Move Along Home (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

Move Along Home is a first-season episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Plot
A previously-unknown alien race, the Wadi, come through the Bajoran wormhole and visit Deep Space Nine. After Quark unsuccessfully attempts to scam them, they respond by abducting Sisko, Kira, Dax and Bashir, and turning them into Quark's players in an apparently deadly game named "Chula."

Why It Sucks

 * 1) The actors and writers clearly don't have that good of a handle on the characters yet, with Kira seeming overly shrill and angry even by her standards, Dax just bland, and Bashir an annoying dork. Odo's make-up also looks pretty bad here, too.
 * 2) The Wadi don't even bother to tell Quark that the kidnapped officers are his players in the game, with Odo instead indicating that to him, therefore making it unclear what lesson they intend for him to learn if he doesn't initially think he's risking the lives of the officers.
 * 3) While the four officers are presented with various puzzles in the course of the Chula game, they're either stupidly easy or outright impossible for all the players to survive.
 * 4) The sets used for the Chula levels try to look surreal, but just look cheap in execution.
 * 5) The station's Starfleet chief of security, George Primmin, is characterised as a total idiot. Unsurprisingly, he never appears after this episode.
 * 6) Odo berates Primmin for not helping him trespass on an alien ship, despite how much of a stickler for obeying the law he's already been established as.
 * 7) Quark rejects most of the items the Wadi initially offer up as gambling collateral, even though he's a good enough salesman (and conman) that he should be able to make a killing on any items from the hitherto-unexplored Gamma Quadrant.
 * 8) Bashir is "killed" halfway through the episode, thus spoiling the twist that the game wasn't actually lethal (since they would never kill off a main cast member this quickly), and robbing the rest of the episode of any suspense.
 * 9) The episode's ending makes the whole thing a complete waste of time, since none of the officers are harmed, and Quark doesn't appear to have learned anything from the experience.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The episode actually does have a neat ending twist, with it revealed that the kidnapped officers were never in any actual danger since "it's only a game," which makes sense if all the Wadi wanted to do was teach Quark a lesson for trying to scam them.
 * 2) Good acting from Armin Shimerman as Quark, and the episode does show that while he might be a petty conman, he's far from actually being evil.
 * 3) You might get a laugh or two out of the stupidity of the "Allamaraine" (read: hopscotch) sequence.

Reception
At the 50th anniversary Star Trek convention, this was voted the worst episode of this series, and the 8th-worst episode of Star Trek overall. While Deep Space Nine, unlike the other Trek shows, does not have an episode universally agreed on as the absolute worst, with about a half-dozen episodes vying for that title, it's safe to say that this one does not have a good reputation.

At least two cast members have negative opinions of the episode, with Avery Brooks feeling it was silly and inconsequential, and Terry Farrell resenting that she was forced to appear in such a bad episode instead of getting a cameo in TNG's "Birthright" (which went to Alexander Siddig instead).