DS9 through 6x19
Jul. 24th, 2010 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitIf you comment, please avoid metioning spoilers, even minor ones, for anything after that. Thanks!
Wow, the show's really not kidding around, is it? I love that it dares to be dark, non-utopian, and show good characters doing bad things in the name of a good cause. But I can see why some Trek fans, the ones in love with the original Roddenberry utopian vision, hated it. Starfleet okaying the use of faked documents to draw the Romulans into the war? Starfleet having a black ops division? Ouch.
Episodes like "Inquisition" continue to creep me out because they feel so timely, too.
I was afraid that "In the Pale Moonlight" was going to end up scapegoating Garak, conveniently laying all the blame on him, but (as usual) the show was smarter and gutsier than I dared expect. The way Sisko ultimately accepted Garak's logic was brilliant. And kind of chilling.
However, I am beginning to fear that Garak and Bashir will never have another scene together. *whimpers* It's been ages. And to make matters worse, their lunch-based friendship isn't mentioned anymore even in contexts where it should be (e.g. in "Inquisition"). I don't know if there's any evidence for the rumors that the producers separated them because of excessive slashiness, but it certainly looks plausible.
On the other hand, O'Brien's crush on Bashir is now basically canon as of "Statistical Probabilities." Poor O'Brien, having his devotion not only noticed by third parties but mentioned (and mocked) in front of Bashir. Not that it seems to have harmed their closeness in any way.
O'Brien is awfully susceptible to homosocial-veering-towards-homoerotic male intimacy, isn't he? He was the worst possible man for the job in "Honor Among Thieves" in terms of maintaining any emotional distance. *hugs him, since Bashir didn't at the end of that episode but should have done* All through that closing scene I kept waiting for Bashir to offer him some kind of comforting touch--parts of the scene were blocked in such a way that they ought to have been touching, such as when O'Brien is sitting down and Bashir is standing behind him--and yet there was nothing but a quick, one-handed, manly pat on the shoulder. And then the cat coming to sit on O'Brien's lap, which seemed to me like a pretty blatant substitution for the human contact O'Brien needed. It was a weird scene. [Also: When Bilby offers O'Brien the prostitute and then says, "Don't tell me you don't like girls?" it would have made a lot more sense for O'Brien to say he didn't and use that as a way out instead of putting himself in the position of having to invent a girlfriend. I was not unhappy to see an acknowledgement, again, that queer people exist in this universe, but the remark was phrased homophobically and O'Brien's reaction also had a homophobic edge. For which I blame the writer, not the character, by the way.]
Argh, I really meant for this post to be short, but I have to talk about Dukat a little. "Waltz" was mostly fantastic, although I could have done without Sisko's concluding speech in which he says Dukat is pure evil. Not because I want to defend Dukat in the slightest, but because I think abstracting the idea of "evil" is not ethically useful. And, in storytelling terms, because I'm very afraid this moment is meant to pave the way for some kind of Evil vs. Good, Dukat vs. Sisko (representing the Good as the Emissary) showdown. DO NOT WANT. I deeply fear the same kind of awful pseudo-spiritual nonsense ending that marred Battlestar Galactica (ruined it for me, in fact), especially since Ron Moore seems to be increasingly involved in DS9 as writer and producer. I've loved most of Ron Moore's DS9 episodes, but I do not trust him.
Anyway, I've decided that Dukat's motto should be "all shall love me and despair." He really does want love, and in some ways it's the most horrifying thing about him, because of course it's purely narcissistic and if he doesn't get what he wants, he destroys whoever has "betrayed" him.
"Wrongs Darker than Death or Night" added another interesting new wrinkle by showing that Dukat's twisted little narcissistic games could, in the context of the occupation, still look enough like real love to genuinely affect Kira's mother. Being Dukat's latest pet probably felt wonderful compared to what her life had been up until that point. So, a significant episode for both Dukat and Kira, but it also bugged me because it screws up the timeline. Dukat was prefect for about 10 years, right? And he was prefect at the time the occupation ended, which was just a few months to a year before Starfleet took over DS9. Well, if he was already prefect at the time Kira's mother left the family (when Kira was three), then Kira can't have been older than 14 or 15 at the time of the first DS9 episode, which, no. It also messes up the timeline for Dukat's relationship with Ziyal's mother, which seemed to have still been going on when he sent her and Ziyal off-planet right before the occupation ended. /nitpicking
Finally (it might have made more sense just to talk about the episodes in order) there's 6x13, "Far Beyond the Stars" which was almost 100% pure brilliance. The "but which was the dream?" ending was a little heavy-handed, and Avery Brooks over-acted appallingly in Ben Russell's breakdown scene (Brooks is great at intimate scenes, very bad at anything that allows him to indulge in melodrama), but otherwise it was amazing. Okay, the show was patting itself on the back a little for casting a black man in the lead, but you know, it deserves to. US television in general and genre television in particular is so damn white, and here's a show that has three actors of color in the main cast, plus a number of significant recurring characters. (I did find it interesting that the Bashir-analogue character in "Far Beyond the Stars" was presented as white, although Bashir canonically has Indian or Persian ancestry--it was mentioned in "Statistical Probabilities" but I can't find the exact reference--and Alexander Siddig's father was Sudanese. Presumably the producers wanted Siddig in the episode, and the racism plot wouldn't have worked as well if there had been another writer of color at the magazine. And now I want fic where the not!Bashir character is, say, of Indian origin but passing for white because of racism, and how he feels about Russell's struggle.)
In fact I want fic about everything, but I fear that once I've finished the show and can safely read fic without being spoiled, I'm going to be disappointed by the lack. At least, there's almost never any DS9 fic listed on
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trek_news. *sigh* Everyone's writing about ST XI which was not very good in my opinion, no one's writing about the good show. This is the price I pay for my habit of becoming interested in shows years after they went off the air, I guess.
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Date: 2010-07-25 07:30 am (UTC)There is a DS9 tag at
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Date: 2010-07-25 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-25 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-25 01:20 pm (UTC)Not a spoiler, because it never actually happened: at one point the writers were considering a plotline for season 7 in which Jake found out about the events of "Moonlight" and essentially went Woodward & Bernstein on his father. I think it was dropped because they didn't have time, which to this day makes me hugely sad.
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Date: 2010-07-25 04:22 pm (UTC)Oh, wow. That would've been quite something.
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Date: 2010-07-25 05:05 pm (UTC)I think it was only dropped for time concerns, season 7 has a lot going on. But I wish they'd done it.
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Date: 2010-07-25 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-25 01:46 pm (UTC)I can ask my friend if she has fic recs if you'd like. I don't know what she'd have to offer, though. It might all be shippy.
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Date: 2010-07-25 04:25 pm (UTC)