Average Deep Space Nine A plot: "What are you willing to sacrifice for the chance at a better world? Who are you willing to hurt? Will the pain you cause now outweigh the peace that it might bring? When both choices are bad, and you do what you think is best, can you live with yourself after? Could you live with yourself if you made the opposite choice?"
Average Deep Space Nine B plot: "What do we do with all this hot sauce!?"
And sometimes, with DS9, the A plot is about the hot sauce and the B plot is about the moral complexities, and I love it either way round.
Yes, this is quite literally “In the Cards”!
I had to go and LOOK UP what those “more serious political machinations” were because I couldn’t remember, and it’s only negotiating Bajor’s non-aggression pact with the Dominion. So, you know, nothing major compared to Jake really loving his dad. Chef’s kiss; perfection.
[ID: excerpt from the wiki page for In The Cards, reading “[In this] episode, Jake Sisko, the son of station captain Benjamin Sisko, and his friend Nog try to acquire a baseball card, while running afoul of more serious political machinations.” end ID]
Flashbacks to a very serious con discussion with @singlecrow, @always-theocean et al c.2015 on whether yamok sauce was made of yamoks, or it was sauce originally formulated to put on your yamoks. (The secret third option I don’t remember if we got on to is, I guess, that it’s like Worcestershire sauce and named after the Cardassia Prime district of Yamok, and dropped the capitalisation over time as some kind of genericisation. Probably no protected designation of origin laws when all production is for the greater glory of the centralised state.)
