Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

One of the telltale omens of the looming Long 1990s is a desire to see stories where heroes fail, lose or make bad decisions. I’ve spent a good amount of time, space and energy looking at the psychology of this, which is curious considering I haven’t actually begun looking at the Long 1990s yet (although there is the argument that the groundwork has already been laid by numerous sociocultural factors and a handful of influential works).

This desire to voyeuristically engage with failure is not a guiding principle of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Although future Star Trek creative teams will most assuredly take this as gospel, most of the touted “conflict” of this particular series was designed to hinge around the natural tension that organically emerges when you take a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds and make them live and work in close proximity with one another. You can actually see a number of good examples of the show’s approach to this throughout the various subplots in “Progress”: The B-plot is the obvious one, where Nog tries to teach Jake some basic Ferengi philosophy to make an “opportunity” out of a supposed setback. But Nog isn’t able to turn a profit on his own, because he’s not capable of negotiating with respect to the various positionalities of the parties involved in his transaction (the only thing he can do on his own is subtly manipulate Quark, which is just him working his native Ferengi system of social mores). It takes Jake to come in and help steer the negotiations into a direction that’s beneficial for everyone’s interests, which provides an interesting echo for the events of their subplot in “The Storyteller” last week.

There’s also the obvious anxiety of the Provisional Government’s representative in Ops before the A-plot kicks off in earnest, who’s not sure he can trust Commander Sisko and Jadzia Dax to oversee the drilling project, and isn’t sure what to make of Major Kira working with them. Kira has to be their spokesperson to him, and bridge the gap between the two teams, which subtly foreshadows what she’s going to have to do once the story itself gets going (and fails to, but that’s getting ahead of things). But the best example is actually the scene where Kira and Dax are in the Runabout en route to Jeraddo: Wonderfully, it’s the first glimpse we get of Jadzia’s signature libido, as she chats to Nerys about attracting Morn’s attention, almost bragging about it. Nerys is repulsed because not only does she not share Jadzia’s taste in friends-with-benefits or her promiscuity, but she can’t even conceive of how someone could swing that way in the first place. She doesn’t think less of Dax, but she’s entirely incapable of putting herself in her shoes. Which is Jadzia’s entire point: She knows Nerys is too buttoned-up and too immersed in her comfort zone, which is something that comes with youth.…

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One of the big advantages Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has, regardless of whether or not Star Trek fans think it’s actually an advantage or not, is, as we have established, its stationary location. But this asset doesn’t just apply to the titular space station, it also applies to the nearby planet: After all, the whole point of setting this show so close to Bajor in the first place was to allow for development of one specific planetary society above and beyond what just having a representative as part of our crew would facilitate.

The biggest problem Star Trek has from an ethical anthropological standpoint is its well-known predilection to fall into the “planet of hats” issue. In less netspeak terms, this means Star Trek has an annoying tendency to depict extraterrestrial civilizations as monocultures in service to metaphor and allegory. Star Trek isn’t the only sci-fi-fantasy work to have this problem (in fact I’d argue it’s effectively endemic to the genre) and I don’t even think it’s anywhere near the worst perpetrator of it, but it is a problem Star Trek is famous for having. There are a number of reasons for this, most of which have to do with the inherent problems of using people or groups of people as dolled-up metaphor in this way, but the one that’s relevant to tonight’s discussion is the inescapable fact that a voyaging starship can’t stay in one port of call long enough to flesh out any given society to the realistic extent they really deserve. Because in theory this is something Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is primed to alleviate and another huge reason why it’s such a necessary second perspective on the Star Trek universe. With our city’s proximity to Bajor, there’s really no functional narrative reason why it need be depicted in the traditionally shallow and superficial sci-fi-fantasy way.

(Actually I tell a lie for the purposes of argument. Star Trek’s biggest problem from an ethical anthropological perspective isn’t the planet of hats issue, it’s the Prime Directive. But I’m not about to dig up that old chestnut again.)

“The Storyteller” is the first episode to really grapple with the potential this setup offers the show, and it succeeds with flying colours. We get not one, not two, but *three* different representations of Bajoran culture that differ from what’s been established thus far across both the A- and B-plots and the story even throws us Kira in specific opportune moments to further the contrast. There’s of course the village of the Sirah that Julian and Miles visit, but also the Paqu and Navot delegations that Commander Sisko has been asked to mediate between. In each case, we get to see glimpses of folk belief and cultural norms and attitudes that differ just enough from established dogmatic Prophets theism that it’s uniquely memorable: The first Sirah obviously talks a lot about destiny and chosen ones being sent from on high wand whatnot, but it’s obvious this is mostly rhetorical bluster and the village has a special set of folk spiritualism all its own based around the Dal’Rok and the telling of the tales that’s found nowhere else on Bajor.…

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I tend to go back and forth on “Battle Lines”. I think it’s because, on paper, it sounds like an almost paint-by-numbers Star Trek story reminiscent of nothing so much as Original Series episodes like “A Taste of Armageddon”, “Day of the Dove” and their ilk (and indeed, “Day of the Dove” was a primary inspiration for “Battle Lines”). As such, what usually tends to happen is I watch the episode, like it a whole lot, then go a long while without seeing it, forget how much I like it and think “oh, it musn’t be that good. It’s basically an Original Series episode and I hate it when Star Trek: Deep Space Nine just chases the Original Series”. Then I watch it again and love it.

Writing this essay should finally break that cycle for me, because “Battle Lines” is most assuredly excellent.

Bear in mind I adored “Battle Lines” at the time, and that probably says something. I especially loved the gritty iconography of these ageless, immortal soldiers constantly slaughtering each other in a bombed out desert cave on a godforsaken moon somewhere with Major Kira and Commander Sisko caught in the middle. In hindsight, yes, it’s just another Planet Hell shoot, but for me this is among the most memorable uses of that venerable old studio. It’s probably because the slightly Mad Max-esque Ennis and Nol-Ennis have a kind of grungy, 1980s post-apocalyptic aesthetic to them that I quite like. We haven’t seen much of that in Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine since the aesthetic’s glorious peak in the Gatherers of “The Vengeance Factor”, costume designer Bob Blackman seemingly preferring to emphasize a kind of forced frumpiness in his outfits for the chronological 1990s.

It’s perhaps not coincidental then that “The Vengeance Factor” was the final episode aired in the chronological 1980s. However that said I find it really interesting, now that I’ve brought it up, how we seem to be seeing little echoes of “The Vengeance Factor”, or at least the zeitgeist it was a part of, showing up again this season. The Gatherers themselves showed up in “Vortex”, and they were every bit as fantastically 80s as there as they’ve always been. And in “Battle Lines”, we once again have a story about a ceaseless war stemming from clan conflicts that may have meant something at one time but which are beyond ancient and petty by now. It’s very fitting that little signifiers like this start to crop up again in Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this season, as I consider 1993 and 1994 to be the real last hurrah of the Long 1980s, before the vibe finally gives way to the grimdark and apathy fueled Long 1990s and the climate we’re arguably still living in today. It’s also perhaps not a coincidence that this season is far and away the best the series has ever been.…

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Odo is a shapeshifter. I know that sounds obvious to any fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I’m not just talking about his plot superpowers here. Rather Odo being a shapeshifter is a diegetic allegory for the role he plays on the series, and clue as to his character’s true nature.

Odo got the first spotlight on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine following “Emissary”, and while it was excellent it was more about the setting of the titular space station itself and inviting comparison with Westerns than Odo himself; it’s that “Fort Laramie in Space” again (Star Trek certainly does seem fixated on its precious Hollywood Westerns and seems to want to invoke them whenever and wherever possible). While “Vortex” draws upon Westerns to a significant degree as well: The script took its inspiration from the movie The Naked Spur such that Peter Allan Fields hired Sam Rolfe, the writer of that movie and an old mentor of Fields’, to handle the teleplay for “Vortex” (Rolfe had previously written “The Vengeance Factor”, which is probably my favourite episode of the third season, and the script even specifies that Ah-Kel and Ro-Kel had at least two of those gloriously 1980s Gatherers as part of their crew!). But there’s more to this episode than simple genre romp pastiche, and “Vortex” is the key moment in establishing precisely who Odo is.

At first, it would seem like he’s being depicted as the stereotypical mythic lone gunman Western hero, with Odo, Croden and the script all waxing fairly poetically (and melodramatically) about being an outsider and not having a home to go back to. But this is actually obfuscating pomp and circumstance: Odo is projecting his anxieties about belonging onto his search for his origins. He feels out-of-place with Starfleet and the Bajorans alike and is hoping that if he finds “his people”, he’ll finally have a place to belong to (true, but not in the way Odo is conceptualizing it here). But what Odo doesn’t realise that the majority of his isolation is self-imposed, and that he’s too insular and self-conscious to figure out that his home has always been Deep Space 9. He probably knows this deep down, but he’s too stubborn to actually accept, admit and vocalize is to himself, much less to anyone else. So when he asks his pendant at the end about where home is, it’s every bit as much of a rhetorical philosophical question as it is an inquiry about a physical location. He’s not looking for a place to belong as much as he is looking for permission to admit that the place he belongs is where he’s spent the better part of a decade dutifully making a living.

And this does beg an interesting question: Can one actually “belong” to a place like Deep Space 9? The station is, after all, ultimately a port city, and port cities on Earth have traditionally been considered deeply liminal places.…

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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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