The Good and the Bad of Deep Space Nine: Part 3, Starting the Ending

Alright, let's finish this up, shall we? Spoilers!

4. The Ending.

The first and last seasons of DS9 were sort of odd.  The first season was strange because the show didn't know quite where it wanted to go at that point, and none of the Gamma Quadrant aliens were as deep as ones created in TOS and DS9, until they revealed the changeling Founders, the Vorta, and the Jem'Hadar. Still, the first season was okay, definitely better than TNG's first season.  Not that it takes much to be better than TNG's.

The final season, however, had an unfortunate blight.  Her name was Ezri Dax.  While she's certainly no Neelix, the idea in itself of adding a new character during a final season is iffy on its own.  Sure, this would make sense if the new character were incidental to new circumstances in the other character's lives, but to bring in a new main character who has to not only become an interesting person on her own, but also correctly take on the legacy associated with all the memories of around ten past lives?  That's a heavy plot burden right there.

It doesn't help that as a young girl who hasn't at all been prepared to become joined to a symbiote and must deal with the consequences of Jadzia's death, there's a lot of plot potential for Ezri.  She has to be introduced and develop friendships when everyone else is well established and finishing up their stories.

The Good and Bad of Deep Space Nine (p1): the Characters

Hey y'all.  So I've been watching a lot of DS9, lately.  It's a bit of the "black sheep" of the Star Trek franchise, as it goes too far away from what Star Trek is about, people claim.  While in certain ways this claim is true, it's also partially false.

One of the more ridiculous claims about this series is that it's not Star Trek because it's not a "trek": none of the characters are going anywhere to discover new worlds and whatnot.  This is very silly, because quite often Next Generation set exploration aside in favor of putting depth into the races and worlds already created.  The "Star Trek" label is now a label of a franchise, and only the first series and Next Generation (because it appeared after a long hiatus) were obligated to trek.  It's okay for there to be a side story or spin-off that focuses on things that aren't entirely unknown.  Yes, this changes the focus of the series, but that in itself doesn't make it bad.  Of course, if it's one's personal taste to prefer exploration over a space station, that's fair enough.  It's just not an objective concern.

However, there are objective complaints about it.  The primary one is that Deep Space Nine betrays what Roddenberry intended in having an ideal universe where people learn to get along.  For a series in Star Trek, this is hard to accept.  Some argue that by having people act more realistically, the show is better.  On an entertainment perspective, I agree.  On the other hand, Star Trek is made distinct by its idealism, and the goal of Trek was never simply about being entertaining.  It was to create something new and refreshing, with the belief humanity could improve itself.  While I feel that much of this philosophy is humanistic bunk, it was hopeful and fun in its own way.  In the original series, anyway.

So if you want to say that DS9 is too non-idealistic, that's certainly true.  It can also be argued that this series is more entertaining than the others.  It's certainly more entertaining than Voyager (a collection of mostly bad actors) and Enterprise (boring and insensitive to canon).

In any case, let's just talk about Deep Space Nine, shall we?

Nitpickery: Captain Sisko

Hey y'all.  I've been watching a lot of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine recently, and I was puzzling over the fact that Captain Benjamin Sisko never interfered in the Picard vs. Kirk conflict over which Star Trek captain was the best.  Granted, he's an easy third, but that's primarily because Janeway was boring and Archer's actor didn't even belong in the Star Trek universe.  Good for Quantum Leap, but not so much Trek.

Anyway, Captain Sisko is in charge of Deep Space Nine, a station that is near the planet Bajor and a wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant.  Thus, he's got the war aftermath between the Bajorans and the Cardassians to deal with, as well as whatever goes through the wormhole.  Isn't that situation at all interesting?

Note that the captains past Picard faced a problem.  The writers apparently felt that a starship captain had to refer back to the previous captains to be a good one, and Picard himself, like much from his series, set a precedent that the others had to follow, for some reason.

In fact, the reason why Kirk and Picard are so entertaining is that they're their own people.  Kirk is a swashbuckling type common in early sci-fi, and Picard's the anti-Kirk who is dignified and diplomatic.  Picard's writers felt no need to make him imitate Kirk, unlike the writers for the subsequent series.  Janeway, Sisko, and Archer all are forced into playing analogues for the two main captains.  One comment I read online even calls Janeway a male Kirk.

Thankfully for Sisko, Deep Space Nine allows him to break free of this.  Note, however, that I have several problems with this series.  It tries to do too much with too many over-arching plotlines, there's really no need to see all those female characters sleeping around, the commentary on capitalism through the Ferengi was uneducated and two dimensional, and most times the show tried to refer to previous series in the franchise, the attempts to do so were flat and uninteresting.

Despite this, DS9 managed to be an entertaining show, probably because it's far more character driven and emotional than the others -- it's not trying to follow Roddenberry's philosophy to a T, and thus it shows humans being human and not some sort of ultra-moral philosophers on spaceships.  It may not fit in so well with the past, but it's an entertaining show, and with television that's all that matters.

But back to Sisko.  So why isn't he up there with Kirk and Picard?  Let me sum him up before we get to the reasons I've guessed.  He's a guy from New Orleans, raised by a man who hates replicator food and taught his children to cook.  Sisko's ultimate goal was to become an Admiral, but through the death of his wife at the hands of Borg Picard, Sisko ends up at Deep Space Nine, a position which appears to be a dead end as far as careers go.  However, though the wormhole and, later on, war with the Gamma Quadrant Dominion, increases Sisko's importance.  Also, he's the Emissary of the Bajoran religion, communicating between them and their gods, the Prophets.  These Prophets, timeless creatures from the wormhole, are ultimately responsible for Sisko's birth, as it turns out, and they also end up responsible for his ultimate fate: to join them in the timeless space.

Okay, so knowing what we know, why isn't Sisko as popular as the two main captains?  Perhaps we can develop a theory.

- Sisko works on a station.