We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

“Supper, sir, and tonight's movie. I'm sorry, sir, it is another Doug McClure.” By which I mean to say, more today on Finnegans Wake. Only in the middle eight though. Little bit at the end. Read it, you’ll enjoy it and you’ll learn something. Read on, MacDuff

We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

We are such stuff as dreams are made on: our little life is rounded with a sleep
                                                                                              The Tempest act 4, scene 1

I love sleep. One of the many reasons why I never really took drugs (certainly not ‘uppers’) is because I can’t imagine anything I’d less like to be doing than taking drugs and stay out all night clubbing. Yawn! All things considered, I’d rather be reading. That and getting an early night.

I say an early night, but my sleep patterns are so notoriously off when not engaged is regular servitude (I mean employment, sorry, sorry, my bad – attitude) that I can be getting up at anything from 4am to midday to midnight. I can easily sleep for anything up to fourteen hours at a time, often staying awake for a day or more just to try and reset my body clock. It usually works, at least for a couple of weeks.

To sleep, perchance to dream¹. As I sleep, I dream. I have friends who claim to never dream or to not remember their dreams. I can’t even begin to imagine what that’s like. I have four, five dreams a night and usually remember all of them. They have regular plots, themes and moods, like episodes of TV series.

There are the post-apocalyptic zombie dreams, the escaping from government agents or criminal mastermind dreams (same difference, am I right?), the dreams where real life locations miles apart are connected by shortcuts through the woods or under the M61. Whenever I leave a job, a house, a town or a relationship, I have dreams of being back there for months afterwards. My father died of cancer eighteen years ago and yet every other month I still dream that he turns up alive and no one but me seems suspicious at him not being dead, even though we had him cremated.

I have dreams where I’m running, but move more like a marionette, feet never quite connecting with the ground because the mind can’t accurately reproduce the sensation of running (or, more likely, because I rarely felt the need to run and so have no stored experience of what that’s like). I have dreams I am on bike, struggling to get up one of the monstrous hills that surround this village. I dream of being on boats all the time, steam boats on Russian lakes and speed boats on canals and some version of my fictional sailing ship, the Anna Livia Plurabelle, zipping around the oceans of the world. And if I’m not actually on water, then I’m walking along the bridal way of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. Except, it’s a dream, so it both is and isn’t the Leeds-Liverpool Canal.

I have dreams that I am in the United States and, most bizarrely of all, I have infrequent dreams about being in Vienna or Saltsburg, though I haven’t been to Austria or have any great desire to travel there.

Whenever I have spent all day reading or writing then the story continues as I sleep and my dreams are filled with nothing but a typed page that I read, except the narrative proceeds in the kind of fucked up way for which dreams are notorious. If that sounds strange, a friend of mine once had a dream that consisted entirely of a can of baked beans on a table. Static image, no panning or tracking shot or anything. Just a can of beans on a table. In the land of dreams it is the ordinary that is fucked up.

I also have a lot of anxiety dreams. I have dreams where I have run away from work or friends and am hiding, but regularly emerging from my hiding place to taunt them and run away and hide again. I used to have frequent dreams where I’m in an elevator that starts to get smaller as it ascends. Or works like an elevator in Star Trek, moving sideways and between buildings like a monorail system. I also have dreams that I’m in Star Trek, Deep Space 9, Red Dwarf, Community or The Office, depending which show I’ve recently been watching in marathon sessions.

In fact, the one dream that I can’t seem to remember is the one that I’d most like to able to recall. It is a recurring dream and a recurring nightmare from when I was very young. I can only remember it in snatches. It’s a disjointed dream. There are some grave diggers, which I know for certain come from seeing The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid. Something involving the army moving into position or something, but as so often with dreams, it’s the sense of unease and terror that the dream used to instil in me. It was the sense of time slowing down to a crawl. Where the sound of speech is in slow-mo and lowered pitch. I would get these sensations in waking moments too, of the world running at half speed. It used to freak me out, but now I’d kill to be able to recapture that sensation. I’m 41. I could do with some extra hours in the day. I had the dream once in a flu fever when I was fourteen, but other than that, I’ve not had in since I was five.

Oh! là! là! que d’amours splendides j’ai rêvés!² Given such a broad range of dreams, it is perhaps not unsurprising that I would become obsessed with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a novel which takes place during the course of a dream. When Joyce was writing, it was the theories of Sigmund Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams that held sway. Both men died long before the discovery of Rapid Eye Movement (REM), first described in 1953, and it was at the time assumed that dreams progressed in something like real time during the course of sleep. Today we know that dreams happen in bursts of activity during the night, identified by REM. What can appear in the dream world to last for hours actually happens in fast forward and often only takes minutes of real time. Perhaps this accounts for my feelings of temporal dislocation as a child.

Freud’s theories seem to us naive, even idiotic at times, but no theory is ever entirely wide of the mark and some of what he has to say is still valid. His theory that some dreams are nothing but wish fulfilment holds true. A child sees a toy in the shops that they wish to own and that night they dream that they are playing with the toy in question. I’d be willing to bet that in these days of consumerism, self-entitlement, arrested development and the cult of celebrity that more people have wish fulfilment dreams than ever before.

For Freud, all phallic or quasi phallic objects represented the penis and all womb or quasi uterine objects represent the vagina. Sex, sex, sex, that’s all that Freud ever thinks about. Joyce employs some of the same imagery in the Wake. It seems to me that in studying Finnegans Wake, which contains allusions to a great many works of fiction, non-fiction and mythology, some fall into the trap of assuming that just because Joyce references something, it must mean he thinks of it as being worthy.

The Wake makes great use and reference to Giambattista Vico’s The New Science, which contains Vico’s theory of history moving through repeating cycles. Yet anyone who’s ever read The New Science should know that while it might have some interesting theories about history and the etymology of certain words, it is for the most part a poorly conceived piece of fundamentalist, misogynist tripe, which tries to prove the literal truth of the Biblical stories, especially the bit where Noah’s three sons, Ham, Shem and Japheth travel out after the Great Flood to the three known continents and singlehandedly repopulate each continent by impregnating the race of giant women who survived the rising waters.

Perhaps I give James Joyce too much credit, but most of what I have read that was written by him or by the people who knew him leads me to believe that he ultimately came to see Vico’s theories as being as misogynistic as I do, especially once he’d read James George Frazer’s counter theories in The Golden Bough. The phrase, ‘a commodious vicus of recirculation’ contained in the opening sentence of Finnegans Wake seems to me to be Joyce calling out Vico’s theory as a vicious recycling of the same old misogynistic shit. Similar denunciations occur throughout the Wake.

The same is true with Freud and with psychoanalysis in general. Joyce’s own daughter, Lucia, muse to Finnegans Wake, suffered from what today would be probably diagnosed as manic depression and simply treated, but then, in the dark ages for feminism and psychiatry, was ministered to extremes and left languishing in mental institutions for forty years after her father’s death. Only Joyce kept faith in Lucia that she was not disturbed, but took her to see the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. The consultation was not successful, especially after Jung tried to get Joyce himself to undergo psychoanalysis. The conversation and Joyce’s witty retort is replayed in the Wake:

I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want (the fog follow you all!) without your interferences or any other pigeonstealer.

At one point in the Wake he refers to ‘Jungfraud’ to describe just what he thought of psychiatry. He believed that Vico had anticipated the work of Jung, Freud and others, but often the language of all three men in the Wake seems to be used as a weapon to strike back at them. The fall of man at the Garden of Eden and all the subsequent falls and returns, deaths and rebirths that play out through the Wake use Freud’s phallic dream symbology to symbolise sexual excitement and release. Death in the Wake is really la petit mort, the little death which is said to occur after ejaculation. Once the giant HCE has shot his load into his wife, ALP, he will sleep and she will be left unmolested until he is priapically reborn to rule over her once again.

Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?³ Today there are two competing theories on the purpose of dreams. One is vastly more woolly headed than the other, but neither quite catches the essence of the landscape of dreams. The prevailing cognitive scientific view is that dreams don’t really mean anything. Dreams are simply what happens when the governing conscious mind is suspended through sleep and neurons in the brain fire to trigger random memories that have no higher-self to give them direction. Freud said that every image in a dream is based on something that the senses have recorded in the real world, whether we consciously remember it or not.

The other theory on dreams come from the New Age community (New Age is such a fine example of Orwellian language: nothing even slightly new about any of it). Here, the theory holds that every symbol and image in dreams has some very definite meaning, as if all dreams are a Renaissance painting or a Modernist novel. Here’s a few of random examples from a fairly typical online resource:

To dream that someone is hacking into your computer or files symbolizes your vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The dream may be a way of telling you that you need to work on building up your self esteem.

To dream that you are eating macaroni symbolizes comfort and ease. The dream may be trying to bring you back to a time where things were much simpler.

To dream that you have rotting or decaying teeth implies that you may have said something that you shouldn't have. You may have uttered some false or foul words and those words are coming back to haunt you.

Sometimes satire writes itself. I’m sure that there must have been some evolutionary advantage to dreams, probably developed when our ancestors still lived in the trees. I don’t imagine our ancestors dreamt about their computers being hacked very often. The middle quote is so inane as to require no further comment. I often dream about my teeth falling out but that’s because I have rotten teeth. As Freud never actually said, sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. New age dream analysis, from the school of thought that brought you astrology.

That said, I can’t quite bring myself to fully endorse the scientific view either, because it fails to take account of the human dimension. Whether or not dream imagery is just random neurons firing in the brains neglects how we as humans interpret the world. It’s like looking at the slide show on someone’s computer screen saver. To the objective observer, the images may seem random, but every single image will be of significance to the person that put the slide show together. The same is true of dreams. We as human beings find meaning in random patterns, as you see from every tortilla chip or toasted cheese sandwich that is said to bear the image of Jesus Christ (funny that he always looks like a white European, never Middle Eastern or Jewish).

The scientific view of dreams has as much wrong with it as the New Age view, because both fail to take account of a personal interpretation. Look at night terrors, where people wake up during sleep, but are still also dreaming. Sleep paralysis, which stop us acting out our dreams during sleep is still in effect, rendering people helpless and they start to hallucinate figures in the room. What form those shapes take is entirely predicated on their personal belief system. Some people see alien abductors, other see the devil. An ex-girlfriend used to say that vampires were sucking her energy, because she reads Anne Rice novels and watches too much True Blood. My mum see angels, because she’s a New Age type and her house is covered in angel trinkets. We see in dreams what is personal to us.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?⁴ Dreams take any significance we chose to place on them. They can be mere entertainments or the revealers of great personal truths. Some nights I go to bed with as much excited anticipation as sitting down to watch a new episode of Community. Other nights I don’t want to sleep at all. Clearly dreams are more than just memories randomly doing as they please while the conscious mind sleeps. The conscious mind never completely relinquishes its control, as evidenced by wish fulfilment and anxiety dreams.

I have yet to experience lucid or directed dreaming, the Holy Grail of the dream world, where you are conscious as you dream and able to affect your surroundings. However, I have had semi-conscious dreams, semi-night terrors, where I dream that I am alone in a room but aware of some other presence being there. I take the view that what I am aware of is my own conscious mind removed to a distance from self and I believe that this is where our idea of a higher power comes from. God is really just ourselves. It’s like when any politician or schizophrenic (same difference, am I right?) tells them that God speaks to them, I think, no, that’s just your inner voice, we all have that, because it was evolutionary beneficial to have some part of you to shout, “Hey! Lion!” than go through the process of conscious recognition and evasive action taking. It just takes a different form when we sleep. Same with night terrors. They’re probably just unconscious substitutes taking up occupancy in the bit of the brain usually inhabited by the conscious mind.

As with dreams, so with Finnegans Wake. I have a personal interpretation of the Wake, probably as shaped by my own views on the nature of the world as anything else. Yet what Joyce intended to say in writing the Wake is to a certain extent irrelevant. Given that it describes an event that is to a greater or lesser degree subconscious, it is reasonable to assume that a good deal of the Wake was written by Joyce’s unconscious mind. Any writer will tell you that there are times when they are compelled to write something in a particular way and only later, when reviewing their work, does the significance of what they have written become apparent.

As Joyce was writing the Wake his eyesight was failing. He wrote in gigantic letters to be able to see what he was doing and had a series of secretaries (including a young Samuel Becket) to help him transcribe the streams of word in his head. Much of the Wake he never saw written down, only spoken, and so even he may have missed much of the significance of his own masterpiece. Yet by virtue of that fact that it hovers somewhere between the Freudian/New Age and the scientific version of dreams, the Wake succeeds in sketching out an accurate version of the dreaming world. It may not get it right all time, but hey, see impressionism, pointillism, cubism or futurism and tell me they are less valid artistically for their inaccurate interpretations of the world. Go on, I dare you (<my dreaming self seeping through).

I would close by wishing for all of your dreams to come true, but I wouldn’t want my zombie dreams to come true, nor that recurring dream where I’m wondering around town in my pants, wrapped in a quilt, trying to masturbate in public without anyone noticing, so I will merely end by wishing that you dream interesting dreams. Dreams rock. I’d take my own dreams over 95% of the shit that’s on TV any day. Listen to what they are trying to tell you, but don’t take them too seriously either. There’s no hard and fast method for working out what dreams mean. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. Sometimes a dream is just a dream.

[wakes: Whoa! Hey Babe, I dreamt I wrote this amazing article on dreams. Ah shit, how did it start again?]

Footnotes

¹Hamlet, act 3, scene 1

²Ma Boheme (fantaisie) - Arthur Rimbaud (‘Oh, of what splendid loves have I dreamt’)

³A Dream Within A Dream – Edgar Allen Poe

⁴The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Volume 1

Get it done.

January in Review

Time to reflect...

January in Review

It’s the end of January and the end of the first month of my trying to post something new to my blog every day for a year. As if things weren’t narcissistic enough already, I thought it would be useful to look back on my output for the first month and see what can be learned for the coming months.

This project was conceived to get me off my backside and become acclimatised to the process of sitting down and writing every day. I tend to think of things I want to write about and then they get stuck in my head for three months, before I sit down at the computer and write the entire thing in twenty minutes. However, setting myself a task like this means that there is no time to become insular. The work just has to be done.

In general, things have gone well. I have blogged every day, even if some blogs have gone up at four the next morning (my body clock seems to be set to a twenty six hour schedule). There has been some minor cheating, blogging pieces that were written years ago, but as they hadn’t been posted previously, they still count. That’s meant that I could get on with other bits and pieces. At the beginning of the month I was barely keeping up. Here at the end, I’m a few days ahead.

A number of articles that have been knocking around my head for a while got written in January to varying degrees of success. There was the Best Things Article on Star Trek Deep Space 9, which I’m quite happy with. There was also a trilogy of pieces on Bob Dylan, one of which I wrote years ago, one which had tripped me up for years, but which was pretty much sewn together from the copious notes I had taken. Finally there was a short dialogue concerning the song, ‘Just Like A Women’ written from scratch from an idea I had years ago. ‘Her Ribbons and Her Bows’. was the most enjoyable thing I wrote all month.

On the down side, I don’t think the article, ‘Blue Metal Jazz’ ended up quite how I envisaged it, mainly because I focussed so much on the sections about jazz music, that I forgot to include half of what I wanted to say about heavy metal. The article was written at the beginning of the month, so it had to go up pretty much as soon as I wrote it. The good thing about getting ahead of myself is that I can write something, not touch it for a few days, then looked at it a fresh and do some editing before publication.

To redress the balance, I want to say here what I forgot to say about my love of heavy metal:

I think of all the styles of music, metal is the most literary and the most respectful and reverential to other artistic mediums. Half of what I’ve read, half of what I know comes from intellectual journeys that were begun in the heavy metal world. I first came to appreciate Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner because of the Iron Maiden song by the same name (and length). It was the Coleridge poem that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick and Moby Dick that inspired one of the best post-millennial metal albums, Mastodon’s Leviathan. Leviathan is like the soundtrack to Ahab’s inner monologue. If you want an album that reflects the man’s anger and his rage, Leviathan is that album.

Metal bands have always written songs based on novels. One only has to think of Metallica’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ based on the Hemingway novel or ‘One’ based on Dalton Trumbo’s terrifying anti-war book, ‘Johnny Got His Gun’. I read both books because of Metallica and went on to read more or less everything Hemingway wrote.

Anthrax wrote a couple of songs based on Stephen King novels, ‘Among the Living’ based on ‘The Stand’ and ‘Misery Loves Company’ based on ‘Misery’. I’ve yet to get into Stephen King, I must admit, but I read 2000ad religiously as a kid, so ‘I Am the Law’ about Judge Dredd was always a favourite Anthrax song. “DROKK IT!”

I have a lot to thank metal bands for. I became aware of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’ when I saw it on the inner sleeve of Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Evil Empire’. Bruce Dickinson’s ‘The Chemical Wedding’ caused me to read everything by William Blake. Indeed, Wolfsbane frontman, Blaze Bailey, is probably most directly responsible for my becoming a writer. I was a member of the Wolfsbane fan club at 18 and  I can remember reading a piece he wrote shortly after David Icke made his now legendary appearance on ‘Wogan’. It was Bailey’s rant against the sneering media reaction that  inspired me to want to do the same. And now I do.

Metal led backwards towards the blues. To John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. From blues I eventually came to jazz. I was a late convert to the genius of Bob Dylan, but between Guns n’ Roses version of ‘Knockin On Heaven’s’ Door’, Hendrix’s blistering ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and Rage Against the Machine’s grinding interpretation of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, I was well versed in his oeuvre by the time I got there. And metal led through a dozen different crossovers to rap and hip hop, via Cypress Hill, Faith No More, The Beastie Boys, Anthrax and Public Enemy.

I use music as a mood elevator, a metronome for writing, a soundtrack to reading and as a relaxant. I need a wide range of musical genres because I have a wide range of moods and need a palette broad enough to match. Hard rock/heavy metal has the broadest spectrum of any style of music other than jazz. Alice in Chains soothe, Clutch cheer, Slayer get me energised and fired up for writing and Tool and A Perfect Circle drop me into a state halfway between relaxation and nervous tension. I don’t listen to a lot of new metal these days, but then I don’t listen to that much music at all. I have enough to work through as it is.

So there you go, that’s that imbalance restored and the karmic, thermodynamic forces are retuned to parity. To finish up, a selection of my favourite articles you may have missed from the month. I’m spectacularly bad at promoting myself, but I would ask that if you read something I’ve written that you like, please do share it. I only want to be read (and to be rich from being read, but you know, one step at a time).

Click on the links below to be whooshed away to genius.

Heaven, Heaven is a Place, A Place Where Nothing, Nothing Ever Happens 

Three Views Upon the Miraculous

The Community Strikes Back

In Appreciation of Captain Beefheart

Blue Metal Jazz

Her Ribbons and Her Bows

A Woman of Conviction

Youthful Angst

Best Things Ever #17 Star Trek Deep Space 9

Review: Shakespeare Beyond Doubt

So that’s January done with. To February and beyond!

Get it done.

Best Things Ever #17 Star Trek: Deep Space 9

Another late blog entry, but this one's about four month's late. Sometimes writing something new can be like trying to find the open end on a roll of sellotape, you run your nail over and over the surface, but it just won't catch. Today, finally, I found the edge I'd been missing. Enjoy!

Best Things Ever

#17 Star Trek: Deep Space 9

I recently watched again the entire seven season run of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (DS9). It certainly has some flaws, too many below par episodes, especially in the first couple of series, too much of the kind clunky expositional dialogue that would today be handled by a ‘Previously on…’ montage at the front of each episode.

That said, DS9 can boast of having produced the two greatest episodes of any Star Trek spin off, namely, ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ and ‘Far Beyond the Stars’. It can also boast of the finest ship, captain and crew. For a few minor imperfections, it remains not just my favourite Star Trek franchise, but one of my favourite TV shows of all time.

Like all Star Trek spin offs, DS9 centres on the adventure of Starfleet, the exploratory and  military wing of the Federation of Planets, an alliance of galactic races, with its headquarters on Earth. What differentiates DS9 from all other series is rather than take place on a Federation starship, usually one incarnation or another of the USS Enterprise, DS9 takes place on the eponymous space station from which the series takes its name. Deep Space 9 is a recently abandoned ore processing plant around the planet of Bajor, built and operated by the Cardassians, a brutal race who until recently had occupied the planet for over fifty year, forcing the Bajorans into slavery.

Other Star Trek series take place in a controlled environment on board a starship. In DS9, the Bajoran provisional government has asked for the Federation’s help in rebuilding their society after half a century of brutality and Starfleet sends Commander (later Captain) Benjamin Sisko to assume control of the station, commanding a crew comprising a mixture of Starfleet and Bajoran personnel.

Sisko’s second in command is Major Kera Nerys, a former member of the Bajoran Resistance. Kera believes that the Federation has no place being there, that the Bajorans have replaced one kind of occupation for another, and she and Sisko lock horns at regular intervals.

DS9 not only features characters that are not affiliated to Starfleet, but characters who are not affiliated to anyone. There’s Quark, the Ferengi barkeeper, whose shady dealings see him continual conflict with Odo, the station’s shape-shifting head of security. Odo’s own origins are something of a mystery. The thrust and parry of repartee between Odo and Quark is one of the highlights of the show.

Indeed, it’s the banter between characters that sets DS9 apart from Star Trek’s other incarnations. On board a starship, dominated by the chain of command, conflict between rank and file officers is almost always in absentia. The bashing of heads between Sisko and Kira, Quark’s  scheming under Odo’s nose, the intrigues of the station’s only Cardassian resident, Garak, as he spins a web of half-truths for the entertainment of an impressionable Doctor Bashir, give the programme its strength. There’s even conflict between Starfleet personnel, with Bashir seemingly oblivious to how much he annoys Chief of Operations, Miles O’Brien (a transfer from the Enterprise and Star Trek: The Next Generation). Their emerging bromance played out over seven seasons is as another of the show’s strengths.

The advantage of setting the series on a space station, rather than dicking about in space (the crew of the Next Generation spent seven years ferrying diplomats about, rarely ‘boldly going’ anywhere), is its potential for longer story arcs. In the feature length opening episode, the crew of DS9 discover a stable wormhole in the Bajoran sector, allowing safe passage to the other side of the galaxy.

It is the wormhole that is the real star of DS9. Everything salient which happens during the series is generated by the wormhole. It offers safe, stable passage, because it was constructed by a race of aliens that live inside it and outside of time. To the Bajoran people the wormhole aliens are gods, The Prophets, and Sisko, in discovering the wormhole and making first contact with them, comes to be adopted as their Emissary, The Sisko, revered as a religious leader by the Bajoran people. It’s basically a mediation upon religious life in America, as Star Trek has always been a meditation upon America’s place in the world (compare Klingon tradition with that of Japan for instance).

The wormhole also generates DS9’s great threat (sustained threat, as it is titled in film classifications). The Dominion, a despotic empire governing great expanses of the other side of the wormhole, the Gamma Quadrant, grow tired of ships coming through from the Alpha Quadrant and declare war on the Federation. They invade the Alpha Quadrant, occupy worlds, subsume civilisations. Deep Space 9 stands on the frontline in this war and the Federation’s increasingly futile situation leads its crew into areas darker than Star Trek had hitherto explored, aside from its occasional forays into the so-called Mirror Universe.

In what is for me the greatest episode of any Star Trek series, ‘In the Pale Moonlight’, Captain Sisko recounts how he came to bring the Romulans into war, turning the tide in favour of the Federation. The course of his downward spiral from trying to find evidence of a Dominion attack upon Romulus, to manufacturing that evidence for himself, to becoming embroiled in the terrorist attack which finally brings the Romulans into the war is brilliantly done, especially the ending. The episode shows war stripped of its usual veneer of false dichotomy, good and evil, us and them, and shows how even the best of us can fall so quickly from grace. The road to hell, as Sisko reminds us, is paved with good intentions.

What differentiates DS9 from most other sci-fi shows of recent years, most television of recent years, is its ability to tackle contemporary events. The best science fiction has always been about contemporary issues and fears, removed to another time and space in order to be considered with some degree of objectivity. We see this in the fears about science and technology evinced in ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Brave New World’, the anti-communist paranoia of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, or the anxieties about thermonuclear annihilation in much of the original ‘Twilight Zone’.

By showing Sisko fabricate reasons to bring the Romulans into the war, ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ recalls the events of Pearl Harbour. I’m far from being a conspiracy theorist, but it does seem to me clear that public opinion in America at the time of World War Two was firmly against entering another costly war (as it had been during  the First World War, hence the promotion of the infamous Zimmerman Telegram) and a plan was concocted to goad the Japanese into an attack, precipitating reasons for America’s entry into the war. Documents released under Freedom of Information show an eight point plan to bring the Japanese into the war through military hazing and out and out attack.

Whether or not you think this was ultimately a necessary evil or not is of course down to personal opinion. It seems to me fairly pointless to speculate on what might have been. Far more important to clarify what did happen, in order to apply the mistakes of the past to the future. Certainly with the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Vietnam War or Iraq’s phantom weapons of mass destruction, the need even to encourage an attack has been superseded by false reporting and fear mongering. ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ reminds us that war is rarely anything but ugly and messy.

In fact, what strikes one as surprising about DS9 is just when it was first aired. The series was originally broadcast from 1993-1999, ending two years before the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Yet so much of what makes DS9 enthralling is its treatment of the kinds of issues that we have had to deal with in the west as a consequence of those attacks. Section 31, the shadowy subsection of Starfleet security, is basically the NSA. The rule of law is suspended for dubious reasons (Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges - At a time of war, the law falls silent). Those who were once considered terrorists are called freedom fighters now that they are resolved to our cause.

One of the chief writers on DS9 was Ronald D. Moore, who would go on to captain the ‘Battlestar Galactica’ reboot. ‘Battlestar Galactica’ in particular reflects the aftermath of 9/11 and the consequences of the so-called War on Terror. What I think makes ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ an especially fine episode is that, retrospectively, you can see in it the entire premise for ‘Battlestar Galactica’ being framed. ‘Battlestar Galactica’ contains all of the same tough questions, the same shades of grey as the DS9 episode, magnified a hundred fold to include suicide bombing, torture and extraordinary rendition. It, more than any other science fiction programme in the last fifty years, is a show about contemporary events. It’s science fiction for people who hate science fiction, stripped of any the usual time travelling, doppelgangers or parallel universes. There are robots though. Lots and lots of robots. It’s also about the only science fiction programme that is actually better than DS9 (though the radio version of ‘The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ is obviously the best thing that has ever been made by anyone, ever).

DS9 is proper science fiction and so there are plenty of time travelling episodes, as well as forays into the Mirror Universe, imposters and doppelgangers, even a nod to ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ in ‘Suspicions’, a personal favourite from the early series. The show was made at a time when model shots were slowly being replaced with cheaper CGI effects and so DS9 can boast of more high energy battle scenes than any of its previous incarnations. These invariably feature DS9’s own heavily armed battleship, the USS Defiant. Tough little ship.

The show even had a real life romance behind the scenes between Doctor Bashir (Alexander Siddig)and Major Kera (Nana Visitor). On occasion, signs of a relationship break the surface, as they do an early scene in the episode, ‘Rejoined’, where the body language between the two is highly suggestive. When Visitor later became pregnant, the show incorporated her pregnancy into the show in a way that only science fiction is capable.

DS9 also has Worf. Once Lieutenant Commander Worf transfers from the Enterprise at the start of season four, the show ascends to a whole new plateau of awesomeness.

Ultimately though, what makes DS9 stand out from all of the other Star Trek franchises is Captain Sisko. This is why I could never live with Sheldon Cooper of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ (apart from all the other reasons): When asked to chose between Captains Kirk and Picard, I would have to Kobayashi Maru his ass and go with Sisko. Sisko has many of the qualities of both of his predecessors, but no other character in the Star Trek universe came to have such depth. Not only is he commander of Deep Space 9, Emissary to the Prophets and imperfect human being who sometimes makes the wrong decisions for the right reasons (or the right decisions for the wrong reasons), but he is also a single father and a strong, leading black character in a genre with a poor record of relegating black actors to bit parts, if including them at all. 

This is why I nominate ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ as second only to ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ for strongest episode in the history of Star Trek. In this episode, Sisko suffers from a hallucination in which he is a writer living in 1950s America. His alter-ego, Benny Russell, writes a short story about his real self, an African-American captain in charge of a space station. The publishers of his magazine though won’t accept the story, even when he makes the whole thing a dream in the final reveal.

The remit of the original Star Trek series was that of a nations working and living together in harmony. It’s a scenario borne in the optimism of the 1960s. With each new incarnation, Star Trek became something different, from the obsession with external threats in the Star Trek movies of the paranoid 70s and 80s, to the touchy-feelyness of The Next Generation with its on-board ship’s counsellor. By the time of DS9, there was very little optimism left in the world. Parts of the United States saw racial segregation at levels little improved since the 1960s and DS9, in the finest tradition of science fiction, dealt with the issue head-on. 

(Someone should, if they haven’t already, write a dissertation on the history of black characters in science fiction. From Uhura as telephone receptionist in the original Star Trek to Uhura as ass kicking love interest in the big screen reboot, taking in Dave Lister, Morpheus and Martha Jones along the way. I would read that.)

I love the symbolism of baseball in the show, a sport which hasn’t been played in two centuries, but which Sisko and his son, Jake, are obsessed with. It’s amazing how many times baseball can be employed in different contexts, from its use by Sisko in the opening episode to explain the concept of linear time to the wormhole aliens, to Jake’s quest in, ‘In the Cards’ to procure for his father a Willie Mays baseball card, to Michael Dorn, usually heavily made-up in the Klingon prosthetics of Worf, playing a barely concealed version of Willie Mays himself in ‘Far Beyond the Stars’. Sisko bonds with his future wife, Cassidy Yates, over baseball, and the presence or absence of a baseball on Sisko’s desk can speak volumes about his future intentions.

Star Trek creator, Gene Rodenberry, died a little more than a year before DS9 first aired in January 1993 (Rodenberry died October 1991). By all accounts, he would not have approved of the dark turn that Star Trek’s newest franchise had taken. A pity, but the world has moved on since 1966. Even since 1987, when The Next Generation first aired. DS9 signposted the way to a darker television dawn, past ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and ‘24’, all the way to ‘The Wire’ and ‘Breaking Bad’.

Truly great science fiction television seems to be on something of a hiatus for the moment. All the money is being ploughed into fantasy drama like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘The Walking Dead’ (which is fine, they’re both excellent shows). Before New Line made ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, they were going to adapt Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series. I hope someone still does, along with Clive Barker’s ‘Weaveworld’, one of the best fantasy novels of the twentieth century (see also, ‘Imajica’). Science fiction will eventually come back with a vengeance. One hopes that Peter Capaldi will inject some much needed darkness into the cloying sentimentality that has infected Doctor Who since its reboot.

In the meantime, there’s always DS9 reruns. Little else pleases me more.

Get it Done.