Deep Space 9 Livetweet, S2, Episodes 16-21

DS9 S2 Ep 16, “Shadowplay”

– Kira says she despises Quark, and lists some good reasons. It’d be nice if that attitude was palpable during her interactions with him in previous episodes. As it stands, this feels inconsistent with her slightly-amused tolerance. 

– Katy wants it on record that Sisko’s pyjamas are good.

– Katy: I love the Star Trek a-plot, b-plot format. It’s so comfortingly the same, every time.

– Sisko: Vedek Bareil is visiting—

Kira: And I’m out, booty calls!

– Katy: Kira’s gotten a bit awkward, now that the sacred orb told her she was destined to fuck this guy. She can’t even look him in the face any more.

– This script is actually very good. Vedek Bareil still can’t make facial expressions, but the lines he’s failing to emote along with are much better!

– Bareil thought he was gonna get laid, but is thwarted when Kira realises this was all Quark’s long-game plot to distract her with bussy. She then gived Quark a thousand middle fingers, throws his sticky-fingered cousin in jail and runs off to fuck her boyfriend. A Victory for Uppish. 

– The prophets somehow neglected to depict Quark’s vital role in getting Kira and Vedek Bareil together. Curious.

– Meanwhile in the A Plot, everybody in a town Odo and Dax visit is a holographic projection created by an elderly, now- dying man. There’s some heavily isekai bullshit wherein the holograms all decide they don’t care who created them, because it’s their shared lived reality that matters. (If the programs have run for years, they may well be sentient? Like they are pushing up against new forms of life, here.)

– Odo becomes a spinning top for a little (holo)girl, and it’s successfully cute. That’s right, for once Odo is not a leaden burden on the narrative. Cherish this precious moment, Odo fans. 

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DS9 S2 Ep 17, “Playing God”

– We’re told that Dax is, historically, a scary Trill symbiote-candidate assassin. (A la Reviewer 2, rather than ‘a murderer’.) To be honest, it’d have worked for me if she was still terrifying in this aspect of her life/work.

– The Cardassian vole is the worst thing I’ve ever seen, so good job, prop guy.

– Every time we go to the Klingon restaurant run by this opera-loving proprietor, it is pretty good. That guy is all right by me.

– Why does this little nerd wanna be a joined Trill? His dad I guess, but he doesn’t want to be here, so.

– ‘You got the station: you’ve got the voles! You could always withdraw—’ Random bitchy Cardassian, you are my favourite.

– This week’s ‘proto-universe!!’ technobabble is w i l d. They’re saying it very seriously, but it’s pretty ?? I think this could have worked better if they’d trusted the audience to hook into the scifi a bit more and played out the explanation, letting it have more narrative focus.

– Quark, a life-ruiner, is here with some ‘life sucks, and then you die!’ advice that comforts no one. This Trill child should have consulted the voles.

– You get the vague suspicion that Trill candidates are raised in a quasi-monastic setting, focused on clean living and high academic achievement. A few sentences to confirm and clarify this would have contextualised Jadzia’s job-shadow kid, and given a shape to his prissiness. (It’s weird that she calls him arrogant early on, when he’s not really done anything yet.) In general it might have worked to retain him for several episodes, giving him a growth arc and Jadzia a relationship with him that meant something.

– I do like that this frustrated child calls Jadzia a ho and stuff!!, and she just doesn’t give a single shit. Nothing a kid could say is going to touch this centuries-old life form’s self-esteem .

———

DS9 S2 Ep 18, “Profit and Loss”

– We’re doing Casablanca this week. Quark’s ex girlfriend has an AMAZING dress and excellent hair, she looks great. She’s a fun character, conceptually.

– An anti-militarist Cardassian student rebel White Rose league is a rich idea.

– Garak: *rips clothing to make a point*

Me: why would he do that, now he has to repair it—

Katy: Sometimes I get the feeling that Garak does not care about his tailoring business.

– You can’t do these one-off, weighty, big romance plots for the same character and never have those relationships have any lingering consequences. The ‘stacking’ effect cheapens every iteration. Eighties BBC scifi (and, arguably, some earlier Star Trek) got around this by just being very light on romance. In part, this was a structural choice motivated by an impetus to avoid this sort of ‘stakes’ conflict. There’s also something to be said about how DS9 finds ‘gross’ Quark’s sexuality inherently surprising and funny, again and again. By Time Three or whatever, is it really much of a surprise?

– Quark’s girlfriend accidentally shoots him and then freaks out about it.

– While I like the idea of her fine, Quark’s Girlfriend does suffer a bit from hetero writing disease. Their whole romance seems to consist of Quark saying ‘remember that time we did stereotypical romantic activities?’ Homie, that’s not a compelling character interaction, that’s a Hallmark card. What are you doing?

– Space Nie Huaisang dobs the White Rose League in, suggests a prisoner exchange for Bajoran nationals (which is accepted) and is then stuck getting asked to paint the roses red instead. Gul Fuckwidget is obviously going to take the credit for this assassination if it works, so Garak would be a patsy to agree. Evidently, this week Garak is a huge patsy, entertaining this phenomenally dumb idea. 

– Garak enjoys a line stolen pretty directly from Avon, along the lines of ‘that alone makes it all worth it’. (Gambit’s version was “yes, well, that makes it all worthwhile.”) I wish that when people tried to rewrite Avon, they understood why that was good writing and how it worked. Instead you get this shit: the plotting equivalent of someone standing next to a painting of a car going ‘vroom vroom’.

– The Star Fleet and Friends cast is very down on the Bajoran provisional government’s commitment to a prisoner exchange: these people we’ve seen, who will suffer if given over to Cardassian custody, are more important that the people we haven’t seen, who are suffering! Granted, giving innocent prisoners over to the Cardassians isn’t cool, but it is a decent enough bet for the Bajoran government, whose primary responsibility is (and this is fair enough!) liberating their nationals from a racist regime that routinely employs torture. Perhaps, in the long term, it would be in Bajor’s best interests to prioritise fostering anti-militarism on Cardassia. But why should Bajor put its money on this movement? Cardassia’s internal affairs are not their business; Bajor’s citizens are being held. Whatever they did (and it was probably political crimes, given the primary vector of contact between these civilisations), the Cardassians aren’t exactly Geneva Convention-compliant jailers.

– Odo’s interference may mean some possibly equally innocent Bajorans remain in custody. He disobeyed a political consensus reached by duly elected officials. Will there be consequences for that?

– Odo is DS9’s answer to Spock and Data; what does that mean for DS9? What does he do for plots?

– A thing that frustrates me about this show’s writing is that I never quite feel comfortable engaging with plot and character problems from a position of knowledge. The genre and logic of this universe aren’t very internally consistent: I’m never sure whether anything out of shot is real. I thought Gul Stealyourcredit would fuck Garak over; he did. But that might just as easily not have been how this universe worked this week. In episode one of this season, we had to believe that, post-occupation, both Bajor and the Federation had established nothing like a protocol for prison camp recovery. More than that, they seemed never to have experienced it before. Do institutions and previous experiences exist in this universe, or don’t they?

This episode, Odo fucks over a prisoner exchange. Will he be fired for that? He won’t, because in this moment we’re in a heroic space opera. However, Bajor made a legitimate political decision Odo disagreed with. This is Bejor’s station. How will Odo’s actions affect future prisoner exchanges? Will Cardassian willingness to carry them out dry up? This show is super willing to say ‘politics’, and to use it as set dressing. It seems less willing to believe in politics as a real thing that exists, with attendant institutional apparatuses and consequences. The terms of the show’s political technobabble are irritating because you can’t co-think with characters, weighing the stakes and choices. The world works exactly as it needs to in order to make the episode work, so engaging with them is ephemeral and unsatisfying. It strongly reminds me of Richard Sennett’s point in The Craftsman regarding the value of material resistance.

Relatedly, I feel like DS9 isn’t consistently presenting or interrogating Odo’s relationship with or fixation on justice. Justice is and isn’t law, and conflicting systems of law are in play. This is especially awkward given that this show is in large part about a just-ended and entirely legal pseudo-Nazi occupation. A friend on Twitter suggested that Odo’s commitment was not to law or justice, but to “bureaucracy. Regulation as engine of actions.” This seems a plausible reading, and Odo’s characterisation, if that’s the case, could be both intriguing and psychologically tenable (if not necessarily sympathetic). But such a characterisation would have to be both consistent and afforded space for development. These seasons are so long and still, nothing about the characters or the world is given adequate time to develop?

The same person (@HooklandGuide) called the show’s handling of Odo tepid. “So often he is reduced to deus ex machina or straight man. There is a failure to make him a lens for the big questions, for the show’s values. Such a missed opportunity. DS9 is a collection of outsider perspectives (Sisko as Federation, but outsider as a mystic; O’Brien as ranks not officer; Kira as Bajoran working with Federation; Garak as exile etc.) and yet the one who should be the Spock/Data level outsider is almost entirely lost.”

———

DS9 S2 Ep 19, “Blood Oath”

– This Musketeer is drunk as fuck. This other Klingon is painstakingly slicing a kugel. Together, these three ancient Klingons and Dax will hunt an albino (an albino what??) who wronged them.

– Quark says a battle happened a hundred years ago, and then Odo calls it ancient. Even if it’s a casual usage, homie, aren’t there several Federation species for whom that length of time is easily inside an average lifespan, like Vulcans? That’s got to alter your cultural concept of time.

– The gifs are right, Klingons are cool with transition. 

– Awkwardly, out of nowhere, Dax asks Kira how many bitches she killed as a resistance soldier. 

Kira: Uuuuuuh, homie?

– I think Dax called the guy they’re after a depredator. Odd choice. 

– Weirdly, Kira is not huge on revenge. I sort of felt like she would be down with this.

– The bat’leth remains a really cool weapon.

– The Klingons all low-key want to die in battle. They’re not keen on Dax coming, now that they realise she’s transitioned and has an entire life before her (are Trill supposed to undertake active combat, given that doing so might kill their multi-lived hosts?).

– Sisko reviewing Dax’s leave request like ’uuuuuh I see you’ve taken a Leave of Absence to… kill people?’

– Katy: It’s very obliging of this Depredator to just stand here and get killed.

Me: I think the back way out of the building has been cut off?

– Nice architecture this week on the besieged building.

– These characters are so inconsistent in their attitude towards murder. They take it extremely seriously, in this kind of cartoony way that isn’t really cognisant of the entire scope of death they regularly participate in. Many Star Fleet officers fairly often kill in the line of duty. Kira has also been an active terrorist. The man they’re after this week poisoned and killed three children, and has gone on to commit further lethal crime for decades: it’s death sentence material if anything is. The show’s creators glibly construct boundaries for viewers between legitimate, state-authorised violence staged onscreen and the possibility of illegitimate violence, which even Kira’s terrorism is constructed as. That’s wild given that Kira’s violence is blatantly self-defence in the face of genocide, and this Klingon affair is in accord with the recognised law of another major culture in the region.  Thus to the extent possible outside of Federation norms, both forms of violence are even state-authorised. 

———

DS9 S2 Ep 20, “The Maquis, Part I”

-Yep, it’s time for this whole plotline to be a thing.

– A persistent prop shortage that also crops up in the TNG films (less coherently: they’re all on the Enterprise) is here being passed off as a Fleet versus Station uniform difference, which I’m down with.

– Sisko and his mentor talk shit about whether Sisko is fucking Jadzia before discussing how they’ve both been recently widowed. Weird.

– Sisko’s mentor is really well-characterised. I love how their first conversation plays out, opening up disagreements within Star Fleet as to how this treaty works in the world and laying out a distrust of the Cardassians that’s more institutionally-located than O’Brien’s lingering racism.

– This Vulcan terrorist has a great dress.

– Dukat: omg, why are you mad I’m in your house?! I can’t believe you distrust meeeee, your friendly local Nazi pal!!

– Apparently Jake and Nog are ‘watching the women coming off the Bajoran transport vessel’.

1. Bleeeeugh.

2. Yeah an activity Dukat can absolutely vibe with, sure.

– Katy: Field trip with Dukat!! I bet Sisko fucking hates his job right now.

– Dukat says Sisko is joyless, which is fair because Dukat always seems to be Loving Life.

– Quark attempts to fuck this Vulcan five seconds after he Casablanca’d that Cardassian lady and ten minutes after he had a big Thing with a Ferengi girl in dead. Love affairs don’t stack.

– Dukat super cross that he tried to call the Cardassian ship involved in the fracas and no one listened to how important he was? Him! Dukat! The protagonist of reality!

– This discussion of the Cardassians’ hostile policing and how disposable Federation Central Command thinks settlers are is staged between two black men, and feels loaded with histories of racist American policing and government neglect or outright hostility. The Federation is nominally post-racial, but the Maquis are so heavily Native American. If they were white, would the Federation have cared more?

– A colleague reads the Maquis, in light of Bajor’s position as a post-war Israel analogue, less as Native Americans and more as intrusive and then recalcitrant colonists, a la West Bank settlers. In terms of the show’s vocabulary I see her point, but the planets the Maquis settled were Federation. or unclaimed, and uninhabited. The existence of a Virgin Planet is itself an imperial fantasy, but as it stands, the Maquis settled and worked uninhabited land, then the Cardassians came. I think this destabilises readings of the Maquis as actively colonial in a ‘West Bank settlement’ sense. I don’t think we can ignore the Native American semiotic layer, even if it doesn’t feel entirely cogent: it’s clearly a major part of what Star Trek wants to work with here. It is, however, consistently a problem that we don’t really know what about Earth makes people want to go colonise other planets, beyond some vague ‘spirit of Adventure’. Is everyone entitled to live on Earth? Is scarcity being resolved via colonisation? 

– Kira is back on the terrorism chain gang this week. This is wild given that just last week, Kira was uncharacteristically gunshy. Again—an over-arching script editor might have been useful in smoothing over these contradictions, if the team lacked fine control over episode airing order.

– Dukat gets kidnapped by some civilians: embarrassing. Honestly, Sisko&co could let him get killed? No one has ever deserved a revenge killing more that Dukat: Lizard Mussolini. Snakey McChuckles is fair game.

– Odo comes over high-key fash about station security. Fuck? off??

– Ben’s mentor was clearly sympathetic to the Maquis, and now it’s official. (They say several things that make them seem like they’re supposed to be peers actually, but this guy looks and feels considerably older than Sisko.)

———

DS9 S2 Ep 21, “The Maquis, Part II”

-A random member of the Maquis holds Kira at gunpoint. She probably wishes Bashir weren’t here so she could give this newbie some tips.

– Dukat, guilty of both warcrimes and phwoarcrimes, is probably going to get a little tortured around the edges. Am I supposed to feel sorry for this guy? I don’t. 

– The five pounds dripping wet blonde admiral from TNG who fucking hates Picard and vibes with Lwaxana is here to tell Sisko to get his shit together. Having her and her terrible attitude crop up in both shows feels nice from a world building PoV.

– Kira comes in to drop off a Space File and Sisko yells at her about the DMZ. Kira looks thrilled at the prospect they’re gonna bond by doing a terrorism.

– Quark hooked this Vulcan girl up with a ton of weapons. It’s not cute anymore? Quark should get like–thrown in jail and/or off the station for all his many, MANY crimes? Like, does nothing mean anything in this show?

– Odo wants to join the urgent Rescue Gul Dukat mission. Here for a gooed time, not a long time.

– Central Command of course is gonna Central Command. They throw Dukat under the bus, claiming he was supplying the weapons. Dukat is obviously politically expendable in the eyes of Prime.

Dukat: Can’t believe I’ve been kidnapped and I’m the fall guy. What a week, huh?

Sisko: Dukat. It’s Wednesday.

– The Vulcan girl tries combat telepathy. That seems really invasive, for a Vulcan? Maybe culture’s changed since TOS. I say that, but the actual answer is that the show has grown very casual about Vulcan abilities and weaponising them over the years. The mystification has evaporated, leaving a Racial Skill Set.

– Dukat’s boss: DS9 has lost its charm–

Like, since they turned off the occupation-era ambient smoke machines, or?

– Dukat tries hard to escalate the fight between the Maquis and him and then the three-way conflict between him, the Maquis and the Federation and get people killed in that cave; he’s war-hornee. I’d suggest a political motive (wanting to spark a conflagration), but ultimately the episode doesn’t commit to this and so it’s just ambient weird writing. 

– Dukat gets invited to DS9’s staff meeting. It is awkward. As a viewer, this is kind of funny, but in-show, Dukat is persona non grata with the Cardassians, of limited utility to the Federation, and anathema to them. Why is he their freelance consultant? Can they condone and bear responsibility for his methods and actions? Because they’re inviting that, without even trying to resolve it without him. Relatedly, Sisko lets Dukat take the lead on a couple command decisions in a way I don’t think is a good idea in script terms? I wonder if it’s supposed to say anything about Sisko’s character arc. I don’t know that it is, if so. This willingness to fuck with Dukat weakens Sisko and the Federation, and the way it does so doesn’t quite make sense. It’s not offering a challenging alternate perspective, it’s the Federation’s having an early-stages crisis business meeting and they’ve invited a member of the local mob to sit in.

– Katy and I disagree about whether Quark’s speech made a lot of sense.

– The plotting is decent on these episodes, but the dialogue scripting is still sitting, painfully, at the Terry Nation level. ‘You have a shrewdness that sometimes surprises me!!’ type shit.

– Earlier on we had a whole conversation to establish that Dukat knows where the runabout’s button to fire on another ship is. There’s a final confrontation with the Maquis wherein Dukat’s console is on (earlier in the story, it wasn’t), which we know because of something that occurred a minute ago in the plot, and he wants to fire on the Maquis. Pavel Chekov’s photon torpedo just sits there, unfired. This was the pay off? Surely this was supposed to be the pay off, and a commentary on Doing Business With Dukat, who believes in keeping the peace not because he’s filled with compassion for all life blah blah, but because the treaty is in Cardassia’s best interests. Come on. It was right there! It was just right there!!

–  Katy: It’s so unfair that Sisko has to deal with huge diplomatic problems. He’s only the same rank as Riker, who’s off happily playing his trombone!

– DS9 tries to tell me it’s gritty on the frontier as though the Enterprise crews didn’t almost die every other episode of the previous two series because exploration and diplomacy are tough and shit. DS9 is thus trying to establish a dichotomy with a Safe Star Trek that doesn’t quite exist. It’s bizarre this taste-change based retcon can happen even as TNG is still running, contradicting it? Because of this grittiness, DS9 ‘needs’ to conceptually fuck about with Section 31 and ‘wild and crazy’ morally grey tactics and bad actors (putting up with Quark and Dukat on the regular, working with an unapologetically fash-inclined Odo), because—well, because what, exactly? On a plot and in-world level, what’s changed, really, other than a wish for grit and a lack of confidence in non-martial conflict resolution? 

This is part of the problem the show keeps having with Dukat. This episode, the Nazi Analogue plays the role of the Bad Boi team member who can make threats Sisko in order to resolve a conflict. (So what, you need the Nazis now? Are you NASA?) The show acts as though he’s bringing something the team needs and lacks, but it can’t even sustain that conceit within the internal logics of a single episode. Dukat only helps temporarily resolve a problem that Dukat’s side and logic started. All DS9’s playing footsie with ‘little a police state, as a treat’ in the Federated worlds doesn’t resolve the Maquis conflict: the Dominion War does (possibly after Cardassia wholesale kills opponents within its sphere of influence), and the ensuing collapse of Cardassian-Dominion relations. 

It’s only series two, and I want to give DS9: the Rewatchening more of a chance. But sometimes I feel like rather than ‘problematising Star Trek’, Ds9 is actually doing something really cheap, and that it failed to understand the assignment. I may just eat this as I continue to watch, and indeed I hope I do. But I sort of think people confused ‘acknowledging the Real-Politik Necessity (?) of military-industrialism’/Better Things aren’t Possible with Maturity, and that the show also hit people at a Time (both in their own lives and in the zeitgeist: this coinciding with Blairism and its international equivalents). Again, the problem might be series two and own current awful mood, but while I’ve liked moments of DS9 so far, overall, on rewatch, I’m not enjoying it. A lot of the elements I liked as a kid, including Kira’s political positioning and the fact that Dukat is fun (but at what cost??), I have a totally different relationship with twenty years on. It reminds me of when everyone still thought Xander was the of the group!!, and I was at a loss because Xander is an asshole I can’t vibe with. That’s how I feel about Odo. He may give some people the Raymond Chandler horn and have occasional Moments with Quark, but overall he doesn’t come off as ‘a bad person, who is fun’, he’s just the worst.

A lot of DS9’s attempts to do bigger character and plot shit are commitments it doesn’t know how to do justice to. ‘Oh I’ll do a big Thing with Bashir, with Dukat’s arc, Quark Does Crimes!’ This is indeed ambitious, compared with TNG! But it’s also an opening to stab right into. The basic causality of the show falters. DS9 wants to do Commentary on the previous iterations’ worldbuilding and moral universe, but that commentary so far feels less cogent and thoughtful, more like a gleefully bleak assertion that neoliberalism is not a historical contingency we find ourselves immeshed in, but intevitable and forever (which flies in the teeth of actual history, but).

Why did American creators and viewers so easily read periphery/’frontier’ as a viable excuse for Federation representatives to circumnavigate ordinary, democratically-arrived at forms of justice and consequences in favour of an expansion of force coded as necessary? It doesn’t feel like these characters need more support, ask for it, don’t receive it and so turn to other problem-solving strategies, it feels like the whole conceit is an excuse to do more violent space opera because it’s cool. I kind of can’t believe this caving to American neoliberal logics is almost universally presented as a strong critique of Star Trek’s pre-existing neoliberalism? Like, is the Emperor naked? Do the next seasons gut this bad start like a fish? What the fuck is happening here? 

A lot of professional opportunities are bound up in this, but this is why I really don’t want to be a Star Trek Person, Professionally, or A Doctor Who Person, etc. By working in that vein you’re tied forever to these things that are important to you, but tethered to a certain point in your relation to them. Star Trek will always be a big part of my experience and thinking. Precisely because of that, I hate the idea of being a Marketing Tool for whatever shitty new IP content is coming out—of not having a fluid relation to something I think and care about Because Capitalist Fandom. To love Doctor Who, I need to be able to fucking hate Doctor Who sometimes. Not in a jokey one off way but vitally, without that being a Farewell to my Livelihood and Networks and Construction of Self. You can’t be in a meaningful marriage if you don’t have the real option to leave. 

The distributed, networking-based and ephemeral nature of freelance media work renders a lot of people are unpaid company handmaidens who live and speak Professionally against the chance of work. You can’t give up that kind of labour for free, especially with so little work going and with so many dodgy actors in these scenes. This position is not difficult for me to assume because I am cantankerous, so the necessary lifestyle diplomacy was always going to be challenging for me to execute. Also I don’t have dependents to support, and I’m not swimming in opportunities. No one is, granted, but I’m not facing some Faustian Temptation here. One can do trade eternally being a soft attache for an IP for access, and that’s not nothing. A lot of jobs ask similar invasive shit of you; this is by no means unique to pro-fandom. But it’s never like, Cool?