Tom Salinsky

TNG S06E12 Ship in a Bottle (). As we’ve seen, these later episodes of TNG are keen to go back and revisit past triumphs and stumbles, to play the hits or to make amends. The Season 2 episode Elementary Dear Data is about as good as we could have expected, but you can almost see the creative team banging their heads on the limitations of the understanding of what is possible in this narrative world. By the sixth season, the writing staff is functioning as a precision-engineered team and the regular cast are all in complete control of their characterisations. Moriarty’s rebuke to Picard that he’s been abandoned and left to rot feels a little like the fans talking to the producers. And they’re both right. Picard should have tackled the problem sooner, but while this episode could have been made sooner, it’s hard to imagine it being made better. Moriarty’s key deception is brilliantly-handled – second-time round, the clues are all there – and it makes perfect sense that Picard would be able to use that same trick against him. Picard understands far more about how 24th century technology works than ever the savviest of computer-generated 19th century supervillains. If this was just a faultlessly-constructed puzzle-box, that would be satisfying enough, but this doesn’t miss the opportunity for great character beats, some lovely faux-period flavour and a playful treatment of the theme as well. Outstanding stuff. In barely a handful of years, walking talking holograms will be standard-issue on board ships in the form of emergency doctors. Possibly Lt Barclay continued working on the problem?

DS9 S01E06 Captive Pursuit (). O’Brien saves the life of a nervy-looking fellow who comes careering through the wormhole and won’t say what he’s there for. The resolution presents a fairly standard issue Prime Directive moral dilemma, resolved with a little more insouciance than is typical for Trek of any kind. There’s some decent Quark and Odo stuff here as well, but Dax and Bashir remain stubbornly bland for now. But after four regular episodes, what’s the engine for this new series? If we’re just going to sit and wait for another alien-of-the-week to drop in with the kind of ethical conundrum you can solve in 45 minutes then how is this different from the shows it spun-off from? What benefit are we getting from being stuck on a space station? This is a fine enough hour of television but it doesn’t point the way forward in any meaningful way.

TNG S06E13 Aquiel (). It’s been a while since an away team beamed down to a research station / ship drifting in space / remote colony / Federation outpost and found it deserted, but here we are again, with only a little doggie remaining alive on this subspace relay station. (There is no money in the 24th century, so we must assume that the people staffing these facilities are there by choice. It would not be my choice.) Geordi is attempting to puzzle out what happened by reviewing logs from one of the crew, a young woman named Aquiel, and of course he falls in love with the recordings of her because this-is-the-story-we-tell-with-this-character. While Geordi is mooning over the pretty Lieutenant, Picard barely breaks a sweat outmaneuvering the Klingons and meanwhile, the damned dog keeps snuffling around, virtually screaming “I will turn out to be the solution to the mystery!” This is pretty thin stuff, by recent standards, a mix of old tropes and idiotic surprises. Again, the beam from Worf’s phaser emerges at a sharp angle to the barrel, which just strikes me as sloppy.

DS9 S01E07 Q-Less (). One way to discover what makes this show different from its progenitor is to make a direct comparison. We haven’t reprised The Naked Time (at least not yet) but we can send Q over to the worm hole to see who this crew respond to his smug provocations. His arrival is foreshadowed by the reappearance of Vash, trapped in a stricken shuttle when the docking doors won’t open. (Did no-one think to beam her off?) It turns out that even Vash finds Q irritating given enough time and now she wants to be shot of him. Last time we saw these two, Vash and Picard were attempting to replicate screwball comedy dialogue and falling a long way short. This time round, no-one can be bothered even to make the attempt. Meanwhile, Bashir is given Geordi’s role of unlucky in love, which does little to further define his character. “My God, you’re an impertinent waiter,” is the kind of line which makes me want to never see him again. It’s the sort of dialogue you’d give to the bad guy in an eighties family comedy to make sure we all hated him and would enjoy seeing him humiliated. Meanwhile, in a directed comparison with Picard, Sisko looks childish and petulant – much easier to provoke as Q astutely determines. This new series is not so much suffering from growing pains as it is terminally stunted, feebly aping the tropes of its now-legendary progenitor.

TNG S06E14 Face of the Enemy (). As previously noted, I do love a good teaser, and this one is an absolute cracker. Troi wakes in the middle of the night and when she looks in the mirror, she sees Romulan features staring back at her. Now, it’s true that not all of the explanations given for this make a whole lotta sense, but who cares when we’re having this much fun. It’s also a cracking episode for Marina Sirtis, barely adequate compensation for six years of saying “I sense frustration Captain,” but nice to see nonetheless. She gets to go toe-to-toe with Carolyn Seymour which is a far more equal battle than you might expect. This late in the game, you might expect TNG to be running out of ideas. Even though it’s riffing on story ideas set up in Unification, this story feels amazingly fresh and bold, while the punky young spin-off seems overly cautious, afraid to try anything new lest they break the show. Guys, you need to drive it like you stole it. Worf is now sporting a pony tail which hangs down the back of his neck. Before long, he’ll be eating avocado toast and buying antique typewriters.

DS9 S01E01-2 Emissary (). Paramount wanted a new show and Berman and co. didn’t want to send another ship with another crew out exploring. If the original series had been Wagon Train to the Stars, the new show would be Border Town in Space. Various tendrils connect the old show to the new show, although not quite as many as hoped. Michelle Forbes was asked to return as Ro Laren. When she declined, I think I read somewhere that the part of Kira was offered to Suzie Plakson. In the end, it went to Nana Visitor. Colm Meany turns up as Chief O’Brien and Captain Picard passes the baton in early scenes.

The big question mark hanging over TNG was: could they get lightning to strike again with the regular cast? And it took a while. By the time DS9 was being planned, the TNG regular cast had been thinned out to just seven. I rate these actors as world class (Stewart), excellent (Spiner, Dorn, Burton) and good enough (Frakes, McFadden, Sirtis) and by now all seven of these characters have become fan favourites. That’s not a bad track record. This first episode of the new show counts eight actors in its titles. None of them can hold a candle to Stewart, but at least four of them can easily take that “excellent” tag (Auberjonois, Meany, Shimerman, Visitor) and Farrell, Siddig and Lofton will get better as the series continues. Avery Brooks I find a bit of a mystery. Many fans think he’s wonderful, but his style of delivery never strikes me as entirely natural and I find he’s stuck between wanting to emulate what worked so well for Stewart and the need to create a new character. The scenes between him and Picard want to be able to distinguish between two equally-capable yet profoundly different leaders. In fact all they do is distinguish between a supremely able actor who’s incredibly comfortable in his role with one who is still feeling his way.

The other contrast is in their uniforms. The Enterprise crew stick in the same togs until Generations (and more on that wardrobe shit-show when the time comes) but Star Fleet officers on the space station wear all black with coloured shoulders and a purple undergarment peeking through a small v-neck. I’ve really enjoyed watching TNG’s colourful episodes, the images beautifully restored from the original 35mm film elements. Watching DS9 means watching smeary NTSC video which even modern AI algorithms can’t do much to clean up, and so it really doesn’t help that almost everyone is inky black from the collarbone down, without even a proper belt to break up the monotony. And those coloured v-necks flop about in a very un-military way. Alas, Voyager will inherit the same look (and not get the upgrade that comes around the time of First Contact).

What is welcome is an even greater commitment to diversity and complexity. Of those eight regulars (and the cast of recurring characters will grow and grow) only four are Star Fleet. The others are a Bajoran major, a changeling security guard, a human child and a Ferengi bartender. This widening of the number of viewpoints is crucial to what makes this series work and one of the reasons why it’s so many people’s favourite. It’s also the only show never to have the airwaves to itself. These four episodes were shown in January 1993, after TNG went off the air for Christmas (following the mic-drop of Chain of Command). Thereafter, both shows aired new episodes until TNG wrapped up its seventh season, whereupon Voyager kicked off. So, DS9 became the “deep cut” show which marked out the connoisseur fan from the casual viewer.

I don’t remember when I saw these episode for the first time. I think DS9 was first shown in the UK on Sky. Possibly I watched it there, maybe I caught up with it when the BBC was finally allowed to air it. I remember trying to follow it, and admiring it greatly, but now I can only call to mind a very few episodes, mainly concerned with key events in the war. Wanting to watch the whole show through from the beginning was one of my main motivations for starting this project and I’m thrilled that the moment has finally arrived.

We open with the Borg attack on Wolf 359, referred to but never depicted in The Best of Both Worlds, and now seen from Sisko’s perspective. This is followed in short order by the fridging of Sisko’s wife Jennifer. Most of this I think is model work, but the wormhole which is the main MacGuffin of these early episodes is primitive but effective CGI. That’s why these episodes look like crap compared to TNG. Everything in the earlier show was shot on film, even the spaceships. But so much of DS9 was created digitally, and at 1990s TV resolution, that it would all have to redone from scratch to create a Blu-ray master. The relatively poor sales of the TNG remasters didn’t inspire Paramount to spend even more money on a less popular series.

The titles are only so-so as well. Visually, it’s just a montage of shots of the space station for the most part, and the title music keeps threatening to arrive at a really good melody and never quite gets there. What’s far more effective is Sisko’s initial tour of the space station. After the gleaming newness of the Enterprise for more than five years, the grime and disrepair of this environment is quite a tonic. We’re also introduced to our regulars more smoothly than we were all those years ago in Encounter at Farpoint. Familiar Miles O’Brien shows Sisko (and us) around and introduces him to Major Kira. Nana Visitor makes an instant impression, immediately dispelling any regrets about Michelle Forbes. She’s electric and her character is fascinating. O’Brien later gets a whole scene in which he formally leaves the Enterprise which feels unnecessary and poorly placed. Acting royalty Rene Auberjonois is next, his highly impressive Odo taking on a small gang of bandits including Nog – a series regular in all but name – who in turn brings us to Quark, already spouting aphorisms but these are not yet dubbed “rules of acquisition”.

In amongst all this, there isn’t much room for a story. When we first meet him, Sisko seems just as fed up with his job as Pike was in The Cage but he rapidly ends up more like Picard than anyone else: pragmatic, compassionate, prone to giving inspirational speeches. He also comes up against a Bajoran high priest who recognises him as The Emissary of their legends. So, he’s either Diet Coke Picard or The Second Coming of Space Jesus – take your pick. He gets the chance to revisit his first meeting with Jennifer (so this is the kind of fridging where you’re really saving something for later). Sisko, having been charged with keeping the peace by Picard, is now charged by Kai Opaka with finding Bajor’s Celestial Table. Big day for Sisko who takes the flashback machine with him for safekeeping (and the supplying of backstories).

As noted when I wrote about The Host, the Trill get reinvented here. Jadzia Dax is still the same old Dax, more or less, unlike Odan who was exactly the same mind but in a different body. Terry Farrell doesn’t get much to do, but seems happy enough to do it. Dr Bashir is keen as mustard, which is something we haven’t seen much of in adult Star Trek characters, but the actor seems a little uncertain at this early stage. It’s also in this first episode that we meet recurring villain Gul Ducat. Marc Alaimo was the original Cardassian, but following David Warner is no easy task, especially when he’s given the series-sell speech in the middle of the episode. Like so many others, he’ll grow into the role as time goes on.

Before long, Dax and Sisko find themselves on Planet Blue Screen in the centre of the wormhole. The trippy visuals here are quite a treat but the concept of non-linear time is one of those things that you really don’t want to interrogate too closely. Why do beings which exist in all points in time fear their own demise? And why don’t they know that the Federation is coming? At one point, one of the wormhole dwellers pretty much says “What is this thing you call love?” for crying out loud. Moving the station to the edge of the wormhole is a great sequence for O’Brien (virtually mirroring the saucer-separation procedure from Farpoint) but not many of the other characters get moments as revealing as this. Kira pops, Odo is fun, Quark shows promise but (despite getting the lion’s share of the screen time) Sisko is all back-story and no personality so far, and the others just get TNG Season 1-style functional dialogue.

Compared to the TNG pilot, this has the advantage of taking place in a universe that’s already five years old, and all of the additions to the lore work well. Ultimately though, this is trying to keep too many balls in the air to be truly satisfying as a ninety minutes of television drama. It’s a overly-complex guided tour of a place stories will take place in, rather than a narrative in its own right, but never dull for all that.

DS9 S01E03 Past Prologue (). Virtually the first thing we see in this episode is Garak the Cardassian “tailor” who will prove to be one of the most fascinating and enduring members of the supporting cast. It’s very clear what Andrew Robinson thought the subtext was, but it was never allowed to anything more than a hint. For the full sorry story, see this fascinating YouTube video. Meanwhile. Sisko and Kira are in (whisper it) conflict once more as she attempts to go over his head regarding his dealings with a Bajoran “freedom fighter”. And – hey! – it’s the Kleavage Sisters again, being made to surrender their weapons to Odo. Speaking of which, he seems to be able to morph into the shape and size of a rat, which either means that that’s an incredibly heavy rat which would probably overstrain the floor structures, or that his shapeshifting is little more than magic and he doesn’t have to maintain the same mass. The Klingons are in league with the freedom fighter, who isn’t nearly as reformed a character as he maintained, so the Federation is proven right and the Bajoran liaison proven wrong, which is probably inevitable, but does make the balance of power on the station a little more stable and thus a little less interesting. This episode doesn’t screw anything up but it isn’t terribly interesting on either a plot or a character level. It feels like more table-setting, a continuation of the pilot rather than a bold new leap into a fresh world of storytelling possibilities. In the pilot, I’m pretty sure people called the Ferengi bartender “Quark” to rhyme with bark, lark, stark, park, hark and – as the word’s inventor James Joyce had it “Muster Mark”. Now people are starting to rhyme it with pork, dork, fork, cork and so on. This is going to piss me off. Speaking of Quark, this is the first mention of gold-pressed latinum, needed to solve the problem of a profit-oriented culture in a post-currency society.

DS9 S01E04 A Man Alone () opens with the limpest, most nothing-burger of a teaser we’ve seen in ages, with the two least-well-defined characters playing a video game for a while before deciding not to. SMASH CUT TO TITLES. The interplay between Odo and Sisko is more interesting. The most senior authority figure and the head of security and they – gasp! – don’t trust each other, or at least not yet. While Gene Roddenberry gets over his attack of the vapours, there’s yet another shady Bajoran dude sneaking around the station while Nog and Jake are making friends and the O’Briens are doing their best to stay married. So, again, this feels low-key, soapy and I’m still waiting for the show to earn its keep as a syndicated science-fiction adventure series, since the characters aren’t nearly well-defined enough or being put through enough for this to qualify as prestige drama. First appearance of Morn whose presence will soon become a very funny running joke.

DS9 S01E05 Babel (). Hey! An actual science-fiction plot with the potential to deeply affect our characters. Some kind of bug is going around and first O’Brien and then Dax lose the ability to process language. This results in their speech coming out as word salad – a challenge which the actors rise to very impressively. Odo tries to organise a lockdown, but you know how well that kind of thing goes down. So, although the symptoms are frighteningly novel, this is that familiar Star Trek cliché, the virus on the loose, complete with mutating strains, the regular cast dropping one-by-one and a last-minute cure which works almost instantaneously and leaves zero ill-effects. But it is at least exciting, which is more than can be said for the last couple of episodes, although the most exciting moment – the ship trying to pull away from the docking clamps – barely registers because the show can’t afford to show us what’s physically happening.

Stray remarks

• On the basis of these early episodes, the nay-sayers were right. A regular group of characters crewing a space station, waiting for adventure to come to them just isn’t as exciting as exploring the unknown. With the exception of the bonkers drug trip in the pilot, this is all pretty mundane stuff.
• Which is doubly a shame when the setting feels so fresh. Seeing different cultures living, working and playing alongside each other is genuinely exciting. Very different from seeing a Klingon on the Enterprise, with all of the hard edges sanded off.
• The standing sets are also gorgeous – handy, since we’re spending so much time here. And Nana Visitor, Rene Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman and Colm Meany are all enormously watchable but the series either needs to figure out how to put these characters through the wringer or find some proper science fiction adventure stories, and fast, because at the moment this is handsomely-mounted televisual Ovaltine.
• Dax, Bashir and Jake are just job titles and/or one line of backstory (“Doctor”, “Symbiont”, “Sisko’s kid”). The writers are leaving it up to the actors and the actors are leaving it up to the writers. That can work, but it takes time and it’s a risky strategy.