Deep Space Nine | the m0vie blog

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Prophecy & Change: Ha’Mara by Kevin G. Summers (Review)

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first season. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry.

Comparing and contrasting the anniversary short story anthologies for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine can be highly informative. The Sky’s the Limit, released to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of The Next Generation, features fourteen stories. Most of these stories serve as prologues or epilogues to existing Next Generation episodes. Suicide Note provides closure to The Defector; Turncoats follows a character from Face of the Enemy after the camera stops rolling; Four Lights is an epilogue to Chain of Command.

In contrast, Prophecy and Change, released to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Deep Space Nine, tends to focus on short stories that fit gracefully between episodes – fleshing out connective tissue and explaining how one plot development or character decision led to another. That says quite a lot about the two shows and the way that their stories were told, with much of Prophecy and Change feeling ling deleted scenes or inserts loosely inserted between what was seen in television.

Ha’Mara is the first short story of the collection, following the introduction and the mysterious Revisited – a book-ending wrap-around written by an author who has yet to be publicly identified. Written by Kevin G. Summers, who provided Isolation Ward 4 to Strange New Worlds IV, the short story is set in the immediate aftermath of Emissary, attempting to smooth over the rough edges transitioning from the pilot to the rest of the show.

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: 17th Century, arts, Bajoran, Benjamin Sisko, British, Emissary, John Donne, Kira Nerys, literature, Sisko, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, Starfleet, StarTrek, World Literature | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Past Prologue (Review)

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first season. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

Past Prologue is a pretty decent second episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It does what it needs to do, serving primarily to build the world of Deep Space Nine just a little bit. After all, a story like this was inevitable with a character like Kira in the main cast, so it’s probably for the best that the show deals with it so early. It’s not a classic episode by any means, feeling as if the show was obligated to tell this particular story. Then again, I suppose that’s what the first season of any television show is for. Set up and development.

Past Prologue continues to hint at the strengths of Deep Space Nine, investing considerable effort in crafting a tangible setting for the series. However, there’s also a hint of the weaknesses of the first season to be found here. Like just about any of the Star Trek spin-offs, Deep Space Nine is going to spend its first year searching for its identity. While Past Prologue indicates the series is looking the right direction, it hasn’t quite found its footing.

Los cannon…

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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Emissary (Review)

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first season. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a phenomenal piece of television. It’s often a bit overlooked because of its unique setting. After all, the words Star Trek evoke space ships and new worlds – “new life forms and new civilisations.” As such, a Star Trek series about a space station feels counter-intuitive. “To boldly sit” is the hardly the most dynamic premise. And yet, despite that, there’s a very serious argument to be made that Deep Space Nine is the crowning accomplishment of television Star Trek. It’s certainly the last great attempt to boldly push the franchise forward, with Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise feeling just a tad regressive and conservative in comparison.

Indeed, Deep Space Nine represents a massive narrative leap forward from the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which remains one of the greatest science-fiction shows ever produced. For better or worse, Emissary makes it quite clear that Deep Space Nine is not an attempt to copy its direct predecessor, even if some of the other episodes in the first season might back-pedal a bit. In fact, it’s surprising just how well the pilot for this strangest of Star Trek shows holds up, suggesting a firmer grasp of its own identity than a few of the subsequent episodes could claim.

A Commanding presence…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Bajoran, Benjamin Sisko, best of both worlds, borg, Cardassian, deep space nine, gene roddenberry, jean-luc picard, Next Generation, picard, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine | 4 Comments »

Star Trek: Terok Nor – Day of the Vipers by James Swallow (Review)

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first season. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine comes with back story. A lot of back story. In fact, the opening scene of Emissary establishes the show in the context of The Best of Both Worlds, Part II, introducing a lead character whose tragic origin is rooted in an encounter that we had only fleetingly glimpse in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Due to the setting and nature of the show, history and continuity were major parts of Deep Space Nine‘s identity, and a large part of what set the show apart from its predecessors. (And successors, for that matter.)

Although the Klingons would dominate the show’s fourth season and remain a presence throughout the show’s run, and the Romulans might occasionally be glimpsed lurking in the back ground, the series largely focused on two alien races that had been introduced in The Next Generation. The Cardassians had been introduced in the show’s fourth season, in The Wounded, and the Bajorans first appeared during the fifth season in Ensign Ro.

Officially part of The Lost Era series of novels designed to flesh out the history of the shared Star Trek universe, the Terok Nor trilogy exists as a bridge into Emissary, something of an extended history lesson that contextualises the events of Deep Space Nine by providing an account of the Occupation of Bajor, an atrocity that only ended shortly before Emissary actually began.

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Bajor, Bajoran, best of both worlds, Cardassia, Cardassian, deep space nine, Dukat, Emissary, Final Reflection, Ico, Sisko, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, StarTrek | 4 Comments »

Star Trek 103: The Best of Deep Space Nine

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Darren

To celebrate the release of Star Trek: Into Darkness, we’re holding a month full of Star Trek related fun. We’re reviewing every episode of the show’s first season, from The Cage through to Operation — Annihilate!, one-per-day for all of May. We’re also looking at some of the various spin-offs, tie-ins and pop culture intersections, so there’s always something going on to do with Star Trek. Anyway, with the release of the new film, we thought it might be interesting to make some recommendations for fans of the new films who wanted to “dip their toes in the water” so to speak. Today, we’re making recommendations from the second of the 24th century spin-offs, and the first to broadcast concurrently with another Star Trek project, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.