Asking the Wrong Questions

I've noticed several people linking to the series now that it's over, and to facilitate this, here is a link post. Introduction The Two DS9s - Did Deep Space Nine only get good in its later seasons? The Menagerie - Alien races on the show Looking for Ron Moore in All the Wrong Places - The obligatory Battlestar Galactica comparison What Does God Need With a Space Station? - Deep Space Nine 's treatment of religion Ode to Kira - Just what it says The Justice Trick - Odo and his troubled relationships with Kira and morality Odds & Ends - A few more comments

Believe it or not, after seven installments there's still stuff left to say about Deep Space Nine . Here are a few topics that didn't grow into full-fledged essays: It's an axiom of television writing that romance, and specifically romantic pursuit, is interesting, but established relationships, and most especially marriages, are boring. Perhaps because it was generally strongest when telling stories about the conventional and the mundane, on Deep Space Nine the reverse was true. Its romantic plotlines were usually obvious and uninspired (and occasionally offensive), but its depictions of long-term romantic relationships were winning and, yes, romantic. Dax and Worf come together in the most insipid of ways, and the fifth season episodes that focus on their courtship are tiresome and in some cases ( "Let He Who is Without Sin" ) borderline unwatchable. Once they marry, however, the writing for their relationship achieves a whole new level. If previously ther...

BENDER: Forget it, you can't tempt me. ROBOT DEVIL: Really? There's nothing you want? BENDER: Hm. I forgot you could tempt me with things I want. Futurama , "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" If Deep Space Nine 's character development has a theme, it is the loss of innocence, and of an idealized self-image. The characters who undergo this process most prominently over the course of the series are Sisko—who not only loses his iron grip on the difference between right and wrong in his efforts to win a brutal war, but also surrenders his objectivity and his detached rationalism in the face of the Bajorans’ faith—and Odo—who at the beginning of the series believes himself to possess an innate sense of justice, but discovers not only that his people have no true understanding of the word, but that his own grasp of it is rather tenuous. Bashir starts out the series a literal ingénue, whose delusions about the glory of war and the glamour of spy life are so...

The breathtaking awesomeness of Kira Nerys, which has been recurring theme in these essays, became apparent to me only a few episodes into my journey back through Deep Space Nine . Almost as soon as I came to this realization, I started pondering a question: how is that this fantastic character, who is strong, capable, confident, and decent, doesn't have pride of place in the pantheon of kickass female characters in genre television? Why isn't her name mentioned in the same breath as Susan Ivanova and Dana Scully, Buffy Summers and Aeryn Sun? What I'd like to do in this essay is take a closer look at Kira, at the qualities that make her so awesome, and most particularly the ways in which she works as a female character. I'd also, however, like to look at the ways in which Deep Space Nine undermines Kira, and serves both her and the show's female fans ill. Kira's most prominent quality is the fact that she's an imposing fighter. This is the woman who, w...

No one who watched Deep Space Nine 's pilot episode, "Emissary," would have had any reason to expect a subtle, multi-faceted treatment of religion from the series. Though by no means disrespectful or dismissive of religion, "Emissary" treats it in a manner familiar from many other genre stories--the SFnal trope of alien (or human) gods who turn out to be aliens themselves, the fantasy standard of a prophecy fulfilled by our heroes (a prophecy whose existence, as Sisko patiently explains to Jake in "In the Hands of the Prophets," makes perfect SFnal sense given the Prophets' non-linear nature). The Celestial Temple is important not for its spiritual significance to the Bajorans but as a conduit for traffic and commerce. For a while, that was all Deep Space Nine 's treatment of religion amounted to. When an extremist resistance fighter proposes to destroy the wormhole in order to prevent alien races from interfering with Bajor in "Past Pro...

It's impossible to come back to Deep Space Nine in 2007 and not be on the lookout for Ronald D. Moore, for his influence on the series and its influence on his later work. Deep Space Nine is where Moore made his bones, rising from staff writer to executive producer. It is also, of all the series he's been involved with, the one closest in topic, tone, and theme to Battlestar Galactica . Just in case there are some of you who have never visited this blog before, I consider Galactica to be one of the most frustrating, because initially so promising, failures in the television landscape of the last decade. Searching for Moore's name in Deep Space Nine 's credits is therefore an education--a reminder that he was once capable of extremely good writing, as well as an opportunity to ponder the reasons for Deep Space Nine 's success in many of the same arenas in which Galactica would later fail. Because of the collaborative nature of television writing rooms, as wel...

A work of fiction passes Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For test if it features two women having a conversation about something other than a man. Deep Space Nine passes the Bechdel test, but not before it passes, several times over, its SFnal corollary by featuring two aliens having a conversation about something other than a human, the Federation, or Starfleet. Deep Space Nine , as I've already said, has a main and recurring cast list in the high thirties (and that's not even counting important but low yield characters such as Dr. Mora or Sloan). Other series have featured cast lists as large and even larger (the potential Slayers alone put Buffy 's at close to 50), but unlike Farscape , Buffy , or Angel , Deep Space Nine didn't cluster its characters around a single person or group. Instead, it allowed them to form overlapping hubs. Sisko and Kira, for example, felt great respect and affection for one another, but they were never good friends, and th...