Prophets: Sisko used baseball to explain the concept of linear time to them.
Ferengi: Quark learned about baseball to examine potential business opportunities.
Unidentified imagination aliens: One of them took the form of a baseball player based on Sisko’s interests.
Trill: Dax is an old friend of Sisko’s, they probably learned about it during life as Curzon, then definitely learned about it as Jadzia.
Cardassian: Possibly. I’m assuming that during the Dominion occupation of DS9, Gul Dukat at least took thirty seconds to learn what the baseball was for.
Vorta: If Gul Dukat bothered to learn, he probably rambled about it to Weyoun while drunk. If not, all Vorta field commanders are required to read Sisko’s psychographic profile. Baseball is in that thing somewhere.
Jem’Hadar: Guards were present during the exchange of an antique baseball card which Jake Sisko wanted to procure for his father.
Bajoran: Kira accompanied Sisko to a holosuite game, later learned to play when brought in by Sisko for his team.
Klingon: Through Worf, same circumstances as Kira.
Vulcan: Captain Solok and at least a team’s worth of his Vulcan crew learned the game in order to play against the Niners.
Changelings: Odo learned the rules in order to be the umpire, that knowledge would’ve been transferred to Laas and later the rest of the Founders when he returned to them. Every Founder now knows how to play baseball in excessive detail.
Because of Sisko, baseball knowledge extends across the galaxy and beyond the boundaries of time.
The number one funniest example of people inventing bullshit reasons ships they don’t like are “problematic” that I’ve ever seen was people calling Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister “like siblings”.
Fam.
Have you forgotten the number one most notable trait about Jaime Lannister.
Sometimes I think about Louise Hobbs for too long and start going a little crazy.
Garret Jacob gets all the attention on the show. Abigail gets it from fandom. The absence of Louise is almost invisible. She’s not there. We don’t think about her.
We don’t think about her, of course, because she’s not in canon in the first place. She has no lines. Her name is not mentioned in dialogue. She only barely appears on camera.
Here is Louise Hobbs alive and well. Striking about this bit, once I was looking at it: she doesn’t look towards the camera, she doesn’t look towards her family members, and her family doesn’t look towards her. They move around one another and don’t directly interact. Look at it: Abigail and Garret Jacob Hobbs are communicating, here, in a way that she’s entirely cut off from.
(And, ok, listen, I’ve gotta sidebar. Even before Abigail actually picks up the phone, GJH is keeping track of where she goes. There are no clear frames of this tiny interaction, but look:
he’s keeping tabs on her. The minute she moves, he’s checking over his shoulder to see what she’s up to. By contrast, he doesn’t look at his wife even once.)
(One other thing about this tiny little scene of them playing house. GJH has absolutely no chill. He is tense and intense even before he gets on the phone. It’s not really possible to tell what Abigail is thinking through all of this–we know from later that she’s a pretty good liar–but Garret Jacob Hobbs is not subtle. He’s jumpy as fuck, and he’s probably that way all the time.)
Continuing.
The next time we see Lousie, she’s being shoved out the front door. Think about that. GJH didn’t kill her immediately. He’s not interested in seeing her dead. He’s using her to buy time in the kitchen with Abigail because he knows he doesn’t have any left.
The way I remembered Louise dying was with a cut to her throat, but look at it. She’s got wounds on her arms, on her torso. He wasn’t careful, or quick. He didn’t hold out his hand to her and ask her to come closer. He attacked her, shoved her out the door, and slammed it behind her.
That is the end of Louise Hobbs.
Hobbs family dynamics just. Absolutely fascinate me. (Too much.) I so desperately want to know what it was like to be Louise Hobbs. I want to know how much she knew, how much she suspected, and how much she refused to let herself understand. She’s the cannibal the show cares about the least. She’s the one who dies so that someone else can have a little more time.
The show constantly returns to the idea of murder as a way to break or make families. Besides the Hobbs family, there’s the children and foster mother from Oeuf, Gideon killing his wife in backstory, Lawrence Wells who killed his own son, Margot and Mason, and of course Dolarhyde’s obsession with killing families together. Louise Hobbs’s is a murder to break a family. She is, very literally, cast out.
We do see her one last time:
It’s interesting that, when Abigail sees this, Alana is the one who becomes her mother. Whatever you want to say about the long-term feasibility of the Murder Family, it’s indisputable that Hannibal was never interested in planning a future with Alana. She’s there nearly by accident. Holding a place meant for Will. She is not part of the plan.
If Abigail mourns for Louise, she does it off-screen. We see flashbacks to her interactions with Garret Jacob, but, after this, Louise never returns. We’re left to wonder, or to forget, all on our own.
ALT
ALT
