Title :
In the Cards
Series :
Rating :
Overall Ep :
122
First Aired :
9 Jun 1997
Stardate :
Unknown
Director :
Year :
Writers :
Season Ep :
YATI :
When Nog first mentions the anaerobic metabolites, he says there are two litres of the stuff. Later when they mention it to Bashir they say it is five litres.
DS9's "Body Parts" establishes a conversion rate of twenty strips to one bar of Latinum. Yet in this episode Quark takes a bid of one bar and twenty five strips, which is like saying one dollar and a hundred and twenty cents. And Dr. Geiger top that bid with a bid for two bars, which is actually less than one bar and twenty five strips!
Great Moment :
I love this episode. I love that we got a nice, lighthearted episode to - quite literally - relieve all the gloom and doom we've had of late.
Body Count :
Zero.
Factoid :
Jake's line about how Humans don't have money because "we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity" is a reference to Star Trek : First Contact, in which Picard says the same thing to Lilly. Ronald D. Moore wrote both the original line and the scene in which Nog points out that it doesn't really mean anything, commenting that he takes great glee in mocking his own work.
The character of Elias Giger was so-named specifically so that Nog could say the "Lions and Gigers and bears" line, a reference to the Wizard of Oz.
Morn is seen leaving the auction with a painting in this episode. The same painting will feature in "Who Mourns For Morn?", when the apparently dead Morn will leave it to Quard.
The USS Tian An Men is reported missing in this episode, presumed captured or destroyed by the Dominion. Presumably either the ship turned up after all or Starfleet rapidly reused the name for another ship, because another USS Tian An Men would feature in the First Battle of Chin'toka a year later.
This is the first episode to be directed by Michael Dorn, aka Worf.
The usual structure for an episode would be to have the serious plot as the A plot, and a more lighthearted one as the B plot. Here this is switched around, with the comic plot as the main story and the negotiations with the Dominion as the backstory.
Plotline
The Dominion's seeming invincibility is causing gloomy times on DS9. When Jake Sisko becomes obsessed with getting a baseball trading card to cheer up his father, he must engage in a complex series of shenanigans involving Kai Winn, Dominion Vorta Weyoun, and a peculiar scientist determined to achieve immortality despite being hounded by the 'soulless minions of orthodoxy'. Jake, determined to win through at all costs, finds himself having an unexpected effect on station morale.
