Back Through the Wormhole, Part VII: The Justice Trick

BENDER: Forget it, you can't tempt me.
ROBOT DEVIL: Really? There's nothing you want?
BENDER: Hm. I forgot you could tempt me with things I want.

Futurama, "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings"

If Deep Space Nine's character development has a theme, it is the loss of innocence, and of an idealized self-image. The characters who undergo this process most prominently over the course of the series are Sisko—who not only loses his iron grip on the difference between right and wrong in his efforts to win a brutal war, but also surrenders his objectivity and his detached rationalism in the face of the Bajorans’ faith—and Odo—who at the beginning of the series believes himself to possess an innate sense of justice, but discovers not only that his people have no true understanding of the word, but that his own grasp of it is rather tenuous. Bashir starts out the series a literal ingénue, whose delusions about the glory of war and the glamour of spy life are soon worn away by constant exposure to the real thing. Jadzia, O’Brien and Worf do not have explicit character arcs, but in episodes like "Blood Oath," "Hard Time," and "Change of Heart," respectively, each ends up betraying a cherished principle and discovering that they are not the person they thought they were or wish to be. Even Jake gets to face up to his inadequacies when he’s dropped into a battlefield in "Nor the Battle to the Strong."

The exception is Kira, who, in spite of her violent past and the show’s tendency to put her in situations that force her to choose between personal loyalty and the greater good, never compromises her principles. The argument could be made that Kira has an easier time with this task because her principles are less demanding—she isn’t governed by a strict set of rules like Odo, or devoted to the notion that violence is the very last resort like Sisko—but to my mind she actually has a much tougher job than either of them. As I wrote in the previous entry in this series, Kira has a fundamental understanding of right and wrong, but having rejected a rigid framework through which she can apply these abstract concepts to everyday life, she is forced to judge every case she encounters individually. The result is an attitude that is compassionate without being unreasonably forgiving.

At no point does Kira forget or excuse the crimes committed against her people. She doesn’t allow her rage at these crimes to govern her, but she won’t sweep them under the rug either, no matter how much she might wish she could. Though she loves Bareil, she prepares to give him up to Winn when she believes him to have collaborated with the Cardassians, and throughout her friendship and love affair with Odo, she is both supportive and clear-eyed, tethering him to the morality he claims to hold so dear while still being prepared to let him go—which she in fact does in "Chimera." Kira is far from perfect. Her politics are sometimes disturbingly reactionary, she is more violent than the rest of the cast, and her willingness to be ruled, in some of her most important life choices, by the will of the prophets can verge on the disturbing. Nevertheless, she is the most unambiguously good character in the cast.

"Nobody ever had to teach me the justice trick," Odo Mickey Spillanes in "Necessary Evil," which is one of the more egregious examples of his capacity for self-deception. Apart from being one of the best episodes in the series's run, "Necessary Evil" is a seminal point in Odo's character development and in the development of his and Kira's relationship precisely because it is in this episode that we see him first being taught the justice trick. And boy, is he a slow study. As the flashbacks to Odo's early career as Terok Nor's chief of security show us, he came to Dukat's attention by acting as an arbitrator for the Bajorans on the station, settling their petty disputes. When Odo is given charge of a murder investigation, he goes about it as if he were determining who stole whose blanket or how food should be parceled out. When Kira, in their very first meeting, insists that he is going to have to pick sides, Odo angrily denies this, and insists that he is a neutral party, a claim which he repeats throughout the episode, to Kira's increasing frustration.

What Kira is trying to show Odo is that addressing a single injustice within a system that is wholly rooted in injustice, and whose participants, apart from himself, don't care about right and wrong (as Odo later learns, Dukat has him investigate the murder in order to distance himself from a politically sticky situation) does not serve the interest of justice. He doesn't listen. "You were innocent of the crime I was investigating," he proudly tells her when she tries to thank him for saving her life by not handing her over to the Cardassians, and is later heartbroken to discover that she in fact committed it. Left unanswered--unasked, even--is the question of what Odo would have done had he discovered Kira's guilt at the time of the original investigation, and whether that might not have been a greater injustice. (To a certain extent, this issue is addressed by "Things Past," which acts as "Necessary Evil"'s mirror image by highlighting an instance in which Odo handed innocent Bajorans over to the Cardassians to be executed. It is, however, a less successful episode, and comes off as derivative, rather than expanding on the issues raised by the original story.)

By the end of the series, the perception of Odo as motivated by a desire for justice has been thoroughly exploded. Though he's a good man, it's clearly not a love of justice that drives him. In the third season opener, "The Search," the Founders inform Odo that what he perceives as a love of justice is in fact a desire for order. This is in keeping with Odo's behavior throughout the second second, during which he repeatedly complains about being forced to adhere to Starfleet's rules about due process and civil rights--rules which, according to him, prevent him from making Deep Space Nine safe. For the next three years, the Founders alternately torment Odo and try to tempt him back to the Great Link. Their entire discourse with him is based not on morality, but on their understanding of the things Odo wants--Kira, whom they insist he can't have, and the solace and companionship of the Great Link, which can only be his if he accepts their immoral behavior.

Odo, whose stripped-down existence has, up until that point, afforded him very little experience of desire, its gratification or its denial, discovers that while possessing an innate sense of justice with regards to the choices of others is quite easy--all it requires is compassion and common sense, both qualities he has an abundance of--it's a very different matter when it comes to denying his own urges. In the end, Odo says uncle. I don't think it's possible to overstate the magnitude of this failure. There are few exchanges in Deep Space Nine's run that have the power to chill my blood as effectively as Odo telling Kira that he no longer cares about Rom's impending execution, the freedom of Bajor, the survival of the Federation, or the future of the entire alpha quadrant in "Behind the Lines," that he has effectively traded everything he once held dear for the comfort of the Link. Odo turns his back on everything he believes in and everyone he loves, and it's the latter, not the former, that brings him back to his senses. He may not care about the larger injustices of the Founders' quest for galactic domination any more than he let himself care about the injustice of the Cardassian occupation, but a threat to Kira's life persuades him to leave the Great Link.

This choice is uncomfortably reminiscent of the one made by the future Odo in "Children of Time." That Odo sacrifices not only the lives but the very existence of 8,000 men, women, and children, as well as the existence of their ancestors, to save Kira's life. Though he is clearly ashamed of this act, present-day Odo also seems to approve of it, or at least to believe that future Odo's love for Kira justifies it. In hindsight, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Odo is only ever motivated by his feelings for Kira--in his choice to stay on Deep Space Nine after his first and disastrous meeting with the Founders, and even in his choice to let her go all the way back in "Necessary Evil." This is certainly the interpretation the Founders would have us believe, and one that Odo violently objects to--though he is clearly not the best judge of his own character. I have to wonder, however, whether being motivated by an attachment to Kira doesn't speak better of Odo than almost any of his other actions.

In general, Deep Space Nine doesn't go in for the redemptive power of love. Whether it's Quark blackmailing his Cardassian lover into staying with him in "Profit and Loss," or O'Brien nearly killing the Prophets to save Keiko's life in "The Assignment," or Worf turning his back on a mission to save Jadzia in "Change of Heart," or even Odo himself in "Children of Time", the show seems to be saying that love comes at the cost of ideals and our better impulses. When it comes to Odo and Kira, however, love is redemptive. It is through love that Odo finally learns the justice trick. In "Chimera," Odo encounters a fellow rogue changeling, who offers him the best of both world--someone he can link with without betraying his ideals. Laas, however, proves unsuited to life among solids, whom he views with disdain and pity for what he perceives as a limited, meaningless existence, and he is soon jailed for attacking one. When Kira, whom Laas has chided for holding Odo back from exploring his true nature, frees him and encourages Odo to leave Deep Space Nine with him and find his happiness, she finally makes him understand the kind of selflessness, the willingness to think of others and put them first, regardless of one's selfish desires, that is required of true moral behavior. Odo's decision to leave Kira and go back to the Founders only a few episodes later is not a betrayal of their love but an affirmation of it, and of the lessons it has taught him.

"Some of them are decent people," Odo tells the female Founder in "The Search" when she first lays out the reasons for the Founders' antipathy towards solids. Whether or not the writers intended for Odo to be thinking of Kira at that point (and she is remarkably decent and supportive throughout the entire story, which finds Odo on the verge of leaving Deep Space Nine in a huff and behaving, in general, like a whiny teenager), it is her decency that he brings to the Great Link when he gives her up for the greater good. Through his personal experiences with Kira, Odo hopes to teach the Founders the truth that he was unable to convince them of in their first meeting. At the end of his character arc, Odo substitutes an unsustainable belief in an ideal with a sustainable--and sustaining--belief in a person who embodies it. During the three seasons between his first meeting with the Founders and the occupation arc (at which point his pretense becomes pointless), Odo repeatedly insists to the Founders that he won't join them in the Great Link because he desires justice. They, in turn, reply that what he actually wants is Kira. Is it possible that, in very different languages, they are saying the same thing?

Back Through the Wormhole, Part VI: Ode to Kira

The breathtaking awesomeness of Kira Nerys, which has been recurring theme in these essays, became apparent to me only a few episodes into my journey back through Deep Space Nine. Almost as soon as I came to this realization, I started pondering a question: how is that this fantastic character, who is strong, capable, confident, and decent, doesn't have pride of place in the pantheon of kickass female characters in genre television? Why isn't her name mentioned in the same breath as Susan Ivanova and Dana Scully, Buffy Summers and Aeryn Sun? What I'd like to do in this essay is take a closer look at Kira, at the qualities that make her so awesome, and most particularly the ways in which she works as a female character. I'd also, however, like to look at the ways in which Deep Space Nine undermines Kira, and serves both her and the show's female fans ill.

Kira's most prominent quality is the fact that she's an imposing fighter. This is the woman who, with a knife wound in her gut, took out a Klingon warrior in "The Way of the Warrior," who held her own against a Cardassian fleet in "Emissary" (as well as coming up with the insane notion of moving the station to the mouth of the wormhole) and against a Romulan one in "Shadows and Symbols," outnumbered and outgunned in both cases. Whether she's fighting hand-to-hand, organizing guerrilla campaigns and resistance movements, commanding a starship, or overseeing the station's day-to-day operations, Kira Nerys is someone you want on your side, and wouldn't want to come up against. She's tenacious and strong-willed, whether she's fighting a bureaucracy in "Progress," interrogating a prisoner in "Duet," or fighting desperately to hold on to her identity in "Second Skin."

What I like best about Kira's strength is that it doesn't undermine her femininity or her ability to relate to others. She has a healthy social life, and over the course of the series she engages in several healthy, loving, sexual relationships. At no point is it suggested that the difficult experiences of her life have hardened her to the point where she can't experience intimacy, or that her lover needs to teach her to be vulnerable. Kira is damaged, but that damage doesn't render her incapable of functioning normally, nor is it used as a justification or apology for her toughness, though both originate in the same circumstances. Neither is Kira's rage--her default reaction when she's frustrated or confronted with injustice--treated as an illness or a symptom of dysfunction, any more than Sisko's similar tendency to go off the handle in the show's later seasons is. Kira simply runs hot, and though her anger can sometimes lead her to act recklessly, most of the time she doesn't allow it to control her.

Even more interesting to me than Kira's physical prowess and her strength as a leader is her emotional and moral strength. She is, I believe, the moral center of the series. She's the person who can always be counted on to speak the hard truths--when she tells Sisko not to go against the Propehts' warnings and marry Kasidy in "'Til Death Do Us Part," or when she urges Winn to step down as Kai for the sake of her soul in "Strange Bedfellows"--and who most fully understands the necessity of sacrifice and selflessness--when she sets Laas free and sends Odo to him "Chimera," or when she agrees to lay down her life so that the Defiant crew's descendants can live in "Children of Time."

One of Kira's greatest flaws is her tendency to assume a kneejerk us vs. them mentality, distrusting the Federation at the beginning of the series and the Cardassians throughout it, disdaining Bajorans who collaborated with the Cardassians so completely that she repudiates her own mother in "Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night," and even earning Odo's wrath in a throwaway episode like "Playing God" when she suggests that destroying a nascent universe in order to protect our own is justified because it's "like stepping on ants." Kira's moral grounding, however, is so sound that she's usually able to overcome this attitude. We see this most often when it comes to Cardassians. Though she never allows herself to forget the crimes they committed against her people, Kira is capable of sympathizing with individual Cardassians--the troubled clerk in "Duet," Legate Ghemor in "Second Skin" (whom she later tends to in his dying days in "Ties of Blood and Water"), Damar, Ziyal, and even Dukat on certain occasions. (It's particularly interesting to compare Kira's ability to judge Cardassians as individuals with O'Brien's inability to do so, in spite of the fact that his grievances against them pale besides hers.) Kira isn't a person for shades of grey--she has very clearly defined notions of right and wrong--but her capacity to overcome both her own prejudices and received morality allows to judge each case, person, and action on their own merits, which in turns makes her the most subtle and sophisticated judge of moral dilemmas on the show.

All of which is to say that I like Kira because she's an adult. It's all too often the case that female characters--even the strong, kickass ones--are portrayed as girlish or immature. Kira is a grown up--in her professional conduct, in her personal relationships, in her moral behavior. She's the person who makes the hard decisions and the big sacrifices because she won't allow herself the luxury of shirking them. There's a scene in "The Way of the Warrior" in which Dax is trying to teach Kira to relax in a holosuite program of a famous Trill spa. Kira, equal parts embarrassed and bemused, complains that the program is nothing but an illusion, and finally admits that she can't see the point of indulging in fantasies as Dax is trying to teach her to do because she doesn't have much of an imagination. On one level, this is sad--Kira's imagination is underdeveloped because she's lived the kind of life that very quickly does away with one's inner child, and the matter-of-fact, practical mindset that that imaginativeness results in is not very appealing to the more fanciful geeky mentality of Deep Space Nine's fans--but it is precisely the absence of almost any kind of childishness that I find so appealing about Kira.

Unfortunately, though Deep Space Nine's writers did an excellent job of creating Kira, they more or less failed when it came to giving her interesting things to do and developing her character. As I've already written, the best episodes of the first season focus on Kira, and on her coming to trust the Federation and see herself as someone in power rather than someone fighting power. From the second season onwards, however, Kira stagnated--she was a fantastic person, and the show never stopped showing us that or giving her opportunities to be fantastic, but she would never again get a chance to grow or change, and not until the sixth season resistance storyline would she get to headline a plot arc again. Also, though Kira continued to be the focus of individual episodes, their thrust changed in the second season. Bajoran episodes, I've already noted, were handed over to Sisko in the show's second season, and when Kira got a chance to deal with the political situation on her planet, it was usually through a personal connection.

"The Collaborator," for instance, is an excellent episode, and Kira is both smart and principled in it, but she becomes involved in the investigation of Winn's allegations against Bareil not because she's a high-ranking Bajoran officer and an important player in her planet's political matrix, but because she's in love with Bareil. The third season episode "Shakaar" might almost be a retread of the first season's "Progress"--Kira is asked to persuade belligerent Bajoran farmers to sacrifice their own interests for the greater good of Bajor. In "Progress," however, the man Kira had to evacuate was a stranger. She was sent to him because of her professional position. In "Shakaar," she's chosen because she has a personal relationship with the title character, who was the leader of her resistance cell. The episode even states that Kira's distrust of Winn is primarily rooted in her resentment of Winn's part in Bareil's death, not her intimate knowledge of Winn's moral failings. The "Shakaar" patterns persists in almost all of the Kira-centered episodes after the first season. In "Defiant," Tom Riker manipulates her into helping him hijack the ship by striking up a flirtation with her; in "Ties of Blood and Water," Legate Ghemor offers to impart his secrets to Kira before his death because he thinks of her as a daughter; in "Covenant," Kira gets a glimpse of the Pagh-Wraith cult because Dukat wants her to like him.

(There's also an unfortunate to undertone "Shakaar," in which Kira allows herself to stop grieving for Bareil, when one watches it with the knowledge that she and Shakaar will later become lovers. It's almost as though she's being handed from one to the other. In fact, though I've said that Kira's romantic relationships are healthy, they are also, with the exception of her affair with Bareil, told from the man's point of view. Shakaar exists solely to spark Odo's jealousy--his and Kira's relationship is only ever viewed from the outside--and her relationship with Odo is related almost exclusively from his perspective.)

And then there's the pregnancy. For the life of me, I can't understand why this storyline didn't appall me the first time I watched the series. I don't mind the original concept--it's a rather neat way of getting around Nana Visitor's real-life pregnancy without saddling the character with a child, and it makes sense to me that Kira, under those circumstances, would consent to carry the O'Briens' child--but almost from the minute the pregnancy is introduced Kira is infantilized. She doesn't just lend the O'Briens the use of her uterus for a few months--she lets them take over her life. A grown, independent woman, she allows herself to become a lodger in their home, a junior member of their family. It's possible to argue that Kira gets something out of this arrangement as well--a family--but her increased closeness with the O'Briens during her pregnancy doesn't translate into a long-term relationship after Kiroyoshi is born.

Just in case Kira's willingness to become Aunt Nerys wasn't creepy enough, we have "Looking for Par'Mach in All the Wrong Places," and the downright scary revelations it makes about Kira's arrangement with the O'Briens. Why in the name of all that is good and holy is O'Brien handling Kira's pre-natal care at the beginning of the episode? Why is Julian handing him medication and instructing him in Kira's care? Is she incapable of seeing a doctor and managing her health? And what about the complete breakdown of personal boundaries that is O'Brien helping Kira out of baths and giving her intimate massages? I realize the point of this hellish plotline is that O'Brien and Kira's enforced closeness gives rise to romantic feelings, which at least means that the episode isn't trying to argue that a pregnant woman is not a sexual being, but that closeness happens because O'Brien assumes that Kira's being pregnant with his child gives him the right to think of her body in a proprietary, albeit initially asexual, way, and to take liberties with it, and Kira accepting that he has those rights. Say it with me: ewwwwwwwww.

Just about the only thing that salvages the pregnancy arc is its penultimate episode, "The Darkness and the Light." I've already spoken about this episode as a vehicle for Deep Space Nine's sophisticated political writing, but it's also a fantastic Kira episode, hearkening back to the deep core badassery of first season Kira. For the first time in what seems like forever, Kira is mad. That anger drives her to violence and irrationality--when she tries to open the door to the O'Briens' decompressed quarters and very nearly vents the atmosphere in the entire corridor, when she attacks a security officer who tries to stop her from doing so, and most especially when she takes off on her own, huge pregnant belly before her, to track down the man who's been killing her friends. This last one is not a very smart thing to do, but "Between the Darkness and the Light" acknowledges that it's something Kira has to do, or else risk losing who she is--just as she has to resist the Dominion occupation in "Rocks and Shoals" if she hopes to hold onto her soul.

As I've already said, "The Darkness and the Light" dares to paint Kira in an unflattering light by presenting us with the ugly consequences of her actions during the occupation and her complete lack of remorse for them, but it also challenges us by breaking a sacred taboo--that a pregnant woman is never allowed to put her unborn child in danger by engaging in risky activity. There isn't even any justification for Kira's decision to go after her tormentor--by the time she does, Odo is already closing in on him--but it's something she has to do, and the episode makes no apologies for it. "The Darkness and the Light" also plays around with the familiar plot of a female character pursued by a serial killer. Like those characters, Kira's decision to go after the killer herself lands her in trouble, but she gets out of it by herself (or rather with the baby's help--the killer keeps her alive because he doesn't want to kill the innocent baby, and the anesthetic he gives her is ineffective because of a pre-natal medication she's on, which allows Kira to overpower him). All Sisko, Odo and Bashir can do when they find her is give her a ride home.

Deep Space Nine's ending finds Kira bereft and alone. All of her adoptive families have left her--Bareil, Ziyal, Jadzia and Ghemor are dead; Shakaar, Odo, and a significant portion of the station's command crew have left. There is, however, no doubt in our mind that Kira can survive and even thrive. The last shot of the series pulls away from Kira and Jake, gazing out of one of the station's windows at the wormhole that has carried away both of their loved ones, but also together and willing to continue with their lives and the tasks ahead of them. It's a testament to Kira's strength that she can survive the ordeals she goes through over the course of Deep Space Nine's seven seasons. Just as it is a testament to the strength of the character that it can survive the alternating bouts of neglect and character assassination inflicted on it by the show's writers, and still emerge from them a remarkable, admirable creation.

Back Through the Wormhole, Part V: What Does God Need With a Space Station?

No one who watched Deep Space Nine's pilot episode, "Emissary," would have had any reason to expect a subtle, multi-faceted treatment of religion from the series. Though by no means disrespectful or dismissive of religion, "Emissary" treats it in a manner familiar from many other genre stories--the SFnal trope of alien (or human) gods who turn out to be aliens themselves, the fantasy standard of a prophecy fulfilled by our heroes (a prophecy whose existence, as Sisko patiently explains to Jake in "In the Hands of the Prophets," makes perfect SFnal sense given the Prophets' non-linear nature). The Celestial Temple is important not for its spiritual significance to the Bajorans but as a conduit for traffic and commerce. For a while, that was all Deep Space Nine's treatment of religion amounted to. When an extremist resistance fighter proposes to destroy the wormhole in order to prevent alien races from interfering with Bajor in "Past Prologue," an early first season episode, Kira is appalled not for religious reasons because he's about to destroy Bajor's greatest resource. In contrast, when Sisko proposes to destroy the entrance to the wormhole in the fifth season episode "By Inferno's Light," in order to prevent the Dominion from bringing troops into the alpha quadrant, Kira quietly prays for the Prophets' forgiveness. By that point, Deep Space Nine had cemented its position in that tiny group of intelligent, thought-provoking treatments of religion in popular fiction, alongside such works as Russell T. Davies's The Second Coming, Myla Goldberg's Bee Season, and Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God."

From the moment they started taking a serious look at religion--in the first season finale, "In the Hands of the Prophets"--Deep Space Nine's writers never lost sight of a simple truth. Religion is about people. Even if you live next door to heaven. Even if your boss is God's instrument on earth. Religion is about people, and people shape their gods just as much, or even more, than those Gods shape them. Terry Pratchett makes much of this theme in the Discworld novels, most particularly Small Gods. His gods are opportunistic beings, something along the lines of parasites, who feed off belief, and whose personality is shaped and changed by the wishes and desires of their believers. Neil Gaiman does something similar in American Gods and Anansi Boys, albeit with existing earth myths. In both cases, divinity is brought down to a human level--in order to serve Pratchett's humanistic message, or because Gaiman sublimates it to his obsession with storytelling. Deep Space Nine, however, manages to discuss the reciprocal relationship between gods and their believers without making those gods any less numinous or incomprehensible.

It does so at least in part by making those gods numinous and incomprehensible to begin with. I've already said that Deep Space Nine was, visually, a conservative and unimaginative series, but that doesn't hold for orb experiences or encounters with the Prophets. The devices used to signal the Prophets' otherness--using castmembers to portray the Prophets, the golden haze that characterizes encounters with them--are simple, but they stand out powerfully against the straightforwardness of the show's day-to-day storytelling. The effectiveness of the Prophet interludes is even more impressive when one considers what an unimaginative hash Deep Space Nine generally made of symbolic, surreal storytelling--Quark's guilt-stricken dream in "Business as Usual," or the use of a physical space to represent a person's damaged mind in "Distant Voices" and "Extreme Measures."

As I've said, Deep Space Nine starts taking Bajoran spirituality seriously in the first season finale, "In the Hands of the Prophets." Though well-made and featuring some fine performances, it isn't yet the intelligent treatment of religion we would come to expect from the series. Its premise is a straightforward evolution vs. creationism story--Vedek Winn, looking to score political points, attacks Keiko for teaching that the wormhole is a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than the seat of Bajor's gods--mixed in with Bajor's political storyline, as Winn uses the resulting unrest to lure Bareil, her main rival for the position of Kai, onto the station, where he is vulnerable to an assassination attempt. The political-cum-thriller storyline soon overwhelms the religious question at the story's core, which is actually more tangled than the Inherit the Wind comparison initially suggests--there isn't actually an inherent contradiction between the scientific and religious views of the wormhole as there is between evolution and creationism, and the question is really whether it's right to demand that Keiko supplement her science class with religious instruction--and not very deftly handled.

The episode sets Winn, a power-hungry zealot, against Bareil, a humanistic progressive. In his first meeting with Sisko, Bareil sets himself apart from Winn, and Kai Opaka before her, by calling him Commander instead of Emissary and refraining from testing his pagh. These, as well as his opposition to Winn's condemnation of the school, are clearly intended as indicators that Bareil is the kind of modern, forward-thinking leader Bajor needs. They also, however, portray him as being less pious than his fellow Bajorans, an impression that is only strengthened the more we get to know him. Bareil hardly ever mentions the Prophets, and it's only in his last appearance as himself, the third season episode "Life Support," that he speaks of them with anything approaching the kind of reverence that is a matter of course from Kira or even Winn. The issues that plague Bareil are rarely spiritual--he is concerned for Bajor's survival, and worries about the threats to it from within and without; he tries to preserve Kai Opaka's memory by concealing her collaboration with the Cardassians; he negotiates a peace treaty with Cardassia. He's a politician, a good and decent man and an outstanding public servant, but not, as far as we can tell, a man of faith. What "In the Hands of the Prophets" seems to be saying is that it's not one's faith that matters but rather the ways in which it is used to express one's policies and politics. Which isn't necessarily a sentiment I disagree with, but it does leave spirituality out of the equation. The reason that Deep Space Nine's later religious stories are so much stronger than "In the Hands of the Prophets" is that they managed to describe the myriad and often contradictory ways in which Bajorans express their faith and view their religion without doing away with that religion's foundation--the provable existence of God.

For all my problems with Bareil, I do love his interactions with Winn, especially this one from "The Collaborator":

WINN: (to a crowd of Bajoran children) Remember now, honor the Prophets, and they will always love you.
BAREIL: As I understand the sacred texts, the Prophets' love is unconditional. They ask for nothing in return.
WINN: Thank you, Vedek Bareil, for reminding us how the sacred texts can be easily misinterpreted.

Which, right there, in what is only her fourth appearance in the series (and her second of note, as she's not much more than a stock villain in the the three-parter that opens the second season), tells us everything we need to know about Winn and why she ends up burnt to a crisp in the Bajoran fire caves. It also expresses one of the most important themes in Deep Space Nine's religious storylines, which is also an important theme in religious fiction in general: people get the gods they look for. Winn wants to believe in gods who are wrathful and vindictive, who withhold their love from those who fail to honor them properly, because that's the kind of god she'd be, and the kind of ruler she tries to be. In "The Reckoning," she is beside herself when Sisko removes and later destroys a tablet from the holy city of B'hala. She blames him for floods and earthquakes that plague Bajor after the tablet's removal, calling them punishments for Sisko's act of sacrilege. That's the kind of religious thinker Winn is--she believes in sacrilege, in cruel and disproportionate divine retribution.

We can all think of examples of people whose own cruelty is mirrored in the god they fashion for themselves, but they are fortunate enough to be working with a more or less blank slate. Winn has the misfortune of living in a time when her gods are highly accessible to her, and their attitudes easily discernible. What a disappointment the benevolent, remote Prophets must be to Winn. Is it any wonder she turns to the Pagh-Wraiths, divinities more to her taste? But of course, even the Pagh-Wraiths reject Winn, because she approaches them with the same pride and self-importance with which she approached the Prophets. In "The Reckoning," Winn pleads with the Prophet possessing Kira to speak to her, but it doesn't even acknowledge her presence. Her injured pride is what persuades her to stop the contest between the Prophet and the Pagh-Wraith, which might have prevented much of the evil that later befalls Bajor. Watching this scene in hindsight, one is almost angry with the Prophets--would it have killed them to say hello?--but how could they have reached Winn when her heart is so obviously closed to them, too full of her own importance, lust for power, and bruised ego to accommodate anyone or anything else?

Opposing Winn's prideful mockery of faith is not Sisko--who never really comes to believe in the Prophets so much as he accepts that they have the right to direct the course of his life--but Kira, whose humility and devotion make her worthy to carry a Prophet within her. Kira is, in some ways, the character Bareil should have been, and the portrait of the kind of deeply spiritual person who truly is an advertisement for their religion. She is humble not only towards her gods but in her outward representations of her relationship with them. She never wears her piety on her sleeve, or takes her religious devotions for granted--there's a childlike wonder and a peacefulness that come over Kira when she's discussing her religion or taking part in religious worship. It never ceases to affect her, to touch something deep inside her, because she is always open to her gods. Her faith is at the root of Kira's righteousness, and it informs her moral compass, but she never seeks to impose it on others--only the moral lessons it teaches her, and she is fearless in expressing those. It's Kira who lambastes Winn for stopping the battle in "The Reckoning," correctly deducing that Winn did so because she couldn't stand to have her faith even further belittled by the comparison to Sisko's, and it's Kira who tells Winn the hard truth in "Strange Bedfellows"--that she can earn the Prophets' forgiveness only by changing who she is, and by rejecting the ambition that led her to her spiritual crisis (she makes a similar offer to the mirror Bareil in "Resurrection"). Though she's eager to help Winn find her way back to the Prophets, Kira can also see that her advice has been rejected, and rejects Winn in turn.

What's especially enjoyable about Deep Space Nine's portrayal of Kira as a person of faith is that it doesn't downplay the more disturbing aspects of that faith, and of religious faith in general. What starts with relatively benign pronouncements about the ineffability of religious faith--not just from Kira, but from Worf, who in spite of the Klingon belief that their gods became too much trouble and were eventually killed, respects the fact of Kira's faith and the strength it gives her--quickly becomes indistinguishable from insanity. It's all very well and good that Kira is honored to have been chosen as the Prophets' instrument in "The Reckoning," but what that honor amounts to is her complete abnegation and exploitation, however willingly submitted to, and it might easily have resulted in her death. In "Accession," a Bajoran from 200 years in the past, Akorem, emerges from the wormhole and lays claim to the title of Emissary. He promptly reinstates a restrictive caste system that was in effect in his era, which among other things forces Kira to resign her commission and become an artist. (It is eventually revealed that the Prophets brought this man through the wormhole to light a fire under Sisko and get him over his ambivalence about his role as emissary, which neatly expresses one of my favorite religious themes, succinctly summed up by Paul Thomas Anderson in his film Magnolia as "When the sunshine don't work, the good Lord bring the rain in.") There's something very sad about Kira's, and the other Bajorans', desperate attempts to remake themselves in the image Akorem sets out for them. "We would've tried to do whatever you asked of us when you were Emissary, no matter how difficult it seemed," Kira tells a bewildered Sisko by way of an explanation for what appears, from the outside, like communal insanity, and may very well be. Then, of course, there are the obvious parallels drawn between the Bajorans' faith in the Prophets and the Vorta's faith in the Founders--a comparison which Kira herself makes in "Treachery, Faith, and the Great River," when speaking of the rogue Weyoun's devotion towards Odo.

A religious story set in a universe in which God's existence is in question can only describe two scenarios--good people worshipping a good god, and bad people worshipping that god. Because it made its gods into actual characters, Deep Space Nine was free to add bad gods into the mix, and much like the Prophets' followers, those who worship the Pagh-Wraiths are neither uniformly good nor evil. In the seventh season episode "Covenant" we get a close look at a community of Wraith-worshippers, and the plain truth is that apart from the fact that these people are being duped--first by Dukat and secondly by the Pagh-Wraiths--there's really nothing wrong with them morally. One can even sympathize with their argument for rejecting the Prophets--that throughout the occupation the Prophets did nothing to aid Bajor though they clearly had the power to do so, and that the Pagh-Wraiths are willing to actively intervene in Bajor's affairs (which is true, though that interference would have involved mass murder--which is my chance to say that one of the most important flaws in Deep Space Nine's treatment of the Prophets' struggle with the Pagh-Wraiths is that it never really explained why the Pagh-Wraiths were so hell-bent on destruction). The result is a somewhat dizzying story. The Wraith-worshippers' faith is as pure as Kira's--her friend Vedek Fala even kills himself for it--but they're worshipping the wrong god. You could go back and forth forever about whether that fact invalidates their faith.

"Covenant" is the fullest expression of the tension that permeates most of Deep Space Nine's religious storytelling--the awareness that no matter how permissive, how progressive, how respectful of other beliefs one's own beliefs are, ultimately they boil down to something irrational. It's the antithesis of "In the Hands of the Prophets," which deals only with the temporal expression of religious beliefs and argues that it's only that expression that matters. At the beginning of "Covenant," Kira is sitting with Bashir, Ezri, and a disgruntled Odo, who wishes he believed in the Prophets so he could attend services with her. Ezri takes this as an invitation to pitch Odo on some other religions, and asks Kira if it would bother her if she and Odo had different faiths. "Not as long as he gets something out of it," Kira says, which is one extremely comforting way of looking at it--religion as an emotional crutch, something to help you get through the day, regardless of whether the god you believe in exists or is anything like what you imagine them to be. Towards the end of the episode, a furious Kira is the prisoner of the Pagh-Wraith cult, and is faced with the inadequacy of her previous nonchalance. Here are decent, moral people, who obviously get something out of their faith. "You believe the Prophets are the true gods of Bajor, I believe the Pagh-Wraiths are. Let's just leave it at that," Vedek Fala tells her, and Kira, to her and to Deep Space Nine's credit, says the one thing that popular depictions of religion hardly ever say: "I'd be happy to. There's just one thing: we can't both be right."

Back Through the Wormhole, Part IV: Looking for Ron Moore in All the Wrong Places

It's impossible to come back to Deep Space Nine in 2007 and not be on the lookout for Ronald D. Moore, for his influence on the series and its influence on his later work. Deep Space Nine is where Moore made his bones, rising from staff writer to executive producer. It is also, of all the series he's been involved with, the one closest in topic, tone, and theme to Battlestar Galactica. Just in case there are some of you who have never visited this blog before, I consider Galactica to be one of the most frustrating, because initially so promising, failures in the television landscape of the last decade. Searching for Moore's name in Deep Space Nine's credits is therefore an education--a reminder that he was once capable of extremely good writing, as well as an opportunity to ponder the reasons for Deep Space Nine's success in many of the same arenas in which Galactica would later fail.

Because of the collaborative nature of television writing rooms, as well as the fact that most of Deep Space Nine's episodes had two writing credits, and often more, it's difficult to pinpoint aspects of the series that are purely of Moore's invention. There are, however, exceptions. The more overt militarization of Starfleet--the introduction of Starfleet marines in "Nor the Battle to the Strong," the morale-building ceremony of displaying the Defiant's spent phaser fuel cells in "Behind the Lines," the stream of war-movie clichés in "The Siege of AR-558"--almost certainly originated with him. It's an approach that doesn't sit too well with Deep Space Nine or Star Trek in general. There are thirty years of backstory, all telling us that Starfleet is a peaceful, exploratory and peacekeeping force, to contend with, and it's a little late in the game to posit the existence of jarheads in Starfleet uniforms. Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, took this approach to its logical conclusion by positing a genuine military in space, all but identical to the real (American) one Moore trained for. By the same token, the total absence of SFnal explanations for even the most important and puzzling of Galactica's technological puzzles, such as the nature of the human-form Cylons, is almost certainly a response to Star Trek's over-reliance on technobabble.

And then there are episodes in Deep Space Nine's run whose themes so closely resemble Battlestar Galactica's that they beg a comparison. At the top of the list is "The Darkness and the Light," in which members of Kira's resistance group are killed off one by one by a Cardassian maimed in one of their attacks. It's not a great episode--it is unfortunately undone the moment the villain makes his appearance and turns out to be a third-rate Buffalo Bill clone--but it does have some great moments. It's a fantastic Kira episode (and we'll be discussing it some more when we talk about her), as well as being the first time in nearly a season that her and Odo's friendship feels like just that, and not unrequited love on his part and obliviousness on hers. Most importantly, "The Darkness and the Light" faces head on the ugly truth of what Kira did during the occupation, and her attitude towards those actions. When she's captured by the killer, and confronted with the fact that the attack that maimed him, a non-combatant, also killed the entire family of the Cardassian official she was aiming for, a furious Kira can only spit out

None of you should've been on Bajor! It wasn't your world. For fifty years you raped our planet and killed our people. You lived on our land and took the food from our mouths, so I don't care if you held a phaser in your hand or ironed shirts for a living. You were all guilty and you were all legitimate targets!

You watch an episode like this and you just have to ask yourself--where did that courage go? How is it that when he got the chance to tell his own story, on a show so much less interested in comforting and reassuring its audience, Moore followed up "The Darkness and the Light" with "Occupation"/"Precipice"? There isn't a single minute of Galactica's third season premiere that comes close to the searing honesty of Kira's tirade. At best, we have Tigh's rant when Roslin questions his methods

You see, little things like that, they don't matter anymore. In fact, not too frakking much really matters anymore. I've got one job here, lady, and one job only. To disrupt the Cylons. Make them worry about the anthill they've stirred up down here so they're distracted and out of position when the old man shows up in orbit. The bombings, they got the Cylons' attention. They really got their attention, and I am not giving that up. ... You know, sometimes I think that you've got ice water in those veins, and other times I think you're just a naive little schoolteacher. I've sent men on suicide missions in two wars now, and let me tell you something. It don't make a Godsdamn bit of difference whether they're riding in a Viper or walking out onto a parade ground, in the end they're just as dead. So take your piety and your moralizing and your high-minded principles and stick 'em someplace safe until you're off this rock and you're sitting in your nice cushy chair on Colonial One again. I've got a war to fight.

But all it does is offer excuses and make Tigh look deranged. In fact, that's all "Occupation"/"Precipice" does, and all it's interested in--that moment when we realize the people we're rooting for are No Better Than the Enemy. It's trying to alienate us from the show's main characters. "The Darkness and the Light" does something much harder and much more subtle. It takes a character we love and admire, not least because of her staunchly moral character, and has her express abhorrent opinions. And it does so in such a way that, at its end, we still love and admire the character, and are still abhorred by her opinions. Instead of alienating us, it draws us in. Instead of searching for that moment of disorientation when the moral high ground is snatched out from under us, it focuses on the hours, days, weeks, months and years we're going to spend trying to reconcile two irreconcilable notions. It's almost impossible to believe that the same person is responsible for both stories. (Of course, it's possible that Bryan Fuller, currently of Pushing Daisies fame and credited for the story on "The Darkness and the Light," has something to do with it.)

All that said, there is one crucial difference between "Occupation"/"Precipice" and "The Darkness and the Light" that may explain the former's failure and latter's qualified success. On Deep Space Nine, unlike Battlestar Galactica, the enemy can be killed, and using terrorist tactics against them actually makes sense. Which brings me, once again, to what I believe is Deep Space Nine's greatest strength--the integrity and complexity of its invented world, and the fidelity that almost all of its stories keep with it. If terrorist tactics hadn't made sense as a tool for Bajorans to use against the Cardassians, I don't believe Deep Space Nine's writers would have used them.

Because the show always prioritized its internal universe over real-world parallels, it's impossible to pin Deep Space Nine down to a single interpretation. "The Darkness and the Light" is almost certainly recalling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but in "Duet," the occupation is likened to the Holocaust, with Kira's interrogation of a suspected war criminal recalling similar interrogations of former Nazis in the 50s and 60s. In "Past Prologue," meanwhile, the strained relationship between extreme and less-extreme resistance groups recalls the situation in Northern Ireland. From the Cardassian point of view, the occupation of Bajor has parallels with the American presence in Vietnam, especially when it comes to Ziyal's difficult situation as a mixed-race child. On the other hand, Cardassian attitudes toward the Bajoran's have the hint of colonialism about them, and most particularly of Apartheid, and I think there's an argument to be made that Dukat's fraught relationship with the Bajorans is reminiscent of the slave-owner, who hates his slaves because he sees hatred in their eyes and knows that he deserves it, and punishes them for his depravity. The Vedek who kills herself in "Rocks and Shoals" to protest the Dominion's occupation of Bajor is probably a reference to the self-immolating monks in Tibet, and the notion of 'comfort women' for the Cardassian occupiers, which is introduced in "Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night," as well as the Bajorans' disdain for them, is probably derived from similar attitudes during Nazi occupation of European countries, and in fact that entire episode has undertones of Vichy France. And then there are episodes, like "Cardassians," which tell stories that could never have occurred have on Earth, but are entirely organic to the show's setting.

The result of Deep Space Nine's broad spectrum of political references is not merely to strengthen the show's fictional setting, but to render it universal and extend its relevance, so that a show written in the early to mid-nineties still has something important to say about the present-day political landscape, in spite of the upheavals it has undergone over the last decade. In fact, in some cases, Deep Space Nine is even prescient. "The issue is not if there are Founders on Cardassia," Worf darkly pronounces when Gowron uses that excuse as a justification for declaring war in "The Way of the Warrior," and then goes on to explain that the Klingon empire is simply eager for conquest. Is it truly possible that this episode was written in 1995? Well, of course it is, because 9/11 isn't the root cause of the current political climate, nor did it erase everything that came before it. The questions that plague us today--how to balance security with a respect for human rights, how to protect ourselves against a virtually unstoppable form of warfare without losing our civil liberties, how to respect other cultures without losing sight of the values central to ours--were just as prevalent, in slightly different forms, ten and fifteen years ago. That's easier to notice on Deep Space Nine, which never ripped its storylines from newspaper headlines.

In a comment to one of the previous posts in this series, it was suggested that the reason Ron Moore did better work on Deep Space Nine than he's been doing on Battlestar Galactica is that in the earlier show he had someone to hold him back, and most especially, that he needed the underlying niceness of Star Trek to counteract his tendency to wallow in darkness and grimness. Looking back on some of my criticisms of Battlestar Galactica over the last few years, it occurs to me that I've frequently taken the show to task not for being too dark but for not being dark enough--for suggesting darkness, such as when Adama almost assassinates Cain or the humans almost unleash a plague on the Cylons, and then backing down from it. One of most shocking realizations during my trip back to Deep Space Nine was that, judging the two shows on the basis of actions taken in the political sphere, not whether the main characters screw around or drink too much, Deep Space Nine is by far the darker series. Sisko actually does countenance the assassination of a foreign head of state. The Federation, or a body acting on its behalf and whose actions it retroactively validates, does infect an alien race (who are not, as far as we know, bent on destroying humanity) with a potentially genocidal virus. The terrorist attacks Kira and other resistance members carry out do kill and maim innocents and non-combatants, none of whom can download into a new body, and including, almost certainly, children. Deep Space Nine isn't as unremittingly grim as Battlestar Galactica, and its greatest flaw was its failure to posit long-term consequence for the events of episodes like "In the Pale Moonlight" or "Hard Time" (not that Galactica has been that great about exploring the consequences of its standalone episodes), but ultimately it is the braver show, perhaps because it had the strong foundations of the Star Trek franchise to stand on.

And there, I think, is the secret of Deep Space Nine's success as political fiction. It borrows and steals elements of political disputes from all over the world and most of the last century, but ultimately the stories it tells are universal. It references the real world, but remains rooted in its own universe. It tells stories in which the main characters do terrible things, but never seeks to undermine the core morality of its setting. Balance. I've said already that Deep Space Nine succeeded because it was conventional and, in some ways, hidebound, because it never sought to burn brightly and transcendently. Nowhere is this truth more evident than in its political writing.

Back Through the Wormhole, Part III: The Menagerie

A work of fiction passes Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For test if it features two women having a conversation about something other than a man. Deep Space Nine passes the Bechdel test, but not before it passes, several times over, its SFnal corollary by featuring two aliens having a conversation about something other than a human, the Federation, or Starfleet.

Deep Space Nine, as I've already said, has a main and recurring cast list in the high thirties (and that's not even counting important but low yield characters such as Dr. Mora or Sloan). Other series have featured cast lists as large and even larger (the potential Slayers alone put Buffy's at close to 50), but unlike Farscape, Buffy, or Angel, Deep Space Nine didn't cluster its characters around a single person or group. Instead, it allowed them to form overlapping hubs. Sisko and Kira, for example, felt great respect and affection for one another, but they were never good friends, and they tended to spend their off-time with different groups of people. And unlike on the Federation starships of the original Star Trek and The Next Generation, on Deep Space Nine humans were not the majority, and the social groups the characters formed were often made up entirely of aliens (though groups comprised entirely of non-Starfleet characters were rarer)--and often of the same kind of alien. Ziyal's closest relationships in her brief time on the station are with the two people who share her biological heritage, Kira and Garak, and in the latter case she deliberately seeks out someone with whom she has a shared culture, which they can discuss. One of Deep Space Nine's greatest strengths was that there was a culture for Ziyal and Garak to discuss, as there were for Klingon, Ferengi, and Bajoran characters. Over the course of the series these races grew from one-word definitions--aggressive Klingons, proud Cardassians, greedy Ferengi, spiritual Bajorans--to complex, multi-faceted cultures, and the show frequently traveled away from the station to places dominated by these cultures--the bridge of a bird of prey, or the rain-soaked cities of Ferenginar.

Of the four dominant races in the series, it's the Klingons who seem best-suited to this kind of in-depth exploration and development. Not only do they originate in the first Star Trek, but The Next Generation was never as Deep Space Nine-ish as when it told stories about their culture--stories which dealt with political maneuvering, courtly intrigue, and king-making on both Picard and Worf's parts. Even before "The Way of the Warrior," Deep Space Nine told a Klingon story in the second season episode "Blood Oath," in which Jadzia has to decide whether to fulfill Curzon's oath to the three legendary Klingon generals, Kang, Koloth, and Kor, to avenge the murder of their sons.

"Blood Oath" has potential--Michael Ansara, William Campbell, and John Colicos ham it up magnificently as the three Klingons--but it is ultimately unsatisfying. Terry Farrell doesn't have what it takes to carry the episode (though she gets better at playing the honorary Klingon in later seasons), and, in an episode whose purpose is to explore the potentially soul-destroying effect of violence, the sanitized, bloodless fight scenes are a fatal flaw. "Blood Oath" does, however, presage some of Deep Space Nine's core issues when engaging with alien cultures. As most Klingon episodes will do, "Blood Oath" immerses us in Klingon culture, with Dax sublimating herself to Curzon's affinity for it, his sense of obligation to the three generals, and mostly, their system of values, which demands and glorifies revenge. Sisko and Kira can only watch from the sidelines, uncomprehending--Sisko even says he never understood why Curzon too the oath in the first place--and hope that the real Dax will return to them.

Then Worf shows up, and it's off to the races. Fourth season and early fifth season Klingon-themed episodes explored Klingon culture through Worf's ambivalent attitude towards it. As Jadzia says in "Let He Who Is Without Sin" (cursed be its name and memory), Worf is one of the least typical Klingons we ever meet. He's reserved, controlled, standoffish in a way that clearly indicates unease in social situations. He has none of the thoughtless boisterousness that characterizes so many Klingons, and though he revels in battle, both hand-to-hand and as a spaceship commander, he doesn't lust for it (or at least, he tries not to show that he does).

Most of Deep Space Nine's early Worf-centered stories showed him reacting to Klingon culture with equal parts fascination and disgust. In "The Sons of Mogh," he initially agrees to kill his brother in order to restore Kurn's honor, but when his first attempt is forestalled he refuses to make another one, having come to view the act as murder. In "The Sword of Kahless," his enchantment with Kor soon sours into disgust as he glimpses the less savory aspects of Kor's quintessential Klingon-ness. His decision to claim the sword for himself is clearly a last-ditch attempt by a rejected outsider to force his society to accept him--if necessary, by remaking it in his image. On the other hand, in "Rules of Engagement" the Klingon advocate argues that Worf's own Klingon-ness runs too deep to be worn away by a life in the Federation, and that it was that Klingon lust for combat that made him fire on an unarmed transport before he knew what it was. The Worf episodes express the show's own ambivalence towards Klingon culture. Are Klingons honorable warriors or bloodthirsty killers? Is their obsession with honor laudable or a fetish? Is their exuberant, larger-than-life existence an expression of joy or mere boorishness?

In the fifth season, this ambivalence fades away. First with the premiere episode "Apocalypse Rising," which sees a rare (for that time) trip so far away from the station and sets us right in the middle of a Klingon bacchanalia. Later on with the introduction of Martok as a prominent character, and finally with "Soldiers of the Empire," which is clearly the point at which the writers threw up their hands and went, screw it, Klingons are cool. Though later episodes poke at the uglier aspects of Klingon society--Martok's wife doesn't want to admit Jadzia, an alien, into her house (and when Worf calls her a bigot, Martok breezily responds that "We're Klingons, Worf. We don't embrace other cultures. We conquer them."); in "Once More Unto the Breach" we learn that Klingon society is rife with class prejudice; and, of course, there's Ezri's stinging conclusion in "Tacking Into the Wind" that the Klingon empire is being destroyed from within by corruption and political games. Ultimately, however, the show is on the Klingons' side, as evidenced by the fact that in its later seasons stories about them are told from within. Worf, who in "The Sons of Mogh" concluded that he would never truly belongs in Klingon society, starts seeing himself as a Klingon warrior again, and Jadzia embraces the culture as well. Other, non-Klingon characters are almost entirely shut out of these stories, so that we're forced to see Klingons as they see themselves: bold, glorious, epic. It's hard not to be swept away by this grandeur, especially with the full force of Deep Space Nine's prodigious worldbuilding abilities brought to bear on us, fabricating for the Klingons customs, rituals, legends, and, of course, songs.

Another race with whom the show takes an immersive approach are the Ferengi. Funnily enough, the Ferengi were originally conceived of by Next Generation writers as an antagonist to replace the now-friendly Klingons, but though in their appearances on that series Ferengi were generally acting against the Enterprise crew's interests, they never developed the aura of dangerous coolness the Klingons wore so effortlessly, and which later attached itself to better antagonists such as the Romulans or the Cardassians. They were portrayed as lascivious, mean, stupid, and above all, obviously, greedy. Deep Space Nine initially toned down the Ferengi's antagonism, but kept their greed and stupidity. They were played for (generally unfunny) laughs. The turning point comes, I think, in the second season finale "The Jem'Hadar," when Quark gives Sisko as much-needed what-for.

You know, Commander, I think I've figured out why humans don't like Ferengis. ... The way I see it, humans used to be a lot like Ferengis. Greedy, acquisitive, interested only in profit. We're a constant reminder of a part of your past you'd like to forget. ... But you're overlooking something. Humans used to be a lot worse than the Ferengi. Slavery. Concentration camps. Interstellar wars. We have nothing in our past that approaches that kind of barbarism. You see, we're nothing like you. We're better.

From this point on, though the show never ceases to mock the Ferengi, it also accords them, and most particularly Quark, a measure of respect. If the Klingons allow the writers to indulge in Tolkien-esque fantasies about the glory of battle, the Ferengi offer a counteracting dose of cynicism in the face of that fantasy. Quark is at times an Al Swearengen-ish figure, combining disdain for the Federation's lofty ideals--which he views as a mask with which they conceal their baser urges--with a deep and abiding respect not just for individual endeavor but for individuality itself. Is it any wonder that he is, at times, the most humanistic of the show's characters? When the war breaks out and the Starfleet characters begin sublimating themselves to the war effort, knowingly and willingly going to their deaths or sending others to theirs, Quark watches in mute, and sometimes not so mute, horror. His disdain for this willingness to both die and kill for an ideal comes to a head in "The Siege of AR-558," in which he parallels his incensed speech to Sisko from "The Jem'Hadar" with another to Nog.

Let me tell you something about humans, Nog. They're a wonderful, friendly people -- as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts... deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers... put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time... and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon.

This same respect for individuality can also be observed in the different expressions of Ferengi-ness we encounter over the course of the series. There is only one way to be a true Klingon, and one is either an honorable Klingon warrior or not, but there are many different, and sometimes contradictory, ways to be Ferengi. It is rare, in fact, to encounter a Ferengi who adheres wholeheartedly to their culture's edicts--Brunt, I think, is the only one. In "Body Parts," Quark resolves to die rather than break a contract because he feels that to do so would make him no longer a Ferengi. In the end he comes to realize that to break and ignore the rules for the sake of survival, conscience, or just because it suits you is the most Ferengi act of all, because to Ferengis the highest loyalty is to oneself. Though a Klingon, a Cardassian, or a human might see this worldview as unprincipled, in its own way it is more principled than any of theirs, because it refuses to sublimate individual judgment to any kind of value system. There's a reason, after all, that Armin Shimerman got to play a liberal humanist in "Far Beyond the Stars."

Better yet are the Ferengi characters like Ishka, Rom, and Nog who use their Ferengi upbringing to do un-Ferengi things--accumulate profit while female, form a union, become an engineer and marry a clothes-wearing outsider, join Starfleet. Nog doesn't abandon Ferengi culture when he decides to join Starfleet--he uses it. He buys an apprenticeship from Sisko and later auctions off his childhood belongings when he leaves for the academy, as Ferengi customs dictate. In "Treachery, Faith, and the Great River" he uses his business acumen to help O'Brien secure a rare replacement part for the Defiant. (And this might be a good time to note that rediscovering Nog was one of the most pleasurable surprises of this rewatch. He's a fantastic character, and it's a great shame that Aron Eisenberg never made it to the opening credits.) Finally, in "The Magnificent Ferengi," all these disparate and different Ferengi--clever Quark, naive Rom, gung-ho Nog, bloodthirsty Leck, desperate Gaila, craven Brunt--come together to rescue Ishka not through force of arms but by scheming, maneuvering, and making deals--by being, deep down, completely Ferengi.

When it comes to its other two dominant races, Deep Space Nine takes a different approach. Though there are plenty of episodes which observe Bajoran society from within--mostly in the first season, but also later on with episodes like "Shakaar"--it's hard to call the society that emerges from these stories alien. The values and attitudes expressed by Kira and the characters she encounters are not just human, but Western and modern. Stories that discuss the ways in which Bajoran society is foreign, sometimes to the point of being incomprehensible--which usually means episodes discussing Bajoran religion--are told from an outsider's point of view, generally Sisko's. Again and gain, Sisko bumps up against Bajoran faith, and no matter how deeply he immerses himself in it, ultimately he's an outsider trying to reason his way through something impenetrable to reason. In "Accession," he watches in disbelief as all his hard work on Bajor's behalf is undone by a man determined to return Bajor to a way of life centuries out of date, and as Bajorans, including Kira, allow him to do so because their faith dictates that they do. His only recourse is to give himself up to Bajor and the Prophets--which ends up claiming greater and greater sacrifices from him.

Cardassian society is even more of a locked room. Though laid out before us like an open book, the characters making their way through it--usually Bashir, but also Kira in the fabulous "Indiscretion" and O'Brien in the didactic "Tribunal"--can only gaze in incomprehension at a value system that is a complete inversion of ours, and which discounts the individual and rewards sacrifice and self-abnegation while encouraging arrogance and a sense of superiority. One of my favorite illustrations of the disconnect between Federation and Cardassian values comes in "The Wire," when Bashir complains to Garak that a classic of Cardassian literature is boring, its characters all living the same kind of life, selflessly serving their nation, and then dying. Of course, Garak replies, that's the point. Not that Garak is uncritical of his society--one of his many tragedies is that he's sufficiently a product of his upbringing for Cardassian ideals to resonate with him, but too smart, cynical, and observant to accept them wholeheartedly--and in fact one of Deep Space Nine's overarching sub-plots is the painful, costly, and, at the time of the series's end, as-yet incomplete transformation Cardassia undergoes as the consequences of its authoritarianism and unjustified pride come down to bear on it.

(Have you noticed which important, dominant Star Trek race is missing from this list? I'd always assumed that the retooling of Vulcans into an arrogant, secretive, manipulative, and hypocritical culture was an Enterprise innovation, but the rot set in in Deep Space Nine. It's this series that gives us, in "Shakaar," a venal Vulcan who insists on collecting his winnings from O'Brien after the latter dislocates his shoulder in the middle of a game of darts, and a Vulcan serial killer, explicitly though somewhat illogically described as someone who hates emotion, in "Field of Fire." And then, of course, there's "Take Me Out to the Holosuite," in which Sisko's Vulcan rival is not just arrogant and vindictive but downright bigoted--he has inexplicably been allowed to crew his ship exclusively with Vulcans--and which features a scene in which Nog has to tag all members of the opposing, all-Vulcan team because they all look alike, and he can't tell which one of them is the Vulcan he's looking for.)

Of course, there's a reason that my extrapolation of the Bechdel test isn't common currency in SFnal circles, and that is that ultimately every invented alien species is a mirror of or a commentary on humanity. Whether or not it is explicitly mentioned in conversations between Deep Space Nine's aliens, the Federation is always in the room, sometimes as an enemy, sometimes as an ally, but always as something that needs to be contended with. "Emissary" opens with the Borg attack at Wolf 359, and as the series draws on, that image begins to seem ever-more significant, presaging the Federation's own crusade--less violent than the Borg's, but no less powerful--to export its own values (a comparison that is made explicitly by Eddington in "For the Cause").

Again and again over the course of the series we see aliens muttering angrily about Federation values contaminating their cultures, and young people like Nog and Alexander (who, alone among all the Klingons we meet in both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, is repeatedly told that he doesn't have to, and in fact probably shouldn't, become a warrior) who seem to bear these dark predictions out. I've been writing these essays for people like myself, who watched, admired and loved Deep Space Nine in its original run, but who haven't thought about it much in the intervening years. These people, I assumed, would be fuzzy on the details such as episode titles and the exact progression of the series's plot, which is why I've been linking to an episode guide every time I mention an episode title. I have no doubt, however, that every single one of you remembers the exchange I'm about to reference, but I'm going to quote it anyway because it encapsulates everything Deep Space Nine had to say about the Federation's influence on the quadrant.

QUARK: Take a sip of this.
GARAK: What is it?
QUARK: A Human drink. It's called root beer.
GARAK: I don't know.
QUARK: Go ahead. Aren't you just a little bit curious?
(Garak drinks)
QUARK: What do you think?
GARAK: It's vile.
QUARK: I know. It's so bubbly and cloying and happy.
GARAK: Just like the Federation.
QUARK: But you know what's really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you start to like it.
GARAK: It's insidious.
QUARK: Just like the Federation.

Of course, this kind of influence travels in both directions. Starfleet officers also find themselves infected by alien cultures and values. Sisko tries his hardest to balance being a Starfleet officer with being the Emissary, but every time he thinks he's found a comfortable middle ground it's snatched out from under him, and by the end of the series he's become a true believer--at the cost of the respectful detachment that was at the core of his Starfleet identity. Jadzia becomes more and more Klingon as her relationship with Worf deepens. The war, in particular, seems to gnaw at the very foundations of Federation culture. In "The Siege of AR-558," Nog notices that one of the defenders is wearing a necklace of Ketracel White vials. This set of grisly trophies is a direct reference to the necklace of Cardassian neckbones worn by one of the Rotarran's crewmembers in "Soldiers of the Empire," and which, at the time, is used as a indication of that crew's derangement.

Deep Space Nine is a series in constant tension between the original Trek concept of infinite diversity in infinite combinations--the idea that you can drink Klingon coffee with breakfast, snack on a Bajoran jumja stick after lunch, eat Creole food for dinner, and relax with some Saurian brandy over a game of Tongo--and the sneaking suspicion that this kind of multiculturalism is ultimately only skin-deep, and that we are all, deep down, either one thing or the other. One of the factors contributing to Ziyal's death is that she was neither Bajoran nor Cardassian, and could never bring herself to choose just one. Odo tries to be a changeling among humanoids, but ultimately gives up the attempt as futile. Federation values, the show ultimately concludes, can't be adopted except at the cost of another culture's values, and inter-species rapport has its limits--as seen in "What You Leave Behind" when Sisko and Ross refuse to drink to their victory in the ruins of Cardassia, and Martok shakes his head over their squeamishness.

I haven't said anything about the Founders, or their servants, the genetically engineered Jem'Hadar and Vorta, in this piece, though they are prominent in the series's later seasons. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be much to say. The Jem'Hadar are genetically engineered to fight; the Vorta, to administrate and carry out the Founders' orders. Neither species has anything resembling a culture beyond their belief in the Founders' godhood, and if the Founders have one it is hidden in the Great Link. At a second glance, a national character seems to emerge, and certainly when it comes to the Jem'Hadar the writers seem to be trying to appeal to the same part of us that responds to the Klingons, by making them, in their own way, honorable and dispassionate. But this is a fallacy. The Jem'Hadar are honorable only because they aren't really people. When they gain a measure of individuality--like the Jem'Hadar immune to Ketracel White in "Hippocratic Oath" or the alpha quadrant Jem'Hadar in "One Little Ship"--they become just as petty, just as given to arrogance and selfishness, and just as capable of compassion and decency, as regular people. The real Jem'Hadar are the ones who, in "Rocks and Shoals," knowingly go to their deaths for no reason because their Vorta--who is sacrificing them in order to save his own skin--has ordered them to. The Vorta are not much better. Though they make a show of being in charge, ultimately they the Founders' puppets, ruled, at all times, by their unswerving faith and dedication to their gods. It's somewhat disturbing that Deep Space Nine expects us to respect this complete abdication, perhaps even complete absence, of autonomy.

My preferred reading, though I somehow doubt that it is the intended one, is that the Jem'Hadar are the Klingons' dark mirror, and the Vorta are the Bajorans' (with the Cardassians combining qualities of both races). They are an example of what results when these species' core traits are exaggerated, and the individualism that characterizes the Ferengi is done away with--monsters, with almost no free will or moral identity. And if this reading is correct, where does that leave the Founders? As the Federation's dark mirror, of course. Or rather, the anti-Federation. As I've said, if there is a Founder culture it's contained within the Great Link, which isn't something we, or the show's humanoid characters, can ever explore. You can't eat at a Founder restaurant, or listen to Founder opera. In "Chimera," when Ezri tells Laas, a non-Founder changeling whom Odo and O'Brien discover swimming through space, that she's always wondered what that would be like, he simply responds that "it's a shame [she's] incapable of experiencing it." Though Odo tries to live as a humanoid he can't experience that life fully, and eventually concludes that its pleasures pale against those of the Great Link.

Unlike the Federation (or the Borg) the Founders aren't trying to export or impose their way of life on other races--what would be the point? Their attitude towards the rest of the galaxy can best be described as aggressive isolationism. They want to be left alone, and by God they'll conquer every species in two quadrants to make sure that happens. They don't care about the races they conquer or the territory and resources they accumulate, and the adulation of the Jem'Hadar nd Vorta means nothing to them. As the female Founder tells Weyoun in "Favor the Bold," she'd give up the alpha quadrant if it meant bringing Odo back into the fold, because all that matters to the Founders is each other and the Link.

At Deep Space Nine's end, every one of its dominant alien species has been infected, to one degree or another, by Federation values. Martok, who has close ties with the Federation, is now Chancellor of the Klingon high council, and his closest adviser is a Starfleet officer who believes the empire needs to be taken apart and put back together. Ferengi society has been turned completely upside down. Bajor is back on track towards Federation membership, and Cardassian society is in shambles, and will no doubt be relying on Federation aid in its reconstruction efforts and, in the process, imbibing Federation values. Even the Founders have been rejoined by Odo, who will spread his message of tolerance, and his greater understanding of humanoids, throughout the Great Link. It is to the show's credit that it is ambivalent about these changes, portraying them as losses as well as gains, and hinting that in many cases change will be slow and uncertain. Especially nowadays, with the issue of cultural imperialism so prominent in the public discourse, it's interesting to watch Deep Space Nine grapple with that very question. "There is a limit to how far I'll go to accommodate cultural diversity among my officers and you've just reached it," Sisko angrily informs Worf after the latter nearly kills Kurn in "The Sons of Mogh," and this, too, is a question that has become more prominent in the last half-decade, as the dream of a truly multicultural society gives way before irreconcilable differences in values and cherished beliefs. Deep Space Nine can't offer any answers to these questions, but it can explore them, and it does so without ever surrendering the complexity and integrity of its own universe. All alien species are ultimately a commentary on humanity, and in Deep Space Nine's case, on Western society, but because Deep Space Nine was good science fiction and good TV, its aliens are also entirely real, and entirely alien.

Back Through the Wormhole, Part II: The Two DS9s

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first three seasons of Deep Space Nine sucked.

OK, so that's an overstatement. But there is a consensus among the show's fans that its early seasons were missing a certain component, and that Deep Space Nine didn't come into its own and earn the title of best Star Trek series until its fourth season, and until the addition of Worf, the Defiant, the Dominion and their quest for galactic domination, and arc-driven storytelling. I'm here to tell you that this is... well, not wrong, precisely, but certainly a vast oversimplification. Firstly, just in terms of chronology: the Dominion is first introduced in the second season finale "The Jem'Hadar," and the identity of the Founders is revealed in the third season premiere, "The Search." The Defiant is introduced in that same episode, and though Worf does join the show in the fourth season premiere, "The Way of the Warrior," it's a full two seasons before war breaks out with the Dominion--the intervening period is spent mostly on inter-quadrant disputes between the Klingons and the Cardassians or the Klingons and the Federation--and the show only starts telling multi-episode stories in its final two seasons.

More importantly, though there is no denying that Deep Space Nine underwent many changes and transformations over the course of its seven seasons, and that the fourth season premiere was a turning point for the show in many respects, a stark division between pre- and post-"Way of the Warrior" Deep Space Nine, and an insistence that the latter is entirely superior to the former, ignores both the earlier seasons' strengths and the later ones' weaknesses, as well as the shared qualities which are, I believe, at the heart of what made Deep Space Nine good TV.

Deep Space Nine's pilot episode, "Emissary," surprised me by being a great deal stronger than I remembered. Like all pilots, it has a lot of work to do--introduce us to the characters, establish their relationships, create a sense of place and educate us about the balance of power within it--and it manages these tasks with grace and intelligence while telling a damn fine and exciting story in the process. It is also quite obviously attempting to distance Deep Space Nine from its older sibling, Star Trek: The Next Generation, mostly by bucking against that show's signifiers. The station's dishevelment stands in stark contrast to the Enterprise's gleaming orderliness. The distrust and resentment the locals feel towards the Starfleet officers, whom they view as interlopers thrust upon them by a foolish bureaucracy, as opposed to the tightly-knit Enterprise crew and the unwavering faith in Starfleet's goodness and necessity that they encounter wherever they go. Finally, in one memorable scene, "Emissary" actively strives to alienate The Next Generation's fans.

I'm speaking of the first encounter between Sisko and Picard, in which Sisko, still grieving the loss of his wife at Wolf 359, reminds Picard of that battle and of his role in it. Coming back to this scene as a Deep Space Nine fan (and as someone who recognizes how absurd it is to expect all of the veterans of that battle to be perfectly OK with Picard in its aftermath) I wasn't thrown by it, but several days after watching "Emissary" I realized that to the teenage, uninitiated version of myself watching it for the first time, it must have felt like a body blow. I didn't know or care about this Sisko person. I knew and cared about Picard, and I knew how tormented he was by Wolf 359. For Sisko to throw it in his face seemed unspeakably cruel (which, of course, it was) and given that I was already feeling wrong-footed by the unfamiliar setting and tone, is it any wonder that I walked away from "Emissary" somewhat dubious? So, I suspect, did many other Next Generation fans, a reaction which was almost certainly the one sought by the pilot's writers (who probably didn't have to worry about losing those fans, Star Trek loyalty and the SF television landscape being what they were in those days). They wanted to make the point that Deep Space Nine, the place and the series, were outside of our comfort zone.

Unfortunately, like Enterprise, whose pilot also sought to distance that show from the neatness associated with Star Trek in all its incarnations, Deep Space Nine backslid in its first season. Most of that season's episodes are variants on The Next Generation's standalone formats--something weird comes through the wormhole, or the characters travel through the wormhole and find something weird. Trouble and/or hilarity ensue, and the whole thing is resolved by discovering a new particle. Putting aside for a moment the fact that by the time Deep Space Nine premiered even The Next Generation was scraping the bottom of this storytelling barrel, and that most of the offerings in Deep Space Nine's first season are rather tired staples of SFnal TV ("The Passenger" and "Dramatis Personae": alien possession; "If Wishes Were Horses": magical wish fulfillment), Deep Space Nine's premise and setting were simply not suited to this form of storytelling. It's one thing to travel from planet to nebula to space anomaly--that's what the Enterprise was for, after all. Deep Space Nine's mission was different. Its purpose was to protect the wormhole and prepare Bajor for Federation membership. Standalone, self-contained stories were never going to accomplish this goal. Luckily, interspersed with the forgettable Next Generation-style stories were also episodes which dealt with the ongoing political situation on Bajor, and which, taken together, add up to an important arc for their protagonist, Kira Nerys.

A good rule of thumb for Deep Space Nine, and something that its writers were quick to pick up on, is that Kira makes everything better. A line, a scene, an episode--give it to Kira and, at the very least, you'll get something watchable, and quite often fantastic. I'm going to talk some more about this kickass character and the ways in which the show serves her both well and ill later on in this series, but for the time being let's just note that, in the first season, political, Bajoran-centered episodes tended to get handed to her, with Sisko playing a secondary role, and since these episodes were pretty strong pieces to begin with the result was very, very good. More importantly, these episodes charted genuine changes and developments in the character.

Kira starts off almost an antagonist to Sisko. She clearly resents his, and Starfleet's, presence in "Emissary," and though they end up working well together they are by no means fast friends at that episode's end. "Emissary" also shows us a Kira who is frustrated by her government and by her role in Bajor's rehabilitation. "It was so much easier when I knew who the enemy was," she sadly tells Odo soon afterwards, obviously ill at ease with her more difficult and less rewarding role as an administrator. In that same episode, "Past Prologue," she's drawn into the orbit of an extremist resistance fighter, but ultimately turns him in when she realizes that he has prioritized his desire for an enemy over the good of Bajor. Later on, in "Battle Lines," Kai Opaka forces Kira to acknowledge the corrosive effect that violence has had on her soul, and in so doing to begin to heal. Soon afterwards, Kira is once again forced to examine her new role as a representative of authority when she's ordered to forcibly evacuate the last holdout on a moon about to be rendered uninhabitable by a public works project in "Progress." After she befriends the man, Kira refuses to evacuate him, and it falls to Sisko to remind her that she no longer has the luxury of bucking authority for the sake of maintaining a spotless conscience.

Sisko and Kira's mutual respect is further deepened in the magnificent "Duet," in which he acquiesces to her request that he arrest and allow her to interrogate a Cardassian whom she believes to be a notorious war criminal (in a neat bookend to "Past Prologue," in which Kira went over Sisko's head to secure her friend asylum on the station). When Kira realizes that her prey is really a tormented file clerk trying to expiate crimes he wasn't responsible for, she demonstrates the decency and compassion that will continue to be her most distinctive characteristics throughout the series, and tries to help him. Kira's faith in Sisko, and his involvement in Bajoran politics, are cemented in the season finale "In the Hands of the Prophets," which is also the first appearance of then-Vedek Winn. Though initially a supporter of Winn's hard-line, isolationist views, Kira is disillusioned when Winn attempts to gain power by fomenting hatred towards Starfleet, and Sisko in particular, and ultimately chooses to stand with him, in a reversal of her stance in "Emissary." Kira's arc over the course of the season is a transition from a straightforward us-vs-them mentality to a more sophisticated worldview, and through it we glimpse Bajor undergoing a similar process as it adjusts to the realities of self-rule. The first season is therefore a strange mixture of the utterly forgettable and the superb, and though it can hardly be called a success, seven excellent hours of television out of twenty is pretty good for a show that is still figuring itself out.

In the second season, the Bajoran-centered political storylines are downplayed, and Sisko begins taking center stage in those stories that do deal with Bajor and with the legacy of the occupation, perhaps because the show's writers had realized where its strengths lay, and wanted to give their main character a chance to take part in these more successful stories. Though Kira has an important role in the season-opening three-parter, it's Sisko who learns the truth about the famed resistance legend Li Nalas, and Sisko who urges him to continue to embody that legend. Similarly, it's Sisko who, in "Cardassians," has to decide whether to return an abandoned Cardassian child to his father or let him stay with the Bajoran couple who have raised him. (An exception is the extremely fine "The Collaborator," in which Sisko barely makes an appearance as Kira struggles to prove Bareil innocent of collaborating with the Cardassians, and becomes the instrument of Winn's accession to the position of Kai.)

The second season is also when we start seeing the prevalence of a third kind of episode, on top of the SFnal standalones and the political stories--the character piece, which focuses on a single member of the main and supporting cast. Some of these, such as "The Alternate" or "Playing God," are quite good, and others, such as "The Wire," are utterly fantastic (much like Kira, Garak makes everything better), and these episodes will continue to be a cornerstone of the series. On top of which, the second season gives us "Necessary Evil"--still my choice for the best episode in the show's run--and "Crossover," which in spite of the ever-increasing inanity of its sequels is not just fun and well-made but downright scary. Finally, the second season introduces the Maquis--at the time, a rather bold and messy addition to the show's universe (which may explain why they were almost immediately downplayed in favor of more straightforward adversaries such the Klingons and the Dominion). All that said, there is no denying that in its treatment of its wider universe and the station's long-term goals, the show goes into a holding pattern in its second season, and unfortunately, things only get worse.

It's my personal theory that the reason so many fans think Deep Space Nine only got good after "The Way of the Warrior" is not that the show's later seasons were that good but that the season preceding them, season three, was that bad. The closest the season comes to standout episodes are "Second Skin" (lock Kira in a room and attack her sense of self--how could it go wrong?) and the two-parter "Improbable Cause"/"The Die is Cast" (Garak and Odo trying to outsmart one another for 90 minutes--see above). In between there's the sheer popcorn fun of "Civil Defense," but none of these episodes scale the heights achieved in the previous two seasons. Some of the remaining episodes in the season are merely missed opportunities--"Defiant" features an intriguing rapport between Sisko and Dukat, and some smart observations about the difference between soldiers and freedom fighters from Kira, but it implodes due to the complete nothingness that is Tom Riker at its center, and "Life Support" has some fantastic interactions between Kira, Bareil, and Winn, but its choice to squander a political development as important as the signing of a peace treaty between Bajor and Cardassia by using it as a backdrop to a medical ethics story is a crucial failure of priorities, not to mention a waste of a good character.

But for the most part, season three is just bad. It's a season that gives us three Ferengi episodes (alright, the first one, "The House of Quark," is more a Quark story and also not bad) as well as "Fascination," a Lwaxana Troi story in which people are compelled to have sex with one another and the entirely boring time travel two-parter "Past Tense." Worst of all, if the second season downplayed the political stories, in the third season that aspect of the show is all but absent. Between "The Search" and "Improbable Cause" there is almost no mention of the Dominion and the threat they pose. The season ends with the discovery of a changeling spy aboard the Defiant who informs Odo that more of his people have infiltrated the alpha quadrant, but if that's so then where have they been all season, and why haven't they been making their presence felt? As I've already said, the Bajoran-Cardassian conflict is used as a backdrop to personal stories, but the same is also done with the Maquis, who are all but ignored except when they need to catalyze a story. It is probably because of this choice to ignore the show's universe that, by the end of the season, the show feels tired, its storytelling, in every variety, perfunctory and not a little bit boring.

Clearly, a change was needed, and though the thrust of this essay is that the division into two Deep Space Nines is simplistic, there is no denying that the fourth season breathes new life into the show. It is, in my opinion, the best of the show's seven seasons. "The Way of the Warrior" is clearly a second pilot, with Worf taking Sisko's place as an out of sorts Starfleet officer contemplating resignation who finds a new home and purpose on the station. Once again, much of the episode is spent introducing characters--or in this case, introducing Worf to the cast and forging relationships with them--while establishing the Klingons as a major player in the series's universe and completely upending its political landscape. And, once again, the writers ably manage these tasks while telling a damn fine story to boot (and, incidentally, rebooting the show's look--the entire color and lighting scheme is made sharper and crisper). After this promising beginning there follows a sequence of episodes that are Deep Space Nine at its best--high concept episodes like "The Visitor," "Little Green Men," and "Our Man Bashir," character episodes like "Indiscretion" and "Rejoined," action episodes like "Starship Down," and, best of all, episodes that demonstrate how to properly ground a standalone story in a wider political setting.

In "Hippocratic Oath," Bashir and O'Brien crash land in the Gamma quadrant and are captured by rogue Jem'Hadar who want Bashir to break them of their addiction to Ketracel White. Bashir is moved by the Jem'Hadar's plight and argues that freeing them of their addiction will land a crippling blow against the Dominion. O'Brien doesn't trust their captors and worries that un-addicted Jem'Hadar might be just as dangerous, or even more so, than the regular kind. They both have valid points, and the episode, which is clearly meant to recall the many Bashir-and-O'Brien-in-peril stories that have preceded it, treats both of them with respect, and doesn't pretend that the actions each takes to get their own way won't have an effect on their friendship. It's a smart, thought-provoking piece whose emotional weight is derived equally from the thorny dilemma it places before its characters and the strain that dilemma puts on their friendship.

Though a second attempt to acknowledge the effects of the current political climate, the mid-season two-parter "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost," collapses into a hectoring, preachy mess, other political episodes in the season ("Rules of Engagement," "Return to Grace," "For the Cause") follow "Hippocratic Oath"'s lead, and explore the political through the personal while according both equal respect. In terms of the series's overarching storylines, not much happens in season four. The Federation-Klingon peace treaty is nullified in "The Way of the Warrior" after the Klingons invade Cardassia, and over the course of the season not much changes in that respect. What the season does instead is explore the ramifications of this galactic upheaval on the show's characters, allowing them to discover their altered universe before it is altered again. The result is extraordinarily satisfying--a season with almost no bad episodes and hardly any mediocre ones either.

Unfortunately, this is an unsustainable high note, and when season five comes around there's a noticeable drop in both the show's quality and the complexity of its political writing. Season five should be all about the slow but inexorable buildup to open war with the Dominion, but only three episodes--"Apocalypse Rising," in which Sisko exposes the changeling masquerading as Martok and secures a ceasefire with the Klingon Empire, the two-parter "In Purgatory's Shadow"/"By Inferno's Light," in which the Cardassians ally themselves with the Dominion, and the finale "A Call to Arms," in which war breaks out and the Federation is forced to withdraw from Deep Space Nine--advance that story. In all other episodes, the political situation is static--except for the Jake story "Nor the Battle to the Strong" which, in a return to the bad old days of season three, posits an end to the Klingon ceasefire for just as long as it takes Jake to realize that he's a physical coward, and immediately reinstates it as soon as that point is made--and virtually unacknowledged. Only three episodes--"Nor the Battle to the Strong," "The Ship," and "In the Cards"--draw on the political situation for their plot as so many fourth season episodes did, and none of them are very good or have that much to say. In fact, there aren't a lot of good episodes in the season at all--the only standouts are "Rapture," "Soldiers of the Empire," and "Children of Time," with an honorable mention for "Between the Darkness and the Light" for being a great Kira episode, in spite of its unfortunate descent into histrionics in its final act (I feel about "Trials and Tribble-ations" the same way I feel about Angel's puppet episode--it's fun and technically impressive, but there's not much there there)--and though the rest of the season isn't as bad as the third, it's largely mediocre.

Season five is also the point at which it becomes apparent that Deep Space Nine is no longer science fiction in any meaningful sense of the word. The Next Generation-style SFnal stories have all but disappeared from the show's repertoire, and the one exception over the course of the fifth season makes it clear that this is a good thing. In "Doctor Bashir, I Presume" it is revealed that Bashir's parents had him illegally enhanced as a child, and that he lied about this to get into Starfleet. We're told that there's a taboo against genetic engineering in Federation society, but we never get to see it or understand its roots (unless you count dredging up the memory of an overacting Ricardo Montalban, which admittedly is quite a deterrent). In the end, it doesn't matter, because the episode belies this taboo by allowing Bashir to remain in Starfleet after all. There is, in other words, no believable exploration of how a technological innovation is viewed in a future society or how it affects it, which would be the core of an SFnal story that revolved around this premise. In subsequent episodes, we don't get to see what it means for Bashir to live openly as someone who was made intellectually and physically superior to his peers, or any indication that they recoil from him or resent him for this superiority--it's mostly played for laughs.

In the sixth season followup episode "Statistical Probabilities" Bashir works with fellow 'mutants' whose genetic engineering has rendered them emotionally unstable. Finding them starved for information, he exposes them to the current crisis, and they quickly come up with a mathematical model that proves the Federation is going to lose the war. A science fiction story would have taken this premise seriously, and showed us its characters seriously contemplating the mutants' suggestion of surrendering to the Dominion in order to save hundreds of billions of lives. Instead of engaging with this grim choice, "Statistical Probabilities" becomes a story about the triumph and endurance of the human spirit, even in the face overwhelming odds--a warmed-over "Cold Equations"--even if the writers have to undermine their own premise in order to get there, by suddenly revealing that the mutants' calculations are flawed.

Season six is very much of a piece with season five. There are more standout episodes--"Waltz," "Far Beyond the Stars," "Change of Heart," "In the Pale Moonlight," "Reckoning"--but the rest of the season hits the same kind of comfortable mediocrity season five specialized in. The main difference between the two seasons is that the Federation is now at war, which means that instead of episodes that explore the political situation we get ones that deal with the reality of life during wartime--"In the Pale Moonlight," "Valiant," "The Sound of Her Voice" (a trend which will persist in the seventh season with episodes such as "The Siege of AR-558" and even "It's Only a Paper Moon"). These are often good stories, and the season's character work is as good as ever, but politically the show becomes almost black and white. The battle lines have been drawn and, though neither side has a good claim to the title of 'good guys', everyone, including the audience, knows whose side they're on.

Another difference between the fifth and sixth seasons is that in the latter the show's writers begin to explore arc-driven storytelling. As I've said already, the format feels alien to the series. Whereas other series which tell continuous stories will advance overarching storylines in sub-plots of standalone episodes, Deep Space Nine maintained a distinction between arc episodes and standalone episodes, which occasionally resulted in a somewhat artificial quality to the progression of the show's political plotlines. This sensation is heightened in the occupation arc which opens the sixth season. It seems obvious that the arc lasts six episodes not because the writers had a story to tell which, broken down, filled six episodes, but because six episodes were mandated for that story. The storylines focusing on the Starfleet characters are very nearly self-contained, and sometimes the progression of the arc is halted entirely for a character-driven story such as "Sons and Daughters." That said, the six episodes with which the sixth season begins are strong and compelling, with lots of good character work as well as exciting storytelling. The station plotline is continuous, and features one of my favorite character arcs as Odo finally succumbs to the temptation of the Great Link. It's not Babylon 5, but it is good TV.

The seventh season is both better and worse than its two predecessors. The problem with discussing it is that it can be divided into two nearly distinct entities--the arc-driven resolution of the war in the two-part season premiere and ten-part series finale, and the standalone episodes in between. The latter are the usual mix of good--"Covenant," "It's Only a Paper Moon," "Chimera"--and not so good, but they are also dominated by Ezri, who is one of only two Deep Space Nine characters I never cared for (the other is Eddington, though to be honest I never got the point of Morn either). She's a cousin Oliver, and the worst thing about her is that I'm not allowed to complain that she's a cousin Oliver because, clearly, there's a good reason for her to be friends with the entire cast and for them to care about her. Actually, the very worst thing about Ezri is that the writers obviously realized this, because they never worked to earn her prominence. In "Afterimage" Garak cruelly informs Ezri that she is unworthy of being Jadzia's successor, and not only is he right, but that never changes. Jadzia was smart, funny, adventurous, sexy, and cool. Ezri is none of these things, and while it makes sense for the writers to make her the anti-Jadzia, she's not anything else either. She's generic, mediocre, and not even a very good counsellor--in "It's Only a Paper Moon" she's upstaged by an interactive hologram--and we're expected not to notice this because her name is Dax.

You may think it's strange to let a single character determine my feelings towards an entire season, but a quick look at an episode guide will reveal that Ezri is omnipresent. Her introduction is an important part of the season-opening two-parter "Image in the Sand"/"Shadows and Symbols," and she has a major plotline in the series-ending arc (as well as a romantic plotline with Bashir). Of the remaining 14 episodes, four are Ezri episodes (though I'll concede that "The Emperor's New Cloak" is debatable), and they are all as generic as she is: "Afterimage" is an utterly hackneyed and unimaginative portrayal of therapy; "Prodigal Daughter" a by-the-numbers story of familial dysfunction among the rich and powerful; "The Emperor's New Cloak" a veritable cliché-fest, culminating with the scoundrel with a heart of gold; "Field of Fire" a twelfth-rate serial killer story of the kind one tends to find in cheap TV movies. The amount of attention lavished on this character is as unprecedented as it is unearned, and it, and she, taint the entire season.

On the other hand, the ten episodes with which Deep Space Nine draws its story to a close are very strong. For the first time, the show manages to do arc-driven storytelling right. None of the episodes are truly standalones, and the different plotlines advance at similar, yet entirely organic, paces (with the exception of Dukat and Winn in the fire caves, who almost hilariously get put on hold for hours, sometimes days, at a time). There's a lot going on--Ezri and Worf work out their differences and discover the Breen alliance with the Dominion; Odo contracts the changeling virus, leading to Bashir's discovery that it was engineered by Section 31 and his ploy to extract the cure from Sloan; Damar rebels against the Dominion and Kira and Garak travel to Cardassia to help him; Sisko and Kasidy get married in spite of the Prophets' warnings; Worf moves against Gowron and makes Martok Chancellor; Ezri and Julian get together; Rom is made Grand Nagus; and, of course, there's the actual fighting and the end of the war, not to mention Dukat and Winn's attempts to free the Pagh-Wraiths. Not everything here is perfect--introducing the Breen as a major player at the last minute is an unworthy device, and "Extreme Measures" is a bit of a throwback to the show's Next Generation-aping days--but overall the ten episodes are strong, make good use of their air time, and tell their story well without leaving the characters by the wayside. It's a good note on which to end the series.

I started this essay by saying that there aren't two distinct Deep Space Nines. In fact, there are several--the Next Generation clone, the frontier story, the character drama, the political space opera, the war story, and I've left out the fantasy, which is what the Bajor episodes become as they grow more concerned with the Prophets' struggle against the Pagh-Wraiths. Over the course of seven seasons, the show slowly transforms from one to another, occasionally backsliding and leaping ahead, and sometimes combining more than one in the same season or episode. With the exception of the first of these 'sub-shows', none are inherently good or bad, and each, when done well, draws on a different set of the show's strengths. As a result, it is just as accurate to say that the first season is better than the seventh as it is to make the opposite argument--it all depends on which show you were interested in. Regardless of the kind of story it's telling, Deep Space Nine achieved excellence when it committed whole-heartedly to the complexity of its universe. The first season did so when it acknowledged the sheer fucked-up-ness of the situation on Bajor following the Cardassian withdrawal. The seventh season, by realizing that the conflict with the Dominion could only be resolved with the steady and unswerving application of plot. Luckily, the instances in which the writers find it in themselves to do so far outnumber the ones in which they lazily resort to stock plots and clichés, which is the real distinction, I believe, between the two Deep Space Nines.