Been rewatching Deep Space Nine here and there.
SPOILERS
If you want to see just how bad some of the actors truly are on Deep Space Nine, you should definitely check this one out. Not only is it an absolutely horrible Sisko episode about civil rights (what else) but everyone goes without make-up and they do (laughable) New York accents.
Another one is S06E23 'Profit and lace'. It's where they turn Quark into a tranny in order to salvage what's left of the Grand Nagus' authority after he gave females the right to wear clothes. Yes, that's right. Trannies & feminism. :')
(Not to mention parroting all the talking points about getting females into the workforce and doubling the economy, but for some reason they omitted the part where the birth rates would plummet as a consequence. rofl)
S06E24 is also hilariously bad. It's where they decide to send an eighteen-year-old Molly back into the time where she was left stranded for ten years and grew up all alone on an abandoned planet 300 years ago. Apparently, she would be better off there, instead of a Federation clinic, specifically designed to rehabilitate cases like hers. :') :')
Edit:
Season 6 was also the season where they decided to turn Dukat into a cartoon villain and make him the 'nemesis' of Sisko. It resulted in that ridiculous episode where Sisko and Dukat were stranded on a planet and Dukat was talking to himself the whole time. It ended with Sisko ignoring Dukat's mental status and declaring him an 'evil man', after his pride got wounded (once again).
This theme was further explored in S06E17. Where Dukat called up Kira out of nowhere and revealed that he was banging her mother during the occupation, rofl. And then to make it even more preposterous, Kira used the Orb of Time to travel back in time to confirm that her mother was really banging Dukat.
Avery was good when he played Sisko as a stoic (not acting). When he tried to act, he often over acted. There were several episodes where he over acted, and it was really off putting. A few in the first season, a few when he was battling the Federation turncoat that joined the Maquis, and the one where Sisko was a scifi author in the early 20th century, to say how bad racism was.
It's a shame, too, because there are a lot of good episodes in DS9. Looking back, it's maddening and hilarious with what they did with Dukat. They made him so nuanced, an actual believable character, with genuine motivations and points of view, rather than a mustache twirling super villain (he was meant to be a stand in for Nazis), and the actor (Marc Alaimo) was so charismatic, that a lot of the audience began to love Dukat. By the last season or two, the writers were so pissed that the audience (how dare they?!) liked their Nazi stand in, that they pissed away all the nuance, development, and writing for the character, that they turned him into the mustache twirling two dimensional super villain they were desperately trying to avoid the rest of the show.
They needed him to make their Saturday morning cartoon showdown between good and evil work. Sisko the Emissary versus Dukat the evil genocidal cartoon villain.
Except that they already established that Dukat had a mental breakdown after the dominion fleet was disappeared by the wormhole aliens and his daughter got killed. He was suffering long-term mental health consequences from that episode. They were playing it like he was finally revealing his true self due to his breakdown, but what kind of man talks with and shoots a phaser at imaginary people?
Ever heard him talking, as himself? He's a scatterbrained idiot. Really bad!
That must make him a terrific actor then? 😜 If he can come across as anything BUT a scatterbrained idiot.
Most actors I've heard talk in real life have almost always been idiots. Very few exceptions. Some are worse than others, though.