I’ve just recently finished a year-long rewatch of Deep Space Nine that has taken almost as long as it must have when I watched it the first time. I’ve held off on a lot of Star Trek thoughts because I wanted to finish watching the show first. Well, I’ve opened the floodgates so I expect I’m gonna have a lot of DS9-related thoughts here over the next few months.

Today’s thought is one that I had when I watched the finale as a child (looks like I would’ve been 17 when the show ended): The Ferengi should have been involved in the final push against the Dominion.

In the episode before the finale, our beloved Ferengi everyman Rom is given the position of Grand Nagus. He’s in charge of the entire Ferengi government (admittedly with a council of some kind as well), and he has many ties to the allied Alpha Quadrant governments. What would be a better way of proving his people’s value to those allies than helping in the war? It wouldn’t even have to be a big help. Just a handful of ships seen among the fleet. You could have them led by a Ferengi like Leck who enjoys a challenge. That alone would make the Ferengi plots tie into the Dominion War plot a bit more nicely.

Aside from that, maybe acknowledge supply lines being bolstered by Ferengi forces and talk about more Ferengi cadets heading to Starfleet Academy to follow in Nog’s footsteps. After all, establishing good relations with the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans would be very good for profit.

This is the one where Superman fights some robots.

This is the second one. We get the whole Faster Than A Speeding Bullet and Amazing Stranger speech here, along with the “Truth and Justice” declaration. Then we’re right into the scene of a robo-bank robbery. An criminal figure is controlling the robot and has it robo-escape by flying back to headquarters and robo-depositing the ill-gotten gains in the money vat. The robots in this short have numbers on them, right? Well it has bugged me for years that when the criminal controls his robot to go rest by the wall until needed again, he doesn’t put them in order. I may not be overly concerned with bank robberies, but this chaos requires the aid of Superman!

Fortunately for me, the criminal is not happy with vats of money, he pushes his luck to also robo-rob a really cool-looking jewellery display place (what is it a museum or something?) and that is very noticed by Lois Lane and Clark Kent. During the chaos, Lois pulls Clark to safety with a visceral “C’mon, you fool, you wanna get trampled?” but she has far less concern for herself because the first chance she gets she sneaks into the robot. Just gets right inside the containment hatch it is stuffing the jewels. One of the more dangerous things I’ve ever seen Lois do.

Lois is captured by the criminal but won’t tell him what happened to the jewels, so the criminal puts her in a deadly trap and Superman comes and busts up the robots and saves the day.

I like this one, which I don’t think is a controversial opinion. On this viewing some of the things that stood out to me were the detail on some of the still backgrounds, such as the jewel display and, even moreso, Metropolis from the sky. We’ve got some iconic things in here as well. Clark protecting Lois from the molten metal with his cape is one I’ve seen referenced, and ending with Lois and Clark at the Planet always feels right with me, though this one lacks a wink. The robots themselves have made appearances in the comics from time to time and they are pretty good robots. They’re not top-level S-tier supercool robots, but they’re solid B-tier I think, especially for the time and for giving Superman a pretty cool fight. That said, the bit when they spend so much time on each robot individually waking up almost feels like a joke to me, but was not intended as such.

More noticeable perhaps is that Clark gets into his Superman suit in a phone booth in this one. It’s a thing that has happened far less often than you’d think considering its reputation. I think it’s interesting that he went in there to actually make a phone call to the police or whomever. He wasn’t gonna Superman up for those jewels until Lois got in trouble. This makes sense to me. People are more important than jewels.

And thus ends another year of Phone Guys comics. What will the next year bring?