Question above. My only experience is with a handful of episodes from the original series. They were OK, but I'm not sure I want to watch the whole thing. It's a little too low budget for me. Can I just jump into the movies or one of the later series?
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DS9 is just a ripoff of Babylon 5, except without the forethought so it's a mess with bad characters, bad writing, and proto-SJW morality.
We're suppose to like the always victim-card playing Bajorans, or creme to the gender-fluid/tranny Dax? Worse-than-Wesley kids featured more prominently? Affirmative-action Nog getting into star fleet, what a joke!
It's a show that if you didn't have teenage raging hormones at the time you watched it (pre-internet) you certainly wouldn't say best series ever produced - far from it.
Yeah, I agree with nearly 100% of this. (didn't think the Nog was an AA hire because he was shown to be competent) I watched it for the first time recently and I expected something great and found it completely meh.
The Dominion arc I just found to be nonsense. There was this gigantic war going on, but the context of what's going on is really unclear, and conditions seem to fluctuate in ways that are convenient to whatever the plot for the story of the week needed. Also the Federation's ships are completely outmatched all the time -- their galaxy class flagships can't even take on the Dominion's fighters -- and they lose most of their fleet in tactical blunders (repeatedly IIRC?) but still somehow don't lose.
Quark, my favorite character, spends the entire series being emasculated. His mom, somehow, single handedly transforms the entire Ferengi empire from "patriarchal" structure with strict gender roles into a feminist utopia in the matter of a few years.
Sisko "sails" a solar ship in space ... which is physically impossible because there are no counteracting forces to steer the ship with, all so that they can show that the Bajorans were the real explorers and that the Cardassians didn't actually discover anything.
They turned Gul Dukat into a cartoon by the end of the series.
There's an "America was racist" episode. There's a "you need to accept your mixed-race offspring" episode.
Maybe I would have liked it more when it originally aired and am just too soured by the social justice nonsense, but even without that I thought most of the story wasn't that great.
To be fair, power isn't an unlimited resource in their setting. They need unobtainium and can't synthesize it. The shields always taking a strong hit could be the defenses are calibrated for a non-combat scenario, meant to deflect micro-meteors and whatnot, and they only divert more power to shields in a combat setting, so of the 10% of full power they have on the shields at the point of counterattack, they lose 30% of that, and don't even go all-in on the shields in combat unless the situation calls for it, to save fuel.
But that's headcanon territory.
I don't care if Straczynski had the idea for B5 first: DS9 was simply better. It had better writing, better acting and more believable characters. It explored themes that none of the other Star Trek series would ever touch, especially when it came to exposing the dark underbelly of the supposedly Utopian Federation, and it did so with a subtlety and a naturalness that B5 could never imitate.
Straczynski laid on his broader themes so thickly and oppressively that I always felt beaten down by them. He has no fialr for subtlety at all: even for 90s camp, that show was melodramatic, transparent and frankly pretty shallow. His dialogue was completely unrealistic and his characters were unrelatable as a result. Everyone in that show feels more like an archetype than a real human being. B5 simply wasn't very good.
I didn't say Babylon 5 was great, but rather that it's the cause of DS9 being a confused mess whereas B5 actually has a story.
Just look at the Babylon 5 plot synopsis vs Deep Space 9 -- the former tells a story, the latter is described as "plot elements" because it's a jumbled mess of nonsense.
Saying you like DS9 more than B5 is like saying you like Burger King better than McDonald's; they're both crap. Oh BK improved on crap, that's a real hot take.
I disagree about DS9. The discovery of the Gamma Quadrant Wormhole leads to a confrontation with a powerful, relentless enemy that's more technologically advanced than the Federation and leads to a years-long story arc that is pretty consistent, where fighting the war forces the DS9 crew and the Federation to question and reaffirm their commitment to the ideals that underpin their whole civilization and way of living. The whole Section 31 arc, the idea that Federation expansionism created more problems than it solved: a whole lot of that was explicitly anti-statist. Gene Roddenberry was too much of a pie-in-the-sky lefty futurist to have ever allowed that to go ahead while he was alive.
And even before that, the discovery of the wormhole and its connection to the Bajoran religion, the portrayal of the Bajorans as a hardened, jaded people recovering from a military occupation which they themselves fought to a stalemate with almost no help from the Federation, the constant assertion that their religion is the only thing holding them together: all of that is the opposite of woke. Even the portrayal of the Pa-Raiths as seeking to rule through corruption and subversion while the Prophets were the ones who largely expect you to solve your own problems was much more in tune with traditional Christianity than any leftist interpretation of it usually is.
That's a lot of words to say "Federation bad". Basically, a Picard-light version of Star Trek.
In fact one of the things people always cite is Sisko agreeing to let somebody go then killing them anyway 'for the greater good'... or something like that.
That's great if you like the Federation pulling people's eyes out as torture for fun. That kind of navel grazing introspection of the dark side happened because they couldn't "go where no man has gone before" since it's set in a fixed place with no story.
Hah the bajorans are like space Armenians, constantly whining about their genocide, but without the space jew clout to make anyone care
There are SOME good DS9 episodes.
For example, the Circle trilogy (S2E1-3).
It's a special kind of retarded to believe Dax is a tranny allegory, but at least trannies have the excuse of being insane. I have no idea how you got there while not being one yourself. Dax isn't a tranny, it's obviously reincarnation in sci-fi flavor. It's not even debatable, previous hosts are called "past lives." For fucks sake, there's even an episode where they do some wacky seance thing so the crew can be possessed by ghosts of her past lives.
Maybe you were too young to pick up on it at the time, but they laid it down pretty thick.
In her intro you didn't notice Bashir wanting to have sex with her then Sisko alluding to him not knowing she was previously a man? "wolf whistle this is going to take some getting used to". This gender confusion is a recurring theme.
Man undergoes surgery then is in the body of a women, taking on a new female name with calling her the old male name literally deadnaming. Oh my mistake, "past lifing". "Reincarnation surgery", yeah that's the ticket. kek.
At least in the TNG they had it right: Dr Beverly falls in love with the trill, he gets put into Riker temporarily and Crusher has offscreen sex with him, then he changes into a woman and Beverly is disgusted.
Kind of hard to miss, but I guess it wasn't on people's radar back in the 90s.
You ever notice that when somebody uses a supernatural being to refer to trannies, they call them demons or skinwalkers?
You're right to recognize TNG's Trill as a tranny allegory, whether or not it was intentional. That one was a body-snatching monster. It wore people like a skinsuit, and discarded them when it was done. It was unable to understand why actual humans were repulsed by it.
That's closer to what a tranny is. They're not just "somebody who once lived as the opposite sex." If that's all it was, you wouldn't find them nearly as disturbing. There's something more to them than that. They're more of a suicidal self-rejection. They cope with it by inventing a new identity, rejecting the old one completely, to the point where they mutilate their own bodies and erase their past self.
That's why they say "Mike was always Michelle, she just didn't know it yet," not "Mike became Michelle." That's why they kill themselves once the delusion breaks. That self-hatred, and the body-snatching by the delusional identity, believing itself to be the "true" identity, is what transgenderism actually is.
DS9's Trill are the complete opposite of TNG's Trill, so they're a rejection of what transgenderism actually is. DS9's Trill don't erase the previous life. The current life doesn't become a previous one either. There's never a moment where Jadzia says "Actually, Kurzon was always Jadzia." Kurzon was a whole person who lived a full life. Jadzia was a whole person (though "full life", maybe not). Dax is a non-sapient mechanism to scientifically justify past lives.
In order for trannies to be represented by DS9's Trill, they'd have to accept that their previous selves were complete and worthwhile people, which they can't do. It would require they face themselves. Most of them can't even do that in a literal sense; they get agitated by mirrors. If they were capable of that, they wouldn't be trannies in the first place. It's acceptance, not denial. They're complete opposites.
And you might say that it's supposed to be transgender allegory, if not a very good one, but they're so far removed from each other that I just don't see it. I find it far more likely that the Trill were just meant to be a sci-fi take on reincarnation, and trend-chasing parasites (Ira Steven Behr) latched onto it twenty years later.