Deep Space Nine at 29
I, like most people, enjoy being right. It happens far too seldom. The film I think should win Best Picture never does. The baseball team I think has the most talent goes out in the first round of the playoffs. The restaurant I like goes out of business. But occasionally I have my moments of prescience.
For many years I have been in the distinct minority of Star
Trek fandom in thinking that the crown jewel of Star Trek TV series was Star
Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was maligned
when it came out as Next Generation was winding down. The flaws that Trek fans
glommed on to were many: the main character wasn’t a Captain; it was set on a
space station, not a star ship; the doctor was an asshole. Okay, that last one was an accurate
complaint; it the 2-volume history of the Trek franchise The Fifty-Year Mission
the creators of DS9 concede that they oversteered into making Dr. Bashir a
jerk. But the other complaints were trivial compared to what ultimately was
created, which was the most complex, rewarding, well written, well-acted series
in the Star Trek universe.
It all started 29 years ago on January 3, 1993, with the
release of the pilot episode, “Emissary.”
It was an auspicious start, far better than The Next Generation’s pilot “Encounter
at Farpoint.” The cast of characters was the most diverse of any Trek
incarnation: Commander (eventually Captain) Benjamin Sisko was not a swashbuckling
rogue like Captain Kirk, or a dedicated explorer like Captain Picard; for one
thing he wasn’t a Captain, and for another he was a widower raising a son and
disenchanted with his assignment. The
science officer was a beautiful young woman who had the memories of 7 previous
lifetimes implanted in her via a slug in her abdomen. The chief of security was a shape
shifter. The chief engineer was Miles O’Brien,
a holdover from Next Gen. The primary
businessman was a Ferengi, a race that Next Gen tried, and failed miserably, to
create as the next big threat to the Federation. The doctor was, as I mentioned, a vainglorious
tool.
Most notable was Sisko’s second in command, a former
resistance fighter and a native of Bajor named Kira Nerys (the first name is
the family name). I’m not sure exactly,
but I believe when Deep Space Nine started word was out that the next Trek series,
Voyager, would have the first female captain in Star Trek’s TV history. I believe the anticipation of that made Trek
fans overlook the fact that DS9 had a woman in command who was intelligent,
fearless, beautiful, and most importantly didn’t take crap from anyone,
especially men. After so many years of
Star Fleet officers politely acquiescing to whatever nonsense an admiral
spouted, it was refreshing to have a character who yelled at her superiors on
Bajor that they were idiots.
The show got off to an admitted rocky start; the first two
seasons are barely watchable (save for the occasional pearl like the episode “Duet,”
a sci-fi version of The Man in the Glass Booth). But the creators course
corrected some things (Dr. Bashir became less of a pain in the ass) while
creating an impressive array of semi-regular characters, such as a Cardassian
tailor named Garrick whose shadowy past was fleshed out over time but never
fully revealed. The show featured
several actors in heavy latex—Rene Auberjonois as shapeshifter Odo, Armin
Shimmerman as the Ferengi Quark, Andrew Robinson as Garrick, and Marc Alaimo as
Cardassian Gul Dukat—who had never made much impact with their real faces but
now excelled while performing under layers of plastic.
Deep Space Nine, along with the contemporaneous Babylon 5, eschewed
the episodic nature of the original Star Trek and The Next Generation and
developed a more serialized approach.
While this made viewing while the show was syndicated or in reruns awkward,
it has proven a boon now that streaming is available, and shows can be watched
in rapid sequence. The creators of the
show have said that binge watching on Netflix is how the show should be viewed.
The show was lowly regarded for years, but that started to
change when, in 1996, TV Guide did a poll the name the best episode of Star Trek
of all time. The heavy favorite was an
episode from the original series, “City on the Edge of Forever,” but when the votes
were counted the winner was a DS9 episode, “The Visitor.” TV Guide declared the
result “a shocker.”
In The Fifty-Year Mission, the creators of DS9 said the show
was about “consequences.” Kirk or Picard would fly to a planet, meddle in
whatever was going on, fix things, then leave.
On Deep Space Nine, when someone made a choice, it often came back to
bite them on the ass. The show’s
depiction of the war with The Dominion (which many have noted was the biggest
deviation from Creator Gene Roddenberry’s concept that by that time humans will
have outgrown the notion of war) conveyed a sense of what a long, protracted
conflict does to people, even those on the periphery. In the episode “In the Pale Moonlight” (the
highest rated episode on IMDB) Captain Sisko recounts how he orchestrated a
plan to induce the Romulans to join the Dominion War at the cost of killing
several innocent people, something the high-minded Captains Kirk and Picard would
never have considered.
I run through DS9 on a loop on Netflix and recently watched
the season three two-part episode, “Past Tense.” In the episode Sisko, Dax and
Bashir are accidently sent back in time to 2024 San Francisco, where Sisko and
Bashir are thrown into a “Sanctuary District,” a place where homeless and
jobless people were herded into “for their own protection.” Now that we are two
years away from 2024, the episode seems eerily prescient about the homeless problem
and society’s reaction to wide-scale economic distress.
I will always maintain that Deep Space Nine was the best of
all the Trek TV incarnations. The
original series was great—for the first half of its three-year run. The Next Generation was terrible in seasons
one and two, and six and seven, and the middle three years were hit and
miss. I never warmed to Voyager, and I
gave up on Enterprise early in season two.
Discovery has been erratic; I disliked season one but loved season two, then
was disappointed by season three. DS9
started slow but gathered momentum as the writers and the audience grew to know
the characters.
So happy birthday, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine! Maybe there will be a party for your 30th
birthday next year.
