Deep Space Nine, a love story

I've been meaning to make this post for a while! Deep Space Nine, lovelies. People who really don't understand the silly Star Trek thing, look away now. (Except you don't get to make fun of me for it, I love science fiction and I love Star Trek and I am so done being ashamed of that.)

Deep Space Nine is the third Star Trek series. It's the only one to be set in one place, it's the only one to have a large cast of recurring characters, it's the first one not to feature a ship called Enterprise. As for what it's about: oh, god, I have no idea. It's about a space station called Deep Space Nine. It's sort of about war, and a little bit about religion, and a lot about family, and mostly about people.

I watched the pilot, "Emissary", in June 2009, and I just finished "What You Leave Behind", the final episode of the seventh season, and I have been watching this show for ten eleven months and I feel like I should say something about it that isn't just flail. I've been enormously lucky in that not one but two of my best friends were watching it for the first time at the same time as me - jacinthsong and hathy_col, thank you for a) putting up with me and b) lending me so many DVDs - and I've had a chance to properly squee. Squeee!

But first of all ( here are some things I don't like about it )

But what do I like about it, that is the question. Oh, so much. I love the tissue of the whole world it creates. The show begins in literal darkness. The space station is still called Terok Nor, a grim tentacular horror of a space station that is being busily trashed by the withdrawing occupying forces. The Cardassians kick stuff about, they leave. In come the Bajorans, who are throwing off the yoke of the oppressor not with a happy shout but with a sort of resigned efficiency, and the Federation, who are merely helping out. They aren't doing it all that well: Sisko's grieving for his wife and doesn't really give a shit about the assignment, Dax hasn't even been a new person all that long, O'Brien can't make the Federation and Cardassian computers work together. Bashir's all enthused that he gets to be a noble doctor working here in this third-world savage backwater, and Kira, as one of the noble savages herself, is getting ready to kick his head in.

Then, right next to the space station in the back of beyond, a stable wormhole is discovered to the Gamma Quadrant. And suddenly these people are at the centre of the world, and suddenly they have to be the best people they can be. And... oh, I love it, I do. Other Trek shows are pretty rubbish at people, interpersonal relationships, love stories, the rest of it – they're plot driven, spatial-anomaly driven, moral-dilemma driven. And Deep Space Nine is about… it's about Sisko and Jake, working out that father-and-son thing here in this very strange environment. It's about how they build ships together, go on trips together, about how Jake sets his father up on dates and Sisko yells at Jake for not doing his homework. It's about how Kira, who has been a terrorist her entire life, has been fighting the Cardassians her entire life, and has to learn now how to have friends, how to have fun, how not to fight, how to live.

(And let's pause for a moment on that: Kira, a woman with strong religious faith, who describes herself as a terrorist, who never regrets her actions, is nevertheless depicted as consistently principled and awesome.)

And then there's Julian Bashir, who incidentally is both non-white and British, who develops from annoying wunderkind to much more rounded character, and he and Miles O'Brien go on to get drunk together, play darts together, fight at the Alamo together and periodically declare their love for each other, together. And Nog, the Ferengi kid whom Jake teaches to read in the first season, who by the seventh season is a lieutenant in Starfleet, and so well-written and effective has his character development been, you absolutely believe it.

And then there's Odo, Quark and Garak, the three alien characters who are not backdrops to the humans – whose concerns and motivations are both entirely real and entirely at odds, on occasion, with those of the Federation.

And there's the whole world this takes place in: the politics of Bajor and Cardassia, the war against the Dominion, the smaller details like the Bajoran shrine on the station, the baseball in Sisko's office, the fomenting unionists in Quark's bar. The darker cast it puts on the Federation: Section 31, and the infamous root beer analogy. The brilliant, and brilliantly random recurring themes of yammok sauce (this is apparently a Cardassian condiment – why it gets so much discussion is never explained) and self-sealing stembolts (which are never explained at all). It's all so well-realised and internally consistent that these things make sense, and they're deployed with such a light and confident touch that you don't even have these sudden, self-conscious this-is-science-fiction moments, but only, these are people in a brave new world, but they're people.

Obviously I want to finish this by posting a clip from the show. I was going to post Miles and Julian getting drunk and singing Jerusalem, and then I was going to post Kira and Dax wearing the most amazing hats ever seen on television, and then I was going to post Garak, being Garak.

But now I'm going to post this: for the simple reason that it's during this little clip that my mild liking for this show made the leap into full-on love. All you need to know is that Kira has, for various reasons, just lost her job as first officer and liaison between the Federation and the Bajorans, and is preparing to leave the station.

( how can you talk about skin lotion at a time like this )