selenak

I've given in to my inner Trekker and bought the second season on DVD. Now I liked Classic Trek. Saw the episodes on TV as a kid, cried buckets about Spock's death in the cinema. But the Trek I first got really passionate about was TNG, and to this day Picard is my favourite Captain. But the Trek show which I regard as the overall most interesting, best written and challenging? ST: Deep Space Nine, without a question. Those episodes of the second season I just watched again during recent days beautifully illustrate why.

Season 2 kicks off with a three-parter, "The Homecoming", "The Circle" and "The Siege", and here we get to one of the quality marks of Deep Space Nine - background and politics. The show used it's stationary premise to excellent advantage. The basic situation which got introduced in the pilot gave us the planet Bajor (in whose neighbourhood DS9 is located), until shortly before the show's start occupied by the Cardassians. Which seems to be a clear-cut situation if there ever was one - the Bajorans were the noble victims here, cruelly exploited by the ruthless Cardassians via slave labor and the other joys of occupation. However, DS9 resisted letting things remain so simple, and most importantly thought things through. It didn't idealise the Bajorans. In the wake of the occupation, the political situation on Bajor is, to put it mildly, troubled. In the above named three-parter, we get to watch how some elements from the provisional government conspire to get themselves on top in the power vacuum left by the removal of the Cardassians, use the nationalistic fervour a liberation war has left, and even ally themselves with religious leaders quite effectively.
(Sidenote I: Which is why Vedek Winn plays a prominent part in this three-parter. Winn is one of DS9's best developed semi-regular characters. A political animal to her fingertips - think of a Renaissance Cardinal of the Catholic Church - who does manage to get all the way to the top in the course of the series and become Kai Winn, i.e. the Bajoran equivalent of the Pope. She's more often the antagonist than the ally of our heroes, and yet, and this is important, not a hypocrite. She genuinenly believes she's doing the right thing for Bajor, not just herself, and the final season of the show will reveal her spiritual tragedy. But back to season 2.)
(Sidenote II: DS9 manages to walk a tightrope with religion. Both the views of the deeply religious Bajorans - the Prophets as divine beings - and the views of the Starfleet personell - the Prophets as wormhole aliens who experience time in a non-linear way - are presented as equally valid. Winn aside, there, most Vedeks we see are admirable people. Kira Nerys, one of the most important characters of the show, is presented as deeply religious. So, no smug attitude about the opium for the masses, nor a blindness of how religion can be used as a very effective tool for powerplay - see sidenote I.)

"Cardassians", the fifth episode of the season, is another example for the literal shades of grey which endeared DS9 so much to me. And an episode which I can't see in any of the other Trek shows, or not playing out in this way. More about the why in a moment. First a moment of uninhibited drool: "Cardassians" features my unquestioned favourite semi-regular of DS9, Garak. We, and regular character Julian Bashir, meet Garak early in season 1 and suspect immediately he must be a spy - a Cardassian tailor on a Bajoran space station, what else could he be? The truth which comes out bit for bit during the following seasons is way more complicated, but it's not nearly as important as Garak, Mr. Moral Ambigiuity personified, charming and and intriguing Bashir and the audience at the same time, getting the best lines of each episode he's in, and then, just when one is reasonably sure about what he would or wouldn't do, getting all cold-blooded and ruthless on us. One of Garak's replies to Bashir - "The truth, dear Doctor, is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination" - summs him up perfectly.
In "Cardassians", Garak - who flirts outrageously with Bashir in the early seasons of the show - manipulates him into uncovering the truth (or some parts of it) about the a Cardassian boy who grows up as a Bajoran with his Bajoran adoptive parents. And here's where the not-in-any-other-Trek-show element kicks in: we get the classic adoptive father versus natural father story. The boy's Bajoran and Cadassian father (no mothers in sight, presumably because there are already plenty of characters in this epiosde) are both presented as concerned parents, and neither nobly resigns. As opposed to just about every other Trek show, Sisko (the station's Commander, later Captain) ultimately decides to hand over the boy to the father the kid does NOT want to be with. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. On the way to this acknowledgement of "there are situations without any satisfying solutions" - we get introduced to some Cardassian politics (the entire reason why the boy got left behind on Bajor as a supposed war orphan is because semi-regular guest star Dukat, an enemy of his natural father's, arranged this in order to have a tool in Cardassian in-fighting later on), and more shades of grey in everyone's reactions. Show regular O'Brien, basically the nice Everyman character of the series, still reacts in a prejudiced fashion to Rugal (the boy) until he realises Rugal hates Cardassians (and himself being a Cardassian) more than O'Brien with his lingering memories of fighting them does. And when Rugal's natural Cardassian father, who had believed his son to be dead, sees him again for the first time and tells him how he believed Rugal to have died in the bomb attack on his house which killed his wife as well, young Rugal replies: "You deserved it. You deserved to lose your wife and your son for what Cardassians did to Bajor."
And here we get to a reason why DS9 couldn't possibly be produced in the US today. The Bajorans fought to free their planet from occupation, which makes the freedom fighters by any definition. But one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist, and the word "terrorist" is used on a frequent basis, and not just by the Cardassians.. Kira, who used to be in the Bajoran underground, calls herself a terrorist a couple of times. And the show makes no bones about the fact that the Bajorans didn't just kill Cardassian soldiers. We're not given the comforting illusion that there is such a thing as a "clean" fight for a good cause. They used every method they could to get the Cardassians out, including bombs which hit and killed civilians. "You deserved it", Rugal, who was raised by Bajorans, says, and it's impossible to watch this today without hearing all kind of echoes, from Palestinians saying this to Israelis and Israelis saying it to Palestinians to the awful, awful euphemism "collateral damage".

"Necessary Evil", the show's first episode to use extended flashbacks, highlights these aspects even further. On the surface, it's a little noir mystery, like "Cardassians" was an adoption story. But on another level, it's an examination of the past and it's impact on the present. The nearly successful murder of Quark causes Odo, the station's constable, to examine a case from the days of the Cardassian occupation. Watching Terok Nor, as DS9 used to be called by the Cardassians, is fascinating the first time around (which happens in this episode) and remains so throughout the show (we'll go back there on more than one occasion), and DS9 builds a credible picture of a military occupation. No, not everyone is in the resistance. There are collaborators, too, and when one looks at the slave labor which is the alternative, it's easy to see why. But just what is a collaborator? Odo, we learn in the flashbacks, got his job from Gul Dukat, the Cardassian commander of the station, believing he could remain neutral. Kira, whom he met then for the first time, tells him he'll have to chose sides. She has a point, of course. But the murder Odo investigates wasn't comitted by Cardassians, but by a Bajoran. The end scene of "Necessary Evil" is typical DS9, with Odo having found the answer he rather would not have had. (With hindsight, it also is a strong indication of Odo's feelings for Kira which are going to become important later in the show.)

Yet another aspect of DS9 which I treasure are the Ferengi. Even after BTVS, the first thing which comes to mind when I think of Armin Shimmerman is not Principal Snyder but his great performance as Quark. Just as TNG, via Worf, developed the Klingons from their Classic Trek one dimensionality to a rich culture, DS9 did so for the Ferengi via Quark and his extended family (brother Rom, nephew Nog). "Rules of Aquisition", another early second season episode, is a good example of this. It's a comedy episode which many but not all of the Ferengi episodes are, and plays on the usual Ferengi traits, which are as un-PC as they come. But, to quote a dialogue between Kira and Jadzia Dax:
Kira: "I don't understand your attitude abou the Ferengi. They are greedy misogynistic little trolls, and I wouldn't turn my back on them for a second."
Dax: "Neither would I, but once you've accepted that, you find out they can be a lot of fun."
(Sidenote: season 2 is also where we see Dax develop from the serious character she was in season 1 to the fun-loving rogue who is the most unjudgemental person on the station, with her symbiotic nature allowing her to mix and mingle with Ferengi, Klingons and humans alike.)
The Ferengi might be greedy, but, as opposed to the TNG episodes where they turn up, they're shown to be very good and competent at what they do. They might be chauvinists, but Quark doesn't let occasionally hitting on Dax stop him from being genuinenly friends with her, and Grand Nagus Zek taks Kira's indignation at his passes with amusement and a shrug. (Admittedly this would be infuriating rather than amusing if Zek weren't two-thirds of Kira's size and if she couldn't beat him into a pulp which he knows.) And while the show's writers often use the Ferengi culture to poke fun at their own (see Quark explaining in "The Siege" how overbooking flights is an accepted and honoured Ferengi practise), they also manage to establish it as just as credible as the one of the Bajorans or Cardassians. Best of all, we don't have the "become more human" pressure which turns up in the other Trek shows, starting with Spock on TOS. Quark is allowed to remain a Ferengi, glorying in capitalism till the end, which doesn't stop him from being courageous when he has to be, sometimes surprisingly insightful, and, deep inside, something of a romantic.
"Rules of Aquisition" features the first of Quark's romances (Sidenote: it's an odd and endearing fact Quark, the conventionally ugliest male on the show, has more of those than the other guys) , this one with a Ferengi female in disguise, obviously modelled on "Yentl", with the woman, Pel, ultimately leaving because both she and Quark know he won't change his attitude re: Ferengi traditions. And as opposed to the other early attempts to give the regulars the usual one-episode romances (Bashir in "Melora", Sisko in the very next episode), it works - the resolution doesn't strike one as artificial, to preserve the status quo. (Of course, later the show lets its regulars have long-term relationships, which works as well.) When Dax talks about Quark with Pel, commenting "I don't care what anyone else says - I love him", I can't help but agree.