DEEP SPACE 9 BRINGS DRAMA TO A STILL SET
Trouble descends on the space station as hunters seek a fugitive, writes Calum Marsh.
Star Trek is in the air this season — and even more so in Canada.
Bryan Fuller’s new Star Trek TV series — Star Trek: Discovery — will begin filming in Toronto this September. Bell Media announced recently that it has licensed all 727 episodes of previous Trek instalments. They will air in syndication on Space, and be made available to stream nationwide on CraveTV. And Netflix Canada introduced the complete Trek back catalogue to its digital library at the start of the month. Last weekend, millions of us ventured to the multiplex to enjoy Star Trek Beyond, part three of Paramount’s expensively refurbished blockbuster reboot. Like Pokemon, Ghostbusters and the Clinton administration, Star Trek has returned from artifact to phenomenon anew.
For many people, Star Trek ended when The Next Generation did. It was the only one of four Trek spinoffs to be created and produced by Gene Roddenberry, father of it all. It was the most watched, the most beloved, the most decorated and acclaimed. It was the only one to yield a feature-film franchise — four in total. Next Generation is widely agreed to be the best Star Trek series. Based on its reputation I’d long assumed it was the only Star Trek worth watching.
But I was wrong. A few weeks I sat on my couch with a glass of beer and a bowl of barbecue ringolos and submitted myself to the 90-minute pilot of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It had me laughing, and smiling, and shaking my head in amazement, and for a moment nearly tearing up. It’s one of the best TV pilots I’ve ever seen. I loved it.
DS9 is about a space station. And that station stays quite still. The favoured story templates of the original series and Next Generation — investigating an oddity that proves dangerous, happening upon strife or cataclysm, responding to a distress signal that imperils them all — don’t apply. Instead it’s what descends upon the station every week that furnishes the show with its action and drama. An alien fleeing from Running Man-style pursuit stows aboard. Warring species visit for heated arbitration. A puckish deity boards and wreaks havoc! A psychic virus infects the crew!
It’s like a western: The space station is a frontier town, replete with sheriff and saloon. (The alien black-hats always seem to cause trouble at the DS9 bar.) Law and order prevail only tenuously. Anarchy is only a baddie with a six-shooter away from breaking loose.
Would it be a stretch to call this Star Trek’s Deadwood? There’s even an appealing Al Swearengen figure in Quark (Armin Shimerman), DS9’s rapacious Ferengi bar manager, whose schemes and mischief are the source of much amusement. The whole ensemble is lovely, in truth. There’s Odo (Rene Auberjonois), the station’s shape-shifting chief security officer, a no-nonsense lawman — almost a Spock-ish figure — with shades of Hercules Poirot. There’s Dax (Terry Farrell), a host-hopping symbiot getting used to her seventh body. And there’s the station commander, Capt. Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks): He’s Star Trek’s first black lead, and as likable a leader as Picard or Kirk before him.