Star Trek: Deep Space 9 Review
I have been meaning to write this post for a while now, and never gotten around to it because there's so much ground to cover... But recently, I finished watching all of Star Trek: Deep Space 9!
I started watching DS9 while I was sick with the coronavirus and quarantining. I had nothing else to do, and so even though I usually don't have the attention span for long form television shows - and certainly not live-action ones - I was finally able to watch enough of it to get invested, after hearing it recommended by friends for ages. It's a really incredible series!
Another thing I've been meaning to do for a while is to start including reviews for things I've watched, played, etc. on this blog. So, this will be the first one of those. To put it briefly, I highly recommend Deep Space 9. It's got an incredible cast of characters who are all well-developed and engaging, even many of the side characters. Furthermore, despite airing before I was born, the series usually holds up very well by modern standards to the point that it is more progressive than most shows I've seen on modern television (although there are a couple episodes where it stumbles). The pacing gets a little wonky near the beginning and the end of the show, but is very nice for most of it, and it isn't terrible even in areas where it could be better.
Alright, that's my brief review out of the way. Of course, I like to talk at length about things, though, and I feel like a show that's worth watching can't be meaningfully spoiled (it will still be good if you know what happens). I know some people care about the element of surprise, though, so watch out...
Deep Space 9 is set on the space station that the series is named after, a former colonial mining outpost and labor camp that's now under the joint control of the newly liberated Bajoran people and the Federation. This is already a really strong premise for a Star Trek show, which to my understanding are usually set on roving spaceships. Being on the space station gives a lot of opportunities for long-running political intrigue, and for plots about civilians who are recurring characters and are able to get up to activities that Starfleet officers might not be interested in or allowed to engage in.
The show really explores the impact that the Cardassian occupation has had on Bajor, and shows the Bajoran resistance in a sympathetic light even when drastic actions are taken - one of the main characters, Major Kira Nerys, is a former resistance fighter who is openly and repeatedly described as a terrorist by herself and others, but even when the negative consequences of her actions during the resistance effort are explored, the show accepts violent resistance against an occupying colonial force as, at worst, a noble effort with serious consequences, and at best, heroic. Meanwhile, the show clearly condemns the Cardassian occupation even while humanizing some individual Cardassians, showing that they're not a faceless monolith but rather a group of people whose government is committing atrocities, and who must each make their own choices about how to respond to that, ranging from gleeful involvement to just trying to keep out of it to aiding the resistance. The Cardassians and the damage they left behind aren't the only issues facing Bajor, though, even early on - there are a lot of different political and religious groups on Bajor with conflicting interests that vie for control over the newly established government and the ancient religious institutions alike.
I still think the biggest strength of the show is its characters, though. Covering every single one of them in detail here would take absolutely forever, though, so I'll just pick a few favorites.
Commander (and later, Captain) Benjamin Sisko, as the show's lead, is of course an obvious choice to discuss here. He's the first Black captain in a Star Trek series, and that isn't just an afterthought - the actor who plays him, Avery Brooks, was adamant about using his role as Sisko to address issues of race and provide a good representation of Black fatherhood. Sisko's relationship with his son Jake is a real highlight of the show, and they get plenty of time to flesh it out. His character arc throughout the series of discovering that he is the Emissary of the Prophets, an important religious figure to the Bajorans, and growing to accept that role is also really well-executed. At the beginning of the series, he is reluctant to even be the commander of Deep Space 9, but over time he grows into his role and becomes a committed and highly competent Captain who leads the station, and to some degree the whole Federation, through a war with a hostile superpower, the Dominion, that comes through the wormhole near Deep Space 9 and attacks the Alpha Quadrant.
Of course, an important aspect of any Star Trek series is that it has to have at least one guy who's extremely obviously autistic but it's never mentioned, so that autistic viewers can have somebody to relate to (after all, I would imagine we make up a pretty significant chunk of people willing to watch a sci-fi series as long and lore-heavy as Star Trek)! DS9, delightfully, has several! Odo, Julian Bashir, and, later, Worf are all on the main cast and all have unique and distinctive personalities from each other while also all being really clearly autistic coded. Bashir is even human - a rarity for Star Trek autism guys. It is later revealed that he's genetically enhanced, but in the episode where this is revealed, it's also made very clear that he was already neurodivergent as a child before this happened and in fact that his parents had him enhanced because of that, traumatizing him and destroying their relationship - a clear parallel to harmful "therapies" like ABA and how they can do terrible harm even when they're "successful" in making an autistic person pass more easily as neurotypical (I have a post about this I made on tumblr - I might update it now that I've watched the rest of the series and link it here eventually).
The other characters I want to mention here are the kids, generally speaking, but especially Jake and Nog. Sadly, Molly just doesn't get as much development - this is probably mostly because she's so young, but it would've been nice to see more of her. Jake is Ben Sisko's son, and Nog is the son of Rom, a side character whose brother, Quark, is a member of the main cast. Jake and Nog become friends early on in the series since there aren't many other kids their age on the station, despite their cultural differences and the disapproval of both their families. They learn about each other's interests, work together at school, and work together in various side plots where they get up to youthful shenanigans. However, what's really great about them is that they don't stay as kids - since the series takes place over a period of years, we get to watch Jake and Nog grow up and become adults with their own careers, both going against their families' expectations but nonetheless winning the support and love of not just their own families, but the entire cast. Jake becomes a writer and journalist, and Nog becomes the first Ferengi to join Starfleet.
The major problem with DS9, of course, is that any show that goes on for 7 seasons is going to have some episodes in it that are just not very good at all. I think that this is overall a decent price to pay for a show that has so much time to develop its characters and plots, but episodes like Profit and Lace are difficult to get through. Still, though, even among the weaker episodes, Profit and Lace is the only one I'd recommend actually skipping (it's terribly transphobic and offensive, and also just badly written). Star Trek has a great wiki, if you need to know what happened in the plot, just look there - that episode isn't worth watching, not even to mock. It just sucks.
My other big criticism is that I feel like writing Jadzia Dax off the show was poorly handled. She had to be removed because the actress left, but there would have been better ways to accomplish this. For one thing, establishing that she was pregnant and then immediately killing her in the same episode was just mean. She did not have to be pregnant all of a sudden in order for her death to be impactful. Worse, though, was how the show moved on in her absence. A new character, Ezri Dax, who was the new host of the Dax symbiont was introduced. Ezri had potential to be an interesting character, but she needed at least two seasons to develop, in my opinion - since DS9 didn't have that much runtime left, I would've preferred just losing Dax from the main cast entirely and bringing in either an unrelated replacement or no replacement at all. Hell, I would've actually really liked if they'd brought in Ezri without the Dax symbiont - maybe establish her as someone Dax had known if that connection was so desperately needed. That way, she could've arrived in a more stable position that wouldn't have required an unattainable multi-season character arc. Instead, though, they brought her in and rushed her through a character arc that needed much more time to breathe if it was to work well, and then shoved her into a relationship with Julian Bashir that, frankly, neither one of them needed.
Again, though, despite these flaws, Deep Space 9 is an incredible show. Most of the flaws do not even appear in the majority of the episodes. This was my entry point to Star Trek, and I've been a little disappointed with the other series I've started watching so far (Voyager - but, I've also heard that there are other Star Trek series that are also better than Voyager). Deep Space 9, though, is a series I'd recommend to anyone.