Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) is a spinoff of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), and takes place concurrently with that series. It primarily features new characters, although it brings over TNG’s Chief O’Brien into a main role and adds Worf midway through its run.
DS9 will naturally draw comparisons to TNG, but it’s like comparing apples and oranges. DS9 is, in many ways, the anti-TNG. It’s a darker show, less utopian, and there’s substantial conflict between main characters (something Gene Roddenberry forbade from TNG). DS9 often moves at a slower pace, but it’s doing more, building its world and its characters. Quality-wise, DS9 is steadier – it doesn’t ever achieve the highs of TNG, but it never plummets to the lows, either.
Like TNG and every other decent piece of science fiction out there, DS9 uses its fantastical setting to address social issues. The setting of the Cardassian-Bajoran conflict means that we get a lot of attention paid to racism and hypocrisy, and we have a very obvious, well-explored parallel to the Nazi Germany-Vichy France/German Jews situations from World War II.
DS9 has a great cast of characters, made more so because here, unlike on TNG, they interact with each other in interesting ways on a regular basis. And, over the course of the show, every single character (even many recurring characters – Dukat, Garak, Rom, Nog, and so forth) grow in considerable and meaningful ways. This gives the viewer the distinct impression that the show has done something, that it has gone somewhere (compare and contrast with TNG, where, for the most part, you can watch any episode in any order without feeling like you’ve missed out on a character’s development).
The cast, headed by Avery Brooks (Sisko), the Great Enunciator, is top-notch. Rene Auberjonois (Odo) and Armin Shimerman (Quark) are particularly good, and the interaction between their characters, highlighted by Odo’s dry sarcasm, is wonderful. They practically carry the first season of the show (and while Quark is awesome, he’s the go-to when the writers have nothing else going on, and so his antics wear thin in later seasons).
The series takes place on a stationary space station, not on a starship, so the writers are able to build a stable of recurring characters. And there are some great ones, most notably Marc Alaimo’s Dukat, Andrew Robinson’s Garak, Wallace Shawn’s Zek, and Jeffrey Combs’ Weyoun.
Season one is uneven, as first seasons often are. But DS9 improves quickly. Season two showed the beginning of serial stories, and the writers really got hold of the characters. It was good enough that when Worf joined the cast in season four, it felt unnecessary (although it was nice to see him again). The series got progressively more serial, highlighted by a six-episode arc to begin season six and a ten-episode arc (that is completely satisfactory if not particularly amazing) to conclude the series.
Serialized TV shows often run into trouble by making bigger promises than they can fully pay off. DS9 never does this. Every time the show sets you up, it pays you off, and it never leaves you hanging. It’s eminently satisfying.
DS9 spends considerably more time (and budget) on space battles than TNG ever did. Some of the fleet battles in later seasons are extremely impressive. And watching the Defiant mow down enemy ships with the fully automatic phasers never gets old.
Dennis McCarthy’s slow, gradually-building title theme is fantastic. Beginning with season four, the theme is sped up – but it was better before, although the opening title sequence is better visually.
TNG featured a great deal of hijinks with O’Brien’s rank, and while they’ve never bothered to explain it in either series, DS9 picked a rank for him and stuck with it.
No show, however great, is without its flaws. TNG suffered from too many vanilla characters; Deep Space Nine drops the ball with religion. The Bajoran religion is important to the series, and it’s the first real look that the Trek world takes at religion. But very little of it rings true.
Firstly, it’s a political religion – the religious leader spends half the show in charge of the planet – but it’s not a theocracy. No more is done with that than is necessary to keep certain supporting characters relevant and on-screen. It’s a bizarrely liberal religion, to be sure – there are no discernable moral teachings of any kind (certainly not against fornication – even the Kai does that!).
Secondly, the characters don’t react believably to the religion. Events continually support that the religion is true, but it’s repeatedly discounted by most people, even by Sisko, the Emissary. So you’ve got, for the most part, unbelieving haters on one side (most of the Starfleet types) and equally annoying flaky believers in a nebulous, Oprah-esque “faith” (Kira, Worf) on the other (Kira’s take on faith in “Accession” is downright pathetic). How can you have faith in faith?
In all, we get a truly bad take on religion (are all the writers so irreligious they can’t write it believably?), and the episodes that focus on the Bajoran religion (“Rapture” and “Covenant”) are some of the weakest in the series.
For the most part, DS9 avoids the tired Trek clichés that got worn out in previous series (clichés that nearly sunk Star Trek: Voyager), although there’s still nothing like a transporter malfunction when you need a story idea. Back in time, alternate reality, another dimension, copy/split/merge characters – you can do it all. And tired formulas endemic to all of TV make occasional appearances – the old courtroom drama where new evidence in the last few minutes saves the day (“Rules of Engagement”), for example.
Some lesser gripes:
-The show frequently uses “human” terms – like “human nature” and “inhumane” and so forth – where no humans are involved.
-The Breen costumes are completely ripped off from Return of the Jedi.
-What happened to the warp 5 speed limit from TNG?
-The issue of Odo’s mass is never satisfactorily addressed – when he’s a mouse or a bag, he should weigh the same as when he’s a person. But nobody ever has a hard time hauling bag-Odo around.
-DS9 continues TNG’s poor, proud tradition of having three-quarters of the Starfleet admiralty be crazy or rogue or both.
DS9 had some story arcs that were greater than the sum of their parts, but here are my favorite individual episodes:
1. “The Search”
2. “Necessary Evil”
3. “The Die Is Cast”
4. “In the Pale Moonlight”
5. “The Way of the Warrior”
6. “Far Beyond the Stars”
7. “Trials and Tribble-ations”
8. “What You Leave Behind”
9. “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places”
10. “The Begotten”
11. “The Nagus”
12. “The Forsaken”
13. “For the Cause”
At this point I would normally list the worst episodes. But while DS9 had its share of mediocre episodes, there were none that were dreadful. There are certainly plenty of episodes where the “A” story works but the “B” story doesn’t, or vice versa, but none where every story fails.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine maintained a high level of excellence for a long period of time, which is rare in television (or any other aspect of life, for that matter). It offered satisfying, complex stories and characters, and delivered on its promises. I give the entire run an 8.
