DS9 so far
Jul. 8th, 2010 03:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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eponymous_rose finally convinced me to give Star Trek: Deep Space 9 a try. I'm almost to the end of S2 (I watched "The Maquis" last night), and I'm enjoying it, although I don't think it's going to become my favorite show ever.
DS9 mostly avoids the "everyone learns a valuable lesson" preachiness that I associate with The Next Generation (and TOS, although TOS at its best had, for me, enough good or at least wacky stuff to compensate). The only episode that has really hit my "this is why I couldn't keep watching TNG" button is "Melora," which was well-intentioned but unspeakably bad.
On the whole DS9 is shades-of-gray without being bleak and ethically complex without falling into the trap of false equivalencies. The Bajorans are far from perfect, but that doesn't mean they were wrong to fight against Cardassian occupation; the Cardassians aren't OMG EVIL, but that doesn't mean their military government isn't fucked up or their murder of ten million Bajorans should be forgotten. And, yes, my favorite episodes so far have been the political ones. (Why does this show have a reputation for being right-wing? I can't tell you how happy I was when the Bajoran priest who was all "teach religion in the schools!" turned out to be a power-hungry murdering hypocrite.)
Although I know there won't be any actual LGBT characters, at least there's an acknowledgement of the possibility of same-sex desire: In "Rules of Acquisition," Jadzia Dax figured out that the Pel was in love with Quark, but had no clue Pel was a woman until Pel said so. It's not much, but it's something. And of course there's Jadzia Dax herself, whose gender identity is interestingly complicated.
Speaking of gender, DS9 is refreshingly free of the ingrained sexist storytelling that mars so many genre (and not only genre) shows. The women characters are fully as three-dimensional as the men and their storylines are as interesting; more so in most cases, in fact. And the kinds of stories the women get are the kinds of stories typically given only to men--stories about loyalty, the consequences of past actions, how to make ethical choices, etc. In contrast, storylines traditionally seen as "feminine"--about family and romance--are tending to go to the male characters.
Kira Nerys is 300 flavors of awesome and I hope she starts getting screen time again soon--she's been rather sidelined for a while. Sometimes her regret over her actions during the war is played a little heavily for my taste, but it's never carried to the point where she regrets the fact of having fought (which would imply that the Bajoran resistance was the moral equivalent of the Cardassian occupiers). Unrepentant freedom fighter FTW! Now, in the ongoing post-9/11 terrorism panic, I can't imagine that a U.S. show will ever be so gutsy again.
My other favorite character is Odo, although the development of his character hasn't lived up to the possiblities. He's tending to get the "learning to be human" storylines that TOS gave to Spock and TNG gave to Data, the ones that are about cute moppets befriending him or him having awkward confrontations with his pseudo-father. (I wanted that episode to be much more bitter, because we know that Odo was required to perform shapeshipfting tricks to amuse the Cardassian occupiers, which to me doesn't exactly suggest paternal care on the scientist's part.) I'd love to see stories about Odo's intractable differences from human(oid) beings, about the fact that his whole self-presentation is a somewhat unsuccessful imitation of something he is not. His mouth is not a mouth; he doesn't eat or drink or have a sense of smell; he can imitate rats and drinks trolleys perfectly but he can't get his face to look like any known species (perhaps he secretly doesn't want to?). And he's apparently asexual, which the other main characters persist in Not Getting. They keep encouraging him to be more like them; I'm hoping for episodes that shake up those assumptions and allow Odo to assert difference as something other than lack or deficit.
Other topics: (1) I'd like Sisko better if Avery Brooks would stop declaiming. Some of it's probably deliberate (I laughed when Gul Dukat called Sisko "joyless") but all too often it comes across as Brooks showing us that he'd really rather be playing King Lear. (2) Garak and Bashir are indeed slashy, but so far I'm finding Bashir terminally dull despite his beauty. Hopefully he'll get more development eventually. (3) Quark, although not my favorite, is probably the most vivid and intriguing character on the show, in part because even under all those prosthetics Armin Shimerman can act rings around the rest of the cast. And how cool was it that Quark got to have the Passionate Tragic Romance in "Profit and Loss"? Okay, I rolled my eyes at the actual story, but I adored the fact that it took place between two characters who are kind of ugly by human standards.
So does anyone have fanfic recs for stories that don't contain post-S2 spoilers? (My definition of "spoilers" includes post-S2 revelations about character backstory.) Preferably Kira-centric or Odo-centric and character-focused. Stories that include a component of romance or sex are fine, but I'm not particularly looking for shippy/romantic stories at the moment.
And finally, please avoid mentioning post-S2 spoilers in comments. I'm spoiled for some stuff, but I'm trying to keep further spoilers to a minimum. Thanks!
ETA: I've just watched "The Wire" and now I ship Garak/Bashir much more than I did. And I'm in love with Garak, largely because he seems to have wandered in out of a John Le Carré novel. (Now there's a cracky crossover possibility!)
eponymous_rose finally convinced me to give Star Trek: Deep Space 9 a try. I'm almost to the end of S2 (I watched "The Maquis" last night), and I'm enjoying it, although I don't think it's going to become my favorite show ever.DS9 mostly avoids the "everyone learns a valuable lesson" preachiness that I associate with The Next Generation (and TOS, although TOS at its best had, for me, enough good or at least wacky stuff to compensate). The only episode that has really hit my "this is why I couldn't keep watching TNG" button is "Melora," which was well-intentioned but unspeakably bad.
On the whole DS9 is shades-of-gray without being bleak and ethically complex without falling into the trap of false equivalencies. The Bajorans are far from perfect, but that doesn't mean they were wrong to fight against Cardassian occupation; the Cardassians aren't OMG EVIL, but that doesn't mean their military government isn't fucked up or their murder of ten million Bajorans should be forgotten. And, yes, my favorite episodes so far have been the political ones. (Why does this show have a reputation for being right-wing? I can't tell you how happy I was when the Bajoran priest who was all "teach religion in the schools!" turned out to be a power-hungry murdering hypocrite.)
Although I know there won't be any actual LGBT characters, at least there's an acknowledgement of the possibility of same-sex desire: In "Rules of Acquisition," Jadzia Dax figured out that the Pel was in love with Quark, but had no clue Pel was a woman until Pel said so. It's not much, but it's something. And of course there's Jadzia Dax herself, whose gender identity is interestingly complicated.
Speaking of gender, DS9 is refreshingly free of the ingrained sexist storytelling that mars so many genre (and not only genre) shows. The women characters are fully as three-dimensional as the men and their storylines are as interesting; more so in most cases, in fact. And the kinds of stories the women get are the kinds of stories typically given only to men--stories about loyalty, the consequences of past actions, how to make ethical choices, etc. In contrast, storylines traditionally seen as "feminine"--about family and romance--are tending to go to the male characters.
Kira Nerys is 300 flavors of awesome and I hope she starts getting screen time again soon--she's been rather sidelined for a while. Sometimes her regret over her actions during the war is played a little heavily for my taste, but it's never carried to the point where she regrets the fact of having fought (which would imply that the Bajoran resistance was the moral equivalent of the Cardassian occupiers). Unrepentant freedom fighter FTW! Now, in the ongoing post-9/11 terrorism panic, I can't imagine that a U.S. show will ever be so gutsy again.
My other favorite character is Odo, although the development of his character hasn't lived up to the possiblities. He's tending to get the "learning to be human" storylines that TOS gave to Spock and TNG gave to Data, the ones that are about cute moppets befriending him or him having awkward confrontations with his pseudo-father. (I wanted that episode to be much more bitter, because we know that Odo was required to perform shapeshipfting tricks to amuse the Cardassian occupiers, which to me doesn't exactly suggest paternal care on the scientist's part.) I'd love to see stories about Odo's intractable differences from human(oid) beings, about the fact that his whole self-presentation is a somewhat unsuccessful imitation of something he is not. His mouth is not a mouth; he doesn't eat or drink or have a sense of smell; he can imitate rats and drinks trolleys perfectly but he can't get his face to look like any known species (perhaps he secretly doesn't want to?). And he's apparently asexual, which the other main characters persist in Not Getting. They keep encouraging him to be more like them; I'm hoping for episodes that shake up those assumptions and allow Odo to assert difference as something other than lack or deficit.
Other topics: (1) I'd like Sisko better if Avery Brooks would stop declaiming. Some of it's probably deliberate (I laughed when Gul Dukat called Sisko "joyless") but all too often it comes across as Brooks showing us that he'd really rather be playing King Lear. (2) Garak and Bashir are indeed slashy, but so far I'm finding Bashir terminally dull despite his beauty. Hopefully he'll get more development eventually. (3) Quark, although not my favorite, is probably the most vivid and intriguing character on the show, in part because even under all those prosthetics Armin Shimerman can act rings around the rest of the cast. And how cool was it that Quark got to have the Passionate Tragic Romance in "Profit and Loss"? Okay, I rolled my eyes at the actual story, but I adored the fact that it took place between two characters who are kind of ugly by human standards.
So does anyone have fanfic recs for stories that don't contain post-S2 spoilers? (My definition of "spoilers" includes post-S2 revelations about character backstory.) Preferably Kira-centric or Odo-centric and character-focused. Stories that include a component of romance or sex are fine, but I'm not particularly looking for shippy/romantic stories at the moment.
And finally, please avoid mentioning post-S2 spoilers in comments. I'm spoiled for some stuff, but I'm trying to keep further spoilers to a minimum. Thanks!
ETA: I've just watched "The Wire" and now I ship Garak/Bashir much more than I did. And I'm in love with Garak, largely because he seems to have wandered in out of a John Le Carré novel. (Now there's a cracky crossover possibility!)
no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 10:55 pm (UTC)Without being spoilery, in regards to the things you like, keep watching, because I don't think you will be disappointed by the later seasons in those regards.
Right-wing? What? Seriously? Did people who say that actually watch the show? I guess...well, okay, I could see that kind of sort of based on one later plot-arc, but not really, and on the whole I think the show does a good job of problematizing it even as it puts it on-air. The main criticism I'm aware of is that it's "dark", and whatever negative phrasing that equates to "not preachy, and Sisko isn't/doesn't like Picard."
Speaking of Sisko, he's actually my favorite captain, though I do think it took the writers longer than season 1 to get a solid grip on him. I also love Kira and Odo to death, and Kira in particular because she is an ex-terrorist by some lights, and that will never be possible on U.S. TV again, at least not the way she's portrayed.
The other thing I love about DS9 is that in the long haul it doesn't let any of its characters get complacent about who they are and what they're doing in the universe, even if they seemingly start out that way. Also, the supporting characters do get featured enough to have their own arcs and development, unlike some other Trek shows. (Even Morn. Morn is awesome.)
ETA: The other main criticism of course was that it took place on a station rather than a starship, but I for one like that; I think it's one of the things that allows DS9 to mostly sidestep some of Trek's signature preoccupations, notably the Vulcans (who in TNG mostly show up as Romulans, but it's a definite concern all the same). Unquestionably I think Odo in the early seasons is the primary bearer of that sort of difference, but it's a different kind of difference. /eta
Now I want to go watch the show, augh.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 02:35 am (UTC)Judging from your comments and some I received on LJ, it looks like I thought this viewpoint was more common than it really it. I got it from the DS9 overview here, which takes the show to task for not having better LGBT inclusion, but it also really negative about it in general. I should have been more suspicious of taking it as representative, especially since it displays the slavering Roddenberry-worship that is my least favorite aspect of (some parts of) Trek fandom.
It probably says something about me that the things I'm loving best about the show are the things it was most widely criticized for. Its relative "darkness" appeals to me, and I like the fact that its being set on a station means that there are non-Starfleet, non-Federation recurring characters and viewpoints. Starfleet is ultimately a military organization, and as such it has a fairly closed culture; I have to admit that the way TOS and TNG set Starfleet up as an ideal kind of skeeved me.
Unquestionably I think Odo in the early seasons is the primary bearer of that sort of difference, but it's a different kind of difference
*nods* I'm trying to pinpoint how . . . partly, I think, it's that Vulcans are humanoid, and in TOS at least were portrayed as nearly human, but suppressing some aspects of "human nature" while emphasizing others. And of course Spock is even nearer to human than most Vulcans. Whereas Odo is not truly humanoid, and a lot of human traits simply don't exist in him. He's radically other. And yet of course he isn't, because he doesn't seem to have any memories of his own culture so he's chosen to imitate the Bajoran culture and physiology. And yet again, he still ends up obviously different; his imitation is always visible as imitation. He's very nearly in the uncanny valley, from a humanoid POV. And now I'm wondering whether he keeps his physical imitation relatively crude precisely to avoid that effect.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 03:21 am (UTC)Oh, absolutely. And it's that very non-Starfleet presence that allows the show to play up Starfleet's military elements and bring them out into the open, which I also like.
Yeah, that's a good point, and a great way of putting it, particularly about the uncanny valley. I think...I don't know, TOS and TNG are so much about humanism, essentially, particularly TOS; there's a reason aliens dressed like Greek gods keep showing up. But DS9 is much more of its time, in some ways, in that Francis Fukuyama/1990s kind of way, and Odo reflects that. I'm not sure how to encapsulate what "that" is in a pithy phrase, but it's definitely there.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 12:00 am (UTC)I liked DS9 a lot - most especially the episodes looking at Bajor's politics, and the effects on a population of reclaiming your home and rebuilding after a war. I liked the Bajoran episodes in the later parts of TNG for the same reason (and not just because Michelle Forbes' Ro Laren was smoking hot.)
The Melora episode was clunky beyond belief - I get the feeling it was cobbled together from other storyline. The Encyclopaedia says that the writers wanted a low-gravity character on the show permanently but it was too expensive - I think they might have handled a disabled character better with a bit of time and consideration.
Sisko is a character that needs nuanced writing - sometimes I find him so, so pompous, while in other episodes, he's really very good. I really like him as a reluctant diplomat, and how he'd so obviously rather be on a ship or in the thick of battle. I like him much less with a phaser in hand.
Push on - I am a big fan of the middle seasons. There's some good political story lines, and the female characters keep on being awesome.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 02:41 am (UTC)One hopes. I did like the idea of disability as essentially cultural in some ways, so that in the proper environment Melora wasn't disabled at all, but the conventions/preferences of others made her disabled. But instead of developing that, the writers focused on her attitude and on the godawful romance . . . and then wrote her off after one episode.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear Kira will be getting more to do and that the politics don't disappear.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 12:30 am (UTC)DS9 got off to a slow start for me, but it is, hands down, my favorite of them all.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 02:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 02:45 am (UTC)That's a good way to put it. So far I've found a lot--probably the majority--of the episodes to be mediocre, but when it's good, it's amazing. And the characters would keep me watching even if the amazing episodes were fewer.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 02:10 am (UTC)Anyway, I'm interested to read further reactions as you watch, like you did with TOS, if you feel so inclined!
no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 02:47 am (UTC)