's performance. DS9 is the darker, grittier Trek, and if it wanted to end its darkest plotline, it should have done it in a darker manner. Not only does that offer the chance for a more clever storyline, but it would have gotten at the heart of what Section 31's motivations were. In other words, Extreme Measures were pretty much a total failure. I say pretty much because stuff like Sloane's good side, Sloane's final temptation of Julian, and so forth, so that they were trying, even if it was grasping in the dark. It was a failure in wrapping up Section 31 in a satisfying wy, both in terms of issues and plotlines, and just as an episode it had problems with plot holes and in executing its concepts. And it brought the arc to a screeching halt. It wasn't a bad idea to do an episode about one thing, expecially about an issue as big as this one. But for crying out loud, do it well! Some short takes: - The Odo/Kira scene had good motivations - mentioning Bareil, for example, but it seemed oddly mushy IMHO. A good idea gone bad, like much of the episode. - How did Sloane know what Dax and Sisko were up to, to have them in the false reality? Rating: C- Next week: Quark's back, but you'd never guess from the preview | |
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