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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Whispers (Review)

Posted on October 3, 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 could make a credible argument that each of the first three Star Trek shows beautifully encapsulated their time and place. The original show was the very embodiment of the sixties zeitgeist, providing a channel for commentary and insight into counter-culture and the Vietnam War, and an outlet for various fixations and phobias. Star Trek: The Next Generation was a show that spoke to a version of America which was emerging from the Cold War, a clean and sterile morning for a new America.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was positioned somewhat strangely, as the idealism and enthusiasm of the early nineties gave way to paranoia and insecurity. If the hyperreal technicolour production values of the original Star Trek spoke to the energy and enthusiasm sixties, then the drab grey Orwellian design of Deep Space Nine was a reflection of the late nineties.

Whispers is really the first time that the show has pushed its sense of paranoia to the fore, and it confirms that Deep Space Nine will be a show of its time, anchored in the nineties.

It’s all a bit askew…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Cold War, cynicism, deep space nine, games, Lance Parkin, Next Generation, O'BRIEN, Philip K. Dick, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, StarTrek, Ted Kaczynski, x-files | 12 Comments »

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 – Rivals (Review)

Posted on September 30, 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.

Rivals doesn’t work. However, while the second season has produced a string of noble failures, Rivals fails for a very simple reason. It’s a comedy episode without any comedy. It’s a guest-star focused episode which centres on a hopelessly miscast Chris Sarandon. Sarandon is an Oscar-nominated actor, and he should be something of a casting coup for the show. This second season has already featured Louise Fletcher, Frank Langella and John Glover – so it seems fair to acknowledge that the casting people were on a bit of a roll.

However, due to a reheated script and Sarandon’s lack of interest or engagement, Rivals winds up feeling stale. There is potential here, but it’s squandered as the writers forget the first rule of a good comedy episode. They forgot to bring the laughs.

I feel a similar way…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: borg, Chris Sarandon, El-Aurian, frank langella, Harry Mudd, List of Star Trek races, Louise Fletcher, Michael Piller, Milky Way, Quark, star trek, Star Trek Generations, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation | 4 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Necessary Evil (Review)

Posted on September 27, 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.

Commence Station Security log. Stardate 47282.5. At the request of Commander Sisko, I will hereafter be recording a daily log of law enforcement affairs. The reason for this exercise is beyond my comprehension, except perhaps that humans have a compulsion to keep records and lists and files. So many, in fact, that they have to invent new ways to store them microscopically, otherwise their records would overrun all known civilisation. My own very adequate memory not being good enough for Starfleet, I am pleased to put my voice to this official record of this day. Everything’s under control. End log.

Necessary Evil continues to deliver on the promise of “things you can’t do anywhere but Star Trek: Deep Space Nine“ that Michael Piller made at the start of the show’s second season. It’s a genuinely ambitious piece of Star Trek, all the stronger for the fact that it’s idea that could go horribly and spectacularly wrong. Movies like Blade Runner demonstrated that it is possible to blend the aesthetics of science-fiction and film noir, but it seems like a mix that would sit rather uncomfortably in the bright utopian future of Star Trek.

However, Deep Space Nine was never afraid to experiment with its format. This wasn’t always successful, but it did give the show a unique flavour. And when it did work, as it does here, it offered something new and exciting to the franchise’s playbook.

Time for a Changeling…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Bajoran, Benjamin Sisko, Cardassian, deep space nine, games, Ira Steven Behr, Kira, Kira Nerys, Odo, Peter Allan Fields, Quark, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, Starfleet, StarTrek | 6 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Rules of Acquisition (Review)

Posted on September 26, 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.

The Nagus was a surprising high-point of the first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It represented a conscious effort to rehabilitate and reappraise the Ferengi, the aliens introduced as potentially major adversaries in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, only to wind up as mostly unfunny comic relief. The Nagus dared to suggest that the Ferengi might not be the monsters the Federation considers them to be, suggesting that their culture – while different – was no less worthy of respect or consideration than that of the Klingons.

Rules of Acquisition is a clear follow-up, right down to the way that it includes Grand Nagus Zek. However, it’s nowhere near as charming and successful as The Nagus, because it feels like it’s just treading water. It teases potential developments down the line, but the story seems locked in a familiar holding pattern – right down to the rather convenient ending that inevitably sees Quark snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

It’s not quite a bad episode, certainly not on the scale of the colossal misfire that was Melora, but it’s also not a particularly good one.

Nothing to see here…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Dax, deep space nine, Dominion, Ferengi, Galactic quadrant (Star Trek), games, Ira Steven Behr, Jadzia Dax, Julian Bashir, Klingon, Nagus, Quark, Rom, Rules of Acquisition, Saudi Arabia, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, StarTrek | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack (Review)

Posted on September 25, 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.

More than any of the other Star Trek spin-offs, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine lends itself to narratives running in parallel to the main plot. Part of this is due to the conscious world-building the show engaged in, creating an expansive supporting cast populated by citizens of countless different worlds that were developed into more than just “planets of the week.”

There’s also the rather epic scale of events depicted in the show, with only The Best of Both Worlds offering a glimpse of events on a scale similar to those of Deep Space Nine. The show’s setting helps as well; even with the Defiant and occasional trips to other worlds, most of the show was focused on life on the station, suggesting a maelstrom of activity in the wider universe.

The Never-Ending Sacrifice takes advantage of these factors to offer a compelling narrative running in parallel to the events of Deep Space Nine, spanning from Cardassians through to the Pocket Books relaunch. It’s a rich and expansive tale which feels like a genuine epic, taking the opportunity to glimpse events of the season through a set of alien eyes.

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: A Stitch in Time, best of both worlds, Cardassian, deep space nine, Diane Duane, John M. Ford, ronald d. moore, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, StarTrek, Way of the Warrior | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Lives of Dax: Reflections (Jadzia) by L.A. Graf

Posted on September 23, 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.

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

The Trill are an absolutely fascinating species, arguably much more so on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine than they were on Star Trek: The Next Generation. They were introduced in The Host as a race that was relatively straightforward – a bunch of symbionts living inside humanoid bodies. There was no indication that the host was anything but a blank slate for the organism inside to overwrite and control.

On Deep Space Nine, they became much more complex. The show’s first Trill-centric episode, Dax, pondered if it was possible to divorce the actions of the host from those of the symbiont, or vice versa. Though the episode in question wimped on giving a definitive answer one way or the other, the implication is that each Trill is a fusion of host and symbiont, rather than one dominating the other. Because of that, it seemed like the show always had trouble defining Jadzia (the character on the show) relative to Dax (the sum of lifetimes of experience).

As such, it’s hard not to pity veteran writers Julia Ecklar and Karen Rose Cercone (writing as “L.A. Graf”) for drawing the short straw and winding up writing the story from the anthology The Lives of Dax focusing on Jadzia.

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Benjamin Sisko, Dax, deep space nine, Jadzia, Jadzia Dax, Julian Bashir, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, StarTrek, Trill | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Progress (Review)

Posted on September 14, 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.

Progress is the best episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s first season to date. Of course, there are better episodes ahead – two of them clustered at the end of the show’s truncated first year – but Progress still represents a considerable improvement over anything that has come before. It isn’t quite perfect, but it does have a nice character focus and takes advantage of the show’s unique perspective and position. It’s evidence that the writing staff were at least engaging with the show’s status quo and trying to work with it to tell interesting stories, with Progress offering an early pure example of what Deep Space Nine story should probably look like.

While the first season has been quite bumpy (although notably less bumpy than any of the opening seasons of the other three Star Trek spin-offs), Progress offers a demonstration that we are getting somewhere. The title might apply as much to the status of the show itself as to the themes of the episode.

Burning down the house…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Bajor, Bajoran, Benjamin Sisko, Cardassian, Dax, deep space nine, feminism, Jadzia Dax, Julia Gillard, Kira, Kira Nerys, London, Misogyny, Quark, sexism, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, StarTrek, Weyoun | Leave a comment »

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

Posted on September 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 season. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

The Storyteller should not work half as well as it does. While some episodes this season (notably The Passenger and Battle Lines) feel like they were simply lifted directly from the “reject” pile within the writers’ room on Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Storyteller is actually a rejected pitch from that show’s first season. Written by Kurt Michael Bensmiller, the writer responsible for Time Squared, one of the stronger installments of the show’s first two years, it was also written late in 1992, about a month before Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would actually air.

And yet, despite that, The Storyteller really feels like a show that wouldn’t work on any of the other Star Trek spin-offs. A lot of that seems to be down to the work by Ira Steven Behr to polish up Bensmillers’ draft and to add a lot of character work and development to what is a decidedly high concept. As producer Michael Piller confessed in Captains’ Logs Supplemental – The Unauthorized Guide to the New Trek Voyages, “Ira did a lot of work on that script.”

O’Brien’s mind is a bit clouded right now…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Bajoran, Colm, deep space nine, england, Gina Philips, Ira Steven Behr, Julian Bashir, Michael Okuda, Michael Piller, Miles O'Brien (Star Trek), O'BRIEN, Rick Berman, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, star trek: the original series, StarTrek, Storyteller, vulcan, Worf | 4 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Battle Lines (Review)

Posted on September 12, 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.

Battle Lines is, quite frankly, not a very good piece of television. Like a few of the episodes scattered throughout the first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it feels like it was pulled from a list of rejected scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Ironically, it feels more like a reheated left-over than the next episode, The Storyteller, which was actually a recycled script from the first season of The Next Generation. Were it not for the involvement of Kai Opaka and a few hints about Bajoran spirituality, Battle Lines would feel almost as generic as The Passenger.

The concept is fascinating, and it represents another long-term shift in Deep Space Nine, but the script from Hilary J. Bader feels too functional and broad to do the episode justice. Instead, it feels fairly bland, which is a bit disappointing for an episode where Sisko accidentally gets the pope caught up in the universe’s most deadly game of laser tag.