#027 - When a mace flies at your face / you must shift it
Not pictured: Picard sobbing in the corner, trying to compose himself. Best that Geordi moved things along from that previous scene, I think.
But yes, so! Odo! Wes seems like a much more fun character to have play Odo than Data did, to me, and leaves Data with something more entertaining to do than roleplay having slightly more fractured relatability than normal, so that’s all good. (More on which soon, I promise.)
The shapeshifting thing: man, there’s a lot to talk about there. I think the elephant in the room for any critical viewer of Deep Space Nine is just how unbalancing that shapeshifting power is. It’s the sort of thing that falls squarely into superpowers, narratively speaking; there is so dang much you could accomplish with the concerted application of a little doppelgangin’ that it’s hard to understand why basically every problem on the station doesn’t get solved with “and then Odo shapeshifts into an x and does y, end of episode”.
(I mean, it’s not actually hard to understand why not; the show is called Deep Space Nine, not The Times And Crimes of Constable Odo, and you can’t have an ensemble show be the same plot and resolution every episode, etc. But it’s a Superman Is An Equal Member Of The Justice League sort of problem: using the magical wand to solve problems is such an obvious approach that if you repeatedly decide to e.g. not have the shapeshifter shapeshift, or to send Aquaman instead of Superman, it can get a bit silly. So you better hope your readers/viewers/fandom are willing to run with the silly.)
But it’s the perfect thing for some excited kid to come up with. As much as Wes is likely to be a handful for Geordi, I think he’s also the best thing that could happen to the game: he’s hungry for adventure, he’s got the relentless, unselfconscious imagination that kids have, and he wants to impress all the adults around him. He wants to Do The Awesome Thing, which, hell yes, kiddo. Doing the awesome thing is an awesome thing to do. Stare that whatever-that-alien-guy-in-the-DS9-pilot-was’ mace down. Shapeshift it. Shapeshift it good.
tk
Wes deploying one of the forbidden tools of Dark Improv: the "No, And".
It felt nice to have Geordi be able to get onside with someone throwing a wrench in the gears, I remember that.
Me, from the comments, really on one:
"Yeah, in all fairness to the show I think the humanization of Odo’s character is the best (if still often OH COME ONNNNNN handwavey at best) explanation for why he isn’t tactically morphing seven times an episode: he doesn’t want to be that guy, he just wants to get along and not be treated like a freak.
Maybe a better analogy would be Superman if Superman’s only power was to prevent crime through farting. I mean, c’mon, Clark, you can stop crime! Why wouldn’t you stop crime, man? Just fart! Just always, constantly be farting! Surround yourself forever in a cloud of noxious smoke! Everybody will totally appreciate it!"
Also from the comments:
IRFH: Odo can’t form complex machines; guns and explosives have chemicals, moving parts. It doesn’t work that way. But he can form solid metal shapes. Like knives and stabbing weapons.
Me: Terminator 2 is just an RPG played by the characters of a DS9 RPG played by the crew of TNG when the Quark’s in-game holosuites break down.
I also had some Odo physiology thoughts:
"One possibility that rescues us from the need for thermodynamic violations (not that those are exactly a dealbreaker in Star Trek given the sogginess of other basic scientific issues): the changeling species might be organic, self-contained replicator/transporter machines.
That is, when they change mass, it’s not by literally changing the physical properties of the mass that makes up their body, but rather by exuding or absorbing ambient matter rapidly to or from the vicinity — Odo as a bird essentially transports the bulk of his mass to a cupboard for safe keeping and then gloms it back in after the fact.
Or perhaps they even have a sort of internal organ that’s a transdimensional matter sac, a sort of wormhole stomach into which they retract unwanted matter reflexively. What we see of any changeling at any time is actually a herniation of matter from that sac?"