Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

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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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