This is another episode that would have worked just fine as a TOS episode, but it would have been a decent episode on either series. A twist on the usual premise of characters being thrown inside a game, with the twist being someone else is playing and doesn't know that it is real. Side note: is it supposed to have been real? Presumably they don't have the tech to make Dax think her leg was broken when it wasn't really. It is also less than clear to me what is supposed to have happened when Odo entered the game room on their ship. Did it transport him to Quarks? Was that really Quarks at all?
The episode opens with Sisko putting on his dress uniform to get ready to greet a new species from the gamma quadrant. Jake is there and all worked up about girls so Ben promises to talk with him about it the next morning. Sisko meets Dax, Kira and a dress uniform lacking Bashir at the airlock. The delegation arrive and head straight to Quarks for some gambling. They love dabo and stay up all night playing. And since they also keep winning Quark eventually decides it is time to start cheating which they figure out in about 3 seconds. They confront him but rather than demanding their money back or attacking him they bring out their own game which literally appears in a flash. It has a super complicated board. We see Sisko sleeping in his quarters and suddenly he finds himself in a strange hallway. He finds Bashir screaming trying to wake himself up and they are joined by Kira and Dax. It appears they are inside the game.
Quark doesn't understand the super complicated game but goes ahead and starts playing and they find themselves in a puzzle room with a little girl. They correctly figure out that they need to mimic her jumping pattern and rhymes to get through. Meanwhile Jake has noticed they are missing and gone to Odo. At first Odo doesn't believe him but discovers he is right and goes to security dude who freaks out when he realizes he has lost his commanding officer. In the game the players next confront a party room that suddenly fills with some sort of poison gas and they have to drink from the beverages at the party to survive.
Odo beams onto the alien ship and finds a door that glows when he opens it and when he goes in he finds himself at Quarks with the game still going on. He somehow communicates to Quark that he is playing with actual lives which ups the tension (this part of the script could have used a few more rewrites, it makes even less sense than the rest of the episode). He loses Julian who wanders off on his own and then has to pick one of his remaining players to eliminate. He can't decide so the game master does a random pick and Dax breaks her ankle or something. But they don't leave her behind and the whole room collapses and they find themselves all back at Quarks. So I guess it wasn't actually real, but what the hell was it then? But in the style of the shore leave planet we are never told what it was, but Quark wants to license it!
Review: I enjoyed this one a lot despite it having some fairly serious problems with not making sense. I have seen so many characters trapped in a game movies/shows that the formula is pretty thoroughly in my head which helps gloss over some of the weaker/less clear scenes.
5 out of 10
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