PATRON TIER LIST - DS9S1E16 - If Wishes Were Horses

Rumplestiltskin can shove it. Buck and the ball are the only things worth saving.

B for Buck!

Didn't care for Rumplestilskin, and no one can convince me that 5'7 Keone Young was the greatest baseball player of all-time. This is a D, but horny Dax bumped it up to a C-

B Tier. It is a shift from Progress, but to me that's the point. I think some people are so quick to declare episodes of Trek as D/F because they want Trek (especially DS9) to be edgier/gut punching TV and little else. But Trek works for me if it isn't just one kind of tone or story. I don't need every episode of DS9 to be "Horses", but I don't need every episode to be Progress either. The character moments are fun, I like the moment where Rumplestilskin makes his offer to Miles (Don't think Miles was as willing to accept it as Josh/Alex thought), and the solution is an interesting one. Maybe a low B, but it does enough for me to get there. Engage!

This Soldier gave it an honest B but barely above a C

One of the worst of the series. Absolute cringe. At least the baseball stuff is kind of right

This is either a C or a B. I went with B. Just ignore the technobabble spatial rift stuff, and you'll have fun with the evil dwarf and the emu on the promenade.

B is for Baseball

It's fine, particularly for a first season episode of any show, as it's a tool to explore the whole cast of characters - just not in the dynamic or successful ways spotlight episodes do. It succeeds in some fronts, and falls flat in others, but the whole cast is interacting and playing around the situation giving varied takes, reactions to one another, and engaging with their particular 'wish'. Compare this to TNGs 'Liasons' we just watched, which is basically the same thing. I honestly prefer DS9's 'Wishes' because we already know the TNG cast, so there's nothing to learn or expand on there. The worst we get is the Bashir and Jadzia angle, but I think it subconsciously does a lot for the good doctor, as we see that while his infatuation is obvious, he really is embarrassed about how unrestrained his depiction turns out, and for Dax, how understanding and forgiving she is of it all. It deepens an otherwise shallow character-dynamic into something more adult, even if on the surface it feels at first childish. And while you may not have consciously picked up on that, I'm sure your subconscious did. Then there's baseball, Jake and Sisko, Odo dreaming up disorder he needs to reorder, and on and on. It's not bad. I think the series and the season is made better with it's inclusion, even if it's not one you're ever eager to rewatch.

I actually think about 2/3rds of this is pretty fun and a solid B tier episode - until that long, deadly stretch of pointless technobabble leading to the big anticlimax in the final act, which lowers it down to a C. Still, weird enough to easily rank as one of the better of Season 1's filler episodes.

D-Tier for me. Like most of DS9 seasons one and two, don’t care.

If i were to guess... with all the money going into the new season 1 sets, aliens, etc., they took a ton of discarded stories from TNG to save $$$. Suddenly, a new season 2 has more cash, we got much better hand crafted stories made specifically for DS9... just an assumption.

D tier for me. It's a silly episode.