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These last few seasons, I have regretted not being a Deep Space Nine fan.

The stories seem to be complex, intriguing and well-written, from the few episodes I’ve seen, and yet I haven’t made it a regular habit to watch since the early seasons when the writing was not great and the characters were flat.

But earlier this season, contributor Emerson Schwartzkopf complained about the producers "throwing away" this final year.

I’ve watched three episodes now, and I have to think he’s right.

Three episodes, three trips to the holo-suites at Quark’s. What happened to the war against the Dominion, the Cardassians and the Romulans (or whoever’s on the bad-guy side now)?

It’s nice to see that James Darren (as Sinatra-wannabe Vic Fontaine) is aging so well, but other than that, I can’t really recommend the three episodes I watched.

I thought the first one, where Nog was mending from some war wound he sustained sometime earlier, was not bad, but that was before I knew we were going to spend the entire season in fantasy-land.

That was before the grudge baseball match against a bunch of Vulcans. (Nominee for our alien awards for terrible episode!)

That was before we went back to Las Vegas again and had to listen to Avery Brooks – I mean Capt. Sisko – deliver a diatribe against the unrealistic acceptance of black people as patrons in the casinos. (Sadly, no one pointed out during this arrogant, self-righteous speech that in the real Las Vegas of 1962, Ferengi were looked askance upon as well.)

The inmates of Voyager never take or even need shore leave, because they have giant holodecks, and apparently plenty of power reserves for their 70-now-32.5-year trip home to keep them running day and night with hugely sophisticated programs.

But the best episode this season, "Bride of Chaotica," took place on the holodeck, and even though Janeway once again single-handedly saved the ship from an untimely demise, she did so in the high campy form that such heroics deserve.

So here’s a thought: why not scrap the space station/spaceship aspect of Trek shows and just do holodeck stories?

Apparently the producers and writers are tired of space stories, and would rather dwell in the mid-1900s.

Trek shows could become repertory anthology series, with the same actors assuming different roles each week. (Although that Voyager episode featuring space lizards as Nazis using the holodeck to take over the ship was a fairly ill-advised outing.)

It would have nothing to do with space or science fiction, but the final season of DS9 is already in that sad situation – unless they only show holodeck episodes when I’m watching, and save the real ones for when I’m not.

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