#034 - If I had my little way / I’d dream beaches every day

I have mixed feelings about specifically relying on skill-check humor in the strip. I don’t think it’s totally avoidable in a “hey, they’re playing an old-school role-playing game” context since that’s a real touchstone of such stuff regardless of your feelings about that method of adjudicating gameplay, and anyway there’s some easy jokes that make me giggle about the intersection of serious-face random skill checks and television writing. But at the same time, it could be really easy to basically reduce things to nothing but a string of dice-rolling jokes, and I’m not sure Larp Trek would really benefit from that.

So, moderation in all things? This seemed like a good time to introduce the idea (and to do so slightly gently so folks who are into this more for the resynthesized Star Trek dramedy than for the RPG jokes have any idea what that’s all about), but maybe we won’t have to hear about it constantly or anything? That sounds like a deal. Okay. Handshake with myself, done.

Also, Picard is a terribly sore loser.

But! Anyway. Star Trek! Let’s talk about this scene in the actual Deep Space Nine pilot. It’s a weird scene — I mean, of course it’s sort of a weird scene since grumpy ol’ Ben Sisko is suddenly standing on a beach in his skivvies hitting on (spoiler alert) his dead wife, when he was just chillin’ with Kai Opaka in a Bajoran cave, but that’s not what I mean because sure, fine, vision quest, we can all get down with that.

What’s a little weird to me is the way Ben Sisko’s reaction is primarily to sort of game out the situation almost immediately, to the point where his conversation with his (spoiler alert) totally dead wife who is not dead here is a mixture of flirtation and self-directed commentary about what he knows vs. what she knows. Like he skips the whole WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON freakout I’d expect most people to have, but not because he’s in some total dream daze where he doesn’t know this is bizarre. He knows it’s nuts, he’s coherent and self-aware, he’s just like, okay! Dead wife, back in time, clearly everything here is wrong but whatever, I am going to tap that.

I’m not sure this is a complaint per se; by the end of the episode it’s clear in a number of ways why they went this route with this scene — in particular to establish the atemporal nature of the prophets, to establish the mind-vision-experience gig said prophets favor for communication, and to set up a nice contrast in tone to Sisko’s later conversations with, not a warm friendly flirty remembered dead wife, but rather the frigid and standoffishness and very thoroughly alien entities that are the prophets themselves.

But it is a bit odd. I think you can handwave it a bit by saying, well, hey: the subjective experience of being thrust into a voyage-into-the-mind flashback by the prophets is different from a memory or a lucid dream or any other normal human fugue state or whatever, but that remains a handwave regardless.