Deep Space Nine: a thread for (re)watching this awesome series

Then they have no honorrrrrr.

shooting at the walls of heartache, bang bang

i am the war-yer

I'm near the end of season 4. the one where they wipe worf's brother's memory is shit -- everyone acting like assisted suicide has never been done on trek before.

otm

h8 u 2 >=(

season 4 is where it starts to get really good tbh.

https://trekmovie.com/2018/07/03/editing-completed-for-what-we-left-behind-ds9-documentary-expected-to-be-released-this-year/

2 episodes to go, but after a strong start season 6 has plumbed the depths of the worst television known to humankind.

Fortuitous revive! I just this week started watching DS9 for the first time since it premiered (I think I watched the first season sporadically before I bowed out), largely because I've been verrrrrry slowly working my way through TNG and didn't recall that the two shows had aired concurrently until I hit the TNG season 6 crossover ep. I also didn't realize at the time that this is essentially a western.

(I wonder how much I'm reading into the Bajoran/Cardassian conflict as a reference to Vietnam finally loosing itself from France's grip just in time for US/the Federation to swoop in as a new colonial presence.)

man season 7 was a fucking chore SO MUCH WEYOUN UGH

I'm on season 1, first time watching the show, other than catching eps here and there when it was first broadcast. it's kind of bad a lot of the time!

I'm choosing to see the occasional badness as a parallel to the ramshackle nature of the station itself. As they rebuild and develop this new community, so too will the show develop. In theory. So I've heard.

Leave us not forget how rough TNG was in the beginning...

yeah I'm sticking with it and there have been some good eps

Some good eps in the first couple seasons, but then it really picks up.

i really like the pilot episode, trippy and moving in parts

What is this Mirror Universe with people complaining about too much Weyoun as if such a thing is possible.

xpost 'You choose to exist here. It is not linear.' has been low-key haunting me since I watched the pilot.

Love Weyoun

Definitely prefer the Dominion story arc to the Star Trek as comic soap opera storylines. Especially if they involve Quark, a new holosuite program, the mirror universe, or anyone being shrunken to miniature size by a rare subspace compression phenomenon.

i like the mirror universe, but the ease with which people move back and forth is pretty silly

almost as silly as 'we had to transport keiko's baby into kira'

So like halfway through the first season, I'm feeling very much like I would like to see a spinoff called The Odo Quark-ple, because they're both pretty great and frankly the only characters I really care about atm. With the caveat that I have no idea how the series ends or what their ultimate fate will be, I'd like to go ahead and pitch Paramount on the next best thing (working title is Grumpy Old Aliens but I'm open to suggestions).

OMG, how had I never learned before that Alexander Siddig is Malcolm McDowell's nephew?! It's all right there in his face, so obvious!

whoa!

mind blown

And Nana Visitor is the niece of Cyd Charisse. And I didn't know Siddig and Visitor were once married. Everybody famous is related to some other famous person and they're all married to each other, apparently.

Fuuuuuuck, 'Duet' is so good. Some haters up itt, yo.

I'm finished! Final season spoilers ahead.

I've had my problems with this show and for a while it seemed that despite the increasing gravity of the Dominion war the inhabitants of DS9 were content to carry on dicking around on the holodeck or in the mirror universe, but finally the show rubbed its hands together and got down to business for a pretty compelling season. Nog's holodeck ptsd episode the only Vic Fontaine one not deserving of being destroyed with plasma torpedoes. Some really strong pair-based conflicts towards the end - Worf & Ezri, Dukat & Winn, Kira & Damar. Unfortunately the penultimate episode was a Ferengenoid shitshow and the last one, though a double, felt rushed, Sisko's arc in particular seemed like a complete waste of a 7 season build up. Still, it beats season 6's 3+ Quark episodes, the mirror universe, Vic fucking Fontaine, and "Molly O'Brien disappears in a vortex and reappears as an 18-year-old woman, but she is now feral".

On the whole though I'm going to miss these crazy folks. I might start revisiting TNG...

OMG, how had I never learned before that Alexander Siddig is Malcolm McDowell's nephew?! It's all right there in his face, so obvious!

the last one, though a double, felt rushed, Sisko's arc in particular seemed like a complete waste of a 7 season build up

I think the consensus is that the Sisko conclusion is anticlimactic, though with time and foreknowledge of what ends up happening, the finale feels like a decent conclusion otherwise, especially for the Dominion War.

That said, Ira Behr's original idea for the ending was an enormous missed opportunity: https://trekmovie.com/2018/08/21/ira-steven-behr-reveals-how-he-really-wanted-star-trek-deep-space-nine-to-end-more-ds9-at-stlv-2018/ (spoilers obvs).

I finished the first season, btw, but then I decided to go back and finish up the final season of TNG (which I never completed) before moving on. So I still have a few more episodes of Data hallucinating/dreaming/having a temporary psychotic break (seriously, did these late-period writers just not consult with one another or was this a conscious decision?) until I get back to my Deep Space Cru.

data is a total liability tbh, he should have been fired out of an airlock into the inky vastness after his fourth attempt on the lives of the crew

Seriously, always thought he seemed like a pretty chill dude until the home stretch, I guess starting from the point when Lore reprogrammed him. Now it's like Five Nights at Freddy's on a spaceship.

they did jettison Lore into the inky vastness. it didn't take.

good point

they should have jettisoned both of them into the inky blackness then atomised them with photon torpedoes

thanks for that link Leee. i think i would've been pretty mad if they did that ending though, tbh, lol
seeing little Jakey all grown up still freaks me out

i skipped back to a season 1 episode for some reason, jake suddenly being a little kid again was a shock.

Watched the season 2 ep whispers the other night while high. Great ep

It's starting to pick up a bit.lots of shit in the first couple seasons but season 2 has some bangers for sure

I watched Whispers after reading your post. Good shit! Although I figured out the (pretty obvious) twist annoyingly early.

I wish I still got high, this show seems perfect for that kind of thing.

o shit, odo got laid

gotta be in the top three of worst things to happen on the show.

I watched Whispers after reading your post. Good shit! Although I figured out the (pretty obvious) twist annoyingly early.

I wish I still got high, this show seems perfect for that kind of thing.

― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, February 21, 2019 5:42 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think perhaps my cognition was effected because it only dawned on me later in the episode.

it also occurs to me that this episode probably has very little replay value.

the final stretch of season 2 was very strong. I'm looking forward to the later seasons.

I enjoyed how Evil Sisko (or at least in O'Brien's imagination) was hardly less weird than Regular Sisko

This looks pretty decent! https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/15/star-trek-deep-space-nine-ai-remaster/

Halfway through the second season now (wanted to finally finish goddamn TNG until I realized the goddamn Maquis show up in the second-to-last episode, so here I goddamn am again so I can find out who the goddamn Maquis even are). Past Odo on Terok Nor investigating past Kira is some good ass Trek. O'Brien the replicant is some good ass Trek. I like that they seem to be developing O'Brien-Bashir into another Odo-Quark 'I hate your guts except that anyone with eyes can tell that I adore you beyond words' odd couple. Kai Winn is an effing great villain. And I'm apparently not even to the point where the show gets next-level good? Cool.

Anybody read any of the novels and have suggestions? I'm a little curious. But I've only ever read like two Trek novels ever. I have a feeling I'll be a little bit more curious about the post-series novels once I'm done watching the actual show. I like many of the actors and at least some of the characters (as characters, as opposed to entities who catalyze or are catalyzed by the plot of the week) from the previous shows but this is the first time I'm vibing hard with the whole ensemble. Auberjonois might be my favorite. He may have unfair advantage in my esteem from his days as an Altman utility player but the dude commands every time he's onscreen.

Averting eyes from potential spoilers while scrolling up but I see y'all were recently discussing the very O'Brien replicant ep ('Whispers') I just finished. I'm glad I didn't see the twist coming at all. Great, great ending.

Oh! I've read one. Mid-'90s. It's the only franchise tie-in novel I've ever read. I was at a KOA in Maine, and I got food poisoning, and my family left me behind for the day. The novel was wedged beside the dirtiest latrine in Aroostock County. It didn't have a cover, and I don't remember the title. I think I talked about it with Ian once, though.

In the book, some bad one-off aliens slowly infiltrated the entire station and brutally murdered/enslaved the entire crew. Beheadings and burnings and bioweapons, lovingly detailed. Lots of minor characters died, but Jake (I think) spent the middle third of the novel hiding in vents and watching the aliens maim/decapitate the show's main cast, one-by-one, while doling out breadcrumbs of a plan for galactic destruction. And then somehow Jake did some time time-stuff, rewound the clock to before the infiltration and ... failed to stop it a second time. He died just after rewinding the timeline, but second-timeline version of himself found his first-timeline corpse and somehow deduced what was happening. Then, second-Jake watched some of the crew die (again) before second-Jake was convinced, rewound time again, got injured again, but this time managed to utter a few key phrases to third-timeline Jake, who successfully had the info to stop the invasion. The book ended with second-timeline Jake dying happy, convinced his plan worked, and third-timeline Jake setting out to make it so. (D+)

Jesus. That's dark

i've stalled in the fifth season. there are some great moments all along, but somehow i am not inspired to carry on

tbh i think i mostly just don't care about odo. oh, you're grouchy and have daddy problems whatever terek nor sellout bro

I've been increasingly vibing w this show but now the Dominion is here and, well...yes. There's an air of menace lingering in the background, faint perhaps at the moment, but it feels like shit might be getting real. I enjoy earlier Trek stuff but it often has a soporific air (a combination of Roddenberry's indefatigable utopianism + the ever-present ambient hum of a starship's interior) that kept me from being wholly engaged. DS9...you have my attention.