Yora reviews Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - All of it!

[Mightymosy]

Luckily I have never watched a mirror universe episode. I don't know if Voyager had them.
Sad that the series after Voyager were so bad. Maybe the next one will be better?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I was a bit surprised that the only Mirror episode I really liked was the very first one. I remembered them being better, but the first one is just okay and all the ones that come later are pretty bad.

I remember the fight between the Deviant and the giant mirror Klingon vessel as being quite impressive on a technical level. I didn't like it story wise, "the ship we're trying to push as a fan favorite can beat much bigger and badder ships than anybody else", but I remember it as surely cool to watch.

[Yora]

I think it was one of the first CGI ship battles on Star Trek. You had not seen anything like that before, that made it stick in your mind.

[Traab]

Luckily I have never watched a mirror universe episode. I don't know if Voyager had them.
Sad that the series after Voyager were so bad. Maybe the next one will be better?

I dont think voyager had a mirrorverse episode. Instead it had stuff like cheese causing an outbreak of viruses that somehow grew into human sized versions of themselves and roamed the ship trying to stab people. Which is just.... so so very strange.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I think it was one of the first CGI ship battles on Star Trek. You had not seen anything like that before, that made it stick in your mind.

Personally I liked the parts with the giant model* better. We were well into the CGI era when I bingewatched DS9, I had seen plenty of that. I think I was mostly impressed that they took one of those "we're just doing it because it was in TOS" story lines and used it to step outside of their comfort zone and give us something Trek had never really done before.

*I think I remember seeing a sort of making of video about it, but what I can find right now is this and this:

The DS9 effects designers built a special thirty-foot-long studio model of the underside of the ship for use in the Defiant's strafing runs, in order to make sure that the two ships appeared properly scaled.

This allowed model maker Tony Meininger, repeating what he had done for "The Way of the Warrior" but on a larger scale, to construct a twenty-five foot model of the underside of the ship only, which was then for extreme close-ups filmed in standard Motion control photography with the Defiant model (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion).

The Negh'Var design eventually became a CGI model,

Those sources seem to indicate that at least the ships in those scenes were mostly not CGI. (The explosions are a different matter.)

[comicshorse]

Luckily I have never watched a mirror universe episode. I don't know if Voyager had them.
Sad that the series after Voyager were so bad. Maybe the next one will be better?

They had a Voyager episode where the crew were all evil ( and the actors seemed to be having great fun being mustache twirling villains) but it wasn't a Mirror Universe one

[Rodin]

I remember the fight between the Deviant and the giant mirror Klingon vessel as being quite impressive on a technical level. I didn't like it story wise, "the ship we're trying to push as a fan favorite can beat much bigger and badder ships than anybody else", but I remember it as surely cool to watch.

Interestingly, the Defiant only rarely performs notable feats in combat. The very first time they take it out the cloak fails and they all get captured by the Dominion. They sneak around in it a fair bit and the ship is hard to kill for its size, but when it comes to solo feats we don't see it do much. It's nowhere near as special as the Enterprise, the Discovery, the White Stars in Babylon 5, etc.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Interestingly, the Defiant only rarely performs notable feats in combat. The very first time they take it out the cloak fails and they all get captured by the Dominion. They sneak around in it a fair bit and the ship is hard to kill for its size, but when it comes to solo feats we don't see it do much. It's nowhere near as special as the Enterprise, the Discovery, the White Stars in Babylon 5, etc.

I'm not saying I'm being reasonable, just that this is how it felt to me. With the Enterprise, Discovery, Voyager etc I'm sold on them by the fact that this is their series. Anything that gets done will get done by this ship. And even in universe, they're brand new and something special. The Defiant is a later season addition, and a bit of a shuttlecraft. (I don't remember hating the Delta Flyer too much, but I probably just haven't seen enough Voyager.) The stupid part is that I like small ships. I'm always cheering for Dominion fighters and Klingon birds of prey. Maybe that's what rubbed me the wrong way on the Defiant, it makes all other small ships look bad. There is no dishonor in losing to a capital ship with a series named after it, but to the Defiant...

Or maybe I'm just misremembering this one episode as being more representative of the series than it was, in which case I have even more reason to dislike that story element in that episode. But the effects were still cool.

[Yora]

Closing Thoughts: Part 2, Characters

To me, one of the big selling points about Deep Space Nine are the characters. I guess that's true for most shows, but I think this series stands out from the rest of Star Trek for having a much stronger cast than the other ones. Though I still am not a fan of all of them.

I know that Sisko has a lot of devoted fans. But I also don't understand why. He's a good man doing good work, and seems like a nice enough guy to be around. But he just isn't raising any strong emotions in me. Having him be some kind of chosen one was a bit dodgy because I find chosen ones to be a poor concept in general, but I think the show handled it pretty well. It did not give him special powers of any kind, and in the relatively few cases where he actually had a big impact on Bajor, it was mostly in interpreting the cryptic messages from the prophet and telling the Bajorans what he thinks the prophets want them to know. It didn't get out of hand, until the last season where they went too far. I think one thing that never quite made the character work for me are the frequent cases of serious overacting. And not in a campy way that we know from Kirk, but overly dramatic in what often felt inappropriate to me. But I guess that's a matter of personal taste. Otherwise a solid character, but nothing too special for me.

I feel similarly about Jake. Initially the idea to have Sisko be a single father having to care for his son on a remote outpost where he's swamped with work seemed like a pretty interesting idea. But since the show made things up as they went, it never really went anywhere. Jake might actually have been too young at the start of the show. He quickly becomes too old to play the initial role he had in Sisko's life and then just was around. With better long time planning for the character, I think Jake could have been quite interesting, but he just kind of fell to the side.

O'Brien and Bashir I want to cover together. I feel very indifferent about them and while their scenes are generally okay, I just don't get invested into them. I think it might be because they don't have any character arcs. Bashir gets less awkwardly hyperactive compared to his first appearances, but that happens very early on. After that he does not seem to progress in any way. O'Brien had some personal stress when he realized his assignment on the station did not allow for his wife to have a meaningful career on her own while living with him. While that has some potential, it never actually got resolved. The solution was for his family to not live with him on the station until he got a new assignment on Earth at the end of the show. Also, the writers wrote really bad arguments between O'Brien and Keiko. I actually quite like her character, but drama requires her to sometimes act unreasonable, which then never gets resolved either.
Teaming O'Brien and Bashir up as buddies was a bit of an improvement, but having two pretty uninteresting characters play off each other also doesn't really lead to anything interesting.

Those were the characters that didn't do much for me. But none of them were terrible or annoying, which is still quite a plus.
But on the other hand we have a really good number of characters that I really like a lot. And I realized that not just do they all have a character arc, they also have really similar ones. You could even say they are different takes on the same underlying concept. My big hypothesis going into this rewatch, and which I now find very much supported by the end, is that we got a lot of characters who are struggling to find a way to live up to the values of their culture and at the same time doing their part to improve their culture, which turn out to be conflicting goals.

Let's start with Kira. One thing I always found funny about Kira is that Kira looks a lot like my mother and also is a lot like my mother, if my mother would punch people in the face. Not sure how that influenced my perception of the character one way or the other. Kira is an old rebel who fought her whole life to fight the Cardassians so that the Bajorans can restore their planet. Once the Cardassians are fought off, she joins the new army to keep working on the process of restoring the planet. But as she finds out very quickly, fighting off an external enemy is completely different from solving internal conflicts. Not only are her old skills mostly useless, she also gets ordered to do things she previously fought against. And the worst thing about it is that she's starting to see that it's necessary. She has to evict farmers who want to live in peace and confiscate resources from people who really need them for the greater good of all Bajorans. And when some of her old compatriots chose to fight the new government instead of obeying it, she has to go and fight them. Her goals remain exactly the same, but once the Cardassians are gone, some of the things she fought against she has to do herself, and the people who still are like she used to be are now the enemy. Fantastic conflict, perhaps one of the best character conflicts I've come across in fiction.
At least for the first three seasons. Then the divisions on Bajor seem to be resolved and the government stabilized, and Kira is fully on board with Sisko's support mission. After that she becomes much less interesting.

Odo is another fantastic character. At first his shapechanging ability was a bit of a gimick, but it all got much more interesting once we got hints that he's originally from the Gamma Quadrant and we occasionally get new hints that his people might still be somewhere out there. At least equally intriguing, if not even more in the early seasons, is his past working for with the Cardassians. At the start of the series he and Kira don't really know each other personally, but they very quickly become friends. Since we see Kira at her most angry, it adds a lot of depth to his character when she has complete trust in his past reputation. And we even get to see a couple of flashback episodes about what exactly he was doing during the occupation, which are often really good.
But then we get to the point at the start of season 3 where we learn that Odo's people are villains and evil dictators. And with that we get the kind of conflict that so many characters on the show are struggling with. He wants to be good and be with his people, but his people are bad. He wants to make them see that they are wrong and come over to his side, but he is just one and only a couple of decades old, while the rest of them are probably many thousands and probably ancient. The chances that he might succeed seem very slim. I also really like how Odo and the Founders deal with the topic of order. The pursuit of order turns out to be in their very nature, but to Odo it means justice, while to the Founders it means oppression. I think it was really interesting when that came together.

Another good example is Garak. The undisputed breakout character on the show, and I would say Star Trek taken as a whole. Like Kira and Odo, Garak wants to be a good Cardassian. Unfortunately in his exile, he realizes that Cardassian society is terrible. He used to be close to the very top of the hierarchy of power that has complete control over all of Cardassia. By any indications we get, he was a horrible enforcer of terrible dictators and he really loved what he was doing. But then he became one of the targets of the oppressive state and lost it all, and it all started to look rather different from the very bottom. Garak fully believes in the traditional values of Cardassian culture and the greatness of the Cardassian people. His purpose in life is to serve Cardassia, and for all his life, Cardassia meant the state. But then he realized that the state is evil and not good for the Cardassian people at all. He still wants to serve the society and preserve its culture, but that means fighting against the institutions he had always believed in. It's a great character arc and one that lets Garak both be super snarky and also have moments where he's just being really mean to others to vent his grief. The only shortcoming I have with it is that it kind of putters out towards the end. He keeps going, even though he fells like **** doing it, and stoically accepts the grief that comes with it. Which perhaps might be somewhat fitting for the character. His dedication to the good of Cardassia is unshaking and he has always devoted his entire life to do whatever it takes to serve it. That he will keep going even though it destroys it is fitting, but it does not feel like a rewarding ending.

Next we get Worf. Worf always wanted to be a noble Klingon warrior living up to their greatest values and honoring their oldest traditions. But he too finds out that the ideal he aspires to live up to don't exist anymore in their culture. When he last lived in Klingon society he was still a small child, and after that he grew up learning about Klingon culture only from a distance, taking everything at face value and being blind to how things really are. As a grow man we wants to be the perfect Klingon warrior, but does not really know how Klingons actually live. Which as a result makes even other Klingons get annoyed with how pedantic and uptight he is about traditions. Things get interesting when he persists to live by the ideals and values that only seem to matter to him anymore. This makes him some powerful enemies who see him as a thorn in their side, but with time he also gains some admirers who see him as an example of how Klingon warriors could be so much better than they are. As much as I disliked the way it was rushed in just one and a half episodes, Worf challenging Gowron to a traditional duel because he is the only one who refuses to go along with the complacency that has corrupted Klingon society is a great conclusion to his character arc.

Somewhat surprising perhaps, we see the same character arc with Quark. Quark wants to live up to the ideal of the perfect Ferengi businessman. And as he finds out over the course of the show, the Ferengi business world is actually terrible. It often turns into a comedy because his reaction is the opposite of what the other characters do. Quark does not make the hard choice to accept hatred and ridicule by working towards making his society better. Instead he always tries to fight his own conscience and become the kind of terrible person his culture expects him to be. When his mother starts to make progress making Ferengi society to be more equal and fair, he always keeps teaming up with his own worst enemies to stop her. When his brother and nephew reject their culture, he gives them endless abuse for it. And then keeps failing at it endearingly. It's funny because keeps failing at being bad. He just doesn't have it in him.
This also somehow keeps falling to the side towards the end of the show. Late seasons Quark is simply a nice and considerable man and ceases to be interesting because of it.
Something I found quite interesting with Rom in the early seasons was that he often became extremely conservative about the Ferengi treatment of women. But only when other Ferengi were seeing it. When he was saying misogynistic things, I think he was always trying to show to other more powerful Ferengi how traditional he is. He only seemed to do it under peer pressure.

I am also somewhat counting Dax with these other characters. Dax is different because she never is conflicted about who she is and what she wants. She knows who she is and what she wants. But starting at the end of season 2, and then most prominently ins season 4-6, she becomes a character who is both a respected Federation citizen who believes and lives up to Federation values, and also assimilated into Klingon culture, fully supporting her Klingon friends who are following Klingon values that sometimes are directly opposed to those of the Federation. And she's also very good friends with several Ferengi, even if many of their values are very objectionable.Dax is in basically the same situation was Worf, and a similar situation to Kira, Odo, Garak, and Quark. But for her, there is no conflict. Perhaps it goes even too smoothly to be fully believable, but there are some episodes that revolve entirely around her struggling with whether she can really continue with acting like a Klingon or she reached a point where she has to quit. So it's not all sunshine and bloodwine.

[Wraith]

They had a Voyager episode where the crew were all evil ( and the actors seemed to be having great fun being mustache twirling villains) but it wasn't a Mirror Universe one

I remember that. It wasn't a "Mirror Universe" episode, but the cold open pretended it was - the Voyager crew gleefully committing genocide on some random planet in order to extort resources and make a martyr of some guy who opposed them. Turns out it was a holographic novel made by the alien culture who had been genocided, and their interpretation of what happened based on heresay and propoganda from the other race that Voygaer had "sided with", until it turned out to be a misunderstanding.

Anther casualty of Voyager's ongoing problem of many episodes having no lasting consequences, but infinitely better than Evil Goatee Janeway making a genuine appearance.

I know that Sisko has a lot of devoted fans. But I also don't understand why.

A lot of Sisko's impact was cultural, as it was narrative. He was the first black character to be the protagonist in a Star Trek show - in fact, as far as I recall, in ANY long running sci-fi TV show (by all means, please correct me if I'm wrong) and especially because he wasn't portrayed as a blaxploitation character to boot. As well as authority, he had dignity and gravitas which was a big thing at the time.

He suffered a bit from typical 90's edginess - he had to be an action hero, and he had to have a dark and dangerous anti-hero flavour (a la In The Pale Moonlight) but fortunately I think that Avery Brooks managed to portray him in a suitable way that we got the best of both worlds. Similarly, especially early on, there was the possibility that the writers would make Sisko too different from the wildly popular archetype created by Jean Luc Picard just for the sake of doing so - had he been hugely different, all edge and no compassion, it would have been a far worse character.

I liked Sisko because he was pro-active and more morally grey than the captains which had come before, but I can appreciate why someone else might not prefer that.

O'Brien and Bashir I want to cover together. I feel very indifferent about them and while their scenes are generally okay, I just don't get invested into them. I think it might be because they don't have any character arcs. Bashir gets less awkwardly hyperactive compared to his first appearances, but that happens very early on. After that he does not seem to progress in any way. O'Brien had some personal stress when he realized his assignment on the station did not allow for his wife to have a meaningful career on her own while living with him.

What I really wish had been done with O'Brien and Bashir is that the writers had continued the themes started in the early seasons and expanded upon them, rather than just bringing them to early closure and having the two character embark on new plots.

Early on, Bashir is portrayed as quite young and - though brilliant - also very naive. He's a Federation "career man" who is looking to progress himself within Star Fleet Medical. O'Brien, conversely, is the old hand who has risen as far as he wants to, and is now looking to just have a steady job while he raises his family.
Both of these have echoes later in the show - when Bashir is ordered to do something controversial and requests his orders in writing to make sure that it doesn't reflect on him later, for example, or when O'Brien becomes a father again and has to juggle work and family - but for the most part it just fades away and they become two guys who work at the station, and their only ambition is to live through the war.
That's a shame, I think. Bashir would have been a much stronger character if he had remained more of an idealist, a staunch Federation "company man" and more vocally objected to some of the less savoury things that were going on, while O'Brien could have spent more time being the pragmatic guy who just wanted to finish his shift and get home to his wife, whatever the means. They could still have been friends, Bashir could still have been corrupted by Garak's nihilistic worldview, but with something over which they could conflict between themselves and Sisko, who had to balance both sides of the argument for the good of the station.

Next we get Worf.

I think we've all agreed that Worf's biggest problem is that the show doesn't spend enough time talking about Worf

Not just him specifically of course, just in general - his arc needed to have better pacing and be spread out over the season, if not multiple seasons, where he becomes an idealistic and traditional man slowly being driven towards a radical solution to a stagnant culture, but the pacing issue is the same for everyone; Late seasons of DS9 were just badly executed all over. Still, I feel that he above all would have benefited the most from a more patient, slow-burning arc rather than it being burned out within a handful of episodes.

Somewhat surprising perhaps, we see the same character arc with Quark.

I think it became clear quite early on that the writers ran out of things to do with Quark. He was supposed to be the Devil's Advocate in every situation, arguing for his own profit over the good of the many, but when the Dominion War got into full swing and it became clear that the Federation was GOOD and the Dominion was BAD then there was no room for someone whose only goal was to be greedy and petty.

They should have done more with him - up to, and including, having him capitulate with the Dominion for the promise of profit, only to get badly burned and learn a lesson about the benefit of long-term investment over his usual get-rich-quick schemes, but instead they turned him into the comedic character whose only goal was to learn Aesop's about how sexism is bad.

I am also somewhat counting Dax with these other characters.

The first time I saw DS9 I remember that I really liked Jadziah Dax, but on rewatching and with your analysis, I don't really remember why. She's a very cool character - the way she looks, acts and her obvious competence in her job were a nice contrast to Bashir who was young and arrogant and O'Brien, who was as "blue collar" as Star Trek could portray. At the same time, Dax is smug and presumptive and while she always seems to have an answer for the problem at hand, it was never really shown to be a result of being over 700 years old - she was right because she said she was. That started to grate a lot more quickly than I recalled.
Similarly, I liked Ezri Dax a lot too for other reasons, but bringing her in at the start of the last season was a mistake. Too much was going on, too much baggage was unpacked with alarming speed, and it never really got the gravitas or the detail that such a complicated character really deserved. Dax should either had died much sooner, or not at all, I feel.

Otherwise, thank you again for your thoughts, Yora. I hadn't thought about how much I enjoyed DS9 for a long time before you started your thread, and I've enjoyed all of it to date, for reliving good memories and making great points about the not-so-good ones.

[Traab]

The whole thing with sisko I think was encapsulated with the episode where he punches out Q. "You hit me! Picard never hit me!' "Im not Picard!" They were trying really hard to create a "captain" who was different. Speaking of, Tell me Q isnt intentionally using racially charged terms here. "This dreary little gulag could use a little COLOR!" "Its my fate to be the galaxy's whipping boy" etc. The emphasis on the words seems to imply that though its never actually confirmed. And iirc sisko references the "ancient" civil rights movements and things of that nature several times in the series so its hardly something he would have missed. Which a nearly omnipotent god like Q would have been well aware of. And considering the entire exchange was Q trying to rile up sisko in the first place, I could see him going the "subtle" route before giving up and going for the outright mockery with the boxing thing.

[Yora]

I actually agree on Dax. Dax might really be more style than substance. Of course there is a good degree of substance to the character, but on repeated viewing and closer examination it's not actually as impressive as it first looks.
Perhaps it's the confidence. You can sell about everything if you look confident doing it. And with Jadzia the actress most of the time just nailed it. Even at her best times she was always just on the edge to being smug and arrogant.
But to the credit of everyone involved, we do get several moments throughout the whole show where we see Dax getting close to her limits. There is a nice consistency that the first sign is always her starting with dumb sarcastic jokes, and when the pressure continues she starts getting mean to innocent bystanders. Without that, the smug confidence really would have been too much.
But in regard to really getting important things done, Dax' track record is not actually that impressive. I wouldn't even say she's good with people. She doesn't let herself easily be bothered by others, but I don't recall her giving actually good advice or support to others.

Still an interesting character, but not the shining and amazing heroine she seems to think herself to be.

[Rodin]

Thanks so much for doing these reviews Yora. You got me to watch DS9 from start to finish for the first time ever, and it gave me a new appreciation of the show. It also highlighted what didn't work, which was a very interesting experience as well.

When it comes to character arcs, my favorite is actually Nog. He starts out as basically a street rat - he works in his uncle's bar sometimes, but a lot of the time he's getting up to petty thievery and general mischief-making. Then the Federation comes along, and he sees there can be a different way. The Siskos have a totally different family dynamic to his, and he grows envious of that. He decides to put real effort into changing his life and earning admission to Starfleet. What's most notable about this is we see it happen slowly over several seasons - we get indications that Nog is unhappy with his situation at first, then see Jake tutoring Nog on how to read. This moment is a culmination of a slow burn that takes 3 whole seasons to set up.

We also see how Starfleet Academy affects him. He's totally different person when he returns to the station from his freshman year at the Academy - totally wound up and military formal. It's exactly what you'd expect from someone who had to work extra hard to fit in to the military as the first Ferengi applicant. It takes him a while to unwind and balance between being a Starfleet officer and his own person. We start to see him become an officer in a much more natural way than Wesley ever did.

With the Dominion War happening, Nog becomes the viewpoint character for the audience - he's scared of what's going to happen, unlike the rest of the crew who have all seen battle before. I really liked seeing the war through his eyes, and his injury and PTSD recovery made for a great couple episodes.

Of all the characters, he had the best character growth and it was spaced out properly across all the seasons. This is perhaps because he was a minor character - the other characters had a similar amount of development to go through, but they were on screen every week. They either sat in stasis for "normal" epsiodes and only got character growth when a big episode focusing on them happened. Nog could actually grow by showing up periodically as part of B plots, allowing him to develop more naturally.

[Yora]

I think it became clear quite early on that the writers ran out of things to do with Quark.

Now that you mention it, this might actually be the biggest problem with the later seasons. I think most characters run out of further development somewhere around season 5. Nog keeps going for a while, but by that point his development was no longer interesting to me. Dax gets a new boost in season 7, but that was completely unplanned. Odo has a few more moments that are critical to his story, but mostly it's meandering until they get to the conclusion in the final episode.

But Kira's development gets wrapped up pretty early and she only got Odo to play off, but even in their relationship there aren't any reap conflicts or doubts on her side.
Sisko fully commits to being the emmisary and is happy with it.
Jake grows up,
Quark becomes nice.
Rom becomes a honest man.
Garak settles in as codebreaker to help free his people from tyranny. This last comes up at the very start of season 7, but that felt oddly late to me and does not actually lead to any development on his side.
Dukat and Weyoun become boring.

This is really weird. How did that happen? It does not seem to be a direct result of the switch to longer main story arcs in season 6. And I think most character arcs were running out of steam in season 5 already.

[Traab]

It may have been production stretch. Most series dont really start out expecting to tell multi season stories because they dont know if it will even last more than 1 at first. Then when it DOES get popular, producers and other higher ups push for more and more episodes and the writers have to scramble to come up with excuses for those episodes, so often the story starts to grow more incoherent. And when the series has gone past its envisioned end point but the higher ups want still more you start to see more filler and less development because the main cast already HAD their development. Thats probably why so many episodes stank in later seasons, they were literally filler episodes meant to stretch out what little story they had for full seasons instead of short arcs.

[Arcane_Secrets]

I don't think she's been mentioned yet in the end of series summaries but I think that Kai Winn/Vedic Winn was a very good portrayal of a certain type of realistic villain. Until the very end with the Pa Wraith storyline she mostly backed away from typically grandiose schemes as compared to more politically grounded schemes that were more about her powermongering than anything else.

One of the highlights of the series for me besides Ezri Dax's speech to Worf about the Klingon Empire was also the scene where she finally tells Kira Nerys about her crisis of faith, Kira tells her to give up the power that had tempted her so much, and she goes right back to telling herself essentially that she was never really wrong; that she could use her political/religious power to 'fix what was wrong'.