Before I do say it, though, I want to present a brief disclaimer about what I'm actually trying to do in writing this post. The point of this post is not to tell you whether Deep Space Nine is good or bad, to give it a numerical rating, or to tell you if you should watch it or not. I really don't care whether you watch it. I like it and think it's good, but you don't have to. I also, more to the point, find it interesting; and I would hope that, even if you're someone who hates Deep Space Nine with every fiber of your being, you might find some if the ideas I talk about in this post, and some of the stories I tell, at least mildly interesting or entertaining. Maybe.
Closely related to the above, I freely admit that someone might say that, in analyzing Deep Space Nine, I am finding more in it, at times, than is actually there, or analyzing ideas that are interesting in themselves, but were not actually well or clearly executed in the show itself. I will freely admit to that, and in fact on some level that's the whole point of what I'm trying to do. This is not a review blog; it is also not a behind-the-scenes essay or a technical analysis. I am quite consciously aiming to talk about more than was actually consciously realized by its creators as they created it. I see this, not as a flaw, but as the basic point of the kind of critical intellectual analysis I'm interested in. Generally speaking, I would always rather hear from someone who liked a work of art why they liked it and what they saw in it than I would hear from a professional critic why something is objectively bad. The former is bound to include some insights into reality, personality, and the human condition; the latter, though, can get by just fine without including any truth at all.
If you want to know what the creators of Deep Space Nine were thinking when they created it, I highly advise you to pick up the excellent and thorough Deep Space Nine Companion, from which many of the quotes and anecdotes in this essay are taken; or peruse at your leisure any of the hundreds of hours of interviews, etc, given at various times by the cast, crew, and writers of the show on every topic under the sun. I include some narrative here about the creation and development of the show, but it is by design sketchy and mythological, featuring I am sure many factual inaccuracies, and focused on the logical progression of ideas, not the actual historical timeline of conscious notions and decisions in the minds of the people involved in creating the show. Ideas, though, have a life and a logic of their own, as do television shows and, indeed, any work of art. Writers write, and painters paint, the world--and so the truth of the world, with all its connections and its teleologies and its thousand-and-one converging perspectives, cannot help but enter into it. My goal is to talk about some of that truth and some of those connections. It is also, hopefully, to be entertaining to read, particularly inasmuch as this is not, in fact, high art criticism but rather a post written over a week or so by a random graduate student and posted on a random blog for no particular reason but personal enjoyment.
It is the purpose of this essay, then, to tell some fun stories, talk about some fun things, and along the way to say some things about this particular television show, and the ideas implicit in it, that might surprise even its creators. So let's begin:
Spinoffs and Siblings
The year was 1991, and Star Trek the Next Generation was one of the biggest hits in the history of television. Even despite the almost total absence of other science fiction on television, even despite being produced for first-run syndication rather than network television, and even after getting off to one of the rockiest starts in the history of television, TNG had managed to overcome both its lagging ratings and its lackluster creative direction to become not just a success, but the show of a generation. By the end of its third season, TNG had more than made up for the sins of its early years: it had actively overtaken TOS as the preeminent focus of Star Trek fandom and a quasi-religious phenomenon of its own. Coming on the heels of this mini-revoluton, TNG's fourth season reached new heights on all fronts: and by 1991, TNG was getting underway on its fifth season, with no end in sight and no obvious limits to its potential future success.
It was at this point, though, that a new, tantalizing, if risky, possibility began to emerge in the minds of Paramount executives and TNG's creatives alike. TNG, it was agreed, would most likely run for at least a few more years, continuing to rake in cash and accolades from all corners. Even then, when the show was finally taken off the air, there would almost certainly be movies, big-screen films like those made by the original cast of Star Trek TOS, whose last film, the Undiscovered Country, was being released that very year. Taken together, Star Trek in all its incarnations was now the jewel in the Paramount crown, the major surefire source of success and (more importantly) profit for the studio, its executives, and its investors. And just as they had done after the unprecedented success of Star Trek IV years before, and just like a certain fictional orphan boy struggling with industrial labor and malnutrition, all these people began to wonder...what if there were more?
This was, in many ways, good sense. It had been quite a risky move to create TNG while the TOS films were still running: but it had more than payed off. American audiences, clearly, had an appetite hungry for Star Trek, and a palate discerning enough to consume different forms of it at the same time. Go see The Undiscovered Country in theaters...and then go home to watch the latest episode of The Next Generation. Star Trek, it seemed, could safely double up without sacrificing anything. So why not try it again?
Thus was born the idea of creating a Star Trek the Next Generation spinoff. Note: not another Star Trek show, but a spinoff, specifically, of Star Trek the Next Generation. For the purposes of television, TOS and the TOS movies were now effectively irrelevant. TNG had been a sequel to a show that, by the time its progeny came into the world, had been off the air for almost twenty years. That had been a risky move: dropping a new baby screaming into a television ecosystem almost totally unused to televised science-fiction, let alone Star Trek. This new show, however, would be very different: a younger sibling, taking a trail already beaten by its successful older brother, moving into a city and a neighborhood where that older brother was king, and so able to rely, to a large degree, on his notoriety for its own success.
Still: TNG would run concurrently with this new show for at least several years. Meaning, well...just as the younger sibling would be able to rely on the protection of its older brother, so too would it have to cope, day in and day out, with the direct, inescapable comparison with that other sibling and his success. If you have any familiarity with sibling dynamics, you might have an idea what this could mean: insecurity, mockery, lack of attention, lack of respect. All this was, in its own way, still quite risky.
This was the task set to the creatives of TNG by the head of Paramount Pictures, Brandon Tartikoff, when he approached them in 1991: give me a baby brother to the most popular show on television. It was a goal that might give anyone pause.
Rick Berman and Michael Piller
Michael Piller, on the other hand, was to a very large degree the reason that TNG starting in its third season began to seem almost a different show entirely from its harsh, utopian beginnings. The main creative driver behind TNG's most successful years, Piller ran the writer's room with a steady hand and a clear, overriding mandate: focus on the characters. In the process, he had acted as mentor and guide for a whole stable of up-and-coming writers, and initiated an open script-submission policy that had already started the careers of several future science fiction luminaries. Thanks in large part to Piller's creative guidance, TNG had moved from being a show about unrecognizable inhuman weirdos living in utopia to a show about warm, very human heroes, and also coincidentally from being a derided mess to a critical and ratings success.
Still, what both men had recently succeeded in doing was very much not creating TNG from the ground up as the successful show they wanted to make, but rather the much more difficult and painful task of taking a failed show made by a desperate, out-of-control egotistical ideologue (Gene Roddenberry) and turning it into something watcheable, regularly good, and occasionally great. That they succeeded at this task is testament to both their skill and dedication.
Now, though, they were being given a very different task entirely: oversee, from blank page to screen, from the creative position of strength granted by having overseen the most popular show on television, a brand-new, the-same-but-different spinoff to that show.
This was in many obvious ways an infinitely easier task than saving TNG--and in others a much, much more difficult one. On the one hand, Gene Roddenberry was now dead, and Berman and Piller were now, for the first time, well and truly in charge of the Star Trek franchise, with carte blanche authority from the studio to do whatever they wanted with this new show. On the other hand...well, as Gene Roddenberry himself had proven time and time again, the task of trying to follow up on one's own wildly popular creation presented rather enormous pitfalls of its own. Twice, Roddenberry had been offered carte blanche authority to revive Star Trek, and both times enormous numbers of dollars and egos had been shredded over years and years to ultimately create two of the most stultifying works of science fiction ever seen, each with little or nothing to do with their predecessors: Star Trek TMP, and Star Trek The Next Generation Seasons 1-2. Berman and Piller might well see themselves as having taken Roddenberry's work, and drastically improved upon it: but would they prove any more successful at laying their own foundations?
This was an especially keen challenge because, like Roddenberry in the '70s, Berman and Piller found themselves in a very odd moment in popular culture in general, and science fiction in particular. Roddenberry and the studio alike had struggled mightily in both the early '70s and the mid-'80s with the basic reality that there really was no contemporary framework for successful science fiction on television and in big-screen cinema besides...well, Star Trek TOS itself. But what did big-screen Star Trek, new and improved after almost a decade, look like? What did televised Star Trek, but new and improved after nearly two decades, look like? In both cases, the stark necessity of self-imitation and the comforting support of familiarity struggled with the desire to push beyond, to do something bigger, better, more modern, more mature: something that would justify their own cheek in making a brand-new contemporary work of popular entertainment to continue a dead mega-hit from the '60s.
The task set for Berman and Piller was not precisely the same: in some ways it was even harder. When TNG had come on the air, televised science fiction had been all but extinct: and then TNG had succeeded wildly beyond anyone's expectations, and proven that televised science fiction really could go where no one had gone before, really could be mainstream and accepted and even dominant. In a sense, TNG had done for televised science fiction what the double success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had done for film science fiction in the late '70s. Star Trek TMP had come out immediately in the aftermath of those two films, able to confidently predict success while relying on its near-decade of development and much older roots to set it apart from its rivals. Deep Space Nine (as it would eventually be known), would have to find its way to success while TNG was still on the air, still dominating the airwaves night after night. In the process, it would also have to struggle to survive as one of a new generation of televised science-fiction shows, shows created with TNG's success in mind and poised to exploit that success to the full with their own imitations and differences.
Of course, hopefully you all know which show I'm primarily thinking of here: yes, indeed, no discussion of DS9 would be complete without at least a passing nod to its great rival in the '90s Sci-Fi Wars, the other show about a space station with a number in its name: Babylon 5.
Now, I fully recognize that by even mentioning Babylon 5 here, I am potentially subjecting myself to ruthless attack by the many fans of both franchises who, throughout their original runs and since, have compared and contrasted their respective qualities and debated their connections and origins. To summarize this Great Debate or comment on it, after all these years, is a perilous task, but I think I'm safe to say that at the heart of this Debate, for many fans of both shows, stood one central, highly relevant, question: Did Deep Space Nine plagiarize Babylon 5?
To which the incredibly obvious answer to anyone with the most basic knowledge of the development of either show is: of course not, they both just plagiarized Star Trek The Next Generation.
For the uninitiated, the origin of the charge is that John Michael Straczynski definitely came up with the basic idea for his show long before Deep Space Nine was a twinkle in an executive's eye, and also shopped it around to various studios before it was finally picked up around the same time as Deep Space Nine came on the air--including Paramount, the home of Star Trek the Next Generation and the eventual home of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Based on that, it becomes theoretically possible to argue, as John Michael Straczynsci at certain points did, that some person involved with the creation of Deep Space Nine at some point was influenced by that information and used it in the creation of their own show.
That being said, it's a fairly ludicrous idea in large part because Paramount Studios exercised very little creative control over Deep Space Nine's development, and the people who did have that control, Berman and Piller, were very scrupulous creative professionals who have also given on many, many occasions very clear genealogies of the show's development in which thanks and acknowledgments are offered to all kinds of people only very peripherally involved in coming up with or influencing ideas.
The whole thing, though, is in my opinion mostly a rather massive distraction from the very obvious reasons, reasons easily graspable by anyone based on no behind-the-scenes knowledge whatsoever, of why it is that Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine do share most of the similarities they share.
The comparison between the two shows is, however, in my judgment quite instructive in what it tells us about the world of science fiction television in the early '90s, and the creative pressures and creative mandate set by the success of TNG. Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 are some of the best examples of the parallel evolution of creative processes that I know of, with very different basic ideas behind them, but nevertheless forced into outwardly similar shapes by external forces common to both.
Those forces are, in short, the necessity of any television show running against TNG to both parley the success of TNG by imitating it, while also setting itself apart from TNG in immediately obvious ways.
The very first similarity that imposed in both cases was the basic format of the show. Babylon 5, despite the occasional exaggerated claims of its fans, is not particularly original or wildly creative in this area. Its format is the format of Star Trek TOS and Star Trek The Next Generation: a mostly human cast, uniformed officers in a military force ("Starfleet" vs "Earthforce") several centuries in the future, who together function as the crew of an outer space vehicle, including the commander of that vehicle as the main protagonist, a no-nonsense first officer, a compassionate chief medical officer, and a macho security chief, along with a smattering of alien characters representing stereotyped cultures with complex backstory; with the outer space vehicle in question represented on the screen by a series of cost-saving studio sets, centering on a main 'bridge' set where our heroes can watch and respond to outside events, a sitting room for the main captain character where he can hold more intimate conferences, a medical bay, and so on; a mix of stand-alone episodes about individual characters encountering strange alien creatures or dealing with personal or political crises, and larger arcs involving bigger changes to all of the above; et cetera, et cetera. On all of these basic points (and many more specific points which it would be tedious to list), Babylon 5 is entirely unthinkable without the previous success of Star Trek TOS and Star Trek The Next Generation.
None of this is intended as a criticism of Babylon 5: the show did indeed do a number of highly creative and innovative things with this essentially borrowed format. Still, the fact remains that most of the basic things that Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 have in common were simply dictated by the reality that TNG, as the only popular science fiction show on television, had set the format for what a popular science fiction show on television looked like. The obvious, smart choice, for people trying to create a new science fiction show while TNG was still on the air, was to take that basic format, work within it, build on it, and (eventually) innovate on it, as both Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine were to do over the years of their respective runs, in ways both similar and different.
The same principal extends to the basic setting of the show as well. A show featuring outer-space heroes serving as the crew of a starship and going out to have adventures in the great beyond, while a proven formula from TNG, would have a hard time competing with a concurrently-running (and vastly more popular) TNG. "The voyages of the USS Babylon," while attractive on its own, would not look nearly as attractive to viewers fresh from watching the adventures of the USS Enterprise. Hence the obvious solution: make your cast the crew, not of a space ship, but rather of a space station.
Actually, as we shall see, Deep Space Nine initially aimed to take another, rather riskier, approach to situating its crew and their adventures--but in the end, television and budgetary realities, and the overwhelming gravitational pull of the TNG format, had their say. A space station was, without a doubt, the easiest way to do the TNG formula, with its cheap standing sets, its cast of uniformed officers, its external effects shots of alien craft appearing and weapons firing, while at the same time not looking completely like a knockoff of TNG and its spaceship exploring the unknown.
This, though, came with its own set of difficulties, the most obvious of which was the fact that the Enterprise moved. That is to say, central to the format of TNG, along with all the preceding characteristics, was the basic fact that its succession of different stories were, time and time again, set in motion by the Starship Enterprise lighting up its fantastical Faster-Than-Light Warp Drive and jumping to a new star system or space ship or debris field full of new, interesting people with new, interesting problems. A space station, though, could never do that--just sit there, in the same place, next to the same planet, forever and ever and ever.
This was by far the biggest break with the TNG format made by both of TNG's '90s imitators, and it's very clear how nervous it made the writing staffs of both shows. The theoretical answer to this problem, though, was in both cases fairly straightforward: if the station itself wasn't going to go to new interesting people (the mountain does not go to Mohammed), new interesting people would have to come to it. There would have to be a reason, though, why said new, interesting people might be plausibly expected to come to the station on a regular basis: something important, something different about the place.
The two shows handled this requirement in rather different ways that are quite telling about their respective emphases, Babylon 5 took the quite bold step (particularly in comparison with TNG) of giving the station an essential political and diplomatic importance, as the center of an interstellar governing council consisting not just of representatives from all the major powers of the Galaxy, but also a larger, diffuse alliance of non-aligned worlds. Ambassadors from alien races would be present on the main cast and could easily rotate in for guest spots, and the station's strategic location within easy reach of many worlds would make it a natural haven for travelers, merchants, and refugees coming and going in all directions. How Deep Space Nine handled that requirement will be duly dealt with in greater detail, but the quickest summary would be to say that the creators of the new show rapidly plunked their remote unmoving station next to a newly-discovered wormhole leading to a vast, brand new, unexplored and unknown quadrant of space. Hey presto, a reason for interesting new folks to come visit!
Of course, both shows also dealt with the problem posed by their cast's limited mobility by eventually, after a few years and (more importantly) once The Next Generation was safely off the air, giving their cast a starship to play with after all. Which, you know, is fair. Come on, space is big, sometimes you just wanna go somewhere else.
There are many other things I could say about these two shows and their extremely different natures and perspectives, but, you know, this blog post is not actually supposed to be a point-by-point comparison of Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5. Before I go on, though, I'll just say that the simplest way to make clear how different the two shows actually are, at heart, despite their surface parallel-development similarities, is to take the titles of the two shows and compare them.
The title Babylon 5 compares the station to the greatest city of the greatest Empire of Ancient Mesopotamia: and throughout the show (spoilers), Babylon 5 is shown to be without a doubt the most important place in the galaxy, first a center of interstellar diplomacy and "our last, best hope for peace," then independent center and leader of a new interstellar war alliance absolutely crucial to saving the whole galaxy from destruction, and then center of a new interstellar state that, as we are explicitly shown, will last a million years.
The title Deep Space Nine, though, conveys something rather different. Not importance, not centrality, but its opposite: marginality, distance, even desolation. This would prove accurate in more ways than one.
Refugees and Terrorists of the Bajora
Let's take a moment, though, to step back from the external pressures brought to bear by Deep Space Nine's older brother and cousin-rival-archnemesis to talk about the original creative spark for the show's positive content, one that initially led it in quite a different direction from what would ultimately end up onscreen.
Interestingly, the initial idea for Deep Space Nine, as much as can be made out, was not of a show set on a space station, but rather a show set in...well, a refugee camp.
Yes, for the very initial stages of its development, Rick Berman and Michael Piller desperately wanted to ground their new Star Trek spinoff entirely, making it quite literally earthbound, set on a planetary surface, an outdoor location and indoor sets together portraying a humanitarian mission to victims of war and migration.
Where did this idea come from? Well, for that answer, we have to look, again, to TNG--though this time to a very particular episode whose importance for what would eventually become Deep Space Nine cannot be overstated: Ensign Ro, from TNG's successful fifth season and initially intended to introduce, not a new spinoff, but a new recurring character, the titular Ensign Ro Laren.
What the show also introduced, though, as part of this introduction was a new race of Star Trek aliens, the Bajora, a people of wrinkled noses and tragic backstories. This new species emerged from the understandable boredom and frustration of Michael Piller and Rick Berman with their main cast of harmonious boyscouts created years ago by Gene Roddenberry in a drunken ideological stupor.
These were nice folks, very nice folks in fact, but for the people tasked with coming up with 20-something stories about them every year, there was ultimately no denying that, well, they weren't particularly dramatic. But what if, what if, our redoubtable showrunners wondered, they introduced a new character who was dramatic? What if this new character had (brief pause, intake of breath)...a tragic backstory, perhaps one involving (pause, steeling themselves to make the leap) personal tragedy and maybe even political repression, all of which would make her at times (hyper-ventilation, uncontrollable shaking) less than pleasant and even (screams of excitement) prone to interpersonal conflict with her fellow crewmembers?
For those who've forgotten, one of Gene Roddenberry's unbreakable dictums for TNG way back in the beginning had been that the human crew of the Enterprise, as the finest specimens of a perfect society, could not display interpersonal conflict amongst themselves--a dictum that Berman and Piller had certainly bent quite a bit by this point, but not actually broken. A new character, though, who was not human, who had not had the benefit of growing up in that perfect, peaceful utopian society, might, perhaps, be able to elicit conflict with her shipmates, and thus spark more dramatic and personable storylines. In any event, Gene Roddenberry was dying.
Thus was born Ensign Ro Laren, she of the tragic backstory, duly introduced as a recurring character along with her new alien race, the Bajora, at the beginning of TNG Season 5. Largely designed for the sake of giving Ro an appropriately tragic backstory as divorced from utopian perfection as possible, her species, the Bajora, proved surprisingly interesting in their own right. Created clearly as a somewhat self-conscious blend of the Roma, the Palestinians, European Jews during WW2, and whatever other repressed people group you can think of, the Bajorans, it was established, had been driven off their homeworld by the alien Cardassians, a recent addition to the pantheon of Star Trek villains with few established characteristics besides intelligence and a vaguely reptilian appearance. As the result of this unprovoked invasion, the Bajora, an ancient, peaceful civilization that had created great works of art and culture "when humans were not yet standing erect," had been forced to become refugees, scattered across the quadrant in makeshift camps like the one Ensign Ro herself had grown up in, persecuted and hated by the other species of the Galaxy, and frequently turning to terrorism in their quest to finally drive the Cardassians from their homeland.
This was, really, all fairly straightforward in original conception--but it also, undeniably, involved a straying into territory that Star Trek had rarely, if ever, dealt with before. Not only war, but conquest; not only conquest, but the plight of refugees; not only the plight of refugees, but the moral quandary of terrorists and freedom fighters striking back at perceived oppressors. All of this definitely provided Ensign Ro with the tragic backstory and moral ambiguity that her creators had hoped for--but it also made them wonder: what else could be done with the Bajora? There was, clearly, a lot of potential story to be mined in their pitiable plight, as well as their struggle to reclaim their homeland.
Thus, when Rick Berman and Michael Piller were approached by the studio with the possibility of creating a new spinoff show based on the The Next Generation, the first idea that came to mind was about as wildly off-format as it was possible to be. What about a show set on the planet Bajor, in a refugee camp like those shown in the episode Ensign Ro? In this refugee camp and Starfleet starbase (a beautiful, scenic location, perhaps in the mountains?), a team of Starfleet officers would struggle to deal with the plight of the Bajoran people, their radically different culture, their tragic backstory, and their collective bad attitudes. The story possibilities were literally endless!
It was a bold concept--perhaps too bold. Quite quickly, the television realities spoken of above asserted themselves like a dash of cold water to the face. A refugee camp in the mountains would mean regular location shooting, which would mean significant, regular expense, very much unlike the cheap indoor sets, available day or night for 15-hour days, used by TNG. It would also mean a Star Trek show not set in space, without regular optical shots of spaceships, without exploration of the unknown. It would be, in other words, very far from the successful format for televized sci-fi established by TNG. For all the reasons spoken off above, this did not seem to anyone like a very good idea.
Thus, Berman and Piller took their original idea, and began reshaping it in response to these external and creative pressures. Instead of a refugee camp on Bajor, the show would be set on a space station next to Bajor. This meant a return to indoor sets, a return to space opticals, and a mostly regular cast of Star Trek stalwarts: a commander, a first officer, a doctor, a science officer, a security officer, and so on.
This still didn't really allow exploration of the unknown, though; and after all, as interesting as Bajor and its politics might be, it was quite likely not all of the Trekkies and sundry sci-fi nerds to tune in would find that tragic backstory and those politics as interesting as Berman and Piller. They would be expecting Star Trek: new alien races, new alien worlds, the final frontier.
Thus was created the Bajoran wormhole. This station was not just to be situated next to Bajor, with its tragic backstory and bad attitude: it would also be situated right next to a magical passage directly into the heart of the unexplored unknown, the final frontier, where no man has gone before, new life and new civilizations, etc, etc, etc. New alien species could arrive through the wormhole at any moment! Our heroes could take trips through the wormhole to meet visit new alien planets! New, interesting people would be passing through the station all the time on their way to and from the frontier! Maybe Q could come visit!
This was all, clearly, a compromise, an attempt to incorporate as much TNG format as possible into a radically different concept. It was not, though, a bad idea. Above all, it offered that most pressing of virtues for a television show tasked with presenting twenty-something hours of first-run television every season: flexibility. Different kinds of shows, different ideas, different stories could be made to work in this setting, given enough ingenuity.
According to Michael Piller, to reassure himself about the show's chances, he personally went through a large number of The Next Generation episodes and tried to find out which ones could have been successfully adapted to occur on Deep Space Nine instead. As it turns out, all of them could have been. He breathed a sigh of relief.
Still, if pretty much any story could be made to work on Deep Space Nine, there was no guarantee that these would be the stories that would most naturally emerge, would most naturally gel with Deep Space Nine's cast and characters and stationary space station and planet of tragic victims. That, though, would depend primarily, not on setting, but on execution.
What the hell was this show gonna be about?
"Darker and Grittier"
More to the immediate point, perhaps: what was gonna set this show apart from TNG? If it was reassuring to be able to imitate its older brother, it was also a potential cause of concern if the show seemed to add nothing to the universe, if it seemed merely derivative, a pale, lesser spin-off of its successful, concurrently-running spinner-offer.
Thus was established a basic dialectic which carried through the whole development of DS9 and beyond. Everything--the uniforms, the sets, the characters, the setting, the actors, the communicators, the bridge, the sickbay, the computer panels, the backstory, the alien politics, the corridors, everything--had to be the same, but different (this phrase would make for a very effective drinking game through the rest of this essay, though play at your own risk). Or rather, it had to be different--but the same. It had be similar enough to be recognizable, understandable, appealing, to all the many people coming straight from watching another comforting episode of their favorite outer-space sci-fi show Star Trek The Next Generation--but also different enough that there would never, for a single moment, be any doubt in anyone's minds about which show they were watching, never any doubt about its distinctiveness, its clear and separate identity, its added value, never any sense that what they were getting was a ripoff or knockoff or repetition, never (in short) any doubt that they were not just watching another comforting episode of their favorite outer-space sci-fi show Star Trek The Next Generation.
These differences as they emerged out of the work of numerous designers, prop masters, set builders, makeup artists, and writers over the course of months of sustained effort, overseen by Berman and Piller, can be most easily summed up in three words: darker, grittier, and more alien.
To take the last first, perhaps the most important decision that Berman and Piller made in developing the show was that it would involve developed, but wholly alien characters and cultures to a degree never before seen in Star Trek. On the one hand, and perhaps most immediately, the titular space station on which the show was set would itself be an alien creation, the work of the wicked (albeit so far barely developed) Cardassians who had once occupied Bajor. Deep Space Nine, and therefore every major standing set for the series, including the aforesaid bridge, sickbay, etc, would be built, not as creations of a futuristic human culture, but rather as the work of a totally alien, villainous society of conquerors. The USS Enterprise was a gentle, comforting environment of warm fabrics and padded seating and carpeted walls: Deep Space Nine would be anything but that. Every room, every corridor, every pad and console, would be harsh, angular, violent, spare, cruel, Spartan--alien to the sensibilities of humans then and now. Built into these environments, then, would be a radically foreign mindset to that evinced by the utopian Federation, and a radically different design aesthetic. The human Starfleet characters would not feel at home in this environment, as everyone felt at home on the Enterprise; they would find themselves, instead, living in an uncomfortable, alien place.
Even more important than this, though, was the decision to include far more aliens, with alien identities and loyalties, in the main cast itself. It would not just be a crew of Starfleet officers, bound together by oaths of loyalty and a common culture. In the end, of the main cast of eight, four would be non-humans, with three of them non-members of the Federation.
This was in a sense Deep Space Nine's most radical break with Star Trek tradition. Star Trek TOS had had Spock, a half-human, half-alien Starfleet officer; Star Trek TNG had had Troi, a half-human, half-alien Starfleet officer, and Worf, an alien Starfleet officer raised by humans. The alien nature of these characters had added interest, but not really threatened the unity or cohesion of the group, dedicated as one to the ideals and structure of Starfleet and the Federation.
On Deep Space Nine, though, this would not be the case. The first officer would be Kira Nerys, a Bajoran officer and former terrorist, whose loyalties were to her world, and who would initially have nothing but disdain for the Federation. The security officer would be Odo, a shapeshifting Changeling with no loyalty to anyone or anything save justice, and a former employee of the Cardassian Empire. And last, but certainly not least, the station would feature Quark, a civilian, a Ferengi capitalist barkeep and petty criminal with a great deal of dislike for the Federation and a radically incompatible set of moral values. These would all be, not one-off guest characters, but main cast, present week in and week out and with their own regular episodes centered around their feelings and desires and perspectives.
From this alienness, from this clash of perspectives and cultures, this sense of unfamiliarity and discomfort, the "darker and grittier" aspects of the show began to emerge.
The basic idea of a darker and grittier spinoff or sequel has become such a cliche by now that it's actually interesting to see how this, one of the earliest and most successful examples in that late-and-little-lamented subgenre, came about. To the credit of Berman and Piller and the numerous other people involved with Deep Space Nine's development, the show really does look different from its predecessor--darker and (yes) grittier while also truly beautiful to look at, full not just of darkness but of bright, intense colors and strange, striking shapes--and really does feel different from its predecessor--with more complexity and conflict emerging naturally from the setting and characters, with their alien perspectives and characteristics, rather than imposed haphazardly from without.
Deep Space Nine, though, when it first emerged on television in January 1993, really was an odd sight to behold for viewers used to the comforting familiarity and derring-do of Star Trek The Next Generation.
The DS9 pilot episode, Emissary, is practically constructed to take every opportunity to set itself apart from its predecessor. Right away, we are presented, not with a Captain, but a Commander, Benjamin Sisko, not only the franchise's first African-American protagonist, but also a widower with a tragic backstory and a teenage son who in the first hour threatens to resign from Starfleet to avoid having to command Deep Space Nine and serve as our protagonist. Oh, and he also really, really hates Captain Picard.
In place of the state-of-the-art carpeted battleship/luxury-liner Enterprise, the space station Deep Space Nine is presented not only as the quite stationary work of alien fascists, but also a total wreck, with all of its regular sets covered with dirt and wreckage from rioting and scorched-earth tactics, and most of its high-tech systems barely working. It is also comically weak in combat, with six available photon torpedoes and no shields, unable to face even a single Cardassian warship.
Still, most of the pilot episode's running time is taken up, logically, with introductions of our regular characters, who are introduced as much as possible (the writers exulting in their newfound freedom) by immediately setting them in conflict with one another. Kira is angry at Sisko because she doesn't want the Federation on Bajor; Odo hates Quark; Quark is forced to bargain with Sisko to get his nephew out of prison; Bashir gets chewed out by Kira for being an arrogant brat; et cetera. This is all handled in a very economical way, but the basic point it hammers in, again and again, is: this show is not Star Trek The Next Generation.
Obviously, though, that could be a very, very double-edged sword. As Deep Space Nine began to be advertised, and as it started out on its initial season worth of episodes, both the look and the vibe of the new show raised many eyebrows among Star Trek and general television fans. Before the show was even on the air, and ever since, brutal criticism was directed against the show for being a cheap sellout, a betrayal of the utopian optimism of Gene Roddenberry's Vision (may it perish forever, Amen), a nasty, ugly work devoid of life or joy, and so on and so forth.
And to be fair, all these people had (and have) a point.
A deeply unhappy and ambivalent group of Starfleet officers struggling to take over an alien space station built through slave labor then abandoned and wrecked by a vicious alien empire, concurrently tasked with helping a planet full of deeply religious and mystical people with wrinkled noses and tragic backstories and (especially Major Kira) bad attitudes recover from a brutal, decades-long military occupation, was hardly the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, its mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man (one) has gone before. It was, clearly, a different animal entirely--and surely many fans of Star Trek The Next Generation came away from the pilot episode uncertain, at best, over how or even whether this new show would ever work out. Time, clearly, would have to tell.
Builders, Explorers, and One Night Stands
Really, though, for most of DS9's first season, they had little reason to worry. Most of these episodes, written well before the pilot had been finalized, featured plots of the "could have been done on TNG" variety, including mysterious plagues and system failures, visiting aliens obsessed with imagination and board games, respectively, and Q showing up to cause havoc.
Along the way, though, even with main plots of very familiar Star Trek varieties, the texture of the characters and the setting was built up more and more. Quark and Odo, Bashir and O'Brien, Jake and Nog, Sisko and Dax...the show began to build itself, to an increasing degree, around the strong, colorful relationships among the strong, colorful characters, each with their distinctive point of view and context, individual and cultural and familial. At the same time, the larger political and cultural backstory of the show, focused around the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor, gradually had light shed on it as well. All this began to reveal, to the writers, some very important differences between writing for Deep Space Nine and writing for the The Next Generation: Bajor and Cardassia were always there, the backdrop, in one way or other, to every single episode, even those involving Q or alien space probes. And because they were there, always, they could be built up, elaborated upon, even in episodes where they were very far from the foreground. Likewise, when it came to the characters, their distinctive cultures and tragic backstories, it was logical, even necessary to bring in others characters to elaborate on those backgrounds--and logical to keep bringing them back. Quark had a brother and a nephew, and employees; Bajor had a Kai and ministers; Cardassia had had a prefect running the Occupation; et cetera. Even as a pure TNG-imitation, the realities of Deep Space Nine's setting and characters demanded a different style of storytelling, demanded above all a deeper and richer political and cultural backdrop to the action, and more and more recurring characters to embody that background. Slowly but surely, a new thing was emerging.
Still, Michael Piller was not, all in all, very happy with the first season of DS9. As the show was successfully launched onto television and found its footing in continuing production and writing and (smaller than TNG, but stable) audience, and the whole set of TV-related, TNG-created anxieties began slowly to subside, more directly creative impulses began to reassert themselves. In the throes of production, Piller had been anxious to prove that any kind of story done on TNG could be done on DS9. Now, though, he began to think more about what kinds of stories should be done on DS9, what kinds of stories showed DS9 in its full distinctiveness and potential, and, perhaps, even whether there were perhaps stories that could be done on DS9, but could not be done on TNG.
In the end, the whole course of both television shows was drastically altered, not just by Michael Piller's musings, but by one particular story towards the end of Season One, a bottle show produced deliberately on the cheap with the minimum of sets and effects, and written by Peter Allan Fields with a lot of help from a certain DS9 staff writer named Ira Steven Behr (a name we'll be seeing a lot more of).
The closest TNG analogue to Duet is without a doubt The Drumhead, another low-budget bottle-show with an excellent guest star pitted against a main character in a judicial battle of wits. Everything else about the two shows, though, could hardly be more different. The Drumhead is, at heart, yet another American take on the McCarthy trials, with Picard as our heroic defender of liberal-democratic rights and freedoms against Admiral Satie's lone, unbalanced inquisitor/witch-hunter. In the end, the problem is clear: Satie herself, a sympathetic but unbalanced figure willing to violate rights and invent conspiracy theories in the ostensible defense of the Federation and the real promotion of her own desperate ego. As if to underscore this, the "twist" of the episode (SPOILER) is that there actually was no crime to begin with. The explosion Satie came onboard to investigate, and which she exploited to extend her reign of terror, was in fact an accident. In the end, Picard defeats Satie through liberal proceduralism and by deliberately provoking her into showing her true colors, and she is shamed before the crew, her staff, and the entire Federation. Picard himself is not, until the very end, himself threatened at all. He is personally involved in the situation only to the degree that the rights of his crew is threatened, and to the degree in which he is himself truly committed to the liberal principles he espouses. When he does get involved, though, he is perfectly clear on what the right thing to do is, and Satie has very little time left.
In Duet, though, our main character, Major Kira, a principal regular, is not a Starfleet officer, but a Bajoran national and a lifelong terrorist revolutionary who has spent her life up to this point fighting in the Bajoran Resistance to liberate her homeworld. The man she is investigating, the accused-innocent/alien-war-criminal, is neither a lone villainous operator in the Federation nor a villain-of-the-week representing a never-before-seen culture on the fringes of space, and the crime he is accused of is neither an accident, nor a set of events invented for that episode and with no significance thereafter. Rather, he is a Cardassian, a member of a culture that had been seen in episode after episode, and would continue to be, and the war crimes of which he is accused make up the very basis on which the whole show Deep Space Nine is based, the Occupation of Bajor.
The Drumhead is ultimately a show about impartiality--Picard is the exemplar of basic liberal proceduralism, rationally free from the personal obsession that drives Admiral Satie and is ultimately responsible for her downfall. For the world of Duet, though, such impartiality is simply impossible. Major Kira is deeply, intimately involved in the quest to find out the truth about the man she is prosecuting, and, perhaps, to punish him for the crimes she herself witnessed. The villain, too, has, it turns out, a very personal interest in Major Kira, in the Bajorans, and in the judicial process against him. Both people, and both cultures, are caught up in the same struggle, to find some way, any way, to respond to the horror of real atrocities, to bring meaning to the meaningless, through denial or vengeance or revelation or deception or punishment. There simply are no atrocities for Picard to confront, and all he has at stake, at most, in the abstract, is his personal reputation, his personal principles, his ship, and his crew. For Major Kira and her Cardassian interlocutor, what is at stake is nothing less than their souls, and the souls of their peoples.
And, of course, by the end of Duet, though this immediate plot has been resolved, all of these basic issues remain. Cardassia is still there, with its guilt for the Occupation unacknowledged and unabsolved. Bajor is still there, struggling to heal the wounds inflicted on it, struggling to move on, to find closure, to take vengeance or forgive. And Major Kira, our hero, is still there, having learned a little more about her people, her enemy, and herself. All of these threads, these places and cultures and people, would, should, must continue to be explored.
By all accounts, Michael Piller reacted to Duet with a rather odd combination of delight and distress. On the one hand, here at last was a truly great episode for the new show that he had created; and more than that, a potential map, a key, to figuring out what made DS9 tick and what could make it consistently great in the future. On the other hand, here, less than a season into his new show, was a truly great episode that bore little resemblance to most of the hours he had come up with for the first season of DS9, and which demanded to be followed up on with many more hours like it.
In the Deep Space Nine Companion, Michael Piller is described as becoming almost ludicrously demanding in his overseeing of the last episode of the first season, In the Hands of the Prophets, incessantly demanding that it had to be like Duet, that it had to be as good as Duet, that it had to in some way capture and extend that elusive lightning-strike of a great show into the reformatting of a continuing series.
To his credit, while In the Hands of the Prophets is not precisely a great show, it is a pretty good one, and good in an entirely Deep Space Nine-specific way. A show about the clash of political and religious ideologies between Bajor and the Federation, it went in a single hour farther towards taking religion and politics seriously--in a contemporary-reality way, no longer in a progressive-utopian, the-past-must-burn kind of way--than any episode of Star Trek up to that point had.
This was followed up on by a three-parter to open up Season 2 of Deep Space Nine, which again focused entirely on the clash of civilizations between Bajor and the Federation and the resulting political and religious intrigue. Star Trek had never done a three-parter before: nor had it ever conceived of giving that much focus to the religious and political landscape of an alien culture. This three-parter, too, was much more of a unabashed success than In the Hands of the Prophets, but still far from perfect. Nevertheless, Michael Piller remained adamant that whether or not all of these format- and content-bending antics were right for Star Trek as a whole, they were right for Deep Space Nine. TNG was about exploring the stars in a state-of-the-art starship: Deep Space Nine, clearly, was about something entirely different.
It was at this point that Michael Piller, in interviews and behind-the-scenes, began espousing a very new view on both his work on The Next Generation and his continuing work on Deep Space Nine. There was, he admitted, something very strange and arguably perverse about the wildly-successful and imitated format of Star Trek The Next Generation. In episode after episode, Picard and co flew in to an alien civilization with a problem, intervened through force or diplomacy to fix that society's obvious problems, and then flew out again to their next engagement. In The Vengeance Factor, which I watched the day of writing this sentence, Picard sets himself, for reasons both of self-interest (one side is raiding Federation outposts) and of more fundamental altruism, the task of healing a 100-year-old schism in an alien society; but when informed by one of the parties that a proposed next step would take 20 days to put into effect, he tartly informs the alien that in 20 days he plans to be very far away from them and their species indeed. He is willing to fundamentally alter the shape of this society, for its ostensible benefit: but only so long as it fits in with his schedule.
Exciting this might be, but it was also, without a doubt, a monumentally arrogant and irresponsible stance to take on the world. This was the legacy, clearly, both of Gene Roddenberry's utopian supremacism and of the show's Imperialist and colonialist roots, coming in five or six different strains through British sea literature, American westerns, the legacy of Manifest Destiny, 1940s anti-Nazi interventionism, 1960s anti-Communism, and 1970s Utopianism. The Prime Directive had been an attempt on the part of Gene Roddenberry to pose a supposedly more enlightened principle separating his utopian Imperialists from the actual rapacious Imperialists of history--but in practice, it could not help but come off as not only arrogant and irresponsible, but also immensely self-serving. Picard and company would never interfere with another culture or another society, even if perishing in great numbers from afflictions easily dealt with with their advanced technology--until and unless it was clearly in their interests to do so, in which case gods would be blasted from orbit, secular utopian lessons preached, and societies made and re-made on a whim. In this sense, the Prime Directive has a lot more to do with the uneasy balance taken after WW2 by the American Empire in maintaining military and economic and cultural hegemony, but also strictly avoiding anything that might make them look like the colonial Empires of the past, or the Nazis, or the Communists, than it does with any clearly-discernable moral principle about "cultural evolution" or "not playing God." "Non-interventionism"--so long as you are the one in control, with nothing to lose. If not, well, then all bets are off.
Still, Michael Piller acknowledged, this basic pattern, as a television format for TNG, did clearly work. But, he now believed firmly, it would never work for Deep Space Nine. For, upon reflection, Deep Space Nine was a show about precisely the one thing that the crew of the USS Enterprise would never, ever, ever do: find an alien society in need, with deep internal and external problems, and stay to help them, day after day and year after year, for the indefinite, foreseeable future. To complete their mission, Piller realized, the Federation crew of Deep Space Nine would have to learn how to let go of their cultural and political arrogance, would learn not only how to help the Bajorans, but how to understand them, listen to them, live with them. Major Kira, after all, the feistiest of Bajorans, was a main character, with episode after episode written entirely from her thoroughly Bajoran perspective. If the Enterprise had flown in during the Occupation to save the day and then abruptly flown out to keep an appointment with an ore freighter orbiting Rigel VII, she would have blown it out of the sky.
This difference, according to Piller, could be summed up by saying that while Picard was an explorer, Sisko was a builder. Picard might make first contact with a new species: but it was people like Sisko who would then have to do the hard work of building trust, building a relationship, with that people, its culture, its religion, its viewpoint on the world. Talk of relationships led naturally, for Piller, into another analogy: if Sisko and his work was like building a stable, long-term relationship, a marriage, a family, built on mutual trust and respect, Picard and the crew of the Enterprise were busy drunkenly stumbling from one-night stand to the next.
Piller had no qualms about letting them continue to do that; but, he was now sure, Deep Space Nine had to be an entirely different animal. It couldn't just be another Star Trek show, a continuation of the format of TOS and TNG. By its very nature, it demanded to be something different.
Ira Steven Behr and the Weasels
Even when wrestling with the question of just how different Deep Space Nine would end up being, just how it could continue to refine itself, playing to its strengths and continuing to innovate on the format and world it had inherited from The Next Generation, Michael Piller had already come to a decision that would have a great deal of bearing on that question: he was not the man for the job. After running Deep Space Nine for a few years, he would, like Captain Picard and his crew of Explorers, move on to greener pastures, and leave the hard work to come to his designated heir and successor, the Builder for Deep Space Nine: Ira Steven Behr.
As Behr tells it, he was initially recruited for the job of Deep Space Nine staff writer long before the show had gone on the air, at a baseball game. Behr and especially Piller were great baseball fans, and as they watched their favorite game unfold, Piller told Behr that he was starting work on a new Star Trek series, one that Behr would like a lot better, that would be far more up his alley, than The Next Generation.
To explain this, a bit of backstory is needed. Deep Space Nine was not, in fact, Ira Steven Behr's first encounter with the Star Trek universe. He had, in fact, worked as a staff writer on a Star Trek show before--in particular, Star Trek The Next Generation, during its fateful and horrible third season.
For those who've forgotten, TNG's third season marked the almost total turnaround and reinvention of the show at the hands of the new wunderkind creative director Michael Piller. It was also, behind-the-scenes, a complete insane screaming disaster that only ever made it on the air by the skin of its teeth.
When Piller had come onboard as head writer, already partway through the pre-production for Season Three, there were essentially no scripts in production for the new season. These would have to be come up with and written, largely on the fly, in insanely short amounts of time, by Piller's small cadre of hand-picked writers: including, of course, a man named Ira Steven Behr.
Ironically, Behr is only credited as sole writer of one episode of TNG's third season--but this was largely because he spent most of his time desperately working without credit on virtually all of the other episodes of the season, writing and re-writing frantically as the clocks ticked and Michael Piller looked over his shoulder. This was not, to say the least, a fun experience, but it was more than just the time pressures that were responsible for Behr's ultimate dissatisfaction: it was the whole system, the whole world, the whole idea of Star Trek as established and still overseen by Gene Roddenberry. Like many writers before him, Behr found himself totally flabbergasted by the specious utopianism, the stilted diction, the sterile calm, and most of all the total absence of interpersonal or inner-personal conflict among the main characters. Not only was he sweating around-the-clock to get episodes written, he was also doing it in service of a show and a universe that was in every way he recognized totally bizarre and hokey.
A telling story that Behr has recounted about this period of time involves him coming up with an idea for what would eventually become Captain's Holiday, one of the lamer episodes of Season Three but the only one eventually credited to him. This would be, in Behr's telling, a dark tale about a carnival world where an overconfident Picard would come face-to-face with his deepest fears. Here, though, he came up against the great Immovable Object of Star Trek, the force that had withstood everyone from Harold Livingston to Maurice Hurley without giving up an inch: Gene Roddenberry's ego. Taken to meet with the Great Man, who was in poor health but still as committed to his ideological and personal ownership of Star Trek as ever, Behr was told flatly that his story simply couldn't be produced, since Captain Picard had no fear. As if to ease the blow, though, Roddenberry suggested that he reconfigure his dark-carnival story into an episode about Picard getting laid, visiting a sensual pleasure-planet where lots of casual sex involving people of all genders would be the attraction of the hour--and then turned Behr back into the world again, shocked and frustrated.
Berman and Piller were much gentler and subtler personalities than Behr--and both had quickly come up with workarounds for Gene Roddenberry's absolutist dictums and his egotistical antics. Piller could write stories about characters having personal crises or engaging in low-level conflict in just a kind and gentle and non-wave-making enough way to ruffle no-one's feathers, even Roddenberry's. Berman could focus on production and quietly sideline Roddenberry from direct involvement with creative decisions on the show. Both would carry on in this way for years, until TNG had been effectively remade in their image, and Roddenberry himself had died.
Behr, though, had none of this gentleness, and none of this patience. Befuddled and angry, he left TNG at the end of Season 3 and never came back.
A few years later, though, and he was being offered a new crack at Star Trek--but this time, a Star Trek show deliberately reconfigured to get around the strangeness and dramalessness Behr had reacted to, and far greater creative freedom. It was, to be sure, a risk; but screenwriting is a tough business. Behr took the bait.
From the beginning of Deep Space Nine's development, Behr was set up as Piller's right-hand man and heir apparent: at first charged with gathering writers and overseeing the first batch of post-pilot scripts, then gradually settling in as one of the leading voices of the Deep Space Nine writers room.
Now, though, after two seasons, Michael Piller had, once again, a new show to build. Star Trek The Next Generation was ending after seven successful seasons, and the studio, pleased with the success of Deep Space Nine, wanted another spinoff to take its place. Deep Space Nine's popular older brother was leaving the house for the metaphorical college of big-screen feature-films--but there was no chance of getting more attention from the absence, since a new baby was already on the way to usurp that place of affection in the hearts of television-watching Americans. Deep Space Nine would be, in the end, the only Star Trek show to run alongside another Star Trek show for the entirety of its run.
Still, though this would without a doubt prove a heavy burden for DS9 to carry, and though Michael Piller was once again deep in the labor of bringing a new Star Trek show into the world, he was not at all concerned about the creative future of Deep Space Nine, his first original creation. It was time for Ira Steven Behr, the man who was too radical for TNG but just right, perhaps, for DS9, to take the reins.
Ira Steven Behr would run DS9, in the end, for four years, from the beginning of season three to the very last episode of season seven. In that time, he brought very many parts of himself to the show, from his understandable dislike of Star Trek's trademark technobabble deus ex machinas to his somewhat inexplicable love for '60s Las Vegas. Perhaps the most important quality he brought with him, though, was precisely that profound lack of understanding and dissatisfaction with Star Trek's trademark progressive utopianism and all that implied about its characters that had made him leave TNG years before. It wasn't just that he thought Star Trek's odder qualities were bad--on some level, he simply didn't understand them, couldn't, like so many other writers, make sense of them in dramatic or human or historical or societal terms. But unlike so many other rejected TNG writers, Behr was now in charge of his very own Star Trek show--and he now had an opportunity, as he once put it, to dig in, to dramatically work out for himself, according to his own understanding of the world and society and politics, just what Star Trek was, and what sense could be made of its characters and setting.
In a sense, Behr found himself in a very analogous position, setting himself a very analogous task, to Nicholas Meyer in writing and directing Star Trek II more than a decade before: to take this bizarre, hokey space show, take it seriously on its own terms, and then make sense of it according to reality, human drama, and human character as each man understood it. Of course, Behr was overseeing the writing of a television show, not writing and directing his own movie--making his task, in some ways, a great deal harder, but also opening up a scope and dimension to explore that a single two hour movie, or even a trilogy of them, could never equal. And in doing this, he also had the cooperation of a truly remarkable crew of writers, recruited or fostered by Michael Piller, who would go on to be some of the heroes of the business: Ronald D. Moore, Rene Echevarria, Peter Allan Fields, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Hans Beimler, and others.
So Ira Steven Behr and the boys, slowly but surely, dug in and got down to work exploring this bizarro television property that had been given into their hands. There certainly were many things to explore, starting with the Bajorans, the Cardassians, the Gamma Quadrant, and the other elements of Deep Space Nine's anomalous tragic-backstory setting. But there was also the whole setting of Star Trek as established over the last three decades, each element waiting in the wings to be explored in turn: the Klingon Empire, the Romulans, and every other part of this strange bastardized liberal-Imperialist-hippy universe conceived of in the '60s, then repeatedly exploited and reinvented throughout the '70s and '80s. What, Behr wondered, was actually going on with all these peoples, these Empires, these cultures and characters? What was it like to live in them, what did they believe in, what crimes had they committed, and what would happen to them in the long run?
And what about the United Federation of Planets, that bizarre hybrid between the British Empire colonizing the high seas, the Federal Government driving the Indians towards the sea, America defending civilization from the Commies, and the Socialist Utopia bringing a final and definitive End to History and perfect maturity to the human race? What the hell even was this strange institution whose interests most of the characters in his cast unquestioningly served as scientists and soldiers?
The Federation was clearly a pretty nice place to live, but, as Behr eventually put it, so what? What was the Federation, how did it run, and how did it respond to existential threats and crises? Was it actually a utopia, actually a paragon of moral virtue and peaceful good intentions?
Or, to paraphrase Ira Steven Behr paraphrasing Harold Pintner, were there weasels under the coffee table?
Rating, Arcs, and Reinventions
With the takeover of Ira Steven Behr and the debut of Voyager in 1995, Deep Space Nine now found itself in perhaps the most truly anomalous positions in the history of the franchise, and one of the more anomalous in the history of television.
DS9 had been created to run alongside and in the shadow of TNG, a provocative spin-off tasked with both drawing from and being clearly different from one of the most popular shows of all time. Now, though TNG was off the air forever, and a new Star Trek show, Voyager, was poised to debut in its place. Voyager, though, was in an entirely different position, with much less of the anxiety of comparison that had afflicted DS9 and forced it to be different just in order to survive. For its creators and audiences alike, Voyager was both expected and demanded to take the place of TNG as big brother of the family, the classic Trek experience of the crew of a Federation Starship boldly going where no man had gone before. DS9, though, was different, with its space station and its tragic-backstory planet and its complex world-building, and could never take The Next Generation's place. By its very nature, it was doomed, seemingly, to the eternal status of red-headed stepchild of the franchise.
This position, though, came with its own advantages. If Voyager suffered creatively throughout its run from the demands of the TNG format and all the expectations and strictures that came with it, Deep Space Nine was henceforth left alone to do more or less whatever it pleased with that format and those strictures. Sure, fewer people were watching--but that included fewer high-powered television executives with bright ideas about how to win over the audience. Creatively speaking, DS9 found itself in one of the most enviable positions imaginable: little oversight, a solid budget, a stable audience, and studio and monetary commitment to go on year after year after year. The writers and producers of DS9 could get away with things that Voyager, the flagship show of a new network and the Star Trek franchise alike, would never have dared to do--while also having the luxury, like Voyager, of knowing that their show would carry on for years to come, without the looming threat of cancellation. Behr and co could do what they wanted to do.
If there is a single reason, above all others, why it is quite difficult to write a single blog post summing up Star Trek Deep Space Nine, monumentally more difficult than it was to write a post about either Star Trek TOS or Star Trek TNG, it is this: that because of this creative freedom, because of the creative drive and dedication of its writers, Deep Space Nine changed dramatically, again and again, over the course of its run, and never quite stopped changing.
This is a show that took a great deal of time to get anywhere--its main villain isn't introduced until the end of Season Two, and the Big Damn War doesn't start until the end of Season Five. In the meantime, in between, there is plenty of time to get to the know the characters, and places, and cultures, and Empires that make up the Galaxy. And then, of course, these things all change--and then, a season later, they change again.
The nature of these changes, though, is interesting in itself. Both TOS and TNG were shows that lived and died by the status quo: the basic sense of the characters and their universe, including other cultures, species, villains, etc, within which individual adventures could then take place. DS9, in its own way, is equally a status quo-based show, with numerous individual adventures taking place in a larger world that both shapes those adventures and is in turn filled out by them. The difference, though, is two-fold, in that, for Deep Space Nine, that status quo, that larger world, is infinitely more complex and stable than it was for either TOS or TNG, and (2) that that status quo itself unfolds on its own logic, and changes in ways both subtle and dramatic. [SPOILERS, obviously:]
DS9 Seasons One and Two is a show about a group of Starfleet officers trying to help the religious, angry Bajorans rebuild while keeping the Cardassians from retaking the station, meanwhile meeting some new, interesting people who come through the wormhole from the vast, vague expanse of the Gamma Quadrant, eager to say hello.
At the end of Season Two, following bread-crumbs dropped throughout the preceding season, that setting is radically redefined. The Gamma Quadrant, it turns out, is not just a vague frontier for exploration and expansion, full of aliens-of-the-week ready to introduce themselves, have their problems solved by the heroism of Starfleet, and then duly become members of the Federation. There is, it turns out, another expansionist power already entrenched in that area of the Galaxy: the Dominion, a multi-species project that mirrors, in unsettling ways, the dynamics of the Federation. The wormhole, then, is no longer an easy shortcut to exploration, but an unsettling reminder of the immediate, ever-present threat of invasion. Our crew's responsibilities are no longer just to Bajor, but to protect the entire Federation from danger; and the Federation itself is developing warships, the first of which is now permanently assigned to the station. Deep Space Nine is now a military fort, a first line of defense.
Chief among these threats, though, is the new threat of political infiltration and manipulation by the shapeshifting Changeling rulers of the Dominion, a threat that plays out throughout the Third and Fourth Seasons, as the Alpha Quadrant powers themselves start to change in response to their new threat.
At the beginning of the Fourth Season, the situation again changes dramatically. Cardassia's Orwellian military government is overthrown and replaced by a civilian government--and in response, the Klingons, afraid of Changeling infiltration and eager to rattle sabers, invade Cardassia and throw it into chaos. The Klingons, our friendly, if somewhat rambunctious allies from TNG, are now the most immediate villain of the show. Deep Space Nine is now tasked with defending Bajor from encroaching Klingons, and with helping the inhabitants of Cardassia, a failed state now plunged into famine and chaos. Dukat, our main villain back in seasons One and Two as the former preject of Bajor obsessed with getting his old job back, is now on our side, fighting against the Klingons for his people.
Then in Season 5, all those things change--again. After a brief war between the Federation and the Klingons, the right-hand man of the Chancellor is revealed as a Changeling infiltrator, bringing the two powers back into an uneasy detente. Then, in short order, the Dominion invades the Alpha Quadrant, and reveals that, through Dukat, Cardassia has become a member of the Dominion. The Klingon-Federation Alliance is revived, with a new permanent Klingon presence on the station, while the Cardassians and the Dominion are now held together by an uneasy alliance of their own. The station is, once again, a main line of defense against that threat.
Finally, at the end of Season Five, the Dominion War begins, with the Federation and the Klingons against the Cardassians and the Dominion. For the remainder of the show, that war will be the predominant background concern, the major status quo situation. Yet even here, there are dramatic shifts: the station is taken by the Dominion, and then retaken: the wormhole is embargoed, first by the Federation and then by the Prophets, cutting off the Gamma Quadrant entirely, and leaving the Alpha Quadrant Dominion the only threat; the Romulans enter the war as allies; some Cardassians, dissatisfied with their relationship with the Dominion, begin a Rebellion, making them allies; and so on and so forth.
This is not intended as a summary of the entire show; but the point is, hopefully, clear. In and between all of these events, there are stand-alone episodes where our heroes have adventures within that political and cultural and personal status quo. These episodes, though, are not merely fodder or filler; at their best, like Duet, they are essential moments in the filling-out of the larger setting and the development of the characters within that setting. At worst, they are simply fun, and provide some small bit of info about the world that had not existed before. All of this, though, gives a texture even to DS9's stand-alone hours that is very different from most ordinary episodes of TNG. The backdrop is not merely the backdrop, is not merely the setting for the action, nor are the characters merely detached heroes to be dropped into whatever plot might possibly suit them. The backdrop is, often, the foreground--and the characters are deeply implicated in the world they live in, its cultures and events, with commitments and principles that change as their world changes.
As we shall see, there is, often, something rather unsettling about this, especially applied to Star Trek's faux-utopian, 19th-century-Imperialist setting. To explicate this, though, we will be spending most of the rest of this review with some individual profiles not only of the characters of the show, but also of the cultures, peoples, civilizations, to which they belong. As we shall see, there is a lot more bound up with them than might first appear.
Characters, Families, and Cultures
The difficulty with doing a character analysis for Deep Space Nine, very much unlike TOS or TNG, is threefold: (1) The characters change. (2) The characters exist in a larger context; and (3) There are a heck of a lot of recurring characters with lots of screentime and importance, making it hard to decide exactly where to draw the line.
Neither of these things was really particularly true for either of Trek's former shows; and, in a sense, this was part of their appeal. TOS gave us a crew of clashing Homeric heroes who could be splashed down any time or place, 23rd century Organia or 20th century San Francisco, and be as striking and dynamic as ever as they squabbled amongst themselves and finally defeated whatever external threat opposed them. TNG gave us a set of bizarre futuristic archetypes who gradually morphed into a diverse family of good, secure people who loved each other and could, together, as a crew, face any situation whatsoever, analyze it, discuss possible solutions, and solve it within 44 minutes.
Deep Space Nine, though, from the very beginning made things a bit more complicated. Like TOS' characters, Berman and Piller designed the DS9 crew to be a set of clashing archetypes, dynamic and different and not at all gelled together in comfortable security a la the TNG crew--yet unlike TOS, most of these differences were established, not just through colorful individual personalities, but through larger cultures and contexts in which these people existed, and which naturally brought them into conflict with each other. On TNG, Spock had been the one representative of an alien culture, the one outcast half-breed, in an otherwise culturally homogenous cast. In a sense, though, DS9 has at least five "Spock"-type characters (defined by their membership in an alien culture and placed to a degree in-between worlds) among its main cast, and many, many more among its recurring cast. At a certain point, it is hard to talk about the characters without talking about the cultures.
TNG and TOS had weird characters among their cast--but these characters were, by design, fairly static, primed for an infinity of one-off shows running along close to the same lines. Once the weirdness of the first few seasons is over, it's difficult to think of many major changes undergone by the characters--Worf's story arc being the one exception that proves the rule. Without many exceptions, the characters are constants, capable of being plugged into whatever centric story is available without worrying about whether it's Season Three Picard or Season Seven Picard that you're dealing with. A show about Picard being nobly humanistic in the face of danger? A show about Data trying to discover more about humanity? A show about Riker just being this guy who gets put in this situation? Don't worry about it, just do it.
This, though, is very much not the case with DS9. The show's characters, without undergoing too many existential crises, do change dramatically over the course of the show's seven seasons. They are very much not interchangeable quantities to be plugged into whatever story is available--for a story to work, it has to fit into, not just the character's archetypal nature, but their immediate present circumstances and development.
Quark in Seasons 1 and 2 betrays the station's crew for money on several occasions--in Season Seven, though, that would be wildly out of character. Sisko in season one wanted nothing more than to leave Bajor forever--by season 7 there is nothing that matters to him more than Bajor, and he plans to build a house and live there for the rest of his life. Kira starts out an angry, ill-at-ease loner with a chip on her shoulder who believes the Federation should leave Bajor as soon as possible--by Season Seven, none of those things are true. Characters get married, form friendships, die; their relationship to institutions, peoples, empires, change, as those institutions themselves change or switch sides or are destroyed. This happens, often, very gradually, in and through a variety of one-off episodes and arc episodes. Everything, though, sticks--and adds up.
Without further ado, though, here are brief discussions of the main cast of Deep Space Nine, attempting to tease out not only the character's fundamental nature but their key changes over time:
Captain (née Commander) Benjamin Lafayette Sisko starts out Deep Space Nine as a figure of tragedy, a reluctant leader, and an even more reluctant figure of prophecy. The story of Emissary, the show's pilot, as part of its larger agenda of setting Deep Space Nine apart from its predecessor, gave us as our protagonist an angry single father whose wife was murdered by a Borg-assimilated Jean-Luc Picard, who actively resents being assigned to command Bajor and Deep Space Nine, who is considering resigning Starfleet to be able to retire to Earth and raise his son, and for all of the above reasons really really dislikes Captain Picard. It also, of course, gave us our first African-American protagonist in the history of the Star Trek franchise, and one of the first in the history of mainstream American television. Over the course of the series' pilot, our hero gains the respect of his diverse crewmembers and the Bajoran people, is told that he's the long-awaited Messiah/Prophet "Emissary" of the Bajoran people, and takes the first step in moving on from the tragedy of his wife's death thanks to the mysterious gods of Bajor.
All of this is, really, very striking, and succeeds quite well in both creating a compelling new character with an arc and then resolving that arc in the first two hours of the series. Somewhat unfortunately, though, it left very little for Sisko to do for the next season or so. As a protagonist struggling to bring people together while overcoming personal tragedy, Sisko was compelling--as the Federation-dogmatist rule-enforcer of the cast given again and again the thankless task of serving as obstacle and admonisher for his much-more-interesting crewmembers and their stories, Sisko suffered.
Sisko in a few of his early outings can come off, frankly, a bit bizarre, an odd combination of stiff and over-the-top: the result of actor and jazz artist Avery Brooks, best known previously for playing the archetypal shaven-headed, dangerous badboy Hawk, having been carefully coached and made up with a full head of hair and a totally blank accent with the seeming goal of having him look and act as much as possible like the 50-something white background Starfleet Admirals on TNG. As the show progressed, though, Brooks' personality and style, both in its '90s African-American specificity and his personal intensity bordering at times on camp but underlain with volcanic reserves both of anger and laughter--came through more and more, and gradually shaped both how Sisko looked, and how he was written. In other words, Sisko not only Grew the Beard: he Shaved the Head, and got a lot more interesting.
As Sisko developed, too, he diverged more and more from the boyish-masculinity loner Hornblower archetype in whose mold Gene Roddenberry had forged both Kirk and Picard. These were both men haunted by their inability to form more than transient relationships with women, growing old in the depths of space without family and with only their immediate crew as friends. Sisko, though, was from the very beginning a family man--a man defined by his relationship with his wife, her death, and his relationship with his son. Sisko's manifest willingness, in the pilot, to prioritize his son's good over his Starfleet loyalties by threatening to resign from Starfleet only underscored this quality. Sisko was a man with priorities, a man defined by unswerving commitments to other people. As Sisko and the show both developed, this side of Sisko became increasingly dominant, and meshed more and more with Piller's idea of DS9 as a show about Builders and marriage and community. This was not only who Sisko was in relationship with his son--it was also, to a very large degree, who he was in relationship with everyone under his command. As his character came into focus in the show's third season, Sisko became a joyful, creative tinkerer and builder, passionate about long-term projects--whose main hobby was cooking up real food from freshly-grown (not replicated) ingredients to serve to large parties of family and friends. If Picard played very effectively a more regal, remote archetype of a father, Sisko was clearly of the more affectionate, hands-on variety.
As he developed throughout the shows later seasons, though, as Starfleet edged closer and closer to war, it also became clear that Sisko, despite or perhaps because of his fatherliness and affection, was far more of a military commander than either of his predecessors, with an undertone of sternness and authority brooking absolutely no argument from anyone. This was a father who would cry with you-- but then, when you crossed the line, tell you sternly exactly what you did wrong and exactly what you must do, and never budge an inch out of sentiment. This was also a man with the capacity to get very angry on behalf of those he loved, and the causes to which he was committed. As committed as he was to the good of his family, so too was he committed to the defeat of those who opposed that community. Picard might conceivably hesitate, in a combat situation, to kill an opponent, might take risks and give the benefit of the doubt, prioritize the future possibility peace over the immediate security of his ship and crew; Sisko never would.
Of course, loyalty and commitment do have their negative sides, implicit in Sisko's anger and his military orientation. If the main goal is to build and nurture, to protect those given into your care, then those who undo what you build, those who harm or threaten those you love, become quite naturally little more than obstacles and enemies. Picard was a humanist, a thinker, first, and a Captain second. His moral clarity about the principles and goals on which all action is based would never allow him to do what he regarded as morally wrong for the sake of his crew's safety. Sisko's morality, though, was far less abstract, flowing from the intensity of commitments and loyalties to institutions and people. What would Sisko do to save his crew? What would Sisko do to save the Federation? Or rather, we might ask, what would he not do?
With every season, and especially with the landmark episode In the Pale Moonlight in Season Six, this question becomes a little harder to answer.
Still, if there is a darker side to Sisko, there is no doubt that he remains the hero. As the show unfolds, he forms friendships, relationships, alliances, again and again. He embraces his role as a religious leader to Bajor; he forms a new romantic relationship; he gets married, and has a child. The tragic, reluctant leader of Emissary slowly gives way to the passionately-committed leader and defender of a community; the staid rule-following Federation ideologue of Seasons 1 and 2 gives way to a man who is "of Bajor," its people and its gods, a man used to handling the diverse viewpoints of his community and the wider world with understanding, and a man far more willing to bend or even break the rules to defend that community.
All of this, though, makes sense because it unfolds naturally from a single basic source: commitment, integrity, loyalty, affection, love.
In the end, Sisko is a lover in a far deeper sense than the shallow affections of Kirk or Picard. This is what makes him the heart of Deep Space Nine.
Colonel (née Major) Kira Nerys is another character with deep roots and deeper commitments; but unlike Sisko, she finds herself not so much moving between alien cultures, building a diverse community in and among institutions with differing viewpoints, as steadfastly living in and defending her one and only home and people--even as this singular commitment forces her to alter herself, her alliances, reactions, like and dislikes, almost entirely along the way.
Kira is almost the only character on Deep Space Nine to come out of the gate swinging, with all the specifics of her character, history and perspective, fixed firmly in place. This was in large part due simply to the fact that, as the only Bajoran character on the main cast of a show devoted to a considerable degree to chronicling the travails of the planet Bajor, she benefited from almost every bit of behind-the-scenes and on-screen elaboration on Bajor, its history, and its culture.
However much this might be, through most of the development of the show, including the first drafts of the pilot script and the series Bible, Kira did not exist--instead, the first officer of the ensemble was to be the one Bajoran female Starfleet officer with a tragic backstory and a bad attitude conveniently already established in TNG: Ensign Ro, of Ensign Ro fame. This was such an obvious decision that it's doubtful the producer's even consciously made it. Once it was clear the spinoff was going to be set on or around Bajor, it was obvious that the character for whose sake Bajor and its tragic backstory had been established should be a key presence on that new show. Ro and Bajor were inextricably intertwined; why have one without the other?
Well, the answer was, again, not really a matter of choice or decision for the producers: Michelle Forbes, who had been happy to play a recurring role on The Next Generation, had no interest in being a regular on Deep Space Nine. So the producers, stymied, set about creating another female Bajoran with a tragic backstory and a bad attitude. Here, though, a few decisions were made that would, in the end provide Kira with her most distinctive characteristics, and help alter Deep Space Nine itself forever. Ro had been established as an outcast from Bajor, raised in a refugee camp, with little attachment to her people and no religious beliefs; she was also a Starfleet officer, with an oath to the service and an ultimate (however challenged) loyalty to Picard, the Federation, and the chain of command. Kira, though, would be none of these things. She would be a Bajoran freedom fighter, with an overriding loyalty to her people and deep religious beliefs, who had spent her whole life on Bajor fighting in the Resistance against the Cardassians. She would not be a Starfleet officer. She would not have any loyalty to the Federation--and, indeed, like many other Bajorans, she would be at first somewhere between deeply ambivalent and actively hostile to their presence on her newly-liberated homeworld. She, like many other Bajorans, had spent her life fighting for Bajoran independence--and would not be at all happy with dependency on the Federation and Starfleet, however supposedly benevolent.
All of this, of course, would change--but change in a way always consistent with her loyalty to Bajor first and foremost, and her passionate desire to protect and further its interests. Living among the Federation officers of Deep Space Nine, Kira would gradually come to respect both them and the Federation they served, would gradually be drawn into a broader perspective on the Alpha Quadrant as a whole, threatened by the Dominion. Central to her rapproachment with the Federation, as with many other Bajorans, would be Sisko's status as the Emissary, the chosen of the Prophets, a religious figure to be revered and obeyed, and a signal from the gods that the Federation's presence was, in fact, right for Bajor. From being a freedom fighter living on blood and adreniline, Kira would learn to relax and heal, make friends, form romantic relationships. Most of all, by the end of the show, her relationship with the Cardassians, the hated oppressors of her people, would radically, totally change, thanks both to her relationships with individual Cardassians and to the turmoil of Cardassia itself. The bitter enemy of Cardassia would become, by the end of the series, its savior.
No single character so directly gets to the heart of what Deep Space Nine, as a show, is really about: people of different cultures and perspectives, deeply, passionately committed to those cultures and perspectives, facing profound challenges to those commitments, changing, healing, adapting, forming relationships with others of different cultures and perspectives--but remaining just as committed all the same. No single character, too, sums up the political challenge of Deep Space Nine so succinctly: a main cast member who has literally been a terrorist, planted bombs that killed civilians, who remains an almost fanatical religious believer, a profoundly moralistic person who will not budge from doing what she believes is right, and denouncing what she believes is wrong--who, nonetheless, is a hero.
So yes, I'm a fan of Kira. And really, though she changes dramatically over the course of the show, she never really suffers from the initial malaise that occasionally afflicts the other characters during the show's TNG-haunted beginnings. Even in otherwise boring or silly or terrible episodes, she's never anything other than herself--and that's high praise for a television character.
Constable Odo is another man of commitment--though at the beginning of the show, this commitment is only to principle, not to any person or group or institution. This, though, like all things, would change rather dramatically before the end.
I said above that on a certain level, the Deep Space Nine cast is full of Spocks--full of aliens ensconced in alien cultures and viewing humanity from a foreign perspective. That is certainly true; but nonetheless Odo is without a doubt, by conscious design, the Spockiest of them all. To create an outcast in a cast already full of them, Berman and Piller took the even further step of creating a character who would be, at least at first, totally isolated, totally unique, in all the universe. Spock had been a half-breed, caught between two cultures; but still, he had in all essential things identified with his Vulcan half, the Vulcan culture and the Vulcan logic and the Vulcan beliefs. Odo, though, would simply have no culture. He would be, in the words of the very on-the-nose title of his first starring episode, "A Man Alone."
He would also be a lawman, though. And indeed, by taking a mysterious stranger and making him the constable for Deep Space Nine's Promenade, Berman and Piller were quite consciously appealing to Western tropes. Unlike Kira, unlike Sisko, Odo's loyalty would not be to the specific laws and regulations of Deep Space Nine under the Cardassians or Bajor or the Federation--his loyalty would be, rather, to a personal code of justice, a personal set of principles, under which he would carry out his duties, no matter who was in charge. This paradox of a law enforcement officer whose loyalty is to his own principles more than the community he serves is in truth a very American paradox, a distillation of our cultural obsession with the clash of individual and community. Having the subject of this paradox being not a gruff, masculine All-American Hero but the sensitive middle-aged actor Rene Auberjoinois in a mask playing a totally unique alien from Waru-knows-where, though, significantly altered the picture.
As it turns out, Odo is as much sensitive adolescent, perpetually caught between the desire to belong, the fear of conformity, and the inescapable reality of difference, as the rigid individualist lawman. As a shapeshifter, Odo can assume any shape he pleases--to an extent. But though he can look enough like a humanoid to pass for one most of the time, he is in truth not one of us, not a man like other men, but a totally alien form of life. He is, in a sense, forced to conform to survive--but also unable to truly be like the others around him, unable to participate fully in their communities and their modes of life. Even if he wanted to be accepted, they would never accept him.
Until, of course, our charming cast of characters comes to town. Over the course of the show, Odo gradually, almost imperceptibly comes out of his shell, and becomes, in a real sense, a part of the group, the oddball family of diverse misfits, headed by Captain Sisko. He goes from open hostility to distant sociability to real friendships, real belonging--and even love. Still, he stands apart from the group more than any other character on the show, with a cynical edge to his commentary.
All this, though, could have been predicted fairly easily. The bigger risk taken with Odo, a risk so drastic that it made Odo's actor, Rene Auberjonois, fear for the future of his role, was to take the one aspect of the character that, at the beginning of the show, most defined him, and totally and permanently alter it. Odo has no culture, no people, and his origins are a total mystery to everyone, including him--until, that is, he finds his people, and all of that changes. Odo, like everyone else, suddenly has a culture, has a people, has a way of life, where he truly belongs--but unfortunately, [SPOILER] he cannot take part in it, because this culture, this people, is in fact bent on the conquest and enslavement of all his friends as the leaders of the villainous Dominion. As the show goes on, then, Odo is caught in what is, for him, a totally new dilemma. We learn more and more and more about his people, about the Changelings and their beliefs and perspective and fundamental nature and their willingness to welcome Odo back as one of them--but also about their disdain and fear of non-shapeshifters, their superiority complex, their horrifying and genocidal crimes. As it turns out, you can go home again, whenever you wants to--but you really, really shouldn't.
Still, Odo is a hero, and a hero precisely because of his inescapable integrity. Even when tempted by everything he has ever wanted, he stands firm, agonizingly firm, and continues to suffer his lonely exile. By it, and by his participation in the larger community of Deep Space Nine, he gains something--a strength, a wisdom, a perspective on the universe--that will in the end serve him and his people far better than his comfort or capitulation.
Chief Miles Edward O'Brien was, in the end, the one and only TNG character to successfully make the jump from TNG--and on TNG, he had been only a recurring character. The logic involved in this decision was probably not profound, any more than the logic that had seen O'Brien and his actor, Colm Meaney, gradually promoted from the position of random extra to named character with his own wife and child: Rick Berman and Michael Piller both simply liked O'Brien, and Meaney, and wanted to give him more opportunities as a main cast member of their new spin-off show. Also, they really wanted someone from TNG to spin over, as part of that master plan to make a successful the-same-but-different spinoff that would attract enough of TNG's audience to be viable. So Colm Meaney got a promotion to regular on a new Star Trek series, and his alter ego O'Brien got a new, much harder job.
In an odd way, though, Deep Space Nine got very lucky that it was O'Brien, of all people, who was spun off to them. Very much unlike TNG's crew of nerds and androids and trombone-playing careerists, Meaney had always played his character with a longsuffering, world-weary air and a sense of humor, a working-class Irishman doing his job, but not always thrilled about it or the various crises thrown his way. He was also, strikingly, the only regular or recurring character on TNG to be married--a further addition to his working-class, man-of-the-people credentials. From the beginning of Deep Space Nine, O'Brien's character was set: he was the Everyman, the working man, the family man, of the cast, someone who enjoyed his job and worked hard, but at the end of the day wanted nothing more than to go to home to his wife and children.
Actually, of all the cast of Deep Space Nine, O'Brien probably changes the least over the course of its run. At the beginning of DS9, he's a family man who enjoys his job but is not particularly thrilled with the cosmic dangers of that job--at the end of DS9, he's a family man who enjoys his job but is not particularly thrilled with the cosmic dangers of that job. In between, though, he has had another child, and formed a number of distinct relationships among the cast: first and foremost being the great, the magnificent, the gloriously ordinary odd-couple bromance with Doctor Bashir. The first friendship in the history of Star Trek to be based, not on extraordinary clashing character tropes or a shared commitment to duty, but the repetition of basic shared interests and activities and camaraderie between ordinary human males, Bashir and O'Brien became, in the end, one of the most ordinary but essential ingredients in Deep Space Nine's diverse community of aliens and oddballs.
But really, with O'Brien individual relationships are less the point as his general air of unassuming belonging, his ease at being part of a community and a set of friends. Despite or perhaps because he has no profoundly alien cultural perspective or tragic backstory, despite or perhaps because he is, at the end of the day, someone more committed to his family than anything else in his life, he is perfectly happy to simply belong, to be a friend without fanfare to every member of the clashing ensemble of alien outcasts.
Of course, along the way, he also has to suffer a lot, too. On the plus side, O'Brien-centric episodes ended up being one of the writer's most frequent and reliable stand-bys, showing up quite frequently even though O'Brien never really had a main arc in the way of other characters. On the downside, those episodes had a nickname among the writing staff and cast and crew of DS9: O'Brien Must Suffer.
Yes, with almost no exceptions, each and every O'Brien-centric episode of Deep Space Nine centers around something truly horrible happening to our Working-Class Hero: being kidnapped and replaced by a double, being appointed religious leader of a remote Bajoran village, having his wife possessed, being imprisoned in an alien mind-prison for a virtual 20-year sentence, being struck with a burst of radiation that slowly kills him but also gives him the ability to see into the future, where, it turns out, some very bad shit is coming up...
Well, you get the idea. In a cast of tragic backstories, O'Brien may have a relatively stable and positive background (though admittedly he is supposed to be a former soldier who fought the Cardassians, and that occasionally comes up): but by the end of Season Seven he's certainly well on his way to building up a backstory just as miserable and tragic as Kira's oppressed-freedom-fighter or Odo's man-alone-caught-between-worlds shtick.
Even this tells us something about O'Brien's character, though: that, as the writers quickly intuited, he really is the Everyman of DS9, the one character who isn't so extraordinary as to be impervious or resigned to pain and danger, the one character whom pretty much everyone in the audience likes and can relate to--and therefore the one character who can suffer literally anything onscreen, no matter how ludicrous or extreme, and still produce relatable drama out of it.
Many of these episodes are quite excellent--some are just okay--but hey, who's such a jerk that he doesn't have a kind word for O'Brien when he's having a rough day? He's a good man, that O'Brien.
Doctor Julian Subatoi Bashir, in his original form, represents perhaps my favorite character idea in the history of the Star Trek franchise. In the same-but-different lottery/drinking-game of DS9's development, the producers knew they needed a Doctor for the show, to do Doctor-y stuff like sit in sickbay and run props over people's body while gravely explaining to the Captain that everyone on the station is about to die unless they can somehow find a tricordrazine substitute capable of shielding nucleonic rhibozomes from the deleterious effects of the Alconian Blood-Borne Psychosis Flu...in the next three hours. Doctor McCoy had been a Western doctor transposed into the sci-fi/military world of TOS--Doctor Crusher had been first Wesley's Hot Mom and later a kind, capable lady without too many outstanding personality traits--Doctor Pulaski had been, well, one of the biggest failures in the history of the franchise. What was the blueprint here? What would make this new doctor the same, but different (take a drink, continue your slide into oblivion)?
Faced already with a collection of alien characters and tragic-backstory characters of all sorts, Berman and Piller took a deep breath...and flubbed it. Dr. Julian Amoros would be...well, mostly just this guy. A young guy. Like...Michael J. Fox (yes, Michael J. Fox was apparently a prime inspiration for the Chief Medical Officer of Deep Space Nine). After all, Dr. McCoy and Dr. Pulaski were old codgers...and Dr. Crusher was Wesley's Hot Mom...so why not a young, handsome man, fresh out of medical school? And...what if...stop me if you're not following...what if...this may be a bit of a stretch...this young handsome guy...is this believable?...was also...really smart and good at medicine...(too out there?)...and what if...also...he was...maybe...also...perhaps...like...a total asshole?!
Along the way, Dr. Julian Amoros was paired with Siddig El Fadil, a young Sudan-born English actor, and thus received a name change to Dr. Julian Bashir...but a brilliant young asshole he remained. That he is a bit of an asshole is not something that the writers try at all to hide...in fact, they seemingly take a perverse delight, in the pilot and throughout the first few seasons of Deep Space Nine, in using every opportunity to reveal just what an arrogant, self-obsessed little twat this guy is. In the pilot episode, he gives Major Kira a long speech about how he wanted to leave the cushy world of research behind to practice "frontier medicine" out in the "wilderness"--a "wilderness," which Kira tartly points out, is also her home.
Still, if Bashir is an arrogant self-obsessed little twat, he's clearly well-intentioned, something that, while it didn't endear him to the Star Trek fans who throughout Seasons One and Two showered Paramount with hate mail, did provide a clear basis for the character's growth over time. As the years roll on, Bashir, well, grows up, in more ways than one. Romantically, he gives up his stalker-ish pursuit of Jadzia Dax and accepts her as a close friend. Professionally, he becomes more and more hardened and assured, learns his limits, but remains dedicated to helping others, even at significant cost to himself. And, of course, friendship-wise...
Well, we already covered the Bashir-O'Brien bromance a little above, but what makes it so brilliant and effective, besides its basic ordinariness, is that their relationship starts off about as far from a friendship as could be conceivable: with Bashir being the aforementioned arrogant little twat, and O'Brien the working family man absolutely loathing him. But then, O'Brien is an older man, married, more established--and, gradually, as Bashir himself grows more mature, and O'Brien loosens up, the two form a friendship that makes all the more sense for that initial strain. Like most close friendships, the two are very, very, very different people on the surface: the young English genius doctor and the working-class Irish family man. Yet they also enjoy spending time together, playing darts and drinking at Quark's bar and fighting the Battle of Britain--and so, quietly, without any great fanfare but simply through hour after hour of shared activity and quiet mutual support, they become inseparable. This is a friendship a lot closer to real life than the Kirk-Spock duo of Horatio Hornblower and Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Oddly enough, though, after many years of commitment to Bashir's gradual maturation, his biggest (and only drastic) character shift comes in the Fifth Season, when it's revealed that he is not only estranged from his parents (a reasonable conclusion given his personality), but also the result of illegal genetic engineering that turned a slow child into a super-genius. This is at once brilliant and misconceived at the same time--brilliant because it puts an effective sci-fi spin on the essential angst felt by many "genius" kids trained and tortured into that position by demanding or insecure parents, misconceived because it at times threatens to turn the slowly-maturing-asshole Bashir into yet another Spock character in a cast already overstuffed with them. Still, in the long run, Bashir remains Bashir, genetic enhancements or not. Yeah, sure, sometimes he's an asshole--but he's learning, really! And who knows, maybe he has a chance with Ezri Dax after all?
Lieutenant Jadzia Dax is yet another Deep Space Nine character who could easily have been the main alien-viewpoint Spock character on any other Star Trek show. On Deep Space Nine, though, she's actually one of the most normal and grounded, a fun-loving, wise friend-adviser-scientist who also enjoys gambling with Ferengi and has a lot of fun at parties.
The Trill were a race introduced in one of Star Trek The Next Generation's surprisingly frequent if ill-conceived attempts to "develop" its female cast by having them fall for rakish alien ambassadors/ghosts of dubious morality. In this case, the female cast member was Dr. Beverly Crusher, and the rakish alien ambassador of dubious morality was not Loud as a Whisper's deaf mediator Riva, or The Price's part-Betazoid negotiator Devonin Ral, or the aforementioned "metaphasic life form"/ghost-who's-been-making-it-with-your-grandma Ronan from the execrable Sub Rosa, but "Odan," a charming fellow with an extremely bumpy forehead, who, it turns out (gasp! shock!) is actually an alien parasite using a humanoid body as a host. Sadly, and very much coming as a shock to the fervent community of Crusher-Odan (Crodan? Odrusher?) shippers, Odan is injured, the humanoid body dies, the parasite gets transferred into a new host, and Crusher decides to call it quits on the relationship, just in time for the episode's running time to elapse and her profound emotional connection with this charming worm-creature/forehead-man to never come up again.
For some unfathomable reason, Berman and Piller seem to have actually liked this episode--or, at least, they liked the idea of the Trill, an alien race where worm-parasites travel around in humanoid host bodies. Perhaps they also just had sex on the brain, because they quickly developed the idea of a beautiful young alien science officer, a woman so beautiful and so sexy that just about every man on the station would be lusting after her--oh, and who also had a worm-parasite in her stomach.
I don't know what any of this says about the TNG writers' sex lives, and to be honest I don't really want to know.
This was, really, an absolutely fascinating idea for a character, bound up with all kinds of crucial philosophical and moral issues about personhood, identity, consent, knowledge, etc--but it was also an incredibly confusing idea that would absolutely flummox both the writers and most of the actresses who tried out for the role.
"Method acting: you are a beautiful young woman, but also a 300-year-old worm-creature with several lifetimes of memories. Go."
In the end, the role was cast only after all development for the show had wrapped up and the pilot episode was mid-way through filming; and Terry Farrell got the role in large part because she was one of the very few actresses trying out for the role who largely ignored all of this nutty backstory and just tried to portray Dax as a young woman who also happened to be mature and level-headed and have a sense of humor. Also she was a former model and attractive enough to correspond to Berman and co's ideas of a real drop dead worm-creature-woman, which no doubt helped.
Actually, the best thing to come out of Jadzia's philosophically-stultifying nature was another excellent relationship in a show already becoming full of them. Berman and Piller's initial idea for the character was, again, that almost every male character, including Bashir, Quark, and Sisko, would be actively pursuing her affections--Sisko because she and he had a sexual-tension-filled, lost-romantic-possibility backstory together from years before. In trying to come up with ways for Dax's weirdo nature to be actually meaningfully depicted onscreen, however, the writers came up with the far cleverer idea of Sisko having a backstory with Dax when she was an old man in a previous host. Sisko and Dax, then, would relate, not on the basis of attraction or romantic interest, but rather on the basis of a decades-old relationship between a trusted mentor and student--and he would thus affectionately refer to her, in an instantly-iconic sci-fi twist, as "old man."
At a blow, Dax had been given a place on the show that neither revolved around her uber-science skills, nor her overwhelming sexiness. Instead, she and Sisko would share a close, even intimate friendship involving the open sharing of frustrations, problems, struggles, and the giving and accepting of advice--but absolutely no sexual interest or tension or potentiality. In the long run, this quiet relationship benefited both characters enormously. Sisko, especially in his days as a relatively staid Federation-apparatchik-cipher, could share his inner workings with the audience and Dax alike, and thereby be humanized and made sense of--and Dax could show her own personality far better hanging out with Sisko than fending off Bashir's stalker-esque pursuit, and show, too, those "lifetimes of wisdom" in quite clear and practical ways.
Anyway, take what you can get. Like O'Brien, Jadzia Dax does not change all too radically over the course of the show: she becomes more confident, perhaps, and gains different relationships with different members of the cast, including not only a humanizing friendship for Kira but also a marriage to a certain Mr. Worf of the Starship Enterprise--but in the basic aspects of her character, she is neither torn up inside by inner conflict, nor committed to the point of madness to any grand institution or cause. She is, simply, a good, intelligent, wise person, and a good friend.
Actually, something that had not occurred to me until I was sitting here typing this out is that, despite her supposedly Spock-like alien nature, Jadzia Dax is in reality the Riker of the DS9 cast. Like Riker, her bread-and-butter is simply coming off as a level-headed, joyful person with many friends and many hobbies, dedicated to but not obsessed with her job. Unlike Riker, though, she has never been kidnapped and drugged into believing herself to be trapped in an alien insane asylum while simultaneously flashing back to her life in Starfleet. But no one's perfect.
Quark is, in origins, the most fundamentally wrongheaded idea for a main character on a television show since Wesley Crusher. In developing Deep Space Nine, Berman and Piller quickly gelled onto the idea of the space station as an analogue for a town, either in the Wild West or, perhaps, on the coast of North Africa, a former French colony called Casablanca. In both cases, a bar would be a logical fixture: and in both cases, said bar would require a bartender (as well as a police officer, who might, perhaps, share a close, humorous-but-adversarial relationship with the bartender? Just spitballing here). This was, clearly, another opportunity for a non-Federation member of the main cast. But where should he be from? What species should he belong to?
At this point, Berman and Piller made the obviously idiotic and fundamentally poor decision to make their bartender a Ferengi. This they did because, for literally unfathomable reasons, they thought the Ferengi on TNG were funny and/or interesting. Dear Waru on Crseih Station were they wrong.
The Ferengi, for those who have blessedly either never known or forgotten the TNG episodes in which they appear, were created by Gene Roddenberry to serve as the primary antagonists for his perfect utopian Federation in the first season of The Next Generation. A race of stupid, greedy, weak stereotypes of capitalists and/or Jews, the Ferengi had large ears and small eyes and did a lot of jumping around helplessly in their debut episode. About five minutes later, someone on the writing staff of TNG realized that these people were about as threatening as the moles from Redwall, and, as Berman and Piller took over management of the show, they were quickly retooled as slightly threatening comic relief figures, constantly lusting for gold and women but constantly undone by their own stupidity and avarice.
Berman and Piller, however, somehow found all this funny and interesting and worth replicating for their new show, and so they began developing a new Ferengi bartender character, given the improbable name of Quark and tasked with playing the role of Rick in Casablanca, the devious
frenemy of Constable Odo and Commander Sisko alike.
Luckily for both Quark and Deep Space Nine as a whole, they then hired Armin Shimmerman, who had not only been among the very first people to play a Ferengi, way back in TNG Season One, but who also happened to be a very strong actor with an edge and intensity capable of being seen even through the big ears and the spiky teeth and the racist caricature. Then, too, while Quark at the very beginning of Deep Space Nine gets many degrading TNG-Ferengi moments to play, sexually harassing his employees and comically lusting for money, the simple fact of his presence on the main cast, combined with his rather more heroic and romantic inspiration, ultimately ensured that Quark would become, over time, almost sheerly by dint of that time, a real and recognizable human being.
The first ingredient in this was baked right into the original idea for the character: the Rick/Renault relationship with Constable Odo. Present though it might have been in first conception, however, its actual character and evolution owed a lot more to the close friendship and similar working style of actors Armin Shimmerman and Rene Auberjonois--meaning that even through the overt hostility of their character's relationship, a simple sense of companionship and joy at each other's presence always leaks through. Here is a relationship in one sense quite different from the ordinary male-bonding parable of Bashir and O'Brien: a bitter opposition between an alien hyper-capitalist bartender/petty criminal and a lonely hyper-rigid shapeshifter lawman concealing not only co-existence but affection. Yet for all the overt strangeness of the relationship, it remains very, well, human. We share our daily lives with all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons; we are even pitted against many of them, for very basic reasons of occupation, principles, personality; yet for all that, a relationship, any relationship, is based ultimately on some combination of regular time together and mutual understanding. As it turns out, sometimes the people we share these things with most of all are not, in fact, the people who are similar to us, the people we might have chosen as friends--yet this remains a species of genuine friendship nonetheless. Odo and Quark in every natural sense are enemies: but they also share a great deal in common. Both are, in the end, lonely men, with many acquaintances but not many close friends; both are also, in the end, men of principle, men who live their lives according to stringent codes which those around them do not share in the least. Even when they hate one another, they cannot help but understanding.
This, though, leads us into the second major surprise about Quark's character that emerged as Deep Space Nine unfolded: that he is, in fact, like Odo, another man of principle. Like Sisko and like Kira, Quark is deeply, profoundly committed to his own people and his own way of life--but unlike Sisko and Kira, but very much like Odo, he finds himself displaced, cut off from the world in which his beliefs are normal, and surrounded by alien strangers who view him with some combination of condescension and disdain. Despite this, even, to a degree, because of it, Quark does not waver--until, of course, he does.
This then, is the crux of Quark as he was to eventually evolve on Deep Space Nine. At the beginning of the show, he, like all Ferengi before him, was set up as the ultimate in craven, hateful beliefs and practices. The Ferengi were created to be a caricature of everything Americans supposedly hate about the world: hyper-capitalistic, caring for nothing other than profit, slaves to their base lusts, fundamentally cowardly. In setting up such a civilization, making it real, though, the writers of Deep Space Nine were forced, in a sense, to codify it. Ferengi were the way they were, not because they all just happened to be personally greedy and cowardly; they were the way they were because their society believed, with religious fervor, in a code of behavior in which these values, greed and lust, were held up as the highest and purest aspirations in the universe. As Quark would eventually put it, being a Ferengi businessmen meant that he was not just someone exploiting or cheating at random: he was exploiting and cheating according to a specific code, a set of rules, as exacting and strict in their own way as the Ten Commandments or the Law of Leviticus. Armin Shimmerman, even when forced to portray Quark as every bit the low, cowardly Ferengi of yore, always played Quark with an almost unearthly fervor. Quark was not just a greedy pig, unconsciously enslaved to lower desires; he was, at heart, a quite conscious and quite dedicated fanatic.
This fascinating and provocative idea, of someone fervently and even selflessly committed to ideals based entirely around self-interest and greed, ended up being responsible for some of Deep Space Nine's absolute best hours of television. In Bar Association, Quark's unflinching principles are pitted directly against his commitment to family, and the harsh reality that he is not, in fact, on Ferenginar anymore. In Body Parts, one of my absolute favorite episodes in all of Star Trek, he finds himself caught in an absolute bind between his desire to survive, and his entire sense of self-respect, based around a set of inflexible principles and a brutally quantitative scale of value. In Business as Usual, finally, he finds himself caught between the rigid necessity of his beliefs and the overwhelming reality of moral evil and the slowly emerging fact that he does, in fact, have a conscience that goes beyond monetary values.
If the emerging drama of Sisko's character is that he is so committed to his family and his community that there is no longer any clear line dividing what he would do and would not do to protect it, then the emerging drama of Quark's character is that, in fact, he does have a conscience. That is, when push comes to shove, and despite the fervency of his commitment, there are things that Quark will not do for the sake of his inhuman ideals of personal profit. He is not the perfect Ferengi; he is, after all, only another hew-mon with a moral conscience and a commitment to community. In Ferengi society, this makes him, ultimately, a bizarre outcast; but on Deep Space Nine, among this bizarre collection of alien and human do-gooders, he is a friend, a comforter, a shoulder to cry on, a pillar of community and family.
If Sisko represents the struggle of someone who is committed to ideals and institutions that are, at least in some sense, good and right and moral, Quark represents the struggle of someone who is equally committed to ideals and institutions that are, in the ultimate balance, obviously gross and immoral. For all that, he retains the dignity of his convictions, as well as the dignity of his humanity and his emerging conscience. He is a Ferengi to the bitter end--but not a bad man for all that.
Jake Sisko is the original main cast member about which there is, without a doubt, the least to say. Although he retained his place in the opening credits of each and every episode of Deep Space Nine, Cirroc Lofton appeared in fewer episodes than some recurring characters. This is not, though, really a problem; for Jake is a character that manages to be a good and positive member of the cast and show and setting almost entirely by not fitting into it at all. This is a show about war and politics and moral decisions of incalculable weight; Sisko is a slacker kid who eventually becomes a writer. A Jake Sisko closer to the heart of Deep Space Nine would be a much less pleasant one.
Child characters on television, after all, have a very unpleasant history. Wesley Crusher, the Hindenberg of child characters on television, was barely two years in the past at the time Deep Space Nine came on the air. The overriding concern of Berman and Piller in creating Jake Sisko was thus, put simply: Die Wesley Die Die.
Jake was created then, as much as possible, to not fit into any of the molds left by Wesley Crusher, saver of the ship and wooer of shapeshifting alien princesses. He would not be a genius; he would not want to enter Starfleet. He would play absolutely no role on the bridge or in the main plots and dangers of life on Deep Space Nine. He would have a friend, the bad-boy Huck-Finn Ferengi Nog, and they would hang out at the sci-fi mall of the Promenade, and occasionally get into low-stakes hijinks. He would also, most importantly, have a good relationship with his Dad.
That last, of course, would prove the most consequential aspect of Jake's character, from the very first scene of Emissary to the last of What We Leave Behind. Jake Sisko is a young man raised by a single father, who also happens to be the protagonist of the show. In that sense, he is, to a large degree, a mirror, a lens through which to view Captain Sisko. Like Sisko's relationship with Dax, this humanizing lens of fatherhood ended up being absolutely essential for Sisko's character through many rough patches of writer-enforced squareness; but even as Sisko's character found itself and came into his own, that relationship remained just as important, just as central. For Sisko, again, is in the end a family man; he is a builder of communities. And through whatever Galactic crises or Bajoran coups he may pass, the first and last community to which he is committed is his family, and his son.
Jake Sisko's best hours of Deep Space Nine all center around this relationship, and all point to the same overriding idea: that no matter what goes on in the wider world, it is absolutely essential that this one relationship remain solid, that Jake Sisko and Benjamin Sisko remain together, committed to one another as ever. The Visitor, one of Deep Space Nine's finest hours, takes this idea and stretches it across a cosmic canvas of time and space, the events of the whole series and beyond, all of which in some sense depend upon the enduring love between a young man and his father.
If there's a theme that's emerging from these character profiles, it's that Deep Space Nine is, to a very large degree, a show built around friendships. Quark and Odo, Kira and Odo, Bashir and O'Brien: these are taken just as seriously, if not more seriously, than the romantic relationships like Dax and Worf, Sisko and Kasidy, (eventually) Kira and Odo. There is a certain comforting realism to this that cuts very much against the grain, not only of Star Trek, but American popular culture in general: that as important as romantic relationships and romantic commitments may be (and Deep Space Nine was the first Star Trek show to have its main characters actually get married, as opposed to living in a perpetual cheerless will-they-or-won't-they Schrodinger's Cat of relationship possibilities), still communities are also built out of, and held together by, non-romantic and non-sexual friendships of all sorts, like that between two good friends or two good enemies, or a father and his son.
As Avery Brooks himself was very aware of, too, this centrality of the bond between Sisko and Jake could not help but have, in a 20th and 21st century context, a rather startling political and social valency: a black man and his son. Deep Space Nine would not only accept this, but run with it, as Sisko gradually built up a black family of his own, with his father and his new wife and his son, as the unbreakable nucleus of a community encompassing the station and Bajor and, perhaps, the whole Galaxy.
Civilizations may rise and fall, Empires crumble, but no matter what, Sisko and Jake will be together, and will love each other.
Or will they? In a Galaxy full of gods and demons and dangers, nothing is totally secure, as What We Leave Behind would make heartbreakingly clear.
Lieutenant Commander Worf was the first character to be added to the show after the pilot, at the beginning of its fourth season, and ended up being a really remarkable and strikingly new addition not only to Deep Space Nine, but the franchise as a whole. This never-before-seen original work of creative genius, with a totally new background and a really cool new Klingon weapon (it's called the Mek'leth), would go on to win the hearts of viewers with the astonishing originality of his--
Yes, yes, we all get it. Worf was not, in fact, a new addition to the franchise, but a rather old one. When The Next Generation went off the air for the good before the beginning of Deep Space Nine's third season, it opened up a hole in the franchise and on television that offered its little brother, for perhaps the first time, the chance to really stand apart and come into its own. This the writers attempted to do throughout the third season, even as Voyager came out of nowhere to usurp the audience and accolades left idle by The Next Generation--but as Deep Space Nine became more itself, it also ran up against a rather immediate problem: the ratings really weren't that great. TNG's audience had been big enough and fervent enough to get a large number of people to watch TNG's little baby cousin as well: but now TNG was gone, a new baby was on the way, and the old baby cousin was shaving his head and growing a beard, and people were no longer so sure.
The obvious answer? Add back in stuff from TNG! Berman and Behr, at the behest of the studio, came up with a plan to draw back in audiences with a bang. Not only would they create a new arc and a totally new status quo, with Cardassia fallen into chaos and newly aggressive Klingons back as villains, but in doing so they would also bring back one of the most popular characters from TNG: no less than Worf, the Son of Mogh himself.
This was a bit of pandering move; but as an at-first uncomfortable Behr quickly realized, it also made quite a bit of sense, even on its own terms. The Klingons, after all, were a major part of the alliance of Alpha Quadrant powers poised to threaten the Dominion by their alliance with the Federation: wouldn't the logical next step of their infiltration and disruption process be to do their best to disrupt and destroy this alliance? Also, of all the characters on TNG, none would fit in so well as Worf, another member of an alien culture with a tragic backstory caught between worlds and brought to suffering by his unswerving commitment to individual principle and moral honor and the very different communities, Klingon and Federation, to which he belonged.
This basic similarity between Worf's character values and those of most of Deep Space Nine's cast was not precisely a coincidence; for in a very real sense, Worf could count himself if not precisely the father, at least the grand-father or great-uncle of Deep Space Nine as it eventually emerged.
In a sea of utopian sameness, Worf on TNG had been the one character in a mostly homogenous cast constantly pushing the writers to think (and write) about alien perspectives, to think (and write) about the complexities of politics and personal drama and the clashing requirements of honor. He was the very first character with a tragic backstory and a bad attitude to grace the franchise, and thus responsible for all those who came after him. Without Worf, would TNG have ever have tried to do a long-term story arc, let alone one centering around the complexities of alien politics? Without Worf pushing them towards drama and personal conflict, would Berman and Piller ever have been enticed into coming up with Ensign Ro, and therefore Deep Space Nine?
Anyway, by the time Worf came onboard his new station, it had already developed a robust identity as a show about precisely those things for which Worf had come to stand on The Next Generation: strong characters rooted in culture and context and struggling with the consequences of their commitments to clashing principles and institutions. This was exactly the right place for Worf to make his home, particularly as the Klingons emerged as antagonists to the Federation once again. Worf's character had always been defined by the fact that he belonged to two totally separate worlds: that he was at one and the same time a participant in Klingon politics, the member of a Klingon house, and a Starfleet officer who had sworn an oath to the Federation. This conflict, though, had never really emerged on TNG, where the Federation and Klingons were trusted allies. But if they became enemies...?
At a stroke, not only did Deep Space Nine have a new, dynamic character, a crowd favorite--it had also made its own yet another developed alien culture, with its own history and contradictions and problems. The Klingons were here to stay--and over the last three seasons of Deep Space Nine, the groundwork was laid to explore the obvious contradictions of their society as never before. Ironically, the Worf who was introduced on Deep Space Nine as an outcast from Klingon society would become, in Deep Space Nine, far more rooted in the specific context of the Klingon Empire in his own time and place than ever before.
The honorable outcast--who would not obey his society when it acted immorally, precisely because of his commitment to it--would become a deeper and more crucial part of this society than ever before, gaining Klingon friends, a new Klingon house, and, ultimately, a role at the very center of the Empire's destiny. Along the way, he would get married, gain new friends and a new home on Deep Space Nine, and lose a wife. He would remain, though, unswervingly himself: a man committed to honor, to principle, first and foremost, but also to painful loyalty and obedience to flawed, concrete institutions and people. If Worf changed less over the course of his three seasons than the main cast of Deep Space Nine, it was, in part, because he was already developed and three-dimensional: but also because the whole point of his character was that he would not change, would not compromise honor or principle, even in the face of the whole Galaxy and its events. In the end, the whole Klingon Empire would be forced to change to suit him.
Michael Dorn did not have as fun a time on Deep Space Nine as he did in the more carefree atmosphere of The Next Generation; but he has never ceased to repeat, at the time and since, that his best moments as both an actor and character came on Deep Space Nine. On the space station of committed outcasts, the big-foreheaded Mr. T of Star Trek found his footing as never before.
Lieutenant Ezri Dax was added to the show in its last season because the studio messed up a contract negotiation. Terry Farrell, after six years of increasing success playing the Riker of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, found herself a bit bored and dissatisfied with her standing on the show; but there was only one year left, and she was not about to just walk away. The studio, though, did not respond well to her dissatisfaction, and a series of crescendoing slights and insults later, Farrell had angrily walked away from the show altogether, leaving the unfortunate creatives of Deep Space Nine bemused and forced to find some way to explain her imminent absence from the main credits. In the end, with no enthusiasm and a lot of regret, they took the obvious path, killing her off in the finale of Season Six to some genuine emotion and a fair amount of contrivance.
The obvious next step after Jadzia's death, though, did come with a certain amount of excitement for the creatives of a show that had long since found its groove with most of its main and recurring cast. Jadzia, after all, was not only a nice, easy-going person; she was also a Trill, meaning that a new character could be fairly seamlessly introduced into the show, who would be at once the same as what had gone before, including all of Jadzia's memories, and dramatically different (drink, drink, for we know not when we go, nor where!), as different as they wanted her to be. Who would this new Trill, this new Dax be? What would she be like? The task of planning Deep Space Nine's last season and the conclusion of its major arcs was temporarily eclipsed by the task of coming up with a new character and successfully introducing her into the dizzyingly-complex mix of the last season of a dizzyingly-complex show. What would Ezri bring that was new, and different, and exciting?
As it turned out, the departure of Jadzia proved to a degree a blessing in disguise. As already stated, the basic nature of the Dax character, despite being rather fascinating in itself, had largely been abandoned in favor of Jadzia's qualities as a joyful friend and scientist and badass. Sure, she had an alien worm-creature in her belly with six lifetimes worth of memories: but she had been trained for this, she was the best of the best, she was in every way that mattered a really capable and swell person. The weirder qualities of her character only served to make her awesome, not to fundamentally put her identity in question.
Ezri, though, would be entirely different. She would not be the best of the best, would not have spent her whole life studiously yearning and preparing to host an ancient worm-creature. She would be a young woman, and she would not have wanted to be joined. She had volunteered in an emergency to save the symbiont's life: and then found herself a totally different person, struggling to make sense of the six personalities and sets of memory suddenly implanted in her mind.
Here was a way, finally, to explore the basic problem of identity always implicit in the Trill as a species and Dax as a character--in a fun, likable, easily-understood package. Ezri Dax would be a young woman with an identity crisis: something in itself eminently relateable, even if the source of her identity crisis and consequent insecurities was a bit out of this world. Terry Farrell had made her bizarro character work by intuiting that a young woman with an alien worm-creature and six lifetimes of experience would act like, well, any other young woman, with only a bit more wisdom and confidence than might otherwise be expected. Now, though, the writers could show the reverse side of that: that a young woman with an alien worm-creature and six lifetimes of experience could also act like any other young woman, with a great deal of confusion and insecurity and self-doubt after having had her life and sense of self turned upside down by events outside her control.
In the end, it was a bit of a stroke of luck that it was Jadzia, of all characters, who had to be killed off after failed contract negotiations: for no other character among the ensemble so naturally provided her own replacement. Introducing Ezri would be far more straightforward than introducing a totally new replacement for O'Brien or Sisko or Quark. She could be, like Deep Space Nine itself, the same...but different (so up my boys, away my boys, and pass it round to me: the longer we sit here and drink, the merrier we shall be).
Of course, with only a season to work with, Ezri could hardly change as much as the other characters--but she could get her own basic arc, the arc of the show in miniature, from confusion and dislocation towards a renewed sense of self and community. Along the way, she could try to figure out the confusion of her former husband Worf--a very soap-opera-esque plotline taken into bizarro sci-fi land by the hook of "I was the husband of the last woman to carry the symbiont now inside you, whose memories you carry." This isn't always as effective as it could be (televised romantic drama rarely is), but it does end up in a satisfactory place, with Worf as the good friend/big brother figure to Ezri the confused young woman, and Ezri the conscience and insightful outside perspective essential to Worf the staid humorless honor junkie: another good, bizarro friendship on a show full of them. And then there's the handsome reformed rake Julian Bashir to think of...
Take what you can get. In the end, Ezri may take a bit too much screen time at times away from the more developed regular characters--but she also fits right into the ensemble without much stress, and adds an interesting new character dynamic on top of it. I also personally find her quite a bit cuter than Jadzia, just so you know.
This is the main-credit regular cast; but as already stated, there are numerous recurring characters, some of which are both more interesting and more essential to the plot of Deep Space Nine than a number of the main-credit folks. But this post is already too long, so in lieu of more character profiles, we will move to the next section of our magnum opus longissimum: analysis of the political and cultural themes of the show, seen through the lens of the changes, tensions, rises and falls, of the various peoples and institutions and Empires to occupy its landscape. Again, what makes Deep Space Nine so different from The Next Generation is precisely the degree to which each and every character is bound up with some larger context, some culture or people or political institution, to which they are committed, and from which they view the world. So let's zoom out for just a second, and take a look at some of that background.
Bajor and the Perils of Assimilation
As stated above, the genetic origins of Deep Space Nine were not, in fact, in John Michael Straczynski brainwave about setting a science-fiction show on a space station and then making it the most important place in the universe, but rather in the planet Bajor, established for backstory-related reasons in the fifth season of TNG. As originally conceived, Deep Space Nine would revolve entirely around this people and its struggles to recover from a brutal, decades-long military occupation. As it turned out, though, cold feet on the part of Berman and Piller quickly led to our heroes' relocation from the surface of Bajor to a space station nearby, and the addition of a wormhole leading to parts unknown--and thereby the seed of the whole broader arc of Deep Space Nine, defending Bajor and the Alpha Quadrant from the Dominion. Still, Bajor and the Bajorans remained an essential part of the show, through Major Kira, through Sisko's status as Emissary of the Prophets, and through the occasional story still focused on Bajor and its internal and external politics and conflicts.
If Bajor was going to be a principal element of Deep Space Nine, though, it would have to have a lot more to it than the rather generic Roma-Palestinian pastiche of Ensign Ro. The Bajorans had suffered horribly at the hands of the Cardassians, had taken up arms and turned to terrorism to resist their oppressors--but now, the Cardassians were gone, and a wormhole had been discovered that, for the first time, made Bajor a significant place in the Galaxy. The Federation, a major power that had ignored Bajor's plight for decades, had been invited in to provide humanitarian aid and defense: but how long would they stay there, and would they merely take the Cardassians' place as another Imperialist power intent on exploiting Bajor's resources? Can the Federation be trusted?
In scoping out this situation, though, the writers needed, well, more to define Bajor, and its conflict with the Federation, than merely the fact that the Bajorans had tragic pasts and bad attitudes and, therefore, every reason to mistrust Sisko and co. There needed to be more to define Bajor than just their tragic past, something that could be easily conveyed and made sense of by audiences, but also had the potential for greater depth and exploration.
Michael Piller seems to have been the one to come up with the answer to this dilemma; and, in a very real sense, it marked the biggest break from Gene Roddenberry's idea of Star Trek ever conceived. The Bajorans would be very very religious, and their religion would be good.
At a single blow, Piller provided a clear point of conflict between Bajor and the Federation, a lightning rod for all concerns about culture and identity and independence, clearer and more complex than just being unjustifiably suspicious of the Federation (who, after all, up to this point in Star Trek history had never been shown as anything but the Very Nicest Folks). Gene Roddenberry had always insisted that the Federation, as a future utopia, simply had no religion at all, and all major human religions had long since died out. This struck most of the writers of TNG as both crazy and slightly offensive--but as with the other Commandments of Roddenberry, they didn't really want to make waves by directly contradicting them. Having the Bajorans be religious--and having that religiosity be respected and affirmed and taken seriously--was an excellent backdoor way to achieve the same ends. More to the point, by accepting the established secularism of the Federation, an immediate contrast and conflict was created between these two civilizations, the greater and the lesser, the technical and the spiritual.
There's a lot that can be said about this move--but there's no question that a part of what was going on has to do with the gradual evolution of American post-colonialism and anti-Imperialism since the 1960s. American liberalism had long balked at the idea of open conquest of "lesser breeds"--but there was no real attempt to hide American liberal belief in not only their own superiority, but also the inevitability of all peoples and creeds one day conforming to the same liberal secular way of life ensconced in America. The path towards that inevitability might be gentle--but it could hardly be respectful.
Piller, though, was a bit more sensitive about these things. Not incredibly religious himself, he nonetheless had been deeply influenced by Buddhism--and like many people interested in this complex of issues, the blithe assumption of superiority made by secular Westerners bothered him deeply. Was this not merely Imperialism by another name? Even if the West didn't conquer by force, it would conquer by means of ideas, spreading its way of life to the exclusion of all others, to the exclusion of the "mystical" and "spiritual" values of older civilizations.
This is, pretty clearly, where the portrayal of Bajoran religion started in the pilot episode: a vague analogue of Buddhism, headed by a Dalai Lama figure ("the Kai"), and full of monks and clerics clad in Buddhist-inspired outfits. Their religion, though, would be a bit more science-fictional--it would be based on the real existence of mysterious Prophets, aliens existing in the wormhole who were, by nature, totally outside the realm of linear time. A rather odd religious dynamic was thereby created between the Federation and Bajoran characters on the show: all sides would acknowledge that the Prophets were real, that they had built the wormhole, that they could see past and future due to their nature beyond linear time. What they would radically disagree over would be whether or not the Prophets were truly gods, whether they could be trusted, whether they should be worshiped, whether they were actually as interested in the lives and fates of Bajor and their worshipers as they were claimed to be.
As someone who studies religion academically, I do not, actually know of any strong analogue to this in the history of religions: though it is not entirely unlike debates between early Christians and Roman pagans in which the basic question was not whether or not "the gods" existed, but what their nature was, whether they were good spiritual entities or malevolent demons, and whether, therefore, they should be worshiped or not.
In any event, the stage was set for a showdown between Bajor and the Federation, a culture clash for the ages. This the show never quite delivered, though it did go quite a fair way towards exploring the basic dynamic between the religious and non-religious, in ways both subtle and obvious, effective and ineffective. This conflict is most effectively pictured, generally speaking, through the main characters, the fervent religiosity of Major Kira and the rather blithe secularism and scientism of the Starfleet cast.
The last episode of the first season, In the Hands of the Prophets, sought to advance the conflict between Bajor and the Federation by turning the Bajorans from otherworldly Buddhists to American Evangelicals upset with the teaching of science in the schools, to rather mixed effect. The most far-reaching thing that came out of the episode was simply its impact on the various characters involved: for the first time in the history of the franchise, Sisko gives a speech to his son on the value of religion and the necessity of not assuming the correctness of their secular way of life, and in turn Kira comes to believe that the Federation is not actually a threat to her beliefs. We also meet Vedek Bareil, a rather lazy copy-paste "good religious leader," as well as Vedek Winn, a rather more effective "evil religious leader"--and then quickly get to see Winn win (I've been waiting years to say that), and become Kai, or Pope-Dalai-Lama of the whole planet of Bajor. From this point, inspired by this Papalesque intrigue and the lapsed Catholicism of some of the show's writers, the Bajoran religion began to take on a few external elements of Catholicism, from the dress of the Kai to the existence of literal evil spirits, the Pah-Wraiths: who are interesting in concept but never quite rise above the level of horror-movie cliches, though admittedly a possessed Dukat with red eyes is a striking image, if nothing else.
Further episodes in the first three seasons explore the basic dynamic between Bajor and the Federation, which comes down, in the end, to one overwhelming and fundamental fact: no matter what differences Bajor may have with the Federation, at the end of the day it simply needs the Federation to protect it. The opening three-parter to season two flatly establishes that if Bajor were ever to drive the Federation away and declare independence, they would be immediately and inevitably reconquered by the Cardassians. The addition of the Klingons and the Dominion to that roster of villains hardly alters the basic math of the situation. Bajor and the Federation will make nice, because of the various Imperialist powers who would very much like to control the Wormhole and therefore Bajor, the Federation is the one the Bajorans can most live with.
The moral arc of the first four seasons when it comes to Bajor is quite clear: Bajor will and does recover from the Occupation, rebuild, unify, and in the process inevitably draw closer to the Federation, which it will eventually and inevitably join as a full member. We've seen this story before: it is, in fact, in some sense just an episode of TNG stretched out to multiple years. The Federation is good; the Bajorans can safely and happily join it, permitted to retain their backward religious beliefs so long as they pose no obstacle to its integration into a greater and more enlightened society.
To the credit of the show, though, all of this is, gradually and then suddenly, thrown into confusion. First, Sisko's status as the Emissary of the Prophets, Bajor's prophesied Moses-Noah-David figure, creates a link between Bajor and the Federation that goes well beyond expediency. And while Sisko at first actively rejects the title, gradually, then decisively, he comes to accept it. And then, suddenly, in the Fifth Season episode Rapture, he embraces it, as no one had ever imagined he would. Suddenly, the hero of our show, the representative of the secular-liberal Federation, is seeing visions of the future, prophesying individual destinies on the Promenade, desiring with total devotion to fulfill his prophesied role and achieve total understanding of the cosmos.
Something, clearly, has gone wrong with the Star Trek secular-liberal-Imperialist script. As if to underscore that, the writers chose that episode to announce, seemingly at random, the inevitable event that the entire show up that point had obviously been leading to: Bajor was officially entering the Federation! Yes, at long last, the smaller, more backward civilization is going to take its rightful place in the institution of institutions, the government of governments, America the Beautiful, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, the Manifest Destiny of the Galaxy: the United Federation of Planets.
And then, of course, Sisko the Prophet breaks into the ceremony, like Ezekiel in the throes of a vision, and insists that Bajor must not join the Federation, or it will be destroyed. And so Bajor doesn't join the Federation--and indeed, the matter is never again brought up through the very end of the show. Bajor signs a non-aggression pact with the Dominion to survive the initial onslaught of the war; but then, when Deep Space Nine is retaken and the Prophets have clearly declared their own allegiance, Bajor joins the war as an independent participant, resists every encroachment from the Romulans and others, and at the end of the show remains an ally of the Federation, but remains independent.
What to make of this? For many years many fans have seen the fact that Bajor does not join the Federation as nothing more than a slip-up, an error, on the part of the writers. The whole point of the show, from Emissary onwards, was to rebuild Bajor and have it enter the Federation. To have it end the show still itself, still not a part of the larger, better entity, is simply an unforgiveable error.
In the recent Deep Space Nine documentary What We Left Behind, though, Ira Steven Behr and the other writers collected draw attention to how happy they are that they managed to end the show without making Bajor a part of the Federation; and then go on to make that a key element in their imaginary version of Season 8 of DS9.
This only makes sense. After all, as we will see, Deep Space Nine is not, in the end, nearly as sanguine about the Federation and its Manifest Destiny to encompass all civilizations as Gene Roddenberry and the mavens of TNG had been. As it turns out, in fact, the Federation does have some flaws to it, does have some weasels under the coffee-table; and so, there is, in the end, good reason for the Bajorans to doubt how well they would fare as members of the Federation, doubt that the liberal-secular utopia would actually have a place for them and their culture and their religion, rather than doing its very best to squash it flat.
And so: Bajor does not join the Federation. And Sisko, having fully embraced his calling as Emissary, makes it very clear by the end of the show that he is just as committed to Bajor--her people and her culture and her gods--as he is to the Federation and Starfleet. Indeed, in his last act on the show, in his his final destiny, he is far more Emissary than Starfleet officer.
As some other patriots have said: Vive la Bajor!
The Klingons Are Not Alright
The Bajorans were, by time and concept alike, the beginning of Deep Space Nine as a separate show. The Klingons came into the world of DS9 only quite late, and in a much more disruptive fashion. The Fourth Season decision to introduce Worf as a new character, and move the Klingons from rarely-appearing allies to regular villains, took Ira Behr and his writing crew very far afield from where they had planned to go. The Klingons had been a central element of both TOS and TNG; but up til this point they had been barely a peripheral element of DS9. Dax had fought with some ancient Klingons in the fun one-off Blood Oath; Quark had gone head-to-head with Gowron, Supreme Chancellor of the High Council, to great comedic effect in House of Quark; but besides that, there was very little to say about the Klingon Empire. They were as they had been in TNG; allies of the Federation with extremely strange beliefs and a rather corrupt government.
The genius of The Way of the Warrior, though, was to do the one thing that TNG had often threatened, but had never really followed through with: take the Imperialistic warrior culture of the Klingons, committed to conquest above all else, and allow it to take its natural, destructive course on Galactic events. The Klingons would invade Cardassia, not just because they feared the Dominion, but also because...well, why the hell not? The Klingons are a warrior culture that values martial prowess and victory above all else, and conquers other peoples as its bread-and-butter--it has also been established, on TNG, as possessing an incredibly corrupt government and leadership. Why wouldn't the Klingons try to conquer a weakened power like Cardassia?
TNG had always played with the idea of the Klingons as potentially villainous, most notably in the Klingon Civil War plotline and the alternate-timeline shenanigans of Yesterday's Enterprise--but it had never actually bitten the bullet. DS9 could, and would; and in this, it would be greatly aided by the presence of Lieutenant Worf, a Klingon who could showcase both the problems and the potentials of this culture.
Worf had been established way back on TNG as having been raised by humans, but with a fervent commitment to his native culture and religion and way of life rooted in personal research and practice. He was, in other words, the Textbook Klingon: deeply committed on a personal level, but standing entirely apart from the actual society he idolized. In its Klingon Civil War arc, TNG had delighted in showing that, in a Klingon society actually riven by internal conflict and corruption, Worf's commitment to Klingon ways and Klingon honor made him, in a sense, the truest Klingon of all: someone willing to take the fall, merely for honor, on behalf of his species' wicked leaders, someone willing to sacrifice selflessly for his people, even when they failed to live up to every one of his and their standards.
Deep Space Nine took that idea, and ran with it. The Klingon Empire as a whole, as represented and led by the slimy politician Gowron, cared far more for personal advancement and victory than for personal integrity and honor--but Worf would stand for just the opposite principle. They might forsake their commitments and alliances for the sake of victory and plunder: he would not. For them, honor meant one's public face, the regard of other Klingons and Klingon society as a whole, first and foremost, whether that honor was based on truth or falsehood, moral actions or immoral ones: for Worf, it meant personal integrity and moral rectitude, one's true face, whether it was acknowledged by the world or not. In TNG's Sins of the Father, Worf had been willing to sacrifice his public honor and name to preserve his integrity and to serve the good of the Empire and the Federation--on Deep Space Nine, he does that again, multiple times, even as the Empire wavers between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, again and again and again.
But in the end, Worf wins.
He wins, though, not merely by being the Textbook Klingon standing totally alone with his own integrity, but by actually making a Klingon friend or two along the way, actually involving himself with the culture and political system he had so steadfastly avoided. The Klingon friend is Martok, who, despite being a 100% full-blooded Klingon raised on the homeworld, is, as it turns out, actually a good man, actually a believer in the ideals of honor and personal integrity on which the culture supposedly runs. That he is also a working-class hero, having raised himself up by sheer dedication from enlisted private to commander of the whole Klingon military, may have a lot to do with that. Unlike Gowron, he is a soldier, a warrior, first, and a politician second: and so he has no interest in merely wantonly spending soldiers' lives for personal advancement. More to the point, he really likes Worf, sees him as he is, a Klingon who lives up to the ideals of his culture and exceeds them while bringing an outside perspective and set of experiences from his life in the Federation; and he brings him into his House, and therefore into the heart of the Empire.
In the end, Worf will return the favor: but only after being lectured by Ezri Dax on the fact that the Klingon Empire is actually and clearly not alright, that as long as Worf or anyone else could remember, it has been run by power-hungry politicians without any regard for honor or morality or truth: and that Worf therefore has a responsibility to do something about that. And so he does.
The Klingon arc on Deep Space Nine is, from the standpoint of the original conception of the show, an afterthought; but it ends up being a truly fitting culmination of all the Klingon storytelling, and all of Worf's character arc, from The Next Generation. Worf keeps his commitments and loyalties, and lives them out: and in the end, he changes the fate of his whole people, forever.
Not bad for the guy who always gets denied.
Cardassia the Damned
Like Bajor, Cardassia's involvement in Deep Space Nine goes back to its roots in TNG, and the fact that, in creating the Bajoran people and giving them a tragic backstory, the writers needed someone, somewhere to be the badguys oppressing them. In the first draft, it was the Romulans--but then someone got the idea of using those what'sacallums, those new villains, the Cardassiwhatsitsnames, instead. Why not? The Romulans, truth be told, were always a bit boring and generic as villains: the Cardassians so far had very little substance, but at least they were new, and had a cool makeup design, and some potential.
Not long before, the Cardassians had owed their very existence to a similar twist of fate. The writers wanted to do a show about the lingering effects of war on veterans; they therefore needed a villain who could be established as having fought a war, within living memory, with the Federation. Unfortunately, no such race was available; the Klingons were allies, the Borg were, well, the Borg, and the Romulans had been previously established as having existed in total isolation for all of the preceding decades. Hence: the Cardassians, a new, never-before-seen race of intelligent reptilian badguys who, it turned out, had actually been fighting a war with the Federation somewhere in the background through at least some of the early seasons of TNG.
Well, take what you can get. The Cardassians, in their first appearance, were portrayed as intelligent and capable and threatening: but without too many outstanding characteristics. Ensign Ro didn't really change that calculation, but it did give them more villainous deeds to their credit, as the people responsible for the occupation and ruthless depopulation of the Bajoran homeworld. If the new spinoff was going to be set on Bajor, it was logical that the Cardassians would play a very large role indeed, both in the legacy of their Occupation and in their continuing threat against Bajor and our heroes. If Deep Space Nine was imagined as a Western town, the Cardassians would be the Indians, lurking beyond the horizon as a foreign, ever-present threat: not precisely a glamorous role, but one that ensured that they would appear quite a bit, and would therefore have to be developed in far, far more detail than before.
The first step of this new development came with the casting of Marc Alaimo to play the role of the main Cardassian villain of the show, Gul Dukat, former Prefect of Bajor. As it turned out, Marc Alaimo had also played the first Cardassian commander, Gul Macet, in the Cardassians' first appearance--and, indeed, Michael Westmore had based the Cardassians' appearance in part on Alaimo's physiology, with his lean face and long, muscled neck. Alaimo played Dukat, though, as far more than just your ordinary sneering villain: he played him with an intensity, a swagger and self-confidence and brute egoism, that were more than a match for any of the regulars of the show. This Dukat did not see himself as a second-rate villain cowtowing to a morally superior band of heroes: he saw himself, rather, as the true hero of the story, the center of attention at all times, obviously admirable in all that he did. Alaimo played Dukat, always, as a primma donna anticipating and exulting in adoring applause from the wings.
From this one performance, and from the background work necessary to make Deep Space Nine, in its physical environment, a truly Cardassian station, a new Cardassian character emerged. The Cardassians were confident, arrogant even, sure of the superiority of their culture and their way of life; they were also intelligent, competent, articulate, ready and eager not only to do great things but to tell you all about it afterwards. As further Cardassians appeared and were cast, this trend only extended itself: Cardassians loved to talk, and they were really, really good at it. On TNG, David Warner made his Cardassian torturer as much a man of culture as a sadist. On DS9, Garak gave the audience the sense that he took far more pleasure from the thoughts in his head and the cleverness of his expression than from any vulgar success. Cardassians took pride in themselves, their people, their accomplishments. They were not thugs or criminals or grunting warriors. They were, at least in their own heads, superior in every way.
They had, however, committed some crimes. Duet, the First Season episode mentioned above, works so well in large part because it pits the arrogant assurance and articulateness of the Cardassian people against the absolute moral horror of what the Cardassian people have actually done: abused, massacred, exploited, tortured, repressed, exterminated the Bajoran people. This is the truth; but the Cardassian people would never accept it, precisely because it runs so counter to their own assured self-image, their own group egoism. War criminals would be praised and enshrined by the State, and their victims suppressed and forgotten. How could it be otherwise?
As Deep Space Nine developed, the arrogant swagger of Dukat and co was gradually transformed into a picture of an entire culture with both Roman and Orwellian dimensions. On the one hand, Cardassia was a proud culture of families, extended clans and aged patriarchs treated with almost religious devotion by their subordinates; on the other hand, Cardassia was a society prostrate at the feet of the State, an all-powerful deity who watched all its citizens all the time, punished them without trial, demanded unceasingly the highest degree of sacrifice from each one of them, and could never, ever, ever be wrong.
Like most cultures on Deep Space Nine, though, Cardassia was ultimately explored through its characters more than through abstract events. Dukat, on the one hand, revealed the underlying reality of the Cardassian system: a man of base lusts and even baser pride, adept at manipulating the system to satisfy his desires, and equally adept at justifying every single one of his actions, no matter how selfish or evil or outright nonsensical. Garak, on the other hand, showed another side of the same system: the fervent belief, the sense of place and purpose and belonging, that it offered to those who took part in it, those who were abused and conditioned almost from birth to serve it well--and the resulting dislocation when they were cast out, and forced to come to terms with a broader universe. Ultimately, though, it would be Damar, the least confident and least intelligent Cardassian among the recurring characters initially, an easily-led, easily-manipulated brute with a drinking problem, who would offer the possibility of redemption for Cardassia. For unlike the pride of Dukat, unlike even the unscrupulous fanaticism of Garak, Damar was little more than a soldier, snatched up and elevated to the heights of power to be a tool, a patsy, first for Dukat and then for the Dominion. For despite or rather because he was capable of being manipulated and humiliated and made utterly miserable and self-loathing, Damar was also capable of a kind of wholehearted change, reversal, even repentance of which neither Dukat or Garak truly was. Damar could change his mind; and if he could, then so could the rest of the Cardassian people.
In the end, though, Cardassia would not be quite so lucky. What Deep Space Nine does with Cardassia is, really, totally unprecedented in the history of the franchise. TOS had had its villains, the Klingons and the Romulans; but its impetus, the impetus of TNG and even the TOS movies, had been towards peace, reconciliation, alliance. Alliance with the Klingons, in The Undiscovered Country, is obviously the right thing to do: to avoid bloodshed, to bring about understanding, no matter how many horrific crimes the Klingons had committed in conquering and subjugating other species or waging war. These crimes were, simply, not relevant. There was no moral scale to be balanced, no possibility of justice or redress; such considerations were bigotry, propaganda, revenge, all totally inappropriate for civilized beings. Back in Ensign Ro, it had been revealed that the Federation had, quite simply, stood back and done nothing when Cardassia annexed and abused Bajor; after all, it was an internal matter, and none of the Federation's business. In the end, no matter what the Cardassians might have done, the answer was clear: peace, peace at all costs, peace in our time. Anything else was luxury.
The arc of Cardassia on Deep Space Nine, though, is from the very beginning something of an entirely different nature. Cardassia has sinned against Bajor, and then refused to acknowledge her sins. She has refused to take responsibility for her crimes, refused to repent and change her ways; and so, she suffers the consequences. Cardassia falls into chaos; she is invaded by the Klingons, and forced to turn to her former enemies the Federation and the Bajorans for help; but even then, faced with the possibility of a totally new situation, a humbled Cardassia finding some way to continue thanks to the help of her former adversaries, a letting go of her group pride and the hope of dominating the Galaxy, she quickly returns to her vomit. Dukat, the ultimate embodiment of Cardassian pride and Cardassian refusal to repent, becomes the leader of Cardassia, and has her submit, body and soul, to the Dominion in exchange for the fantastical recreation of her lost Imperial dreams, the prospect of playing some role, even that of slave, in the inevitable domination of the whole Alpha Quadrant. Cardassia will not acknowledge her sins or learn from them; Cardassia will be ruler of the Galaxy, even if it is only as the first conquered, humiliated subject of the Dominion.
Eventually, though, Cardassian pride cannot bear the humiliation of Dominion rule; and Damar emerges as the repentant leader for a potential new Cardassia. Still, when Kira and Garak ride to the rescue, it quickly becomes clear that this Cardassian Rebellion is, in truth, a somewhat ambiguous development. It could be a chance for real repentance, freedom, an end to the worship of the State and the Empire, a free acknowledgment of Cardassia's crimes and sins; or, much more likely, it could simply be a return to form, a rebellion precisely of Cardassian pride and egoism against any subordination to anyone, any acknowledgment of another's power or right. At the center of it all is Damar; and he, almost alone of his followers, is learning, seeing what it is Cardassia has done not only to Bajor, but its own people, what they have done wrong--and therefore what could be done, perhaps, to change it.
In the end, though, Damar dies, and Cardassia suffers for its sins in a suitably apocalyptic fashion. They will survive--but only barely, humiliated, conquered, devastated, reduced to a pitiful remnant. As both Garak and Martok in their own separate ways to acknowledge, in its own way, Cardassia is merely getting what it deserved, measuring out for itself what it meted out to others, including Bajor; but it is no less horrible for all that.
What will become of Cardassia? She is not, in the end, damned, not destroyed completely; but her future remains uncertain. If she is to survive, it will only be through humility, through becoming a very different culture than she has been.
This whole plotline, reminiscent of dystopian fiction like 1984, Holocaust stories, and Old Testament prophetic narratives, is, really, Deep Space Nine at its best; taking history and culture totally seriously, but with an inescapably moral focus, one far more at home in Jeremiah or St. Augustine than in the ostensibly secular-progressive-utopian world of Star Trek.
Is Cardassia damned? Yes, unless repentance is possible, not only for individuals, but for peoples as well. On that many things depend, both in the world of Star Trek and in our own.
The Federation and the Dominion
Many shows since the '90s renaissance of Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 have had central plot arcs, planned out, at least to some degree, in advance; few have had the patience to build up that arc for as long, and layer it with as much detail, as Deep Space Nine. The Dominion is first mentioned in throwaway dialogue in the middle of Season 2; it is introduced at the end of that season; but it is not until the end of Season Five that the Dominion War, actually begins, and not until the very last episode of Season Seven that it ends.
This could seem like mere delay, treading water, keeping up the status quo; but in truth, very little of that time is wasted. We learn an awful lot about the Dominion, its structure, goals, origins, and internal tensions, before war breaks out; and a lot more afterwards. And it is with the thematic resonances of the Dominion, in contrast and comparison to the Federation, that Deep Space Nine brings in some of its most incisive political content.
The Dominion was originally conceived of, by Ira Steven Behr, Robert Wolfe, and Peter Allan Fields, during the production of DS9 Seasons One and Two, as a dark analogy, a fun-house mirror, of the Federation. This comes through even in the names: "Federation" implies alliance, coexistence, equality, "Dominion" domination, subordination, and conquest, but for all that they are in some sense synonyms. Trek had a long history of coming up with bad guys--but there had never really been a badguy quite like this before.
TOS was produced during the '60s, when ideological conflict between global ideologies was the order of the day. We tend to forget, in retrospect, just how truly global the Cold War really is, reducing it to the simple nationalistic narrative of America versus Russia. In its heyday, though, it was much, much more than this; there were not only Russian Communists, but Indian Communists, Latin American Communists, Vietnamese Communists, and not only American Capitalists, but British Capitalists, NATO Capitalists, Latin American Capitalists. Each "side" of the war tried to present itself, at least, as offering a universal way of life for the whole world, all races, nations, and peoples, to imitate--and it is therefore even more striking that in providing villains for itself TOS steadfastly avoided any such thing, and instead made every one of its villains an Empire defined primarily not by ideology, but by race.
The Klingons were, from the very beginning, intended to serve as an analogue for Soviets and Communists against the "Free" Federation; but on the show itself, they were defined simply by culture and species and phenotype, set apart from our heroes by their "Oriental" appearance, white actors wearing darkface and Gengis-Kahn mustaches. The only other time TOS tried to portray the battle between Communists and Capitalists, in the alternate-Earth parable "The Omega Glory," it had taken this racialism to even more ludicrous heights, with blond-haired, blue-eyed freedom-loving "Yangs"/Yankees pitted against conformist East-Asian "Coms"/Communists in a seemingly genocidal struggle. For a show ostensibly about a future of tolerance and understanding, Star Trek clearly preferred to lean into its 19th century British-Imperialist roots in its portrayal of villains: people against people, "race" against "race," with the (multi-ethnic) United Federation of Planets (America/the British Empire) decidedly in the right in all its conflicts with the backward, violent Empires in the East (China, Russia, France, etc).
TNG for the most part continued that streak, bringing back the Romulans to serve as the Federation's primary single-species rival, and introducing the Ferengi to take all the unpleasant racial undertones of TOS as ludicrously far as possible; but along the way, TNG also came up with the idea of the Borg, a "assimilating," multi-species Collective that would serve as the ultimate analogue and rival of the Federation. The Borg in practice mixed too many metaphors (technological augmentation, American conformism, Soviet Collectivism, colonialism, etc) to be all that clear--but it was clearly a society that, like the Federation, expanded and assimilated outsiders to its institution and way of life. Very much unlike the friendly, affirming, family-like Federation, though, it did this by violently and totally erasing any individuality from its victims through technology. This was, really, a very striking and powerful and appropriate villain--but more for the family-like crew of the Enterprise itself, less for the Federation as a whole. More to the point, by their very nature the Borg were faceless and impersonal, more like a swarm of locusts or a tsunami than a society with its own perspective on the world. Whatever implicit critiques of America and the Federation were to be found in the Borg (and they are definitely there), the overwhelming otherness and impersonality of the Borg would always swamp the similarities and comparisons. Yes, clearly, the Federation was not going around sticking mind-control probes in the heads of its officers to suppress all individuality--so what was the problem?
The Dominion, though, would be subtler, sacrificing the apocalyptic drama of the Borg for a group of clear individuals and peoples who could be communicated with, whose perspective on the universe could be understood and sympathized with, even as it was opposed. Like the Federation, the Dominion would be a multi-species institution, centered on a single species and their homeworld (humanity/the Founders) but encompassing many others. Like the Federation, it would be constantly expanding, incorporating new species into its overall system.
Unlike the Federation, though, seemingly, the structure of the Dominion would be quite harsh, and its methods of expansion frequently brutal. Even before we had met the Dominion itself, we had heard about how they expanded, and how they treated those who refused to comply: in Sanctuary, an entire species had been driven from its homeworld as nomads, and in Shadowplay another species had been wiped out altogether, for refusing to submit and join up. The best look at the "shadow" of the Dominion, though, would come in Season Four, with The Quickening; again, another species who refused to submit to the Dominion, but this time one infected with a deadly, incurable, and unpredictable disease to be tormented forever as an example to all others. We never really see, on TNG or DS9, what happens to those who refuse, when given the chance, to join the Federation--but the implication is always that it is a no-harm, no-foul kind of relationship. Join up if you want; or walk the other way. Not so with the Dominion.
Likewise, the Federation, while clearly possessed of a high proportion of humans (i.e. most of the crews, Captains, and Admirals we actually see), was always portrayed as accepting new species on a strictly egalitarian level. Everyone gets representation on the Federation Council; everyone gets to serve in Starfleet. The Dominion, in contrast, would feature genetically-manufactured species assigned to all military (the Jem'Hadar) and governmental (the Vorta) posts, created by and at the ultimate service of a single species for whose sake the entire Dominion would exist: the Changelings.
The Changelings, it is eventually revealed, were once much like the humans at the heart of the Federation; explorers interested in learning about and cooexisting with other species throughout the Galaxy. They were met, though, with prejudice and violence; and so, after retreating in shock from their efforts at co-existence, they decided to take an alternate tack towards relating to the rest of the universe. "What you can control can't hurt you," the Female Shapeshifter says in her first appearance; and we quickly see the point of the dictum. The whole Dominion is, in a sense, a protective shell around the Changelings, designed to keep them and their personal-collective society The Great Link safe from every other species in the Galaxy.
The Changelings are different; not solid, monoform, but liquid, capable of taking whatever shape they choose. This difference initially led to them being rejected and persecuted by "solid" species; but now, it will serve as the basis of their safety and superiority. The Changelings deliberately cultivate a sense of their own remoteness and superiority in their subjects, forcing the species they control and create to regard them as gods. There is, indeed, some truthfulness in this. After all, the Changelings' powers, to live forever and become and be whatever they choose, are truly vast, almost supernatural--and more to the point, by hook or crook, they have created a system in which all other beings live and die to serve only their interests, their safety, their will: and if this is not to be a god (in the pagan sense of the word), what is? In any event, the Dominion will continue to expand, a machine for subjugating all beings to the control and security of the Founders, until there are no more beings to subjugate.
At the heart of this is a fascinating psychological and moral point about the complex dynamic between abusers and victims--the Changelings have subjugated and even destroyed numerous other species, yet this goal itself emerged out of the first-hand experience of persecution and mistreatment at the hands of others. "The solids have always been a threat to us; that is all the justification we need," says the Female Shapeshifter, and does she not, after all, have a point? The experience of being mistreated by a person, a group, a kind, a class of persons, is the best possible justification for mistreating that group. After all--clearly they can't be trusted, clearly they're just going to hurt me again. What, do you want me to trust them after what they did to me? I know how things work; I know what happened. I'll make sure they'll never hurt me again.
More than this, victims often become abusers simply because they know, from the inside, what it is like to be abused; and the fear, the worship, even, of the undeniable reality and power of that experience can all too easily turn into obsession and recapitulation. The Changelings know how species who are different are treated, how they are dealt with, how powerful and overwhelming and final that can be; and now, they will do it to others in turn. They will be safe.
Also key parts of the Dominion, though, are the Vorta and the Jem'Hadar, both manufactured species designed to be the only trustworthy beings in the Galaxy to their insecure creators; totally controlled down to their genetic code to be nothing more than tools for the Founders, obeying them without question, worshiping them as gods and willingly sacrificing themselves to their interests and whims.
The Jem'Hadar are one of the most compelling takes on the idea of the Orc, or manufactured monstrous soldier, to emerge in either science fiction or fantasy. JRR Tolkien created his "Orcs," initially, as a race of villainous monsters who might or might not have souls; but as his legendarium took shape, it became clearer and clearer that the Orcs simply were people, recognizable human beings warped and twisted down to their depths by an industrial and militaristic society. The Orcs in LotR talk, quite deliberately, like British soldiers in WWI--an analogue that JRR Tolkien, a veteran of the Great War himself, highlighted on more than one occasion. Still, the fact that this race of people were, seemingly, irredeemably evil deeply bothered the devout Catholic Tolkien a great deal; and though he spent a great deal of time attempting to deal with this, he never quite solved it to his satisfaction.
The Jem'Hadar are, at base, a very similar idea; a race of people, with minds and hearts and souls, altered down to their DNA for one purpose: to fight and die without question as soldiers in the interest of a totally uncaring master who is also worshiped as a god. Deep Space Nine, though, had somewhat more room, by its very nature as a sci-fi show, to explore and humanize this portrayal than Tolkien's good-versus-evil fantasy world. The Abandoned, in Season Three, showed that the Jem'Hadar were real people, but also how profoundly they had been altered, to a degree impossible to undo simply with good intentions. Hippocratic Oath revealed that there were Jem'Hadar who recognized the ignominy of their condition, and wanted to escape from it; but also that, by addicting the Jem'Hadar to a drug that only they could supply, the Founders had made such an escape virtually impossible. To the Death showed the real culture, with religion and a sense of community and a sense of morality, built up by the Jem'Hadar around their servitude, and the moral fervor and even nobility that lent them; but also that this only made them, in the end, far harder to deal with than mere unthinking automatons. Rocks and Shoals, finally, showed to the greatest extent the tragedy of the Jem'Hadar's situation, full of noble people willingly sacrificing themselves with the utmost devotion, honor, and even charity for what they believed in...all for the sake of a false and uncaring system, and false and uncaring gods. In the end, Deep Space Nine showed at one and the same time the dignity of the Jem'Hadar, as people, even in their servitude; and the necessity of fighting them, as the only hope of freeing them, and others, from the system they propped up.
The Vorta, in contrast, have no real analogue in Tolkien's system, or in many other science fiction or fantasy systems. It is little wonder; for the Vorta were conceived of as the ultimate bureacrats, uncaring commanders, lying negotiators, the Dilbert-esque business management for the Galaxy's greatest pyramid scheme. Unlike the Jem'Hadar, who are honorable and devoted not only to their gods but also to each other, the Vorta seem to care for nothing more than No. 1; everything, that is, except the system as a whole, and the Founders. There is a fascinating dynamic here: what sense can be made of people who are seemingly cynical and self-interested operators in regards to every value and system in the universe except their own, which must be served with religious fervor to the bitter end? There's a good comment in here somewhere about business and government and the illogical self-sacrificing commitment to insane systems quite frequently displayed by supposedly detached and self-serving people.
There is, also, though, something a bit sadder as well. At the end of the day, the Jem'Hadar, however short and brutal their lives, have each other, a community, and an overwhelming, collectively-ratified sense of purpose and meaning that follows them from their birth to their death. The Vorta, though, are singular--a fact only reinforced by the fact that they reproduce, seemingly, only by cloning, each Vorta an exact replica of a previous version. The Jem'Hadar are always in groups: unless I'm very much mistaken, I don't think we ever see Weyoun, the series' main Vorta, interact with another member of his species. As Weyoun eventually reveals as well, the political and social power we see the Vorta wield comes at a significant cost: Vorta are physically weak, have poor eyesight, cannot taste most foods, and are incapable of aesthetic appreciation. Whatever the rewards that other self-interested businessmen or bureacrats might enjoy, the Vorta cannot partake in. They are, in the end, just as imprisoned by their role as slimy administrators as the Jem'Hadar are by their role as soldiers; no matter how delighted they may seem by their cleverness, they are only really serving the system and the Founders, not themselves.
Treachery, Faith, and the Great River shows this essential pitfulness of the Vorta better than any other episode of the series. A Weyoun has been created defective, and decides to make a move of conscience, to defect to the Federation. Or rather, to defect to Odo; the one Changeling in the Galaxy who is not also a Founder. Apart from the system that gives him (illusory) power, though, Weyoun is the most pitiful creature in the Galaxy; small and weak and helpless, barely able to see and unable even to taste his food, with no shred of meaning in his life except the hope that, when he dies, he will have done the right thing, and served Odo well. For all his bluster and villainy, and all the power he wields as one of the Dominion's most powerful officials, Weyon, and every other Vorta, is, in the end, just another victim in a system full of them.
The Dominion, then, is going to keep expanding, forever, until there are no more threats, no more people who have not been either made a totally controlled, safe part of its system--or else eliminated. And the Federation, too, is going to keep expanding, accepting new members, until there are no more people who have not been made a part of its peaceful, egalitarian system--or at least given that chance. And so of course they are going to go to war.
The Dominion War Actually Took Place
The most immediate and striking thing, without question, that sets Deep Space Nine apart from both TOS and TNG, is that it centers around a war: and more than that, that it focuses on winning that war. TOS and TNG both had many plotlines centered around preventing war, taking things to the absolute brink before the crew of the USS Enterprise or magic Organians put an end to the barbaric spectacle and returned things to their proper status quo.
TOS, though, had been a very military show, about a Navy crew, created by someone who had himself been a soldier in wartime; and so in some sense war was always a part of the DNA of Star Trek. Horatio Hornblower, the inspiration for Kirk and Star Trek as a whole, had been a (fictional) British naval officer in the Napoleonic Wars; America itself had been engaged in constant, low-level warfare with the Indians, Mexico, Spain, etc all throughout the period of its expansion towards the Western "frontier"; Gene Roddenberry had fought in WWII as a bomber pilot; and when TOS was airing, America was drafting kids to fight in Vietnam, and the whole world was in the grip of a Cold War that would go on for decades more. The 20th century, up through Vietnam and beyond, was the time in history when the most people around the world, the highest proportion of the population of every country and city and family, served in the military or suffered personally from the horrors of war. To a degree, war was simply in the water; and TOS never backed down from this. Post-WW2, America had committed itself to having the largest standing army, with both volunteers and mass conscription, of any nation in the world. And Kirk, I think, would be quite alright with that:
"We aren't meant to stroll to the sound of lutes, Bones; we have to march to the sound of drums."
Is Captain Kirk a fascist? Well, that's a definition problem. He's certainly a soldier; and so is everyone else on the show, without question. Star Trek's audience, full of people who had fought in or at least had their food rationed or their sons taken away by the World Wars and Vietnam, would have grasped the basic military dynamic of the characters quite easily. They could talk and joke and laugh; but in the end, Captain Kirk would give the orders, and everyone else would obey them, to their deaths, if necessary.
Gene Roddenberry, though, would soon grow disillusioned with this militarism, like much of the rest of the world, in the '70s and '80s; and by the time TNG came around, he was insisting, against all odds, that Starfleet was not a military service, but something in-between Jacques Cousteau's scientists and the Coast Guard. This, though, didn't really last all that long; and by Berman and Piller's tenure on the show, Starfleet was clearly a Navy once again, though admittedly one committed to peace and science as much as defense. Picard would use his phasers where necessary, guard the border with the Romulans and prepare for a fight to the death with the Borg (the one utterly implacable enemy of TNG); but in the end, every war would be averted (or at least take place offscreen, like the Cardassian Wars), and the Federation would continue to grow and expand and explore, at peace, as it should be.
All this makes the basic clarity of Deep Space Nine's Dominion War storyline all the more remarkable. The Federation is a peaceful place; but war with the Dominion is inevitable. This both the characters and the audience realize quite quickly, as soon as the basic nature and goals of the Dominion is made clear. There is no negotiating with the system that inevitably expands and subjugates everyone else without end; no creating a modus operandi, no holding talks, no drawing up a treaty that both sides can agree on. In the end, the Dominion will accept nothing other than subjugation, by whatever means; and so, there are only two possibilities: to accept that subjugation, or to go to war to prevent it.
In fact, in a sense, with the Dominion, peace is more dangerous than war. The events that take up the Third through Fifth Seasons of DS9 take place in a supposed state of peace between the Alpha Quadrant and the Dominion; but they actually reflect a devastating series of infiltrations by the Changelings that break up alliances and eliminate threats and pit Empire against Empire with the goal of leaving the Alpha Quadrant ripe for conquest. To butcher an already butchered paraphrase of von Clausewiz (sorry, man!), this peace is simply war by other means. Or to quote Sisko himself, "We're losing the peace, and so a war may be our only hope."
This clarity is, really, quite remarkable for a franchise usually committed to utopian constructions of peace; and it is hard not to read it, at least in part, as a reflection of the general American myth of WWII, the one good war against entirely evil people that most people believe in. Certainly, appeasement of Hitler, on the understanding that he could be mollified into accepting a status quo that didn't involve genocidal German dominance of the whole world, was an obvious and costly mistake; and the recognition that came from that, that where ideology and belief are concerned, negotiation can be impossible, and war inevitable, is true enough. The Dominion's focus on peacetime infiltration and subversion, too, can be seen as a distant echo of American anti-Communism, faced with the unprecedented reach and power of Soviet intelligence and ideology, and obsessed with the possibility of subversion.
Still, neither Hitler, a monstrously poor liar and terribly ineffective diplomat, nor the KGB, which through most of the Cold War expended enormous amounts of resources for relatively little tangible gain, were nearly as good at all of these things as the ancient shapeshifting Founders. Obsessed with unity and order and safety for themselves, they thrive on distrust and chaos for their enemies. Like the Federation, they even prefer to use peaceful means to achieve their ends, rather than war; but those ends will be achieved, one way or another. And so, after the Dominion has done its best to divide and conquer, and our heroes have done their best to unite and prepare, the Federation and the Dominion go to war.
And then, of course, after two seasons of battle, the Federation wins, thanks to the intervention of the gods, the untiring (if occasionally unscrupulous) dedication of Sisko and co, the Founder's inability to control their Alpha Quadrant allies as they could their own servants, and Odo's unique ability to access the heart of the Dominion and, perhaps, heal it from within. The Dominion has been forever excluded from the Alpha Quadrant, and, perhaps, permanently transformed from the center out; the Klingon Empire has been humbled and reduced by costly wars with Cardassia and the Federation and then the Dominion; Cardassia itself has been entirely devastated and destroyed permanently as a power; the Romulan Empire has been made into a patsy, manipulated and infiltrated up to the highest level by the Federation's devious machinations; and the Federation stands alone, triumphant, the premier power in the Alpha Quadrant and beyond.
The Federation, the Weasels, and the End of History
If this sounds familiar, even vaguely, then good. Deep Space Nine was not created in the '60s, when most people in the audience could see war for themselves, but in the '90s, a time when a major war had not been seen, in America itself, for decades. The '90s, in fact, were a time after the War to End All Wars, after the Good War Against the Evil Nazis, and after the End of History, the final, definitive fall of Communism in 1991. In 1999, when Deep Space Nine ended, no one was expecting another war to break out any time soon; after all, where would such a war even come from? America had won WW1, won WW2, and then beaten the Soviet Union in the Cold War. She was the single, sole superpower of the world. No one would ever challenge her again; indeed, nothing would ever even happen again.
Francis Fukayama later disavowed the idea of the End of the History, but it stuck then and since because of how basically accurate it actually was to how many Americans felt about their place in the world and history. America had won, bested all comers in a century of the greatest wars and horrors humanity had ever seen, because America was right. Her way of life was the correct way of life; her system of government and economics was the correct way to do such things; her ideals were the right ideals. Or rather--she herself was the ideal, a city on a hill, destined to shine her light into every corner of the world until everyone, everywhere, could share in the blessings of her freedom and prosperity.
At the heart of this myth of the entire history of humanity culminating in America c. 1991 was the myth of WWII, the "good war" against a clearly evil enemy, indeed against evil itself, embodied in all its purity in Hitler and the Nazis, and the war (coincidentally) in which America had come to dominate the entirety of the world not subject to the Soviet Union, and so (after a brief interval of Cold War) the world as a whole. The moral myth of WWII has been and remains, to generations of Americans, a sort of founding myth to the American Empire, a justification not only for America itself and her often bloody history, but her present dominating role in the world.
In the 1990s, then, while history was over, and no wars were actually going to happen ever again, it was still a great time to reflect back on the wars of the past, WWII in particular, and replay them over and over and over again, in different permutations but with the same eventual point. Babylon 5 did this, though in a far more Tolkien-inspired and cosmic vein; and so did Deep Space Nine.
It is no coincidence that in presenting the Dominion War, the writers and creators of Deep Space Nine clearly and consciously took inspiration from WWII, in the ideological bent of its enemies, the scale and devastation of its events, the leitmotif of bringing together former enemies in a common cause, and finally in its outcome. When the treaty ending the Dominion War is signed, Admiral Ross, our friendly, if a bit staid Federation Admiral, quotes the words of General MacArthur at the end of WWII: "Today, the guns are silent..." The message is clear: the Federation, and the Alpha Quadrant as a whole, have entered into a new era, one marked not only by peace, but a new preeminence for the victorious Federation.
It is only after grasping this fact, that in replaying WWII DS9 was in a sense doing what many other Americans in the '90s were doing, to the ultimate effect of reinforcing and justifying present American dominance, that we can see in proper proportion the unsettling, troubling aspects of how Deep Space Nine in fact portrays the war, its progress, its outcome, and the Federation itself.
What the hell is the Federation? Is it Utopia? Well, for that matter what the hell is America? Is it Utopia?
In defeating their enemies, the good guys, the Federation, do some very bad things. Sisko tricks the Romulan Empire into entering the war, helping to murder a Romulan senator along the way; and good Admiral Ross, in a further episode, brings about the imprisonment of another Romulan senator to put a Federation mole into the very top echelons of the Romulan government. And of course, in the end, it is made clear that the Federation wins the war in large part because some among its number were quite willing, when push came to shove, to commit genocide.
Yes, I'm talking about Section 31, everyone's candidate for "most controversial element of Deep Space Nine." This is, really, a bit overblown; but it has its point. Behr had wondered, for quite some time, whether there were in fact metaphorical weasels under the metaphorical coffee table of the Federation. Section 31 was a way, more or less, to put those weasels, the darker potentialities of the Federation, onscreen in a simply, striking, easily grasped form. There are certainly reasonable and maybe even correct critiques of this method: such as the simple point that by taking the Federation's darker potentialities and turning them into a series of villains in black leather, the Federation itself could be made less responsible for its own crimes and misdeeds, all villainy shuttled off into conveniently rogue badguy. I don't think this really hits the mark exactly, though; not only because as a television show, establishing a permanent presence like Section 31 at the heart of the Federation makes a bigger statement than simply having an admiral or two, or even a particular Federation President or Council, act out, but also because it is made fairly clear, from Section 31's introduction, that it does enjoy, if not the active approval, at the very least the passive acceptance and patronage, of both the Federation and Starfleet.
Section 31 is a clandestine intelligence agency full of philosophically-inclined, murderous agents who are quite open about the fact they are, in principle, willing to do anything, no matter how criminal or genocidal, to protect the Federation. That such people exist, that some of our heroes, such as true-blue MacArthur Admiral Ross, even end up working with them, that the Federation and Starfleet as a whole tolerate and protect them, does mean something. It means, at the very least, that the Federation is not, after all, the utopia it at first seems to be. The Federation does not do bad things like commit genocide or assassinate foreign dignitaries or overthrow foreign governments--except, of course, when it does.
Then, too, America certainly doesn't do any things like that--at least in public. Just how many governments has the CIA overthrown by now? How many people have they assassinated? Does anyone even know? And then, of course, there is the true, giant elephant in the room, both of the Cold War and of the purportedly peaceful post-Cold War global order. America won WW2 in part by being the only country in the world, still, to this day, to use nuclear weapons on a civilian population. It is, still, the official position of the US government that America, if push comes to shove, could and likely would use nuclear weapons to totally wipe out (even to the point of genocide, even to the point of annihilating all life on earth forever) its enemies. How often do we think about that reality? And is Section 31's willingness to kill every last Founder in the Galaxy to preserve the Federation, in comparison with that, really so horrible, so fantastical, so hard to believe?
The payoff for Section 31 is relatively slow in coming; but it does come. Section 31, long before there was even a Dominion War, decided that the Founders were a threat that had to be stopped, and so they immediately went about creating a secret, undetectable way to kill every Founder in the Galaxy, using Odo as a carrier and a patsy. This revelation, coming as late as the last episodes of Season Seven, is enough, in itself, to throw a radically new light on all the events preceding it. The Dominion, clearly, is an ideological entity willing to do anything to protect itself, inevitably expanding to swallow all enemies, and adept at using peacetime infiltration and disruption and other devious means to achieve its ends without firing a shot. How horrible that the Changelings infiltrate the Alpha Quadrant and cause wars before there was even a war to fight! But then, hasn't the Federation, likewise, long before there was even a war to fight, recognized the Dominion as an inevitable ideological enemy to be destroyed, and decided to destroy it without ever firing a shot by killing every last Founder in the Galaxy. Compared to this, are the Dominion's manipulated brush-fire wars really so evil?
And then, too, is the Federation also not an ideological entity aimed at constant expansion, at the inevitable swallowing up of all of its enemies, by whatever means? This is the critique of the Federation posed, again and again, at one time or other, by all the non-Federation members of the main and recurring cast--perhaps most cogently in this excellent scene. The Federation is kind, and understanding (looking down, from a position of superiority); it never uses violence (until it has to); it respects the rights of other peoples not to become its allies, not to join it (unless, like Bajor, they're threatened by other Imperialist powers, in which case it could be a really good idea to join up!); and, most damningly of all, it is absolutely clear that, as a basic matter of ideology, of belief, the Federation really does want to expand indefinitely, take over the whole Galaxy, incorporate every species and every people, and does think this is, in some ultimate sense, simply inevitable. The Federation is, in its own eyes, the End of History.
This perspective is expressed most forcefully by an ex-Federation officer, Michael Eddington, in one of the most striking speeches in the franchises' history. The Federation, Michael spits, is in some ways worse than the Borg (that big metaphor for colonialism and social conformity whose real-world analogies and implications were never really quite made explicit on TNG, until now, on DS9, where the Borg never even appear, where they're suddenly as plain as day): "At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious; you assimilate people, and they don't even know it."
This is, in different ways, the battle fought by the various non-Federation members of the world of Deep Space Nine. The Federation is in reality a very nice place--certainly much nicer on many basic levels than America in the '90s or since. And Sisko and co, are, clearly, good people, even heroes. And the appeal of the Federation is very real to everyone, not just members of the Federation itself. The Federation will protect you, take care of you; and you will lose nothing, nothing of what you have, nothing of what you are, nothing of what you believe in. You can be a Ferengi, or a Cardassian, or a Bajoran, and also be in the Federation and Starfleet, an equal among equals. Isn't that, deep down, what everyone really wants? Isn't that, in the end, when all the pious platitudes about non-interference and respecting other cultures and not imposing our morality on others are put aside, the right way to live?
But what if, perchance, you were someone, like Garak or Michael Eddington or even Major Kira, who believed differently, who had other ideas about religion and culture and truth and morality, and who therefore didn't want to join up, adopt the Federation Way, whether it came by guns or genocidal microviruses or more peaceful means? Would you, in the end, find the Federation any less threatening than the Dominion? At least the Founders, at the end of the day, simply want to be left alone, with no threats to them and their people. What does the Federation want? If it's anything, isn't it something far more all-encompassing, far more potentially dangerous?
After Section 31's plot is revealed, and a cure found for their manufactured disease, the Federation decides not to give it to the Founders, for reasons of self-interest in warfare; and Odo is bitter. How convenient it is, he says, that the Federation claims to abhor such tactics, and yet when push comes to shove, is happy to profit from them: "It's a tidy little arrangement, wouldn't you say?" Not long before, Dr. Bashir had confronted Admiral Ross with the knowledge of his complicity, to which Ross had responded with a maxim from Cicero: Inter arma enim silent leges. "In time of war, the law falls silent." In response, Bashir is indignant, and questioning: "So, is that what we've become? A 24th-century Rome, driven by nothing other than the certainty that Caesar can do no wrong?" Ross offers no response but a curt dismissal. Sisko, for his part, is a bit more honest. He stays silent.
It is on this note of uncertainty that Deep Space Nine ultimately ends. The Federation is, clearly, for Bajor and others, better than the alternatives. Sisko is a good person, a builder of families and communities that are diverse and yet affirming, even if his unswerving commitment to those communities can lead him to real moral evil. And Odo returns home, to the Great Link, to cure them of their disease, and to share what he's learned from his time with this good and loyal community with his people, so desperately in need of bonds of understanding and trust that reach beyond the limit of their own species.
Still, Bajor hasn't joined the Federation; and Cardassia, the Klingons, the Romulans, the Ferengi, and many other peoples remain independent. The Federation has done good, and also evil; and there are, clearly, good things, values, beliefs, which it could never, as it now is, totally incorporate into itself while doing justice to.
Is it perhaps possible, then, that the Federation is not actually the End of History, not actually the utopia of utopias, capable of including all other distinctivenesses within itself without diminishing them? Is it, perhaps, merely one government among many, one people (or peoples) among many? Is its liberal egalitarianism not actually capable of respecting and adjudicating all possible beliefs and ways of life? With some it must fight; with some it can be friends, or allies; and from some, perhaps, it has lessons of its own to learn.
It's worth a thought.
If there's a reason that Deep Space Nine, of all the Star Trek shows, seems the most relevant to this time and this place, to America at the end of the 2010s, it is precisely in this grappling with the contours of the great American myth. In 2019, in America, we no longer live in the End of History; history has resumed, with a vengeance. We can longer believe, as we did in 2003, that all nations will inevitably embrace democratic liberal egalitarianism, and live just like us. We can no longer believe, as we did in the 1990s, that America's dominance of the world is always for the good of those we dominate, and always carried out by good and just means. We are a fractured society, divided between many cultures and ideologies and systems of belief. Religion has made a comeback, and Communism, and all those things that were supposed to have been rendered obsolete by the turning of history. Liberalism, in both its Classical and 20th century species, is being questioned drastically from voices on both the Right and the Left. We are not, in short, on the Starship Enterprise anymore.
And so, it is quite natural that we should turn to Deep Space Nine, the Star Trek show that, for the first time, dared to challenge the Liberal-Imperialist Americanism of Star Trek, dared to show people of decidedly non-liberal beliefs and ways of life as main characters with perspectives just as real, just as compelling, or more, than their bland Starfleet counterparts, and dared to tell the American myths just a little bit wrong.
The promise of that '90s liberalism that dominated the world during the airing of Deep Space Nine, was that it could, through value-neutral, procedural means, bring everyone, of whatever belief system or way of life, together in a single system, to their and everyone else's good. Deep Space Nine took that idea more seriously than just about any other show in the '90s ever did; and showed how hollow that claim really was. Whatever a just future for the Star Trek universe might look like, it was not merely the Federation triumphant forever, having incorporated Ferengi and Bajorans and Cardassians and Founders into its one, culture- and value-neutral system. Whatever a just future for our world looks like, it does not merely look like America dominating the world, incorporating everyone everywhere into its one culture- and value-neutral system, under its dominion, forever.
Whither Star Trek?
Star Trek is fun to talk about because of how intertwined it really is, and always has been, with American culture and American ideology and American self-image. TOS imagined a Kennedy-esque future with touches of a British and American Imperialist past, multi-racial Cold Warriors sailing the oceans to plant colonies and push the Final Frontier back just a little further. TNG gave us a humanist future of kindly, mature Americans, defending our frontiers against threats far and near, encountering new species, solving their problems, and laying the groundwork for their eventual joining up with the one truly peaceful and liberal Empire. Then Deep Space Nine arrived on the scene, and for the first and last time, dared to take all that seriously, as seriously as it ever, on some level, could be taken--and then called it radically into question. Where would Star Trek go from here? Where would America?
I still plan, at some point months or years into the future, to come back and finish this series of miserably long and unfunny blogposts with a post going through a few individual episodes of Deep Space Nine. I do not, however, as I have already said, plan to go on to chronicle Enterprise, Voyager, the new Star Trek films, and the new Discovery show, at least in the same depth and detail. This is, in part, because despite my best efforts I have still not watched the entirety of either Voyager or Enterprise, and was never able to get into them to the same degree as TOS and TNG and DS9. It is also, though, in large part because I really do think that Deep Space Nine laid down the gauntlet for all future Star Trek, in detail, in storytelling, in character, and above all in thematics. Deep Space Nine made, almost for the first time, a honest Star Trek show that honestly grappled with America and American pop culture and American Empire, in its positive and negative and ambiguous aspects. It did not come to some kind of grand conclusion on all of these matters, or shut the door for any future developments; but it did try, and no Star Trek show or movie since then has managed even that much.
Whither Star Trek? Where does it go, where should it go, from here? The TNG films, predictably, continued TNG, with some success with Generations and above all First Contact, and an ultimate fading into utter boredom and irrelevancy with Insurrection and Nemesis. Voyager tried, with not much success, to bring Star Trek back to TNG, only without many of the elements that made TNG, for me, such an interesting and enjoyable show. Enterprise tried to take things at once back to TOS and the Roddenberryian utopian roots of the series, and, to a very small but real degree, into the conflict and chaos of the post-9/11 world: both to very mixed effect.
Then, of course, JJ Abrams, quite rightly bored to tears by all this, took Star Trek really back in time, into the brave new future of nostalgia-baiting entertainment, with doses both of '60s and Star Wars-imitation feel-good franchise entertainment, with a darker, but ultimately dishonest and incoherent, undertone of insecurity and unease lurking just below the surface. The best of the reboot movies is, without a doubt, Star Trek Beyond, because it is the only one that actively doesn't care about being epic or making some grand point; and that is, as far as I'm concerned, where the reboot movies stand, and where they always likely will.
Take what you can get. I have not yet watched Discovery Season Two, but Season One hardly inspired my confidence with its belly-flop combination of magical mushroom science and grotesque, cartoonish Good-Versus-Evil politics. Still, the show has potential, both in its characters and its attempts to grapple with the issues of our time; and a new show, Picard, is now filming, taking us, for the very first time in decades, back into the post-DS9 phase of the Star Trek world. As always, the future is uncertain.
There has been good Star Trek since Deep Space Nine went off the air; there will probably continue to be for quite a while to come. But will any of it actually answer the challenge of Deep Space Nine, actually try to grapple honestly, without so many American-pop-culture magical-utopian answers, with the complex realities of our life in our world in our time? More almost than any major pop-culture franchise, Star Trek from the beginning has been about America. As America starts to question itself, as it is further and further divided, as it, perhaps, transforms in dramatic ways both for good and for ill--does Star Trek actually want to grapple with those changes, as Deep Space Nine, during the static peaceful '90s, dared to grapple with the basic myths of American life and power? In a changing world, Star Trek today seems bent on giving America little more than nostalgia, the same '60s-dramatic fun and '70s-utopian ideals in the same 19th-century-Imperialist package.
Whither Star Trek? If Deep Space Nine proves anything, it's that, at some point, you have to stop telling the same story over and over again--at some point, you have to dare to be not only the same, but different, as well (take your final drink, my friends, it's been a pleasure). Will Star Trek ever heed that lesson?
I really don't know, nor, on some level, do I care. I will continue to watch, and enjoy, Deep Space Nine for what it is; and I will continue to be happy at the growing attention and honor it is getting both from Star Trek fans and the audience at large. In retrospect, with the weight of hindsight, Deep Space Nine starts to look very different from the red-headed stepchild/younger brother that many fans viewed it as in the '90s. It starts to look, rather, like the very heart of the franchise, the one that told the best stories, with the most detail and meaning, and developed the world of Star Trek more than any other.
So here's to you, Deep Space Nine. Have this long, ungainly blogpost as a belated birthday present.
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