Always the forgotten step child of 90s era Trek but it was the most consistently good of those series and in many ways way ahead of its time. It premiered today in 1993, with a pilot episode beginning with finally showing us the Battle of Wolf 359 and ending in a way where you can’t wait to see what happens next.
It’s funny was about to write “modern Trek” in the first sentence above but can something 30 years old be modern?
People make a lot of noise about how The Sopranos and The Shield introduced series-long narrative storytelling but forget that Deep Space 9 (and Babylon 5, which was narratively more consistent but hampered by often hammy acting and generally poor special effects) actually did this half a decade before. Paramount had a lot of reservations about the casting of Avery Brooks and placed a lot of constraints to prevent him from being “too black” (e.g. not letting him shave his beard and grow a beard) but it is hard to imagine anyone else cast into that role. In general, the DS9 had the strongest cast of any Star Trek franchise, and even managed to give depth to the most offensively charactered culture of the Ferengi (although any episode featuring “The Grand Nagus” is guaranteed to have multiple cringe-worthy moments), and managed to have a broad diversity in casting and storytelling without it ever seeming like a plaintive appeal. It also completely eschewed the Roddenberry mantra of avoiding personality conflicts and a utopian future which gave the show its own unique identity rather than just seeming like an extension of The Next Generation at a slightly different time or milieu. What I appreciated the most is that the writers only rarely defaulted to a “particle of the week” technobabble solution to the plot, preferring to deal with complicated issues often without a neat resolution.
I’m not a huge Star Trek fan, and I have a lot of issues with the underlying premises of this kind of easy space opera, but I’ll watch most episodes of DS9 and I particularly enjoyed “Far Beyond The Stars” which implied that the entire show was just in the imagination of aspiring mid-20th century science fiction author Benny Russell.
Stranger
It had its moments, but it still feels very old-fashioned compared to Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica(2004).
My wife and I watched it on DVD and I think one thing we noticed is how little Sisko is featured on DS9 compared to Picard on TNG, especially in the first few seasons. I mean, they do episodes about him, but not nearly enough. I thought Avery Brooks was one of the best things about the show.
I think the fact that they gave all of the cast their own episodes and storylines that contributed to their development (and the actors were uniformly good enough to carry them) is a strength of the show. TNG was basically The Picard-Riker-Data Show with an occasional Worf-focused episode that was of little ultimate consequence. (At one point, he flat-out murders another Klingon in vengeance and suffers zero consequences.)
Even when they bothered to give fine actors like Levar Burton or Gates McFadden an episode focused on their respective characters instead of having them stand around giving an exposition dump or being utterly incompetent at their ostensible professions, it was almost uniformly awful or pointless, and of course they treated McFadden so badly that even after they brought her back onto the cast they had her in a film where she had a couple lines of dialogue and then was summarily shoved into the ocean, never again to appear in the film until the finale.
Stranger
I really liked Deep Space Nine, particularly the Dominion War story arc. But I hated any episode involving the mirror universe, which just seemed an excuse for the actors to ham it up by playing evil versions of their characters.
One of those “makes you feel old things”: TNG and DS9 are now older than TOS was at the time those series premiered.
The “Mirror Universe” episodes seemed to be a producer walking into the writers’ room and saying, “Guys, it’s time for another one of ‘those episodes’ again!” to a chorus of groans. They were so lazy and pointless.
Stranger
We enjoyed all the Star Trek series in varying degrees (even the often-maligned “Voyager”), but never could latch on to DS9 until the Dominion story arc in the last couple of seasons, when they finally got off that damn space station and out into space.
And we never could stand the Ferengi.
That’s my favorite episode. It lives on my DVR for the occasional re-watch.
DS9 is the best Trek in my opinion because it had an over-arching story from beginning to end. It hit all the “epic” storytelling points - war, occupation, religion, love. And through it all, every major character comes to terms with who they are.
We started a (re)watch of this three days ago (I got to start of S4 in the 90s, restarted pre-covid, watched and stalled and reached start of S7 a few months ago). My other half never really watched any Star Trek seriously, but we watched Babylon 5 during covid.
I start with the description that the first three seasons are ok, but it really kicks off in the 4th season. Someone I know said it was because Roddenberry had died and his restrictions on the series had been removed, so they could write what they actually wanted. The episodes in the fourth seasons are so good that it’s barely a joke that one of them has more plot than the whole of the previous season (Quark gets into trouble, Odo finds out, then some other B plot with Kira and religion, repeat 23 episodes).
However, from my original memories back in the 90s, the theme tune used to be slightly different. When it plays there was always a little ‘pooooo’ noise somewhere in it back in the day, which isn’t in the dvds nowadays. I’ve tried today to locate if someone has a youtube of the old vhs titles (and I might have an old tape in the attic, but the trouble of getting that and the VHS player to work is a bit much), but none seem easily findable. I guess I’ll just settle on having imagined that little artifact.
I remember an old workmate who bought all the VHS tapes as they were released at the time, 3 of them I think. One to lend, one to play himself, and one for collection never played. Cost him a fortune, I guess several grand at full price (he lived at home with his mum, didn’t socialise, so had plenty of money). I recall meeting him later in eras of dvds, and he’d sold them on ebay for about £50 (and this may have included his TNG, Voyager and TOS tapes). Quite sad, really.
Gene Roddenberry died in 1991 while DS9 was in very early concept development, and frankly had little involvement in any Star Trek properties after the second series of TNG (and no involvement whatsoever with the films after Star Trek: The Motion Picture beyond an EP or “Created By” credit and getting a hefty pay check). Pretty much everything people love about the franchise today has nothing to do with Roddenberry, and many of the elements he introduced in the original series have, to put it mildly, not aged well.
Stranger
Interesting, perhaps it was being respectful of his original ideas, or I’ll just push back when it next comes up for discussion with my friend… Something definitely was different on Season 4 onwards though. Sisko shaving his head, and Worf joining aside.
I’d be interested as if you have a theory on what engineered that change…
I don’t have any particular theory other than that the it was clear by the fourth series that the show, while never as popular as TNG, had enough legs to keep going for a while, and with Voyager in play and getting the spotlight of the “sexy” show, the writers could engage in deeper storytelling with less interference by Berman and Braga. It may be noteworthy that Naren Shankar—more recently the showrunner and EP of The Expanse—started working on. DS9 at that point as script/science consultant and one of a bullpen of untitled showrunners, and Ronald D. Moore—of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica—transitioned to the show as full time co-ex/supervising producer, both of whom are well known for their longer form story arc productions.
That was also at a kind of point where network television was kind of realizing the potential of serialized storytelling in terms of keeping people watching consistently from week to week; Lynch had tried that in Twin Peaks but kind of flopped because he wasn’t actually interested in the story, but the short-lived Profit, while ahead of its time in terms of how comfortable the networks were in presenting a show headlined by a sociopathic anti-hero, showed the potential of that style of story presentation. You hear people talk about The Sopranos as if it came out of nowhere but there were a number of preceding shows that started into longer multiple episode narratives and overarching character developments, just not to the depth and breadth of The Sopranos as a character study in sociopathy.
Stranger
The DS9 theme did change during the series run. There are actually three different versions;
The Pilot episode titles don’t show the wormhole.
Seasons 1-3 have the worm hold.
Seasons 4-7 have the same visuals but slightly different music. Actually they any have changed the visuals to add more ships now that I think about it.
The point being you are right there are two different scores for the opening. Maybe some streaming services just used one score for the entire series?
While your reasoning on the long arcs does explain some of it, and perhaps the extremities of drama the show went to onwards in the fourth season, even at individual level of episodes seemed a LOT higher quality. Quark and co crash landing somewhere, Siskos moral ambiguity, the overall quality per episode seemed to just shoot up. The writers room firing on all cylinders would be an explanation for that.
Still I’ll push back on that next time I see him.
Garak is one of my favorite characters in all of Trek. The episode where he arranges to kill the ambassador then calls Sisko out for acting morally outraged when he knew perfectly well what Garak would do — love it.
It’s the same theme but with a more upbeat tempo and accompaniment instead of the more ponderous dirge-like tone, and Defiant appears docked at the station. I seem to recall that they also added a bunch of Federation and Klingon ships in the background during the Dominion War but that may just be conflating post-credits establishing shots. At some time around that point they also went away from compositing practical motion capture models with CGI background and went to fully digital effects.
Stranger
I enjoy that episode just for the chance to see all the actors out of their make-up and prosthetics.
Agree with others that the “Mirror Universe” episodes are pointless and boring.
My personal favorite DS9 episode is “Duet”. In fact, I would rank it as one of my favorite sci-fi TV episodes ever, right up there with “The Constant” from LOST.
The friendship of Dr. Bashir and Garak was probably my favorite part of the series. Garak seemed to love having a sounding board when he explained his efficiently evil work for the Obsidian Order, and Bashir couldn’t get enough of it, even though he was thoroughly appalled.
I don’t remember this exchange verbatim, but it’s one of my favorite scenes. Bashir and Garak are having lunch, and Bashir expresses skepticism over some of Garak’s stories. Garak assures him everything he told Garak was the truth. “Even the lies?” asks Bashir. Garak responds, “Especially the lies.”
Is that the same scene where Bashir tells him the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf? Bashir is trying to make the point that if you always lie, then nobody will believe you when you tell the truth. However, Garak’s takeaway from the story is “Never tell the same lie twice.” 