Space Invader: Deep Space Nine Lives
Celebrating 30 years of the Best Star Trek* (*Not a typo).
The Tip Sheet is spinning off. Introducing Space Invaders, a newsletter about movies and pop culture that invades this space on Saturday. Arrives irregularly during this pilot phase.
It seems like every other movie that comes out these days is underwritten with a theme of trauma and grief, but in 1993 it was quite unusual to build your TV series’ pilot episode around these ideas; especially if it was a space-based action/adventure show, and especially if that series started with the words “Star Trek.”
This month, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine marks 30 years since its launch, and it opens with our main character, Commander Benjamin Sisko, still living in the moment he lost his wife in battle against Borg and arriving at his new command with a headful of thoughts about sacking his Starfleet career. DS9 was a standout in so many ways – the first Trek series not created by Gene Roddenberry, the first (and so far, only) Trek set on a space station, and the first to be led by a non-White actor – but the first impression wasn’t necessarily excitement about a new space adventure.
So has that changed? During the pandemic, it seemed like people looking for stuff to binge took a good hard look at Deep Space Nine again. Long the red-headed stepchild of Trek and sandwiched between the blockbuster Next Generation and the network-supported Voyager, DS9 was able to do its own thing and establish its own voice without much in the way of studio interference, and the result was – without hyperbole - the Best Star Trek Series Ever Made!
Narrative-wise, the plot was simple. Sisko (played by the incomparable Avery Brooks) is assigned to an abandoned space station in orbit of the planet Bajor. The Bajorans, having secured liberation from the technocratic Cardassians, are looking to establish an independent future for themselves, which becomes both easier and more complicated when Sisko and his crew discover a stable wormhole that connects Bajoran space to the opposite end of the galaxy. The discovery puts Deep Space Nine on the map as a major diplomatic, economic, exploration, and later, military outpost.
That’s what DS9 was about. What it did though was hold a mirror up to the 90s and the hot-button themes of the times like the “end of history”, suspicion of government institutions, creeping militarization, terrorism, the friction between faith and secularism, and pre-millennial questions about inclusion and tolerance.
This has always been something baked into the cake of the franchise. The original series represented both sides of the 60s with the Kennedy-era of idealism around space exploration represented by Captain Kirk and crew as they travel through a galaxy full of racial tumult and war. Twenty years later, The Next Generation embraced Reagan-era corporatism with the captain as CEO delegating authority, making executive decisions after conference with senior staff and negotiating with a shrink at his literal left hand.
Deep Space Nine was a direct response to the tidy and comfortable world of Next Gen, and that was emblemized in a scene from the season two episode “The Maquis”. The story involves Federation colonists going renegade to defend their homes after a new treaty with the Cardassians puts their planets on the wrong side of the border. The Starfleet admiral overseeing the region considers them an irritant, but Sisko, who’s friend is one of the leaders of the rebellion, sees things differently:
Deep Space Nine over the course of its run would repeatedly test the fences of Roddenberry’s vision that the shiny happy people win in the future. It’s not that the idealism of the Federation is a lie, it’s that the people in the 24th century seem to be taking it for granted. Peace and prosperity don’t come cheap, and they don’t come easy, and the characters of Deep Space Nine are continually confronted with hard choices that are often necessary but rarely heroic and sometimes not even in keeping with Starfleet moral standards.
To wit, in season six’s “In the Pale Moonlight”, Sisko is confronted with a conundrum: The Federation is losing a war against the Dominion, essentially an anti-Federation of conquerors from the Gamma Quadrant made up of many aliens under the authoritarian yoke of the Founders. Even allied with the Klingons, Starfleet’s on the ropes and are now desperately seeking an alliance with the Romulans, who are more than happy to let everyone else slug it out in a galaxy-wide war while they cool their heels.
Sisko decides to fake evidence that the Dominion is plotting to attack the Romulans, but in what would end up being a supremely memable moment, the crafty Romulan representative realizes it’s phony. Sisko’s ally in the effort to con the Romulans into war is Garek, an exiled Cardassian who was once a master spy but now lives on DS9 as a “humble tailor.” When the fake fails, Garek blows up the Romulan ship and frames the Dominion for the act, which causes Sisko to react angrily at the murderous presumption until Garek lays out how he’s masterminded the perfect scheme to get the Romulans into the war and save the galaxy.
“And all it cost was the life of one Romulan Senator, one criminal, and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer. I don't know about you, but I'd call that a bargain,” Garek said. And the chilling part is that Sisko agreed with that assessment in the end.
There’s so much to say about DS9. It was able to balance dark dives like “Moonlight” with goofier efforts like season 7’s “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” were the DS9 crew play baseball against an all-Vulcan starship crew. It was able to let entire episodes unfold with barely any presence from the main cast, like “It’s Only a Paper Moon” where Ferengi officer Nog deals with PTSD after losing his leg in battle by retreating into a holodeck version of 1960s Las Vegas. DS9 even chased social justice, like season 4’s heartfelt “Rejoined”, which used two alien characters from a species that lives many lifetimes in different hosts to explore lingering mid-90s bigotry about same sex relationships.
But Deep Space Nice was also unafraid to call out humans for their own B.S. directly.
In season six’s “Far Beyond the Stars”, Sisko is presented with a vision where he’s Benny Russell, a Black writer in 1950s New York who essentially comes up with the story of Deep Space Nine as a magazine serial: The tale of the Black leader of a space station in the future. Russell’s idealism and vision clash with the inherent racism or pre-Civil Rights America, and his White publisher refuses to print the “controversial” story.
Eventually, the publisher relents, and when Benny is out celebrating, his friend Jimmy is shot and killed by two racist detectives who have been hovering around the streets the whole episode. When Benny gets upset about the death of his friend, he’s beaten by the detectives who, in an especially eerie touch, are played by the same actors who portray the military leaders of the Dominion, Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo) and Weyoun (Jeffery Combs). The pointless savagery mimics the ongoing war story arc in the series, but it’s also frighteningly real and visceral, and in context of the Black Lives Matter era, it’s still disturbing prescient.
It's highly unusual for a Star Trek series to take a hard look at us. It almost always uses aliens as a way of exploring timely human issues, but DS9 didn’t just promise that it would get better, it dared the audience to realize that winning paradise is hard fought and not without sacrifice. Star Trek offers a beautiful dream of humans at their best, but it skips over the hard part: How to get over our demons and embrace our better angels? The answer is that it’s an ongoing mission…
You can stream all seven seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on Netflix, Crave, or Paramount+.
This week marked John Carpenter’s 75th birthday. He doesn’t do a lot of directing anymore, but when your legacy involves a 10-year run of hits that includes Halloween, Escape From New York, Christine, They Live, and Big Trouble in Little China maybe you don’t have to work yourself to death. I want to highlight one film from this period, Prince of Darkness, which is vintage Carpenter but not as well known as his other hits.
The story involves a priest played by Carpenter rep player Donald Pleasence who discovers an ancient evil confined under an L.A. church. He brings in a team of scientists to study the whirling pool of green goop as the movie develops a mythology that’s part Biblical end time prophecy and part quantum physics technobabble. It’s almost incomprehensible but its really just window dressing for a non-stop 100 minutes of dread as Pleasence’s priest and the scientists realize that they have no way to stop the evil that’s corrupting them from inside the building.
Ultimately, their survival depends on a fluke, but the scariest part of Prince of Darkness is just how close we can come to the end of the world without anyone ever noticing. It’s a common thread among the movies that make up Carpenter’s “Armageddon Trilogy” including The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness. All underappreciated in their times, but now finally getting the love they’re due.
You can stream Prince of Darkness on Hollywood Suite or rent it on VOD.
The Bookshelf: Corsage; The Menu (Sat-Sun, Wed); and Tár (Fri).
Galaxy Cinemas – Woodlawn: Avatar: The Way of Water; Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Sat-Tues); A Man Called Otto; Missing; M3GAN; Minions: The Rise of Gru (Sat); Pathaan (Wed-Thurs); Plane; Puss in Boots: The Last Wish; The Son; and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime The Movie (Sat-Sun).
Galaxy Cinemas – Clair: Avatar: The Way of Water; A Man Called Otto; Missing; M3GAN; Plane; and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
Mustang Drive-In: Closed for the season.
Princess Cinemas – Original: Aftersun; Broker (Sat); The Princess Bride (Sat-Mon), and Skinamirink (Sat-Sun, Mon-Thurs). Starting Friday, When You Finish Saving the World.
Princess Cinemas – Twin: The Fabelmans; Stories from Land Back Camp (Mon); The Whale; Women Talking.
Apollo Cinema: Alien (Sat); Aliens (Sat); The Banshees of Inisherin (Sat); Door Mouse (Sun, Thurs); Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (Sat-Sun); Raiders of the Lost Ark (Fri); The Rules of Attraction (Tues); Skinamarink (Tues-Wed); and Tár (Sun, Thurs).
Coming up on next week’s edition of End Credits, we’re going to talk about a surprisingly unique dining experience in the devilishly horrific The Menu, which you can now stream on Disney+ or rent on VOD. Also, since The Menu is a send-up of foodies and foodie culture, we will sink out teeth into some of our favourite movies about food and eating, with guaranteed nods to the rarest of all meat: Human Beings!
End Credits airs Wednesday at 3 pm on CFRU and can be downloaded as a podcast every Friday.
And finally, feel free to reach out to me by email at adamadonaldson [at] gmail [dot] com, or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, GuelphPolitico.ca!