I’m happy to be participating in this experiment with my friend, dtungsten. It should be very enjoyable looking back at a show that has been repeatedly recommended to me by other friends, but that I have never actually gotten around to watching.
Oh, sure, I’ve seen an episode or two here or there. I remember when Deep Space 9 was on TV. But I’ve never really been much of a Star Trek fan. I’ve never watched all of any of the series. I enjoyed some of the Original Series, but it was more of my parents’ generation. I do remember watching The Next Generation early on, probably seasons one and two. But even that wasn’t an every-week affair for me.
I did see Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, in theaters when it first came out. It was a lot of fun, and I’ve picked up all of the Star Trek movies on blu-ray when they’ve been on good sales, and I have even watched most of them. But I’m not someone who knows the lore, or trivia, or even most of the characters.
So why watch DS9 now? I’ve been exploring old TV and movies, and am finding them to be very enjoyable. I have had this recommended to me by a number of people as “the best Star Trek,” at least until Enterprise. And this does seem like a fun and interesting project to collaborate on with dtungsten here at the ass end of the ‘net. We watch shows (and play video games) years later. Sometimes even decades later!
I do one rule for this watch-through. No Spoilers—for me, since the show is 30 years old, that means no outside research and no looking things up. I’m going to talk about only what I see and glean from the show. I’ll learn the names of characters/species/locations organically, or not at all.
I don’t care if you spoil plot arcs or whatever in the comments.
On to the show!
Season 1, Episode 1 and 2, pilot “Emissary”
Star date something or other. Do those numbers actually mean anything cohesive and coordinated, or are they just random, made up numbers? Regardless, it has been almost 30 years since this show first aired. That is hard to believe.
DS9 has a pretty decent intro. The shots of the station actually remind me a great deal of the video game Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance, with the Azzameen home base. That has some very fond memories for me.
It is nice to see that Star Trek is trying something different, too. Rather than a ship exploring places, a more-or-less stationary station should have a different feel, and the look of the show is definitely trying to be more “industrial.” The sets, however, are very spartan. Not a lot of detail, not a lot of props or atmosphere. Very utilitarian. I guess that is how TNG was too.
Emissary actually starts off very rough. Everything comes across as very ‘90s for sure, and very low budget. There’s a lot of forced acting, over-acting, and bad acting. We’ve got the cliched “damaged metal bits and bots” that appears to be cardboard and styrofoam, looks like bad modern art, has no discernable utility or function, and is poorly portrayed by the actors to be heavy while the directors force the characters to interact. And wow, do the characters seemingly not want to interact. Things, and characters, start off pretty wooden.
And yikes, the woke tropes. We’ve got the obligatory black captain, because it was time for some diversity breaking the glass ceiling in Trek. We’ve got the strong female lead, and the other strong female lead, and the conniving, swindling space-minority with the big nose, and big forehead, and big ears.
We also have what I would imagine are Star Trek trope staples. We’ve got a MacGuffin, an ancient religious artifact, called an “orb” by everyone on the show. It appears neither ancient nor orb-shaped. It looks like an hourglass was bedazzled (props if you get that 80s throwback reference) with glowy rhinestones, and then the hourglass itself was removed leaving just the rhinestones.
Of course the ancient artifact isn’t going to look ancient! This is Star Trek! It has to be glow-y and space-y! They have to blow the effects budget on stuff like this, with high-dollar CG effects, to justify the lack of spending on the set pieces!
We have the pretty young female, the secondary strong woman character, who has a backstory of actually being an old man who wasn’t an old man, but was a space cockroach instead, and just lived in the old man’s body, but it wore out or something. Now the space cockroach is a pretty, young, female thing who flirts with the handsome young doctor and doesn’t tell him that she’s a trap, even though the commanding officer knows and makes a joke about it. I’m sure this will never be mentioned again.
We have another character who is a shape shifter, and his backstory is not knowing who he is or who his people are, and pretending to be one of “them,” referring to the B’jorans (Bajorans?), I think. He has the ability to perfectly mimic their racial facial features of an accordion-nose, but inexplicably doesn’t, because reasons.
They must have realized they were losing steam. We have two space-boobs sightings to keep the audience engaged. The camera makes it a point to move from a silly rubber stack of post-it-notes pretending to be a musical instrument (while being struck by two cucumbers, no less) and pan across a stacked, trim blond woman rocking some bounty under a TNG-style Star Fleet pantsuit.
It isn’t a fluke, because then the camera makes sure to linger on some serious space underboob as an unnamed alien extra, wearing a space bodysuit with a mesh bodice and satin stretched tight across her nipples, jiggles down some stairs and into a close-up of, yes, underboob. There’s nothing like a little objectification to go along with our enlightened principles and our other strong, female characters. Hey, sex sells.
Emissary is off to a fairly rough, cringe-filled start. I get why the acting is so lackluster. The actors didn’t have a lot to work with on the writing.
Things do get better. There are several nice scenes where Commander Sisko1 bargains for his, and all of humanity’s, life with mystical alien beings who created or are the early orb-that-isn’t MacGuffin. The stock Star Trek secondary bad guys, the Kardashians2, are going to blow up Deep Space 9. But they get bluffed out by the first strong female lead, assisted ably by engineering chief Miles O’Brien3. That actor has a long and storied history of looking industrious and intelligent standing behind a counter while pretending to touch non-existent buttons, and he does a great job here. It isn’t his best acting work either, but he’s a solid addition to the cast, and I rather like him. I remember him from TNG.
The strong female lead with the nose is likeable. She has some nice scenes, if a touch overly-dramatic, where she confronts the Cardassians. There are some shaky-cam pyrotechnics where crew accidentally crush the “metal” bulkheads as they fall into them, but things end well and on a reasonably high note. It is all wrapped up by the end just like TV shows used to do.
Overall, it was enjoyable enough. It made it on TV for seven seasons, so it has to get better. It can’t get any worse, or it wouldn’t have made it through the first season. I would not recommend this particular episode to anyone else, however. My wife refused to sit through it with me.
Final grade: C-
Maybe a C-minus-minus. If this pilot was any worse, I wouldn’t be watching any more. If I weren’t doing this as a project, and instead just stumbled upon this via Amazon Prime, I don’t think I’d have made it through this pilot, nor would I continue on with the series. But we are!
1. I don’t know how I know how to spell his name. It must have come through memory somewhere. Otherwise, I’d be spelling it “Cisco.”
2. I know the real name here. I made an unfunny joke. Sue me.
3. I have no idea how I easily remember Miles O’Brien. Probably from exposure to TNG.
“Do those numbers actually mean anything cohesive and coordinated, or are they just random, made up numbers?”
In the original series, they were just random numbers, but in Next Generation, they all start with 4 for the 24th century, then the season number, then arbitrary digits that increase as the season progresses. DS9 doesn’t start 41 since it’s going off of the Next Generation timestamps. Neat, huh?
Yeah, I kinda dig the trying something different than the starship, too. One reason the Space Station looks so different from the Enterprise, or is supposed to, is that it’s of Cardassian design. There’s an interesting commentary on the design in a later episode that I’ll touch upon when we get there.
You nailed “orb” description. That was tough to follow.
“handsome young doctor and doesn’t tell him that she’s a trap,”
No, Sisko asked her and she said she HAD told him. It’ll get mentioned a LOT later, heh.
“Kardashians” believe me, that was the first thing I thought of when I first heard of the Kardashians. New Trek spin-off Keeping up with the Cardassians, starring Garak.
I don’t think I have anything more to add to this that is particularly important, though there are all sorts of trivia and potentially relevant fragments of ideas flying through my mind.