DS9 Season 1

There’s always been an aspect of duality to the Ferengi. On the one hand, they’re meant to be dangerous and threatening capitalists, working as pirates and marauders who use intimidation and strongarming tactics to turn profit at all costs. On the other hand, thanks to their infamous “crazed gerbil” depiction in “The Last Outpost”, there’s an undeniable and irreducible silliness to them that at once seems at odds with this intended narrative function.

However as I have previously argued, I feel these two interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive; there’s a great deal to be said, after all, about a group of antagonists who at once embody ruthless capitalist values and blatantly misogynistic attitudes (many of which are at least taken for granted and accepted as “the way things are” in modernity, thus becoming hegemonic, or, in the absolute worst case scenarios, idealized and triumphed) and are also seen as a completely harmless laughingstock by the Star Trek universe. I still believe “The Last Outpost” walks this line fairly well, gerbils notwithstanding, but subsequent Ferengi stories have had a rougher time trying to maintain that careful balance. Too often we’ve been expected to see them as genuinely menacing and ignore their kind of inherent silliness, which is kind of a hard swallow given the aformentioned gerbil jumping (though there was a Michael Jan Friedman story from the third season that actually managed to pull it off in my opinion). Or, the opposite problem: Writers will portray the Ferengi as a total joke and not taken seriously whatsoever. In stories like “Ménage à Troi”, “The Price”, “The Perfect Mate” and “Rascals” the Ferengi’s clownshoes quotient is dialed up to such a degree they become so grating to the point of becoming absolutely unwatchable.

By the first/sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and our first regular Ferengi character in Quark, the show has been sort of forced to develop some more nuance with them, although it hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing either. After a good show in “Emissary” and a few assorted memorable moments in other episodes (most notably Quark’s subplot in “The Passenger”), for as much good as we’ve gotten there’s also been a lot of bad. As fun as Quark and Odo are to see bicker, when they get overexposed to the point of hijacking the show, such as in the insufferable “Odo and Quark Save the Day” of “Babel”, things become less fun. And then there’s the utterly obnoxious grovelling Quark is made to do in last week’s stupefyingly awful “Move Along Home”.

With “The Nagus” though we now have an entire episode pretty much dedicated toward exploring Ferengi culture in ways we haven’t really gotten the chance to see until now, and thankfully the show more or less manages to pull it off and make it seem somewhat respectable (well, as respectable as the Ferengi can ever get I suppose).…

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Allamaraine, if you can see/Then Allamaraine…Oh fuck me.

“Move Along Home” is astoundingly terrible.

I’m tempted to just leave the essay there-The production woes of this story are all well documented and self-explanatory (the team could not budget, ran out of money, and were working with a questionable brief to begin with) and almost nobody is going to leap to defend it. Ranting about how dumb and silly everything is here feels like a waste of time and preaching to the choir. One thing I will go on a bit of a tirade about is how Terry Farrell’s obligation to have Jadzia Dax play alien hopscotch precluded her from guest starring in “Birthright, Part I” as both episodes were filmed the same week. Aside from the fact Dax is and always was obviously the correct character for that subplot, there’s also the tragic fact that Farrell was the biggest Star Trek fan of the entire cast, was yearning for a chance to walk the Enterprise sets and was currently rooming with Marina Sirtis at the time.

Farrell begged and pleaded and even broke into tears, but the creative team refused to budge. Apparently for whatever reason they couldn’t do a simple strikethrough script edit (even though that’s been common practice in Star Trek since time immemorial because this is Star Trek). I guess they were firmly set in their notion that playing alien hopscotch was really gripping abstract theatre and it was really important for Jadzia’s character to be the one doing the hopping. I appreciate the commitment to start giving Dax a more active role in the show than has been the case up to now, but I kind of wish this hadn’t been the episode where the team dug their heels in.

Apart from satisfying a personal vendetta, bringing this up also allows me to segue into a broader analysis of “Move Along Home”. Well, I say analysis. Part of the reason the team remained so steadfast and doggedly dedicated to an obvious tire fire is because they were dead set on doing an homage to “Checkmate”, episode four of The Prisoner. This means “Move Along Home” is the latest in a long line of Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tributes to Patrick McGoohan’s magnum opus, and it also means it’s the latest in a long line of utterly and ineptly *failed* Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tributes to Patrick McGoohan’s magnum opus. As far back as the second season, Maurice Hurley’s creative team tried to do two Prisoner riffs straight in a row with “The Schizoid Man” and “The Royale”, and it was even hoped McGoohan himself would be able to guest star in the former. But “The Schizoid Man” was aimless and kind of creepy and “The Royale” was a frustratingly tepid presentation of half-baked surrealism. And now we’ve come to “Move Along Home” which is…“Move Along Home”.…

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So I quite like “The Passenger”. It’s one of those sixth/first season episodes that tends to get criticized for “not being Deep Space Nine enough”, meaning its a tech mystery, doesn’t involve gratuitous action scenes and people are reasonably personable to each other. But to me, this is perfectly recognisable as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and features much of what I love about this show in abundance.

One interesting thing to note about this episode, or at least where this episode falls in my coverage of the series, is that it’s a Morgan Grendel pitch with help from Michael Piller coming immediately after another episode with the exact same credit (though the teleplay for “The Passenger” also had help from Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who’s not on staff for Star Trek: The Next Generation). If Grendel is brought up in the discussion here though, it’s typically to compare “The Passenger” with his most famous work, “The Inner Light”. Both stories do, after all, deal with a person living on in some form after death within the mind of another person, and some people like to read “The Passenger” as a dark reflection of “The Inner Light”. Grendel didn’t mean for it to be though, and anyway the two episodes are only similar in a very superficial way: “The Inner Light” uses its premise to examine different kinds of utopianism and a life unexplored, while “The Passenger” uses its mainly as a plot device to set another mystery in motion.

Said mystery is a good fit for this story though, in a procedural sort of way: There’s a dangerous fugitive running amok on Deep Space 9, and the team have to work together using their various skillsets to find him. And in spite of any protestations that this setup is too “Next Generation-like”, this is a premise that actually works way better here: We’ve seen plenty of examples in the past where trying to do a story like this on Deep Space Nine‘s sister show requires a significant amount of hoop-jumping, often involving the Enterprise having to escort some shifty dudes for some strangled reason, typically interrupting the galactic exploration they really ought to be doing. But it makes far more narrative sense for your undesirables to crop up in the stationary setting of this show, especially given the fact said stationary setting is an interstellar port city.

So in “The Passenger” we get another good look at the Deep Space 9 team in the role of first responders, investigators, and local city officials. It’s a role we’ve not really seen them in since “Babel”, and not used quite to this extent since “A Man Alone” (though there’s a little bit of it in “Dax”, I suppose). I’ve said before I really like seeing this crew used this way (it’s probably my favourite alongside being intermediaries to Bajoran post-colonial politics) so no surprises I like it used here, but what I *really* like is how it develops the framework laid down earlier in the season and shows the main cast more comfortable in their roles and with each other.…

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So I need to get something off my chest right off the bat. The entire teaser and first act of this episode manifestly do not need to exist. They’re nothing more than horrid, stock Male gaze-y Damsel in Distress capture/escape/chase science fiction bullshit. Obviously, the writers wanted that precious “conflict and drama” and, because they’re science fiction writers, they think the best way to do that is to abduct a pretty, doe-eyed young woman who pleads for mercy while helplessly immobilized by the Standard Female Grab Area and then lead the macho military men on a chase through corridors on a starbase as they spout protocol at one another.

I’ll bet you can guess how I feel that Jadzia Dax is the character who gets the treatment in question. But what makes it even worse is that this actually doesn’t make any real dramatic sense! Think about it: How much more dramatic would it had been if, rather than deciding to indulge their Buck Rogers fantasies, the writers actually let us know this was going to be a courtroom drama from the start. Imagine if in the teaser the Klaestronians approach Dax in the corridor, validate her identity, and than flatly state “Jadzia Dax, you are hereby under arrest on suspicion of treason against the Klaestronian people and the first degree murder of General Aredlon Tandro, my father”. Tandro, Jr. slaps handcuffs on Jadzia, we pan up to a shot of her stoic and unmoved expression, and then fade right to black and cue credits.

Casting doubt on characters like Kira, Quark and Odo is one thing. Quark is set up to be a shady dude right from the start, from her first appearance Kira’s loyalty to us is in question (though if you’ll notice, that seems to have all be resolved as of this episode: Kira is one of Commader Sisko’s staunchest allies all throughout the investigation. Uh oh, the crew seems to be getting along! Guess it’s time to cancel the show then!) and before we got to know him better we could imagine Odo being the kind of person who might take his dedication to justice a bit too far. But Dax? The wise woman of DS9? I mean hell, if you’re looking to shock the audience and get them to distrust the characters (I mean, I personally don’t think that’s a great idea, but this team sure seems to think so) I can’t think of a blindside bigger than accusing Dax of all people of murder. High treason…OK, maybe. But murder? That’s a twist worthy of a teaser.

The rest of the story has its ups and downs and has a lot of fruitful material to discuss, and is obviously one that’s quite important to me, but that whole first sequence absolutely mars the episode and singlehandedly consigns it to the rubbish portion of this season it otherwise could have marked the end of.…

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Remind me again why I’m wasting my time here.

OK, at no point was this ever going to be a good idea.

The critique effectively writes itself. Neither Q nor Vash belong on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Vash was a bad idea to begin with and has never appeared in a good story. It’s silly in an incredibly awkward and forced way (granting as I do a lot of the comic dialog is good, so long as you divorce it from literally all of the rest of the context). More seriously and worryingly though, it gets extremely up in the audience’s face about forcing contrast to Star Trek: The Next Generation where contrast doesn’t need to be drawn. “I’m not Picard” says it all, frankly.

And it really does. “Q-Less”, like “Captive Pursuit” before it, is trying way, way too hard to prove to us it’s something that couldn’t be done on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is something of a problem for an episode explicitly conceived of as a crossover. When I see work like this, I can’t help but get an almost overwhelming sense of adolescent self-consciousness from it and it gets tiresome. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is at its weakest when its so painfully obviously being all neurotic and anticonformist, and this episode is an absolutely prime example of that. There was no reason to bring characters and plot devices like Q and Vash to Deep Space 9 other than to jump about waving your arms saying “See? See? *This* crew handles this kind of situation *differently* than the Enterprise crew would have! Aren’t we clever?”.

No. No you’re not. Go back and come up with something that actually justifies your own existence instead of being a poser and just trying to define yourself in opposition to something.

Which brings me to the primary criticism to level against “Q-Less”, apart from it being shit. John de Lancie summed it up when he said that Q works best when he’s used to explore philosophical issues and concepts, and this episode doesn’t do any of that. It’s Q in his most obnoxiously grating Great Gazoo mode, petulantly throwing a temper tantrum like a little kid who isn’t getting what he wants and fucking with people just because he can. I know that’s a common reading of who Q is as a character, but I think it’s an uncomfortable and potentially dangerous one because of how it works to sabotage and undermine the power he can wield when he’s not used that way. And it’s especially frustrating here because, and I’m actually going to walk back a little of what I said above, there actually were ways Q could have been used on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine other than brand mascot.

As much as I disliked “Tapestry”, given how close that episode was produced to this one and given how uncannily fitting certain oversignified aspects of it were, a savvy writer could have conceivably further developed that episodes thematic elements in a different context here.…

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One of the common criticisms leveled against Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in its early years is that its episodes had a tendency to be “too much like The Next Generation”, with the typical argument generally going that these episodes either had technobabble or plots that weren’t uniquely Deep Space Nine centric. I personally don’t think this is the case at all; in fact, of the episodes we’ve looked at so far, by my estimation that only one that could conceivably have also been done on Star Trek: The Next Generation was “Babel”-the one that was actually originally written for Star Trek: The Next Generation. And even “Babel” was worked over really well to fit the setting and character dynamics of the new show.

This makes it terribly interesting for me to see “Captive Pursuit” held up by pretty much the entire creative team as a great early example of a show that could never have been done on Star Trek: The Next Generation, because as far as I can tell the big problem with “Captive Pursuit” is that it’s a story that doesn’t belong to either Star Trek: The Next Generation *or* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

The first obvious issue is that it’s a Prime Directive story, and Prime Directive stories are without exception always terrible all of the time. For my arguments as to why, go re-read literally anything I’ve ever written about the Prime Directive spread across four books. The Deep Space Nine creative team’s reasoning as to why it’s only here that we could get to see Starfleet officers breaking regulations to go up against an obvious moral travesty is very revealing, and actually pretty offensively disingenuous in my opinion: They claim that it’s because the Enterprise crew are “squeaky clean” and would never dream of going against their superiors, citing the scene in this episode where Chief O’Brien only gets the idea to go against the Federation after listening to Quark. But that’s provably untrue, and it’s not just my wish fulfillment projecting onto Star Trek: The Next Generation, that’s an actively ahistorical reading of the series easily refuted by citing concrete textual evidence.

No matter whether you think they’re actively renegade scientists and explorers as I do or think they’re bureaucratic officers trying to do the best they can within the constrains of the system they’re working in (which to me is actually a better reading of this show, actually) the fact of the matter is the Enterprise crew go against Starfleet regulations *all the time*. We had them taking down the admiralty as early as “Too Short a Season” way back in *1987* and as recently as “Chain of Command”. The Enterprise even has a pretty notorious history of violating the Prime Directive itself: In “The Drumhead”, Admiral Satie accuses Captain Picard of violating it *nine times* (which he had, and rightfully so) prior to the the events of that episode, which was way back in the fourth season.…

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Realistically speaking, I don’t think this is an episode anyone is particularly excited or enthusiastic about. I do think it’s a grave misconception and the deepest of follies to dismiss this first half-season outright, as much of mainline fandom is wont to do: In fact I’d argue this crop of episodes is part of the single greatest season in all of Star Trek, counting Star Trek: The Next Generation alongside it, of course. On the other hand this is not to say that each and every story this year is a triumph, and, on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine at least, we’re about to enter a run of episodes where the new show, so imperious and strong right out of the gate, is…less than successful.

Not unrelentingly terrible, it must be said. I don’t think there’s an episode in this run that is unwatchably or offensively bad, and there’s at least one interesting and/or memorable scene in all of them. And each and every one does contribute something to the show’s rapid and astonishing rate of development and maturation, even if it’s only something as simple as “never do that again, ever”. But even so, we are entering a phase where Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seems to be struggling to define itself a bit, and while there’s no shame in that it does cast perhaps more of a shadow over the year than it otherwise would have given that, from this show’s perspective, it’s a truncated half-season. Normally I would applaud a restricted episode count like this and while I do still definitely believe it’s infinitely preferable to have fewer episodes a year than more, that usually comes with the unspoken expectation that each and every episode is going to be, if not a masterpiece, at least really, really good and demonstrative of how attention to quality trumps quantity.

“Babel” is not that. None of these episodes are. Although that said it’s probably by my count the second-best of this run…It’s entirely watchable, and I didn’t ever find myself annoyed to the point I wanted to switch it off and go back to rewatching Original Dirty Pair (any time not spent watching Original Dirty Pair ought to be well-justified). The actors’ performances are still remarkably compelling and they’ve all already clearly found their voice with their respective characters (even if they’re being given material like this to read) and it’s got a decently suspenseful pace to it. It doesn’t have any cripplingly massive flaws that are worth spending an entire essay complaining about…except for the obvious really big one that the premise is too self-evidently ludicrous and silly to take seriously or get invested in (not the last time this will happen in this run of stories, I’m afraid).

A pandemic isn’t even a terrible idea to base a Deep Space Nine story around, especially a pandemic involving a breakdown in communication: We had a murder investigation in “A Man Alone” and an episode all about differing perspectives and Kira’s past in the resistance cells in “Past Prologue”, and there’s a lot of potential mileage to be had in exploring how a team of operations administrators deal with an outbreak and having to invent quarantine procedure effectively on the spot.…

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To elaborate a bit on some of the discussion in the last chapter, a big thing that underwrites the difference between “A Man Alone” and “Aquiel” from a narrative procedural standpoint is the differing, though complimentary, central focus of their parent series. In the context of those episodes, I phrased the difference between Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as being primarily one of scale-The former works best when it’s seen as a counterintuitively intimate show about a close-knit family team of voyagers, while the latter gives us a community-sized look at an entire urban geopolitical region extrapolated to a science fiction setting with interweaving stories about several different families set against a large-scale cast of characters.

But there’s one other major distinguishing characteristic of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s approach, and it’s one “Past Prologue” is the key episode in setting in motion. Namely, although it’s every bit as utopian as Star Trek: The Next Generation, it examines this utopianism from a different angle: Whereas the Enterprise is a utopian setting by default, even down to the fact “Encounter at Farpoint” essentially establishes it that everyone aboard knows each other in some capacity already and has some history with at least one another person (the exceptions would seem to be Worf and Tasha Yar, solely for the reason they were last-minute additions to the cast, though the mid-fourth season reboot does retcon shared backstories for Tasha and Captain Picard in), Deep Space 9, in accordance with this show’s key themes about building and healing, has to be made utopian through the generative and commutative efforts of the people who live there. That sense of community and mutual trust that comes so easy aboard the Enterprise isn’t here yet, and by design, and a significant portion of the first/sixth season is about fostering that.

A lot of critics will turn this contrast into a judgment of quality, making the claim that the lack of familiarity aboard Deep Space 9 is objectively better than the premise of Star Trek: The Next Generation because it encourages conflict and conflict is always better in absolutely every circumstance for everything. I don’t think this is the case for a healthy variety of reasons…Setting aside for the moment my extremely well-documented distaste for the (in my opinion) crass and juvenile conception this team has of what the word “conflict” in a dramatic sense actually connotes, by the very narrative structure Star Trek: Deep Space Nine operates under, this crew is going to get to a level of Enterprise-style intimacy and comfortable familiarity at some point, and presuming that “conflict”, where “conflict” is defined as “people screaming at, disappointing and betraying each other constantly”, is always better all the time would seem to be setting up the show for what they would consider failure at some future date. Were they just planning to cancel Deep Space Nine whenever the crew started actually getting along with each other?…

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Of course Jadzia Dax would spend her free time meditating. With a video game, no less. Technological media does not supplant spiritual experience (except when appropriated by hegemonic forces of social control), but it can offer a glimpse of it, or at least a simulacrum of it. We can’t spend every waking hour in an altered state of consciousness, so art exists that we might not lose sight of what’s real. 

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is in the position of justifying its existence. With its pilot, the show has decisively seized the zeitgeist, but it still needs to let us know the sorts of things it’s going to do and how it’s going to operate on a week-to-week basis. What we see in “A Man Alone” is already very compelling, however: The plot is a simple sci-fi murder mystery the likes of which even Dirty Pair on an off day can do, but even that is an important indication of one of the things that sets this show apart from its sister. Star Trek: The Next Generation is ideally a show about voyaging and exploration-The Enterprise crew is best seen as a team of scientists going out and doing their jobs, which are in the business of making new discoveries about themselves and the universe. The inhabitants of Deep Space 9 are a far more heterogeneous bunch, however; most of them are civilians and business owners and the joint Starfleet/Bajoran action staff are basically administrators. My favourite analogy is to think of the Enterprise as a research vessel and Deep Space 9 as a port authority.

This means that the Deep Space 9 team are going to be spending most of their time dealing with situations that crop up in their jurisdiction, so to speak. If you can imagine the station as a kind of port city, you can conceive of a lot of things that could only happen in a setting with that sort of eclectically striated society. That’s not to say we won’t get a fair bit of world building to go along with that: Bajor alone is ripe with infinite possibilities for storytelling, and the Gamma Quadrant is their very own “vast unexplored reaches of the galaxy” waiting to have research teams sent into it, just like Miles tells Keiko here. But it’s the station itself that will unquestionably be the primary setting, so “A Man Alone” does a great job showing us what this looks like in practice.

Against that backdrop, a murder mystery is a straightforwardly sensible thing to throw out as your first nominal episode. There’s Prophets-only-know how many detective shows and police procedurals on the air, so it’s a solid idea to use that as a case study for how this series can do urban slice of life in deep space. But while it’s Odo’s story that’s obviously front and centre this week, there’s a multitude of other stories going on all over the city as different family units and circles of friends try to get themselves situated: We have the expected (and ever-so-slightly stock) marital strife with the O’Briens, the beginning of the Jake and Nog Comedy Show and the quite fascinating Sisko/Dax/Bashir dynamic that’s beginning to take shape that I’ll be spending a great deal of time parsing out, but we even get a look at the lives of characters who are effectively extras.…

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It’s Stardate 4399.7 at the Battle of Wolf 359. Star Trek: The Next Generation fans exist here. This is a moment of grotesque apotheosis: The moment when you finally realise you’re truly not alone in the universe. The Borg: Unfettered efficiency and misanthropy. Proof by negative. I refuse to believe. Behold and confront the negation of reality to reveal the true natures of reality. This is a path. You must decide for yourself if it is a good one for you.

It’s January 3, 1993 on your television screen. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine exists in this moment. But it has always existed at this point of singularity. It has waited. It waits. I’m skeptical, though cautiously optimistic about a second Star Trek series. I don’t like that it’s on a space station, because I dream about travelling to the stars. “This isn’t a starship, Major”. I fear a new show will make people stop paying attention to and caring about the Enterprise crew. My crew; my family. Living in the present, but without the self awareness and inner focus to truly comprehend what that means. The local Vermont syndication affiliates are airing Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the exact same timeslot opposite one another. They exist together in the same moment. “I do not understand the threat I bring to you. But I am not your enemy. Allow me to prove it”. It’s February 2003. It’s October 2015.

There’s a lithograph of a Runabout leaving Deep Space 9, still in orbit around Bajor. I can see the image in my mind. I remember the Runabouts. The Runabouts are cool. They’re like miniature starships. It’s late 1993, and my father is doing warehouse inventory for the toy store. There’s an AMT/ERTL model kit of the USS Rio Grande on offer and my curiosity is piqued. Deep Space 9 waits to be rediscovered. It’s mid 1994, and Star Trek: The Next Generation is on TV. It may be a rerun, I can’t quite make it out. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is on one of the other networks. I flip back and forth between the channels, two different cameras trained on two different sections of the same universe at the same point in time. It’s dark. Kira Nerys is trying to have a conversation with Jadzia Dax, who is preoccupied with practicing gymnastics on a high bar. I am unable to turn away.

Stardate 46388.2. Three years later. Miles O’Brien is with Commander Sisko wearing the new Deep Space 9 team open collar Starfleet uniform. His sleeves are rolled up, literally getting his hands dirty with the station’s bombed out infrastructure. This is how I always picture Chief O’Brien-To me he is always here in this place with these people. He belongs here. But there’s a part of him that still exists on the Enterprise: It’s those values he embodies and strive to teach, and its the Enterprise his presence constantly evokes.…

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