Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Vedek Bareil experiences an orb vision in this episode’s teaser-The first we’ve seen since “The Circle” at the opposite end of the year. The one in “The Circle” was surprisingly trite, however, only showing us foreshadowing (and basically shot-for-shot foreshadowing to boot) of the climax to “The Siege”. Kind of a weaksauce spiritual vision, if you ask me. The vision in “The Collaborator” (or rather series of visions) is comparatively far more visually striking, utlising a lot of inventive cuts and camera angles as well as some well thought-out abstract visual symbolism. It’s the first time since “Emissary” the Prophets have really felt like gods who have a presence in the lives of their people.

There are other, more explicit parallels to “The Homecoming”/“The Circle”/“The Siege” here as well, since “The Collaborator” effectively serves as the end of the Bajoran Provisional Government plotline that was the backbone to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for almost a year and a half. It’s been an interesting thing to watch unfold to be sure: The show’s connection to Bajoran religion began as an attempt to explore more internal spiritualist themes in Star Trek. “Emissary” is essentially a lite version of abstract cinema depicting different metaphors and analogies for our personal, macro/micro individual inner lives. But with Kai Opaka’s sorta-death in “Battle Lines”, the result of the creative team’s desire to kill off a recurring character for dramatic purposes, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s mysticism has been increasingly compartmentalized, repackaged and kept in check (with notable exceptions like “The Storyteller”, “If Wishes Were Horses”, “Playing God” and arguably “Shadowplay”). The Bajoran religion, originally a metaphor for our cosmic wonderings in general, becomes planet-of-hats set dressing, its main purpose to serve as the backdrop for Vedek Winn and Vedek Bareil’s Machiavellian story of political machinations.

So in this respect “The Collaborator” feels almost like an attempt at reconstruction and reconciliation, which is perhaps appropriate for a story about Bajorans. It’s very much a story about backroom deals, realpolitiking and political backstabbing, but some of that mystical energy from “Emissary” manages to crackle through. And yet at the same time there’s definitely a sense that this is the last time we’ll be seeing this sort of thing, with Vedek Winn’s campaign for the Kaiship finally coming to fruition through the character assassination of Vedek Bareil, who plays along with it due to his stubbornly intractable loyalty. Winn’s victory is a win for fundamentalism, which has really nothing to do with spirituality or religious experiences. Rather, fundamentalism is about dogma, xenophobia, nativism and willfully shallow networked thinking. Fundamentalists believe that there is only one true way of thinking and behaving, their unexamined assumptions are it, and they furthermore have a right to coerce everyone else to share them. It doesn’t actually matter what the fundamentalism is about, so long as the fundamentalist has the feeling of being righteous, and of being listened to.…

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This does, on the surface of things, seem to be an example of the show’s worst impulses gone unchecked. Following “Blood Oath”, it now seems Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has no qualms about straight-up doing sequels to Original Series stories. As beloved and as iconic to not just Star Trek nerddom, but pop culture in general, as “Mirror, Mirror” may be, there’s simply no avoiding the smack of fanwank that surrounds a brief like this. Especially in a month where Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is most assuredly staring down its own mortality in an climate of fanboys that is growing increasingly hostile to it.

The counterpoint is, of course, that “Crossover” gets away with it because it’s quite simply a tour de force.

One of my absolute favourite episodes of the series, I’ve loved “Crossover” forever, and I love it even more now. In hindsight, from the vantage point upon which I now sit, it does feel a bit like it’s ushering in a block of stories that is ultimately the last brilliant flash of genius before the final end, though at the time I obviously would not have picked up on that. This was also one of the first episodes I rewatched later in my life during my second wave of Star Trek fandom, and even before the DVDs came out. I remember being at my great-grandmother’s house flipping through the channels for something to watch and coming across a rerun of “Crossover” on whatever local affiliate station she had. So I can attest to the fact that as late as 2002 proper Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was still being shown in syndication. I remember finding it weird, because I’d sort of mentally filed away *that* kind of Star Trek as Not Really Being A Thing Anymore, consigned to the dustbins of history where polite and fashionable people didn’t like to talk about it. As I was neither of those things I still did, but I had a deserved reputation for being uncomfortably eccentric at the time, so that proves nothing.

I’ll get the base criticism of “Crossover” out of the way at the start, because as much as I like it I’ll freely admit there were some attitudes that went into it that were perhaps less than desirable and are worth mentioning upfront. There is the potentially fanwanky nature of the brief. I personally happen to think “Crossover” is rather good at explaining the Mirror Universe situation for people who weren’t approaching Deep Space Nine from the position of being lifelong Star Trek nerds who grew up on the Original Series (that is, normal people) particularly well through the choice of characters to send over: Major Kira, who obviously wouldn’t know much about Starfleet history, and Doctor Bashir, who excitedly tells us how much he does and leaps at the opportunity to share his knowledge of it.…

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Some mysteries should remain unsolved.

We all love a good mystery. I believe a wise man once said something to the extent of “And to many humans, a mystery must be solved”. There’s that nagging sense that there is some big truth out there that’s being concealed from you, and you can’t rest until you learn what it is, because of information wanting to be free, or any number of other justifications for the quest for gnosis we’ve come up with throughout the ages. In the United States, perhaps we’ve wed our thirst for mysteries with our romantic ideal of vigilante justice garnered from the media’s foundational myth of the “Old West”. Perhaps it’s this simultaneous desire to see a mystery solved and a perpetrator brought to justice by a lone lawman that has brought about things like the noir genre, and that speaks to something about who we are as a people. Just go and ask Odo. I think this same desire for a certain kind of disclosure is part of what fuels the appeal of conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking, the corollary of which is the romanticization and mystification of the intelligence community. I find it very satisfying that this selfsame episode introduces us to the Obsidian Order through Julian Bashir, possibly the second-biggest truth-seeker and mystery buff on Deep Space 9.

But the biggest mystery of all is of course Garak. The question of “Who Is Elim Garak?” (whoops, guess I spoiled a major plot point. Oh well) is a complicated one. But then again, so is the question of who any one of us are. Personal identity theory is more than just the continuity of consciousness in an android body. Let’s, for the moment, set aside the persistence of the self problem, and you go ahead and make of consciousness whatever you will. Are we, could it be argued, the sum total of our life experiences, and thus not only shaped by them but reducible to them? Perhaps on one metaphorical level each of us are nothing more than an amalgamation of events and interactions with other people. This is, after all, how we will all be remembered someday. There is no hidden platonic “real” you because a part of you behaves a certain way in social situations, and it’s by those facets you display in interactions through which you will be defined in the eyes of society. I never got far enough in philosophy to say with confidence if there’s a name for that theory, apart from perhaps “anti-solipsism”. Or maybe, post-structuralist reading writ large. Whatever the case may be, when we’re talking about fictional characters perhaps it could be argued this is literally who they are.

The identity and personhood of characters are intrinsically bound up with the stories that are told about them. Who they are to us is defined by how they behave in the snapshots of their lives we see and read, coloured by our own interpretations and perspectives, and perhaps what we need them to be at that particular stage in our own lives.…

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So this episode. This one has been a long time coming, certainly for me. Here’s an episode I’ve always heard so much about: A good, nay great Jadzia Dax episode penned by Peter Allan Fields, possibly the most consistently excellent writer in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s stable. It’s a story I never experienced at the time, as I didn’t have the magazine issue where this one was written up and I didn’t, to my knowledge, see it on television before the DVD sets came out. Furthermore, this is supposed to be a kickass action story set against the backdrop of a glorious Klingon romp. If this isn’t Dax’s best story, its the one where she finally comes into her own as a character.

At least, that’s what everyone tells me. And you can, I’m sure, see where this is headed.

The first thing that strikes me about “Blood Oath” is how much it actually feels like a Ronald D. Moore story. It isn’t, obviously, nor could he have had any input on it considering he’s not on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But it had absolutely all of his signature beat points: Pompous, grandiose musings on death, honour and glory. Angsty, moody, broody male antiheroes who don’t get along with anybody because “no-one understands” them (at least Fields has the decency to play them as slightly comic characters, whereas Moore tends to play these types of characters alarmingly straight). A ham-handed approach to feminism that is basically saying a “strong woman” is someone who can reject femininity to prove to us she’s capable of filling the same masculine/patriarchal archetypal roles. Here it even manifests in a rather cringe-worthy game of “I can do anything the boys can do!” that lasts about two-thirds of the episode. It’s a picture-perfect example of the liberal assumption that increased opportunity to climb the pre-existing social ladder of the heierarchical status quo is tantamount to liberation, where real liberation would entail the dismantling of said ladder and probably the torching of the entire building and surrounding areas. And of course, it’s a great big Klingon love-letter epic that puts the entire rest of the show on hold so it can fawn over a bunch of trivia questions for forty minutes.

To be fair, this isn’t on Fields. Kor, Kang and Koloth were not in his original pitch, which was basically a “Let’s Do” of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The Klingons were apparently added at the behest of Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who is, of course, a massive Original Series fan. Fields compensates for this by writing them based not so much on their portrayals in “Errand of Mercy”, “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Day of the Dove”, but on characters from John Sturges’ remake of Seven Samurai called The Magnificent Seven, as well as Falstaff from Henry IV, Part II. But even so, Holy Prophets is this bad: The fanwank, while not quite as overwhelmingly wanky and referential as this sort of thing tends to get, is still the number one biggest problem with “Blood Oath” and sinks the whole production for me before even the shaky grasp on feminism can.…

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I’ve got a theory that Hollywood and the greater Los Angeles area are different from other big world cities. I mean granted every city is different in its own way because every place has its own unique energies, but even so there are general and superficial cultural similarities that we can notice if we do a comparative study of a lot of big cities. By those standards, I’ve always got the sense that Los Angeles is weirdly insular, at least the Hollywood area. It seems to operate less like a huge world city and more exactly like a small town with the exact same traditional relationship with vocational trade that’s existed throughout modern western history. Nobody is in Hollywood if they don’t want to be in the film industry, and if you grew up there you know everyone. Hollywood is an old European small town that just so happens to dominate the media of the entire country, as well as that of a few other countries.

It’s no secret that the Star Trek team are massive old Hollywood fans. I think that’s sort of a prerequisite for living in southern California. When you get right down to it, they’re all tradesmen and craftsmen who have worked their way up through a system that’s basically vocational apprenticeship and they naturally want to pay tribute to their old masters. That’s the reason genre romps, pastiches and “Let’s Do” stories exist to begin with: Art is built on imitation anyway, and I would imagine that’s merely amplified and concentrated by living and working in a climate like southern California’s film industry. Genre fiction is no different and isn’t on some higher plane: In fact, one of my favourite ridiculous things about the generally ridiculous movie Species is how it’s this serious, provocative sci-fi sexual horror movie that also desperately wants to be a breathless tribute to 1940s hard-broiled LA Noir pulp fiction because it’s endearingly, stupidly, hopelessly in love with Los Angeles. It’s “the city of the future”, you know! You can do anything and be anyone in the City of Angels!

But I’ll have to come back to Sil and her joyride of carnage through every LA landmark that’s been in every movie ever another day (though her movie is in production by now and, because synchronicity is everything, the earthquake that interrupted production on “Profit and Loss” is an actual plot point in Species). The point of the matter is that Star Trek is far from immune to this sot of hyperlocalized psychogeographic make-out session, and we’ve seen this plenty of times before (Vasquez Rocks, anyone?). And so with “Profit and Loss”, we get Star Trek: Deep Space Nine bending over backwards to borderline remake Casablanca simply because Casablanca is a classic of Old Hollywood and because it can. This sort of giddy-yet-pointless genre romp seems to be a reoccuring Thing for Quark stories, considering “The Nagus” was basically this but for The Godfather instead.…

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Attest to your goddess. In this form, she is the energy of life and creation embodied. She waits for you to realise that which you have always known about yourself.

Normally I write these at night. I’m a bit of a night owl by habit already, and I find that, when doing creative work, I perform far better at night. I’m much more focused during the evenings, whereas I tend to get distracted far too easily by the business and hustle-and-bustle of diurnal life. Today though I am breaking habit and writing this during the morning, but it seems to feel right. I am, after all, also very much a day person: Sunshine is a vital and fundamental part of my existence and I need to be around it and in it constantly or I get depressed. I am of the Sun and the Moon equally, which makes things annoying when I need to find time to sleep. I could say the same thing about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine-This is a show that uses a great deal of dark cinematography and colouring, and it’s of course a space-based science fiction series. And yet a sizable majority of my memories of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine evoke feelings of openness, brightness and warmth because, as I’ll discuss in further detail in following chapters, much of my experience of it came through comic books and magazines, including most, if not all, of this season. I have extremely vivid place-memories of reading about this year’s stories in such magazines beneath the warm and welcoming summer sunshine.

It’s news to nobody that Jadzia Dax is my favourite character on this show. It is, in fact, typically a three-way race between her, Tasha Yar and Geordi La Forge for my favourite character in all of Star Trek. But of those three, it’s no contest who has the most consistent and unforgettable personality. Jadzia Dax is a goddess-woman, a divine avatar who exists in the space between worlds beckoning us to join her. And this is her definitive story. Jadzia is “Playing God”, that is, playing at being a god, but not in the expected Robert Oppenheimer sense. Though diegetically mortal, Jadzia Dax is dressed in the trappings of the divine, her initiate Arjin also her prospective pupil and the play’s stand-in for us. Jadzia plays a goddess of fertility, love and lust: Wild and vivacious, she tries to make Arjin get over himself in order to make peace with and accept himself. Because only someone conscious and mature enough to do that will be able to accept cosmic love and light into themselves. It’s in that moment of ego death where we find clarity and gain the power to channel our own truest selves. True confidence and identity lies in the moment where we shed the anxieties and self-consciousness of youth while retaining its vive.…

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A holographic little girl discusses the nature of imaginal reality with a formless being and a goddess. This is an interesting one.

We should begin with the personal identity theory and problem of self themes which naturally always crop up in any story like this. As one might expect from this show, particularly this show this season, the problem is addressed and dealt with rather easily. As a direct thematic follow-up to both “Inheritance” and “Whispers”, it’s never portrayed as ambiguous whether or not the colonists really are sentient beings. That is, if you discount Odo. Odo’s apparent uncertainty over this fact is a reflection of his own inner nature, not necessarily a statement of judgment: He’s accompanied Dax to the Gamma Quadrant to look for clues about his history and identity, and he wants hard and clear answers. Of course, Dax has helped him in this regard before, earlier in the season in “The Alternate”. But seeing “The Alternate” is not a necessary prerequisite for enjoying this episode.

Odo is a neoplatonist here, out searching for an objective reality he can define himself in accordance with. He’s also a detective, heavily invested in solving mysteries and getting to the bottom of a capital-T Truth he sees as being wrongfully withheld from him. It’s of little surprise that the mask he crafts for himself involves serving as a constable, an elected law-enforcement officer with changeably defined responsibilities. This is, of course, and always has been, the key to understanding who Odo is: The naturally fluid and amorphous shapeshifter yearns for form and rigidity because of his own reflexive questions and self-conscious insecurities. Odo likes hard facts and hard truths, things he can hold onto and be absolutely sure of. So naturally he’s going to be less than thrilled with the colony of holograms whose holographic nature is being hidden from them. To him, this is a willful Obfuscation of The Truth, a crime being committed that someone must be held accountable for.

Except Taya tells Odo that shapeshifters aren’t real. Which means, by definition, Odo isn’t real either. And things suddenly got all “Ship in a Bottle” up in here. Although then Taya says she wants to be a shapeshifter, because that would mean she could be anything and everyone would want to be with her. And maybe the better analogy is Promethea…

Taya and the rest of her people are real because Rurigan treats them as if they’re real. He designed them to be exact duplicates of his deceased family and friends on his homeworld and loved them the same way, which means the holographic villagers have become them. This is personal identity theory working on the plane of the imaginal: Not only the psychical continuity of one person, but an entire world kept alive through one person’s perspective of it. The imaginal is dynamically formless: Shaped by positionality, it can also influence it in turn. Gods inarguably exist in the realm of the imaginal, and gods can reshape themselves into new identities through mythopoeia.…

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