Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Is the Best of Star Trek’s Next Generation

It has a Better Story and Characters

I was born the year the Star Trek: The Original Series began and only three when it ended, so I’m not certain this qualifies me as a first-generation Star Trek fan. But like the first generation of Star Trek fans, my first experience of Star Trek was that it was the one and only Star Trek (okay, there was an aminated extension of it). I never thought much about it coming back, and I was content with watching it over and over in reruns. I collected and read the James Blish novels, got Star Trek toys for Christmas, and had posters up in my room. Before VCRs, with reruns playing every weekday at 4 p.m., I recorded audios of the episodes on my cassette tape recorder and would listen to them in my room, often late into the evening with the lights out. Later, I had nearly every episode recorded via our first Betamax, even with commercials omitted.

Then, thanks to the success of Star Wars, my undreamt dreams came true when Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out. I wasn’t pleased about the 70’s-style disco uniforms, but I was enthralled with the special effects, especially with the new U.S.S. Enterprise. The uniforms and everything else only got better with Star Trek II and III. The Next Generation then started when I was in college, and in my mind, it would never be as good as Captain Kirk’s Star Trek, but it was still very cool that Star Trek was continuing in some form. The original Star Trek gang was still going strong in movies, but they were clearly getting older.

As the 1980s ended and the 1990s began the Next Generation continued and got better and better, even taking over for the original crew in the movies. I was biased for sure, but this series could never quite find a place in my heart like the original show had, in spite of some really great episodes. And I realized over time, after years of watching, that I found myself never really liking the human characters all that much. Captain Pickard, played by Patrick Stewart, alone I liked, but none of the others ever resonated with me. They never felt entirely real.

I read years later that this human character problem might have been the result of an edict from Gene Roddenberry himself that Star Fleet personnel should be depicted as evolved human beings, not effected by such sinful, human (my own words there) motives such as greed, lust and power. I certainly don’t think such motivations are needed to make a good character, but even good people are at least tempted once in a while. I realized why I liked Data (Brent Spiner) and Worf (Michael Dorn) much more than the others, probably because they were not human and didn’t quite fit in. Perhaps in Data’s case, his artificial problems seemed to be the sorts of problems that an artificial person would likely have. Regardless, I’m not sure this caused my problems with the characters, but I never felt like any of them earned any special regard within me.

Then in January 1993, Deep Space Nine (DS9) aired for the first time. The setting of the show was so different from previous Star Trek, instead of a ship going to all kinds of fascinating places, it was set on a space station of enemy alien origin parked next to a planet of no particular importance, Bajor. That is until a wormhole makes a precipitous appearance nearby the planet and everything changes. DS9 and Bejor are now the jumping-over and stopping point between parts of the galaxy previously too distant to visit each other. Now that the Alpha and Gamma quadrants have access to each other, this spells eventual trouble as powerful forces will clash for control of their sectors. (Fortunately for all concerned, the Borg are not from the Gamma quadrant—that’s for the Voyager crew to handle.) The show started off in an episodic fashion like the other shows, but later ongoing storylines took hold. Not every episode is a winner, but the story line of the Dominion War is truly outstanding. This helps to make DS9 greater than its fellow Next Generation shows, but in my opinion it’s the characters and their interplay that makes the show truly great.

As a side note, I am purposely not delving into Star Trek: Voyager in this article other than to say it suffers from the same troubles as the Next Generation in my mind. The character that makes that show for me is the Doctor, who although a hologram is the most human character aboard the ship. Seven of Nine is another character that works because as she’s a cyborg this makes it difficult for her to behave like a normal human (similar to Data). You would expect that from her.

In DS9, the human character problem is resolved—there are hardly any of them on the station, and the ones that are there have real, human problems. Captain Sisko, played by Avery Brooks, is somber and bitter due to the loss of his wife and a widower father to a bored, homesick teenager, Jake (Cirroc Lofton). Sisko is a great character in all the classical ways. He’s forced to play the dual role as the Star Fleet commander of the station and the anointed, but reluctant “Emissary” of the Prophets, the gods of Bajor and the aliens of the Wormhole.

The other two main human characters are real as well. There’s the constantly overworked Chief O’Brien (Colm Meaney), who has a very real and constant problem of keeping his marriage from falling apart. There’s also the young Doctor Bashir (Alexander Siddig), who is very able as a doctor but overly impressed with himself. The series itself doesn’t take him too seriously as he’s often humbled by happenstance, and he grows as a character as the series progresses, especially in his friendships with O’Brien and Garak (discussed further below).

The two female officers, Major Kira (Nana Visitor) and Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) are practically human. The Bajoran Major grew on me as her character evolved in several episodes from being singularly defined by her past freedom fighting days and a hatred of the Cardassians. But Dax, who was a Trill (a humanoid host with a long-lived symbiont creature implanted within her body), was basically to me another Next Generation officer character. She never seemed real. It’s drummed into our skulls that she is a wonderful, accomplished individual. Most of the regular, single men in the series are hopelessly in love with her, for example. And this is my main problem with her. Telling us she is wonderful doesn’t make it true; she needs to earn her accomplishments. She’s constantly quoting and telling stories from her symbiont’s past lives and coming off as a veteran of 1,000 wars, and thereby taking undeserved credit for all these accomplishments. Her fighting ability and affinity with Sisko and the great Klingon masters seems far-fetched, and when Worf falls for her, I thought he could do better. And I totally preferred her replacement, the sincere but lacking in self-confidence Ensign Ezri Dax (Nicole de Boer).

However, what makes DS9 a truly great show are the alien characters of the show, Odo, Quark and Garak the Cardassian tailor (who’s really a spy).

While the primary protagonist is Sisko, the show in many ways is about Odo (played by Rene Auberjonois) the shape-shifting Constable of the station, whose origins are a mystery in the first years of the show. He eventually learns that he is actually a member of the Gamma Quadrant race, the Changelings, who at war with the Federation. But the show has the most fun with his interplay with Quark (Armin Shimerman), the station’s crooked Ferengi bartender.

They are outwardly enemies but there’s always a hint of affection between them in their clashes. Quark is that character that John Cleese describes as someone who is truly an awful person and would be awful to know, but he makes you laugh so you forgive him and have positive feelings about him. (This was his description of Cleese’s own character, Basil Fawlty.) Quark can always be trusted to cheat you, and you don’t mind. The Ferengis remain as comic relief in DS9, but they are three-dimensional comic relief. I don’t think there was a bad episode that featured the Ferengis.

As the series progressed I became more interested in the alien races these characters were from because the characters were so good, and not the other way around. Bajorans were frankly kind of boring to me and did not improve as the series continued, but the Cardassians grew more interesting with each of Garak’s (Andrew Robinson) adventures as a spy. He sees himself as the necessary evil who must do the messy, morally-questionable acts in order to have an ordered, good society (one that he would probably define quite differently than you and me). In one episode, he evaporates one of his nemeses with a Cardassian pistol without hesitation and clearly would not lose a wink of sleep over it. He’s an outcast from his people (and his own father) yet tirelessly loyal to them. Dax could quite probably obliterate him in hand-to-hand combat, but I would bet all my pay on his prevailing in the end. When they are held prisoner in a Dominion escape-proof prison, and he’s accomplished his mission (finding his father there and making peace with him), he announces that it’s time to leave, and they do. He was there only because he needed to be, and he knew all along they would unquestionably escape. Garak glides on the gray area between good and bad guys, but remains ever so slightly on the good side of things.

Given more space and time, I would go more deeply into the addition of Klingon characters like General Martok (J.G. Hertzler) in later episodes. Having good characters like this certainly helps a show, but to make a show truly great, you need truly memorable bad guys. DS9 is full of them. Arguably the greatest bad guy of them all in any Star Trek series is Gal Dukat (Marc Alaimo). He’s the ex-commanding officer of DS9 during the Occupation of Bajor, which was basically the same as being the Commandant to a planetary-scaled Nazi concentration camp. He commits every kind of evil throughout the show, including killing his own half-breed daughter. And yet, he’s not just written off completely as a one-dimensional villain. There are times in the story where you actually find yourself rooting for him, especially in his one-ship crusade against the Klingons. But like all good villains, he eventually resorts back to his basic villainy and chooses sides with evil to his own doom. In his final scenes, he looks purely demonic having been possessed by evil alien spirits. Also doomed is the best Bajoran bad lady, Kai Winn (Louise Fletcher), who is smugly awful throughout the show but nobody else knows she’s bad except for Major Kira, her close friends, and us the audience.

To avoid losing your short attention span completely, let me briefly summarize the other great bad guys on the show. The female Changeling, played by Salome Jens (I don’t believe she is ever named, but I could be wrong), is the commander of the Alpha Quadrant Dominion forces. She’s perfect as the disinterested, unemotional and uncaring “god” in charge of the Dominion forces. Her chief and able second-in-command is the Vorta, Weyoun (Jeffery Combs). He steals any scene he is in. And, lastly, the Cardassian Damar (Casey Biggs) is another character who you think is one-dimensional but turns out is not.

One last side note—my thoughts above are intended to be chiefly focused on the characters and less on the actors’ performance as this is not my area of expertise. However, that said, I have to say that each of these great characters discussed above are portrayed so very well by their actors—that of course plays a great part in why the show was so good.