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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Heart of Stone (Review)

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Darren

This September and October, we’re taking a look at the jam-packed 1994 to 1995 season of Star Trek, including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. Check back daily for the latest review.

Heart of Stone feels quite similar to Life Support. Once again, there’s a main plot that doesn’t involve Kira quite as much as it should. Once again, this is supplemented by a subplot involving Quark’s mischievous nephew, Nog. And yet – while still flawed in a number of ways – Heart of Stone works a lot better than Life Support did, primarily because it’s a lot more thoughtfully constructed. The lack of focus on Kira is explained as part of the plot; Nog isn’t holding down an unfunny comedy subplot, he’s getting some nice character development.

Heart of Stone is occasionally a little heavy-handed in its character beats, but it works well because it pitches its plot at the right level, focusing on the characters at the heart of these stories.

A rock and a hard place…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: change of heart, deep space nine, Dominion, female changeling, heart of stone, Kira, nog, Odo, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, Starfleet, unrequited love | 7 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Fascination (Review)

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Darren

Well, that could have been much more unpleasant than it ultimately was.

Yes, that’s damning with faint praise, but Fascination feels like a long sigh of exhaustion after what has been a tough run of episodes. The last episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to air in 1994, Fascination came at the end of a production crunch that had seen the show desperately grasping for time. Quite a few of the first ten episodes of the season had been rushed through, with varying results – from Second Skin to Meridian.

So the fact that Fascination is not a massive soul-destroying screw-up on the scale of Meridian is a good thing, even if the episode’s plot does smell a little bit of desperation.

Dax can be quite touchy…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Avery Brooks, betazed, Betazoid, comedy, deep space nine, ds9, fascination, Lwaxana Troi, Odo, shakespeare, star trek, star trek: deep space nine | 3 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Abandoned (Review)

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Darren

The September and October, we’re taking a look at the jam-packed 1994 to 1995 season of Star Trek, including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. Check back daily for the latest review.

The Abandoned is a problematic episode.

It’s brave and provocative and challenging, but it’s also incredibly grim and cynical. In fact, it is probably the most relentlessly pessimistic episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s third season. And, given the episodes surround it, that is quite an accomplishment. Deep Space Nine has subverted classic Star Trek storytelling before. The Maquis was really a watershed moment for the series, suggesting that paradise itself might be unsustainable – attacking Roddenberry’s utopia rather brutally.

However, The Abandoned pushes things even further. There’s a social and racial subtext to this episode that grounds it in the racial politics of Los Angeles in the mid-nineties. The story of a young angry drug-addicted killer can’t help but feel associated with the increased profile of Los Angeles’ gangland in the early-to-mid-nineties. Casting the episode’s young Jem’Hadar soldier using African American actors invites this comparison, something that director Avery Brooks himself has conceded.

The racial politics of The Abandoned are decidedly uncomfortable, but they are clearly meant to be. Still, there’s something rather cynical and pessimistic about the episode’s conclusion that this young boy cannot be saved from a life of brutality and violence.

A Jem?

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: deep space nine, Dominion, ds9, gangs, Jem'Hadar, los angeles, nineties, Odo, race, review, serialisation, Sisko, Television, the abandoned | 6 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Search, Part I (Review)

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Darren

The Search, Part I is interesting. It is an episode that, in effect, serves as something of a second pilot for the show. It’s an episode that re-conceptualises the show, while taking a great deal of trouble to ensure that any new viewers will be brought up to speed. In fact, The Search is a rather disjointed two-parter as a whole. The first part feels like a lot of set-up with a cliffhanger tacked on to the end of the episode, while the second part is very clearly its own story.

It makes sense. At this point, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the only Star Trek on television. It’s a period that doesn’t last, and which is really just a scheduling fluke. The show’s second season continued on past the airing of All Good Things…, the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The third season began broadcasting before the airing of Caretaker, the pilot of Star Trek: Voyager. Star Trek: Generations was released somewhere in the middle. So the stretch where Deep Space Nine was “the only Trek on television” feels largely illusory.

Still, The Search, Part I feels like a conscious attempt to welcome any wayward Star Trek fans. Including, appropriately enough, new staff writer Ronald D. Moore.

Staring into space…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: cloaking device, deep space nine, Dominion, ds9, gamma quadrant, Ira Steven Behr, Odo, rene auberjonois, review, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, ronald d. moore, shapeshifters, star trek: deep space nine, the defiant, the search, uss defiant, voyager | 4 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Collaborator (Review)

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Darren

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

It’s surprising how long we’ve had since a solid Bajoran episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Barring the dark reflection of Bajor as a power-broker (and brief allusion to a colony in the Gamma Quadrant) in Crossover, the last episode to really explore the planet’s political and religious structure was probably Sanctuary, which aired more than half a season earlier. After a reasonably high concentration of Bajoran political adventures in the first season and the first half of the second, it seems that further explorations will be more broadly spaced.

Indeed, the first season ended (and the second season began) with a five-episode run that was heavily anchored in the show’s Bajoran surroundings. However, as of late, it feels we’ve been strangely disengaged from the show’s stated objective of welcoming Bajor to the Federation. With episodes like The Maquis, it seems like the show is making a conscious effort to disentangle Cardassian politics from those of Bajor.

In a way, this probably represents Deep Space Nine growing into the form that it will take for the rest of its run. The second season has really been about Deep Space Nine figuring out what it wants to be, and what it doesn’t want to be. With The Collaborator‘s focus on Bajoran politics feeling conspicuous by the lack of other Bajor-centric episodes in this half of the season, it seems like Deep Space Nine doesn’t want to be a show about Bajor.

Enough rope to hang himself…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Bajor, Bajoran, Benjamin Sisko, Cardassian, Collaborator, deep space nine, Dukat, games, Ira Steven Behr, Kira Nerys, Odo, Opaka, Star Trek Games, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, star trek: the original series, Star Trek:Deep Space Nine, StarTrek, video games | 4 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Blood Oath (Review)

Posted on October 8, 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.

Blood Oath is a pretty fantastic piece of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and kicks the second season back into gear after a few mediocre (although not embarrassing) episodes. While it’s hardly the best episode of the year, and comes with its share of problems and baggage, it’s a tight and well-constructed piece of space opera. It’s a pulpy Klingon adventure, with the show’s best exploration to date of the existential problems of being Dax and a relatively simple (but potent) moral dilemma. It’s also just great fun.

Here’s Kor!

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Blood Oath, history, james t. kirk, kang, Klingon, Odo, Peter Allan Fields, Romulan, star trek, Star Trek Original Series, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, StarTrek, Wagon Train to the Stars, Wilson Tucker, Winrich Kolbe | 10 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Profit and Loss (Review)

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Darren

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

It seems we’ve reached the point where Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has figured out a base level of quality, an “average” zone that it can pitch to without too much effort or breaking a sweat. We’ve had three episodes in a row now that haven’t been brilliant, but have been far from terrible. Solid, watchable stuff. That might sound like damning with faint praise, but it took Star Trek: The Next Generation longer to find that base level of quality, while Star Trek: Voyager settled into a zone where that “average” was a lot lower.

Profit and Loss is unlikely to be anybody’s favourite episode, but it remains thoroughly unobjectionable. It features the cast playing their roles reasonably well, some hints at world-building and even a guest spot for Garak. Nobody will really remember Profit and Loss as a brilliant piece of television after completing a lengthy Deep Space Nine rewatch, but they also won’t curse its name. It’ll simply be an episode in the middle-to-end section of the second season that wasn’t too bad and wasn’t too great.

Love him and leave him…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Bajoran, Bashir, Benjamin Sisko, Cardassia, Cardassian, deep space nine, Earth, Elim Garak, Garak, Julian Bashir, Odo, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation | 9 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Shadowplay (Review)

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Darren

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

Shadowplay is a great example of the kinds of things that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is beginning to do very well. While the main plot works very well (so well, in fact that Star Trek: Enterprise would borrow it – and Rene Auberjones – for their first season episode Oasis), it’s remarkable how much of Shadowplay is given over to the two character-development subplots unfolding back on the station. Indeed, Dax and Odo have effectively solved the mystery of the missing villagers by about two-thirds of the way into the episode.

The character-development stuff in Shadowplay is interesting because the two subplots are not written with resolutions in mind. Indeed, they don’t even kick off the respective character arcs. Kira and Bariel have been waiting to become a couple since The Siege at the latest. The last episode, Paradise hinted that Jake might not be cut out to be a Starfleet officer.

In short, what is interesting about Shadowplay is the fact that it’s really just demonstrating that the show has reached the point where it is doing the things that it does relatively well. Deep Space Nine has found its groove, that point in a show’s history when it seems like it’s relatively easy to produce an hour of television of reasonable quality.

A holo crowd…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: deep space nine, Dominion, Game, Ira Steven Behr, Michael Ansara, Noley Thornton, Odo, Shadowplay, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, star trek: the original series, star trek: voyager, Star Trek:Deep Space Nine, StarTrek, Tempest | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Alternate (Review)

Posted on October 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 and second seasons. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

Well, at least the second season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is experimental. It might not always pay-off, but there’s a clear sense that the show is trying new things, bending various genres to make them fit within the broad outline of a Star Trek show. Necessary Evil was a fascinating attempt to construct a noir episode, while Rivals was a less-than-successful sit-com in space. The Alternate is very much doing “Star Trek as monster movie”, which is surprisingly fun.

To be fair, it’s not a subgenre new to the franchise. Indeed, the first episode of the original show to air, The Man Trap, was essentially a monster horror in space. Still, The Alternate feels a bit more sinister and dark than anything that Star Trek: The Next Generation might attempt. (Schisms probably comes closest, but – even then – there’s no sense that the monsters are stalking the starship. They have to abduct their victims to experiment on them.)

More than that, though, The Alternate is also a fascinating exploration of Odo as a character, looking at the relationship that Odo has with his co-workers and how that is rooted in his relationship with the man who claims to be his “father.”

Melting! Melting! Oh what a world!

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Alternate, Bajoran, Benjamin Sisko, Cardassian, deep space nine, Ferengi, Ira Steven Behr, Jake Sisko, Kira Nerys, Man Trap, MORA, Odo, Quark, Recreation, Sisko, spock, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, StarTrek | 1 Comment »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Second Sight (Review)

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Darren

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

You know, this the first real Sisko-heavy episode we’ve had since Emissary. He’s the lead, so he’s never too far from the heart of the story, and episodes like Dramatis Personae and Invasive Procedures gave Avery Brooks an opportunity to demonstrate his acting chops (and ability to be just as bad-ass, albeit in a different way, as Kirk and Picard). However, Sisko never really dominates or towers over Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the same way that Kirk and Picard seemed to anchor their shows. Deep Space Nine is closer to an ensemble show than any other Star Trek series, and characters like Odo and Kira (and even Quark) have received as much (if not more) definition than Sisko, despite the fact he is the lead.

That’s not a bad thing. Over the run of the series, Deep Space Nine would produce a number of classic hours of television centred around Sisko as a character. The Visitor, Far Beyond the Stars, and In the Pale Moonlight are all hours that lean heavily on Brooks and can all be counted among the very best episodes of Star Trek ever produced.

Second Sight, on the other hand, is not.