Deep Space 9

Finally, I’m getting around to this. I had planned to write this before Mattia was born, but things rarely work out as we plan. So I’m doing it now because Deep Space 9 (DS9) is my favorite Star Trek series and favorite TV series ever. It’s much more plot based and less episodic (going from about 2-3 episodes per season of the other shows to 6-7), so this will be long.

One way that I like using for explication of a story is one of Dante Alighieri’s letter to Cangrande, the doge of Venice (I’m not going to tell you which because I don’t remember). There are four ways that an author can convey meaning to the audience: the literal, the metaphorical, the allegorical and the philosophical. The way that I understood is that for most books, there’s the story, that’s the literal. The metaphorical and the allegorical are somewhat interchangeable (at least usually), but whatever. The philosophical is much more about the relationship of humans with the divine, the literal philos sophia, the love of wisdom.

On the metaphorical: DS9 is progressive in all the ways that TNG is liberal.

On the allegorical: Imagine Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail but as Star Trek.

On the philosophical: if TNG is about looking for meaning, DS9 is about looking for God.

But let’s start with the literal to explain that all.

The Setting:

On the edge of Federation space, there is a space station called Deep Space 9. It isn’t actually Starfleet but Cardassian, handed over in a peace treaty. It was an ore processing station that has been repurposed for general purposes, including commerce, which had been absent from Star Trek other than some minor mentions in TOS (and completely absent from TNG).

DS9 is positioned right above Bajor, a technologically and militarily inferior planet that was occupied by the Cardassians for a long time. And I don’t mean they applied taxes or anything. There was slave labor, sex slaves, human trafficking, secret police and every type of 20th century oppression imaginable. It’s fairly easy to draw the comparisons to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Palestinian state, the Armenian genocide or pre-final solution Nazi Germany (because the destruction of the Bajorans isn’t genocidal or systematic but violence and power).

The Cardassians are a major political and military power, roughly on terms with every other power, the Federation, the Klingons or the Romulans (this is relevant later). Their day-to-day life is basically 1984 but in space. There’s a near-omnipotent-and-omnipresent secret police that enforces an authoritarian society.

There are also the Maquis (the last season of TNG covers their origins). They are humans and other Federation species that were living in an area that was handed over to the Cardassians after the peace treaty. However, they refused to leave. The Cardassians came to an agreement to mostly leave them alone, but they sabotage and use guerrilla tactics to attack the Cardassians as much as they can.

Starfleet is somewhat helping the Bajora get back on their feet in the hopes that Bajor will join the federation. The apathy changes until they discover the first stable wormhole that anyone knows about. Things get crazy. The wormhole is inhabited by a group of aliens who are called the wormhole aliens or the Prophets (by the Bajorans). It turns out that they’ve been occasionally communicating with the Bajorans for a long time (who revere them as Gods, relevant for later), not that they know that it’s been a long time. The Prophets exist outside of time and have no ability to experience linear time. They also gifted the Bajorans with various orbs, small fragments of the wormhole that each have different qualities. One lets the user see visions of the future, others travel in time, but most importantly they let someone communicate with the prophets. There’s some even crazier things, but that comes later.

On the other side of the wormhole is the Dominion. This will be hard to talk about without mentioning characters, so I’ll give a general description. The Dominion is a perfectly ordered society. The Dominion is ruled by the shapeshifters, called the Founders in their society, an elusive race that stay as far away from all eyes even those of anyone else in their Dominion. They command with an iron fist and have genetically engineered everyone in their society to fit perfectly in to what are needed.

The Vorta perform the commands of the Founders, acting as military commanders, bureaucrats, diplomats and any other organizational role in their society. Like the next race of the Dominion, they are genetically programmed the revere the Founders as Gods and are incapable of dissent. They are produced by cloning and cannot reproduce on their own.

So now I’ll talk about the Jem’Hadar. They are the soldiers of the Dominion. They are cloned, grow to full size in a few days, and are genetically dependent on a drug, Ketracel-white. The Founders keep them in line by making the process to make the drug as secretive and difficult as possible. The Jem’Hadar are violent and live only a few years.

So, when I was hesitating to call the Cardassians Nazis, this is why. The Dominion are Nazi Germany to the Cardassians’ Fascist Italy. The Dominion do all sorts of atrocities. The least of which comes up in Season 1, Episode 13: Battle Lines. Two tribes of people on a planet were always fighting. Think Hatfields and McCoys. So the Dominion punished them by forcing them to fight an eternal war between each other. Anyone who dies on their planet will be healed, but they can’t leave the planet. So these people are eternally tortured in a cycle of life and death they cannot escape. Another example is Season 4, Episode 24: The Quickening. They infect an entire planet with a nigh-incurable super disease that causes tremendous pain and lesions but is only fatal when people get to the latter end of their sexual maturity. So people have children because they want to have hope for the future, but everyone is destined to die horribly, for generations and generations. All for the crime of rebelling against the Dominion.

The characters:

Starfleet:

1. Benjamin Sisko is the most important character. He is both the Starfleet commander stationed at DS9 and the Emissary to the Prophets. So I’ll touch on that first thing. The story starts that he and his son, Jake, move to DS9 because he’s lost all purpose or faith in his life after his wife was killed in a Borg attack. He despises Jean-Luc Picard, the protagonist of TNG and hero of Starfleet for becoming Locutus of Borg (TNG last episode of season 3 and first episode of season 4). It’s a bold, meaningful choice for the show since Sisko, just like the viewer, has to construct meaning out of what he experiences.

2. Jake Sisko is the son of Benjamin. Unlike the other Star Treks, he and Nog (under Ferengi) grow up together from adolescence to young adulthood. He is so disillusioned with Starfleet that he (like Wesley in TNG) doesn’t join it and goes on his own way. He’s maybe the only main character that goes into a mostly creative pursuit, writing.

3. Jadzia Dax is the science officer on DS9. It’s a bit nebulous what she does (as it is for all ‘science officers’). The most interesting part of her is that she’s a joined Trill. That means that she’s actually two beings: an effectively immortal symbiote (Dax) paired with a humanoid Trill voluntary host (Jadzia). In her past lives Dax has been an artist, an engineer, a diplomat, a father and a mother. So there’s a fine line where Dax has to live in balance of the two personalities inhabiting her body. There’s a lot of development of what exactly it means in her species to be joined with a symbiote and what it doesn’t. Dax is fantastic because the way she’s portrayed is very progressive. She’s effectively transgender and beyond normative sexuality. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her. She just does what she does. She also had the first lesbian kiss on TV, and it was pretty controversial at the time. Note: TOS had some firsts too, such as the first interracial kiss on TV, but TNG didn’t.

4. Julian Bashir is the medical officer, ambitious and arrogant. DS9 is the only Star Trek series where the doctor gets to demonstrate his medical abilities. Bones in TOS was more old-fashioned, cantankerous and a foil for Spock because he was emotional rather than logical. Pulaski (TNG) was more of that, and Crusher was more the mother of Wesley and friend of Troi than fully idealized for her medical abilities (a few minor exceptions and the major exception being season 5, episode 16). Bashir has to wrestle with the fact that he’s genetically engineered (banned in the Federation because of the eugenics wars, elements of which come up in almost every Star Trek series).

5. Miles O’Brien, Keiko, and Worf are three characters/actors that come over from TNG. I don’t have much to say about them except that Miles and Keiko are somewhat comic relief (when horrible things aren’t happening to Miles). Worf has to continue to wrestle with his loyalty to the Klingon empire in the latter half of the series.

Bajor:

1. Kira Nerys is the liaison officer between the Bajoran government and Starfleet. She fought as a resistance fighter against the Cardassian occupation. She is deeply spiritual to the point that she finds herself frequently caught in a struggle between her real life obligations and her religious beliefs.

2. Odo is a shapeshifter, but he’s on the good side. In the last decade of the Cardassian war, a bunch of goo was found in space, and a Bajoran scientist under Cardassian rule slowly discovered what he was and helped raise Odo until he grew into sentience. He was one of a hundred young changelings sent out into the galaxy by the Founders. He believes strongly in order but has difficulty squaring his reality with the strict rules and hierarchy of the Founders in the later seasons.

3. Winn is basically the Bajoran equivalent of a Catholic cardinal. She is zealous and regressive. She will do anything to do what she perceives as what the Prophets wants.

Ferengi: Before I go on to the specific characters, I should talk about the Ferengi as a whole. They were first introduced in TNG and supposed to be the big bad foil to the Federation, hyper capitalist and bloodthirsty in place of curiosity and luxury gay space communism. That didn’t really work out because the Ferengi never really came off as that threatening. So they got a lot more life and exposure on DS9.

1. Quark is the quintessential Ferengi. He is an ardent believer in the Rules of Acquisition (a mercantile, minimalistic bible/Art of War that’s a series of 200+ commandments like ‘treat workers like family: exploit them’). He runs a bar on DS9, starting in the days of the Cardassians. He is notorious for promoting his self worth and surviving.

2. Nog is Quark’s brother and a miserable Ferengi. He values women’s rights and is compassionate. He is often pitted as a foil to Quark because of how much he’s a loser in Ferengi eyes for doing what any reasonable person would consider a good or nice thing.

3. Rom is Nog’s son and undergoes a lot of change for what seems to be a side/comical character. He goes from being very Ferengi and on Quark’s side to Nog’s and joining Starfleet. He serves as a foil to Jake throughout the series. Nog is Ferengi to Jake’s humanity at the beginning, and later Nog is Starfleet and ordered to Jake’s lackadaisical and creative pursuits.

Cardassians:

1. Gul Dukat is the closest thing to persistent antagonist in all of the Star Trek series. He was the governor for Bajor, and, though the Cardassians have withdrawn, frequently finds himself nearby. He is fantastically dynamic, weirdly charming and overpoweringly narcissistic. He believes in himself and nothing else. He is at times a convenient ally to Starfleet, but he ran concentration camps and sides with whoever will give him the most power.

2. Garak is the only Cardassia who lives on DS9. He runs a clothing store on the station and never reveals anything about his origins. His backstory is slowly revealed, but he revels in the mystery. If Gul Dukat is the military side of Cardassia, Garak is the secret police. He’s an onion of deception, lies and subversion. Comically so.

Dominion: 

1. The female changeling is the face of the Dominion’s Founders in the last few seasons. I am reluctant to mention her, but it is important because she leads the war effort (uh, that’ll be mentioned in the story) for the Dominion. She is the embodiment of law and order of her strictly controlled empire. She doesn’t tolerate any sort of deviation from her desires by anyone except by other changelings because, in their credo, no changeling harms another (this series’ Checkov’s gun). In fact, she speaks for all of them (minus Odo) because changelings are entirely alien from other societies in that all changelings more or less a part of one super organism.

<b>Why I like DS9 so much:</b>

So, obviously, there’s an overarching plot. And, however much I said I loved the monster-of-the-week plots that Star Trek often uses, this one is exceptional. Not because it’s particularly nuanced, but it is deep for Star Trek, and it doesn’t hold back. It fulfills its themes in a way that TOS doesn’t do and TNG only does in its very last episode.

The most important thing about the series is that the Benjamin is ready to admit the faults of Starfleet. Let’s start with the peace treaty with the Cardassians. It’s Starfleet’s brand of centrist, principled stands. It brings peace and ends a war, undoubtedly good things, but it doesn’t resolve the fundamental problems that created the war in the first place because Starfleet refuses to intervene in Cardassian internal affairs. The refusal to be proactive sets in motion the events for the later seasons of DS9.

Okay, the crux at the center of this series is the paradox of free speech. There are some people who use their free speech to only undermine the free speech of others. They are the types to do whatever they can to convince others they’re right, no matter if it’s in good faith or not. They’ll claim that all ideas need to be presented as equal on the grand scheme of everything, and the moment that they face a contrary minority opinion, they’ll claim that the opponent is unpopular or unnatural in some way that it doesn’t deserve equal representation. A reasonable person cannot engage with their ideas because they’ll switch argumentative tactics in whatever to convince someone when all of their rhetoric is just flashy, not substantive. I suggest you check out Umberto Eco’s list of 14 features of Ur-Fascism, available, a short version available here, and the whole essay that explains these ideas is here. It’s worth the read.

One of the most famous quotes is: “When I was a boy, I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”  Everyone should understand that because it won an election in 2016.

TNG, which really established modern Star Trek, tolerates literally everyone. Starfleet’s philosophy works for (and washes its hands of the consequences of) what they know, the Cardassians, the Klingons, etc., but it’s aggressively useless against those who act in bad faith and seek to do anything to conquer the galaxy, the Dominion. DS9 is the reaction to that. They pull no punches in showing that for Starfleet to continue existing, it cannot tolerate those who seek to militarize it in fear of its enemies (the Dominion and its shapeshifter spies which can perfectly imitate anyone) or restrict any of the rights of the citizens of the Federation. They cannot “destroy paradise to save paradise”, as is excellently demonstrated in season 4, episodes 11 and 12, Homefront and Paradise Lost. In these episodes, Benjamin along with Odo seeks to increase security of Starfleet because of changeling infiltrators, namely taking blood samples. The only problem is the old-school dad of Benjamin who calls it out for what it is: reckless paranoia. When I first saw the episode (I was like 20), I thought Benjamin’s dad was acting ridiculous, but when I watched it again last year, I realized that he’s completely right. This act allows neighbors to denounce each other. It opens the floodgates to the Gestapo stalking through the everyone’s lives, the constant fear of denouncement to the Inquisition for being a jew, etc. In the episodes, it turns out it was a Dominion plot to undermine the democracy of the Federation because they cannot tolerate free will (check out the essay by Eco). That is the Dominion: every act and decision is mandated by the Founders through the Vorta.

Now, before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy because DS9 introduces the first pure warship (the Defiant) to add to the starships of Starfleet where they had only had multipurpose, scientific research or commerce ships, I don’t think it’s bad. They must accept an active role in combatting the enemy, but they must also do it for the right reasons (check out season 7, episode 23, Extreme Measures for a Starfleet response to the American use of atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

I’m not going to go into all the story because I think it best anyone interested watch the show. Some of the episodes suck, but most of them are good, and some are excellent. But I will mention three story points and a kinda thematic element.

First is season 3, episode 26, The Adversary. A changeling spy has infiltrated the Defiant and is going to destroy the Defiant and kill the protagonists while they’re on board. This is where the series’ Checkov’s gun comes into play, as in Odo has to choose between saving all of his friends and killing the other changeling. The Founders frame the choice as loyalty to his race or a complete betrayal. All they want to do is bring order to chaos, and so Odo’s choice of stopping the plot is a corruption of the super organism.

Before I go on, I wanna talk bout the thematic element. The Dominion is depicted, through their use of absolute control of their sector of space. They justify their intolerance as making sure that they are never the oppressed again. To this end, Jem’Hadar can’t be anything but bellicose and short-sighted because they’re that way from birth (a complete change from TNG’s philosophy of anyone can be saved), obey the Founders (their gods) without question and will die (because they don’t get Ketracel-white if they don’t obey every order, a parallel to the use of methamphetamines in WW2). Check out season 3, episode 6, The Abandoned; season 4, episode 23, The Abandoned, and season 6, episode 2, Rocks and Shoals for episodes about this.

The philosophy of the Dominion is that everyone is a literal instrument, so much so that the Jem’Hadar who pilot their warships know absolutely nothing about what’s going on. It’s up to the Vorta leading them to give out orders, which they follow literally blindly. Also these warships literally suicidally run themselves into the enemy when they are about to be destroyed (another parallel with WW2 and the Kamikaze pilots). The rest of the Founders of the Dominion will not harm Odo, even though he is on the opposite side, because he is one of them. Either they have genetically reprogrammed themselves so much that they cannot understand why one of their own would side with the enemy or because they drank the kool-aid and believe that he is a Founder no matter what, even if it runs opposite to their self-interest.

The second story point is the Klingon invasion of Cardassia. I’m going to gloss over a bunch of things, but the Klingons invade Cardassia at a point at which there is a lot of upheaval in the government. Gul Dukat prevails and becomes the new face of Cardassia and becomes the sole ally of the Dominion in the alpha quadrant, enabling the Dominion assault on the Federation. I bring this up because it highlights the problem with the TNG: the Dominion isn’t afraid to take advantage of Starfleet’s policy of non-interference.

The last story point is the ending. In Star Trek, the ending and the last season of each series is usually pretty bad. In TOS, it’s just kinda a mediocre episode. In TNG, it’s great in my opinion, but the last two seasons are god awful because the writers ran out of ideas. In DS9, the last season isn’t that interesting for the most part, and its best episodes are only good (okay, there are a few gems like season 7, episode 9, Covenant where Gul Dukat can’t help himself but sleep with the married women of his cult).

Okay, so the story is building up to Gul Dukat summoning the Bajoran devil, the Pah-Wraiths. Winn, now the Bajoran pope (Kai), helps him because that’s her only way of proving that the Prophets are actually against the Emissary, who disagrees with her about her orthodoxy. I’m not going to talk about the last episode, but I think, like all serious matters in Star Trek, it’s not executed well (after the part where Winn kills her cardinals to help Gul Dukat because I like how that’s done) and a bit cheesy. But the point is that Dukat’s God is himself. Winn’s god is being right even if that means changing what correct means.

I love this series because it asks every character to be completely honest with themselves. Okay, the one exception is Ezri Dax. For the last season, they switch actresses for Jadzia. In the last episode of season 6, the writers hastily come up with some excuse for her to die, and they get some other actress. It really ruins the story and thematic elements of the series (I’m not going to go into depth about it, but you can read up on it on your own). With that covered, if you watch DS9, I beg you to watch it with a critical eye and ask always ‘what God does this character serve?’ which leads the question of ‘who is my God and what do I do for him/her/them/it?’