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: Of Trek and War (2)

Cont.

While the story arc itself had its problems and the series as a whole did have its flaws (overuse of the Ferengi as comic relief, a very weak seventh season with a rushed finish, poor to non-existent exit strategy for the Dominion War story arc, etc), I think the Dominion War worked overall and helped define Deep Space Nine as a series, for better or worse.

Dominion War

By contrast, the Xindi storyline in Enterprise was a good idea that was not as well executed as the Dominion War… but that describes many of the ideas Berman & Braga have come up with over the years. To begin with, the concept itself was really a clone of the Dominion War done to drive up Enterprise’s lackluster Nielson ratings. Created as a prequel by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga (both of whom had lost their touch by then, in my not-so-humble opinion), Enterprise wasn’t doing very well as a series. This was largely due to poor stories that either lacked internal continuity (on an episode-by-episode basis) or pissed all over established continuity for either the series or the franchise (by either introducing certain concepts from TNG way too soon in the timeline or by introducing potentially major threats to Earth in one episode, then completely ignoring them and the story-telling opportunities they could have raised in later episodes by never mentioning them again and zooming off to some other would-be threat). Remembering the brief viewer increase caused by the Dominion War in DS9, Berman & Braga decided to bring their own war into Enterprise with the Xindi.

Xindi Weird Stuff

Xindi Weird Stuff

While that might have been a good idea, the concept suffered problems from the start. To begin with, the entire Xindi arc wasn’t its own story; rather, it was just one season-long subset of a larger conflict that was shown, but never explained in the series: namely, the Temporal Cold War. No real details were ever given as to what the nature of the Temporal Cold War really was (a cold war across time itself, we assume?) or who first started it. We know some of the factions, but not all, nor do we truly understand their motives, beyond the old “Saturday morning cartoon villain” m.o. of “destroy the Federation!” that gets so cliché. Like many concepts from Berman & Braga, it was a great concept poorly executed and given little true depth. We saw precious little of this concept in Enterprise (aside from the occasional Suliban episode or the odd appearance by either “Future Guy” or Daniels, none of whom give nearly enough exposition), and what we did see was rather lackluster. Originally, this concept was expressed through a rather poorly-conceived race called the Suliban (which, guessing by their name, I assume were supposed to be some sort of heavily veiled parody of the Taliban?), though that didn’t quite pan out the way Berman & Braga hoped. With more viewers slipping away, they rushed the Xindi storyline into production.

Again, it began with a great concept: some faction in the Temporal Cold War called the Sphere Builders (really, you couldn’t give them a better name than that?) attempted an invasion of the Federation in the 26th Century, but the Federation repelled them. Instead of retaliating in that era, the Sphere Builders attempted to prevent the founding of the Federation. (As time travel expert M.J. Young would attest to on his website about temporal anomalies, such a notion has its own problems, but Star Trek has always played rather fast and loose with the concept of time travel, anyway.) To do this, they provided the Xindi with trumped-up evidence that the Federation would one day cause the destruction of their homeworld. (So, they’re fighting a war over something that hasn’t happened yet based on evidence “from the future” that could easily be manufactured? We can manufacture war photos using Photoshop right now. What kind of photo/video/hologram-doctoring technology would they have in the 22nd Century? Surely the Xindi thought of that!) This managed to get the Xindi moving in high gear, and they initiated a conflict against humanity – the Federation’s major founding member – by attacking Earth in “The Expanse“, Enterprise’s Season 3 opener. Enterprise gets recalled from its mission of exploration (which, I’m sorry to say, really hadn’t been going very well, as the crew of Enterprise either nearly got their ship destroyed each episode or spent as much time as they could pissing off the Vulcans, who – for whatever reason – were written to be colossal uptight assholes during the series) and assigned to head for a massive area of space called the Delphic Expanse in search of the Xindi’s homeworld. Once there, they would either parlay with the Xindi’s leaders and try for peace, or kick their asses and come back home victorious.

This war lasted all of one season (when has an actual war ever lasted only one year? Hell, Voyager took seven damn years to cross the Delta Quadrant – a feat they only barely accomplished by cheating several times via numerous space/time “shortcuts” – and the NX-01 Enterprise, which is technologically inferior to even the [/i]shuttlecraft[/i] of Kirk’s day, was able to cross this vast expanse of space in one year and return home in less time than that??). Some of the Xindi sided with our heroes; the others said, “Fuck it!” and launched a superweapon at Earth, which our heroes then had to stop in the Season 3 finale “Zero Hour“. Since the producers weren’t quite certain if Enterprise would return for Season 4 or not, they tried to bring all the major plot threads they had woven into the series (what few plot threads they actually bothered with, like the switch from a potential Archer/T’Pol pairing to a much more intriguing T’Pol/Tucker match)… Then they completely threw a giant WTF into it by ending the episode on a shot of an alien in a Nazi uniform. (I kid you not! Click the damn link and see for yourselves already!)

To be honest, Enterprise as a series bored me to tears (except for the occasionally interesting or even good episode, like “Regeneration“), and the Xindi storyline – while offering a few intriguing tidbits here and there (like “E²“) – was something I was rather blasé about altogether. To start with, I had grown weary of the emotional highs and lows of the Dominion War, so another war in an entirely different Trek series – especially when that war wasn’t the Earth-Romulan War we had been promised so many times – just didn’t hold as much appeal to me. I had just come to terms with the ending of Voyager (good or bad), and I wasn’t quite ready to commit to Enterprise the same way I had for TNG, DS9 and Voyager. Moreover, I had just started watching a different Roddenberry-based series – Andromeda – and had grown quite fond of it. The episodes I had seen of the Xindi war were very reminiscent of both the good and bad aspects of the Dominion War with a few interesting (and many not so interesting) twists. The writing, unfortunately, was still done by Berman & Braga (way past their prime, if you ask me) and the characters were still as… well, dull as they had been since series launch.

In Season 4, they left it to new Enterprise scribe Manny Coto – Brannon’s & Braga’s replacement, as they were refraining from writing duties (yay!) – to finish out the faux cliffhanger they created with the silly Season 3 finale “space Nazi” end scene. This he did in the two-part “Storm Front“, which explained how aliens had gone back in time and aided Nazi Germany, changing the timeline and enslaving America, and how our heroes had wound up back in the 1940s and blah blah blah… Normally, I enjoy alternate histories, but these two episodes stretched the concept beyond credibility.

After this horrid start, Manny Coto gave us a kick-ass final season of Enterprise, as (unlike Berman & Braga) he actually had a little something called talent. By then, however, the damage to the series had been done by Berman & Braga, and not even the Xindi conflict or the talented Manny Coto’s intriguing fan-wank scripts loaded with awesome original series references could save it. Enterprise was cancelled. The Earth-Romulan War plot they kept promising us and building up to? Never happened. As interesting as portions of the Xindi conflict were, maybe they could have focused on the Earth-Romulan War instead? *sigh*

To sum: Dominion War good, Xindi War so-so.

Anyway, that’s my two cents on the issue. Apologies for both the length of the post and the time which I posted it. (I hadn’t gotten to see my sister on her birthday, so I was taking her around town last night to make up for it.) What’s your take on the whole mess?

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

Cont.

Julian Bashir/Miles O’Brien

http://ship-manifesto.dreamwidth.org/19822.html

“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

In the beginning, Bashir and O’Brien seem to be very different men, but over the course of the series, their friendship builds similarity upon similarity. This relationship is one that deepens moment by moment, a relationship that’s about building up trust and hope, about turning a somewhat faltering beginning into one of the deepest and strongest relationships that we ever get to see on Trek.

A. The Guys:

To know Miles O’Brien, you have to start with basics. He’s a good guy, a family man, someone who couldn’t possibly have any deep, dark secrets. But he’s much more than he seems on first glance (a common theme in DS9). He’s a soldier as well as an engineer. He’s done what he’s had to do, and he’s made himself content with what he has in his life. Miles has been through many dark nights of the soul, but his strength of will and his heart have carried him through it all.

Julian Bashir seems simple in the beginning, too — he’s the brash young doctor with too many brains and not enough sense. But as the years pass, his bravado is shown to be true bravery, and his arrogance to be as much façade as truth. He chose to be a doctor, chose to make saving lives his life’s work. He chose to work not in the heart of the Federation, but on what he thought would be on the outskirts, what he assumed would be an unimportant space station. To help and to hide, those were the twin goals of Julian’s life, and as time passed, they became more and more irreconcilable.

What I love about Bashir and O’Brien is that their closeness grows out of the characters and the story. We’re there for every important step of that relationship. Interestingly, even from the very first, long before they played war games together in the holodecks, their relationship is defined by war — their first exchange is O’Brien asking Bashir if he knows his history of the Border Wars and of the massacre of Selik III. We learn at some point that O’Brien was the ‘hero of Setlik III’, and this may be the moment when Bashir connected that O’Brien to this one and got his hero worship trigger tripped.

Another thing that probably should be mentioned is the sexual orientation question, i.e. Miles is married and Julian clearly likes the ladies. What’s up with the gayness, yo? To start with the easiest one first, Julian is the most-slashed character in DS9, mostly with Garak, but also with… interesting intra-Trek crossovers. This may be in part because Julian comes across as open to anyone who’ll listen to him talk. That sounded nicer in my head. He clearly has a normality thing, but since there’s no big “Gosh, Gay People, they’re so weird” episode, I’m going to take it as a given that people have grown past the current prejudices. In order to make room for new ones, I’m sure, but still. So, Julian isn’t really a problem.

Miles, on the hand, is married with kid(s) for his entire run on DS9, and leaves DS9 (and Julian, as the show itself presents it) on his wife, Keiko’s, urging. In fact, much of her on-screen time is taken up with how she doesn’t fit and doesn’t really belong on DS9. Eventually, a choice had to be made, and considering the O’Brien character, the choice could not be other than it was — it was to Keiko and his children that his first loyalties must and should lie. Despite the seeming inevitability of his choice, the show itself does, at times, clearly set up a comparison between Julian and Keiko.

Part of the problem is that we rarely get to see the sympathetic side of Keiko — both Miles and Julian are main characters, so the show spends quite a bit more time on them and on their friendship and their growth. And while we often get to see Miles say that he loves Keiko, it’s much rarer to hear Keiko’s side of things — most of time when she’s on the show, it’s because the writers are highlighting a problem or issue, so we see the O’Briens more on the outs than the ins.

And while, at first, Julian and Miles seem at first to be as different as oranges and eggs, over the years, though the banter stays, their closeness grows stronger and stronger. In the end, we can see that they are more alike then they are different, both of them caretakers first, yet fighters, too, when necessary. Each of them willing to fight for something that they believe in, two friends who can stand back to back against the any enemy. I love Bashir and O’Brien for the same reasons that I love most of my fic couples — they tease and fight and stubbornly refuse to admit how much they care while showing their affection by their actions. They have a solid friendship with sparks of possibility. They can trust each other and lean on each other.

B. Subtext:

As you might imagine, seven years gives these guys quite a bit of subtext (and some actual text) to sift through. Because of the volume involved, I’m just going to point out some of the more obvious examples from each season.

Storyteller, a first season episode, is the first time that we get to have Bashir and O’Brien thrown alone together. While O’Brien tries to weasel out of it, Julian is thrilled (I wonder if Julian actually requested that Miles take him, it seems to play that way). Julian is, after all, very honest and open about liking Miles. He likes him from the first episode and goes right on liking him until the last episode.

Julian is so… almost desperate for affection at places in this episode. He asks Miles if he annoys him. In this episode, Julian asks Miles to call him Julian, because he’d ‘simply prefer it’ if Miles would call him by his first name. At the end of the episode, he relents, seeing that Miles isn’t comfortable with it (yet). Julian acts near starved for attention, especially first season, possibly because he feels that he can’t trust any attention that he does get, because it isn’t for the real him. The real him wasn’t good enough. And even now, he’s constantly afraid that even this ‘better’ him isn’t good enough.

Even apart from that, he’s just so fascinated by people within people — he wants to know all about Dax, not just Jadzia. He’s curious about ‘plain, simple’ Garak, the spy-tailor.

And Miles O’Brien, who appears to be ‘just’ an engineer, was also the ‘hero of Setlik III’. He wants to know all about them (as opposed to the women that he dates, wherein he’s all about telling them about him).

 

At the beginning of the episode:
Bashir: “I’m really looking forward to this mission.”
O’Brien: “And why is that?”
Bashir: “Well, I see it as a wonderful opportunity for us to get to know each other.”

On the subject of Bashir’s annoyingness:
Bashir: “The only reason I’m asking is because your opinion means a lot to me and I’m aware I have a tendency to run off at the mouth sometimes.”

In Armageddon Game, in the second season, Julian and Miles are thrown alone together by an ‘accident’. They spend most of the episode with just each other’s company and Julian saves O’Brien’s life. We also see the continuation of Julian sharing his life with Miles when he tells the story of the ballerina Palis, whom he almost chose over Starfleet.

Bashir:From near the end of the episode:

 ”I want you to know, I really appreciated what you said back on T’Lani Three.”
O’Brien: “What did I say?”
Bashir: “That it was an honor serving with me.”
O’Brien: “Oh… right.”
Bashir: “I’d like to return the compliment, Chief — it’s been an honor to serve with you, too.”

DS9 Stories/News: So You Want To Watch Star Trek: DS9? – Season 4

Source: http://directgeek.com/2012/01/so-you-want-to-watch-star-trek-ds9-season-4/

Previously: A primer on the series, season 1, season 2, and season 3.

Every season will now come with a “don’t listen to me, just watch it all” disclaimer. These are my personal favorites among a season of favorites.  Seriously, by the time we get to season 7 the whole post is just going to be a video of me sobbing and hugging myself.

And pressing my cheek to this image lovingly.

4×01-2: Way of the Warrior parts 1&2:

These episodes are killer. The tone and drive of the back half of the series sharpens to a knife-point. We learn so much in these episodes, we see so much set up, so much is twisted and turned around.

We learn that “sand peas” are almost definitely watermelon Jelly Bellies. We learn that the spots do go all the way down. That Garak doesn’t bother to fold his tucked napkin when having lunch with Odo. (Perhaps the whole torture thing means those social niceties are beneath them now?)

We learn that, if you have begrudgingly made your home among aliens, if you’re isolated and plodding on through bitterness and regret in a place besieged at every side, if your friends are your enemies, and your hardscrabble pride is your dearest enemy-friend, if you are drunk and afraid, then take heart. The only time you should really start to worry is the moment you begin to like the taste of root beer.

But, most importantly: Worf. Worf Worf Worf. Worf.

WOOOOOOORF.

4×03: The Visitor:

Do you enjoy weeping freely? Has it been too long since you’ve had a good, long, snotty, blotchy, call-everyone-you-love-at-an-inappropriate-hour cry? Well, here you go, buddy. Leave those embarrassing voicemails as the credits roll.

4×05: Rejoined:

Oh, and just go ahead and keep right on weeping. Just segue straight from tragic family story into tragic love story.

See, in addition to questionable psychiatric practices, the majority of Trill society believes it’s taboo-level improper for the new hosts of symbionts who once knew each other to “re-associate”. I’m gonna just translate that to “make out and be in love forever omg”. This is supposedly for the good of the symbiont so that it can have new and various experiences in its ages-long slug life.

Like many people would when confronted with the gorgeous new host of their ex-wife, Jadzia Dax calls bullshit on that.

Oh, does she ever.

And from this we get what’s arguably Star Trek’s most direct treatment of queer relationships. Some argue that the outcome of this episode precludes it from being pro-LGBT. For me, it only made the story hit closer to home. Trill’s taboo against re-association is as dehumanizing and insulting as any modern law that drives people in love apart, that bleeds into society and diminishes the character of any person enforcing or affirming that law. It isn’t Trek as utopia, but it is absolutely Trek as worthwhile and passionate social commentary.

4×06: Starship Down:

Like many geeks, I’m a person who loves stories about teams, about constructed families. Unlikely alliances and unexpected friendships that end up being so, so rewarding. This episode deals with that beautifully. Worf gets his in to begin really gelling with the crew, Jadzia and Julian laugh together at the expense of early-seasons-Julian, Quark makes friends with James Cromwell, and Kira and Sisko are the best.

Kira’s “holy crap I am friends with the Emissary” grin is also the best.

In addition to all these Feelings, this is just a really great spaceship episode in classic submarine storytelling style.

4×07: Little Green Men:

Look at this.

Look at it.

Good, now go watch the episode.

4×10: Our Man Bashir:

It should be clear by now that I’m a woman of offbeat tastes. I’ve always wanted to meet a nice lady with a tapeworm so that I could date someone like Jadzia. I somehow found it in my heart to love early-seasons-Bashir. Bedazzled skintight jumpsuits, disproportionately long limbs, anime eyes and all. But do you want to know what really gets my engine revving?

Oh. Hello, there.

O-o-oh. Oh, I see.

Oh God, what are these feelings inside of me? What witchcraft are you working on me, Star Trek?

OMG now he’s bleeding he’s in a tuxedo and he’s bleeding this is the most amazing thing to ever happen to me in my life what do I do with my hands how do I go on living when this is over OMGOMGOMG

I’m told that some other things happen in this episode, but frankly I never noticed.

4×16: Bar Association:

Rom: labor union organizer.

4×20: Shattered Mirror:

Subtitle: Jake Sisko goes on the Best Vacation Ever! The trend of excellent space-therapy continues as Jake spends the weekend with the body-double of his dead mom. Captain Sisko isn’t entirely convinced of the wisdom of this.

Jake and dead mom double, however, are sure that nothing could possibly go wrong.

In other news, Regent Worf got the cream of the crop from the SPCA.

I’ve had this dream so many times.

There is some subtextual evidence in the dialogue that implies Regent Worf is not a leader of well-considered opinions:

GARAK: The Intendant was bad enough. She was irrational, accusatory, unappreciative. But at least…
WORF: At least what?
GARAK: At least I was able to please her now and then.
WORF: You are not my type.

Worf, how are you even in charge of anything ,what is wrong with you, ye gods.

4×22: For the Cause:

Up until this episode, my opinion of the Maquis was “pfft, boring, they’re humans”. But then this hits and it’s like whaaaat.

Kasidy’s Maquis??! Whaaaat.

And then you’re like okay, okay I can deal with that. The Sisko will persevere. Jake will add this onto the pile of mommy issues and move on. But then!

Whoa whoa wait but Odo totally liked you what whaaaaaaaaat.

The shit: it is real. Oh, and Garak goes on a date with a teenager. To be fair, she’s pretty great.

4×24: The Quickening:

I have had this song stuck in my head since 1996.

This is the episode where I can begin to feel okay about liking Doctor Bashir in all his colonialist glory.  In an apt follow-up to Eddington’s Federation-as-homogenization tirade, Bashir finds himself neck-deep in his beloved ~frontier medicine in a place we’ll call The Planet of the Lepers.

I get the impression that Julian Bashir’s internal monologue sounds a lot like the content of a long series of pulp novels with racy covers and titles like Doctor Bashir And The Girl With Five Breasts, or Doctor Bashir Investigates: Where Are My Socks?, and in this particular instance Doctor Bashir– Among the Lepers! The great thing about our little ball of Starfleet-spiffy sunshine, though, is that he’s not that guy anywhere outside the holosuites. He doesn’t get the girl, and for the moment he’s no master of espionage. Heck, he can’t even cure one measly planet full of lepers. No matter how much he’s sure that he can.

“My bad, lepers.”

There’s a wonderful moment in act four where Bashir comes face-to-face with his own recklessly optimistic arrogance. It’s beautiful stuff.

4×26: Broken Link:

My notes for this episode were just “Worf totally ruins a perfectly good plan to commit genocide.” I stand by that. Another note could be that it’s clear from this that the universe runs on a currency of charm, and Garak is a goddamn billionaire.

No, for real. Why is Garak even on this mission in the first place? There’s every reason to disallow it. But all it takes is Garak reminding Sisko how great he is. The scene goes like this:

“Check it: I’m great.”

“Damn. He’s got a point.”

Season four ends with Garak in the clink, Odo in a meatbody, the Federation and Klingon Empire kinda-sorta tapdancing around open war, Emperor Gowron a suspected pudding-person, and the death of all Cardassia foretold by the Founders.

In the next post: Wacky Emissary hijinks! An episode about Keiko that’s actually fun! The spots go all the way down! Klingons, Klingons, Klingons! Even more genocide! Doctor Bashir becomes an unwilling expert in treating injuries associated with particularly rough interspecies sex!

Plus everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

DS9 Stories/News: Learning to Love Star Trek, Part 39: “A Man Alone”

Source: http://scifiblock.com/features/blog/learning-to-love-star-trek-part-39-a-man-alone.htm

By Robert Ring, Mon, 10/04/2010 – 21:31

“Learning to Love Star Trek” is a weekly blog series by Sci-Fi Block Editor in Chief Robert Ring, begun January 1, 2010. In this series of blog posts, Robert is endeavoring to determine whether he can make a Star Trek fan out of himself through an exposure to a combination of episodes from Star Trek the Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation (Update: TNG has now been replaced with Deep Space Nine) . Click here to read his introduction to the experiment.

I realized while watching “A Man Alone” that there’s something fundamental about Deep Space Nine that appeals to me. Sure, I like this series, and I’ve given reasons for that in my write-ups for the two episodes I’ve watched so far, but this one comes along and its plot does nothing special. It’s a murder mystery. However, it still had me more engaged than 90% of the Star Trek I’ve watched so far. I think the reason for this is that DS9 is so character-centric. The other series have great characters, for sure, but their stories have thus far seemed mostly to revolve around ideas (although TOS seems to be gradually moving in the direction of its characters now that I’m nearing the end of its first season). So, this episode did not have much of a great overarching impact, but the details here and there and the ideas brought up are both relatable and involving, because they are attached to the characters.

Odo is the focus here. An evil smuggler, named Ibudan, is on DS9, and Odo wants to kick him off, but Sisko won’t allow it, saying he hasn’t broken any laws. Soon Ibudan is murdered, and while Sisko claims he doesn’t believe Odo had anything to do with his death, he orders him off the case. In the meantime, word gets around about Odo’s conjectured involvement in the crime, and soon it seems everyone visiting the station has it out for him. Eventually, after Odo experience some persecution and a near beat-down at the hands of a mob, Julian Bashir solves the murder. It was actually Ibudan murdering a clone of himself so as to frame Odo. Hey, Odo told us this guy was mean.

See? This is why I like DS9 so much. The plot is just about as basic as you will find in an episode of a Star Trek series, but it’s what they do with the characters within the plot that makes it enjoyable. Primarily, it tests Odo’s judicial philosophy. When arguing that Ibudan should be kicked off the space station (because the guy truly has done some deplorable things), he touts the virtue of upholding justice over the law, saying, “Laws change, depending on who is making them. But justice is justice.” It reminds me of the faux super-conservative newspaper article at the end of Chapter X of Watchmen, where the writer asks, “[I]s it not more noble to follow the course of right and justice; to serve the spirit of the law rather than its every dot and comma?” Both Odo and this fake columnist have a point, but the problem, I believe, is that when you step outside the law, anything can happen. So, societies make laws and agree to adhere to them, almost as a compromise. We know they’re imperfect, and we try to adjust and fix them as we go along, but it’s the best way we have of assuring that everyone is treated fairly and equally.

Now, apply this to The Next Generation’s “Justice,” of course, and you get a different perspective on the matter. But I don’t have the time or energy to go there right now.

Odo gets to see the other side of his philosophy when the mob comes after him. As a clearly frightened Odo locks himself in his room, the others stand outside waiting for him until finally Sisko and DS9 security come to break them up. One individual in the mob uses the same term — justice — when Sisko asks what they are after. And justice truly is what they want, but their anger has blinded them to the dangers of a society in which justice is not arrived at through a previously agreed-upon system. I’m hoping that at some point in the season this experience will be shown to have become a part of Odo, an experience that has allowed him to view his own mindset from a different angle. Either way, though, for the time being we get a perfect thesis/antithesis scenario.

It’s the meditation ball game!

Jadzia Dax suddenly becomes extremely interesting in this episode. “She” is, of course, a Trill in a woman’s body, but at this point it seems the character is more fundamentally a sexless Trill than anything else, despite Jadzia’s physical body. It’s great how they set her up to be a former (male) friend of Sisko’s and also a current potential romantic interest of Bashir. This subplot really calls into question the concepts of friendship and romantic love as they relate to gender. Through both Sisko’s disinterest in Jadzia as an attractive female and Bashir’s interest in her despite her formerly inhabiting a male’s body, the very nature of the character suggests that romantic love in its most basic form should not be dependent upon gender. However, just as it is easy to see why Sisko has no desire for a romantic relationship with his old buddy in a woman’s body, it is also easy to see why Bashir’s knowledge of her gender temporality does not affect his attraction to her. So, maybe this is actually proof that romantic love is inherently and inevitably influenced by one’s physical characteristics — Bashir cannot ignore the woman’s attractiveness, and Sisko cannot ignore the fact that she used to be a guy. I suppose the question that remains is whether this predilection for attraction to a specific sex (and romantic revulsion from the other) is the result of society or biology (homosexuality, I should note, would be equally applicable to this question, as that, too, could be the result of the same societal or biological influences playing on different genetic/psychological make-ups).

A few more, miscellaneous thoughts on this episode:

• When Odo is being chased by the mob, he looks way too scared as he keeps glancing behind him. Since he’s the station’s constable, I would have expected him to act a little more John Wayne about it all. Run for cover, sure, but don’t cower and keeping looking over your shoulder like an old lady.
• When Odo explains to the Ferengi (I forget which one specifically) why he chooses not to enter into romantic relationships, he says, “There’re too many compromises,” with a pretty defensive tone. Then he goes into a surprisingly prolonged and detailed explanation of why these compromises are too much. Sounds to me like he’s had a bad personal experience with this.
• The kids on Deep Space Nine, especially Sisko’s son, dress even dorkier than Wesley Crusher.
• The facemask pull-off at the end of the episode is incredibly lame. Anything that reminds viewers specifically of Scooby Doo probably doesn’t belong in Star Trek.
• Bashir looks and sounds a lot like a young Gaius Baltar. That amuses me.

I gotta wrap this one up, but I’ll end by restating that this episode demonstrates what I view as a superior style of storytelling over The Original Series and TNG. The plots almost – almost — don’t matter. It’s what we learn about the characters that is the most rewarding. Since the focus in this series is so much more heavily swayed to the characters and their personal dilemmas than to plot, we get, in my opinion, a vastly more engaging show.