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.
