The holosuite episodes were an interlude and a break from the overarching dominion war arc allowing the crew to do something out of the box and wacky. Even then they often covered relevant topics such as Nog's PTSD. The heist episode is one of my favourite episodes in all of Trek.

It felt totally natural to me watching it first time round. It’s part of DS9’s thing to be about a group of people who stay in one place and have lives and relationships. And it’s part of DS9’s thing to throw in stuff and let it grow if it works.

It balances against the harsh darkness of the main storyline, and in a 26 episode series you can’t just bash out war after war after war episode - everyone needs a break.

Probably also helps that it’s likely cheaper than other stuff to produce and means they can save some budget for a space battle in another episode.

All his episodes felt like the showrunners were pulling a "Sandler" and just hooking up their out of work friend that used to have a hell of a lounge act.

He is a good actor and singer, but using him so much was just freaking weird. 100% filler in my opinion, even though they did some charector development in his episodes.

Cause he was cool as hell. Him working with Nog was some of the best television ever. Only dumb thing was him being a person in the mirror universe. But that is minor. The singing after Jadzia died was gut retching.

Most people here are ignoring the main reason: the writers were just a bunch of baseball loving rat pack fans who took their love of those things maybe a little too far. In the case of baseball, we only had Take Me Out to Holosuite to deal with (which is a great episode--provided you like baseball, I suppose). In the case of the rat pack, we inexplicably got Vic Fontaine who you either love or hate. I wouldn't hate Vic Fontaine so much myself if they didn't force him to basically take up the space that Quark's Bar was supposed to be, and for him to be an integral part of the show so late in the series. And yes, the musical numbers take up too much time, if you ask me.

As much as I absolutely love DS9, I did not like the Vic Fontaine character. But, in general, I'm prejudiced against holodeck stuff, most of the time, because I felt Trek spent way too much time in the damn holodecks instead of exploring space.

At first, I didn't really mind this character that much. But then they really started giving him more screen time as the show went on, and that just made me resent the character. I did not want to spend time in the holodeck when they could have spent that time on the Dominion war storyline or on more interesting characters (Sisko, Dukat, Kira, Kai Winn, etc).

DS9 is still one of the few Trek series that, overall, I truly enjoyed, but I skip the Fontaine scenes whenever I go back and watch episodes now.

I'm just going to add that James Darren was actually a professional singer with gold records and multiple top ten hits before he started acting. It was nice to see that that wasn't entirely forgotten.

I think Vic Fontaine is one of the weirdest things in Star Trek, and that's saying something. I couldn't believe he had such a big part in DS9. I enjoyed some of it and I always crack jokes about him so it was definitely entertaining but just so very weird.

I think I get what he was supposed to be, it's kind of like when they send comedians and singers onto military bases to boost morale of the troops. It was just such a weird choice to have that style of music. It felt totally out of place to me, and I'm sure it was seriously uncool at the time it was on TV.

Imagine being 15 or something and trying to persuade one of your friends that DS9 is amazing and really cool (which it was and is), so they come round to watch an episode with you and it's Vic Fontaine.

I felt the same way. I wonder if it hit different on TV at the time.

So that Sisko could do a song with him as a little icing on the DS9 cake

Oh, I forgot about these. These songs are so lovely to catch up on