Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Colm Meaney is an immense acting talent. We all know this. Chief O’Brien was elevated from a nameless bit part who was little more than an extra to become debatably the most lasting and memorable character in the entire series because it was evident to everyone from Day 1 on “Encounter at Farpoint” that this was a guy who had some serious chops, even before bringing in quite extensive and illustrious motion picture career outside of Star Trek.

How you respond to a talent like that probably says more about you than it does them. When you write material for a specific actor, you’re more than likely envisioning a specific subset of their range you’d like to see them give when they perform your script. On Star Trek: The Next Generation, the creative team responded by giving Colm increasingly larger and larger parts until they could hang an entire story off of him, usually emphasizing his everyman characteristics by giving him a unique insight on or offhand reaction to the topic at hand. On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, they invented an entire new hyperlocalized genre of story entitled “Let’s Torture O’Brien”, and actually called it that internally. This probably ought to say it all, but in slightly more nuanced and descriptive terms for the newcomers, a “Let’s Torture O’Brien” story entails coming up with a relatively strangled science fiction premise that allows the writers to put Miles O’Brien through a psychological wringer so that Colm Meaney can masterfully convey an everyday, likable, relatable person enduring extreme, oftentimes traumatic events while we watch on with rapt attention.

I’m not going to say too much more about this approach and the mindset that might attract a creator to it. You all can fill in the blanks by this point. I would ask, however, that you at least reflect amongst yourselves upon why in particular someone might think this is the best way to showcase an actor’s range. Is it not possible that an actor could potentially convey powerful emotions that aren’t extreme mental and emotional trauma? Does the category of “good acting” by definition require that he do so? But neither will I deny that “Whispers” is a damn corker of an episode or that Colm Meaney is heartbreakingly formidable in it. Though it’s frequently cited as such, this isn’t actually the first “Let’s Torture O’Brien” episode, at least not by my count. In fact, that’s a minor issue I have with it, considering it comes immediately after “Armageddon Game”, which I find to be a more down-to-Earth and relatable way of making us connect with a character’s pain: The Chief’s workmanlike honour in the face of death is unbelievably moving, and is light years beyond anything that has ever been done with the Klingons ever.

Speaking of “Armageddon Game”, I almost wonder if Doctor Bashir wouldn’t have been a better choice for this story. Sure, Siddig El Fadil may not have the pedigree of Colm Meaney as an actor (at least not yet), but he’s still damn good himself and its his very youthfulness, both as an actor and as a character, that I think would have added a layer to the story here.…

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I can’t help but read “Armageddon Game” in the context of the Cold War, or rather, in the context of the perceived end of the Cold War that would have permeated the zeitgeist of the early 1990s. I say “perceived”, because a lot of the geopolitical climate we currently live in as of this writing stems directly from the Cold War, or from multinational powers operating like the Cold War is still on. Which, by definition, means that it is.

Perhaps some of this is due to the title’s similarity to that of the Original Series episode “A Taste of Armageddon”, which was likewise about apocalyptic wargaming with thinly-veiled stand-ins for nuclear weapons. But “Armageddon Game” goes well above and beyond the average Cold War fears over Mutually Assured Destruction: In this story, the analogs for the United States and the Soviet Union are entering their process of disarmament, a certainly timely topic in early 1994, yet are still engaged in heinous acts related to their earlier displays of diplomatic aggression. In order to ensure such a protracted conflict can never happen again, they can’t just destroy their stockpile of weapons, they want to erase all record that their weapons ever existed in the first place. This includes…disposing of…anyone who had any contact with the weapons or the process through which they were created, which unfortunately includes Chief O’Brien and Doctor Bashir.

(It is perhaps worth noting that mere weeks after this episode aired, the CIA arrested Aldrich Ames at the end of a nearly ten year investigation into his perpetration of the second biggest act of espionage of the Cold War. The biggest ever espionage case, which would result chief investigator and double agent Robert Hanson playing cat-and-mouse with his own superiors for literally decades, would not be resolved until 2001.)

It’s significant that these supposed arch-enemies, the T’Lani and the Kellerun, would actually be working together behind the scenes to manipulate information about their activities during the Cold War. State governments look out for each other, not for the people they claim to govern, and it’s no different from the United States and the Soviet Union, who spent the majority of their Cold War constructing narratives about themselves they then imposed upon their people. Constructing narratives-That’s what’s going on in “Armageddon Game” too: Whoever writes the textbooks, or pays the people who write the textbooks, gets to decide what is and isn’t history, because that’s the narrative that gets taught to children in history classes and disseminated through the public discourse. Were the T’Lani and Kellerun to be successful in their efforts (which I hesitate to call “revisionist”, because there’s never any such thing as pure history-It’s only what gets written down and repeated by those with the power to do so), they would erase their Cold War from lived memory itself, and saved their own backsides in the process.…

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“The Alternate” is a study of Odo’s past. There is a clever fake-out during the first few acts, with the tease of an archaeological site in the Gamma Quadrant yielding clues about Odo’s people, and which actually doesn’t amount to much aside from the plot device needed to get the episode’s central…conflict in motion. Because while “The Alternate” is about Odo’s backstory, it’s not stupid enough to explain away an origin story for him outright, or even give too many hints that would tempt the audience to get distracted trying to solve a mystery instead of paying attention to the story. Rather, the past we learn about Odo is his relationship with Doctor Mora Pol, who becomes the Bajoran scientist who found and raised him Odo mentioned to Lwaxana Troi in “The Forsaken”.

As much as I enjoy the fake-out science fiction mystery worldbuilding that baits us away so we don’t notice the naturally more important exploration of characters an their relationship with one another until we’re already in it, something about this plot has never sat entirely well with me. Odo is written here as a bit of a prodigal son, a headstrong and wayward child who becomes estranged from his father because of his determination to chart his own course in life (it should be noted that this doesn’t really connect back to the Biblical parable of the prodigal son, but it’s become a common enough archetype I feel comfortable citing it. Star Trek itself uses it in this context some years down the road). This strikes me as ever-so-slightly a cliché, although it’s an unfortunately frequent enough occurrence in family dynamics that it’s not entirely so.

The larger issue this strays into is that by pushing Odo’s story in this direction (down to the whole “throwing a temper tantrum by turning into a monster” bit), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine risks trespassing into children’s literature territory, as it sometimes tends to do from time to time when handling this sort of material. I know I’ve described Star Trek during this era as being “children’s television for adults”, but the crucial variable in that statement is *for adults*. I’m not entirely sure a prodigal son narrative about making up with your dad entirely qualifies. For some reason this doesn’t strike me as quite as mature a handling of this kind of familial dynamic as, well, Lwaxana and Deanna Troi, for instance (especially after “Dark Page”). But besides, in “The Forsaken” Odo seems to describe his history with the character who would become Doctor Mora as frightening, being treated as an inanimate object of curiosity rather than a person. And that doesn’t quite always come across through James Sloyan’s powerful and sympathetic performance.

Another issue I have with this episode is Jadzia, namely that she spends a fair portion of it knocked unconscious. I sort of thought we were passed the point where writers would keep Dax bedridden or otherwise incapacitated for all of part of an episode because they didn’t know what to do with her, or otherwise treat her as anything other than one of the most capable and competent members of the crew (if not the most capable and competent outright).…

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Chaos theory is the principle of mathematics that states dynamical systems which are subject to any number of individual initial conditions, such as the commonly cited example of a butterfly flapping its wings ultimately leading to a dramatic shift in weather at the opposite end of the planet, behave in such a way that defies prediction in the long-term. These systems are called chaotic, where by this definition chaos is not random, but is so impossible to predict by any meaningful system of measurement that it might as well be random.

This is ostensibly the premise “Rivals” was pitched under. But the neutrino-spinning gambling machine Martus Mazur brings to Deep Space 9 hardly constitutes an example of chaos theory. Instead, it operates by altering the laws of probability, as numerous characters state at various points in the episode. Far from large-scale effects being generated seemingly at random by an otherwise inconsequential initial event, the device arbitrarily dispenses good luck and bad luck across the station, which is a very different sort of phenomenon. Perhaps it’s small wonder than that the “chaos theory” pitch languished around in production hell for over a year before Michael Piller got around to it, by which point the finished product could hardly be called something that could be traced back to its source. Actually, that‘s a better example of chaos theory than anything in the actual episode as aired.

But this isn’t a blog about mathematical models of scientific processes. I’m sure you can find oodles of critique of Star Trek’s clumsy handling of those issues elsewhere. We all know that Star Trek’s scientific concepts are usually the least interesting thing about any given story, and the same is certainly true here. The only trouble is there’s not a whole lot else to “Rivals”: It’s an aggressively unfunny attempt at a low-stakes story that leaves me without a lot to talk about. I suppose that’s the first thing I could mention, because it’s not a good sign to see Star Trek: Deep Space Nine trip up on a low-stakes story like this. “Rivals” is precisely the sort of episode that should be absolutely in this show’s wheelhouse and it should be able to churn out this kind of material practically on autopilot. This is what the series was built to do, and that it can’t seem to wrap its brain around it is concerning. Maybe the show has epiced itself out following the season opening three-parter and big dramatic attempts like “Necessary Evil”, “Invasive Procedures”, “Cardassians” and “Sanctuary”.

Maybe the answer is that troublesome brief. Either chaos theory doesn’t make a great Star Trek story, or the creative team doesn’t know how to make it a good Star Trek story. The fumble on the chaos theory thing has tripped me up for years, and I’ve spent longer than any human being should trying to piece together what this story actually has to do with a field of theory I’ve actually found kind of interesting at varying points in my life, only to finally realise it actually has fuck all to do with it.…

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Here’s an episode I always remember being ambivalent about. It’s one of those situations where it always seemed like it was something I should like, but somehow it never quite clicked with me for one reason or another. Each time I would rewatch this episode (or, given where it falls in the year and the fact it’s a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode more generally, re-read) I would expect it to be good given my mental sorting algorithm filed it away as part of a stretch of episodes I’d just accepted as classic outright, and then I would always leave it feeling vaguely unsatisfied for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Well, the same thing happened this time, except now I know exactly why this episode has never struck a chord with me.

“Sanctuary” is ostensibly trying to Say Something Important about the plight of refugees, a humanitarian crisis that’s sadly just as pressing as I write these words now as it was in 1993, if not more so. This means of course it’s an “Issues” story, and we’ve just come off of a stretch of episodes that have proven pretty conclusively that “Issues” stories simply do not work in Star Trek in spite of what everyone thinks. Even though its cause is a just and noble one, “Sanctuary” doesn’t work any better than “Force of Nature” or “Melora” (indeed, those episodes’ respective causes were every bit as just and noble as this), and in fact it’s “Sanctuary” that casts into light even more stark why this kind of morality play is a bad fit for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It’s not, it should be stressed, that the depiction of a refugee crisis in this episode is a poor or ill thought out one: Indeed, the depiction is, if anything, depressingly realistic: Deep Space 9 becomes a staging ground for millions upon millions of starving and displaced refugees escaping oppression in their homeland. They’ve made a harrowing journey across great distances and the only thing that’s kept them going is the hope that their new home will afford them the realised dream of freedom denied them where they come from. But once they arrive, they find locals whose attitude runs a gamut between reluctant to help and outright bigoted and contemptuous. There’s even the reveal that the Skrreeans (which, as an aside, is a name for a fictional culture right up there with BeBeBeBeque in terms of sheer trollishness) see Bajor as their own holy land, a forsaken planet they are prophesied to bring light and hope back to. Which is of course a plot point clearly reminiscent of a certain real-world political situation in the middle east.

But though there are parallels between the plight of the Skrreeans and the great western identity crisis that is the Israeli-Palestinian-Christian conflict, the clearest connections are to the history of the United States, which “Sanctuary” has pegged depressingly well.…

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This is the moment where I finally break with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine establishment. I mean, not that it hasn’t been obvious over the past year and a half that I have serious disagreements with this creative team about what this show is fundamentally about and even what constitutes good basic storytelling, but “Second Sight” is where whatever bridges span the rift between us vanish forever and it becomes obvious we have two irreconcilable conceptions of what this show is about and something is going to have to give: I think this episode is a defining classic, but the creative team hates it and I have a feeling the majority of fandom agrees with them.

Just like “Necessary Evil”, “Second Sight” is about elements from the past returning to have an impact on events in the present and, also just like “Necessary Evil”, it’s about finding positive, constructive ways to make peace with them and continue our lives. It’s the four year anniversary of the Battle of Wolf 359, and thus of Jennifer’s death, and Commander Sisko almost forgot. The guilt he feels upon this realisation is genuine: At some point we have to move on with our lives, but through the grieving process it’s not uncommon for people to feel like they’re betraying the memory and legacy of their loved one by not keeping them in their thoughts 24/7. But of course, we always have to remember that our loved ones would want us to move on and have healthy, fulfilling lives, with our without them. This is the conclusion Commander Sisko reaches, and he reaches it fairly early on in the story, even if the cause is a woman who’s not quite all there, if you know what I mean.

And make no mistake, “Second Sight” handles this with unabashed utopianism. The whole narrative is pushing Ben to go talk to Fenna, even in spite of that business about unconscious psychic projections I’ll deal with a little further down. The show could have taken the trite and clichéd path by using the romance as an excuse to drive a wedge between Ben and Jake for some good old-fashioned conflict-You can just imagine how the scenario would play out in your head with Jake petulantly complaining that his father beginning a new relationship isn’t fair to him and is an insult to his mother’s memory or something equally stupid (in fact, the normally sensible Michael Jan Friedman does precisely this in a couple years on Star Trek: The Next Generation, astonishingly with the thirtysomething Will Riker). But no: Here, Jake is the *first* one to say that if his dad has found love, he’ll support him all the way. So does Jadzia Dax, though Ben keeps dancing around addressing the topic with her.

Speaking of Jadzia, her role in this story, and Ben’s evasive behaviour around her, is somewhat revealing. Like “Rules of Acquisition”, “Second Sight” is another episode that very strongly defined my interpretation of Jadzia Dax: Once again she’s playing a support role to another character, and this is the most important one for her because it’s with Commander Sisko.…

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“Necessary Evil” exists in two distinct places within my memory, and they map alongside the two phases of my experience with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The first time I was exposed to this story was in 1993 or 1994, naturally, as part of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine. Like “Rules of Acquisition” before it and “Second Sight” after it, this is a story I vividly remember from the episode synopsis printed in issue 7. At the time, I immediately recognised it as a modern classic in the making; a wonderfully dramatic noir mystery that fleshes out the backstory of Odo and Kira during the occupation and adds a touching nuance to their relationship in the present day.

It was not, however, an episode I watched on television at the time (or if I did I don’t consciously remember it…The imagery certainly feels familiar). The first time I actually got to see the finished product itself must have been somewhere around 1999 or 2000. I’m not sure if Enterprise had been announced or the TNN Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns had started up yet, but either way the winds must have been starting to change: I was over at the house of some friends, two brothers who shared my love of all (or at least most) things Star Trek. One of them made the offhand comment that they had actually taped an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine live at the time as part of a larger collection of programming that also included one or more episodes of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (for younger readers, you have to understand that in those days VHS tapes were capable of holding several hours of video at a time, so it wasn’t uncommon to have single tapes that had entire days worth of material archived away. The catch was, of course, that the transfer quality was garbage). Knowing how passionate I was about the series and how eager I was to fill in the gaps in my understanding of this period in my life, the two suggested we give it a watch that afternoon.

The episode they had recorded (of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, not The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh) was “Necessary Evil”. I immediately recognised it from the teaser and the name drop of Vaatrik, and I got very excited because I knew this was a good one. Then the credits ran, and I proceeded to be completely bowled over. This was the first time I had actually seen the intro credits to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in something like seven years, and it was the first time I remember consciously registering what I was seeing. I was utterly taken aback because I didn’t remember what they were like and didn’t really know what to expect: I guess I was assuming that the theme song would echo the motifs of the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme song in some way instead of being something completely different.…

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Along with “The Homecoming” /“The Circle”/“The Siege”, “Rules of Acquisition” is probably the first Star Trek: Deep Space Nine story that became genuinely iconic to me.

As I’ve mentioned before, though I was familiar with the show before this run of episodes, my familiarity basically consisted of dissociated images-The water bath clone scene from “A Man Alone”. Some promotional art of a runabout. The offhand conversation in the shadows under a staircase somewhere. That elusive scene of Dax on the parallel bars that I’m half convinced I completely imagined. Vivid as it was, my memory of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in its first season was fragmented, consisting only of brief flashes of lucidity. This is very much a consequence of the way I watched the show at that point: I could only ever catch the odd glimpse of it while flipping through the channels, because my local affiliates stupidly ran Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine opposite one another, and I wasn’t going to chance missing my favourite show to take a gamble on its younger sibling.

(This was not an uncommon happenstance, by the way: I am by no means the only one who made that decision when faced with similar circumstances, and that’s a major contributing factor to the failure of every post-Next Generation Star Trek series.)

So while my experience with Star Trek: The Next Generation was similar, I was always better researched on that show and it didn’t take me long to connect my sensory memories with actual plots and episode titles: I had enough reference guides, VHS tape rentals were not unheard of and eventually the reruns became commonplace enough I gained a working knowledge of that show rather quickly. But Star Trek: Deep Space Nine I pretty much literally never got to watch again for another ten years: Between the initial run of the first and second seasons and the DVD release in 2003, I had no material critical experience with actually physically watching the series whatsoever. As a result, there were only a handful of episodes of this show I was ever intimately familiar with at the time. And by no coincidence, these were the ones “novelized” in the issues of Starlog’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine that I owned, specifically issues five and seven.

The magazine itself is getting its own chapter in this book because it absolutely defined my exposure to and formative impressions of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s world so I have to keep myself from going into too much detail about it here. The reason it’s relevant to tonight’s episode is that “Rules of Acquisition” was the first episode covered in issue seven, which happened to feature our very own Jadzia Dax as its cover girl. This kind of sets the stage, because while I know “Rules of Acquisition” is kind of a sequel to last year’s “The Nagus”, as far as I’m concerned this one is all about Jadzia Dax: This is the story where the Jadzia Dax I know and love finally emerges fully formed and in bloom.…

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Both this episode and its titular character are concepts that hail from the early days of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s pre-production. Melora Pazlar was originally going to be Deep Space 9‘s permanent science officer, but she was replaced by Jadzia Dax in part, ironically, for the very reason she has a tough time adjusting to the station in this story: The low-gravity environments she was adapted to proved too time-consuming and expensive to convey on a regular basis. The station, in a very real sense, could not accommodate her; a theme that underwrites this entire episode.

As an episode of television exploring the topical message it takes on, “Melora” is very good. It was put in the best possible hands: Writer Evan Carlos Somers, who served as a Guild intern during Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s first season before getting a shot at pitching his own stories in the second, was a wheelchair user himself and pushed for the chance to build a story around a the abandoned concept of a Starfleet officer from a low-gravity planet who had to use a wheelchair to navigate Earth-like environments. Somers also wrote “Melora” as a direct rebuttal of the appalling ableist issues of “Ethics” from the fifth season by showcasing a disabled person who is proud and accepting of who she is and the perspective she brings and doesn’t want to change to suit anyone else.

Understandably given his own perspective, Somers’ treatment is as laudable a depiction of mobility issues as we could expect. This episode always reminds me of a conversation that transpired during one of my seminars while I was still in the university system doing academic work in social studies of knowledge: One of my colleagues at the time was a disability advocate, and during a panel one day the question was posed to him whether “disability” was an appropriate term to use in his work. He felt that, from his experience, both “disabled” and “differently abled” were equally valid terms because while the people in question most certainly were not ashamed by their positionalities and in fact championed them, the infrastructure of modern society is not built with their needs in mind, and they are thus disenfranchised and excluded by it. So in a sense while they are merely “differently abled”, the material realities of modernity also leave them “disabled”. I think this a paradox that Somers captures incredibly elegantly in “Melora”.

Unfortunately, and by his own admission, Somers didn’t give himself enough time to groom his script with the level of care and attention that it really deserved, necessitating a successive series of rewrites by Steven Baum, James Crocker and Michael Piller. Though Melora herself is predictably handled well in Somers’ original draft, the other characters aren’t so lucky. From what I’ve seen of it, Melora actually comes across as a bit of a Mary Sue in it and ends up lecturing the rest of the crew, who seem to have collectively lapsed to a level of ignorance and thoughtlessness about her condition they really ought not to have.…

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