"Deep Space Nine's" fifth season ended with a remarkable cliffhanger: the station had been occupied by the Dominion, the show's totalitarian villains, and our heroes escaped to join a massive Federation fleet while the entire galaxy stood poised on the brink of war. What became even more remarkable, at the time, was that the sixth season premiere picked up where the cliffhanger left off and kept going for five more episodes, telling stories all about the war and the plights of all the characters wrapped up in it.
Until that point, science fiction television shows had always avoided any hint of serialization. The adventure of the week was the standard format, and it had succeeded fairly well for many decades. TV was changing in the mid-Nineties, and Star Trek changed with it, offering fans a show with more complex characters and an ongoing story that would hold everything together.
The biggest failing of DS9 is what happened after those six episodes: the station was retaken, and everything reset to square one. The follow-up to the climactic battle is a light-hearted wedding. There were two more seasons for the show to get through, and thirty-six more episodes before the story resumed. Thiry-six more episodes of holodeck adventures, Ferengi shenanigans, mirror-universe escapades, romantic melodrama, and pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo. Thirty-six episodes that could have been picked up, dusted off, and plonked down safely in any other science fiction franchise without any effort.
Is this a gripping series? It's more frustrating than gripping, though perhaps all the dangling plot threads and unresolved tension might contribute to a fleeting sensation of being "gripped". DS9 is a deep space shaggy dog story, a shuffling, incoherent mess of a show, that never quite escapes the feeling of jarring discontinuity between epic interstellar conflict and humdrum soap opera. There are good episodes every once in a while -- even great ones -- but in between there are such depths of unremarkable mediocrity that there's nothing to unite those better moments. The storyline is so tangled and knotted that only a heavy dose of expository dialogue can eventually unravel it.
In the end, what is it all about? The Dominion, with their dreams of universal order and their genetically engineered super-soldiers, are convenient villains with an absurdly simple motive. The good guys in the war -- the Federation, the Klingons -- go unexamined and uncriticized, and exist merely as generic futuristic states. Gene Roddenberry's original optimistic vision of the future is diminished and hushed up -- buried under impressive pyrotechnics and convoluted plot twists -- and eventually forgotten. The future of DS9 is a venue for space battles and soap opera, but not science fiction.
Until that point, science fiction television shows had always avoided any hint of serialization. The adventure of the week was the standard format, and it had succeeded fairly well for many decades. TV was changing in the mid-Nineties, and Star Trek changed with it, offering fans a show with more complex characters and an ongoing story that would hold everything together.
The biggest failing of DS9 is what happened after those six episodes: the station was retaken, and everything reset to square one. The follow-up to the climactic battle is a light-hearted wedding. There were two more seasons for the show to get through, and thirty-six more episodes before the story resumed. Thiry-six more episodes of holodeck adventures, Ferengi shenanigans, mirror-universe escapades, romantic melodrama, and pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo. Thirty-six episodes that could have been picked up, dusted off, and plonked down safely in any other science fiction franchise without any effort.
Is this a gripping series? It's more frustrating than gripping, though perhaps all the dangling plot threads and unresolved tension might contribute to a fleeting sensation of being "gripped". DS9 is a deep space shaggy dog story, a shuffling, incoherent mess of a show, that never quite escapes the feeling of jarring discontinuity between epic interstellar conflict and humdrum soap opera. There are good episodes every once in a while -- even great ones -- but in between there are such depths of unremarkable mediocrity that there's nothing to unite those better moments. The storyline is so tangled and knotted that only a heavy dose of expository dialogue can eventually unravel it.
In the end, what is it all about? The Dominion, with their dreams of universal order and their genetically engineered super-soldiers, are convenient villains with an absurdly simple motive. The good guys in the war -- the Federation, the Klingons -- go unexamined and uncriticized, and exist merely as generic futuristic states. Gene Roddenberry's original optimistic vision of the future is diminished and hushed up -- buried under impressive pyrotechnics and convoluted plot twists -- and eventually forgotten. The future of DS9 is a venue for space battles and soap opera, but not science fiction.