Over the years, there are many many episodes of TNG I have rewatched, even some VOY (Year of Hell) and ENT (In a Mirror, Darkly), but not once did I feel the urge to rewatch any of DS9 episodes. To each their own I guess.
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That depends on the imaginations of the writers and also budgetary constraints. It's a big galaxy out there, with unlimited possibilities for storytelling.
Personally, I got bored with the Cardassians and The Dominion and all of that, just as I got bored with the Vulcan-Romulan reunification thing. When Trek gets into too much diplomacy and politics and neighboring-world-fighting-neighboring-world, my attention drifts away pretty quick. Give me exploration.
Eh, I dunno. Compared to the cast of a modern drama, DS9's characters were still a bunch of saints. Quark pretended to be nothing more than a Gordon Gekko type character, but it became clear as time went on he had a moral compass. Garak did many terrible things, but he was ultimately a heroic character. No one else out of the core group of characters was really all that morally gray.
As for the Dominion War, the extent to which it took over the later series was partially the fault of the studio, from my understanding. They originally planned for it to be a one-season affair, but when Worf was reassigned to the show they had to push back their planned schedule, which ultimately resulted in the war not finishing up until the end of the show.
In general I feel like DS9 was the most "adult" of the Trek series because it found its strength in moral ambiguity. I'm not talking about the common modern trope in fiction of flawed cast who does bad things. I mean that although it kept to the classic Trek pattern of having "issue" episodes, it seldom ended the episodes with a moral sledgehammer of "X is right, and Y is wrong." Instead it openly explored all sides of an argument and showed there really are no pat answers. This is part of why I was so disappointed in some of the choices in the endgame of the series involving the Prophets and the Pah-Wraiths, which put a good/evil duality into the show - indeed in to Trek - that had never existed before.
I do think there are lots of exploration-related concepts which have not been really covered by Trek. That said, I do not think the current writing team is likely the best one if they want to go that route. If you want to have a writing team which can think of original and creative sci-fi concepts, you need to hire sci-fi writers, not people who have written episodes of Law and Order and Desperate Housewives.
Those aren't even among my favorite for either series.
My favorite VOY episode - by a wide, wide margin - is Living Witness. Most of the other ones I liked were the "character focus" episodes (Barge of the Dead, Before and After, Mortal Coil, Someone to Watch Over Me, etc). Voyager's attempts to do action were always mediocre, IMHO. I could simply never suspend my disbelief and get involved in the idea the ship was actually in danger.
For ENT, I consider the "Vulcan trilogy" in the 4th season to be the high point of the series. IAMD is fun, but it's comic-book schock, and I like my sci-fi more cerebral than that.
You know what, I really could have used a sledgehammer which says that murdering foreign diplomats and using WMDs against civilian settlements is wrong. But I really don't want to start this discussion about DS9 again, I've done this countless of times already. Agree to disagree, and all that.
I wonder if anyone considers Sisko right for his actions.
I duinno about right, but aside from irradiating the Maquis world in For the Uniform, I don't find his "amoral" actions out of character. Some of the stuff he did as the Emissary was much more poorly written, IMHO.
I also think that Janeway and Archer did much worse things overall, but the writers were so stupid they didn't even realize they were engaging in character assassination.
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A lot of people. He is like J.J. Abrams, to some people it is completely impossible to contemplate that he could ever do anything wrong.
I don't think what Sisko did was right, but DS9 is still my favourite series.
'For the Uniform' never portrayed what he was doing as right, even his senior officers either protested or hesitated at what he was doing. I wish they had seen him being reprimanded or something.
'For the Uniform' never portrayed what he was doing as right, even his senior officers either protested or hesitated at what he was doing. I wish they had seen him being reprimanded or something.
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I’m a huge Sisko fan and there’s plenty he did wrong. He should never have sent Dax and Worf on that dangerous mission together. Actually, he should have nipped worf’s “Klingon” behaviour in the bud like Picard did in “farpoint” when they’re separating and Worf is all “I’m a Klingon sir” and Picard is like “er that’s enough out of you”. Sisko encourages Worf to be more Klingon and he ends up trying to kill Kurn. Sisko trusts admiral Leyton and underestimates how devious he is. He risks polluting the timeline by meeting James Kirk. He (as Vreenak points out) basically starts the war with the dominion. He gambled the future of the alpha quadrant on the will of the prophets! He allows the thing with Eddington to get under his skin. That and the attack on the maquis base could all be things Sisko does wrong. I’m not sure why the maquis base thing is such a big deal. There were no neutral maquis colonies. Someone was either a maquis or they weren’t. The maquis colony Sisko attacked was an enemy planet. The only thing he did wrong was not get permission first - and starfleet obviously approved the plan.
Fair enough. I certainly don't regard him as right and don't see why his actions have to be regarded as right.
For me, it is often an error I see that whatever the hero do must be the right course of action, but Star Trek has often demonstrated different course of action that may or may not be right. Instead of having a black and white way of thinking, i.e. a morality tale or a speech from the hero, it leaves it to the audience to decide. The fact that it is still being discussed years after the fact is far more indicative of the story's power to generate discussion than whether or not a character should be lauded for being "right."
I'm a shameless TOS partisan, but will concede that DS9 is probably the best of the latter-day series.
And it's probably worth noting that STAR TREK has never just been about "exploration." If you go back and look at TOS, a fair number of episodes have the Enterprise on diplomatic missions, on military missions, on missions of mercy, delivering emergency vital supplies to distant colonies or whatever. The number of episodes where they're just zipping through space to see what's out there represent only a percentage of the total episodes.
Which, in fact, is one of the strengths of the franchise. Star Trek's format is broad enough to incorporate everything from courtroom drama and murder mysteries to political intrigue to exploration to trippy time paradoxes and so on. STAR TREK is a big umbrella that can't be narrowly defined.
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Ack.
I hated that sequence in STID.I agree that DS9 went a step or two further than necessary when you frame things that way. There was sometimes an unfortunate tension between what was in service to the story being told, and what was in service to the larger Trek setting. I think overall Babylon 5 did a better job of taking a very similar scenario and telling morally complex stories, not least because it wasn't saddled with the need to fit into the utopian Trek universe.
That said, we've seen that same kind of story-vs-setting tension in other shows as well (paging DSC!), and unlike those, in DS9 the story being told was usually at least worth the tension.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I liked the show, but it always frustrates me when people describe it as more "realistic" because of these elements (or, especially, because of Section 31). That just seems unduly cynical. The whole point of telling stories set in the future is that it won't necessarily be constrained by what we consider "realistic" in the present day!...
Well, I don't really see the those as being mutually exclusive. But then I have a deep and abiding love for politics and diplomacy, and think they're one of the most fertile breeding grounds for good fiction (everything from The West Wing to those wonderful early seasons of Game of Thrones!...).
Word.
I tend to agree very strongly with this.
Although, I thought DS9 did it well, but that should be DS9's unique niche and legacy in the Star Trek franchise...and it shouldn't be the new template for what Star Trek would look like going forward.
Give me mysteries and discoveries in outer space. I don't need "politics and power games IN SPAAAAAACE." There are enough entertainment options out there to scratch that itch if I need to. I don't want to watch Star Trek for that, though. I want to watch Star Trek to discover cool places, meet weird aliens and unlock the secrets of the universe.
You can keep Picard trying to solve a trade dispute and/or some asinine premise about the "Post-Nemesis Aftermath of the Dominion War Political Climate and the Federation's Place in It All Featuring the Breen and the Gorn and All Other Manners of Wanky Bullshit Nobody In Their Right Mind Cares About" in a can somewhere. Doesn't interest me in the slightest.
I've always maintained that Star Trek at its best has always been about metaphorical exploration of the human condition, not necessarily literal exploration of new areas of space, which would probably mostly involve long and boring periods of routine charting and cataloging of space dust in vast uninhabited stretches of the galaxy.
Kor
It could have been completely excised.Ack.
True to a certain point. At the same time, it should be relatable to the audience or else you run the risk of losing said audience. It is a tension that is difficult to maintain. Even Tolkien admitted that though he was dealing in fantasy, ultimate the characters had to be relatable for audience to keep the story engaging.
Agreed. Same thing with TWOK.
As I've written before, there's a difference between "optimistic" and "utopian." To my mind, TNG arguably got a little carried away with the "utopian" thing, especially in its early seasons. I prefer the TOS approach where society has progressed, and somehow managed not to destroy itself, but humans are still as flawed and imperfect as ever. I like that DS9 and subsequent shows have edged back in that direction.
A certain degree of idealism is fine, but "utopian" can too easily slide into "escapist," where everything is nicer and cozier in the future because, well, it's the future and people are more "evolved."
(One can practically hear Dr. McCoy rolling his eyes.)
A certain degree of idealism is fine, but "utopian" can too easily slide into "escapist," where everything is nicer and cozier in the future because, well, it's the future and people are more "evolved."
(One can practically hear Dr. McCoy rolling his eyes.)
Agree completely. But you can do both. And there's certainly fertile storytelling ground in exploring the human condition as they chart space dust.
Really, the reason DS9 and TNG succeeded more for me than ENT and VOY is that there was (way over-generalizing here) a thematic concern as well as a more literalized problem in the former and one or the other in the latter. (And I don't mean the A story / B story format, I mean within the content of A or B or both.)
Not the "whole" point, surely. Future settings are often used, frequently with great effect, to present a story with elements that might not "slide by" in a contemporary setting and yet are framed in such a way as to be recognizable and familiar to the audience. Otherwise, the entire notion of allegory is mooted.
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