Where no series had gone before
Why Deep Space Nine isn’t aging very well at all
Calum Marsh’s essay last month on his delighted discovery of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — the third television instalment of the sci-fi franchise — could not have come at a better time. I was just heading off on a vacation and programmed in some binge- watching time. Regular readers will know I’m an unapologetic Trekkie, with a particular fondness for The Original Series. Nonetheless, I’m a Niner first. I’ ve l ong held that Deep Space Nine was, on the whole, the best Star Trek has ever been.
But Calum’s piece, and some of the episodes I’ ve watched, have led me to a dark place. It’s not that I’m turning my back on DS9, but after 17 years since the show went off the air, I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that Deep Space Nine isn’t aging very well. And has indeed aged especially poorly in contrast to the two other Star Trek series that aired (at least in part) during the 1990s — Star Trek: The Next Generation ( TNG) and Star Trek: Voyager.
I enjoyed both of those other shows. But I always held up Deep Space Nine as the superior product. The setting of the show is unique: rather than a starship t ravelling t hrough space, DS9 a base in a strategically important region of space. This enabled a much deeper examination of storylines than a show that is, by design, telling a new story from a new place each week.
The casting of DS9 was superb — the large ensemble of main and supporting characters were uniformly excellent, person for person the best ever put together on Star Trek. The writing was fantastic, with a good balance of heavy and light episodes. Throughout the series, single-show stories were handled just as well as multiinstalment arcs. So what’s the problem? To understand that, you need to know the context out of which DS9 came. The Original Series, of course, got it all started in the 1960s, with the famous trio of William Shatner (Captain Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock) and DeForest Kelley ( Leonard “Bones” McCoy) exploring space aboard the USS Enterprise in the 23rd century. The show was an optimistic version of the future produced during the grim late 1960s. After three years on TV, Star Trek was resurrected as a film franchise, and by the late 1980s, Paramount, which owned the rights, had decided to bring Trek back to TV.
That was the somewhat literally named Star Trek: The Next Generation, set 100 years after the Original Series. Both creator Gene Roddenberry and the studio had drunk the “optimistic vision of the future” KoolAid. The United Federation of Planets, as depicted in TNG, is virtually flawless. The union of peaceful planets has essentially no crime, no want, no conflict, no suffering. The crew of the Enterprise are ideal postmodern humans. Starfleet is a coast guard patrolling calm waters. It all seemed, well, dare I say, boring?
It wasn’t just the fans who noticed this. When DS9 was approved, it was intended, from the start, to be different. The characters would be less perfect — a station commander with unresolved emotional issues stemming from the tragic death of his wife, a first officer with a dark past during a guerrilla war against brutal alien occupiers, a human doctor with a shameful secret. The setting was notably grittier: an isolated outpost above a planet devastated by a brutal war and decades- long genocide of the native inhabitants. In stark contrast to TNG, the crew of DS9 got on each other’s nerves.
It was a hugely refreshing change of pace. Things got darker in later seasons: due to dramatic shifts in the galaxy’s geopolitics ( astropolitics?), the once-isolated outpost becomes a flashpoint for conflict.
At the time, I was delighted. It was a far more realistic take on the future than what TNG had given us. DS9 was Star Trek for grown ups. TNG, as great as it was, l ooked naively dopey by comparison to its cousin.
But that was then. Looking back, it’s DS9 that can often look dopey.
The problem isn’t with the show, it’s with history. Deep Space Nine wrapped up its run in 1999. Barely two years later, of course, the Sept. 11 terror attacks occurred. The Western world has been at war, in some form or another, for 15 years. After having lived through these tumultuous 15 years, it’s getting harder to take DS9 seriously.
A show that purported to be a gritty and lifelike story about war, terrorism and the moral compromises required to protect a free and open society looks like costume theatre. A generation that has seen hostages’ heads sawed off on YouTube cannot be particularly horrified by actors shooting beams of light at each other, where the carnage of war is limited to exploding spaceships and little scorch marks on shirts.
DS9 may be as gritty as Star Trek can ( or should) be, but realistic? Only by comparison to TNG. Against reality, it’s quite tame. And t hat’s t he problem. The show set out to be dark, but the timeless optimism of TNG simply holds up better than the dark vision of writers from a time and place before darkness truly intruded into our comfortable 21st century lives.
Time and circumstance, it seems, have conspired to turn TNG’s dopey naiveté into a more relevant feature than the faux grit of what is still probably a superior series.