“Tracts of sea, sick at heart”: Battle Lines

I tend to go back and forth on “Battle Lines”. I think it's because, on paper, it sounds like an almost paint-by-numbers Star Trek story reminiscent of nothing so much as Original Series episodes like “A Taste of Armageddon”, “Day of the Dove” and their ilk (and indeed, “Day of the Dove” was a primary inspiration for “Battle Lines”). As such, what usually tends to happen is I watch the episode, like it a whole lot, then go a long while without seeing it, forget how much I like it and think “oh, it musn't be that good. It's basically an Original Series episode and I hate it when Star Trek: Deep Space Nine just chases the Original Series”. Then I watch it again and love it.

Writing this essay should finally break that cycle for me, because “Battle Lines” is most assuredly excellent.

Bear in mind I adored “Battle Lines” at the time, and that probably says something. I especially loved the gritty iconography of these ageless, immortal soldiers constantly slaughtering each other in a bombed out desert cave on a godforsaken moon somewhere with Major Kira and Commander Sisko caught in the middle. In hindsight, yes, it's just another Planet Hell shoot, but for me this is among the most memorable uses of that venerable old studio. It's probably because the slightly Mad Max-esque Ennis and Nol-Ennis have a kind of grungy, 1980s post-apocalyptic aesthetic to them that I quite like. We haven't seen much of that in Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine since the aesthetic's glorious peak in the Gatherers of “The Vengeance Factor”, costume designer Bob Blackman seemingly preferring to emphasize a kind of forced frumpiness in his outfits for the chronological 1990s.

It's perhaps not coincidental then that “The Vengeance Factor” was the final episode aired in the chronological 1980s. However that said I find it really interesting, now that I've brought it up, how we seem to be seeing little echoes of “The Vengeance Factor”, or at least the zeitgeist it was a part of, showing up again this season. The Gatherers themselves showed up in “Vortex”, and they were every bit as fantastically 80s as there as they've always been. And in “Battle Lines”, we once again have a story about a ceaseless war stemming from clan conflicts that may have meant something at one time but which are beyond ancient and petty by now. It's very fitting that little signifiers like this start to crop up again in Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this season, as I consider 1993 and 1994 to be the real last hurrah of the Long 1980s, before the vibe finally gives way to the grimdark and apathy fueled Long 1990s and the climate we're arguably still living in today. It's also perhaps not a coincidence that this season is far and away the best the series has ever been.

“Battle Lines” itself is a good demonstration of this, and a lot of its strength comes from the very thing that, at first glance, comes across as its most Original Series-esque aspect: The rather explicit moral about the futility of war and fighting conveyed through two opposing armies who, thanks to the inability of any of them to die, are literally just fighting because “you're this and I'm not”, in the words of various creative team members. It's such a classic kind of Star Trek morality play trope that you think it has to be derivative of something else, but it actually isn't. It's a simple, almost trite, message (even the names of the combatants almost sound like they should come from a parody of this kind of story: The Ennis and the Nol-Ennis), but damn if it isn't conveyed with startling and sobering effectiveness: I mean, this really is conflict boiled down to its most basic and fundamental roots. “You are one thing and I'm another and this is unacceptable. Ergo, I must kill you”. It frankly doesn't get much more real than that when you get right down to it.

But what sets “Battle Lines” apart in this regard is its strong emphasis on empathy and forgiveness: Where the Original Series was defined by the crew swooping in, issuing proclamations and telling everybody how to do things, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine delivers the story that's the most in keeping with its commitment to healing, rebuilding and rebirth that we've seen so far. First, there's Commander Sisko's empathy with and forgiveness of the prisoners. As he curtly explains to Doctor Bashir in a scene that is as much a showcase for Avery Brooks' range and an air-pounding rejection of the Prime Directive as it is a statement of themes, it doesn't matter what the crimes of the Ennis and Nol-Ennis originally were, they've certainly more than paid for their crimes after centuries living on this hellish and inhumane prison planet. They deserve the opportunity to move beyond the violence and bloodshed that's defined their existence and start new lives.

This is of course brilliantly paralleled with Kai Opaka's subplot with Major Kira. Nerys is not proud of the things she had to do as a member of a guerrilla resistance movement that operated with terrorist tactics, and she doesn't want her hero Opaka to think she's a heartless killer. But what Nerys doesn't fully understand is Opaka's infinite capacity for empathy and forgiveness: She accepts Nerys not in spite of the things she had to do, but because of them and, through her pagh (naturally, the eternal life-force that we all share which binds us all together), helps her come to accept herself too. And this is perfectly played by two absolute masters, Camille Saviola and Nana Visitor, who deliver just grippingly powerful displays of theatrical emotion and drama. It's a scene that's not only pitch-perfect Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, because, as Opaka just about spells out, acceptance of ourselves is the first step towards bettering them and leaving negative energy behind, it's also a wonderful follow-up to “Frame of Mind”, which touched on almost exactly the same sentiment. Once again, the two halves of Star Trek compliment, rather than oppose, one another.

Speaking of Kai Opaka, her exiting the narrative here certainly bears repercussions. For me, this was always the point at which I felt the series left the “Early” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine phase and entered the “Peak” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine phase. Not because Opaka is a poor character or Saviola an underwhelming presence, in fact the contrary; I'll get to mourning her loss here very shortly. But her absence sets in motion what is in many ways the show's definitive story arc: The war of succession in the Vedek assembly for the honour of succeeding Opaka to be the next Kai. A war that starts in earnest at the end of this year, explodes into the forefront to usher in the next and becomes a looming, ever-present question that hangs over the rest of the series. It's a war that forces the Bajorans to confront some deeply-rooted ugliness at the core of their idealized aspirational planet state that brings an unparalleled level of nuance to the setting, and somewhere within these next five months is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's finest hour.

And yet as good as those future stories are going to be, the show loses something massive with the departure of Camile Saviola's Kai Opaka. She was a vividly iconic part of “Emissary”, just as much as anyone else was. She was originally intended to be a recurring character and her relationship with Commander Sisko would only have continued to deepen in complexity and nuance. Had she been given the chance, Kai Opaka could have been just as integral a member of the unofficial main cast as Rom, Nog and Garak, and I personally would have loved to see that. Camile Saviola has an uncanny and beguiling mystical presence that hints at hidden depths, and to me that's a more apt fit for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's brand of storytelling than the Machiavellian machinations of Louise Fletcher and Philip Anglim's Vedeks Winn and Bareil, as well handled and interesting as they are. But, the script called for a character who was effectively a redshirt, and the team thought it would be more respectful to the audience to write out a recurring character. And Kai Opaka was the only one they felt they could afford to let go.

As it sets up what is arguably the show's biggest story arc, it's easy to miss how “Battle Lines” is also a subtle proof of concept for another important part of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's formula. One of the biggest criticisms the series would get from fans is that due to its stationary setting, it was thought that this crew wouldn't be able to indulge in the spirit of exploration that was so beloved in older Star Trek works. But “Battle Lines” demonstrates how this is not only possible, it's something that can be given a fresh twist by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's unique perspective. Materialistically speaking, the station has a component of Runabout starships and a nearby wormhole that links them to the other side of the galaxy. It's really not unfeasible to expect they'll be sending scientific research teams over there to see what they can find, and Miles O'Brien even tells Keiko this in the second episode, seemingly anticipating fan grumblings.

(Which reminds me: I quite like the scenes where Miles and Jadzia are hunting for the downed Runabout: There's a potential here for them to be this show's Science Power Couple, much as Geordi and Beverly are on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Unfortunately, this pairing seems destined to get the same amount of exposure, not helped by Jadzia being written as basically a Doctor Who companion uncomfortably often in these scenes.)

But beyond that, in this episode Commander Sisko, Major Kira, Doctor Bashir and Kai Opaka are on what amounts to a spiritual journey through the Celestial Temple, and the Kai even phrases it in terms of finding one's place in the universe and one's own life's work. Even Julian starts talking in terms of unlocking the mysteries of life and death, although he phrases it in the rhetoric of the philosophy of science. This is a reading I graft onto Star Trek: The Next Generation as well of course, or a reading similar to it, but this particular manifestation is an easier fit for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine thanks to its streamlined clarity of focus that jettisons a lot of the militaristic baggage Star Trek as a franchise inherited from Gene Roddenberry and the Original Series. The Enterprise is the voyaging canoe to be sure (even if nobody except me agrees that it is), but Deep Space 9 has that Celestial Temple and seems custom-tailored to tackle these issues from the outset.

It seems curiously reflected in Kai Opaka's own resurrection. Only by listening to the universe will we discover our newfound purpose. Even, and especially, if it's not exactly where we thought we were going to end up.

“No, I won't sit idly by as you hurl clichés at me”: Suspicions

And this would be a good example of *why* Star Trek: The Next Generation is straining against its material constraints.

I was originally planning to criticize “Suspicions” for being grimdark-Just another boring and juvenile “lengths they will go”, “doing that which must be done” exercise in false depth. But in reality if it's grimdark, it's only halfheartedly so, because “Suspicions” is halfhearted everything. The grimdark stuff feels like going through the motions, as if there's just this assumption that any story about a murder investigation simply has to be grimdark for the portagonists to have any stake in solving it (tracing grimdark's lineage back to Frank Miller is almost a cliché these days, but the comparison does need to be drawn in this circumstance as those are his signature beats to the letter, albeit really watered down and done in a middling fashion). And, for that matter, that we need token “character development” every week to hold the show together. Which, if we're being perfectly honest, is precisely the kind of assumption it's reasonable to guess was floating around this production team's offices, even if it's not as dogmatic as it might be amongst their colleagues across the street.

But more to the point, “Suspicions” is just a boring and inept production. The flashback and voiceover stuff is resoundingly pilloried in fandom (which is something of a surprise for me to learn, as I'd always figured this episode was rather well liked for the aforementioned grimdark), and there is something to be said about the hackneyed use of such noir staples to the point it's become an almost instantaneous signifier of the parodical. However, given that this precise format is going to be used to astronomical success and wild acclaim in little under a year just with Odo instead of Beverly, I'd be careful about writing that off as a fault of “Suspicions”. Maybe then Star Trek: The Next Generation is just bad at this kind of story: While writer Naren Shankar doesn't say that, he does say that he didn't think he was very good at writing murder mysteries.

While I can't speak for Shankar, I do think it would be silly to argue this crew can't do murder mysteries. It's true that given its setting Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a little better poised to handle a brief like this, but it's not impossible to do it over here. “Aquiel” from earlier in the year was a damn good one as far as I was concerned, and it was successful because it remembered the major strength of Star Trek, and especially this version of it, is competency porn and that this crew shines the brightest when you let them do the things they're good at in service of working together to solve the mystery. And that the best way you do that is essentially write a kind of procedural, but the most naturalistic and engaging procedural you've ever seen. The problem with “Suspicions” is that it's effectively the opposite of that, showing Beverly screwing up and wallowing in it. Granted she's not screwing up in her investigative techniques, but she's violating all kinds of regulations and ethical standards to get at the truth, and the story is more interested in how she feels about that then watching her be clever and figuring things out.

Normally I applaud any kind of rule-breaking in Star Trek, but this isn't rule breaking in service of any kind of grater good. I mean it kind of is, at least in terms of the diegetic plot, but the story isn't about vindicating Beverly's actions, its about forcing her anguish at having done what she did. Now that I think about it, this is precisely the kind of voyeuristic conflict spectacle that the various undercurrents of “Frame of Mind” were looking at and rebelling against: Just like Will in that episode, Beverly is subjected to a kind of psychological torture for our amusement, but “Suspicions” lacks the necessary extra level of higher metatext that made “Frame of Mind” work because “Frame of Mind” was a masterpiece and “Suspicions” is boring crap.

I suppose it's interesting to note how the plot of this episode deals, at least in passing, with Ferengi culture and tradition shortly after another episode that deals with them in quite intricate detail. One wonders how much the two teams were communicating with each other in that respect, however, as the depiction of Ferengi funerary rites seems to pretty explicitly contradict what was established in “The Nagus”. People have tried to handwave it this away, but (and you know I'm straining for material here if I start poking at continuity) really it just seems to be a contradiction born out of carelessness. If you're going to build an established universe that spans two concurrently running television series shot across the street from one another that are freely viewable to any and all parties involved at any given time, it seems to me you'd be a bit more behooved to make things like this click together a little tighter than at times they seem to.

I mean there are a few good moments here and there, mostly due to, as always, how astonishingly good the cast is. Beverly is as entertainingly witty and sardonic as ever, both in Gates McFadden's delivery and in the script itself. That's worth taking note of because it's indicative of how the actors' unique takes and personalities have become so well known and so accepted as part of who the characters are by this point that scripts are even written specifically with them in mind. And it's especially telling that we're talking about Gates McFadden here, and actor well-known for not getting on astonishingly well with various production teams over the years, so there's positives to be found in that if nothing else. And there really is nothing else.

Well...There is one thing. Because “Suspicions” is notable as the final appearance of Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan. This is assuredly due to coincidence and scheduling conflicts (she was even tapped to appear in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Rivals” but Goldberg wasn't available during filming), but still, this is sort of an ignominious note for the character to go out on. Star Trek loses something from her absence here, even if a lot of her narrative role is now filled by Jadzia Dax. Guinan had a unique kind of folk magic all her own: Jadzia may be every bit as mystical, but her power takes a different form. As much as Jadzia is an Emissary to the Prophets, we can't quite imagine her staring down Q with the same kind of imperious power Guinan exudes. Star Trek: The Next Generation without her feels like Star Trek: The Next Generation without Captain Picard, Commander Riker, Tasha Yar and Ro Laren.

That is, inconceivable.

“Morphology of the amorphous”: Vortex

Odo is a shapeshifter. I know that sounds obvious to any fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I'm not just talking about his plot superpowers here. Rather Odo being a shapeshifter is a diegetic allegory for the role he plays on the series, and clue as to his character's true nature.

Odo got the first spotlight on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine following “Emissary”, and while it was excellent it was more about the setting of the titular space station itself and inviting comparison with Westerns than Odo himself; it's that “Fort Laramie in Space” again (Star Trek certainly does seem fixated on its precious Hollywood Westerns and seems to want to invoke them whenever and wherever possible). While “Vortex” draws upon Westerns to a significant degree as well: The script took its inspiration from the movie The Naked Spur such that Peter Allan Fields hired Sam Rolfe, the writer of that movie and an old mentor of Fields', to handle the teleplay for “Vortex” (Rolfe had previously written “The Vengeance Factor”, which is probably my favourite episode of the third season, and the script even specifies that Ah-Kel and Ro-Kel had at least two of those gloriously 1980s Gatherers as part of their crew!). But there's more to this episode than simple genre romp pastiche, and “Vortex” is the key moment in establishing precisely who Odo is.

At first, it would seem like he's being depicted as the stereotypical mythic lone gunman Western hero, with Odo, Croden and the script all waxing fairly poetically (and melodramatically) about being an outsider and not having a home to go back to. But this is actually obfuscating pomp and circumstance: Odo is projecting his anxieties about belonging onto his search for his origins. He feels out-of-place with Starfleet and the Bajorans alike and is hoping that if he finds “his people”, he'll finally have a place to belong to (true, but not in the way Odo is conceptualizing it here). But what Odo doesn't realise that the majority of his isolation is self-imposed, and that he's too insular and self-conscious to figure out that his home has always been Deep Space 9. He probably knows this deep down, but he's too stubborn to actually accept, admit and vocalize is to himself, much less to anyone else. So when he asks his pendant at the end about where home is, it's every bit as much of a rhetorical philosophical question as it is an inquiry about a physical location. He's not looking for a place to belong as much as he is looking for permission to admit that the place he belongs is where he's spent the better part of a decade dutifully making a living.

And this does beg an interesting question: Can one actually “belong” to a place like Deep Space 9? The station is, after all, ultimately a port city, and port cities on Earth have traditionally been considered deeply liminal places. Miami is a good example: Its history as a tourist destination built by immigrant railroad workers and its location at the extreme southern end of the continental United States (and thus its proximity to Central and South America-Indeed, Miami is often considered more part of them than it is North America, sometimes to the point of becoming their de facto cultural capital city) gives Miami a history of being seen as the kind of place people pass through. People come to visit, or come to work temporarily to send money back home-Not a whole lot of people actually come to Miami and stay forever. And while Miami remains arguably the most dramatic and unique example you can see similar incidences of this in a lot of other major port cities, like immigrant neighbourhoods in New York City.

But let's not forget that there's power in liminality as well as transience and impermanence, and that liminality can in fact be a state of mind or being. Deep Space 9 reminds us of this subtly all the time through its proximity to the Bajoran Wormhole, the Celestial Temple, and through the existence of Jadzia Dax. Everything is always in flux, and yet everything is also eternally now. When cast in that light, Deep Space 9's status as an interstellar port city thus becomes just another macrocosm and symbol of this selfsame liminal power. And here is where Odo fits, because Odo too is a liminal being, an explicit one. As a shapeshifter, he is infinitely adaptable, able to acclimate himself to any form or climate imaginable. He can fashion himself into anything he needs to be to fit any occasion or situation he might find himself in, and as such could theoretically fit in anywhere he wants to. Which ironically means he belongs on Deep Space 9 more than anywhere else because he's a reflection and manifestation of its own liminal power: Just as we all are, Odo is his universe asserting itself within and as a part of him. Odo is a microcosm of Deep Space 9, and Deep Space 9 is a microcosm of the cosmos itself.

But from a strictly characterization perspective, Odo's shapeshifting symbolizes something else. The fact that he could make himself look like anything and pass effortlessly, yet specifically chooses not to, is quite revealing. After all, why did Odo choose to be a humanoid anyway? Why couldn't he have chosen to take the form of, say, an eloquent and well-spoken hyper-evolved cat beast? Odo chooses to make his face look deliberately unfinished not just as a result of his uncertainty about his identity and his place in the universe, but in an attempt to draw attention to it in a kind of performativity: It's a mask that lets audiences know the role he's taken for himself. His very formlessness is another metaphor: Odo isn't comfortable making up his mind about what exactly he wants to be yet, so he remains permanently fluid and mercurial. The challenge for him is coming to embrace this malleability and liminality instead of viewing it as a curse, because more than anything else that is what makes him belong here. Ironically, it's his very formlessness and lack of understanding about his identity that defines and shapes his character.

There's some other great stuff in “Vortex” as well, apart from Odo's character moments. The effects shots of the titular vortex are really well-done (you can hardly tell the background is all stock footage of the Mutara Nebula from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) and I'd count the battle scenes here among the most memorable effects sequences of the first/sixth season. I also quite like Marvin Rush's lighting in this episode: He's always said the Deep Space 9 sets gave him more to work with then the Enterprise ones did, mostly owing to how much room for shadowplay they allowed. Although that said, a lot of that is due to him having more freedom to experiment with creating his own style instead of having to keep a style consistent with his predecessors in the cinematography department (although with respect to Rush, I don't think he ever managed to make the Enterprise look quite as visually captivating and unique as Edward R. Brown did).

Either way, Rush's handle of the Deep Space 9 sets and their potential to provide high contrast is on full display here. One scene that really struck out to me was when Odo confronts Quark under the stairs of the bar demanding to know the full details of his deal with Croden: There's a lot of shadows on the faces of Armin Shimerman and René Auberjonois, and that combined with the general murkiness of the lighting in Quark's Bar really underscores the tension of that scene. This is what my sensory memory of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on television looks like-People huddled in dark corners energetically whispering at each other with mildly pointed aggression and a tangible feeling of tension. This is how I remember the scene that finally sold this side of the Star Trek universe to me: Dax swinging on a horizontal bar while Kira tries to converse with her from stage right.

I haven't found this scene in any of the episodes I've revisited yet, and frankly I'm not sure if I ever want to. Some things, just like Odo's backstory, are better left to the ether of imagination. Better to be guided by memory and live in the present.

“If he rose/If he chose”: Frame of Mind

It was only a matter of time before we returned to the dark recesses.

In many ways “Frame of Mind” is Brannnon Braga's archetypal Star Trek: The Next Generation story. It certainly bears all of his trademarks: A bold and unafraid examination of genuinely dark psychological horror themes done with a deft and ambitious surrealist flair. Braga is also flatly unafraid to throw us some undiluted theory, with copious quotations, citations and visual nods to the work of Carl Jung. It's a candid and refreshing bolt of unashamed intellectualism that goes a long way towards letting us know what Braga thinks his show's audience is like: Star Trek isn't exactly patronizing, or at least not as much as a lot of other television is, but even so it's still rare for it to be this frankly and openly (and literally) philosophical, and every time it happens it feels like this really should be the way the show always operates. Pretty much nowhere else are you going to get a 200-level course on Jungian psychology and dream theory told through a mini piece of abstract sci-fi cinema on primetime television.

Braga's debt to his idol David Lynch is certainly on display tonight. We wouldn't expect to see blatant body horror on Star Trek: The Next Generation (...yet), but the suitably dreamlike (or should I say nightmarish) flow to the story brought exquisitely to life through James L. Conway's direction remains undeniably Lynchian, and also very, very Brannon Braga. And yet in spite of the entirely deserved wild acclaim this episode gets from fandom (it's yet another stellar highlight of an absolutely astronomical creative period), when you sit down to watch “Frame of Mind” it actually comes across as one of Braga's more restrained and subdued offerings: As haunting as the concept of perceptive reality being in constant flux and turmoil is and as absolutely gripping as Jonathan Frakes is as the beleaguered Will Riker (unquestionably one of his absolutely finest hours on the series, end of: Frakes should have at least been nominated for something), the central premise remains surprisingly pedestrian, at least by Braga standards.

As the series is obviously not going to undo six years of character development and world building in 45 minutes, we know from the start the “real” world is the Enterprise, or some manifestation of it. The game then becomes trying to guess how many iterations we have to pass through and the meaning of a handful of specific psychological signifiers. Unlike Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia, which I once compared to “Frame of Mind” long ago and far away, there's never any genuine doubt cast here onto the true nature of observable reality, it's always just a matter of getting to the bottom of the mystery that's caused things to go all meta-Lynchian and freaky this week. Even when compared to the utterly sublime dreamworld symbolic logic of Braga's own “Birthright, Part I” a few weeks back, “Frame of Mind”'s hook of “Riker wakes up in an insane asylum and doesn't know how he got there” feels fairly straightforward and almost simplistic. Which kind of makes sense once you learn that this was the exact one-sentence pitch that popped into Braga's head randomly and that he wrote in about a day for Michael Piller when the script they were supposed to be shooting that week fell through.

This is not to say, I must emphatically stress, that “Frame of Mind” is at all overrated or ineffective. There are some utterly brilliant bits of abstraction and dream logic here, Frakes is so outstanding and the story and its accompanying mood are conveyed so expertly it's an absolute pleasure to watch on its own merits. I love how the structure of the teaser frame's Riker's psychic torture in terms of the play (which even shares the name of the episode itself) and sets up the narrative misdirection: We first think Riker may actually be in an insane asylum, and that the doctor sounds suspiciously like Brent Spiner is just all the more tantalizing. Then it's revealed to be all just a performative artifice (but then again, isn't everything?), until we see Suna and cut to credits. Paralleling Riker's fractured psyche with his role as an actor (diegetically and extradiegetically) is a clever touch and, naturally, reinforces the latent performativity of the show and the series. My favourite bit comes in the climax where the play and asylum realities converge and Riker finally confronts Suna...With ad libbed lines from the play. As he starts to finally figure things out, the applause of the audience, his friends and colleagues, increase their applause to a standing ovation.

Although Star Trek: The Next Generation has dabbled in it before, “Frame of Mind” marks something of a thematic shift towards more overt psychological darkness that will become more of a theme in the remaining season and a half. At first glance, this sounds like nothing so much as a straight road direct to Grimdark City: Deanna even tells us outright that “sometimes it's good to get in touch with your darker side”. But Brannon Braga is a cleverer writer than that, and falling prey to that temptation is something that Star Trek: The Next Generation is now more or less beyond the reach of It's not *quite* immune to it, grimdark is still Ron Moore's favourite old standby let's not forget, and Naren Shankar can go either way, as next week frustratingly shows. But on the whole, this side of the team has essentially put grimdark behind them. And “Frame of Mind” is doing something way cooler: Instead of wallowing in negativity, one way to read this story is actually a more graphic and explicit version of what we've just seen recently in stories like “The Chase” and “Emissary”: It's about acknowledging and making peace with the self-doubts, regrets and anxieties of our past so that we might heal from them and go on to something new.

...I know when phrased a certain way that still sounds a hell of a lot like grimdark, but I maintain there's a very thin line between them: One is about acknowledging the existence of negativity as part of a healing process to move beyond it, while the other is a voyeuristic, fetishy fixation on it at the expense of everything else with only the hollow pretense and facsimile of character development. One is drama, while the other is the simulacrum of drama. The real thing and its spectacle.

This of course begs the question: What “inner darkness” does Will Riker have to confront? What we know of his past seems fairly tame-He doesn't have a great relationship with his father, but that was cleared up four years ago. His stalled realtionship with Lyrinda Halk seems like it'd be a pretty major regret for him that would have caused him a lot of pain, but they too have seem to have patched things up (and I don't care what anybody says, I still ship them and consider them an item offscreen). And the stuff we get in this episode seems pretty localized and can be chalked up to external factors. Or...can it? Because it seems pretty clear to me that this episode is telling us that Will's personal hell is being trapped in a play, being forced to recite the same programmatic mental anguish over and over again. That's not a comment on Beverly's skills as a playwright, but it may very well be a statement about the material reality of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Will is tortured by the performance of psychological drama. He's stuck in longform scripted drama, subject to the whims of an audience who wants to voyeuristically leer at someone else's misery and writers who gleefully provide that to them for entertainment. Will's torture is grimdark itself, and as the empathic voice of the crew his torment is that of the entire Enterprise. Look at how during the climax, Will's reality literally “shatters”, as if a mirror or camera lens has been tossed to the ground and cast aside. “Frame of Mind” is the next step in Star Trek: The Next Generation pushing against the boundaries of its own existence, aching to transcend to something greater than what it's been allowed to become. One can hardly blame it given the maddening amount of half-starts, unfulfilled potential and neglect it's been subject to over its life to date.

But the fact it does seem so keen to break free is another sign it's not quite ready to yet. For true enlightenment only comes through the understanding of reality's true divine nature. Our lives are to be sublimated, not transcended: We've left behind the panicked adolescent urge to retreat and refuse in the face of reality's frequent uglinesses, and now we must learn to grow out of our mournful, nostalgic yearning to escape. As the Enterprise itself knows, the solution is to be the change ourselves.

“A person who trusts no one cannot be trusted”: The Nagus

There's always been an aspect of duality to the Ferengi. On the one hand, they're meant to be dangerous and threatening capitalists, working as pirates and marauders who use intimidation and strongarming tactics to turn profit at all costs. On the other hand, thanks to their infamous “crazed gerbil” depiction in “The Last Outpost”, there's an undeniable and irreducible silliness to them that at once seems at odds with this intended narrative function.

However as I have previously argued, I feel these two interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive; there's a great deal to be said, after all, about a group of antagonists who at once embody ruthless capitalist values and blatantly misogynistic attitudes (many of which are at least taken for granted and accepted as “the way things are” in modernity, thus becoming hegemonic, or, in the absolute worst case scenarios, idealized and triumphed) and are also seen as a completely harmless laughingstock by the Star Trek universe. I still believe “The Last Outpost” walks this line fairly well, gerbils notwithstanding, but subsequent Ferengi stories have had a rougher time trying to maintain that careful balance. Too often we've been expected to see them as genuinely menacing and ignore their kind of inherent silliness, which is kind of a hard swallow given the aformentioned gerbil jumping (though there was a Michael Jan Friedman story from the third season that actually managed to pull it off in my opinion). Or, the opposite problem: Writers will portray the Ferengi as a total joke and not taken seriously whatsoever. In stories like “Ménage à Troi”, “The Price”, “The Perfect Mate” and “Rascals” the Ferengi's clownshoes quotient is dialed up to such a degree they become so grating to the point of becoming absolutely unwatchable.

By the first/sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and our first regular Ferengi character in Quark, the show has been sort of forced to develop some more nuance with them, although it hasn't been entirely smooth sailing either. After a good show in “Emissary” and a few assorted memorable moments in other episodes (most notably Quark's subplot in “The Passenger”), for as much good as we've gotten there's also been a lot of bad. As fun as Quark and Odo are to see bicker, when they get overexposed to the point of hijacking the show, such as in the insufferable “Odo and Quark Save the Day” of “Babel”, things become less fun. And then there's the utterly obnoxious grovelling Quark is made to do in last week's stupefyingly awful “Move Along Home”.

With “The Nagus” though we now have an entire episode pretty much dedicated toward exploring Ferengi culture in ways we haven't really gotten the chance to see until now, and thankfully the show more or less manages to pull it off and make it seem somewhat respectable (well, as respectable as the Ferengi can ever get I suppose). There are a few parts that grate on me, but most of them are actually from the B-plot and I chalk that mostly up to personal taste. In spite of this episode's origins as effectively a pastiche of The Godfather (yet another slavish reference to old Hollywood-There's even a scene nicked from the Francis Ford Coppola film shot for shot), I found the Ferengi summit Grand Nagus Zek calls in Quark's bar to be delightfully reminiscent of, say, some self-important CEO indulging himself during an annual sales figures meeting for some giant investment firm as the board of directors goads him on with false sincerity through clenched teeth. It's completely hilarious for one, but it's also genius satire that's the perfect extension of who the Ferengi were supposed to be in “The Last Outpost”: This is exactly the way I would imagine Ferengi foreign policy operates, and their prominent purple and gold lamé aesthetic just further invites the art deco and Manhattan comparisons for me. I also just love how the Ferengi are a society organised around a monolithic corporation comprised of sociopaths, sexists, cutthroats and robber-barons: Just like in real life!

Telling a story about these kinds of themes and exaggerating them beyond infinity also makes it easier for us to take note of the striations that develop in this kind of hierarchical authoritarian system. To put it bluntly, the shit rolls downhill: Krax is forever subservient to his father the Nagus Zek to the point several characters point out how he's always living in his father's shadow. It's his resentment of this, along with his own personal ambition (and youthful hotheadedness), that leads him to spring the assassination plot with Rom, who himself is constantly getting dumped on by his older brother Quark. But even Quark isn't on the top of the dogpile himself, as he and the rest of the Ferengi delegates are still lower on the ladder than Zek, though Quark's strength and stubbornness is shown through him being one of the few Ferengi representatives less than thrilled about having to prostrate himself before the Nagus. And yet at the same time, this also shows Quark to be cut of a slightly different cloth than his kinsmen: He speaks of things like honour, loyalty, dignity and cooperation, concepts that would assuredly be alien, if not anathema, to other Ferengi. He's the most charismatic, upstanding and likable one of the lot, in a kind of grizzled antiheroic way. Which only makes sense, as he's one of us. He lives on Deep Space 9. This bears significance to the rest of the plot threads here and is worth returning to a bit later on.

And at the lowest of the low here is, predictably, Nog. As the child and therefore the youngest, he is also the one who bears all of the vitriol and weight from three generations of his elders taking out their frustrations on and power tripping through him. Just as is the case throughout modernity, children are the most powerless of all, denied the freedoms and liberties of their adult relatives to the point they're effectively indentured servants. And the fundamental unfairness and inequality of his society is something Nog is just now starting to realise and chafe against, as adolescents in modernity have done for as long as modernity has existed. But unlike his father, who chose to play the game to win for himself (and fail miserably at it), Nog is starting to realise that maybe there's another, better path for him to go. Regardless of your feelings on this epiphany coming to him through a whitewashed and idealized version of the Western educational system (I have plenty, believe me), the fact of the matter is it still comes through a form of cultural diffusion. Nog's eyes are opened and his horizons are broadened through interacting with people from other positionalities and knowledge-spheres.

Which is actually a theme that resonates at multiple levels throughout “The Nagus”, reinforcing a major tenet of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's utopianism. The “opportunity”, a Zek puts it, is the wormhole. And not just the wormhole, but specifically Deep Space 9 and its proximity to it. People from all different societies and experiential spheres mingle here, resulting in a net positive for everyone. For Zek it's an opportunity to line his pockets. It is for Quark too, but it's something a bit more than that as well: Take notice of how he's the only one who doesn't raise an objection to Nog attending the O'Briens' school over dinner, and how he mentions in passing that he's always wanted to see the wormhole-Not because of where it takes him physically, but merely because of it itself. Because of his permanent presence on Deep Space 9, Quark is beginning to embody its ideals of empathy and self-growth just like his fellow residents.

This is all still a tentative process, mind, just as it is for everyone. And it's therefore wonderfully appropriate how trust, or lack thereof, is a major theme of this episode as well. Chief O'Brien doesn't trust Nog and express his concern about his relationship with Jake to Commander Sisko. The Ferengi famously distrust on principle: None of the delegates trust each other, though Quark does trust Rom and Krax (even though he shouldn't) but doesn't trust Gral, Commander Sisko, Odo and Doctor Bashir (even though he should). And meanwhile, Ben himself isn't entirely convinced he can trust Jake anymore, and likewise Jake distrusts his father enough not to tell him about his entirely benign plans to teach Nog how to read and engage in amateur business ventures with him.

But what's critical here is how the show handles this: Never once do we get the impression this is being done simply to wallow in negative emotions for the audience to voyeuristically partake in, because in each case it's an individual, unique manifestation of utopianism: Quark's decision to “keep things in the family” instead of putting faith in Sisko, Odo and Bashir almost gets him in serious trouble, and the Nog's dilemma over continuing to attend school is framed as really being about the benefits of exposing oneself to other cultures and other ways of thinking instead of remaining isolated in an insular comfort zone of fundamentalism. Even the Ben and Jake story has undercurrents of this, albeit far more subtle ones: What their impasse boils down to is essentially a failure to communicate. Jake is projecting his experiences seeing Nog's frustration with Rom onto his relationship with his own father.

Ben isn't outright forbidding Jake and Nog to see each other out of a basal xenophobia, actually the contrary: He's championing Jake on his enthusiasm to go out and meet new people who are different from him, he's just cautioning his son that part and parcel of everyone having different beliefs is that not everyone's beliefs are compatible and not everyone is going to necessarily like him. The problem is Jake doesn't fully understand what Ben is trying to tell him because, well, Jake is a teenager. One of the things that makes adolescence rough is that constant exposure to new and unfamiliar experiences can be overwhelming to the point of not being entirely sure what to believe anymore. In those circumstances, some teenagers have a tendency to cloister themselves up because they're not entirely comfortable with their experiences and beliefs, have a hard time expressing themselves and aren't always sure who to trust, and that's what Jake's going through here. That doesn't make him wrong, it just means he's a regular kid. It's a damn sight more accurate and realistic a depiction of adolescence than any kid's show or young adult fiction I've ever read, and it's a great call to address it as part of a larger story where trust (and learning to trust) is such an important theme elsewhere.

This also leads to yet another brilliant Jadzia Dax moment. The scene where she basically invites herself into Ben and Jake's quarters for dinner is classic Jadzia, and throughout she demonstrates an absolutely uncanny sense of perceptiveness and empathy. Because of course adolescence is just as hard on parents: We're all just people trying to do the best we can, and there's no playbook telling us exactly how to fill these kind of roles. So this scene is about Ben not being entirely sure how he should act as a dad-Jadzia senses this and, displaying the same preternatural awareness of the narrative she showed in “The Passenger”, guides him into a position to act that's beneficial to both him and Jake employing some abjectly brilliant double reverse psychology. She says if Jake were her son, she'd be the strict (authoritarian) parent, find him and demand he come back to eat his dinner.

But of course she says she's not the type to be a mother or a father (and she really isn't) and has pretty much failed as a parent each time she's tried: She knows it's not the right thing to do, but she also knows a lot of parents think it is the right thing to do (after all, she's been in that position before herself), and she plays on Ben's desire to Do the Right Thing to get him into a place where the rift can be healed. Again, we never explicitly get to see Dax figure out what Jake and Nog are really doing, but we can pretty easily infer that she has and is popping by with that in mind to help smooth things over a bit, just because she's Jadzia and incredibly perceptive and this is the sort of thing she does all the time. I'll bet she knew perfectly well Ben had been waiting on Jake for dinner for a half hour and came by *specifically because* of that. It's a moment that's deeply reminiscent of early Guinan scenes because, just like Guinan, Jadzia plainly does not mean what her words would superficially indicate she means. She's playing an interlocutor to help move the plot along to a more positive place, and it's all in Terry Farrell's inflections and body language, something she's every bit as good at as Whoopi Goldberg.

“The Nagus” is another terrific example of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine doing what it does best. The broad-strokes comedic tone works to obfuscate some storytelling that's far more intricate than the brief might lead to to believe. It's another fantastic use of the ensemble where every major character has a subplot centred around the themes of the week; themes that are a subset and microcosm of the show's larger set of themes and ideals it looks at each and every week. If there's parts that wore on me a bit, it's honestly only because I'm overly familiar with some of the teenage beats and have long since grown beyond tired with them (although I stress this is hands-down the best I have ever seen them examined) and the Ferengi always walk a thin line between endearing and unwatchable for me. But they certainly keep the balance here, and it all adds up to yet another stellar week On the Edge of the Final Frontier.

“Inner Space”: The Chase

“The Chase” is definitive Star Trek: The Next Generation for me. It's one of those episodes I find truly iconic, everything I want this show to be and one of the first stories that comes to mind whenever I think of it in passing. There's quite a lot of those this year.

And yet I'm finding it hard to come up with things to say about it that aren't obvious. I guess I'll address the only real potential criticism I can think of straight away: The von Dänikenism stuff at the end is a little bit iffy and arguably anthropocentric, even if it does fit into the continuity of the established Star Trek universe without incident. But that's sort of the problem with this kind of writing, isn't it? Science fiction writers can focus on details like world-building minutiae and miss the larger social implications of their work. It must be said, however, that Ron Moore and Joe Menosky cite Carl Sagan's Contact rather than Chariots of the Gods? and “The Chase” does provide the interesting wrinkle that the protohumanoids were responsible not for the cultures and religions of the species they gave birth to, but to existence itself, theirs being the only intelligent life in that part of the galaxy (and I like the stipulation “this part of the galaxy” because it hedges against the common sci-fi tendency to downplay the immense size of the observable universe: Maybe intelligent life evolved in other forms elsewhere in the universe. Maybe even in our galaxy, like, say, on the other side of that wormhole near Bajor).

I also adore the protohumanoid's speech: It's such a beautiful and fitting Star Trek message delivered with warmth and conviction by Salome Jens. And from a Vaka Rangi perspective, it's even more appropriate: Cherish and respect life, because we are all living beings bound together by consciousness. And it's entirely fitting that this is a message we hear at the conclusion of a vast, galaxy-hopping adventure (and it's a testament to how much progress we've made this year that I don't even feel the need to point out how well served the cast is, with everyone getting to show off their skills in an effective and memorable way to help solve the puzzle): It's a perfectly effective Star Trek metaphor for the very things we voyage to understand.

Jens' one-scene wonder also showcases what an absolutely killer week this is for guest stars: Apart from her, Norman Lloyd is absolutely wonderful as Captain Picard's old archeology professor and mentor, and he brings a lovely and moving bittersweetness to every scene he's in. Just in passing, Professor Galen's subplot with Captain Picard is a naturalistically flawless demonstration of what's become such a hallmark of this series: An examination of your life guided by awareness, and acceptance, of the weight of your past on your present self. Jean-Luc's words to Beverly about the weight of the past resonated particularly with me: I think it's the best depiction of this theme in the season, and one of the best in the whole series. Galen even provides us with another barbed critique of Starfleet and what stands for: The Professor's stinging indictment of the Federation as a “dull and bloated empire” and Picard's role as “a centurion off patrolling the provinces” is absolutely devestating...But so is Jean-Luc's contention that he wouldn't trade being an explorer for anything.

Then there's Linda Thorson's Gul Ocett, the first adult female Cardassian we've seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the only female Gul we'll ever see. She's a delightfully commanding presence with an incredibly striking style, but the even in spite of all that the standout for me this week is and has always been John Cothran, Jr.'s positively amazing Captain Nu'Daq. I absolutely love this guy and always have: I'll always vividly remember his look, his bombastic inflections and the way he goes around calling everyone a dishounrable Topah, whatever that means. Frankly, he's probably my favourite Klingon character in all of Star Trek and just about the codifying example of the Klingon warrior character archetype-For my money simply one of the all-time greatest prosthetics guest stars in the show's history.

Captain Nu'Daq also leads me to an interesting point, however. One thing that caught my attention on this rewatch was how actually untrustworthy the Klingons are portrayed here. For one thing, they're paralleled with the notoriously devious Cardassians as another “rival faction” for the Enterprise to compete with for Professor Galen's puzzle, but Nu'Daq even tells us that he's initially unwilling to share what his team have found with his Federation allies, leading to that brilliant scene where Nu'Daq tries to bribe Data (and you couldn't have asked for a better showcase for Brent Spiner's comic relief approach to Data's character than that scene, especially getting to act opposite a performance like John Cothran, Jr.'s). Taken on its own this is an interesting way for Star Trek: The Next Generation to depict the Klingons, at least after “Redemption”: One thing that's easily forgotten in the general knowledge that the Klingons and the Federation are allies in the 24th century is that the alliance was depicted as far cooler and shakier prior to “Redemption” and there was a lot of uncertainty and distrust of the Klingons in those earlier episodes, especially in stories like “Heart of Glory” and “A Matter of Honor”.

But in the wake of “Aquiel” this is even more interesting, because there the Klingons were used explicitly as red herring antagonists. So this is two stories in the same season that seem to walk back the post-Gowron affable familiarity between our heroes and the Klingon Empire. It's also interesting to see them paralleled with the Cardassians here, because in a little under a year we're going to be seeing the galaxy positively lit up by bloodthirsty warmongering and unreconstructed imperialism from both of them, with our heroes caught in the middle. Future hindsight aside, it's also a provocative idea to link the Klingons and the Cardassians in this story following “Face of the Enemy” and the eleventh-hour reveal of the Romulan investment in the search. Because in the denouement, it's the Romulan commander who contacts Captain Picard with that lovely speech about how we're all “not so different as we might think”.

I think it's wonderful that the story gives that scene to the Romulans. It could just as easily have gone to Nu'Daq, our Klingon ally, or Ocett, as the Cardassians were originally conceived of as antagonists who could debate our heroes as equals, something it was thought the Romulans could no longer do. But as I said, we're in a post-“Face of the Enemy” world now, and the Romulans have reclaimed a lot of their earlier symbolism because of that. Furthermore, it calls back to Galen's indictment of the Federation at the other end of the episode and sets up an interesting schism that is potentially starting to develop: On one side are the Klingons and The Cardassians, perhaps foreshadowing their looming confrontation with one another, a conflict born of the fact they're both too proud, stubborn and quick-tempered to admit how similar they are to each other. In the original draft of the script the Ferengi were supposed to be involved as well, and you can hypothetically imagine them being on this side too. Meanwhile on the other side are the Federation and the Romulans, who have always been designed as compliments. No, that's not the way it plays out in the plot diegetically, but thematically this is the arrangement that seems to be speaking to me here.

After all, as the story takes care to point out, its the things we share with other life, our inner and fundamental humanity, that's the best hope for progress we have. That's just empathy, and it's not an anthropocentric platitude because our humanity is bound up with life and consciousness, and life and consciousness is everything. Nobody is better poised to understand that better than the Enterprise crew and Romulus. We really are more similar than not, especially our best sides.

“Jam, elephants, peanuts, elephants and dung...”: Move Along Home

Allamaraine, if you can see/Then Allamaraine...Oh fuck me.

“Move Along Home” is astoundingly terrible.

I'm tempted to just leave the essay there-The production woes of this story are all well documented and self-explanatory (the team could not budget, ran out of money, and were working with a questionable brief to begin with) and almost nobody is going to leap to defend it. Ranting about how dumb and silly everything is here feels like a waste of time and preaching to the choir. One thing I will go on a bit of a tirade about is how Terry Farrell's obligation to have Jadzia Dax play alien hopscotch precluded her from guest starring in “Birthright, Part I” as both episodes were filmed the same week. Aside from the fact Dax is and always was obviously the correct character for that subplot, there's also the tragic fact that Farrell was the biggest Star Trek fan of the entire cast, was yearning for a chance to walk the Enterprise sets and was currently rooming with Marina Sirtis at the time.

Farrell begged and pleaded and even broke into tears, but the creative team refused to budge. Apparently for whatever reason they couldn't do a simple strikethrough script edit (even though that's been common practice in Star Trek since time immemorial because this is Star Trek). I guess they were firmly set in their notion that playing alien hopscotch was really gripping abstract theatre and it was really important for Jadzia's character to be the one doing the hopping. I appreciate the commitment to start giving Dax a more active role in the show than has been the case up to now, but I kind of wish this hadn't been the episode where the team dug their heels in.

Apart from satisfying a personal vendetta, bringing this up also allows me to segue into a broader analysis of “Move Along Home”. Well, I say analysis. Part of the reason the team remained so steadfast and doggedly dedicated to an obvious tire fire is because they were dead set on doing an homage to “Checkmate”, episode four of The Prisoner. This means “Move Along Home” is the latest in a long line of Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tributes to Patrick McGoohan's magnum opus, and it also means it's the latest in a long line of utterly and ineptly *failed* Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tributes to Patrick McGoohan's magnum opus. As far back as the second season, Maurice Hurley's creative team tried to do two Prisoner riffs straight in a row with “The Schizoid Man” and “The Royale”, and it was even hoped McGoohan himself would be able to guest star in the former. But “The Schizoid Man” was aimless and kind of creepy and “The Royale” was a frustratingly tepid presentation of half-baked surrealism. And now we've come to “Move Along Home” which is...“Move Along Home”.

In that regard, it's worth asking the question: Why? Along with Hurley and his team, both Michael Piller and Ronald D. Moore were admitted die-hard Prisoner fans. Piller would even frequently cite The Prisoner as his model example of how to make television as art. How can people who have that level of appreciation for the source material consistently screw up this regularly and be this spectacularly awful at adapting it? I don't think it has to do with the level of talent of the writers involved: Apart from Moore (who's irrelevant to this discussion anyway as he's not even on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), every one of those people is a veteran television writer or producer with credits that aren't to be taken lightly. And while yes, they may have tripped up on Star Trek here and there, by this point the argument for the influence of Piller at least on the history of the franchise is straightforwardly a non-issue.

I think the answer may lie somewhere in Star Trek's strained relationship with abstraction and surrealism, especially in recent years. And that's a consequence of changing attitudes about what Star Trek is, what it's about and who it's for. In the 60s and 70s, not coincidentally when its fandom was mostly female, Star Trek was seen as a kind of sci-fi “lite” for the primetime TV crowd, not befitting of attention from “serious” sci-fi fans (who were, not coincidentally, Hard SF fans and overwhelmingly male), in spite of the calibre of “serious” sci-fi writers and creative figures it attracted. This may be part of the reason, apart from just generally being part of that zeitgeist, that the Original Series was able to do so much trippy gonzo psychedelia-influenced stuff back in the day. But somewhere around the early 80s male SF Nerds started to speak up and loudly proclaim their affinity for Star Trek (they've been there pretty much as long as stuff like the tabletop wargaming scene has been around, but they only took control of the discourse in the early 80s), and it's also not a coincidence that this is when the film series began, which laid the groundwork for the climate we're at now. And Hard SF, as a general rule, doesn't like anything that smacks of mysticism or baroque experimentation.

So as of Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, we have an interesting dilemma. We have a Star Trek that's more popular than the franchise has ever been before and will ever be again that's popular entirely because it appeals to normal people, but it's being made by people who came up through early 80s Star Trek fandom. Namely, male Hard SF Nerds who read Star Trek as an extension of the old Golden Age stuff and write with that conceit (we even saw a bit of that in “Dax” with the team's respect for D.C. Fontana's pedigree stemming largely from her perceived status as an old guard Hard SF writer. Whether she is or not is up for debate). And this is kind of strange to think about, considering the art department, namely Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda, are so heavily indebted to animated Japanese science fiction, which is *incredibly* heady and stylized: It's not, and never has been, what Westerners would think of as Hard SF. You'd think if anyone could translate that to a live-action production it'd be them, and perhaps they could under better circumstances.

The team will say the budgeting killed “Move Along Home”, but I honestly have a hard time believing that. You don't need infinite money to do really excellent baroque theatre, as the other half of the team is going to start proving with aplomb and regularity very soon courtesy Brannon Braga. Hell, he already has: Again, look at “Birthright, Part I”. And it probably unfortunately says something that Braga is at once both the person who is most capable of penning proper, genuinely compelling abstract cinema and is also the one person on either team who came onto the series with zero prior knowledge of or experience with Star Trek (apart from Piller, though since he's been around awhile he's a special case). And that's really sad, because Deep Space Nine should be every bit as capable of this as The Next Generation, if not more so, given where it started with “Emissary”.

I dunno, maybe Star Trek just should have been an anime.