Rob

choose a country, pick a decade, and GO!!

you’ll get an endless streaming of songs (ad free!).

episode 7: Jadzia's new Klingon mother-in-law is mean!! Worf invites his friends to the galaxy's shittiest bachelor party

ep 8: Kira must confront her dead boyfriend's doppelganger from another universe

ep 9: the neurodivergent breakfast club, starring Bashir

ep 10: the Ferengi Comic Relief Brigade have to do a Weekend at Bernie's with a POW they killed by accident

ep 11: Ben Sisko is injured and trapped in a cave with his self-declared archnemesis who goes violently insane while hallucinating and ranting about his intention to commit genocide

ep 12: Quark goes on a treasure hunt but the real treasure was here inside Morn's colon all along

ep 13: a Black science fiction writer struggles with systemic racism and police brutality in 1950s America and the entire show might be a dream he's having

like look at this:

sitting all alone in a fancy room, with an computer voice singing. or, just standing in an empty room, all alone, singing with no audience. now im sure this also reflects the change in karaoke establishments irl from like 1988 to 2005, but you can also read into it that it reflects kiryu's situation.

kiryu's an ex-convict, which are heavily stigmatised in a lot of countries and societies. ten years in the joint prison have detached him from the world outside and he probably at least somewhat feels like an alien, an intruder on a world that isn't his.

yes, this is also me getting very emotional over "Tonight" I looked up the translation of the lyrics and it fucking made me cry. just imagine kiryu pre-show down, singing this, hoping in his heart that everything will be okay. that nishiki will come meet him and change back into the nishiki he remembers. then, kiryu post-show down, singing this again, that hope now nothing more but a wishful fantasy that will never become reality because nishiki is dead. Both the nishiki he knew from 88 and the nishiki of 2005.

especially contrasted against y0:

look how lively! the disco light, other people cheering you on, there for the same reason as you. (also akira is there because I HEART NISHIKI and i want kazuma to fucking spend time with him and GIVE HIM A HUG ALREADY!!!)

Deep Space Nine didn't work bc it was Dark and it wasn't Dark out of nowhere. Deep Space Nine is intimately tied to TNG in a way no other series is with another (Voyager could've been just as rooted in DS9, but. Y'know. Wasn't). Not only in characters, but that the show is so devoted to exploring deep cuts from TNG: the Bajorans, but also the Ferengi, long dismissed as failed villains, and the Trill, one-off aliens-of-the-week who DS9's writers turned into one of Trek's major species. The central thesis of DS9 isn't that the Trek Universe Is Fucked Up Actually. It's that things get more messy and complicated when Starfleet has to stick around and not dash off to another planet at the end of the episode