Yora reviews Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - All of it!

[Xyril]

S3E14: Heart of Stone
Another okay episode. Somehow this made it on many top episode lists, but I don't see why. The story is okay, but I find the small continuity advances much more interesting.

I'm guessing the whole "why" of it is that other folks might give more emphasis on character development than you do. Which isn't to say your tastes are "wrong" in any way. DS9 always struck me as more plot-arc driven--both in terms of its war/political saga nature and in terms of character growth over time--and so I think a lot of the audience were probably new fans who wouldn't necessarily have been die-hard fans of TOS or TNG.

Obviously we have Nog deciding that he wants to go to Starfleet. This is where that starts, not much more to say about that.

This illustrates my point. For you, it's an important continuity point, but as you say "not much more to say about that." For me, it wasn't just an inflection point at which Nog branched off the "civilian" path and turned onto the "Starfleet" path--it was a moment of really meaningful character growth. Plus, it was some really solid acting from Aron Eisenberg, something that I honestly wasn't sure he was capable of--his pre-DS9 resume wasn't exactly full of great roles, and other than some decent chemistry with Jake, he performance as Nog rarely deviated too far from comic relief/greedy Ferengi stereotype/fish-out-of-water. He did a great job portraying a guy trying hard to hide his vulnerabilities and surprisingly less-than-dishonorable intentions behind his usual persona, and in doing so made the audience (or me at least) look at all of his previous schemes and misadventures in a whole new light.

That alone would have put this episode on my noteworthy list, though not necessarily my top list. The fact that this was really the B-plot, and one that mirrored the A-plot so well, certainly elevates the episode even more. Odo's situation was very similar to Nog. From a meta-standpoint, it was perhaps less impressive to me because Rene Auberjonois had a demonstrated track record of being a capable actor, and on DS9 in particular, Odo had already been much more fleshed-out and complex as a character compared to Nog. Still, it was solid acting in this episode as Odo, like Nog, was forced to show the vulnerability that he was hiding underneath the gruff, business-like facade he presents to everyone else. Plus, Kira is arguably the one person who knows the deeper Odo better than anyone else (among cast regulars at least), but this was the one thing he obviously had to keep hidden even from her, and seeing him realize that he just gave away his most closely-guarded secret to someone he considers, at the very least, a dangerous potential adversary was a big moment.