Re: Hello fellow Niners
Welcome to the DS9 forum. If deep, and sometimes too deep, discussions on DS9 are what you're looking for then you've found them. I agree with you that DS9 is both overlooked and has aged better than the other Trek series. If anything, when I watch DS9 now, the show seems even more relevant than it was during the original airing.
A shame that there's no thought on taking the show further, but I kind of shudder to think what might happen in the hands of incapable writers anyway.
Wholly agreed; the show does feel more relevant now than ever before!
I saw the show in the 90s. As the series went on it improved a ton. Early episodes were hit or miss if not underdeveloped, like "Move Along Home", and I often turned off episodes if I got the vibe they were copying TNG (e.g. "Starship Down" = "Disaster", I don't recall the DS9 episode that was influenced by "Sarek" nor have I gotten to it yet but I'll know it when I see it again
, which I am looking forward to doing...)
After buying the DVD re-release and getting my fill of the awesomeness known as "seasons 4-6" - this show has dated the best of all Treks, IMHO, in part due to the creative freedoms that add a little more meat to the bone. The bone of a more perfect humanity was always cool. But DS9 takes things to a deeper level, hinting if not discussing HOW they make humanity work and proving that humans, as with all sentient species, can still fumble. But no other Trek comes close to gems like "In The Pale Moonlight", "Sons of Mogh", "For The Uniform", "Valiant" (Ronald D Moore had a certain style that I was a magnet toward), and scores of others since those episodes are part of larger and complex tapestries that lose a little something if watched out of order or out of context.
And seeing a couple eps I missed back in the day, I rewatched previously perceived clunkers.
"Starship Down" has grown on me a ton and, indeed, improves on TNG's "Disaster" rather than just merely copying it. I didn't pick up on details back then.
"Move Along Home" was lacking in spots (or written off as fan-created canon by just saying how the Prophets were quietly involved in teaching Quark a lesson) but a lot was a lot better than what people were saying at the time, and I wanted to know more about the Wodi - not just because they come in and leave without any explanation, they're just there with a mystery game. It's a terribly underrated episode that deserved a sequel.
And in a show where even convenience-based one-off species like the Wodi have such detailed and colorful and rich costumes (plus enough to make them
interesting for later use), this series genuinely deserves to be remastered from the original 35mm film negs.
My favorite characters are, in no order, O'Brien, Bashier, Sisko, Dax, Garak, and Worf (inspired and was precisely what the show needed). But there's no character I dislike. The Odo/Quark plots are often fantastic, it's Odo and his people that expand the show's direction, and the Ferengi were treated better in DS9 than in TNG - to the point they one-up humanity's own past in what the Ferengi never allowed.
And while the Federation manning an outpost (with wormhole to keep more possibilities flowing), the inclusion of the Defiant did feel a step in the right direction too.
