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: 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.

DS9 Stories/News: Behind the Scenes on Deep Space Nine

BY NICK OTTENS ON JULY 10, 2007 4:31 PM ON DEEP SPACE NINE

The Next Generation had proved the resilience and appeal of the Star Trek universe — it was not dependent on its famous first crew for its success. The future of Star Trek seemed unlimited. But after five years of production, Paramount executives could see that their own future was more constrained. It made little economic sense to continue most television series for more than five or six seasons. Costs invariably increased, storylines became exhausted and the syndication market would fill with too many episodes chasing too few time slots. From a purely business perspective, The Next Generation ‘s days were numbered. But everyone’s instincts said that Star Trek still had not saturated its market. In Paramount offices, the idea of a third Star Trek series was discussed.

The Next Generation had shown that Star Trek could thrive without its original characters. Could a new series survive without a ship? Rick Berman, who was Gene Roddenberry’s handpicked successor as the person to guide Star Trek after his death and Michael Piller, The Next Generation‘s most influential writer, created Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with exactly that challenge in mind.

Production designer Herman Zimmerman inspects the space station model

For more than twenty-five years, one of Star Trek ‘s strengths had been the detailed future universe through which the two Enterprise s had traveled. Now the franchise’s newest guides decided it was time to venture out into that universe, choose a pocket of it and locate a new series there.

January 1992 marked the launch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Sadly the announcement of the plans to produce the series came shortly upon the after of Gene Roddenberry in late 1991. The timing led to the speculation that had Roddenberry lived, Deep Space Nine might not have. Suspicions along these lines were raised particularly after description of the new series filtered out. “It’s going to be darker and grittier than The Next Generation,” executive producer Rick Berman had stated in the March 6, 1992 Entertainment Weekly. “These characters won’t be squeaky clean.”

Even though the announcement about Deep Space Nine seemed to come out of nowhere several weeks after Roddenberry’s death, Berman and Michael Piller had actually been discussing ideas for a new series for some time. It was always planned to be a spinoff from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Ideas were discussed with Paramount but it never went beyond the planning stages. When Brandon Tarticoff moved from being head of NBC to behind head of Paramount, he told Berman that he wanted to see another Star Trek series to launch into syndication. Berman and Piller returned to their series notes and worked up a proposal for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Alternative costume design by Robert Blackman

In October 1991, Berman and Piller began developing the new series and they decided to set it in the same time frame as The Next Generation — a decision made consciously to take advantage of the Star Trek universe that had so far been established. Berman and Piller wrote several different versions of the series bible while it was being developed. When they finally showed a later version to Paramount, the studio provided its own input into the project and in fact Brandon Tarticoff, before he left Paramount, suggested that the show might be something like The Rifleman in outer space, although Berman and Piller did not quite feel that this idea particularly fit in with what they were trying to develop. But the studio’s suggestions were weighed and incorporated into the series concept to produce the final result.

Deep Space Nine was a means of escaping the somewhat limiting constraints of Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek concept. According to Rick Berman, they “set about creating a situation, an environment, and a group of characters that could have conflict without breaking Gene [Roddenberry]‘s rules. We took out characters and placed them in an unfamiliar environment, one that lacked the state-of-the-art comfort of the Enterprise and where there were people who didn’t want them there.”

These are characters who come through much darker than the Next Generation characters,” reflected Michael Piller, “but I don’t know that I could say this is a dark series.”

It’s still Gene Roddenberry’s vision. It has an optimistic view of mankind in the future. Reason and dialog and communication are still the key weapons in the fight to solve problems. I think the label of darker is probably exaggerated.

Alternative costume design by Robert Blackman

For writing the Deep Space Nine‘s pilot, Piller was influenced slightly by “Encounter at Farpoint”, which had been The Next Generation‘s first episode. Piller took his cue from “Encounter at Farpoint” in delaying the introduction of some key characters until later in the story. Another key plot ingredient reused was the necessity of having the lead character explain or justify humanity to an alien race. Piller managed to give the concept, so many times used on both the original Star Trek and The Next Generation, an interesting spin — Sisko had to communicate with aliens who did not understood humans and their ilk because they did not, themselves, experience time in linear fashion. Sisko would thus be faced with the difficult task of explaining time, human consciousness and the importance of humanity’s past experiences to an utterly uncomprehending alien form of consciousness.

Early Cardassian costume design by Robert Blackman

Piller, however, was dissatisfied with his early versions of the script for “Emissary” and continually involved a somewhat reluctant Rick Berman in constant rehashing of their original story ideas. The basic plot with Sisko explaining humanity to the unseen aliens was too talky, according to Piller and the other aspect of the story, the transition to Federation command of the space station, seemed to be suffering.

In the early concepts of the series, the setting of Deep Space Nine was to have been a dilapidated, seedy space station with technology that lagged somewhat behind that of the Federation. In the course of series development, this notion had been scrapped in favor of a more high tech look. Now, however, Piller was forced to rethink this whole approach — while that station would still be a fairly advanced piece of alien technology, Piller decided that the departing Cardassians would ransack the place, leaving a shambled that Sisko would be faced with rebuilding. Now the new commander’s job would involve convincing the merchants of the Promenade, and other inahbitations of the station, to stay and pull things back together.

“Emissary” would end up costing as much as twelve million dollars to film — two million of which were spent on building the standing sets for the series.

When production began for Deep Space Nine, the Star Trek universe was already well defined. The Bajorans had been introduced in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Ensign Ro,” when Ro Laren became a popular character though not a regular cast member. “Ensign Ro” and later “The Wounded” told of the planet Bajor, a world conquered fifty years before by furthless aliens known as the Cardassians. The Nazi like Cardassians stripped the planet of natural resources using Bajorans as slave laborers. After forty years of Bajoran terrorism and the mining out of the planet, the Cardassians left Bajor which immediately sought Federation membership, offering Starfleet to take control of the former Cardassian space station.

The first episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine explored Bajoran culture and religion. Bajor’s religious leader, the Kai, appears in crucial scenes in “Emissary.” Not long after, in “Battle Lines,” her character is written out of the series, leaving Bajor in religious turmoil. The series explores Bajoran culture in “The Storyteller,” “Cardassians” and “Sanctuary,” continuing in season two with “Homecoming,” “The Siege,” “The Circle” and “The Collaborator.” Piller and Berman set Deep Space Nine in the midst of Bajor and its conflict with the Cardassians. Piller, who had headed the script department of The Next Generation, said, “One of the primary goals in making this series is to do something we didn’t have the opportunity to do in The Next Generation.”

Early Cardassian costume design by Robert Blackman

The experienced creative team and established storyline failed to give a strong start to Deep Space Nine. Berman and Piller wanted to break new ground. That began with Commander Benjamin Sisko. “We wanted to create a new kind of Star Trek hero,” said Michael Piller, “a man who is not just the Starfleet officer who has given up family for career, like Picard; not like Kirk, who’s one of the boys on a great adventure. He is a man who had had a family and has lost a wife he loved and must raise a son.

Avery Brooks said his “very human” character avoided the military strictures adorning many Starfleet officers. He said of his character, “So much of the military veneer is not there. He expresses what he feels. He isn’t particularly interested in being here. He’s following orders. He’s worried about raising his son in this environment. This station has been devastated.”

Deep Space Nine was the ultimate distillation of the Star Trek universe. The crew was united under one flag. There was no ship and there was little physical exploration. More importantly, what remained of Star Trek was the firmly established background details of the twenty-fourth century, the ever more complex consistency of future history and technology and the determination of Berman and Piller and their production crew to create an arena for adventure and storytelling that would live up to the name, Star Trek.

Which they did. Deep Space Nine was an instant success, sharing many viewers with The Next Generation, adding new viewers of its own, demonstrating once and for all the deeply appealing richness of what Gene Roddenberry had wrought. It wasn’t the characters. It wasn’t the ship. Star Trek was a state of mind. And millions still wanted to share it.

From Garfield, Judith Reeves-Stevens, The Art of Star Trek (1995) and James Van Hise, Hal Schuster, The Unauthorized Trek: Deep Space Nine The Voyage Continues (1994).

The station played host to a wide variety of alien lifeforms, not all of them quite humanoid. Here a Dan Curry alien concept.

DS9 Stories/News: So You Want To Watch Star Trek: DS9? – Season 1

Source: http://directgeek.com/2011/11/so-you-want-to-watch-star-trek-ds9-season-1/

Previously: A primer on the series.

And now: What you need to know about the first season.

My mother requests that we begin this post with a link to the ST: Deep Space Nine opening theme song.

Take a good, long look at that monstrous, stately space station.

Prepare yourself to love it.

The series begins with a quick recap of the relevant events from Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes “The Best of Both Worlds” parts 1 and 2. In short: Locutus of Borg (aka Captain Jean-Luc Picard) used his insider knowledge of Starfleet’s tactical capabilities to utterly slaughter the Federation fleet. 39 ships and more than 10,000 people were lost.

It was super awful badtimes.

Among the dead was Jennifer Sisko. It’s her husband, Benjamin Sisko, former first officer aboard the lost USS Saratoga, who will be in charge of Deep Space Nine.

Observe: it’s pretty.

We good? Okay, let’s go.

1×01-02: Emissary parts 1&2

I know, I know. 90-minute pilot. One of the desires I have while beginning to watch massive, already-aired TV shows is to skip immediately to totally loving it. And, to do that, I usually have to skip over something like a 90-minute pilot, or at least skim through it. You are perfectly free to do that now.

But here’s what you’ll be missing:

• Sisko resenting the hell out of Picard. It’s beautiful. Their scenes together, which could have been a simple info-dump, instead become a study in simmering bitterness. Especially if you’re coming to this series after watching TNG, it’s a jarring and wonderful thing to see Picard cast as the villain.
• Avery Brooks meowing like a cat.

Post-meow satisfaction.

• Everyone’s terrible pilot episode makeup.
• Dr. Bashir as the mouthpiece of the most horrifyingly colonial, patronizing, and naive attitudes that you may have heard from young Westerners who “spent a few months in Africa” or “found the real India last summer”. Early-seasons Bashir is often the Federation at its worst. It’s awesome.
• Chief O’Brien finally getting to leave the transporter room of the Enterprise. This marks the last time I’ll care about O’Brien for the next season or so.
• Terrible pilot episode CGI. You can barely tell that Odo’s supposed to be made of pudding.
• Witnessing non-linear beings begin to understand linear existence. COME ON, SCI-FI FANS! THAT’S FREAKING AWESOME.

1×03: Past Prologue

Here is where the action begins. And by “the action” I obviously mean “Garak”. Once upon a time, the writers of this series sat around thinking to themselves, gee. Julian Bashir sure is unlikeable! What we need, they thought, is a grounding relationship for him. Something that people can really invest and engage in.

So then there was Garak. I am not even making this up. In any case, this episode contains their meet cute.

I am not even slightly making this up.

I’m relatively sure a couple non-Garak things happen in this episode, but I’m guessing they’re few, and to be perfectly honest I couldn’t care less. I think it’s about Bajor. Whatever.

Oh, and I promise that Garak doesn’t always dress like a watermelon. That will never happen again. I apologize.

1×05: Captive Pursuit

He is Tosk.

This is a very good representation of how DS9 does monster-of-the-week episodes. It’s pretty adorable. O’Brien learns to be slightly less speciesist. Tosk is Tosk.

1×10: Move Along Home

Do not watch this episode.

Please don’t watch this episode.

I am not kidding.

1×17: The Forsaken

Yeah, I just skipped half the season. And I like this season! But I’m being real with you, internet. The rest of the season is okay, but this is an episode that will make you care about a man made of pudding. More than that, it makes you really, really like Lwaxana Troi. And that is something special.

Betazed: a planet full of retired professional figure skaters.

In the B-plot: Chief O’Brien adopts a giant Tamagochi.

1×19: Duet

There are Cardassians in this episode.

Rocking the off-kilter spoon like a boss.

Watch it.

1×20: In the Hands of the Prophets

This season is a bit shorter than the rest, and it ends here, with an object lesson on the dangers of forcing a creationist bias into education. Spoilers: this practice ends in tears.

I will admit, this is a quiet choice for a season finale. It’s a deceptively quiet episode. What it does well, though, is crystallize the tension that exists between the Bajoran religious establishment and the Federation citizens who live on DS9. The very basic differences in their motivations, the difficulty both sides have in seeing past their biases, and the care Sisko takes to adopt a Bajoran perspective, all these persist and evolve as themes through every season.

But what is Jake wearing.

Stop, it Jake. Please, stop.

Jake must be stopped.

In the next post: Secrets! Lionel Luthor! Drug abuse! Ill-advised away missions! Imaginary girlfriends! Mirrorverse! And Garak dresses like a watermelon again, I totally lied about that. But it’s only once more.

DS9 Stories/News: Learning to Love Star Trek, Part 43: “Captive Pursuit”

Source: http://scifiblock.com/features/blog/learning-to-love-star-trek-part-43-captive-pursuit.htm

By Robert Ring, Tue, 11/02/2010 – 08:45

“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.

Another below-par episode for Deep Space Nine. However, this one’s not as bad as “Babel,” and, to be fair, the first few episodes set the bar pretty high. This one examines the Prime Directive under a unique and challenging set of circumstances, but it spends too much time on stuff that just isn’t interesting. On paper, its plot sounds like the premise for a solid episode, but it wasn’t pulled off as well as it could have been.

When the first life form from the Gamma Quadrant comes through the wormhole by Deep Space Nine, O’Brien befriends the visitor, named Tosk. Or he’s a Tosk. Or the word “Tosk” describes him in some other manner. He never fully explains. Anyway, this Tosk seems a little too secretive and on-edge. His arrival is a great occasion for the Federation, but unfortunately he is uninterested in chatter and seeks only to get his ship up and running as quickly as possible. Eventually, we learn why: he comes from a culture in which his race is bred and trained for hunting by those in power, and it was during this hunt that his ship was damaged and he ended up on DS9. Though he could seek asylum on the station if he wanted to do so, he views such action as an abandonment of his life purpose. All he wants to do is continue the hunt as prey. As much as Sisko and the others don’t like the idea, the Prime Directive demands that in these conditions they allow the hunt to continue. Queue a heroic action sequence, and curtain.

Hey Tosk, do you happen to know a guy named Bossk?

While the Prime Directive bit is interesting here, it comprises a small portion of the episode. Still, it’s absolutely worth looking at. We’ve had a difficult call in The Next Generation, where following the Prime Directive would have meant allowing someone to die, but here we have to bring an entire culture’s way of life into question. No doubt, to us this custom is deplorable. However, even Tosk is fully given to the morality of the hunt. He believes he’s fulfilling his life’s goal. There hardly seems a way to justify this on the part of those who arrange the hunt system, but if everyone’s happy with it, what are we to do? Tell them they’re wrong? Good luck with that. So, because of the Prime Directive, we have to allow the culture to keep doing its thing.

I like this in part because it forces us to acknowledge a seemingly universally heinous custom as possibly morally acceptable from a certain perspective. To me what’s even more interesting about it, though, is the idea of actually finding meaning in a life in which one is bred only to serve as the prey in a hunt. It is as if these people have to create their own meaning in life, and they do so without apology and without reservation. They just need a purpose, and they’re happy to serve that purpose even if it means their death. After all, who needs life if it’s meaningless? I would like to learn more about this society. Is it totally absent of religion? Their need to create purpose in life would suggest that it is.

So, there’s some good stuff here, but I remain disappointed that so much of it consists of establishing the mystery of what Tosk is running from, why he’s in such a hurry, and, eventually, why aliens in space suits are trying to capture him. We don’t actually learn what’s going on until over halfway through the episode, as if the mystery is somehow more rewarding than the pondering of the morals of the situation. Then we learn what’s going on and get to watch the characters talk and think about the problem for about ten minutes, at which point we get an “O’Brien saves the day” escape scene that lasts pretty much the rest of the episode. Yawn.

At the least, I can say that DS9 still seems to know what it’s doing a lot more than what I’ve seen of TNG. Plus, at this point the series is still very young. Every good show has its missteps. Right now I’m just hoping these indeed are its missteps. From what I can tell based on the first three episodes, I’m still in safe territory