The SmarK DVD Rant for Star Trek Deep Space Nine — Season One
– Well, here we go again with another marathon reviewing session, this time of the first spinoff of Star Trek: TNG. Created in 1993 as another cash cow for Paramount, Deep Space Nine was a radical departure for the Star Trek universe, featuring a more dark and claustrophobic setting and characters with personal problems. I, however, was never a fan of the series while it was in original syndication, because the other computing science nerds I hung out with in university were more partial to Babylon 5 as far as space station dramas went, and once you get a computer geek off on a rant about which show is better, there’s no point in arguing. Besides, JMS is something of a cult hero to that particular group.
At any rate, I watched very little of the show and basically have no historical perspective to offer on it, like I did with Next Gen. I read enough of the books to know who the major characters are and some of the big story arcs in the later years, but as far as the show in general goes, I’m basically going in blind. I’m willing to give it a chance, since I’ve had a lot of people tell me that taken as a whole, it’s a more fulfilling series than TNG. When it comes to Voyager next year, however, f*ck it, I’m ripping it apart.
The Film:
Based on a space station called Deep Space Nine (duh), it’s the story of the Federation and their attempts to keep Cardassia away from newly-liberated planet Bajor, home of TNG’s Ro Laren. In fact, Ro was the character that this series was supposed to be based around, but Michelle Forbes wanted out and Nina Visitor was written as Major Kita Nerys instead. DS9’s loss is 24’s gain. At any rate, the station is commanded by Commander Ben Sisko, a single father raising a brat named Jake, and he’s essentially stuck out in the middle of nowhere after being one of the only survivors of the Wolf 359 attack by the Borg. His wife was killed there, and he’s still pissed off at Picard about it. Shapeshifter Odo is the head of security for the station, and Ferengi Quark runs the local bar and gambling establishment. Transferring over from TNG, and getting some well-deserved airtime as a result, is Chief O’ Brian, who has mysteriously dropped from Lieutenant (two full pips) to what appears to be a Yeoman (half a pip, which is less than even an ensign!). He has more responsibility, so the rank reduction doesn’t matter so much. The best thing about the show is the boss reverse-colored uniforms, which would soon permeate the entire Trek universe.
The first season only has 19 episodes (20 if you count the premiere as two), and is divided over 5 discs
Disc One:
– Emissary. The pilot episode introduces all the major characters, and is already boring. The station is in a shambles as Sisko arrives there for the first time, since the Cardassians had only given up control of the station (formerly called Tarak Nor) three days earlier. Things immediately get complicated when Sisko has a chat with the local Bajoran religious leader and is given a holy “orb” of immense power. The woman (called a “Kai” by the Bajorans) seems to think that Sisko is the Emissary, sent by the prophets to unify their people. Sisko is dubious, but brings the orb back to the station to examine it. We then meet Jadzia Dax for the first time, as the Trill make their return to Star Trek in the form of a young woman who is carrying a parasitic host that happens to be an old friend of Ben’s. And yeah, those conversations go about as well as you’d expect. They fly out to examine where the mysterious orbs could be coming from, only to discover that there’s actually a stable wormhole a few million kilometers from the station, which isn’t far at all in space terms. Sisko gets caught inside there and has a rather long talk with the aliens who inhabit it, and meanwhile the Cardassians come knocking on DS9’s door looking to claim it for themselves. Kira decides to move the station beside the wormhole in order to guard it for the Federation and Bajor, and a war is averted at the last minute after Sisko has a boring conversation with the aliens about the nature of linear time. Not exactly a great use of two hours (they could have easily squeezed it into one), but it does the job of introducing everyone important and sets up the big plotline for the year.
– Past Prologue. The loyalties of Kira are examined, as a former Bajoran dissident flies into the station and requests asylum. The Cardassians naturally want to take him for themselves, but Sisko holds them off while Kira immediately takes the side of the ex-terrorist, who insists he’s reformed. Meanwhile, Dr. Bashir meets Plain and Simple Garak, a tailor who happens to be a Cardassian, and who Bashir thinks might be a spy. And when the sisters of Duras make a guest appearance at the station and plot things with Garak and the Bajoran, his suspicions seem to be coming true. Cookie-cutter “Where do his/her/their loyalties lie?” Star Trek stuff, but a decent start for the series.
– A Man Alone. Yes, it’s one of those double-meaning episode titles, as yet another former Bajoran terrorist appears on the station (what, is there a convention going on?) and runs afoul of Odo, who promises bad things if he doesn’t leave within a day. And in fact, hours later he’s getting a massage on the holodeck and ends up with a knife in his back. No one entered the room and no one left and the only DNA in the room is the victim’s, leading everyone to believe that the only possible suspect is Odo. The Bajorans on board the station want justice, and soon a message about racism and hating those who are different is being imparted by the show. A very Star Trek twist in the story leads to evidence of a different suspect, however. Meanwhile, Jake and young Ferengi Nog get into mischief while Keiko O’Brien is bored, so a compromise is reached to keep everyone happy, and DS9’s first school is formed. A fun episode with lots of little plot points that will get used again in the future (like Odo and his bucket).
Disc Two:
– Babel. Ah, our first biblical reference in a title sees the station’s crew speaking in tongues after problems with the replicator seemingly drive O’Brien nuts and leave him speaking babble. And not just the usual Star Trek technobabble, but honest to god meaningless words. Turns out that evil Bajoran doctors set up a boobytrap for the Cardassians some 18 years earlier, which is only now being activated and wreaking havoc on the poor inhabitants of the station. Soon only Odo and Quark are left to run Ops while everyone else is stuck in the makeshift hospital and prattling on like an idiot. Must be what a meeting with Brannon Braga is like. Kira saves the day by finding one of the original creators, however, and soon everyone is back to mindless repetition of neutrino waves and zeta particles again. And thank god for that.
– Captive Pursuit. Yup, we’re two discs in and already Sisko is playing fast and loose with the Prime Directive. In this case, an alien comes zooming out of the wormhole in a damaged ship, the first ever visitor from the Gamma quadrant. Thankfully, they speak English over there, too. Miles tries to help fix his ship and they bond, but the lizard dude won’t tell him who he is or why people were taking shots at his ship, only that he’s Tosk. Wasn’t that the Fleetwood Mac album after Rumors? Man, that one sucked. Anyway, soon the guy is looking for ways to access the weapons and growing increasingly paranoid, so Odo locks him up, and no sooner is he caged than bad dudes with helmets and big guns start storming the station looking for him. Turns out that Tosk lives for the glory of being hunted by the other guys, and being taken alive would be a huge dishonor. You can guess the ending for yourself, I’m sure.
– Q-Less. Another returning guest from Next Gen sees everyone’s favorite omnipotent being visiting DS9 to pursue Vash, who has returned from exile in the Gamma quadrant after looting several civilizations for everything they’re worth. She immediately bonds with Quark and they speak the universal language of greed, while meanwhile Q gets under Sisko’s skin and they take things to the ring for some fisticuffsmanship to settle it. There’s a subplot with the station hurtling to it’s destruction or something, but to paraphrase Q, the Enterprise would have figured out the technobabble behind it hours ago and that’s probably why Sisko doesn’t have his own ship. OUCH! Anyway, funny stuff all around here with cute little inside references like the changing uniforms and “technobabble” being used within context of the storyline for the first time I can remember.
– Dax. Ah, our first “major character put on trial” episode of the series. In this case, it asks the philosophical question “If Curzon Dax murdered someone, is Jadzia Dax responsible for it?” Of course, the question is never really answered, but it’s an interesting naval-gazing question for you meditative types. Anyway, Dax gets kidnapped by mysterious alien hitmen who are unable to escape in time, and they reveal that in fact they’re serving a cosmic arrest warrant for a crime committed 30 years earlier by one of Dax’s former lives. Sisko, ever the sneaky sort, stalls for time and then turns the matter over to Bajor in order to buy time for Odo to investigate the matter himself. Dax won’t say anything in her own defense, so Sisko argues metaphysics with the head alien while Odo discovers that Dax (while a horny old man some 30 years earlier) in fact was doing the nasty with the wife of the victim. Odo blackmailing Quark into giving up the bar for the trial was pretty funny, the rest was talking heads and nothing terribly interesting.
Disc Three:
– The Passenger. This one’s a little more sci-fi, but anyone who’s seen Star Trek III or that Treehouse of Horror with the haunted toupee a few years ago can probably figure out the solution about 20 steps ahead of the rest of the crew. Bashir and Kira rush to the aid of a crippled spaceship, which turns out to be carrying a dangerous criminal who attempted to blow up the ship to save himself. Julian tries to save his life, but alas his medical skills aren’t enough to pull him from the dead or ARE they? When everyone gets back to the ship, the poor woman who’s been chasing the prisoner for 20 years is convinced that he’s somehow eluded death, despite the body being right there. And indeed, weird things start happening on the station, and a mysterious stranger makes a deal with Quark to hijack an incoming ship. But if the smuggler is dead, then who’s making the deal? The answer will SHOCK you. Actually, not really, although oddly enough there’s a philosophical question about sharing a consciousness and the responsibilities for action therein which is completely ducked, even after an entire episode about the same thing right beforehand!
– Move Along Home. Definitely one of the sillier titles of the first season, it’s also one of those episodes that jerks you around for an hour with no real resolution to anything. Sisko and the crew are playing ambassador for a first contact with aliens from the Gamma quadrant, who are obsessed with gaming. They visit Quark’s bar, and when they start winning too much, Quark cheats and rigs the Dabo table to even up the odds. However, the visitors notice this and propose a game of their own, which unbeknownst to Quark involves putting Sisko, Kira, Bashir and Dax into a life-sized game board with daunting challenges such as EXTREME HOPSCOTCH and social drinking. Why do all games in the future suck? Anyway, you think they’re dead, but they’re not, because it’s all just a game. Normally I’d blame something like this on Brannon Braga and his fascination with malfunctioning holodecks, but he was working on getting Voyager started by this time so the blame has to lie with the DS9 writers alone.
– The Nagus. A more light-hearted episode sees the awesome Wallace Shawn making his first guest appearance as the Ferengi head of state, the Grand Nagus Zek, with his son and entourage in tow. There’s gold to be made in the Gamma quadrant, but the Nagus is getting old and needs a replacement. His son assumes it’ll be him, but Zek swerves everyone and names Quark instead. Then he drops dead. Whoops. Worse for Quark, people seem to be lining up to kill him, moreso than usual. Meanwhile, Sisko is going nuts trying to keep Jake from hanging out with Rom’s son Nog all the time, figuring him to be a bad influence. Things of course turn out to be quite the opposite. A sweet, fun episode.
– The Vortex. The first hints that Odo might not be alone in the universe after all start to emerge, as a Faberge Egg deal gone horribly wrong leaves one alien in custody and another dead. The victim’s brother swears revenge, but while Odo is interrogating the killer, the guy lets slip that he’s met other shapeshifters in the Gamma quadrant, and he might just be able to bring Odo to them if he lets him go. Unfortunately he’s a pathological liar and Odo doesn’t find what he expected to, but the seeds are planted in his mind.
Disc Four:
– Battle Lines. This one kind of reminded me of “A Private Little War” from the original series, except way creepier. Sisko, Kira and Bashir take the Kai out on a little sightseeing tour of the wormhole, but on the other side they encounter a moon circled by killer satellites, and soon find themselves crash-landed on the surface with a useless ship. Kai Opaka is killed instantly, and the remaining crew stumble into the middle of a centuries-old battle between two factions who are prisoners in what is a giant penal colony. Soon, however, Opaka mysteriously returns to life, and so do the people who were killed in a nearby skirmish with the enemy. Sisko decides to offer amnesty and escape to both sides of the war if they wish to leave when the rescue party arrives, but when Bashir figures out exactly why no one can die, things get complicated. And the end, as no one ends up learning anything, is decidedly un-Trek and rather depressing, if true to the nature of humanity. A weird and intriguing episode, to be sure.
– The Storyteller. One of the themes of the first couple of seasons, before the show became about the Dominion Wars, was the wacky religious beliefs of the Bajorans, and this one is all about that. O’Brien and Bashir head down to the planet for a distress call from a village, where poor Miles gets mistaken for a prophesized leader of the people who can control a rampaging energy monster that attacks once a month. Meanwhile on the station, two feuding factions from Bajor try to settle things with Sisko as the mediator, but one side is represented by a 14-year old girl filling in for her deceased and legendary father. Jake and Nog decide to put the moves on her, complicated things for everyone. Nothing earth-shaking here, just a fun little episode with some character moments for everyone.
– Progress. It’s the old “cantankerous old coots who cling to the old ways know best” message, with a twist. Bajor wants to mine one of the moons for energy, but there are 50 farmers living on it, so they issue evacuation orders and 49 of them comply, leaving one old guy who’s been there for 40 years and has no intention of leaving. Major Kira beams down to talk sense into him, but she soon realizes that the tactics of Starfleet are resembling those of the Cardassians. However, the end result is not what you might expect it to be. Meanwhile, Jake & Nog end up with an unwanted shipment of Cardassian condiments, and begin a series of trades in hopes of turning it into gold-pressed latinum. This kind of felt like two half-baked storylines stretched to an hour and bolted together, and I never enjoy those episodes. Brian Keith as the stubborn farmer is suitably grumpy and gnarled, however.
– If Wishes Were Horses. A slightly bizarre episode sees the standard technobabble emissions from deep space causing some very strange happenings on the station — specifically, peoples’ imaginations are running away from them. Rumpelstilskin comes to life after Miles reads his daughter a story, Jake brings a famous baseball player home from the holodeck, and Julian finally gets to score with Dax (although he chooses not to). Things turn a bit more dire, however, when they discover a bigass rift open outside the station and threatening to devour them and the entire star system. The solution to the problem fits nicely within the rules of the game, although the FINAL solution is Just Another Godlike Alien Species. This was a really charming episode at times, and obviously Michael Piller was involved because there’s a lament for the ongoing death of baseball, where famous future star Buck Bokai talks about how 300 people were in the stands for the last ever World Series. While it was a very out-there slice of the show, they at least played by their own rules, and I can appreciate that.
Disc Five:
– The Forsaken. This is one of those neat episodes where it’s looking like one thing and then turns out to be another entirely. In this case, it starts as a typical light-hearted farce involving Lwaxana Troi, and turns into a really nice story about people growing. The story revolves around a visiting party of ambassadors, whom Sisko is nice enough to dump into Bashir’s lap as a perverse form of entertainment for himself. One of them is Troi, who falls madly in love with Odo of all people after he finds her stolen broach (handed down for 36 generations, naturally). However, when a probe from the Gamma quadrant comes through the wormhole, Odo & Troi get stuck in an elevator shaft, which leaves the unflappable Constable, well, flapped. Meanwhile, the probe leaves a new personality inside the station’s uncooperative computers, and they appear to be falling in love with O’Brien as a result. Finally, Bashir and his unappeasable group of delegates get trapped in a burning hallway as a result of computer glitches. The centerpiece for the episode ends up being the unexpected bonding between Odo and Troi, and the really neat moment they share when it’s apparent that Odo isn’t going to make his 16-hour deadline before turning back into liquid. Everything is tied together again by the end, and it makes for one of the strongest overall episodes of the season, in my opinion, being both funny and poignant when it’s all over.
– Dramatis Personae. Things get a bit silly again as a Klingon ship comes barreling out of the wormhole and explodes in front of the station, and as a result the crew members become increasingly paranoid and irrational. Oddly enough, the only one unaffected is Odo, the most paranoid of them all. As everyone chooses sides and the station deteriorates, Sisko is more concerned with building a clock. Odo uses a well-played bit of deception with Bashir to convince him to help find the solution to everyone’s problem. All these recycled plots with The Crew Goes Insane as the main point got a bit tired after season one of TNG. MAJOR GEEK ALERT: For you continuity buffs out there, watch as Sisko’s comm badge magically appears and disappears again in the climactic scene in the cargo hold.
– Duet. One of the more cerebral episodes sees a Cardassian passenger coming aboard the station for medical treatment, and Kira immediately flags him as a war criminal. He claims that he is nothing more than a filing clerk, but the deeper that staff digs into his past, the more layers to the story they begin to find and the tale twists and turns several times before the ultimate truth of his identity and whereabouts during a slaughter at a Bajoran work camp years earlier are revealed. The question then becomes “If his identity is what they believe it is, should he be executed for crimes committed years earlier?” Very much a Kira episode, and a very strong episode at that.
– In the Hands of the Prophets. The season wraps up as Sisko learns the most important lesson about dealing with religious fanatics: Don’t f*ck with them. A simple lesson about the origins of the wormhole in Keiko’s classroom turns into a terrorist plot by warring factions in the race for the position of Kai down on Bajor. The main plot runs concurrent with the investigation of a murder mystery by Odo and O’Brien, and pretty soon it becomes apparent that the two mysteries are the same one. Will it be in time to prevent a tragedy? The intrigue about who will assume the position vacated by the late Kai Opaka sets up the second season as the first one comes to a close.
Having not paid attention to the show first time around, I have to say that I was amazed by the quality of this first season, even after being warned that it’s boring throughout. Quite the contrary, I discovered, as the stories were mostly strong and nowhere near the level of crap that the first season of TNG produced, or any season of Voyager for that matter. Although the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere for the most part, characters started to grow and it held my attention from start to finish, and I really enjoyed it all the way through. If the following seasons maintain the same quality, you may consider my opinions on the show in general changed.
The Video:
Pretty much on par with the last couple of seasons of TNG (obviously, since they were done at the same time), colors are spectacular and contrasts are strong. There’s some serious compression artifacting during black portions and scene transitions, however, and I could make out matte lines in a lot of the SFX shots in space. So not a perfect transfer, but certainly not distracting like the first seasons of TNG were.
The Audio:
Redone in Dolby 5.1 like all the Trek releases, this season doesn’t take advantage of it, as 99% of the show is in the center channel and the only use of the surrounds is during the pilot. Other than that, my rear speakers were silent and I can’t really judge the quality of the 5.1 mix as a result. That’s not a fault of the mix, it’s just a very dialogue-based season of the show.
The Extras:
As with the TNG releases, you get about 90 minutes worth of featurettes and documentaries. I’ve heard of major spoilers in them for the later seasons, so I’m going to avoid watching them until I’ve seen the entire series on DVD and then go back and do them later, because I’d like to experience things blind. I’ll assume it’s the same rating as the TNG releases.
The Ratings:
The Film: ****
The Video: ****
The Audio: ***
The Extras: ****
