Look we all want very badly for the new Star Trek series to be good, but if the first season isn’t super weird and kind of crappy, then is it even a real Star Trek series?
You ever think about those DS9 episodes where everyone's aboard the Defiant fighting an intergalactic space battle, and meanwhile back at the station it must be like:
According to ‘Terok Nor: Night of Wolves’, while Odo’s first words were repeating Dr. Mora’s sentences (“My name is Mora”), the first sentence he came up with on his own (like, independently constructed) was “Men don’t make good scientists”, which he picked up from Dr. Mora’s Cardassian supervisor, Dr. Yopal.
Modern Star Trek needs to stop being so concerned with looking cool and return to its roots of being about horny nerds doing diplomacy in pajamas.
Kay I can't get over "Improbable Cause"/"The Die is Cast" because Garak stabs Odo in the back without a moment's hesitation the second he gets the invite to return to the Obsidian Order/Tain/Cardassia/Whatever, and then he tortures Odo nearly to death looking for info on the Dominion and all he gets out of Odo is that Odo really wants to go home to his people and join the Great Link despite Everything, but when Odo gets the chance to go home, despite how much he wants to, he sticks to his morals and refuses.
So Odo gets stabbed in the back, and tortured into revealing a shameful secret. He should kick Garak out on his ass and never speak to him again, but he doesn't.
So whereas Garak took the chance to go home without hesitation, Odo refused his own chance to go home with equal conviction, so Odo could sit on his moral high horse and judge Garak for giving into temptation, but he doesn't.
Odo might not forgive Garak for what he did, but he understands why he did it enough to stick around and be his friend despite it all. Like, the guy really says "hey you did a really shitty thing to me but I understand, let's get breakfast sometime."
Something about that just hits, you know?
Obviously Dukat's continued predation on Bajorans is all flavours of deply fucked up but the moment when he ad-libs the "Ah.... It's a miracle!" when the cultist's child turns out to he half-Cardassian is so absurdly funny. You can see his face fall for one moment when he realizes he fucked up real good this time. When he realizes everyone will see what he did the best that he can come up with is "let's all kill ourselves real quick". A true master of improvisation. Always 10 steps ahead.