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: Magic in Deep Space Nine: The Bajoran Prophets of Yesod…

Source: http://bajorron.blogspot.com/2012/01/magic-in-star-trek-deep-space-nine.html

Inside the Bajoran Wormhole: abode of the Prophets

It is an interesting endeavour to rewatch my all time favorite Star Trek series Deep Space Nine with my spiritual training in the back of my mind. Science fiction, like all good storytelling, does rely on the imagination, which is also one of the cornerstones of magical practice. But in Star Trek, magical concepts and ideas are often dealt with in new and surprising ways. And as Deep Space Nine may be the most spiritual of all Star Trek series, interesting correlations are bound to be found.

Take for instance the pilot episode “Emissary”. One of the key features of that episode is an encounter of Commander Benjamin Sisko with “wormhole aliens”, who the Bajoran people know as their “Prophets”. These creatures are presented as “non-corporeal” and do not live in our own “space-time continuum”, but in another higher form of being. They possess no fixed shape but communicate with Sisko while borrowing faces from people from his present and past, and continuously shifting countenances as well as the surroundings. All this happens in Sisko’s mind, because we, the audience, see what’s really going on: he is stuck in what looks like a white limbo, a “sea of milk”. And on an even lower level we know that his “runabout” is somehow stuck inside the Bajoran wormhole.

Sisko’s encounter with the Prophets

What are these “Prophets” in our own magical terms? The Bajorans consider them as gods, but do we agree with them? The way these aliens are portrayed offers a key: they show themselves in a wide variety of guises yet their true form is somehow not perceivable. This “shapeshifting” reminded me of the next higher plane relative to our own, which is known in Kabbala as the Sphere of Yesod. This is a Hebrew word meaning Foundation, but more importantly for this discourse, Yesod is also -and more commonly known as the World of Dreams.

Tree of Life diagram: Yesod is indicated by the purple sphere,
our material world is the green sphere at the bottom

It is a “world”, where images abound and these images are often illusionary and fluid as the waters or the sea. As fluid as the faces of the Prophets Sisko is encountering! Mark also that these aliens in Bajoran religion are called “Prophets” and not “Gods”. A “prophet” is someone who speaks on behalf of (a) God and not a god him- or herself. So, one starts to wonder who are the real gods of the Bajorans and whether these can be found higher up in the Tree of Life.

A Prophet wearing the face of Sisko’s deceased wife, Jennifer

The concept of shapeshifting as shown by these Prophets is often considered a trademark of a “higher being” in Star Trek. Later in Deep Space Nine, a race of shapeshifting Founders also proclaim themselves as Gods, also tapping into the power of the realm of Yesod. The same can be said about Q, the “omnipotent” nemesis of Captain Picard who resides in a realm called the Continuum which is equally fluid in its appearances. And many more examples may be given from all the various Star Trek shows. It seems that the makers of Star Trek did not want to deviate too much from the familiar states of being when portraying the nature of “advanced” beings. The World of Dreams, called “Yesod” in Kabbalah is quite close to our own experience (we all know dreams!), so that’s where we see most of these entities operate. It will be interesting to test these ideas in future episodes dealing with the Prophets and assorted beings!

I also spoke about the power of Imagination, and in Season One of Deep Space Nine there are at least two episodes that make an interesting use of this: The Storyteller and If Wishes Were Horses. More about that in a next blog!

DS9 Stories/News: Birthday Alert – Colm Meaney’s 3 Day Birthday Special

Cont.

O’brien Must Suffer

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O’Brien Must Suffer

http://www.stick-online.com/boards/index.php?topic=2151.0

But you gotta admit, this guy has life tough!

It’s montage of different scenes from different episodes, but it’s suprisingly representative. He didn’t actually commit suicide though.
The funny thing is: the producers deliberately put in at least every season, an episode themed “O’Brien must suffer”
-He gets cloned and his clone is the victim of a conspiracy while he’s held captive on some desolate planet in a cave.
-He is arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and tried for a crime he didn’t commit by a culture whose verdicts are decided before the trial.
-He starts randomly time-warping around during one instance of which he witnesses his own death.
-He is falsely convicted of espionage and in a Matrix/Inception-esque way, he experiences a 20-year prison sentence in a matter of hours by having the experience, stimuli, and such scanned into his mind.
-His wife is possessed by an alien entity who forces him to commit sabotage to his own station, lie, frame one of his friends, and attempt to kill some other non-corporeal beings.

-His daughter was aged(in a time warp, of course) to the age of 18. Without her parents or human contact. She basically becomes this feral monster girl, though they manage to de-timewarp her.
-His other child has to be transplanted into some alien’s womb in order to save his wife and baby after their ship is attacked. The woman happens to be his superior officer.
-On that note, he’s one of the only enlisted people on the entire show who actually ever does anything(besides guards and stuff) so he has to call everyone sir. Including a punk 22 year old ensign.
-He gets stuck in a little metal cargo box for violating some obscure law on an essentialists planet…for over 24 hours.
-The station of which he is the chief engineer has at least 3 minor malfunctions which only he can resolve at any one time and a major failure at least every 3 episodes.
-He’s a direct descendant from one of the High Kings of Ireland…and nobody, fate included, cares.

The woman who falls off the bridge is his wife.

Luck O’ the Irish? Hmmm…this guy is in need of some.

O’Brien Must Suffer

According to DS9 executive producer/writer Ira Steven Behr, “O’Brien is everyman. In a show about humans and aliens, he’s as human as you get.” Similarly, Behr’s writing partner for the first four seasons of the show,Robert Hewitt Wolfe, says, “He’s just a regular guy, a guy doing his job. He’s just the most unlikely of all heroes because he’s a family man with a daughter and eventually a son and a wife and they have arguments and a real relationship, and he’s just a working class schmo, I mean obviously he’s a really bright guy and very good at what he did, but basically, a working class schmo just trying to get through his day.” (Crew Dossier: Miles O’Brien, DS9 Season 5 DVD, Special Features)

The DS9 writing staff had a running joke with a semi-annual “O’Brien Must Suffer” episode. Among these were “Whispers“, “Tribunal“, “Visionary“, “Hard Time“, “Honor Among Thieves” and “Prodigal Daughter“. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion) According to Ira Behr, “Every year in one or two shows we try to make his life miserable, because you empathize with him.” Robert Hewitt Wolfe further explains, “If O’Brien went through something torturous and horrible, the audience was going to feel that, in a way they wouldn’t feel it with any of the other characters. Because all the other characters were sort of, I wouldn’t say larger than life, but nobler than life, but O’Brien was just a guy, trying to live his life and so if you tortured him that was a story.” (Crew Dossier: Miles O’Brien, DS9 Season 5 DVD, Special Features)

Those Episodes Were:

Whispers

Episode 2×14

Upon returning from a mission to the Parada system, O’Brien begins to notice the crew acting strange around him and suspects there may be some unknown influence at work.

Tribunal

2×25

When Cardassians arrest Miles O’Brien for working with the Maquis, he’s put on a Cardassian trial, where the verdict is known before the trial begins: guilty.

Visionary

3×17

After receiving a minor dose of radiation poisoning, O’Brien inexplicably begins experiencing a series of jumps into the near future. Meanwhile, a Romulan delegation arrives on the station, expecting an intelligence report on the Dominion.

Hard Time

4×19

Convicted of espionage, Miles O’Brien is given the memories of twenty years in prison in a matter of hours. Returning to DS9, O’Brien finds he cannot shrug the memory of his awful experience or rid himself of the guilt he feels over the death of his cellmate.

Honor Among Thieves

6×15

O’Brien, working undercover for Starfleet Intelligence, befriends the man he will have to betray.

 

& Then, there is “Time’s Oprhan”

An accident on the planet Golana sends Molly O’Brien through a time portal three hundred years into the past into an uninhabited world. Beamed back too late, Molly returns to the present eighteen years old with no immediate recollection of her life or her family.

DS9 Stories/News: Birthday Alert – Colm Meaney’s 3 Day Birthday Special

It’s Colm Meaney’s Birthday

30/May/1953

Colm J. Meaney (Irish: Colm Ó Maonaigh) (born 30 May1953; age 58) is the Irish actor best recognized by Star Trek fans for his portrayal of Chief Miles O’Brien on bothStar Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from 1987 through 1999. He also played Albert Macklin in the acclaimed episode “Far Beyond the Stars“.

Courtesy of Memory Alpha.org

Here, we’ll concentrate on Mile’s of DS9

O’Brien was a character favorite to DS9 Writers, where they had a recurring motto “O’Brien Must Suffer”

Ira Behr once confessed that while he was persuaded to work on DS9 by Michael Piller, he responded to him that he would only do it if he had a chance to work on O’Brien’s character and have him with a real, true friendship with Julian Bashir.

“The relationship between Bashir and O’Brien is the best relationship… the best friendship in the history of the franchise.”
Ira Steven Behr, Season Six dvd set, Crew Dossier: Julian Bashir”

So, let’s explore those two themes today shall we?

First, The Whole “O’Brien Must Suffer” Thing

…

Luck of the Irish? The Tragedies of Miles O’Brien

by Ryan Britt

It’s Saint Patrick’s Day and that means celebrating the best Irishman in space: Chief Miles Edward O’Brien from The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine! Played by noted Irish actor Colm Meaney, O’Brien always came off as one of the most relatable and down-to-earth (put intended) characters in all of Star Trek. But, this likability and good-heartedness is often rewarded with bad luck and sorrow for poor O’Brien and his family. He certainly has the Irish gift of gab, but not the luck of the Irish. How does he suffer so? Let me count the ways.

John Lennon’s little-known protest song “The Luck of the Irish” points to the irony of this famous phrase by outlining just how incredibly unlucky the people of Ireland have been throughout the years. And when it comes to the 24th century, all the unluckiness of the Emerald Isle seems to be heaped all on the shoulders of Miles. And we’re not just imagining this. According to both the special features on the DS9 DVDs and the book The Deep Space Nine Companion writers of the show actively sought to make sure at least one episode a year would feature an “O’Brien must suffer” plotline.

According to Ira Steven Behr, “If O’Brien went through something torturous and horrible, the audience was going to feel that, in a way they wouldn’t feel it with any of the other characters.”

While this is certainly true, it’s also possible that the tremendous acting chops of Colm Meaney allowed us to really believe that what he was going through was real, as opposed to the stiffer characters in the series. (Or, for that matter, all Star Trek series.) But another important reason why O’Brien’s various plights seem particularly relatable is because there are actual stakes for his character. Unlike a lot of other Trek regulars, O’Brien has a family, and fairly normal”one at that. When things on the Enterprise or Deep Space Nine go pear-shaped, it feels really scary for O’Brien. Sure Sisko has a family too, but his son Jake is a little older and savvier. Miles’s daughter Molly is just a little kid!

In DS9’s “Time’s Orphan” the notion of the O’Brien family getting seriously screwed up by a science fictional premise is particularly heartbreaking. Due to a freak time vortex showing up and ruining a perfectly good picnic, a feral 18 year-old Molly suddenly replaces little kid Molly. Despite their efforts at reintegrating Molly back into civilized society they make no headway and Miles and his wife Keiko eventually send the feral version of Molly back into the vortex in hopes of swapping her for Molly’s younger self. Basically, Miles exiles a version of his daughter. Heavy.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s also been tortured, held captive, betrayed and possessed a whole slew of times. In the TNG episode “Power Play” O’Brien is one of three crewmembers whose body is occupied by malevolent aliens hell-bent on taking over the Enterprise. With bad-O’Brien pointing a phaser at his wife Keiko for pretty much the entire episode, it’s a minor miracle they stayed together. In fact, Keiko must be some kind of saint for putting up with O’Brien. Now, I’m not saying O’Brien isn’t a stand-up guy and good father and good husband. He totally is.

And though she does suggest moving back to Earth a few times, Keiko is a pretty good sport about pretty much everything that happens to her family. Though when she was turned into a little kid in “Rascals” you could really feel O’Brien’s pain in just how weird that relationship was going to be.

However, the whole spouse-possessed by really mean aliens thing gets switched in the DS9 episode “The Assignment. “Here, the Pah-wraiths take over poor Keiko’s body and tell him he has to do what they want or Keiko gets it. This is made even worse by the fact that not only does O’Brien have to try and destroy the wormhole against his will, but also that he rarely even gets to see Keiko. Life-threatening, space station-destroying stakes AND their quality time taken away!

 

Oh no! Somebody stop him!

 

Basically, every member of the O’Brien family has to be put through some kind of time-futzing shenanigans. In “Hard Time” Miles himself experiences 20 years in an alien jail cell, even though almost no time has passed at all. With all the perspective shifts in this guy’s life it’s amazing he keeps it together at all. Which is why he has a drinking buddy: Dr. Bashir. And even though we all love Kirk and Spock, Miles and Julian just might be the best Trek bromance of them all. Actor Alexander Siddig backs me up here by saying “…O’Brien and Bashir are the only real friendship that’s ever happened on Star Trek. Those two are really friends…”

Even in a bizzaro universe, Miles O’Brien can’t escape from being the nice guy who sort of gets screwed over all the time. In the various mirror universe episodes on DS9, “Smiley” might seem more hardcore than our Miles, but he’s still an everyman and stand-up person, despite kidnapping the regular-universe version of Sisko. Notably, the alternate version of drinking buddy Bashir is a total jerk in the bizarro universe.

 

True Love

 

What’s also demonstrated here is how unjudgemental the character of O’Brien is. It’s not that he’s amoral about bizzaro Sikso having a mistress, it’s just that he sort of looks past it. The same goes for O’Brien’s relationship with his former Captain, Benjamin Maxwell in the TNG episode “The Wounded.” Despite the terrible things that Maxwell has done, you really get the sense that O’Brien will be able to separate his fond memories of Maxwell from the crazy person the rogue captain eventually became. It’s not just that O’Brien is crazy loyal, it’s that he gets people. Space station Deep Space Nine didn’t really need a counselor for six years because most of the characters probably just went and got plastered with Miles. (We see Worf do this at least once.)

But despite the massacre on Setlik III, his family being screwed with by time vortices and jerky aliens, getting captured and tortured over and over again and not even having a name in “Encounter at Fairpoint,” Miles O’Brien endured. Did he have the luck of the Irish after all? Whatever the answer is, it’s clear we certainly needed him. And on this St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll be lifting a glass in a toast to the one and only Chief O’Brien!

DS9 Stories/News: Birthday Alert: 05:05:2012 Marc Alaimo

It’s Marc Alaimo’s Birthday

Michael Anthony Alaimo, known professionally as Marc Alaimo (born 5 May 1942; age 69) is an actor best known for his portrayal of Gul Dukat on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He also played the role in the video game Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Dominion Wars.

Alaimo holds the honor of playing the first Romulan seen in the Next Generation era as well as the first Cardassian seen in the Star Trek saga. Nicknamed “The Neck” for his prominent neck muscles, Alaimo influenced makeup supervisor Michael Westmore‘s design of the Cardassian makeup, as Westmore based the race’s neck ridges on Alaimo’s physique.

Several costumes worn by Alaimo in Star Trek were sold off on the It’s A Wrap! sale and auction on eBay, including his Breen suit from the episode “Indiscretion“, which was later worn by background performer Todd Slayton.

Alaimo has been playing characters in television shows since 1972. He has appeared, mostly as villains, in shows such as Kojak, Gunsmoke, Baretta, The Bionic Woman, Starsky and Hutch, Knight Rider, Quincy, The Greatest American Hero, The Incredible Hulk, Quantum Leap, Family Guy, Walker, Texas Ranger, and Hill Street Blues. Alaimo has appeared in some feature films including the 1984 classic science fiction movie The Last Starfighter (portraying the human guise of an alien assassin), the Leslie Nielsen film Naked Gun 33⅓, Tango & Cash, and the 1988 film The Dead Pool. He also appeared as a Martian security officer in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall.

He played several characters in Star Trek: The Next Generation, starting in the first season, including the first Romulan, Commander Tebok, and the first Cardassian, Gul Macet, in the 1991 episode, “The Wounded,” of that series. He also played a poker player who speaks French to Data in the episode “Time’s Arrow“. In 1993, Alaimo began playing Gul Dukat in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Gul Dukat was a recurring character, who appeared in 37 episodes of that series.