Frank PodmoreReflections on Deep Space 9
I’ve been (re)watching all of Star Trek in approximate stardate order (approximate because apart from anything else stardates are inconsistent across the series). I’ve just watched the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, so of course I have some extremely strong opinions about it.
Historical background
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 began broadcasting while its predecessor Star Trek: The Next Generation was still on the air. It is almost invariably discussed in terms of its various firsts: first Star Trek show made without Gene Roddenberry’s involvement; first to air simultaneously with another Star Trek, first with a black lead, first where the lead was a commander, not a captain (at first, anyway), first set on a space station, first where not all the main characters were in Starfleet, and so on.
I think it’s somewhat notable that, creatively anyway, at least one of these firsts was also a last: there’s never been another stationary Star Trek. Indeed, alert readers may have noticed this is a contradiction in terms. The showrunners eventually realised they really needed a proper ship and introduced the USS Defiant to serve as as a means of getting off the station from time to time. Similarly, perhaps aware of the optics of having the various white leads explicitly outrank the only main black lead on Trek, they eventually promoted Benjamin Sisko. Twenty years later, a different set of showrunners gave themselves a near-identical problem on Star Trek: Discovery and likewise solved it by making Michael Burnham, the first black female lead on Star Trek, a captain (although she was, oddly, a ‘co-captain’).
Space: The Final… Outpost, I suppose
Overall, DS9 is probably the most consistent of all the Star Trek shows. The Original Series was notoriously all over the place, The Next Generation was, just as notoriously, pretty poor for the first two seasons and also experienced a significant drop in quality in season 7, likely because the producers had stretched themselves too thin with TNG and DS9 airing simultaneously, and Star Trek: Voyager and the first TNG film, Star Trek Generations, also in production. DS9, by contrast, starts pretty strong and is mostly good to very good all the way through (although I do think that, like TNG, the middle seasons are the strongest). Unlike Voyager, there aren’t any characters that feel oddly pointless (Harry Kim) or just plain annoying (Neelix1). It has a much stronger sense of self than the later, strangely messy shows2, and that carries it through the odd rough patch.
The acting is also generally better than it had been on Trek up to that point. I have a theory that the overall quality of mainstream film and TV acting started to get a hell of a lot better in the ’90s but no theory as to why this is. Just look at how good someone like Michael B. Jordan is3 compared to the people we got starring in blockbuster films in the ’80s, for example; he absolutely blows away Stallone or Schwarzenegger or anyone else you care to name. DS9 may be an early example of that, bar a couple of performances which I’ll come to in a moment. Right from the start, Nana Visitor, René Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman and Colm Meaney4 (returning from TNG) are all excellent, as are recurring guest stars Andrew Robinson, Marc Alaimo, Louise Fletcher (who was, after all, an Oscar winning actress), Aron Eisenberg and Max Grodénchik5. Siddig el Fadil and Terry Farrell wobble early on, but both find their feet eventually, as the writers work out what they want to do with the characters and learn how to play to the actors’ strengths. Both also benefit later from being paired up with actors with whom they have great chemistry (respectively, Meaney and Michael Dorn, likewise returning from TNG, as Worf, from season 4 on), eventually getting some of the best episodes in the whole thing. Where the space station concept works well is in allowing them to have that strong recurring cast, who slowly build relationships with many of the regulars. The recurring guests introduced later on are also all fantastic: Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs and JG Hertzler6, in particular, are perfectly cast and routinely excellent.
The only major fly in the ointment as far as acting goes is Avery Brooks. I find him to be an utterly baffling actor, not least because I know that many people absolutely love him7, whereas my view of him is that he cannot act at all.
Now, look, I could hardly enjoy Star Trek if I couldn’t put up with the odd wooden performance. The problems with Brooks come not when he’s wooden, though he often is, but that almost every time he does emote, he’s bizarre. People often say he got better when he shaved his head and grew a beard and this is true – but we’re coming from a low base here. And his fundamental issues never went away. Look at his performance in the first episode, ‘Emissary’, where he over-reads the line ‘We just can’t leave her!’8 so much – and so badly – that it’s unintentionally hilarious. Compare this to his climatic scene with Gul Dukat in the very last episode, where he also overdoes the line ‘I am!‘ to similar effect. His much-vaunted performances in ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ and ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ have the exact same problems: whenever he tries to show a strong emotion, it’s overdone (as in ‘Stars’); when he tries to just get through a scene without a single strong emotion, whether that’s because it’s a paint by numbers scene or one where there’s meant to be an ambiguity, he’s wooden (as in ‘Moonlight’). All he really has going for him is a beautiful voice9, but this really isn’t enough. His performance in DS9 does not encourage me to seek out his other work, but perhaps he’s just woefully miscast as Sisko, or poorly directed, and really shines elsewhere.
No Gods, No Masters
I think some of the issues with Sisko are the fault of the writing, particularly his plot arc as the Emissary to the Prophets (Bajoran gods/wormhole aliens). Trying to examine religion in Star Trek was a good idea. After all, most of the world and most of the USA is still very religious. It’s long-established in the Trek universe that alien cultures have their own religious beliefs, even the hyper-logical Vulcans, including various prophets, gods and ceremonies. In our own culture, where it’s been obvious for centuries that an interventionist god doesn’t – indeed, cannot – exist, there are still a great many religious people, and it’s not at all clear that that should change by the time the 24th century rolls around10. Additionally, there have always been plenty of godlike beings in Star Trek, from Trelaine, to that thing that can’t explain what it wants with a starship, to Q. It makes sense to explore this aspect of humanity more deeply than can be done with a single episode or recurring character.
But is it well-handled in DS9? I don’t think so. The Bajorans see the Prophets as gods and their home, the wormhole to the Gamma quadrant, as the Celestial Temple. However… they’re wrong, aren’t they? The wormhole is a wormhole, not a temple, and the things that live in it really are just aliens without a linear sense of time. Kai Winn, Louise Fletcher’s character, is not wrong to argue in the final few episodes that the Prophets don’t seem actually to care very much (or at all) about Bajor, Bajorans or even their Emissary, Sisko, who they arbitrarily whisk away to live with them, he having apparently served his purpose on this corporeal plain by pushing Gul Dukat off a cliff11, forcing him to abandon his friends and family forever, for no reason.
The concept of a species that doesn’t experience or understand linear time is really interesting and also a very Star Trek kind of idea. There’s genuine interest and bathos in the idea that the Bajorans have been worshipping these entities that not only do not but cannot understand them at all; the Prophets don’t seem to know what time is until they meet Sisko and he explains it to them, which strongly suggests they’ve never seriously interacted with the Bajorans at all. But this interesting idea gradually falls away and the writers, out of nothing more than inertia, turn the Prophets into traditional ‘good’ gods, complete with some opposite, ‘evil’ fallen angel/fire demon types in the form of the Pah Wraiths (who want to set the entire universe on fire, for some reason, but can’t, for some reason).12 This of course sticks the writers with a fictional version of the problem of evil13. In the real world, the solution to the problem of evil is that God isn’t real. In Deep Space 9, the gods/Prophets are real, and so the problem of evil cannot be solved. They’re just totally useless as gods.
The interesting notion of the uncaring not-actually-gods is undermined further whenever the Prophets act more like ‘traditional’ gods with an interest in Bajor, which they do more and more as the series goes on, culminating in the revelation that ‘the Sisko’ is a Jesus analogue who the Prophets actually created in order to fulfill the destined destruction of Gul Dukat and the Kosst Amojan14, both of which again, just fall off a cliff. Why do they need a special magic man to do the job of pushing a book and a person off a cliff? Anyone can push someone off a cliff. And why didn’t they just tell Sisko – or, again, anyone, really – to destroy the book at any given time in history? This book, the origins of which are never explained, is totally useless. Literally all it can do is release the Pah Wraiths (and thus destroy the universe15) and make Gul Dukat go blind, so why can’t an immortal, non-linear race of aliens who can speak to anyone at any time using psychic alien powers just tell someone to chuck it into a warp engine or out of an airlock? Or not write it?
Because gods move in mysterious ways!
This is not actually an acceptable argument in real life. It’s a clever-sounding way of saying ‘I don’t know’ and also a major reason we know that this type of god doesn’t exist: history unfolds in a way completely indistinguishable from random chance because that is, in fact, what is happening. You don’t need a guiding intelligence to the universe to make statistical chance happen16. However, this is a still more unsatisfying answer in narrative fiction. ‘Things just happen all the time for no particular reason’ is not a story.
The end result is that the conclusion to Sisko’s arc is unsatisfying. We’re presented with this guy who is a dedicated family man, who feels a bit ambivalent about his career in Starfleet and is considering the possibility that he may have to drop his career to be a good father to his son. He then has a third role, of Emissary to some annoying aliens, thrust upon him. He gradually comes to embrace all three of these identities and find some sort of peace and equilibrium within himself – only to then very suddenly abandon both career and family because a not very competent god told him to, for no reason that we’re ever given. This is annoying writing. It might even have been better to leave it totally ambiguous as to whether he died in the Fire Caves rather than insisting there was some reason that he just can’t tell Kassidy (or us). And he doesn’t speak to poor old Jake at all!
So, I find it difficult to sing unqualified praise for a series where the main character and his arc are both flawed as written and executed badly onscreen.
Moral grey areas
DS9 has also been much-praised for introducing moral ambiguity into the Star Trek universe. This is very welcome in the character of Kira Nerys, a former terrorist who now finds herself in a position of authority as chief representative on DS9 of the Bajoran provisional government. She’s gone from leader of a terrorist cell, carrying out bombings, sabotage and assassinations, to an army major. This outsider to insider journey makes her different from previous Trek characters. She’s the first really good female role the series had17 and provides a fascinating point of contrast to the upstanding citizens of the Federation, most of them male, that we’d seen up to this point. She’s deeply religious, a warrior, frequently (and understandably) angry about both the past and the present. The show neither blames her for having been a terrorist but nor does it ever entirely let her off the hook. Right up to the end, she’s explaining to people who would quite like to kill her that they are going to have to kill their own people if they want to win a revolution. It’s intense and difficult, but also difficult to argue with: after all, she’s right and it largely works (and, in a neat twist, the person who most objects to the idea of killing his own people in the name of the revolution is later killed, in the name of the revolution, by one of his own). Kira never apologises for her actions in the Resistance and never forgives the Cardassians as a group, although she works with them when she has to. Her arc works through never entirely resolving the ambiguity of her position. By series’ end, she’s had one last successful go as a terrorist, ironically fighting for the people who oppressed her planet for so many years, before she returns to Deep Space 9 as the commanding officer, but still outside of Starfleet and the Federation.
Kira really hits the ground running as a character. The first really stunning episode of the show is episode 19, ‘Duet’, which I don’t think the show topped till ‘The Visitor’ (more on which later). Kira meets a man she thinks is a war criminal, but who insists he isn’t. I don’t actually want to spoil the plot of this episode. You really should just watch it. It’s really impressive that DS9 delivers an all-time great episode so early on in its run.
Likewise, Odo is a great character. He’s a variation on a key Trek trope, the alien outsider who doesn’t fully understand the human (and Bajoran, Ferengi and Cardassian) people he lives among, but wishes to understand them better, and to be like them in key ways. In TOS and TNG, this role was taken by Spock and Data, who became the most beloved characters on their shows,18 so Auberjonois has some big Beatles boots to fill. The variation the writers came up with is of an alien who is not only living among aliens, but also not in his ‘natural’ state physically: he’s a shapeshifter, a species that doesn’t have a single form and spends most of its time linked to some indeterminately massive number of its fellows in a gigantic ocean of sapient goo, known as ‘the Great Link’, located on the other side of the Galaxy. Just as Spock and Data relied on abstract non-emotional frameworks to guide them (logic and a broadly defined positivism), Odo relies on justice. When he finally meets his fellow Changelings, he soon discovers they’re a race of imperialistic genocidaires, so that his sense of justice forces him to reject them. Again, the series maintains this ambiguity throughout: he recognises both that he can never truly be himself on Deep Space 9, among ‘solids’, out of his natural state, but that he also cannot be himself if he joins the Great Link while they’re still pursuing a war, because that would violate his sense of justice.
Like Kira, Odo came of age in the show’s ‘past’ during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. He likewise had a morally ambiguous role as a sort of police officer on the station, trying to find some balance between the violent, oppressive ‘justice’ of the Cardassians and his own still-evolving ideas of what justice should involve. As we see in various flashbacks, he didn’t always succeed but, as the show also makes clear, it would’ve been impossible for him to achieve justice while working with the Cardassians. As with Kira, the show makes it clear that he could have behaved differently, but never comes down on one side or the other as to whether or what he should have done.
In Odo’s case, his arc ends in a satisfying way, because the contradiction that animates him isn’t actually internal or inherent to him; once the external issue of the war goes away, he’s able to rejoin the Link. It’s still a wrench for him, because he has to leave Kira, but it makes sense: the idea of romantic love was something he’d learned from the Solids, so it’s something he’s able to leave behind.
Shades of… black? Evil? What do you call this colour? ‘War crime grey’?
Where the moral grey areas don’t work is when the writers try to create them within the Federation itself. At their absolute worst, major characters are simply allowed to commit crimes – serious crimes – that they get away with when the status quo is restored at the end of the episode. There are three particularly egregious examples of this.
The first is with Jadzia Dax, during one of her early pre-Worf episodes in which Farrell very much fails to give the impression that she’s several hundred years old. Dax goes on a mission of vengeance with a group of Klingons, so she’s party to what, in the Federation, is clearly murder, but to the Klingons is justified as part of a blood feud. Sisko explicitly warns her not to do it. She does it anyway. It’s obviously murder, but her entire comeuppance is that Sisko gives her an annoyed look when she comes back to the station. That’s it. Is this really Starfleet’s attitude to officers violating a direct order in order to take part in a – successful! – conspiracy to murder someone?
Apparently it is! Because, much later, Worf and Dax go on holiday to Risa, the sex pleasure planet. Worf decides that he doesn’t like sex pleasure, so he joins a group of terrorists for the weekend. Again, he is simply allowed to get away with this. Perhaps remembering that she also went on a terrorism-themed jolly once, Dax doesn’t even break up with him. Nobody ever raises the time Worf joined a terrorist organisation for a bit.
Starfleet’s shockingly lax attitude to criminality in its officers continues, however. in ‘For the Uniform’, when Sisko is faced with a (different) terrorist group, the Maquis, he responds by, I’m not kidding, committing an act of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing, by poisoning a planet’s atmosphere in such a way that it won’t be able to support humans (or similar) for fifty years. This is, unambiguously, a war crime and a crime against humanity. Having done this, with scarcely a single objection from the crew, he threatens to do it several more times unless the Maquis surrender. By the end of the episode, everyone’s laughing about it.
In a lot of the writing about DS9, it seems to be assumed that the society depicted in the earlier series was a morally unambiguous utopia. However, this is not the case at all and it’s honestly quite odd that anyone thinks so. Apart from the many times the Federation is nearly destroyed by conspiracy or invasion, some of the most celebrated episodes in TOS and TNG depict the Federation, Starfleet and the people within it as deeply flawed characters, who force our heroes into uncomfortable situations. ‘The Doomsday Machine’ sees the crew having to survive when they’re given suicidal orders by a revenge-obsessed captain, for example, and Kirk frequently cheats, bluffs and lies when he has to, including to his superior officers. His senior staff spend the entire time bickering and McCoy is kind of a racist. Utopia?
‘The Measure of a Man’, one of the most celebrated TNG episodes sees the Federation threatening to dismantle Data, potentially killing him in the process, because they think it might be useful to do so. Data has to go through an entire trial to prove to the Federation that he exists. Riker’s forced to act as the prosecution for his friend. Okay, Data and Picard win in the end, but ‘proving you have the right not to be dismantled simply because it seems like it might be convenient to dismantle you’ is hardly the stuff of utopia, is it?
‘The Measure of a Man’ is a perfect example of what makes for a good exploration of ethics in Star Trek (and sci-fi more broadly). It needs to take a moral issue that is not a solved issue, then add a sci-fi element. So, the questions in ‘The Measure of a Man’ are, What does society owe to the individual (and vice-versa)? (A moral issue we haven’t solved, hence the existence of democratic politics); and, Do androids count as individuals with rights? (which is, of course, the sci-fi element). In the episode, we as the audience naturally side with Data, because we know him. But the points made by Bruce Maddox (and by Riker, acting for the prosecution), are valid. Data is a machine. It would be really useful to have a Data on every ship in Starfleet. Where they collapse is in the fact that Data is a machine who can express real views about himself, and he does not want to be dismantled.
In Star Trek: Insurrection, there’s a similar situation in that Starfleet wants to do something and the crew of the Enterprise want to stop them. The reason it works much less well than ‘The Measure of the Man’ is that, while it has the sci-fi element (a mysterious anti-aging energy), the thing Starfleet wants to do is just wrong and it is a solved moral question: it is never okay to forcibly displace an entire population19 (are you listening, Captain Sisko?). We know this is the case, and so we know there’s absolutely no question that Picard and co. will refuse to help the Federation do such a thing once they know that’s what’s happening and, indeed, that they will turn against Starfleet if they have to, in order to prevent it, which they duly do.
Back to ‘For the Uniform’: Sisko decides that he’s going to poison a planet in order to commit ethnic cleansing (displacing the humans and Bajorans so that Cardassians, who aren’t susceptible to that posion, can move in). This is a crime. The sci-fi element isn’t really interesting. It’s not significantly different from using a hypothetical dirty bomb to make an area radioactive. So this episode fails both tests: a solved ethical problem and a sci-fi element that’s not different or interesting enough from what we have in the present, non-fictional world.
It also demonstrates what’s wrong with much of the ‘grey’ morality of DS9. Committing a crime against humanity isn’t morally ambiguous, it’s evil! There isn’t any question about this, that’s just what those words mean. People like to go on about how Janeway murders Tuvix in Voyager, but for some reason Sisko is let completely off the hook here by the fanbase and, indeed, by Starfleet and the Federation, when in fact he should’ve been tried at whatever the Federation’s version of the Hague is.
Another area where DS9 had a negative impact on the series was the introduction of Section 31,20 which is a branch of the Federation that does ‘morally ambiguous’ (again, read: evil) things, apparently without any kind of oversight or approval from the government. This kind of organisation is a dreadful, nonsensical fictional trope. Invariably it’s an excuse for writers to have a group of villains who just do whatever they like with no restrictions whether physical or logical, until the writers get bored and suddenly it turns out they can be stopped21. In the case of DS9, the writers team once again use Section 31 to make what they consider to be an ambiguous argument which in fact boils down to ‘Atrocities are okay when the good guys do them’ and, again, there’s no sense in which this is ambiguous, it’s just false and wrong.
Worse, with Section 31 in particular, it’s just lazy writing. The organisation is absurdly overpowered, with its agents able to walk into rooms without anyone seeing them (until the plot deems that it’s time for them to magically appear) or, equally, to spirit people away without their noticing. Even in a universe with near-infinite resources, it’s impossible not to wonder just how Section 31 gets so many, e.g., spaceships, without anyone questioning what’s going on. Plus, the main characters frequently plaintively ask each other how they can finally ‘reveal’ what Section 31 is up to, without ever considering that the sworn testimony of numerous high-ranking Starfleet Officers, not to mention the evidence of all the corpses lying all over the place or the fact that they’ve literally caught Luther Sloan, he’s right there! – might actually be enough to reveal everything.
But apart from all that…
Despite silly elements like Section 31 and the Pah Wraiths, the show is generally good or even great. Those things are in few enough episodes that I can mostly ignore them and there’s just so much to like that even the regrettable choice of Brooks doesn’t wreck the show.
One episode, in particular, is not only one of the best Star Trek stories but I think one of the greatest works of SFF ever written: ‘The Visitor’ from season 4. I strongly advise you to go and watch this if you haven’t but, in brief, the plot is that Sisko is killed in an accident, leaving Jake an orphan. However, Sisko begins to reappear at brief intervals, first weeks and then years apart, throughout Jake’s life, as a sort of ghost. For Sisko, time doesn’t pass at all between the intervals: he remains the same age while Jake gets older. Thus, eventually, Sisko sees his son as an adult, then an old man – older than Sisko himself. After several failed attempts to bring Sisko back, Jake realises the only way to save him is to commit suicide at the right moment; that this will allow Sisko to return to the time of the accident, and avoid it. The right moment, of course, turns out to be a time when Sisko is there, with Jake, so that Sisko cradles an old man who is also his son in his arms as he dies in order to save him. It’s absolutely stunning.
Brooks, for once, doesn’t overdo it, completely selling this impossible situation. Tony Todd22, as the older Jake, is also fantastic, as is Cirroc Lofton in his regular role as the Jake we know. The reason, though, that it’s such great SFF is that it creates a real, human story that could only be told with some sort of fantastic element (in this case the ‘temporal displacement’ that takes Sisko out of time). You could achieve the broad outline in a couple of ways, but never in a ‘realistic’ plot. Yet, you feel the entire thing as a real human being: Jake’s bereavement at losing his father, the impossible hope when he apparently returns, only to devastatingly vanish again, then Sisko’s sense of loss at his son’s death (even though he understands that this will allow him to live, with his son, again). It’s brilliantly, brilliantly done. You don’t often get a piece of fiction that not only works in itself but singlehandedly justifies23 the existence of an entire genre.
Deep Space 9 is mostly good and, when everything comes together, very good. It proved that you could do Star Trek without a ship called the Enterprise and that you could almost do it without having a ship at all. It increased the alien quotient in the show, finally delivered some really good roles for women and even had a kid in it who wasn’t annoying. I think overall it’s not quite as good as TNG was when it really got going, although you could persuasively argue that it’s average was better. I also think I still prefer the generally under-rated Star Trek: Voyager, though I’ll get back to you about that when I’ve finished watching it.
Book reviews
Queen Macbeth, by Val McDermid
This is a reasonably workmanlike book. It’s not really a re-telling of Shakespeare’s play; rather, it goes back to the source materal and re-tells that. I’m not sure I find Gruoch more compelling or even necessarily more sympathetic than Lady Macbeth, though. Fun fact of the day: While we all call her ‘Lady Macbeth’ and most modern editions of the play give this name in the stage directions, she’s never referred to as such in the First Folio, the only authentic text of Macbeth: she’s referred to simply as ‘His Lady’ and then just ‘Lady’. So, McDermid does her some justice by giving her her name back.
The Malcontent, by John Marston
One of the first tragicomedies, an entertainingly twisty turny play with a fun bit of metatheatre at the beginning, featuring Shakespeare’s pals Richard Burbage (‘Burbadge’ here), Henry Condell (co-editor of the First Folio) and William Sly arguing with each other and the audience. Still, oddly, feels pleasantly surprising when the tragic-seeming play ends happily. I imagine the first audiences were blown away.
Utopia, by Thomas More
Speaking of utopias (utopiae?), I also read the original this month. As David Wittenberg argues in The Philosophy of Time Travel, it’s to later utopian fiction that we owe the concept of time travel. Once there were no new lands to discover, utopian authors had to locate their societies elsewhere in time not, as More and later Swift, parodying the genre, did, on far-flung islands. Being both a hit in Shakespeare’s day and a predecessor to the time travel story, this ticks a lot of boxes for me.
What I found most interesting about it is that More’s Utopia is so similar to the various socialist/communist utopias people have come up with afterwards and also quite similar, mostly knowingly, to Plato’s Republic. I can’t tell if this is because we’re all so collectively unimaginative we can’t come up with anything new or if it just is the case that ‘some sort of communism [that works (somehow)]’ really would be the best way for humans to live. Anyway, it’s an interesting, fairly brief read, well worth the little time it takes to read it.
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