This is an episode that to me seems like it was mostly intended to be a character piece about O'Brien and Bashir starting to become friends, but also has scifi elements with the altered luck plot. Episodes with con men tend to be some of the ones I really enjoy and this is no exception. Quark is continuing to rise as probably my current favorite character on the show, not just because of his sliminess, but also because of how effective he can be.
The episode opens with a woman talking to a man she just met about how she is investing her remaining fortune in a mining venture and you can see dollar (latnum) signs lighting up in his eyes. As the conman is getting ready to make his move Odo shows up at hauls him away. It seems his last friends/victims weren't happy that he got access to their bank account and have decided to press charges. Next O'Brien is getting ready for a game of racquetball on his new court and is surprised to find Julian already there warming up. Julian brags endlessly about how great he is and O'Brien just keeps getting more mad. It cuts away as Bashir score the first point to the holding cell were the conman is annoyed by another prisoners snoring. The snoring guy wakes up and explains that the light up ball he has is some sort of gambling device and it has ruined his life. He hands it to the conman who dies. The conman tries playing the game and wins, and moments later Odo walk in and lets him out, charges have been dropped!
Back in his quarters Miles is exhausted and sweaty and can't stop complaining to Keiko about how obnoxious, and good at the game, Julian is. Then we see Julian is at the replimat complaining to Dax about how he thought he was going to kill O'Brien and had to create an excuse to get out of there. At Quarks the conman tries to sell the game he got from the prisoner but Quark isn't willing to offer him much so he cons a woman on the promenade into letting him use her shop as a casino. Being the new show in town he steals all the customers from Quarks and gets them hooked on big versions of the prisoners gambling game. Even Rom gets recruited to work at the new place. To try and get business back Quark decides to take bets on a racquetball game between O'Brien and Bashir and of course doesn't ask them first, but he does agree to give some part of the profit to monks so they agree to do it.
Strange things are happening around the station. People seem to have either super good luck or super bad luck to the point that extremely unlikely events start happening everywhere. The woman with the mining interest shows up in the new casino and the conman walks right over to her. It turns out she is just a little money short of having enough to get her mining operations going but she knows she can return ten times any investment in profit so he agrees to give her the profits from the casino. The racquetball game starts but Julian can't seem to hit anything. In ops they have figured out that they have a luck problem and eventually trace it to the gambling games the conman has been running. Sisko and Dax destroy the machines and the conman is immediately arrested on the previous charges and when he gets to the holding cell his mining partner shows up, but not to bail him out, she is also under arrest, for also being a con artist.
Review: A fun and fairly shallow episode, but it has plenty of fun character stuff and I really like how the O'Brien/Bashir friendship is building. A little bit of a silly premise, but better than many TOS or honestly TNG scifi bits.
6 out of 10
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