What do some fans see as DS9's flaws?

TNG was starting to struggle after 7 seasons, and VOY was running on fumes. But DS9 could have gone 8.

 

Thing about later Trek is that they would hit on something and then run it into the ground. It usually had to do with the holodeck or something "funny." With DS9, it would be the Mirror universe, Vic Fontaine, the Grand Nagus, and the Dominion War, which dragged on a bit too long for my taste.

However, what the did right outweighs all that. The characters were all incredibly well drawn and DS9 had the strongest supporting cast of any Trek before or since. And DS9 brought back loud adventure music, thanks to Dennis McCarthy slipping in his "Generations" action licks without anyone making a stink. After "The Die Is Cast", the music got bolder again.

 

Sisko became Hawk.

The show had too big a chip on its shoulder over the Roddenberrian better future. It explored a lot of other cultures but not much about the aspirational Federation.

Sexy wars took over when they abandoned trying to explore the Gamma Quadrant and get Bajor into the Federation. First the Klingons, then the Dominion. Not as bad as Seven in a catsuit I suppose. That’s ratings for ya.

Cousin Oliver shouldn’t have joined the cast at the 11th hour. No offense to de Boer, but Jadzia didn’t need to die and the show established that was a no-no among Trill.

Yeah, too many bad Ferengi episodes, God help Ira.

Red-eyed Dukat was farcical.

 

That was tough for me to deal with for awhile. But from what I read, looking the way he wanted to look was a really big deal for Avery Brooks. There's something to be said for keeping your crew happy.

It's the nature of the medium. And it did take Starfleet in a new ditection.

Agreed. And it was just dumb as a sack of hammers that Sisko (1) hired on a station counselor who was more neurotic than her patients, and (2) promptly sent her into battle.

That's what happens when you build an intriguing culture and then decide to systematically annihilate it.

Was there any episode featuring the "Bajoran equivalent of the devil" that wasn't?

 

IMHO he was wrong. As was Shatner riding those horses in GEN and Stewart with the parental abuse storyline in PIC. Actors are not their characters. Writers would be better writing better scripts to keep actors interested instead of would-be biopics. And if the actors don’t like it, there are other actors in the cast, other casts in the franchise.

That every other franchise already traveled. Including non-genre. WWII isn’t untrodden territory.

It was so hypocritical of them because they spent the entire series talking about how Ferengi (misogynist, child abusing, exploitative) are people too, then changed them to be just like us in the last episode. Did the ghosts of Roddenberries past present and future come to the writers the night before? But okay, they’re the comic relief species and all ends merry, blithe, and bonny.

The writers didn’t like how much the fans liked Dukat, ostensibly Space-Hitler. Well wasn’t that on them, making him a romantic resistance pirate on that bird-of-prey, flirting with and starting a quasi-family with Kira and Ziyal? And who doesn’t like a good mustache twirling villain with power? It’s why everyone likes Vader. If their consciences were troubled, maybe depict the ugliness of power, infuriate us by his injustice and make us want his head.

 

The emphasis of religion, capitalism and war over exploration and diplomacy.

 

I meant the Pah-wraiths, not Dukat. The latter had some good episodes.

 

As someone that loves this show, there are aspects that I largely attribute to budget that I sometimes think about when rewatching the series.

• I wish the societal effects of the Dominion War were explored a little more. Deep Space Nine does show the quasi-Utopian Federation buckling from the paranoia of Changeling infiltration. But I thought they missed an opportunity to explore the conflict between the very nature of Starfleet (i.e., exploration, discovery, etc.) and the threat of conflict. I always thought there had to be family members of war dead out there that would have the same bitter attitude towards Sisko that he had towards Picard. I can imagine a situation where he's back in New Orleans at his father's restaurant and families approaching him crying, asking him why he didn't collapse the wormhole at the first sign of a threat, and blaming him for caring more for the Bajorans and his role as Emissary than their family's lives.

• There should have been at least one episode where Garak and Sloan meet. I always thought the episode where they go into Sloan's mind to retrieve the cure for Odo should have been a Garak and Bashir episode, instead of a Bashir and O'Brien one. To me, it would have been more interesting for Bashir to task Garak with getting the cure out of Sloan, and the episode to be about how far Julian would be willing to allow Garak to go in order to make Sloan talk.

• I feel it probably would have worked better if Dukat's story-arc ended with "Sacrifice of Angels." The character just didn't work as well as a mustache twirling outright, crazy villain. They could have still done the fire cave ending, and just shifted all of the Armageddon stuff over to Kai Winn and made her the Anti-Emissary. And, honestly, it probably would have worked better if they had done it in a way where she's revealed to have always been in cahoots with the Pah-Wraiths (e.g., maybe reveal that she became the Anti-Emissary at the same time that Sisko discovered the wormhole), instead of making her a fool that betrays everything after getting some Gul Dukat "D" and the cold shoulder from the Prophets.

 

TNG: Add new crewmembers to replace the one that leave (i.e. Picard and Data) or focus on supporting characters more, and have the Ent-D explore the Gamma or Delta Quadrants. Or even another galaxy.

Voyager: Dominion, Breen, Klingon or Romulan expansion into the Alpha Quadrant. Encounters with the Fen Domar. Debut the Suliban as originally devised. And maybe bring in Seska from a different timeline where she didn’t leave Voyager for the Kazon and have her kick off a Maquis mutiny against Janeway with Starfleet, Maquis, and Equinox crew behind her.

Could probably carry on a couple of extra seasons for both shows with those arcs. So I don't see why DS9 would have had trouble if it had received extra seasons.

 

The first season or so were a little patchy but it found it's feet pretty quickly. Although I didn't take to all of the cast initially, that didn't last.

I really liked the Vic episodes, the Ferengi episodes and most of the other stuff people find fault with. I'm enjoying Bar Association at the moment.

I love the show unconditionally. With the exception of Move Along Home...

 

Aww... no love for Allamaraine?

 

its such a beautiful series...... i love it so much
just started a new round with it today, i cried a little tbh.....

flaws?...what is this???

 

*coughPROFIT&LACEcough*

 

lol

 

Yeah: I'll watch Move Along Home all day if the other option is Profit & Lace.

 

Well, I say all post-DS9 trek series (including Voyager) are flawed because of their emphasis on exploration and diplomacy over religion, capitalism and war. See how meaningless that statement is? In my view, you're not mentioning a 'flaw' of the series, you're telling us this series wasn't written for you since you reject (some of) its core concepts. Which is fine, by the way. We all have different tastes.

Also, while I can understand the war and religion emphasis part, I'm not sure what you mean by the capitalism part? The only ones 'guilty' of that would be the Ferengi, as far as I can see it, and they never were the main focus of the show. Also I'd argue there is probably more diplomacy in DS9 than in most other Trek shows. It just fails in some cases.

What do I think of in DS9 as flaws? Let's see. I'm not going into one-off atrocious episodes (e.g. Profit and Lace) or inconsistencies (e.g. character of Rom), such flaws are too 'incidental' to interest me. I'm more interested in structural flaws. I can't find too many.

Someone mentioned it never felt as if Bajor had truly gone through a 50-year holocaust. Never thought about it that way, but I agree. On the other hand, I think it would have been exceedingly hard to accurately portray that. I mean the ''devastation' and 'background' part would be the easiest things to do, but to get the actors playing Bajorans to play characters that had been through it convincingly, I gather, would have taken many personal conversations with actual Holocaust survivors. And even then it might have been next to impossible.

Then, I think sometimes the show got too 'cartoonish' and overdramatized in some cases. When this show was on the air, I was around 20, and I gobbled it all up. When I was 40, I had my first opportunity to view Babylon 5. While I liked the show, I found that I couldn't get really into it, because some of the characters were drawn larger than life, manufacturing grand sweeping displays and emotions that probably wouldn't occur that way in real life, giving me the, yeah, 'nice entertainment but it wouldn't actually go down that way' feeling. It's quite possible that had I seen DS9 only around 2010, it would have struck me exactly the same way, and the reason that DS9 is my favorite Trek show is simply that it was on when I was young. In my view it gradually spiraled out of control with the Battle between Good and Evil (pah-wraiths vs. Prophets, Dukat degenerating from a nuanced, albeit thoroughly evil character into a raving lunatic) coming ever more to the forefront until it got, frankly, ridiculous. The only thing I missed in the final was Sisko suddenly gaining a blue light shining through his eyes, so we knew for sure he was on the good side.

Then the overutilized comedic relief and 'fluff' episode substance- holodeck, Vic Fontaine, Ferengi. Even though I generally liked the Ferengi as shown on DS9, what I dislike was the easy 'we need a lighter episode! OK, Ferengi or holodeck?' -feel to it. Other than that, I think enough has been said about it already.

Finally - but this is only a minor complaint- I thought DS9 sometimes veered too much into the realm of soap opera. While I can understand their normal lives just going on in the middle of the war, I really didn't care for Kira and Jadzia discussing their love lifes on the battle bridge, or the 'interesting' arc (blergh) of Bashir and Ezri getting one another (or the Worf-Ezri-Bashir love triangle, for that matter). Or the 'nostalgic' navel-gazing with flashback clips in the final episode.

 

I liked Kira and Jadzia discussing their love lives, but it would have been better over a meal at at replimat or some restaurant.

 

I maintain that if there are WWII parallels to be seen with the Cardassia/Bajor situation, then they are much closer to the 'Pacific Theatre' than the 'European Theater.'

Kor

 

As a continental European, I'm not particularly knowledgeable about 'the Pacific theatre' of WW2. So, what makes the Cardassian /Bajor situation more like that, in your view?

 

One difference for me is that, unlike the Nazis, the Cardassians didn't seem to be pursuing a "final solution" with the Bajorans. Or was it centered on spreading any sort of Cardassian ideology. The Bajoran occupation has more similarities to the way the Japanese treated China and Korea, where they believed in their own inherent superiority, used the population as slave labor and comfort women, and stripped the resources for the expansion of their empire.

To throw another interpretation into the mix, I think the Cardassian/Bajoran situation has a lot in common with British colonialism in India. The way Gul Dukat speaks about Bajor and Bajorans has a condescending paternalism that justifies atrocities as being a form of helping a "lesser" society grow. It is very "Cardassian-white man's burden." If you go back and read some of the justifications people like Rudyard Kipling and others made for British atrocities, they sound a lot like Dukat in the way they speak of India.