Deep Thoughts After Rewatching Deep Space Nine On Pluto TV.

I rewatched DS9 a couple of years ago on Paramount+ but when I found out Pluto TV had a whole channel just for DS9, I couldn't resist rewatching some episodes.  Unfortunately the disadvantage over streaming is you can only see so many episodes and you don't get to pick which ones, so some I've seen a couple of times and many in the early seasons not at all.

Anyway, here are some random thoughts I had:

1. Vedek/Kai Winn is the perfect representation of the modern Republican party.  She's a nasty, scheming bully who first comes to the station to shut down Mrs. O'Brien's school by claiming that O'Brien shouldn't teach the science of the wormhole and "Prophets."  Basically she demands they teach creationism instead of evolution.  Later she schemes her way into becoming the religious leader of Bajor and uses that to gain more political power for herself.  All the while she claims to be religious and love the Prophets, she actually doesn't give a shit about them..  Sound familiar?
2. One episode in the 6th season I think is called "The Sound of Her Voice."  The Defiant picks up a distress call from a female captain.  Over a couple of days they take turns talking to her while she's slowly suffocating.  They finally get there only to find she's been dead for 3 years.  So...why didn't anyone look up her or her ship in the computer?  That would have told them the ship--and her--had vanished years ago.  But then we wouldn't have an episode, right?
3. In the big ship battle scenes I kept thinking, "Geez, I'd hate to be in one of those fighters or really old ships."  I mean they have these tiny fighter ships going up against the Klingons, Cardassians, Jem H'Dar, and Breen ships which have way more armor, shields, and weapons.  It really seems like you'd have to have a death wish to take a little fighter ship against those.  Then you have those ancient Excelsior-class and Reliant-class ships that are for some reason still around.  They've probably had upgrades in the last 100 years or so but still they were made in the previous century--back in Kirk's day!  They were designed for exploration and maybe fighting off an old Klingon K7 cruiser or something.  And they're supposed to be going toe-to-toe with much newer, more powerful warships?  Again, seems like suicide.
4. I think I said it on Facebook--or maybe on here--about one episode I think in the 4th season.  Sisko and Jake are in an accident in the Defiant's engine room.  Sisko disappears but keeps popping up during Jake's life but only for a few seconds/minutes.  Jake writes a famous book but then spends a lot of time trying to save his father.  And eventually does.  I was just thinking that in the end this is similar to what does happen to Jake's father, only instead of an accident, he goes to live with the Prophets in the wormhole.  And he probably doesn't periodically show up, though I suppose he could.  For Jake, he's left without his father, though by then there is Kassidy Yates and her baby, so not as alone.  But it was kind of a prophetic episode.
5. Something that started to bother me not just with DS9 but probably TNG and Voyager as well.  They use these "datapadd" things for reading and writing that are basically like iPads we have now.  Often you'll see a character with a whole stack of them.  Like Jake would have a bunch for his schoolwork.  Why?  It's the 24th Century; shouldn't they have padds with more memory and storage by now?  I mean characters should only need one padd to do everything, right?  Maybe if there's like secret encrypted shit on a padd it might not be online but most of the time it seems like you should just have one.
   
6. While the show did a good job developing the main characters, it also did a good job developing some of the secondary characters.  Rom is just Quark's brother at first who's just kind of a jerk to humans and mostly does what Quark wants.  But over time he finds a talent for engineering, gets married, and finally becomes Grand Nagus.  His son Nog was just supposed to be Jake Sisko's ne'er-do-well friend but then he decides to join Starfleet and becomes an officer.  General Martok was a bad guy at first when the Klingons turned against the Federation.  But later (once Worf and Garak rescued the real Martok from the Dominion) he became an ally, made Worf part of his house, and then became Chancellor of the Klingon Empire.  Then there's Damar who was just Dukat's aide at first and then his henchman who murders Dukat's daughter and then the puppet leader of Cardassia.  But in the final season he takes another turn, rebelling against the Dominion and becoming a legendary hero.  So all these characters started out pretty plain and developed whole stories.  It's kind of like The Simpsons where characters like Disco Stu or Cletus start out as one-off jokes but over time start getting more and more added to them.

Anyway, those are just some random thoughts I had.