Welcome to season 6 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine! It’s been three months since the start of the Dominion War, and if “A Time to Stand” is any indication, things are not going well for the Federation. Then, in “Rocks and Shoals”, we find out how bad things are on Deep Space N… we mean, Terok Nor.
Trekabout Episode 211: A Time to Stand/Rocks and Shoals
Lev
-Rocks and Shoals is a favorite of mine. The Jem’Hadar plot is the most convincing of the show’s many attempts to do a Western–with a bit of rewriting, you could set this in the Civil War a la The Good, The Bad and The Ugly without much trouble. It’s so good that you even feel the redshirt death. And it’s also a damn good antiwar story too–no glory, only shabby compromises and preventable death.
Man, was this run of the show good or what?
Eric Brasure
-Or what!
Nah I’m kidding it’s awesome.
DS9 had Western tropes in its bones–I remember that the original conception of the show was a frontier colony.
Jonathan
-Rocks and Shoals is one of my favorites, too. I was just coming to say how much I liked Phil Morris as Remata’Klan, especially since I otherwise mostly know him as Jackie Chiles from Seinfeld. But in looking him up on Memory Alpha, it turns out that he and his sister were both on the Original Series episode “Miri” as kids, and both have guest starred on different Trek series since then. Fun fact!
Eric Brasure
-Wait. What? That’s the actor who played Jackie Chiles??? You just blew my mind!
Niner
-O’Brien says pants instead of trousers? Easily explained away. The Universal Translator was stuck on American English. He really said trousers but everyone heard pants. He could be speaking Irish Gaelic instead of English too.
Faulty Universal Translator is also how I head canon any egregious sexism / racism in Trek. Universal Translator was playing up. Totally explains previous Spock sexism but perhaps not Code of Honour. Nothing ever gonna explain that one away. Sigh.
Eric Brasure
-Quality fanon! We <3 our listeners.