DS9 Stories/News: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Crossroads of Time (Genesis/Mega Drive) (1)

When I found out that this was actually released for real I had to check it out. A Star Trek platformer? Seriously?

Apparently the lead designer wrote a Star Trek fan film, so I expect this is going to be fairly faithful to the franchise. The music sounds like the actual Deep Space Nine theme, and that looks like the right space station, so it’s doing well so far.

Some Trek games (like Starfleet Academy and Elite Force for example) put the player in the shoes of Lieutenant Bland, chiselled generic space hero, who gets to go on an adventure alongside everyone’s favourite heroes from the show.

But fuck that, I’m Commander Benjamin Sisko himself, and this is my office.

Dammit Odd, how many times have I told you not to call here and interrupt my kung fu? Odo, whatever.

Eventually I realise he’s not going to stop calling me, so I should probably go find ‘security’ and hear what he has to say. First step: leave office.

These graphics aren’t actually that bad at all, and Sisko moves fairly… gracefully. Okay, the faces are a little weird, but that’s what happens when you go for realism at this kind of resolution.

The music on the other hand, is nothing like the soundtrack to the series. For one thing it’s catchy and tuneful. Exactly what I want to be listening to when I’m playing my ridiculous Star Trek platformer. Okay, now where the hell is the way out of this place?

Damn, you can really tell these two are related.

This corridors looks like it’s supposed to be in a complete loop, but sadly it doesn’t wrap around at the edges. Nice parallax scrolling though.

Okay, I’m just going to watch him do this for a second or two. There’s nothing even up there, it’s entirely pointless.

Right, what was I doing again? Oh yeah, I’m looking for ‘security’.

A docking pylon you say? I think I passed the door to that on the way here.

Uhuh. So… what now? He mentioned that Doctor Bashir was treating the technician so I suppose I should go find him.

Right, now that’s done I can go start the first level.

Doctor Bashir didn’t give me any clues about what I’m supposed to be doing now, so I suppose I’ll have to go talking to people until one of them gives me the next part of the plot.

LATER.

http://superadventuresingaming.blogspot.com/2011/12/star-trek-deep-space-nine-crossroads-of.html

DS9 Stories/News: Some ‘Deep’ Talk with Alexander Siddig (2)

Cont.

Reaction On The Station

Regarding his reaction to the character’s change.

Jordan Hoffman: What did the other cast members think? Were they on your side or did they think you were being crazy?

Alexander Siddig: I had a reputation for being a bit of a crank, yeah. They thought I was being cranky. I had this – there was one time I got furious because none of us were being paid royalties on our – this is rubbish, not important for the real world – but, nevertheless, we weren’t being paid royalties on our photographs. So I changed my name for a number of reasons, but that was one of them. So that they would have to re-do all the photographs, all the press with all the right name on it.

And I didn’t turn up to the big photo call for the season’s photo. So there’s one season’s photo of Deep Space Nine – the cast, without me in it which is the one I didn’t turn up to. And being a naïve twenty-something year-old, I didn’t realize that they immediately turned around and fired the head of marketing. So there was a real significant impact for me being such a childish brat.

Jordan Hoffman: Wow. So did that wake you up a little bit? That move?

Alexander Siddig: It woke me up, yeah it woke me up to being naïve and stupid and that real people get involved in these things.

So, Yeah, What’s The Deal With The Name Change?

Jordan Hoffman: It’s funny, for a while you were Siddig El Fadil, then you became Alexander Siddig.  But your full name, is. . .

Alexander Siddig: It’s a mouthful; it’s not something you’d say on the street.

Jordan Hoffman: What is it, could you actually say it for me?

Alexander Siddig: Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderrahman Mohammed Ah – I stumble a bit myself – Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi.

Jordan Hoffman: Wow, okay. And you sort of just picked Alexander?  Said Alexander works.

Alexander Siddig: Yeah, Alexander worked because it was, it’s Mesopotamian, it’s Arab, you know it’s pre-Muslim. The “Al” bit is a bit like, well, I suppose like Al-Qaeda.  Al-Isskandar is the actual name in Arabic. And it’s a pre – it’s not a Western name at all, it’s an Arabic name. Hence, obviously the great Mesopotamian Alexander who didn’t look much like Colin Farrell and all that jazz.

Jordan Hoffman: So it wasn’t just as random as everyone says.

Alexander Siddig: No, it wasn’t random, and, also my first best friend had a dog that was called Alex. And so I was already happy with that name.

Jordan Hoffman: Can we talk a little bit about your background more? You’re a descendant of Sudanese royalty? Is that correct?

Alexander Siddig: No. I mean, there are no royals in Sudan.  There are certainly religious leaders and I was – my family is a family called the Mahdi family, and these are direct descendants of 1880’s great religious leader. Mahdi loosely translated means messiah so you’ll kind of get the idea.

Jordan Hoffman: That’s a heavy burden!

Alexander Siddig: Heavy burden for him, not for me. I can be the naughty grandchild, great-great grandchild going off the rail. So yeah, the family ruled in the Sudan for many, many years. Even now Sadiq al-Mahdi is trying his hardest to get into power as an opposition party in Sudan.

Jordan Hoffman: You steer clear of the political side of what’s going on over there?

Alexander Siddig: I do, because I’m pretty disgusted by it to be honest. It horrifies me. I happen to have had the privilege of growing up in the West, dictating my righteous indignation across to Africa where they have a much more difficult time and more nuanced existence than I could possibly lead. But I find it very abhorrent and very dangerous. I have problems with the far right. . .I went back in the ’80s and it was a gap between presidencies when my family I weren’t going to be arrested when we arrived and they were extremely condescending . . . Fundamentalist Islam terrifies me anyway, speaking as an Arab. And that’s not just because I’ve been brought up in a coveted western society, it’s because it is scary. That’s the end of that.

DS9 Stories/News: Some ‘Deep’ Talk with Alexander Siddig (1)

Source: http://www.ugo.com/movies/alexander-siddig-interview

We chat with one of Sci-Fi’s greatest doctors about DS9 and his new indie hit Cairo Time.

By Jordan Hoffman May 6, 2010

On Being Bashir:

Jordan Hoffman: Before we talk about your new indie Cairo Time, let’s talk about the greatest television series in the history of time, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It’ll always be the greatest and, for better or worse, no matter where you go we will always love Dr. Bashir and his adventures. The show has been off the air for -

Alexander Siddig: A decade.

Jordan Hoffman: Over a decade.

Alexander Siddig: Yeah, a decade and then some.

Jordan Hoffman: I’m just curious to know, now that you’ve got a lot of time behind it, what it’s like if you’re flipping channels or somebody calls you Dr. Bashir on the street?

Alexander Siddig: You know, I got over the whole cool stage of trying to pretend I hadn’t anything to do with it and acting like ‘sci-fi sucks,’ which I immediately went to when I finished the show. Because I was blasé, I needed to distance myself from it to get a career going. But I grew up there; literally from my mid-twenties to my early thirties and it’s home. And I still do, anytime there’s a show that reminds me of it, in structure – I’m doing a fantasy show right now with dinosaurs only because it’s a similar kind of thing, because it’s relaxed so I’m doing two seasons worth of being sort of one of their guys on one of their shows.

Jordan Hoffman: This is Primeval, yes?

Alexander Siddig: Yes, and kids – my son who’s thirteen; everybody actually loves it – it’s a family show but my son who’s thirteen just made a ton of friends at school because I’m doing that show. And I will always have a soft spot, as long as I live, for doing crazy, geeky sci-fi shows. And I hope to goodness that people keep offering me them because I love them.

Changing the DNA:

Jordan Hoffman:  I’m curious, was there ever one episode where you got the script and were just like, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

Alexander Siddig: Yeah, there was an episode where they gave me a genetic modification. (Dr. Bashir, I Presume Season 5, Episode 16)

Jordan Hoffman: Oh, well that wasn’t an episode that was a major change in your character!

Alexander Siddig: But it arrived, I didn’t know about it on Tuesday, and on Thursday the script arrived – we started shooting on Friday. I was so shocked. You know you get the impression that maybe the producers sit down and talk about strategies and character arcs with actors but this thing came out of the blue and pissed me off so royally. It was a reaction to the fact that the character was genuinely unpopular in the early days. Because he was not fancy; I mean this is a time where 90210 was at the top of the charts in American TV and this guy was so not the hunk, he was the anti-hunk. He was the -

Jordan Hoffman: He was a man of science! That’s what he was!

Alexander Siddig: He was a man of science; he was like half good looking, rubbish at pulling girls. I mean it was all the wrong kind of archetypes. And so they kept trying to do things to make it happen. Eventually they did the Bond thing (reference to Our Man Bashir) – they did the Bond thing before that actually. And that kicked it off. I have to say that I’m still pretty angry. Well, not angry . . .

Jordan Hoffman: You have a craft, and you fill out a back-story of the character and you work at it for three years, four years and one day they walk in and say “guess what, you have this secret you’ve been keeping from everybody”.

Alexander Siddig: Exactly. And everything you’ve done could have been completely different had I known.

Jordan Hoffman: So did you go to the producers and voice your displeasure or just roll with it?

Alexander Siddig: I did it the only way that an actor can.  I completely destroyed the lines that they gave me regarding the situation. Every time something came up that was to do with being kind of Data-esque – I mean, I couldn’t get away from the fact – I thought I was being a Data, which is what they wanted to do, they wanted to switch the characters from all the shows, which they ended up doing with Voyager -

Jordan Hoffman: Which may have been a problem for that show. . .

Alexander Siddig: Well, it was a bit cynical at the end of the day. But I just fluffed the lines; well I didn’t fluff them completely I literally pinned the lines on the back of someone’s shoulder once, reading them. I wasn’t bothered even to learn them. I just pinned them around the office as if they were lines needed for daily modification. And they got the message and dropped it kind of.

Jordan Hoffman: Okay, so maybe they scaled that story arc back a little bit?

Alexander Siddig: They did.

DS9 Stories/News: Goodbyes

Source: http://deflipside.com/?page_id=1693

by Christopher DeFilippis

DeFlip Side, Vol. 1, No. 6
(First Appeared: June/July, 1999; First Light E-zine, Issue #82)

This is going to be short and sweet, folks. My original plan for this month’s column was to bid a fond farewell to Deep Space Nine, until recently the best show on television. I was going to do an in-depth review of the final episode, exploring whether or not it brought the Dominion war arc to a satisfying conclusion, as well as if it proved a fitting send-off to the best Trek series ever; my swan song to the swan song, so to speak. But those ne’er do-wells at Paramount took the wind out of my sails. After watching the finale, I came to only one inescapable conclusion: It’s not over.

After all, Sisko left his baseball behind.

Of course, there’s also the question of his unborn child, his career in Starfleet, a new Defiant that needs to be broken in, an unfinished real estate transaction on Bajor and his promise that he would return “in a year from now or yesterday.” But the baseball is the cincher. He doesn’t leave home without it, much less take up permanent residence in Prophet limbo. We haven’t heard the last from him or the rest of these characters. I don’t know when or in what format, but we’ll see them again. Bet on it.

This fact colors my opinion of the two-hour series finale. As a final good-bye, it would have left too many loose ends. But as a “so long for now” it was perfect. It brought enough closure to satisfy, but egged us on just enough to keep our expectations for a return simmering on a low frame somewhere in the back of our brains. Like Kira and Jake, we’re all gazing out of a portal on the Promenade, waiting patiently to see what happens next.

I’ll spare you all a long-winded essay on what I liked and why. Different parts of the finale will have appealed to different people for different reasons. But there is no call for excess exposition. After all, we’re not talking about “Mirror Image” here (the legendarily confusing finale to the TV series Quantum Leap). Instead, I’ll be as succinct as possible:

The Good Stuff:

• The death of Kai Winn.
• The kick-ass battle scenes.
• Kai Winn’s unfortunate demise.
• Garak’s revenge on Weyoun.
• Barbecued Kai.
• Nog’s promotion.
• Pah Wraiths 1, Kai Winn 0
• Kira’s ironic role in the liberation of Cardassia.
• Kai Winn all gone.
• Ezri’s nearly exposed breasts.
• Bye bye Kai.
• Sisko plowing Dukat over the cliff’s edge in a flying tackle.
• The old bag bites it.
• Martok’s self-satisfied belt of blood wine while standing on bloated enemy corpses.
• She’ll finally shut up.
• The faint hope that once O’Brien accepts a teaching position at the academy, he’ll attain some kind of rank (Where does “Chief” fall, anyway? As far as I can tell, it’s somewhere between ensign and lieutenant. So Nog outranks him now? Not a proud legacy for more than a decade in uniform…).
• Winn-kabob.
• Damar’s last stand.
• Burn Winnie burn.
• Worf’s new-found honor and influence with the Klingon council.
• Are those Kai burgers I smell?
• Bashir finally gets some.
• Armagedd-Winn.

The Bad Stuff:

• Vic Fontaine’s schmaltzy send-off.
• A too-short stand-off between Dukat and Sisko that smacked of the
• Kirk/Mitchell showdown in “Where No Man has Gone Before” (“Get on your knees and pray to me, James”).
• A tuxedo-clad Odo melting into the Great Link.
• The use of stock footage of a Klingon getting blown down a corridor on a wave of fire (from The Undiscovered Country, I think).
• Worf’s flashback sequence that held not a smidgen of Jadzia memories. (I guess Paramount didn’t want to have to pay residuals to Terry Farrell.)

 

As you can see, the good clearly outweighed the bad. I think the very best thing about the episode, and the series over all, was that I could never tell exactly how things would turn out. And even when I did have a pretty good idea of where things were going, the characters would reach their destinations via completely unexpected routes.

This rule holds true for the future of Deep Space Nine. It’s a foregone conclusion that Sisko will come back. Just watch; he’ll soon get tired of playing pinochle with Wesley on the astral plain and shuffle back into his mortal coil for a return to his old life. But to what effect? Will he be considered a lord on Bajor? Will his new found Prophet wisdom cause a rift between him and his all-too-human friends and family? Will he have hair? I can’t even guess at the possibilities.

Of course, we’re most likely to be hearing from Worf the soonest. I just hope the powers that be use the opportunity they’ve created to full effect in the next movie. Worf’s position as Federation ambassador to Qo’noS lends itself to a sweeping story that could encompass the Federation and Klingon Empire and propel the franchise forward, something it sorely needs after the disaster that was Insurrection.

The one thing I do not want to see is a feature length film that combines the Next Gen and DS9 casts. The writers have a tough enough time as it is finding useful roles for the entire Enterprise-E ensemble with each outing. If they tried to add the DS9 crew as well, the screen would be packed tighter than Seven of Nine’s Wonder Bra, but with a far less marvelous result. I’ll pin my hopes on a small-screen reunion that will give the DS9 characters and plot lines free reign.

In the meantime, I guess I still have Voyager to give me my Star Trek fix, though it’ll be like going from heroin to methadone. Now that the DS9 writers are freed up, maybe they can help put Voyager on the right track and raise it to the standards we’ve come expect from Star Trek. But I’m not gonna hold my breath. I don’t have to anyway.

When DS9 premiered, I still had a maniacal hatred of new Trek. I wasn’t sucked over the Next Gen event horizon until Generations hit the theaters. And by the time I got into DS9, it was well into its run. So I ask you to pray with me now that channel 11 in NY soon starts rerunning the series from the beginning. There are three years worth of episodes I’ve never seen. It’s a little something extra to look forward to.

See Pop? Sometimes it works to your benefit to be a day late and a dollar short…

DS9 Stories/News: The Magic Of Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Ritual Magic and The Storyteller

Source: http://bajorron.blogspot.com/2012/02/magic-of-star-trek-deep-space-nine.html

The Sirah and the Dal’Rok:

Deep Space Nine’s First season episode The Storyteller is an interesting one for several reasons. Characterwise, this is the first episode which sows the seeds for Bashir and O’Brien’s future friendship. The main storyline happens on Bajor, but rather than showing us a Bajor under the guidance of the Prophets, it depicts a rural Bajoran village where perhaps older customs survive of what could be called a more Pagan past.

The storyline in brief: Bashir and O’Brien beam down to a village which is in trouble: it is under attack from a creature called a Dal’Rok and the only way to fight this entity is under the leadership of the Sirah, a Storyteller. Bashir and O’Brien witness an attack and the defense, upon which the Sirah collapses, but not after naming O’Brien as his successor. The next evening, the Dal’Rok returns and O’Brien sets out to fight it as he has seen the Sirah do it, but he fails in his attempt. Then Hovath, the young original apprentice Sirah takes over and succeeds in chasing off the entity and is thus appointed as the new Sirah, letting O’Brien off the hook.

The Sirah in action:

This story has a number of interesting Ritual Magic concepts weaven into it. For example: why does O’Brien fail? There are several reasons for that. Yes, he does not know the entire story, although that seems hardly necessary: all we see the Sirah and Hovath do is tell the villagers that they can defeat the creature. But in their cases, they speak with conviction and in magic as well as anywhere else, Words have Power proportional to the conviction with which they are spoken. Magic is not about ‘just speaking the right words and then something will happen, Harry Potter style’, it is about giving words as much power as possible, and that power comes from the conviction of the speaker and from his or her energy. We see O’Brien struggling to speak out the words while he himself barely believes it is going to do any good (nicely played by actor Colm Meany as well!). And his words dissipate into thin air, nothing happens, the magic does not come about and the Dal’Rok keeps attacking.

Incidentally, what is this Dal’Rok? We are informed that the tricorders do not register anything, yet we see something happening, and what is more, we see some attacks that are convincingly real. So what is going on here? My guess would be that we are dealing here with a thought form that has gained a more or less corporeal existence. Probably as a result of repeating this ritual over and over again for many years- a sure recipe to increase the power!- the image has gained so much energy that not only has it become visible to outsiders, it is also found to be interacting with the material environment. Our magical literature abounds with examples of the very same thing: elementals, golems, homunculi, etc. all “conjured” up by the imagination and subsequently energized to such an extent that it gets a “life of its own”.

Hovath (played by Lawrence Monoson):

The fight against the Dal’Rok indeed looks very much like a time-honored ritual, with certain fixed stagesin it, the use of certain words of power and with a more or less hierarchical structure: it is the Sirah and the Sirah only who leads this ritual and is able to direct the energy of the villagers into a concerted defense against the Dal’Rok. He is the High Priest in what looks suspiciously like a ritual to reinforce the village identity by defeating a common foe. In order to become Sirah, a candidate has to undergo a test: he (or she?) should be able to direct the ritual and direct the power single-handedly. Miles O’Brien clearly fails at this test: he does not have the necessary training, he does not have the faith and as an outsider he is also not connected to the village’s group mind. Hovath is and has all those things, so at the end we see him take charge of the ritual and bringing it to a good end, thus finalizing his own initiation as a Sirah. Which brings a final question to mind: what if the old Sirah had staged all this as an initiation ritual for his successor, with O’Brien as the unknowing catalyst? We’ll never know…