Star Trek: Deep Space Nine gets its first explicit Original Series link in “Blood Oath” and it’s kind of successful we guess? Later, in “The Maquis, Part I”, the gauntlet is thrown down.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine gets its first explicit Original Series link in “Blood Oath” and it’s kind of successful we guess? Later, in “The Maquis, Part I”, the gauntlet is thrown down.
Jonas Kyratzes
-I think that to properly explain all my problems with DS9’s politics, I’d need a carefully annotated essay, but…
There’s something about the whole concept of this treaty that bothers me. It’s not that situations like this haven’t existed on Earth; they have. But they’re usually the result of imperialist/colonialist powers ignorantly drawing lines on a map, of intentional “divide and conquer tactics” and/or simply of geography. I find this very hard to apply on an interstellar scale. It’s a case, I suppose, of DS9 wanting to be allegorical rather than science fictional, but here it really gets in the way for me.
Particularly, I suppose, since they’re transplanting problems from Earth history that exist under and are caused by specific economic systems to a conflict between two vast interstellar civilizations, one of which is clearly a post-scarcity society. Note that I’m not saying there should be no conflict between these civilizations, only that I find the *way* in which it plays out, this whole Freedom Farmers of Space scenario, hard to believe.
This is going outside the show itself, of course, but there’s a long history of US liberals being infatuated with small nationalist groups in other countries – the IRA being a popular example. And when you then connect that to the historical events that were playing out around that time in the Balkans, I get a lot more uncomfortable when a noninterventionist stance is portrayed as naive. If the Federation represents the Western powers, then intervention has generally meant coming to the aid of “controversial but fighting for a good cause” groups, i.e. reactionary nationalists representing some small segment of a population, usually after first spending several years creating rifts between those populations. The results have generally been pretty horrific for everyone.
Of course, that’s not to say that the Federation would behave in exactly this way, but that’s why it’s such a problem that the show is more allegory than fictional politics. It functions more by evoking real-life conflicts than by worldbuilding, but those real-life conflicts don’t fit the situation presented. We don’t live in the Federation and the fact that the Federation has the technology that it does changes everything.
Speaking of technology, I’m reminded of what you said in the podcast about Paradise, about the show wanting to be smart but its understanding of “technology” basically being somewhat stupid. I feel the same way about its politics here, though perhaps not as strongly. It’s taking on extremely complex issues in a way that, while not entirely simplistic, isn’t up to the task.
Perhaps what bothers me the most is that the two political poles the show seems to imagine exist – and it shares this with many other productions from a similar cultural and political space, from TV to video games (Fable 3 comes to mind) – are Naive Liberal Ideology on the one hand and Neoliberal Realpolitik on the other. And its idea of asking the difficult questions is to ask “What if Tony Blair is right?” Battlestar Galactica, which shares some connections to DS9, drives this to its most reactionary extremes, but DS9 seems incapable of imagining a Federation that is actually smart AND compassionate, as if the opposite of being a capitalist warmonger is living with your head in the clouds.
Eric Brasure
-I think a lot of this boils down to two things:
1) Star Trek is frequently stupid
2) The Federation wants peace, views it as a ur-good, and will do almost anything to maintain it.
Jonas Kyratzes
-Some more thoughts:
– I think Dax is consistently the most boring character on the show, and Terry Farrell doesn’t bring as much to the table as some of the other actors… but I’m not convinced she couldn’t have done this right with better direction and better writing. They want to make Dax sexy but they’re tame even for time, and none of it really gels. But I think Farrell could’ve pulled it off.
– Marc Alaimo is the best damn actor on the show. I can’t talk about what’s great and what’s terrible about Dukat without spoiling the last season, but that is one fine actor.
– Blood Oath isn’t the greatest episode ever but I think I enjoyed it more than you guys did. The three Klingons are especially good, I think, in an epic spaghetti Western sort of way. I like Klingons when they’re over-the-top and grand a lot more than when they’re dour.
– Come to think of it, there are a lot of good Klingons on DS9.
– Harsh as my criticisms may be, I do find all of this interesting. I wish it was better, but it’s not without merit. If anything, I’m critical because I think it could be so much more, because despite everything I do care about the setting and the characters.
Eric Brasure
-I think part of my problem with Dax is that “better direction” is television is generally not the way to get a good performance out of a actor. Directing in TV (especially in this era) was just so much more workmanlike. You come in, you direct, you go away. Actors live with these characters for 6 days a week for years, and they generally have to be a lot more self-starting.
David
-I’m more in agreement with Richard on Farrell, in that I always thought she played the slightly aloof scientist side of Dax quite well, and I love how she played the relationship with Sisko. Avoiding spoilers, I remember really liking her in a notable episode where she shows a geeky fangirl side to Dax. The sexy/gambling/adventuring side of her usually fell flat for me though, and I would’ve preferred the Curzon influence on her personality be a bit more subtle. So personally I would hesitate to blame Farrell’s acting ability because I think it’s more the writers not focusing on her strengths, even if they’re not mistreating her on a Troi level or anything.
Lev
-I see Blood Oath as a bit confused–there’s clearly an attempt to tell a story about the price that comes with killing another person, something which I think First Contact (the movie) did a lot better, if imperfectly. But you also have this rousing adventure with these Klingons. Not like it’s impossible to do both but man does the show not pull it off.
Andreas
-I’m late to the party, so I don’t know if anyone will see this, but here goes:
There was some discussion in this episode about how there can be scarcity problems when the federation is a post-scarcity society. I would argue that the federation is not completely post-scarcity. There are a couple of resources that are still limited: energy, space (land or otherwise), and to a lesser extent labor.
Energy is probably the most significant. Replicating stuff takes a huge amount of energy. It’s not really a problem we run into on starships or a starbase because they have their antimatter reactors that generate a lot of energy compared to the amount of people that live there, so it’s not really something they have to worry about. But getting enough fuel to power replicators on a planet-wide scale is a different matter. I think that’s why we frequently see societies that do things like farming and mining despite having replicator tech, because they can’t get enough energy to replicate everything they need, and doing it the old-fashioned way takes less resources.
It’s not something the shows cover a lot, but we do see it on Voyager since they do implement replicator rations and do manual cooking to supplement the replicated food, to save on energy.
(And no, you can’t just replicate fuel, it takes more energy to do that than you get out of the fuel you’re replicating)