In previous threads, I’ve watched with utter astonishment as poster after poster says that DS9 is their favorite Star Trek series.
Let me set the record straight: DS9 is the worst series.
Stop and consider – the whole purpose of Star Trek, from the very beginning, was to explore and learn. Starfleet sent out ships (Enterprise was not the only one) whose purpose was to advance the sum of human knowledge about the galaxy. Yes, they were armed–many alien races are aggressive.
We saw that pattern of exploration play out both in TOS and TNG. (And afterward, Voyager and Enterprise.) But then we come to DS9. And guess what? They just sit there! Now I realize that the Federation had to set up a station garrison to protect Bajor, but that’s not the CORE mission of the Federation. And yes, they did do a little exploring later on, and they got into a war, but the over-all story line still revolved around the space station.
Now yes, DS9 has some very well-written episodes. But the whole concept for the series is faulty.
Listen carefully, people – Star Trek is not meant to be about garrison duty! Sisko was a capable captain. He deserved to have a real command, not to be stuck behind a desk. (Or the functional equivalent thereof.)
How in the world people can say it’s the best series, when it’s antithetical to almost everything that Star Trek stands for, is utterly beyond me.
At the time Trek was big enough to be different things and DS9 was a great addition to the franchise and is probably the most consistently good of the series (although TNG will always be my favorite).
All that said, with Trek being off TV for over a decade now I would not want the new series to emulate DS9. I want Trek to go back to basics: An Optimistic future you would want to live in and a star ship full of interesting characters exploring space.
That’s easy. Quark, Weyoun, Dukat, Worf, Damar, Garak, Sisko and Bashir. And General Martok. And the skeevy woman from Bajor, the priestess whose name escapes me. Her, too. DS9’s characters were way more interesting than TNG’s or Voyager’s. Also, things happened in DS9. It was better storytelling.
Star Trek that adhered too closely to Gene Roddenberry’s ideals was boring. Everyone was so…nice! TNG started off that way, and it was awful. I suppose the original series was supposed to be that way too, but if you stop and think about it, the Federation was full of jerks in that series too. Enlightened, my shoe.
Deep space nine did something the other series’ never did. They had consequences for their actions. It didn’t follow the same lame monster ������ of the week format. They had interesting characters and even more importantly interesting villains with reasons for their behaviors.
Yea, DS9 ran concurrently with TNG and then Voyager. It would’ve been pretty hard to have two shows at the same time based on people tooling around in space-craft on a voyage of exploration. I thought putting DS9 on a frontier outpost was a pretty smart way to keep the exploration theme going, while not just re-hasing TNG.
And as a practical matter, if they wanted to introduce a new alien of the week, or weird technology, they just bumped into it in the Gamma quadrent. On the other hand, TNG was pretty limited in how many plots it could have with developing re-occuring characters and settings. Since they were supposedly flying around a huge universe exploring, there was only so many times they could plausibly bump into the same places or people.
I thought DS9 did a pretty good job of keeping the optimistic vision of the future going, while making it a little more realistic. DS9’s Federation is still pretty utopian, but it isn’t totally devoid of disagreement or practical concerns.
DS9 did plenty of exploring. I don’t mean the jaunts off the station. Literal geographic (or astrographic) exploration was never the most important kind, in any Trek. It was about exploring ideas.
The concept of Star Trek my have been to explore and learn, but the value of Star Trek as entertainment has been, and always will be the fascinating characters and relationships. I never cared about the alien of the week, but Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty kept me watching. As **The Tooth **says, the characters on DS9 were some of the best ever on television. I especially loved Gul Dukat, and I would add Odo and Dax to the list. I also agree with drewder that having a more static setting made it possible for the characters to grow and develop in a way that they didn’t on other Star Trek incarnations. The sheer variety of characters, most of them alien characters who risked turning into stereotypes, that were thoughtful and went through meaningful growth arcs, was very impressive.
I’d also go so far as to point out that ST:NG got its start based on Roddenberry’s bible… and his hobby horses.
Roddenberry had some good ideas, sure, but he also had some bad ones, and one of his major issues was that he could not tell the difference. In his secular humanist future, everyone was a nice, well adjusted person who worked for free in order to keep society running and contribute to the greater good. Bad people were invariably from other species. Humanity had “grown up.”
Except for all these godlike aliens we keep running into that are either spoiled children, insane, or both. Harlan Ellison went on record as saying that this was Roddenberry’s favorite SF trope, and I have to respectfully agree, since Roddenberry rode that horse long after it was dead. This was not his only hangup. Several folks have gone on record about the difficulty of creating a dramatic, threatening situation on TV when people are brandishing weapons that look like a black pack of cigarettes. This is the whole reason why STOS invented the gun shaped “Phaser II.”
When the situation arose AGAIN on STNG, they solved it by giving our security officers things that looked like… little vacuum cleaners. Because Roddenberry didn’t like guns. And Roddenberry was in charge, dammit!
My point: STNG improved when Paramount finally took it away from Roddenberry. And STDS9 was created with NO input or meddling from Roddenberry. And while its first season was a tad rocky, at least we had zapguns that looked like zapguns, and were thus dramatically interpretable by the audience, and while we had godlike aliens, they at least stayed in their damn wormhole and hardly ever came out to play idiotic games with our protagonists out of spoiled childishness or madness. And most importantly, humans got to be humans. Make mistakes. Redeem themselves. Be villains. Make compromises.
Tell me any other series with the gravitas to pull off in the pale moonlight. You can’t because the other shows were basically problem happens, we need to examine federation ideals, turns out those ideals were right, give a self righteous speech. There was never the moment where maybe we’re wrong. Never any grey moments.
I can’t add to the above comments except to say that DS9 is also my favorite of the Star Trek series because, even though it had humor and (on rare occasions) farce, it was the most ‘grown-up’ of all the ST series, and I think most people were ready for that.
They also managed to get the holosuite (holodeck) to work without it taking over the station and trying to kill everyone. Probably because it was run by a capitalist who knew people would stop paying to use it if it killed everyone who stepped in.
I’m pretty sure there was at least one murderous holosuite episode. Bashir was a secret agent, IIRC. But yea, they at least went to that well a lot less then Voyager/TNG.