I am watching DS9 for the first time (some observations)

No. They needed to get the story off the station and onto Bajor.

 

Ah okay. Yes, more showing and less telling would have been helpful.

 

I thought none of the Skrean where let onto the planet?
Personally, I always preferd, for the most part, shows that were on the space station.
Also,
I just always imagined that they would need food crops that would not be useful in anyway to others or the Bajorans.

 

Haneek's son tries to make a forced landing on Bajor, but is killed in a firefight with Bajoran interceptors.

 

I've been gone for over two months, and I've been "busy" (read: lazy). My work gets pretty busy around the holidays but things should settle down soon.

 

For me, Kira was a great character from the very beginning. Dax took awhile to grow on me. I didn't really get into her character until Blood Oath. Then when she got with Worf, her character seemed to shine much more. Leeta...well...to me she was a typical bimbo, nowhere near as interesting as the other two. And Wynn and the female changeling were great villains.

 

Okay, I’ve left off partway into “Rivals”, and I’m going to try to get to it in the next couple of days.

 

If you like "Necessary Evil", you will like "Things Past". The tables were turned in "Things Past".

In "Things Past", it was a dubious incident in Odo's life during the occupation that came to light. In this story, it was Kira (and everyone else) who learned about something unsavory that Odo had done. After it was revealed what Odo actually did during that incident, it was Kira's faith in Odo that was shaken.

Both "Necessary Evil" and "Things Past" were flashback type of episodes. Both were really good. As Kira noted at the end of "Things Past", "I guess the truth is that anyone who lived through the occupation had to get a little dirty."

The two episodes are complementary.

 

Fair enough. Your challenge for 2020 is to get to the end of season 5.

Just keep on truckin' thru season 2. You're so close to where it *starts* to hit it's stride.

 

Yeah, "Rivals" is sort of an anomaly, you'll be good again once you're past it.

Honestly, you could pretty much skip it with no ill effects other than knowing in your heart of hearts that you'd invalidated your entire viewing of the series.

 

I enjoyed "Rivals." Okay, it's not a truly great episode, but it's certainly worth watching once just for the banter.

 

IIRC, I walked away feeling as though the banter was trying to be more funny than it actually was.

 

CRM-114,
How do you feel DS9, a 90s sci-fi series, holds up today? I personally think all the post-TNG series hold up. I only think TOS looks and feels dated, even the remastered episodes. ST: ENTERPRISE probably holds up the best, due to the improved visuals.

 

TNG is starting to feel dated, TOS is really dated, but if you immerse yourself in them, this will go away more or less. DS9 and Voyager, don't seem dated as much to me. ENT, even less so. I do love these series. I wish a could take a forget pill so I could watch them all like new. I watched them to the point where I can't watch them anymore. I'd guess over 10 or more times all the way through...

 

Honestly, visually speaking, I think TNG feels more dated now than TOS (at least the TOS remastered version on Netflix). DS9, VOY and ENT all seem pretty even to me.

Narrative wise, I'd have to say TOS holds up even better and TNG even worse. Voyager also feels a lot more dated narratively than DS9 or ENT.

 

That's an interesting observation, i don't see how TOS could hold up better than TNG either narratively or visually, which doesn't just include the visual effects but also costume, makeup, and set design. There are really obsolete episodes like Gary 7, even the music feels dated. As for VOYAGER i would have to agree, a series like that should have been more serialized, BSG kind of showed how it should have been done. ENTERPRISE holds up the best IMHO both visually and narratively since it's a post-911 series and that event had a huge cultural impact.

 

Certain episodes aside, TOS just feels somewhat timeless to me. Whereas TNG for much of its run feels very, very specifically 80s.

 

The main problem with TNG is (I think) it had a very restricted feel of how future humans should turn out. All (near-)perfect, the captain quotes Shakespeare, everyone loves classical music and intellectual pursuits. I mean, the most "rebellious" taste we see is Riker loving jazz! TOS, even though it is more "dated" in things like effect and music and fashion and such, has a more universal feel to it.

On the other hand, weirdly enough, I could never get "into" TOS as much as I could into TNG as a child (or later series, for that matter). Perhaps that's because I never lived during the 60's myself, and therefore do not entirely share the culture that produced it.

 

The synthesizer music of the early TNG seasons, some of the costumes and hairstyles do give off an 80s vibe, but narratively i feel that TOS was far more influenced by the culture of its time than TNG. TOS had stories about fears of nuclear annihilation, automation, hippies, etc.

 

I mean, TNG had a just say no episode, multiple episodes about people being uncomfortable with homosexuality, an episode about Picard's 'long lost son' who's indepedent mom never told anyone about him, stories about trying to find peace and common ground with decades long implacable enemies, stories about the dangers of automation and cybertechnology, etc.

All the series have those kind of marks. But while TOS is definitely conceived by 60s culture, I can still see those characters and those stories, for the most part, as a hypothetical future of humanity even from today. They have a frontier spirit and a humanity which is recognizable. The TNG stuff, as At Quark's mentioned, is very heavily locked into a very specific ideal version of humanity that in itself is heavily dated and doesn't look nearly as utopian to me anymore as it did when I was a kid, which undermines the whole point of TNG.