The Worst Star Trek DS9 Episode Almost Scared Off The Franchise’s Best Writer
While not every Star Trek fan agrees, most in the fandom consider “Move Along Home” to be the worst Deep Space Nine episode ever made. The episode was awful enough that many in the show’s crew agreed that it was a stinker, including Ronald D. Moore. He was arguably the best writer and producer of that era of Star Trek, but when he watched this episode before joining DS9, he found himself “wondering if everyone had lost their minds.”
An Episode Everyone Wants To Forget
To understand what makes “Move Along Home” so bad, you need to know a bit more about what the episode is about. After Quark tries to scam some visiting gamer aliens (no, really), he must play a new game while several others on the station are stuck inside and instructed to simply “move along home.” This leads to seemingly life-or-death stakes for those inside the strange game, but the episode ends with the surprising revelation that all of this has been safe and harmless entertainment for everyone involved.
The Episode Was Confusing To Everyone
Ronald D. Moore came to Deep Space Nine after The Next Generation ended, and he watched the entirety of the spinoff (then only two seasons) before joining the show. Like most of us watching at home, Moore was confused by the various storytelling decisions of “Move Along Home.” His conclusion was simple: this was an episode put together by a crew of crazy people.
Chutes And Ladders
Sadly, Ronald D. Moore didn’t elaborate on what he found most baffling about this episode, but we can take a few guesses. For example, the game they play in “Move Along Home,” Chula, is essentially just a three-dimensional version of Chutes and Ladders. This alone makes it hard to take this episode seriously, and the only thing that could have been more embarrassing was watching everyone play Monopoly (although a game where you have to pay rent and taxes while narrowly avoiding jail does sound like Quark’s worst nightmare).
One Of The Writers Of The Next Generation Finale
Another common criticism of this episode is that the “it was all just a dream” ending was a complete disappointment. This more or less confirmed that everything that happened in the episode (including some deeply stupid singing) happened for no reason. Such a shallow episode was always destined to offend Ronald D. Moore, someone who made a career out of creating high-stakes Star Trek episodes with appropriately dramatic payoffs.
Back when “Move Along Home” first aired, Moore was still working on The Next Generation. He toured that show’s set in 1989, dropping off a script so good (it was “The Bonding”) that he got hired as a staff writer. Moore eventually became a producer of the show and even won a Hugo Award for co-writing the series finale “All Good Things.”
Moore Wrote For DS9 For Three Seasons
In other words, he was a pretty big deal when TNG ended, and he joined DS9 as a producer and writer. However, watching “Move Along Home” briefly made Ronald D. Moore question the sanity of the staff that he was about to join. This didn’t keep him from joining the show for three seasons, but he would eventually grow tired of Trek, abruptly walking away from Voyager because he couldn’t tell the kinds of dark, ongoing stories that he felt the show’s plot demanded.
Went On To Launch Battlestar Galactica
He may have joined Trek as a wet-behind-the-ears writer, but Ronald D. Moore ended up defining arguably the best era of the franchise across three different shows. This gave him the experience to create the Battlestar Galactica remake, a series that is among the very best sci-fi ever put on television. For that reason, we’re glad that he could look past the awful quality of “Move Along Home” to instead see the potential of this new show and its very different cast of characters.
