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When did DS9 lose gas?

Good Will Riker

Good Will Riker

Admiral
In my honest opinion, DS9 peaked with the 6-part occupation arc at the beginning of Season 6.

Sure, we got a few wonderful gems afterwards such as "Far Beyond the Stars," "In the Pale Moonlight," and Section 31, but the latter-years of DS9 without the creative participation of Robert Wolfe was like TOS season 3: a few gems sprinkled along a whole bunch of "mehs" (The 10-part Final Chapter excluded, of course.). :borg:

Infact, when I owned DS9 on DVD, I purchased Seasons 1-5, but only decided to rent Seasons 6-7 from Netflix.
 
I only wish I had the few episodes of DS9 I don't have on tape. Especially now, each one is a treasure. Maybe I'll get a DVD set one of these days.
 
I thought it had some problems in season six after the Occupation arc. It relegated to the Dominion War and characters like Weyoun, the Founder, Damar etc to the background and used the War only peripherally. A lot of episodes were essentially standalones which is fine except a lot of them were pretty mediocre.

But then it picked up in season seven and I thought it shined in its last season especially with the Final Chapter. So I don't really think DS9 ran out of gas--if anything it actually continued improving going out on a high note. In fact, season seven is my favorite DS9 season. I actually thought DS9 was so strong I wouldn't have minded an eight season.
 
Right at the end, with all the Dungeons and Dragons nonsense. Science fiction kind of goes out the window; magic books are changing people into things, and so forth. Kind of like where Battlestar Galactica seems to be headed :confused:
 
DS9 never lost gas. Every single season of DS9 has about 5 or 6 total crap dud episodes, and the rest range from good to masterpiece. Season 6 and Season 7 have the same ratio of duds as every other Season, but more meat and epic story, as built up from all the previous years, backing up their masterpiece episodes. Therefore Season 6 and Season 7 of DS9 are by far the best of the series, and of any Trek show. Probably the best seasons of SciFi ever made.

Granted, the Dukat character and storyline got all fubared in Season 6 and 7, and was a waste of time. But that's only one element of many, and not enough to significantly drag the show as a whole down since there are dozens of compelling threads going on at the same time aside from the bad Dukat/Pah one.
 
The first season was very meh ! At first I was put off my DS9, too dark, DS9 a lot of soap, spent too much time de-constructing Roddenberry's great vision and Kira just pissed me off. I haven't watched it all but went back to look at other episodes, its later seasons were much better, the show had great actors and I understand why it has so many fans. But I think its story could have been connected better and perhaps Babylon-5 did the whole long arc story better. I never clicked with the whole Federation versus Dominion war going on for too long. I'm not sure of the history or production politics as to why Farrell left DS9, but IMHO by that stage DS9 was already running out of gas
 
startrekwatcher said:
I thought it had some problems in season six after the Occupation arc. It relegated to the Dominion War and characters like Weyoun, the Founder, Damar etc to the background and used the War only peripherally. A lot of episodes were essentially standalones which is fine except a lot of them were pretty mediocre.

But then it picked up in season seven and I thought it shined in its last season especially with the Final Chapter. So I don't really think DS9 ran out of gas--if anything it actually continued improving going out on a high note. In fact, season seven is my favorite DS9 season. I actually thought DS9 was so strong I wouldn't have minded an eight season.
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I too wish, as many of you, that DS9 had an 8th season.

Everything seemed so rushed towards the end. But, overall, it ended pretty well (stock footages and fire caves, and all...).
 
Agree w/you on that.
Firecaves (suck)
Gul Pah Bajoran (sucked hard)
All that stock footage (sucked hardest)
What happened to Sisko was beyond sucking and no resolution.
(Sucked the entire band)
 
^ I agree with some of this, however there are other targets (Like Voyager) we can pick on.

BTW: The fire caves really sucked. :(
 
Having watched seasons 6 and 7 over the past two weeks, some of the stand alone episodes are a little mediocre but none more so than in any other Trek series - after all, you need some filler otherwise the war angle would've become tiresome.

And with regards to all the "mysticism" and Sisko's "death", I like it in some ways as far too often Star Trek is wrapped up in a nice neat package where everyone goes home happy (i.e. Voyager). Having what happened to Sisko seems to be pretty consistent with the storyline in season 7, with his mother warning him about the suffering he will endure, which to me translates to the pain he will have of leaving Kasidy and Jake in our reality.

The prophets / pah wraiths story is easily explained as lifeforms locked in a power struggle with our plane of existence a mere playground for them. At least they do try to explain their whole being in some sort of "scientific" terms and they are no different from the many other "mystical" lifeforms encountered in many, many other sci-fi.

So, ultimately, my point is this - DS9 gets gas from the beginning of Season 4 onwards (in my opinion) and never runs out, only stopping to fill up with the occasional "restbreak" (READ: mediocre) episode.

And I must admit, I would have loved for that crew to have been in a spin-off film more than any of the others.
 
hmbnimbus said:
Having watched seasons 6 and 7 over the past two weeks, some of the stand alone episodes are a little mediocre but none more so than in any other Trek series - after all, you need some filler otherwise the war angle would've become tiresome.

And with regards to all the "mysticism" and Sisko's "death", I like it in some ways as far too often Star Trek is wrapped up in a nice neat package where everyone goes home happy (i.e. Voyager). Having what happened to Sisko seems to be pretty consistent with the storyline in season 7, with his mother warning him about the suffering he will endure, which to me translates to the pain he will have of leaving Kasidy and Jake in our reality.

The prophets / pah wraiths story is easily explained as lifeforms locked in a power struggle with our plane of existence a mere playground for them. At least they do try to explain their whole being in some sort of "scientific" terms and they are no different from the many other "mystical" lifeforms encountered in many, many other sci-fi.

So, ultimately, my point is this - DS9 gets gas from the beginning of Season 4 onwards (in my opinion) and never runs out, only stopping to fill up with the occasional "restbreak" (READ: mediocre) episode.

And I must admit, I would have loved for that crew to have been in a spin-off film more than any of the others.
Click to expand...

QFT

Agree completely, particularly about the 'mysticism' aspect - Looking at episodes like 'The Reckoning' or the 'Image in the Sand' mini-arc, it always plays very Star Trek to me, the Prophets and the Pah-Wraiths are aliens, out of linear time, fighting a battle just as we fight against the dominion in our time. I like to compare the Prophet/Pah-Wraith fighting to what the Time War in Doctor Who would look like to a species in linear time - pretty damn weird, throwing cause and effect (like Sisko's parentage) out of whack.
 
I thought it lost gas when it started taking secondary characters of only moderate interest and making them front and center. Nog and Rom are perfect examples of this. Even Garak had gotten pretty bad by the end. When they would start getting episodes devoted to them, the show lost focus. Despite this, the show was consistently good up until about the end of the Dominion Arc on the station. After that, DS9 was all over the map and did not advance the plot at all unless there was a Very Special Episode devoted to doing it like the one where Sisko gets the Romulans into the war. It was either a Standalone or a Plot episode and was always reluctant to mix the too. Meaning that when they were in a period where each episode should advance the plot, they staggered around accomplishing little, thus leaving it to a 10 episode arc at the very end to wrap up everything and we know how that turned out. Magic books and whatnot.
 
I didn't think it every lost gas.

In fact, I felt season 1 was by far the weakest season, and season 2 the second weakest.

After that, it just got better and better.
 
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