It’s an old show, yes, but I was only introduced to it the other day. Some sci-fi house friends have the show on DVD and they’ve been playing it on the house TV. Fascinating. First of all, it’s got way better developed characters than the original Star Trek. But what prompted me to blog about it is the way they get the most bang out of their cheap-o special effects.
There’s this episode where the shapeshifter, Odo, is at a loggerheads with Garak. Instead of actually fighting him, he starts describing all the things he might do to him. “Shall I reach out my arms and strangle you from across the room?” Instant vivid mental image, without actually having to spend any money on morphing Odo. Reminds me of a trick my English teacher pointed out in Macbeth. There’s a scene with a couple of scouts standing on the top of a hill watching an epic battle. They describe it to each other, exclaiming just how awesome it is, though the audience doesn’t actually see anything. It’s a nice cop-out: it would have been kind of hard to stage an epic battle scene on the scale of, say, Pelennor Fields on a stage in 1600.