Deep Space Nine, a love story
May. 27th, 2010 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI'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 forten 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 - ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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:
-How it deals with queer issues. It's the closest Star Trek ever comes to acknowledging queer people exist at all in the lovely utopian liberal future, and so I sort of expect better of it – but… no. It does have "Rejoined", where we do get a relationship between Dax and Lenara, and a proper same-sex kiss and everything. But… it's predicated on Dax having previously been a man, which rankles, and it ends badly, which rankles even more. And, well, why just one, and why so sad, whereas the future is supposed to be full of as many happy queer couples as there are straight ones.
And, Ezri and Worf having sex later in the show really rankles – in doing that, they break the same Trill taboo that Dax and Lenara do in this episode, but, surprise, surprise, because Worf's a man, somehow the same righteous indignation never features.
(And let's not even start with the queer couples in the mirror universe. Ezri Tigan likes women, but it's okay, because she's evil. Admittedly, the writing in "The Emperor's New Cloak" does highlight the stupidity of it all with Rom as the baffled audience mouthpiece, but still.)
-How it incorporates women. DS9 has one of the largest main casts of any science fiction show I can think of, and dozens of recurring characters on top – but of the main cast of eight, a mere two are women.
But as a moderate defence, I've watched seven seasons of the show and almost... didn't notice? I mean, yes, it's egregious, but as a rule DS9 is not bad at women. Neither Kira nor Dax (either of her) is a token - they are all fleshed out characters with thought-through arcs. And there are other women, too: Kasidy Yates, who smuggles supplies to the Maquis and is not sorry for it; Leeta, who could so easily be One-Shot Hot Girl, but then recurs over four seasons (and joins a union to piss Quark off!); Lwaxana Troi, who hands down is the best recurring character in Star Trek; Tora Ziyal, who blossoms despite years of slavery.
Another gripe, though before I go on: one of the most important women in the show, who for two seasons is its major antagonist, who recurs and recurs and recurs… doesn't have a name. She's referred to in the script, and in dialogue, as "the female changeling". And, okay, we do get the handwave in one episode that individual changelings don't have names – that Odo is unusual in that respect – but if she were another changeling who looked like Odo, I suspect she wouldn't have been referred to as "the male changeling". I'm just sayin'.
But, to return to that point. DS9 isn't bad with women at all. Nearly every episode passes the Bechdel test, and it's not all technobabble, either. Dax and Kira talk about, among other things: why Kira should not be a therapist, Captain Boday and his transparent skull; why holodeck kayaking is for suckers; why Kira's faith is important to her; why you're not supposed to hit Lancelot in the face when you're pretending to be Guinevere. Dax and Sidrella have a screaming row. Keiko and Kira talk about family. It doesn't happen as often as I'd like, but every time you think it's getting a bit manly, it passes the test with flying colours.
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.
And that's a wrap. I'm rewatching bits of TNG and Voyager at the moment, and in some ways I wonder what can be done, if anything, with the Star Trek franchise now - as some pro writer or other put it at some point, how far in the future can they go? Do things just get sleeker and tinier? But if this is all we've got, then for me, I'm happy. I mean, there are seven hundred extant episodes of Star Trek, I've watched most of them over the last ten years, and you know what? I'm a hippie drippy liberal, and I would like a better world. Yay, show.
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
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:
-How it deals with queer issues. It's the closest Star Trek ever comes to acknowledging queer people exist at all in the lovely utopian liberal future, and so I sort of expect better of it – but… no. It does have "Rejoined", where we do get a relationship between Dax and Lenara, and a proper same-sex kiss and everything. But… it's predicated on Dax having previously been a man, which rankles, and it ends badly, which rankles even more. And, well, why just one, and why so sad, whereas the future is supposed to be full of as many happy queer couples as there are straight ones.
And, Ezri and Worf having sex later in the show really rankles – in doing that, they break the same Trill taboo that Dax and Lenara do in this episode, but, surprise, surprise, because Worf's a man, somehow the same righteous indignation never features.
(And let's not even start with the queer couples in the mirror universe. Ezri Tigan likes women, but it's okay, because she's evil. Admittedly, the writing in "The Emperor's New Cloak" does highlight the stupidity of it all with Rom as the baffled audience mouthpiece, but still.)
-How it incorporates women. DS9 has one of the largest main casts of any science fiction show I can think of, and dozens of recurring characters on top – but of the main cast of eight, a mere two are women.
But as a moderate defence, I've watched seven seasons of the show and almost... didn't notice? I mean, yes, it's egregious, but as a rule DS9 is not bad at women. Neither Kira nor Dax (either of her) is a token - they are all fleshed out characters with thought-through arcs. And there are other women, too: Kasidy Yates, who smuggles supplies to the Maquis and is not sorry for it; Leeta, who could so easily be One-Shot Hot Girl, but then recurs over four seasons (and joins a union to piss Quark off!); Lwaxana Troi, who hands down is the best recurring character in Star Trek; Tora Ziyal, who blossoms despite years of slavery.
Another gripe, though before I go on: one of the most important women in the show, who for two seasons is its major antagonist, who recurs and recurs and recurs… doesn't have a name. She's referred to in the script, and in dialogue, as "the female changeling". And, okay, we do get the handwave in one episode that individual changelings don't have names – that Odo is unusual in that respect – but if she were another changeling who looked like Odo, I suspect she wouldn't have been referred to as "the male changeling". I'm just sayin'.
But, to return to that point. DS9 isn't bad with women at all. Nearly every episode passes the Bechdel test, and it's not all technobabble, either. Dax and Kira talk about, among other things: why Kira should not be a therapist, Captain Boday and his transparent skull; why holodeck kayaking is for suckers; why Kira's faith is important to her; why you're not supposed to hit Lancelot in the face when you're pretending to be Guinevere. Dax and Sidrella have a screaming row. Keiko and Kira talk about family. It doesn't happen as often as I'd like, but every time you think it's getting a bit manly, it passes the test with flying colours.
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.
And that's a wrap. I'm rewatching bits of TNG and Voyager at the moment, and in some ways I wonder what can be done, if anything, with the Star Trek franchise now - as some pro writer or other put it at some point, how far in the future can they go? Do things just get sleeker and tinier? But if this is all we've got, then for me, I'm happy. I mean, there are seven hundred extant episodes of Star Trek, I've watched most of them over the last ten years, and you know what? I'm a hippie drippy liberal, and I would like a better world. Yay, show.
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no subject
on 2010-05-27 05:42 am (UTC)I read my way through the DS9 Companion Guide when I was about thirteen, and a story told by the writer of Dax and Lenara's episode has always stuck with me. An irate parent complained to him about the same-sex kiss, saying that his child should not have to be exposed to "that kind of thing". The writer asked the father "If one of the women had instead pulled out a gun and shot the other woman, would you have complained?" "No." "Well then, I don't think we [the writers] are the ones with the problem."
no subject
on 2010-05-27 09:27 pm (UTC)That's a great story, though! Despite my gripes, I do like "Rejoined" as an episode - problematic it may be, but points for trying after all those years.