Deep Space Nine occupied, it seems to me, a weirdly ambiguous niche among the various Trek series during its run (and, to a lesser extent, still to this day)—loved by some, hated by others, simultaneously lauded and somewhat overlooked. These days, to be sure, it probably gets more love than hate, but even now, advocates tend to focus on its later seasons and brush aside the earlier ones. There is, of course, no way to succinctly sum up all the takes on the show that exist, but my (admittedly very unscientific) impression is that on the whole, it was/is favored by critics but dismissed/ignored by much of the “mainstream”/casual Trek fan contingent that TNG had managed to garner, while opinion within the core Trek fan community has tended to be sharply divided. It’s possible, granted, that my estimation of the negative reactions to the show is partly outdated, but back in the day, to be sure, there was a sizable contingent that complained about its stationary setting, “soap opera” storylines, and darker/edgier tone and themes—and one can still encounter this sort of disdain for the show on fan sites and other sundry corners of the internet. (Also, if these types of complaints have become less common as the show has receded into TV history, this may be as much because its detractors moved on and stopped engaging with it at all, and/or because the setting became less stationary in the show’s later seasons (among various other adjustments that were made), as because of any real change of the audience’s mind.) At the other extreme, plenty of people have been comparing DS9 favorably to TNG for years—sometimes for some of the same reasons that put off the detractors, but also for other reasons (some solid, some less so). TV Guide famously called the show “the best acted, written, produced, and altogether finest” Trek series in 1999 (without, it might be noted, offering any specifics to back up this assessment), and this pronouncement aptly conveys the sort of prestige that the show has enjoyed in hindsight, especially among those who fancy themselves more discerning and sophisticated (the “cool kids” of the Trek-fan world, as it were).
Personally, while I am certainly more in agreement with the latter crowd than the former, I tend to find both perspectives a bit shallow and grating. Deep Space Nine benefited, as a series, from its seasoned creators’ experience making TNG, on whose giant shoulders the new series very much stood; it was able to avoid some of the prior show’s failings and weaknesses, and even to grow beyond it in certain ways. It would also, however, exhibit unique failings and weaknesses of its own. That it departed from the “formula” that previous Trek shows had adhered to is entirely to its credit—but this is not, or at least not entirely, to say that there was anything “wrong” with the said formula. Partly, it was simply that the “voyages of the Starship Enterprise” had already been done (twice)…so why create a new show, unless it were going to be something different? Also, in terms of tone, TNG had a kind of stately, polished feel (with characters who generally behaved themselves, and listened to classical music, and so on), and a warm, optimistic, “family” sensibility, that some claim to find stodgy, naive, or corny. I’ve said elsewhere on this site that this kind of smug, jaded holding of TNG at arm’s length is something for which I have little patience; still, for DS9 to distinguish itself from its predecessor by establishing a different tone was the correct move, as far as I’m concerned. That said, I do consider DS9’s role in pioneering (for Trek, certainly, but also for TV in general) a modestly more serialized form of storytelling to constitute a bona fide improvement over TNG, and the same goes for its interest in exploring moral complexities and shades of grey to a greater extent than TNG usually was willing or able to. Relatedly, what I probably love most about DS9 is how, by virtue of being a spinoff series that needed to carve out its own place in an established fictional universe, it came into existence with a much more specific premise, and narrative/thematic agenda, than TNG ever had; it represented an opportunity not just to tell stories in general, but to tell a particular kind of story, and even (to a degree) a single, overarching story. To my dismay, the show never stuck to that vision as much as I wanted it to; still, it owes most of its distinctiveness, and a lot of its brilliance, to this aspect of what it was. (A down side to starting off with a more cohesive premise is that it sets the bar high, and makes the kind of narrative meandering that might have played just fine on TNG feel like a disappointment.) Indeed, generally speaking, most of DS9’s greatest strengths are also its biggest weaknesses. It’s willingness to go “darker” than TNG would (in my view) prove, over time, to be a somewhat mixed bag, making possible much of its best material but also opening the door to some lamentable missteps—and something similar could be said with respect to what has sometimes been called (and what I, too, for lack of a better phrase, will call) the more “contemporary” feel of its characters.
If it seems like I’m making a lot of vague, sweeping generalizations without offering much in the way of specifics to flesh them out, this is actually more or less intentional. I will take no stand on the question of which show, TNG or DS9, is “better,” and I intend for my individual episode reviews to be the vehicles for my more substantive and detailed thoughts; they, in aggregate, will constitute the only answer that I have to offer as to my overall assessment of the show. I did want to use this page to provide something in the way of a mission/position statement, so that readers would know what sort of angle I approach DS9 from in a very general way—but beyond the things that I’ve already said here, I think the core of my take on the whole “TNG vs. DS9” question is that they are both, in the end, compelling yet imperfect shows; each was capable of great things, but each also produced more misses (and even outright bombs) than I would have liked. Each has things that recommend it over the other, even; I love pretty much all of DS9’s characters, for example, and in particular, it developed several fantastic recurring/secondary characters over the years (not least, one of the most complex, three-dimensional, and compelling “villain” characters I’ve encountered anywhere!)—but I’m not sure that any one of its characters quite “speaks to me” to the degree that both Picard and Data do. On the other hand, DS9 succeeds where TNG fails with regard to female characters, and none of its main characters is as weak a link, or goes as chronically underdeveloped, as both Troi and Crusher are/do. What I’m really trying to say, though, is that despite the various ways in which DS9 has been both lauded and dismissed over the years, it is, in the end, just what it is: seven seasons’ worth of individual episodes, of varying quality, that need to be judged on their individual merits.
My personal relationship to Deep Space Nine is somewhat different from my connection to TNG. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I feel like TNG and I “grew up together”; it was formative for me on a level that few (if any) other cultural phenomena even come close to matching. DS9, on the other hand, debuted in the middle of my freshman year of collage, at a time when my life was both less organized around a stable routine, and less oriented toward solitary nerdy pursuits, than it had previously been. I was still finding the time (and the access to a TV, generally in a dorm lounge) to catch my favorite show most Sunday nights, and to be sure, I made a point of watching (together with friends) the pilot episode of this new spinoff show when it aired—but I did not, at first, incorporate weekly viewing of the new show into my routine. This had nothing to do with the show itself, or any negative opinion of it on my part; it was entirely about where I was at in my life at the time. Later, when TNG ended and left a gaping, Star Trek-shaped hole in my life (and when I also had moved off-campus and had my own TV in my own living room), I did get around to engaging fully with DS9, and eventually caught up with what I had missed. Thereafter, I became both a huge fan and a regular weekly watcher, just as I had been with TNG; still, I was older, and the experience was inevitably very different. I said of TNG, on my intro/landing page for that show, that, having watched and re-watched the show as many times as I have, starting at as young an age as I did, every episode (including the ones that I loathe) is like an old friend to me. I’ve watched some seasons of DS9 multiple times as well, but none as many as I have any given season or episode of TNG, and some probably no more than once or twice; also, as of the point in time at which I’m commencing this reviewing project (having just finished my years-in-the-making full set of TNG reviews), it’s been a long time since I’ve watched any DS9 at all. So, while this show, too, is an old friend, it’s one that I know less intimately, and that I have not spent the kind of time with that I have with TNG. I’ll be (re-)discovering, reconsidering, and honing my thoughts and opinions about these episodes as I re-watch and review them, to a greater degree than was usually true when I was working on my TNG reviews. As of this writing, I’m excited to get started!
Notwithstanding the ways in which my general style and approach to review-writing has inevitably evolved since I began doing it, both the overall intent and the nuts & bolts remain the same: I’ll still be rating each episode on a scale from one to five stars (no exceptions, half-stars, zeroes, etc.), with three stars representing the minimum rating for what I think of as a “keeper” (a basically decent episode whose existence doesn’t vex me, and that I, to at least some degree, “like”), while four- and five-star episodes are the ones that inspire my love of the show (five-star earners being the “next level” classics), and one- and two-star episodes…well, either kind of suck, or really, really suck. 🙂 Also, I will most assuredly continue referencing other review sites from time to time (readers of my TNG reviews will know that Jammer‘s site is a big go-to for me), and will probably make some use of Terry Erdmann’s Star Trek Deep Space Nine Companion as a reference as well (though I have spent much less time with it over the years than I have with Nemecek’s TNG Companion, and have accordingly been influenced rather less by it).
So, with no further ado…time to plunge into the wormhole!
OMG! So exciting!
Your framing here is, maybe not surprisingly, less charitable to DS9 (or more charitable to TNG, depending on how we look at it) than mine. An outsider and non-Trek fan might not see the nuance between our positions; maybe it’s a bit like Catholicism vs. Lutheranism. I’m not even really sure if we disagree on anything? But it may not surprise you that I would just tend to approach the whole distinction slightly differently. To me, DS9 mostly builds on the past parts of TNG, taking them further (though ultimately not really far enough to truly transcend by not living up to what it started as, as opposed to TNG, which had lesser ambitions and exceeded them). DS9, you could say, is what would happen if TNG started over in its prime, having put more thought into its characters and premise. I mean, take the characters. Kira, Sisko, Odo, and Dax (O’Brien also, but obviously he had seven seasons to develop on TNG) all have a whole fuck of a lot more going for them as of the pilot than any of the TNG characters in Encounter at Farpoint. I know you address a lot of this in what you said above, of course, and I’ll be curious to hear as you go along what you see as the weaknesses unique to DS9. I certainly won’t contend that there aren’t any, but a lot of its weaknesses (some of the worst Ferengi stuff comes to mind) seem like they also have their origins in TNG, just like DS9 owes most of its strengths to TNG. Basically, the way my brain wants to emphasize it, DS9 is an objectively better show than TNG… and is so precisely because TNG came before it—its standing on its shoulders, as you said. (Though interestingly, it’s the polar opposite of TNG in terms of the quality of both its pilot and its finale.)
The idea of distinguishing DS9 for having a less “warm, optimistic, ‘family’ sensibility that some… find stodgy, naive, or corny” is silly in my view, but I do think the case can be made that DS9 puts the premise of the Trek universe on trial better than Q or TNG ever did by asking more questions about *how* society would function in an ideal way and allowing more complexity into its exploration of topics. That caused it to be seen as “darker,” but I think “more mature” might be a better way to describe that. You talk about this as having a downside, so I’ll be interested to hear more about that as well. I mean, it’s a downside in the sense that it creates higher expectations that the show isn’t always able to live up to. But as I’ve said before, sometimes Trek has had a tendency to advance certain overly simplistic points of view as if they were absolute, and DS9 does that a bit less, I think. Much has been made of Trek’s optimistic vision, and I’m glad it strives to portray a better world… but I think by showing the world as it really is in all its complexity, it’s better at giving us a path to that world. Not to say that I think we humans are ever actually going to get there… but that’s beyond the scope of a Trek review blog!
Apart from being uncomfortable with a statement like “DS9 is an objectively better show than TNG,” I don’t disagree with much, if anything, that you said here (especially in your second paragraph, where you talk about how DS9 at its best explored the “how,” and the complexities/limitations, of a more ideal society, to a degree that TNG never did). It’s just…well, two things: First, part of my argument in my second paragraph above is basically me saying “I insist on loving DS9 in a way that doesn’t necessarily imply putting TNG down by comparison, despite also agreeing that it improved on TNG in certain respects.” And then, second, I’m trying to consider the whole of what DS9 actually was, as opposed to just the aspects of it that I think are awesome, or the show that I feel like it would/could/should have been if it had consistently lived up to its potential. I mean, I ABSOLUTELY think that it started with more potential than TNG did, both in the sense of the writers having much more of a clue what they were doing at the outset and also because of its rich, unique, and specific premise. But (without wanting to get into too many specifics here, as I’d rather save them for the individual reviews) I also remember a) that, despite all of this, it was still bad frustratingly often, just like every other Trek series, and b) that I do find some of its narrative left turns/periodic ratings-oriented “adjustments”/gradual abandonment of its original core story REALLY frustrating, and c) that, in its later seasons, it sometimes goes to places that I would REALLY have preferred for it not to go. So these things all have to figure into any overall assessment, too, along with the things that I love about it.
In other words…I don’t intend to be “charitable” to either TNG or DS9. Rather, I’m doing my best to consider them both in a “warts and all” kind of way—and with DS9 specifically, to not let the luster that it has because of the ways that it DID improve on TNG lead me to minimize or overlook its flaws (as I see them, anyway).
That all seems reasonable to me!
I’m curious if you’re going to create DS9 “story types” and how they might differ from the TNG ones.
I wasn’t really planning on it. My TNG ones kind of stopped making as much sense as I got to the later seasons, and I ended up thinking of it as a less than entirely successful experiment. But I do foresee talking about episodes in terms of the extent to which they do or don’t relate to various aspects of DS9’s core narratives/themes, and/or just how “distinctively DS9” an episode is or isn’t. It’s not the same thing, and it won’t be a formal set of categories, but it some ways I see it as quasi-analogous.