DS9 (Deep Space Nine) is excellent. I haven't watched DS9 in something like twenty years, so I thought the COVID-19 lockdown might be a good time to re-acquaint myself with the show.
I remember seeing a good deal of it during the initial run, but I know I missed some episodes.
I just finished all seven seasons (over 7 days worth of content spread over two months), and I can say it holds up. It has an epic arc with The Dominion War, a fabulous set of nuanced, compelling characters and some of the best villains to grace a Star Trek show.
Like the other two late Twentieth Century Trek shows (TNG and Voyager), it changes radically in season three.
The first two seasons of TNG were, let's face it, kinda rough. Lots of great ideas were there, but they didn't gel. Season two is more in focus than the first, but it's not until season 3 that it all really comes together. It may have something to do with the new uniforms, which were no longer causing extreme crotch discomfort for the male actors (seriously, this is why they changed the uniforms: Starfleets key personnel were being rendered infertile).
Voyager spent the first two seasons, if memory serves, dealing with the Kazon, who were (for me) a rather lacklustre foil for the crew. Season three sees the ship hit Borg space, and introduces Jeri Ryan in her sexy silver cat suit. I have some quibbles around that as an act of pandering to the lowest common denominator, but admittedly no objection to Miss Ryan's unquestionably riveting appearance.
DS9 starts out like typical Trek, solid and episodic. The first two seasons are a lot better than TNG's first two and on par with Voyager's start. The characters, however, stand out more with DS9: while Voyager also has a mix of Starfleet and non-Starfleet cast members (the latter half Maquis terrorists), the cast of DS9 is more eclectic.
The big initial twist with DS9 is that it's set on a space station near Bajor. The crew isn't going anywhere, which means the villains and extras stick around, and the consequences of earlier episodes aren't so easily evaded. In the first episode, a wormhole leading to the Gamma Quadrant (far far away otherwise) appears beside the station. This opens up a whole new region of space to play in and populate.
Planet Bajor was set up in TNG: it has just been freed from a long and oppressive Cardassian occupation. Initially the TNG character Ensign Ro was going to be the station's first officer, but she turned down the role, and it turned into the equally feisty Major Kira.
Kiera (Nana Visitor), a core cast member, is a spiritual former terrorist and understandably hates Cardassians. She's combative on every front, both personal and professional. It takes a little while to discover her softer side. Her struggles nicely nuanced right from the start: she's not needlessly violent, but like the French Resistance (and the parallels are deliberate) she'll fight and kill (including civilians) for her people's freedom.
DS9 is headed up by the bold Commander Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), who's suffering from PTSD after losing his wife at Wolf-359 (where the Borg slaughtered the Federation fleet). He's immediately proclaimed The Emissary by the Bajorans, adding an interesting mystical subplot to the show.
He's joined on the station by his young son, Jake (Cirroc Lofton), who's an ordinary kid, unlike the almost superhumanly capable adults in Starfleet.
Quark (Armin Shimerman), an openly, defiantly avaricious Ferengi, runs the station bar; his character is rounded out by flashes of empathy from time to time. Not that he'd ever admit to it. His brother Rom works with him, and is a peripheral character initially, but takes on new dimensions starting in season three, where he emerges as a gifted engineer.
Rom's son Nog (Aron Eisenberg) is paired with Jake, and the two form an unlikely interspecies friendship. In fact, interspecies friendships abound on the station.
Odo (Rene Auberjonois), the shape shifting station security chief, is an island, preferring not to have any close connections, but he has an antagonism with Quark, who's always got some illegal scheme going on, that has a fun interdependent angle to it. They're like the coyote and the sheep dog from the Warner Brother cartoons: friends but also enemies.
Bashir (Alexander Siddig) is the brash young station doctor, who's a bit of a legend in his own mind, and he rubs the other crew members the wrong way at first, especially O'Brien. Bashir proves to be both brilliant and genetically enhanced, which is revealed around season three, and that adds a whole new angle to his character.
Miles O'Brien (Colm Meaney)is the station's chief engineer and responsible for keeping the aging Cardassian station operational, which is no small feat. He's put upon and disgruntled a lot of the time, besieged by requests and demands, and storylines regularly subject him to great suffering. In fact, this becomes something of a joke in the writer's room, where they have the saying: "O'Brien must suffer". And man, does he. In one episode, they actually kill him off, only to replace himself with an O'Brien from another timeline.
O'Brien is a man down in the trenches, and Julian Bashir's attitude and endless chatter drive him bonkers. Over the course of the show, the two become fast friends, although there are some hilarious barbs exchanged between them over the years.
Dax (Terry Farrell) is the station's sexy Trill science officer; she's had multiple lives, including several as men (Curzon, a former male host, was fast friends with Sisko). She's a little nebulous at first, character wise: early on she's very chill and balanced. Later on, they bring out her party hearty side, like a kind of space age science hippy.
Garak (Andrew Robinson) is the station's tailor; an ex-Cardassian spy, he's endlessly dissembling, and mixes lies with truth so much you can't tell what's real and what's not. He develops a friendship with Bashir, and the two have lunch once a week together for almost the entire run of the show. There's even a little sexual subtext to their connection.
Conflict is the order of the day on DS9. Character's are built to conflict, but they also work through their differences, which is a big theme of the show: that people with very different points of view can ultimately get along.
Kiera (Nana Visitor) is a window into Bajor, Julian can explore all sorts of medical themes, Sisko gets both command and spiritual themes as The Emissary, Quark is a window into Trek's underworld, Jake and Nog into youth in the Twenty-fourth Century, Dax into balance, tolerance, change, and difference; while Odo is law and order, topped by his fabulous shape shifting, a topic that is mined extensively. In later seasons, it is revealed he is one of The Founders, the shape shifters who run The Dominion, the arch-foil of The Federation for the later half of the show's run.
What's great about DS9's first two seasons of episodic shows is that it lets you get to know the characters really well before throwing them into the grand narrative arc of The Dominion War.
This builds up over season three and then becomes a dominant aspect of the show all the way through to the finale.
The show intersperses the Dominion Arc episodes with one-offs until towards the end of season 7, and it's jarring sometimes. You go from a life and death struggle with a relentless enemy one episode to funny problems in Quark's bar the next. You get a bit of whiplash with this. On the other hand, if all the one-off episodes were taken out, I think the show would get too dark. It's nice to still have side jaunts that explore the lives of the station's quirky characters.
One thing the show does very well is convey a sense of a larger universe. The writers will seed clues to larger events in episodes earlier on in the season, or even whole seasons earlier, and then hit you with a big payoff that's all the bigger for the build up. You can look back at the clues and they all add up, which is awesome. I'm sure there's a lot of ad lib stuff, and retro fitting, going on as well, there always is in such a complex, ongoing narrative, but enough of it is so well planned out you can really invest in the show's reality.
There are quibbles, of course, but they don't seriously detract from the show. Considering the scope and scale of it, and the likely onerous demands of higher level executives, I'm amazed it all holds together as well as it does.
This is Trek as never before: no other Trek show at this point has had such strong, ongoing narrative threads. No other Trek show fleshes out it's villains as well as DS9, and they are worth mentioning:
Gul Dukat (Mark Alaimo), the former leader of Cardassia's Bajor occupation, is a reptilian, Machiavellian schemer who likes to preen and pose as virtuous. He has enough of a conscience to need to justify his villainy to himself and others. What's great about him is that the writer's will let him be decent for a stretch, to the point you wonder if he's changed, if he isn't really villainous, but then he'll do something truly dastardly. It ties back nicely to a quote from Jean-Luc Picard: "Villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. It's the ones who cloak themselves in good deeds who are the real threat." Or something close to that.
Speaking of villains cloaked in virtue, Kai Winn (Louise Fletcher) is the epitome of this. She's one of the most vile characters I've ever seen on Trek, and I can't stand to watch her oily condescension and passive aggression. She keeps things just civil enough, masks her snide barbs just enough, to avoid direct confrontation. She lies and denies as well as Garak, perhaps even better, but with non of his charm. That said, the show will allow slivers of decency to show through from time to time.
Later on there's Weyoun (Jeffrey Combs), the unctuous and smarmy Voorta diplomat. He's exceedingly polite and complimentary when he wants something from you, and turns snide, demeaning and sadistic when he doesn't.
No other Star Trek show has ever explored villainy with such depth and nuance. It's great stuff!
The Founders are presented as deeply xenophobic, ruling an empire of solids out fo fear of them. The lead founder is motherly towards Odo, and seems decent and reasonable at first, but as push turns to shove, becomes monstrously punitive and genocidal.
Speaking of which, DS9 introduces Section 31, a secret organization within The Federation that is dedicated to protecting it at any cost, including creating a plague to exterminate The Founders. Their methods are antithetical to everything the Federation stands for, the stick to the Federation's soft speech, and they run into conflict with DS9's crew.
This is an area of contention with fans of Trek: many see it as undermining Roddenberry's hope for a better, gentler humanity. And to be fair, they have a point. Section 31 delves into the nasty side of international (interstellar) politics and implies they're necessary. It's disheartening that the Federation's decency is a lie, and that deceit, murder and even genocide are necessary for survival. That The Federation continues to exist at all could indeed be thanks to Section 31's hidden perfidy and mass murder.
On the other hand, the storyline does pose the question loudly and effectively, and it pits the crew agains this viewpoint, to a degree (as we shall see next). Star Trek has always glided past how it's economy works, and how they've solved all of today's pernicious social and economic issues. Perhaps it is childish to view the future through rose coloured glasses. The show's writers are more hard nosed realists when it comes to interstellar politics.
The important thing here, I think, is that the question is raised, and we are poised the question: at what price survival? What are we willing to countenance from our military and spy agencies? Where does one rightly draw the line?
This leads nicely into In the Pale Moonlight, for me the most memorable of all DS9's episodes. One of the hallmarks of great drama is characters making truly difficult choices: not between right and obviously wrong, but between lesser evils. Here Benjamin Sisko enters into a deception, aided by Garak, to bring the Romulans into the war with The Dominion, which The Federation is currently losing. Distressed by the weekly casualty lists, Sisko is intent on doing what he can to save his beloved Federation. With Garak's help, he concocts a fake hologram tape of The Dominion's agents plotting an invasion of Romulus. He passes it on to a Romulan senator, who discovers it is fake. Before he can get back to Romulus and expose Sisko's hoax, his ship explodes. The damaged data rod is then recovered by the Romulans, it's flaws hidden by the explosion, and they duly declare war on The Dominion. This is what Garak planned all along, and Sisko is complicit in the deliberate murder.
The episode is presented in flashbacks as Sisko recounts events in his log, which he then deletes. He questions whether or not he can live with what he's done, with the compromises he has made, and in the end, he decides he can.
Unlike TNG, DS9 never sugar coats, and moral absolutes are quickly muddied into shades of grey. The best thing I can say about it is that it's truly thought provoking. You can argue about Sisko's choices (as you can about those made by many of the other characters) because there are multiple sides to the issues. Where do you draw the line? Was Sisko justified? Why and why not?
What Sisko does condemns millions of Romulans to death, but also saves the Alpha Quadrant. Does he have the right to make that decision? And yet, with your own civilization on the line, what would you do to survive?
It reminds me of The 100, which (before it flew off the rails and into orbit) was relentless in presenting it's characters with painfully difficult choices that would stain their souls.
Some things don’t track if you think about them too much, and I’ll list a couple quibbles just to be pedantic:
Starfleet asking Sisko to plan the invasion of Cardassia strikes me as odd. He’s a field officer, not a staff officer. D-Day was led by Eisenhower, who was a five-star general, and he was supported by a large dedicated staff. Invading a planet is many orders of magnitude larger than D-Day; there’s just no way they’d give that responsibility to a captain. It’s beyond their pay grade and role. At very least, Sisko would be promoted, transferred to HQ, and have dozens of new characters assigned to support him. Sure, they could make DS9 their HQ, but where are Sisko’s staff officers? This is a monumental task!
Earlier, they had Sisko lead a fleet of six hundred ships (six hundred!) against the Dominion. Such a vast fleet would be broken down into sections, each commanded by an admiral, with at least a rear admiral commanding the lot. There’d be admirals coming out of your behind with that many ships. It certainly wouldn’t be led by a captain.
Sisko is being screwed: his admiral managers are off loading tons of THEIR work onto him without proper compensation or recognition! Planning the invasion of a planet, leading a thousand ships, that’s what admirals are for!
Of course, the show is on a budget, and for narrative reasons they want a main cast member at the head of the story (ie. invasion plans, etc).
Something else that irks is the ire Sisko gets from Starfleet for trying to be The Emissary and a star fleet officer at the same time. Hello?!? Surely Starfleet knows that the whole reason they have not lost the Dominion War is because The Emissary asked The Prophets very nicely to evaporate the Dominion fleet and prevent more from coming through the wormhole.
Yet The Admiral keeps riding Sisko for trying to get along with The Prophets. Is this man oblivious? The greatest contribution to the war effort, by far, was made by The Prophets. They’re the only thing standing between The Federation and utter, total defeat. But you won’t allow even a little leeway for Sisko to deal with them, to keep them happy?
It’s so monumentally short sighted, so transparently artificial, such a bit of drama for the sake of drama, that it knocks me out of the narrative a little.
Then again, Starfleet admirals have a history of being boneheads, traitors, megalomaniacs, batshit insane or controlled by alien parasites.
C’est la vie.
The Dominion is repeatedly shown to be crafty and resourceful, setting traps and starting wars between their enemies. They aren’t merely a bunch of tin plated imbeciles running into laser guns in order to aggrandize the heroes. They have agency, an instincts for self-preservation (well the Voorta do, not so much the Jem Hadar), and they can and will adapt to our hero’s plans. All of which makes them excellent foils.
On the progressive front, the show is no slacker: it tackles inequality, excessive greed and racism repeatedly. Of particular note is a two-parter in which Sisko goes back in time to 2023 and gets embroiled in a historic riot, as well as a dream episode in which he’s a writer in the 1950’s and is forbidden to publish a story about a black space station captain. Quark and the Ferengi are used to criticize the excesses of capitalism.
Worf joins the show in season three, and has numerous episodes exploring Klingon warrior/honour culture.
DS9 also has a wonderful extended wrap up: the latte half of the seventh season is one big long story, and most of the story lines are suitably tied up with bows.
Sisko sacrifices himself to destroy Dukat (who's the evil Pah-wraith's chosen one) and ascends into the wormhole in the sky. He tells Cassidy (a freighter captain he marries in season seven) that he may one day be back. The one quibble i have here is that he doesn't talk in a vision to his own son. But that's just a quibble.
There's a great arc for Nog, who's joined Starfleet, only to be badly injured in battle (losing his leg), and finally returns to duty as a lieutenant.
Rom becomes Grand Nagus, Odo merges with the Great Link, Kiera becomes station chief, Dax and Julian get together, O'Brien goes off to earth to teach at Starfleet academy and Worf becomes ambassador to The Klingon Empire.
Of all the Star Trek shows, this one has the best wrap up.
Thanks in large part to the ongoing narrative and nuanced, multi-dimensional (and compromised) characters, it feels the most like an evolving family, and it's the most sorely missed when it concludes.
What show runner Ira Steven Behr, and talented symphony of writers, actors & crew, accomplished with DS9 is truly special. Thank The Prophets Paramount executives were too focused on micromanaging Voyager to notice the brilliance happening in the background.
Count me a fan.
Try it, you may like it. It's the most approachable, immersive and innovative (after TNG initial setting up of the franchise's New Wave) of all the Trek iterations for me, thanks to a diverse cast of characters, including ordinary civilians. It shifts from episodic to serialization, explores spirituality/religion, war, morality and capitalism.
It also has a bar.
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