Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is thirty years old this week, since the series first premiered in January 1993, and the celebrations of—quality wise—Star Trek’s finest TV series (and still probably its most under-seen and under-rated) have begun.
I thought I would dig out a piece I wrote a couple of years ago which almost featured in a book about DS9. It didn’t quite make the cut, but I’ve always liked it and have looked for the right time to share it. Now feels like a good time to make an argument for DS9 as one of the formative 1990s shows of a second ‘Golden Age’ of television series.
Strap in, it’s a long read, so shields up and let’s open the wormhole…
Star Trek as a franchise is predated by what would become known as the Golden Age of Television in the United States, beginning in the late 1940s and lasting through to the late 1950s, encompassing along the way a wide range of writers and directors who would shape not just television but cinema, as the classic studio system gave way to the changing social and cultural landscape of the 1960’s, laying the foundations Gene Roddenberry used to create his seminal, original series of Star Trek.
By the time Deep Space Nine, the third Star Trek series, arrived in the wake of the enormously successful sequel series The Next Generation in 1993, television was entering what has been referred to as the ‘New’ or ‘Second’ Golden Age, also known as “Peak TV”, with some debate as to when it began. Was it thanks to Steven Bochco’s groundbreaking serialised police drama Hill Street Blues during the 1980’s? Or did the 1990’s, with long-running hospital, police or courtroom dramas such as ER, NYPD Blue and Law & Order, and finally the critically lauded, psychological melodrama that was David Chase’s The Sopranos, constitute the turning point? The moment television aspired to be greater? The moment it aspired to ‘quality’?
In 1997, Robert J. Thompson popularised in his seminal work, Television’s Second Golden Age, the theory of “Quality TV”. Though based on subjective criteria, quality TV is designated as television which operates at a higher level of skill, depth and construction than other programmes. Examples often cited as among formative quality TV series include The Sopranos, The West Wing, Hill Street Blues and so on, though the criterion is expansive and open to interpretation. Thompson’s thesis was predicated, however, on quality TV’s emergence across the 1990s as HBO led the way for cable television, the ‘showrunner’ emerged as the equivalent of a directorial ‘auteur’ on television, and the ‘mid-budget’ movie steadily combined with television budgets to allow television production to aspire to a cinematic reach.
Deep Space Nine is frequently not cited amongst the examples of quality TV yet this feels like an unwarranted omission, given the series regularly meets the criterion laid down by Thompson in his presentation of quality TV as an indicator of how television, from the 1980s, had begun to develop a higher threshold of creative and dramatic texture. Deep Space Nine does not correspond to all of Thompson’s litmus test but enough for the series to be reconsidered in the framework of not just 1990s television, but the framework of quality TV as it relates to the Star Trek franchise.
Thompson judged that quality TV could be characterised in the following ways, which it is worth examining Deep Space Nine in the context of.
“It is produced by people of quality aesthetic ancestry, who have honed their skills in other areas, particularly film. It attracts a quality audience.”
A quality audience is recognised as the kind of viewer who “is appealed to by, and not in spite of, their status as niche audience, and the cultural value accruing to their niche status has transformed investment in casting, scripting, acting, directing, producing and critically evaluating television”.
Deep Space Nine managed to capture this kind of viewer in how it combined a mixture of production staff with significant experience on television from the 1970’s onwards in line with acting talent with a wide array of history in cinematic terms.
Ira Steven Behr proved himself as a quality showrunner thanks to working on the difficult yet inspirational writing staff of The Next Generation’s third season, in which Piller solicited scripts from new writers and gained from the move scribes such as Ronald D. Moore, but Piller’s experience, while not in film, suggests a pedigree that invested DS9 with a litany of historical television accolades.
Moreover, Deep Space Nine recruits perhaps the widest array of theatrical, television and cinematic acting talent of any Star Trek show across the franchise.
Avery Brooks, who sets the tone as Commander and later Captain Benjamin Sisko, came from Spenser: For Hire. Rene Auberjonois, as the taciturn and dogged Constable Odo, was widely known to American audiences as Clayton Endicott III on Benson, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award. Andrew Robinson, who often steals the show as recurring guest star and possible Cardassian spy Garak, came to fame as the Scorpio killer in 1971’s classic Clint Eastwood detective thriller Dirty Harry, before in 1987 segueing into what would become a cult horror classic as the ill-fated father figure in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. Similarly born from a cult cinematic pedigree is recurring guest star Jeffrey Combs, playing a multitude of characters (most significantly the odious Dominion stooge Weyoun), who in the mid-1980’s became the face of Stuart Gordon’s H. P. Lovecraft adaptation Re-Animator and From Beyond, not to mention a veritable legion of cult movies.
This fails to even take into account the Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated pedigree within the Deep Space Nine cast.
Louise Fletcher, who played the cunning Bajoran religious leader Vedek (later Kai) Winn, was immortalised to viewers as the terrifying Nurse Ratched in Milos Forman’s 1975 adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. She won the Oscar for Best Actress the following year. Frank Langella, as the corrupt Minister Jaro who plotted with Winn in three memorable episodes, is a respected film and theatre character actor who was nominated for Best Actor in playing Richard Nixon in the 2008 film Frost/Nixon. The show even features, in a brief role as an alien trader, actor James Cromwell, nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 1995’s memorable children’s film Babe.
Deep Space Nine, therefore, maintains a balance of pedigree between the worlds of cinema and television that many science-fiction series of the era, at least, fail to achieve.
“It succeeds against the odds, after initial struggles.”
Few Star Trek series faced the existential mountain Deep Space Nine was forced to climb from the outset.
The Next Generation, arguably the most successful Star Trek series in television history in terms of ratings, was moving via slipstream toward a cinematic future. DS9, in how different the very premise was from either preceding Star Trek series, would be initially considered an unwanted, unloved second sibling. Where was the Enterprise? Would they just stay on the space station?
The Next Generation also benefited from a significant headstart in ratings terms. It was the only first-run syndicated series on television in 1987, with barely any competition in terms of science-fiction. Five years later, once DS9 premiered, a host of similar series had begun to emerge as challengers to Star Trek’s dominant crown. “As of June, there were 7 networks, dozens of first-run syndicated shows, and over a hundred cable and premium channels. Where TNG had to deal with maybe a dozen competitors, DS9 and Voyager contend with around 50 (counting the premiums) and a sci-fi market that's close to being oversaturated.”
Alongside a slow start in the ratings, Deep Space Nine found itself across the first two seasons often recycling narratives and stylistic touches from The Next Generation. “Q-Less” is the one and only attempt to bring Q into the world of DS9, and it swiftly becomes apparent his brand of cosmic whimsy does not fit the grittier, earthier world of the space station. The same is true of Lwaxana Troi, who appears in “The Forsaken”, replacing her traditional lust on TNG for Picard with Odo here. The series, at this point, is even still relying on existing TNG and even The Original Series writers such as D.C. Fontana, Morgan Gendel or Naren Shankar - fine wordsmiths in their own right, but none of them would become part of the core group under Ira Steven Behr who shape DS9 into the show it became.
Come the third season, Deep Space Nine began to find that shape, and the ratings started to reflect that. The series remained, for most of its lifetime, the number one first-run syndicated show on television despite falling viewer numbers. “Even when it became a near-serial show (usually, long-term serial shows are ratings disasters -- witness Babylon 5) airing in prime-time in less than 60 percent of the nation, DS9 managed well over a 4.0 average in its final two years. As a general rule, a syndicated show needs to maintain a 3.0 to be successful, DS9 always maintained that despite the strikes against it.”
In an ever-crowded marketplace as genre television took off during the ’90s, Deep Space Nine remained popular with fans and critics throughout.
“It has a large ensemble cast which allows for multiple plot lines.”
The Next Generation had operated firmly within the principles of television made for syndication, the golden goose that drove production up to the advent of the streaming era in the mid-2010’s that transformed the landscape of television, fronted by Netflix.
Syndication was a target by networks alike, to reach the round number of 100 episodes which would allow series to be sold off to local, domestic networks that would be able to show the series in repeats in perpetuity, gathering consistent residual income from that series even after production had stopped. This is a major reason why, during Star Trek’s own ‘Golden Age’ on television from 1987 through to 2001, all three series that aired in that time ran for seven seasons of 150+ episodes. TNG, DS9 and latterly Voyager all were syndicated. Enterprise, much like The Original Series in the 60’s, was cancelled before it could reach the magic 100 number. And one of the key precepts that enabled syndication, and made it a more attractive proposition to national networks, was the reliability of stand-alone storytelling.
DS9, very quickly, proved to be a different animal where this was concerned. The writing staff understood that while they would hold to the traditional stand-alone production model for Star Trek episodes, by very nature the space station setting did not afford the narrative the opportunity to change setting and location every week. Picard and the Enterprise could deal with Worf’s parentage and then warp out to a completely different adventure in a different part of space. Sisko and his crew were not afforded that opportunity. They existed on a hub in which characters and situations would come to them, and logically by virtue of staying in the same location on a major port for travellers, crews and officials, we would see the same characters on a more frequent basis.
Hence why unlike TNG, and indeed unlike Voyager subsequently, DS9 builds up an ancillary group of supporting cast members and characters from Season 1 onwards who would reappear with growing frequency across the seven seasons: Garak, an enigmatic, exiled Cardassian and possible ex-spy; Rom, the brother and lackey of Ferengi bar owner Quark, and his wayward son Nog; Chief O’Brien’s wife Keiko and their daughter Molly; Gul Dukat, the former commander of DS9’s previous designation, Terok Nor, who would grow into the series’ principal, Machiavellian antagonist; and Vedek Winn, a cunning Bajoran politician who stoked religious nationalism and frequently butted heads with Sisko and Kira. All of these characters, and many more besides, became as central to the complex, weaving narrative over seven years as the main cast of characters themselves.
Deep Space Nine was early on, therefore, breaking the mould, as writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe attests: “The whole point, and we realized this very quickly, is that the show was about consequences. How the things we do ripple and echo and sustain, and we did not warp away every week at the end of the episode. The premise of “come to a planet, have an adventure, warp away” is inherently an episode-by-episode stand-alone premise. The premise of “come to this place and take control of it and build it into something better” is not that. It is a serialized premise; it inherently lends itself to that kind of storytelling. That is a part of what we were figuring out, but it didn’t take very long to figure that one out, to be honest. It was a quick realization.”
“It has memory, referring back to previous episodes and seasons in the development of plot.”
Memory within Deep Space Nine is displayed from the season first finale “In the Hands of the Prophets” which directly confronts the secular teachings of the Federation with Bajoran religious values, causing political issues for Sisko and Starfleet in the process. It is perhaps the chief example that demarcates the point DS9 begins to fly in the face of the precepts of syndication and devise episodes expressly designed to pay off previous stories, bring back existing characters, and lay the foundations for ongoing, semi-serialised narratives to come.
The ‘Homecoming’ arc of “The Homecoming”, “The Circle” and “The Siege” which follows on from “In the Hands of the Prophets”, focuses heavily on the legacy of the Bajoran Occupation and the post-occupation attempts to form a ruling Provisional Government, which Starfleet’s assistance, with the eventual possible goal of Bajor joining the Federation. The first three-part story ever expressly designed as such in Star Trek, it fuses together the serialised aims of the DS9 writing staff with the TNG model of expansive, multi-episode stories. It delivers well-known guest stars in Oscar-nominated actors Frank Langella (playing villainous Bajoran politician Jaro Essa) and Richard Beymer (as mistaken resistance hero Li Nalas), and a significant narrative idea in the station being laid siege by a Bajoran coup, but it brings back characters such as Winn and Dukat, who play their own roles within a story arc that tells a contained story but both illuminates further aspects of Kira’s character and lays track for what would become the ‘Bajoran political arc’ of the series, one of many continuing story threads that would steadily begin to grow, develop and build from Season Two onwards.
Deep Space Nine therefore bridged the gap between traditional standalone storytelling and serialisation that would emerge in the subsequent decade, in much the same way as The X-Files—a key cultural television touchstone which aired during the same period—balanced the two approaches. Deep Space Nine embraced the conceptual idea of a deeper ‘mythology’ as the series continued, particularly from the third season onward as the connected arcs began developing into continuing narratives that would refer back to previous episodes and seasons to a degree Star Trek had not embraced before.
Season Three would begin with the show being gifted the U.S.S. Defiant, a “tough little ship” designed to fight the Borg after the events of “The Best of Both Worlds”, which allowed the series to resolve a problem many had accused DS9 of having—being unable to travel out and explore the galaxy—and not only introduced the Dominion, the ongoing primary antagonists of the series, but it made them Odo’s people, thereby resolving the mystery of the shapeshifter’s origins and establishing a personal connection to our cast and crew that would complicate the narrative significantly in the years to come.
It was an inspired choice that led, almost immediately, to a narrative boon as Behr and his team worked to balance Star Trek’s traditional storytelling structure with a growing sense of serialisation and mythology. Character stories did not simply just explore a cast member, they factored into the world-building going on around the space station. “Life Support” and “Shakaar” feature Kira but also expand the Bajoran political storyline from “The Collaborator” the previous season; “Improbable Cause” begins as a detective thriller for Odo but expands out in “The Die Is Cast” into a huge storyline for he and Garak that threads Season Two’s “The Wire” with the Dominion plot, and even the Romulans. We even see the Mirror Universe gain a continuing storyline in “Through the Looking Glass”, following on from “Crossover” last season. This was just an unprecedented move for Star Trek, engaging in this level of consequence for what traditionally would have been an assemblage of stand-alone storylines. It is the move from Behr and his staff that gave DS9 its unique identity within Star Trek, and moved it creatively even beyond its own franchise.
In some ways this was made possible by The Next Generation heading into the movie sphere, which would largely untether it by necessity to the workings of the adjacent TV shows, but also Voyager’s premise taking place in a distant part of the galaxy. DS9 now had the canvas of the Star Trek universe largely to itself for around five years, the world of Klingons and Romulans as well as Cardassians and Bajorans, and it worked to combine all of the threads from TNG and indeed TOS from the past three decades and develop them as a broad, connective, ongoing galactic narrative.
Seasons Four and Five would establish smaller but key ongoing story threads that would be returned to once or twice a season - the Maquis, now obsessively being hunted by Sisko and led by former Starfleet officer Eddington in episodes such as “For the Cause” and “For the Uniform; Ferengi-based comedy episodes such as “Bar Association” which would also see through Quark, Rom and a small core of returning characters, the regressive sexual and capitalist politics of their society challenged; the Cardassians under Dukat ever more becoming tethered to the Dominion in episodes such as “In Purgatory’s Shadow”; Bajoran politics become entwined in ancient mysticism involving imprisoned dark spirits and religious prophecies, such as in “Rapture”; even established Federation utopian precepts compromised in episodes such as “Homefront”/“Paradise Lost” where martial law is declared on Earth in fear of Changeling influence; eugenic experimentation becomes apparent in shocking revelations about Dr. Bashir in “Dr. Bashir, I Presume”, and in Season Six a Federation version of the sinister Tal Shiar or Obsidian Order intelligence agencies of the Romulans and Cardassians are introduced in the mysterious ‘Section-31’.
The Dominion antagonism would blossom into a full-blown conflict, one which allowed the series for the very first time to experiment, from Season Five finale “A Call to Arms” through to Season Six’s “Sacrifice of Angels”, with a serialised mini-arc which fully introduces the Dominion War and tethers it with the other significant mythological narrative of the series that would become more and more crucial to the final seasons of the show - Sisko’s Judeo-Christian transformation into the Bajoran Emissary of the Prophets, a prophesied saviour of their people. This seven-part story arc was, at that time, a fulcrum of all the strides DS9 had taken in weaving together narratives, paying off character beats and storylines, and laying story track across the previous five seasons.
Had DS9 not taken the chances it did, nor Behr butt heads with Berman as he so often had to do, the ’Occupation’ arc in which the Dominion-backed Cardassians, led by Dukat, regain control of the station from the Federation, would never have happened. It was embracing the same level of serialisation that J. Michael Straczynski was making par for the course over on Babylon-5, which at this point was rocketing into a fourth season in which the ‘Shadow War’, its own galactic conflict, was racing toward unexpected conclusions; or indeed on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Joss Whedon began to introduce ‘seasonal arcs’ that culminated in Buffy Summers’ confrontation with the so-called ‘Big Bad’ villain, following a serialised narrative structure amidst more traditional ‘monster of the week’ episodes.
Running alongside these celebrated contemporaries, the further that Deep Space Nine developed, the more it embraced an internal memory that speaks to quality television.
“It defies genre classification.”
Numerous series within the purview of quality television have the ability to move between genres. They often begin at first principles as beholden to a well-established, often cinematic genre—the Western, the gangster film, the romantic comedy—and subsequently manage to build on those established tropes while deftly eschewing them. The Sopranos edges deeper into family drama and human psychology than embracing The Godfather, while Sex and the City uses screwball comedy trappings as a means of exploring controversial sexual mores.
Where this applies to Deep Space Nine from a quality perspective lies in how the show, using the framework of Star Trek and the space station setting, manages to cross-pollinate with other established genres while remaining in the context of science-fiction.
This becomes first apparent as the second season moves into the third and Deep Space Nine grows more confident in balancing tones and narrative styles. Following the major ‘mythology’ revelations and forward momentum of ‘The Search’, ‘The House of Quark’ serves as a hybrid of ‘Ferengi comedy’ episode and Klingon drama, before ‘Equlibrium’ plunges Dax into a dark, Gothic tale about a serial killer in the history of her symbiotes past. These are, stylistically, very different approaches to the same text, and Deep Space Nine embraces this variety consistently as the series evolves.
Looking back at Star Trek as a franchise up to this point, such narrative and genre divergence was not apparent. The Original Series and The Next Generation had the scope to tell a range of different science-fiction stories within the conceptual framework of exploring new worlds and travelling space, but they rarely defied genre conventions. TNG might switch from a holodeck romp to action adventure story through to a romantic drama, but there was little sense the entire tone and stylistic feel of the series changed week to week. These narrative constructs simply existed within the established framework.
Deep Space Nine fundamentally works to challenge the conventions of the kind of Star Trek series you are watching week on week. ‘Past Tense’ uses time-travel in order to evoke TOS and tell a story about homelessness, and democratic oppressions of poor minorities, before the very next week ‘Fascination’ turns the series into a bacchanalian Greek comedy of love potions and farcical trysts. DS9 even inverts conventions within the same story. ‘Improbable Cause’ begins as a low-key detective story for Odo, investigating a bomb attack on the shop of Garak the tailor, before building unexpectedly into the first of a two-part story with ‘The Die Is Cast’ which involves fleets of ships, space battles and seismic geopolitical events within the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants. Deep Space Nine is the first Star Trek series here to even buck the convention of two-part stories having the same title, thereby confounding audiences into believing they are separate entities, rather than being connected as the conventions of a detective drama turn into a balance of political action adventure and espionage on the head of a pin.
The show even takes internal narrative tropes and combines them in surprising ways. ‘Prophet Motive’ fuses together the aforementioned ‘Ferengi comedy’ style of episode with Bajoran mythology and the mysterious Prophets; similarly, ‘Business as Usual’ eschews the traditional idea of a Quark-centric episode—a character often approached from a comedic perspective—and places him within a serious, disturbing story about arms dealers which challenges the expectations placed on that character.
In this sense, Deep Space Nine works to buck its own established conventions of the kind of stories it frequently tells, or Star Trek as a franchise often tells, confusing and combining genre tropes as a means of approaching storytelling devices from fresh perspectives.
“It contains sharp social and cultural criticisms with cultural references and allusions to popular culture.”
Deep Space Nine is not the only Star Trek series to embrace 20th century popular culture, but it remains one of the few to ascribe a particularly liberal, democratic world view to the future Federation universe.
The aforementioned ’Past Tense’ recalls the social commentary of a brief contemporary, Donald P. Bellisario’s Quantum Leap, which while not among the vanguard of quality TV’s definition certainly engaged with science-fiction as a means of exploring cultural and social issues facing the American people. In sending Sisko, Bashir and Dax back to the ‘future historical’ America of 2024, and Sisko being forced to ensure the timeline continues as history records by stepping into the shoes of Gabriel Bell, an iconic black protestor who died amidst a violent riot that directly influenced the end of ‘Sanctuary districts’ in 21st century America which detained the poor and immigrants in dystopian detention centres, Deep Space Nine pointedly and directly comments on growing, anti-Democratic sentiments emerging from the Reagan-era about the divide between rich and poor. It is, with hindsight, worryingly prophetic, but it serves as liberal polemic to a degree The Next Generation certainly avoided.
‘Past Tense’ posits the idea that it took the death of a black figurehead, and America facing the reality of how it had neglected the poor and needy amongst society, to trigger progressive reforms that aided humanity’s eventual pathway to the utopian enlightenment of the United Federation of Planets. This is nevertheless a utopia Behr’s series repeatedly challenges and questions throughout the run of DS9, particularly in later seasons as the peaceful, post-capitalist exploration of the future is replaced by devastating costly war, and even the spectre of democratic abuse thanks to the creation of Section-31, a covert agency baked into the Federation’s charter (read: America’s constitution), which is directly antithetical to Roddenberry’s original vision for Star Trek and a reaction, in no small part, to the upsurge in ‘90s popular culture of conspiracy theory thanks to other examples of quality TV such as Twin Peaks and The X-Files, which suggest a dark, alternate reality exists at the core of the American heartland.
Deep Space Nine continues the deeper exploration of liberal anxieties with ‘Far Beyond the Stars’, a bold Season Six episode directed by Avery Brooks which finds Sisko visited by raptures whereby he becomes convinced he is Benny Russell, a black science-fiction writer in 1950s New York who, amidst violent and unjust racial prejudice from publishers and police officers, imagines our titular space station and the Star Trek universe and writes stories about it which he struggles, in an American landscape still haunted by Jim Crow laws and before the advent of the Civil Rights movement, to get his work published. ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ does not just suggest Roddenberry’s utopian vision could in fact be in the mind of an aspirational black writer in the post-war, pre-Star Trek era, but draws a through-line between minority civil rights in America and the peaceful, progressive prosperity of the Federation future.
There are also consistent references to the singularly American sport of baseball from the pilot episode to the series finale of DS9. Sisko from “Emissary” is denoted as a fan of the sport, keeping with him an actual baseball which becomes an emblematic totem of not just latent Americana in the series, but Sisko’s spiritual presence. When the station is abandoned in “Call to Arms” as the Dominion War begins, Sisko leaves the baseball behind for incoming commander Dukat to see - a signal that he will one day return. The baseball remains on the desk of Colonel Kira once Sisko has vanished in the Bajoran Fire Caves at the end of “What You Leave Behind”, again symbolising the possibility of his reappearance. ’If Wishes Were Horses’ externalises the baseball connection when a phenomenon incarnates Buck Bokai, a legendary player from the year 2026, likened to American legend Joe DiMaggio; ‘In the Cards’ sees Jake and Nog embroiled in galactic politics while hunting down baseball cards.
Much later, in ‘Take Me Out to the Holosuite’, Sisko gathers his crew for a baseball match as part of a rivalry with a fellow Vulcan Starfleet Captain. The series revels in these direct connections and allusions to American popular culture. The same is true of the recurrent interest in the 1960s in later seasons and the glamorous, easy listening lounge culture of Las Vegas. “Our Man Bashir” indulges ’60s style with a holodeck spy romp that combines Matt Helm kitsch with James Bond cool; “His Way” frames Odo and Kira’s burgeoning romance through the prism of a Vegas holodeck program which introduces Vic Fontaine, played by ’60’s crooner James Darren, a sentient hologram of a Las Vegas club owner and singer who, in the last two seasons, becomes a sounding board of 20th century wisdom to the 24th century characters. “Badda Bing, Badda Bang” provides a Deep Space Nine take on Ocean’s Eleven, a signature Rat Pack starring heist caper, and “What You Leave Behind” partially concludes with a montage sequence set to a rendition from Vic of ‘The Way You Look Tonight’.
Deep Space Nine is, therefore, littered with examples of connections and references to popular culture, and indeed 20th century cinema, which distinguish it from the rest of Star Trek before it, and inspire series such as Voyager or Enterprise to come. They work to repeat a style Deep Space Nine laid down, often with less success.
“It tends toward the controversial.”
If Deep Space Nine stands as a controversial example of Star Trek, it surely is thanks to how willing the series is to challenge the established precepts of its own universe.
“In the Pale Moonlight” actively works to embroil Sisko, our ostensible protagonist, our hero, in an ultimately murderous conspiracy which literally changes the entire geopolitical structure of the Alpha Quadrant. Manipulated by the devious Garak, in the face of projections suggesting the Federation will lose their war against the Dominion and massive, growing casualties, Sisko compromises his ethics to trick the Romulans into joining the conflict, and a politician dies as a consequence. The episode uses a framing device of Sisko confessing his guilt over what happened to ‘us’, in the form of a to-camera delivery, before deleting the recording and instituting a cover-up which persists. The truth never emerges. Justice is never served. A hero in a Star Trek series commits, if unwittingly, conspiracy to murder. It is the darkest, existentially, the franchise has ever been.
Quality television often focuses on a compromised or damaged main character, and in many instances a direct anti-hero. Fox Mulder in The X-Files might be handsome, funny and charming, but he is also obsessive, anti-social and psychologically traumatised by events in his childhood. Tony Soprano and Breaking Bad’s Walter White are troubled examples of toxic American masculinity; the former a mobster facing a deep-seated psychological reckoning with his life as a gangster and father within his patriarchal society, and the latter a white-collar suburbanite who is corrupted by his own fantasies of breaking free from his ordinariness and emerging as a jagged master criminal as a result. While Benjamin Sisko is hardly an anti-hero, he is the most complicated and edgy Star Trek protagonist in the series’ history.
Sisko is honourable, dignified and righteous, but he is also quick to temper, outwardly emotional and himself dogged and obsessive. He pursues Starfleet rebel Michael Eddington with a crusading zeal. He grows increasingly fascinated and consumed by Bajoran mythology and history which, in “Rapture”, sees him actively sabotage Bajor’s entrance into the Federation based on his belief in what the Prophets are trying to tell him. He is unconventional with the construct of Deep Space Nine as a series, never in line with the charming cowboy that is James Kirk, the assured diplomat that is Jean-Luc Picard, the principled matriarch that is Kathryn Janeway or the humane everyman that was Jonathan Archer. Sisko has many of these qualities but also an, at times, fanatical zeal that allows the audience to believe he could grow into a passionate believer in Bajoran mysticism or the kind of hero who would compromise his ethics so completely, he may never completely return to who he was.
In that sense, Deep Space Nine is controversial, if more inwardly than the opposite.
“It aspires toward realism.”
Deep Space Nine takes place on a station on the fringes of known space, built by the reptilian-looking Cardassians race, filled with a myriad number of alien species visiting and trading on a daily basis. On a visual level, there is nothing ‘realistic’ about DS9, indeed it might be the most diverse and ‘alien’ Star Trek series to date.
Yet in one key way, Deep Space Nine serves as the most realistic, grounded and relatable of all the Star Trek series: the relationships between its characters.
DS9 is the first—and indeed, only—Star Trek series to make its protagonist a father, and for the relationship between he and his son remain a central, core factor to the show. Kirk may inherit a son in middle age, but Sisko—a widower—is a father to Jake for their life, and their relationship is an entirely relatable one to a 20th century audience. Jake is an intelligent and kind young man but he clashes with his father, falls in with a bad influence in Nog, chases girls, gets into trouble with the local ‘sheriff’ (Odo), and runs the gamut of teenage experiences as he grows into a man - an aspiring reporter and novelist, eschewing the Starfleet life Sisko believes he will inherit. Episodes such as “Explorers”, in which the Sisko’s build and fly an ancient Bajoran solar sail ship, or “The Visitor”, whereby an old Jake who lost Sisko in a freak accident changes the past to save his father, speak to the close and very human relationship between these characters. It later extends to Sisko’s father Joseph, a New Orleans restaurant owner and chef who has rarely left Earth, in later seasons. The Sisko’s, representing an inspirational, multi-generational black family in space, often feel as contemporary as the audience watching.
The same can be said for the O’Brien family, who began life on The Next Generation before the character of Chief O’Brien moved to DS9 as a regular fixture. An enlisted man, with no Starfleet rank, O’Brien is the most 20th century character in the Next Generation-era. He could have stepped right off a transport vessel from Dublin, and there is a natural warmth between he and wife Keiko and daughter Molly that captures a traditional, ‘nuclear family’ dynamic, while also representing another forward Star Trek stride in a happy, inter-racial marriage in Star Trek’s future. O’Brien even becomes the best friend of Dr. Julian Bashir, both frequently going to Deep Space Nine’s equivalent of ‘the pub’ and playing darts, even in one episode getting drunk and singing ‘Jerusalem’. These are 20th, not 24th century, realistic human affectations that DS9 brings to these character dynamics.
Not that such relationships simply apply to human characters. Around unscrupulous Ferengi bar owner Quark develops an extended family who represent a traditional American ideal. Quark is a classic grifter who drags his unwitting (yet truthfully extremely intelligent) brother Rom into his schemes, while his nephew Nog ends up defying Ferengi capitalist convention as he grows out of mischief into nursing dreams of becoming a Starfleet officer. Rom forges another inter-racial marriage with Quark’s beautiful Bajoran bar girl Leeta, while their firebrand mother Moogie frequently appears as she challenges the Ferengi’s ingrained, ultra-sexist, male-driven capitalist autocracy. These are flawed, often difficult, frequently at odds human characters in alien makeup.
Deep Space Nine, therefore, imports dramatic realism, and many conventions of 20th century life, culture and family, into these futuristic alien surroundings to a degree no other Star Trek series manages.
“Finally, it is recognized and appreciated by critics, with awards and critical acclaim.”
Though Deep Space Nine did not win an array of dramatic awards at television’s most prestigious awards ceremony, the Emmy’s, it did frequently receive nominations for music, makeup, hairstyling, visual effects and more behind the scenes aspects that helped devise the look and feel of the series, while it did receive two Hugo Award nominations for ‘Best Dramatic Presentation’ for episodes “The Visitor” and “Trials and Tribble-ations”.
Deep Space Nine was, however, feted by critics at the time, and has certainly grown in the subsequent three decades into, for many, Star Trek’s finest production, primarily thanks to the advanced strides the show took in character development, serialisation, cultural impact and resonance, acting and dramatic construction. In a 2018 poll from IndieWire, DS9 was placed third in a list of science-fiction series set in outer space, with the far more popular and successful Original Series and Next Generation lagging behind in eighth and twelfth place respectively. In 2016, the L.A. Times ranked it the third best Star Trek product in a list of all series and movies from the franchise, while in 2017 Vulture ranked it first in a list of Star Trek series. The cultural legacy and appreciation of Deep Space Nine has only grown in the two decades since the show concluded.
All of these factors combine to warrant Deep Space Nine a place on the list of quality TV productions, even if it cannot fit every criteria on the list. While the series lacks the cultural impact of decade-defining series from the ‘90s or ‘00s, Deep Space Nine formed part of the transformation of television from cinema’s lesser sibling into not only a challenger, but a format deserving in our modern era of greatness.
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