Been rewatching Deep Space Nine here and there.
SPOILERS
If you want to see just how bad some of the actors truly are on Deep Space Nine, you should definitely check this one out. Not only is it an absolutely horrible Sisko episode about civil rights (what else) but everyone goes without make-up and they do (laughable) New York accents.
Another one is S06E23 'Profit and lace'. It's where they turn Quark into a tranny in order to salvage what's left of the Grand Nagus' authority after he gave females the right to wear clothes. Yes, that's right. Trannies & feminism. :')
(Not to mention parroting all the talking points about getting females into the workforce and doubling the economy, but for some reason they omitted the part where the birth rates would plummet as a consequence. rofl)
S06E24 is also hilariously bad. It's where they decide to send an eighteen-year-old Molly back into the time where she was left stranded for ten years and grew up all alone on an abandoned planet 300 years ago. Apparently, she would be better off there, instead of a Federation clinic, specifically designed to rehabilitate cases like hers. :') :')
Edit:
Season 6 was also the season where they decided to turn Dukat into a cartoon villain and make him the 'nemesis' of Sisko. It resulted in that ridiculous episode where Sisko and Dukat were stranded on a planet and Dukat was talking to himself the whole time. It ended with Sisko ignoring Dukat's mental status and declaring him an 'evil man', after his pride got wounded (once again).
This theme was further explored in S06E17. Where Dukat called up Kira out of nowhere and revealed that he was banging her mother during the occupation, rofl. And then to make it even more preposterous, Kira used the Orb of Time to travel back in time to confirm that her mother was really banging Dukat.
Star Trek was always pushing progressivism. ToS had the first interracial kiss and in TNG Riker fell in love with an androgenous scientist from a society where having a gender was a crime.
The problem is it's always ranged from something innocuous like imagining a future where Russians and Americans wouldn't be rivals anymore to pushing trannies and bull dykes in the newer shows. Progressivism wears this "it's all just get along and accept each other" mask, when in reality they want to throw you in a gulag if you don't agree with their world view.
"ToS had the first interracial kiss"
The network only went along with it because the two characters (Kirk and Uhura) had their bodies controlled by others.
It was against their will.
That being said, it always starts small.
Didn't the original have the NAZI episode that said the computer created a NAZI society because it was the most effective form of government
"Most...efficient...state..."
In that ToS episode, it was an earth historian who transformed that planet's culture to mimic the NSDAP, because of its efficiency and ability to become extremely prosperous in a very short time.
It was the episode where Riker was portrayed to have so much charm that he turned a member of an androgenous race into a female (was played by a female) with his raw sex appeal. rofl
All the new shows are feminist-diversity DEI laundering attempts.
I could be remembering that episode wrong, but I remember the whole Quark dressing as a woman thing as being more in the tradition of isn't men dressing as women funny? that had existed for decades and not the modern men can actually become women sense. The joke is lost in 2025 though because that joke is our reality now.
The feminist nonsense is feminist nonsense though, of course.
The problem was it originally written like that but both Siddig [Bashir directing] and Shimmerman [Quark acting] tried to play it far more seriously.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Profit_and_Lace_(episode)#Cast_and_characters
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Profit_and_Lace_(episode)#Production
There are a lot of dipshits who can't tell the difference between a mid to late 90s show having a character, especially a space alien, dress up as a woman and a 2025 gender studies project.
Except that they had doctor Bashir surgically alter Quark and then in order to prove that he was a female (after being questioned about it) he opened up his dress and revealed that he was an anatomically correct female. (Not graphically shown.)
It went far beyond 'men dressing as women' and into the realm of body horror.
You're correct. It's not meant to be showing him as a tranny, and he has to deal with getting hit on and it makes him uncomfortable.
If it was pro tranny, he'd have enjoyed it.
Is that one of the ones where he goes back in time as a black sci fi author?
Yeah, I could only endure the first five minutes until I started skipping ahead. The guy playing Dukat (edit) called Sisko a 'boy', rofl. All those facial prosthetics were in part used to hide the piss poor acting chops of some of these actors.
Avery's over-acting is also extremely bad in this one.
Avery was good when he played Sisko as a stoic (not acting). When he tried to act, he often over acted. There were several episodes where he over acted, and it was really off putting. A few in the first season, a few when he was battling the Federation turncoat that joined the Maquis, and the one where Sisko was a scifi author in the early 20th century, to say how bad racism was.
It's a shame, too, because there are a lot of good episodes in DS9. Looking back, it's maddening and hilarious with what they did with Dukat. They made him so nuanced, an actual believable character, with genuine motivations and points of view, rather than a mustache twirling super villain (he was meant to be a stand in for Nazis), and the actor (Marc Alaimo) was so charismatic, that a lot of the audience began to love Dukat. By the last season or two, the writers were so pissed that the audience (how dare they?!) liked their Nazi stand in, that they pissed away all the nuance, development, and writing for the character, that they turned him into the mustache twirling two dimensional super villain they were desperately trying to avoid the rest of the show.
They needed him to make their Saturday morning cartoon showdown between good and evil work. Sisko the Emissary versus Dukat the evil genocidal cartoon villain.
Except that they already established that Dukat had a mental breakdown after the dominion fleet was disappeared by the wormhole aliens and his daughter got killed. He was suffering long-term mental health consequences from that episode. They were playing it like he was finally revealing his true self due to his breakdown, but what kind of man talks with and shoots a phaser at imaginary people?
Ever heard him talking, as himself? He's a scatterbrained idiot. Really bad!
That must make him a terrific actor then? 😜 If he can come across as anything BUT a scatterbrained idiot.
Most actors I've heard talk in real life have almost always been idiots. Very few exceptions. Some are worse than others, though.
I liked that episode only because it gave the actors a chance to act beyond their DS9 characters for an episode. The actual plot was garbage but I just ignored that shit and skipped through any soapbox lectures.
DS9 was really uneven. It gave us "Wrongs" but it also gave us "nobody leaves paradise'. Obviously its progressive writers' worldview seeping out, but back then they had a bit of skill and could produce good along with he bad. All that to say: B5 was better (and it was even more uneven with more ideal progressivism at times).
The guy playing Eddington was also a bad actor. He's so emotional.
The whole thing between Eddington and Sisko wasn't really about Eddington betraying his oath, uniform and Sisko. It was really about Eddington using Sisko's side-chick and exposing her criminal smuggling gig as a diversion to get those industrial replicators. Sisko poisoned a planet, because Eddington messed with his side-chick.
Sisko is black so it’s cool and edgy when he renders a planet uninhabitable!
They tried to rationalize it by claiming that he only poisoned the planet for humans. Just like the Maquis did with those Cardassian planets. Using a biogenic weapon to render them uninhabitable to only Cardassians.
Then they tried to even it out by saying that they could just switch planets.
Another argument was that the Maquis were planning to target every single last Cardassian planet that was previously in human hands. But Sisko ended up catching only Eddington. Not sure what happened to the rest of the biogenic weapons.
On the other hand, I thought it was completely legitimate.
Why not use the tactics your enemy is? Holding yourself to a higher standard doesn't work in the real world. And I thought DS9 showed that well there. Of course, in the ST universe, Sisko would have been sent to prison for it forever, but that's a different issue.
Everything leading up to it was retarded, and Eddington's decisions were sketchy at best the whole way through. The maquis idea is basically "but what if the rebels are the real good guys?", which is unfortunate. Like yeah, the cardissians were largely shitbags, as seen by their governments. That's a given. But the maquis weren't exactly good people either.
My issue is indeed with Sisko getting off Scott free. Much like worf joining up with terrorist on the vacation planet and nothing happening to him after. God that episode was terrible
I don't remember that off hand, but it's been forever since I've watched TNG. Also had a lot of great points, but a lot of really stupid ones.
That said, imo, voyager was the worst for highs vs lows.
The Maquis were just normal people in a hard place, and there were legit reasons to sympathize with their motivations or disagree with their actions. You don't have to like it, but they were very believable and the audience could understandably see both sides. Perhaps like the IRA during the troubles. Your "Why not use the tactics your enemy is? Holding yourself to a higher standard doesn't work in the real world." can apply to them and their choices too.
Your analysis actually gives the writers more credit than I would. I don't think Ira Steven Behr et al were skilled enough to try to do a "rebels are the good guys" but also let Sisko get away with what he did without some poetic justice. They wouldn't be able to help themselves. (and eventually Eddington did get his "just deserts" proving that they always wanted to make it clear he was on the wrong side)
Sure, but them making a planet not inhabitable for another group takes it from understandable to "ehhhh....maybe you guys went too far".
I think eddington (and the maquis) were sympathetic to a point. But like everything else, not being 'the good guys' doesn't mean they're evil. Just means there's a lot of morally iffy things being done, and maybe neither side comes out as good or bad.
I don't remember the cardissians just ruining planets for people entirely. They were the bad guys (for quite a long time, until the writers tried to get away from making them just that). Tbf, there's a lot I don't remember from the show, so maybe I'm wrong. But using the biogenics seemed like a new escalation point in their war, from what I remember now.
I remember when the episode came out we had study Les Miserable in school. And they had the Javert/Valjean analogy. I felt odd as I kinda always appreciated Javert. And I didn't like them calling Javert a villain in the episode
Never read Les Miserable.
Javert was basically a dumbfuck who at the end killed himself because he couldn't handle that the law isn't perfect (and that sometimes good people can do bad things and still need to get punished for it).
He's not a villain though.
I liked the concept of Section 31 introduced in DS9. The implication that the Federation utopia is a lie and only works because a secret organization is controlling everything.
They weren't controlling everything, they were simply doing the dirty spywork that the Obsidian Order, CIA etc to keep the Federation on top and hurt it's enemies.
Potato, Potato
Section 31 was the best thing (had it continued in that form) to come out of ds9, with the longer arcs being used as the second best thing.
Of course, 'modern' section 31 is basically "what if they were retarded leftists the whole time, who loved people who committed genocide because reasons".
Don't forget everything after Enterprise just completely doing away with how secretive S31 was meant to be. At least with Harris in Enterprise he flies very close to the sun when justifying his work without being as blatant as Discovery or Lower Decks were about the organisation.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Divergence_(episode)#Memorable_quotes
Meanwhile STD not only had visible crew with S31 badges but also the entire AI fleet and station. Lower Decks just did its usual thing of pissing all over the lore while trying to be funny about it like the Rick and Morty rip-off that it is aimed at normies and tourists who want to feel part of the Trekkie in group.
That's a shame. Because DS9 didn't even confirm it's existence, it was a grey area
My favorite part of DS9's depiction was how vague it was. For all we know, Section 31 is just a story playing itself out through people who believe it exists, whether they believe in its values or not.
I stopped watching after ENT, so I couldn't tell you what happened. I saw where it was going, and how shit it was.
They did Dukat so dirty in the last two seasons. Him running off into the electrical storm, never to be seen again would've been a better ending than the fire caves. But he didn't need to be space Hitler. A narcissistic space pirate was cool enough.
It's funny how that all worked out, because the writers actually wanted Dukat to be Space Hitler the whole time, but Marc Alaimo kept playing him so charismatically that he ended up being a fan favorite, so they had to roll with it. But they never gave up on their intent to have the audience hate him, so they kept putting him in more and more outrageous situations where the only choice was to conclude he's Space Hitler.
What? You didn't like him turning into a Hitler space cult leader who raped his brainwashed followers? What more could you want in a bad guy?
I'll take "Bajor should have statues of me because I wilfully murdered fewer of them than anyone else would have." over generic cultists any day.
DS9 had a lot of great episodes, but a lot of weird/mediocre ones.
I appreciate the idea behind Wrongs (and the rest of the 'but ben is a writer in the 50s!'), and I think it could have been itneresting, but the execution is clumsy and I usually skip them because they aren't relevant to the main story (besides the one weird orb episode, and even that's skippable for the most part).
They almost ended the series on an episode of Sisko being a 50s writer and would have made the whole show something he imagined, but Ira Steven Behr was talked out of it.
ala Saint Elsewhere and the Sopranos? I'm not opposed to ending something by saying "and none of that was real", but audiences tend to get pissed when the characters they invested emotionally in are done dirty like that.
I never preferred the human characters in DS9. Sisko was intolerably self-righteous and preachy, and his son was completely uninteresting as a journalist. The standouts in DS9 were all the aliens: Garak, Dukat, Quark- hell, they even made Nog interesting as a Ferengi that wanted to be a Starfleet officer.
A funny salvage on the "civil rights" episodes, is that Sisko is canonically evil and a bad person. Not just "In The Pale Moonlight" ends-justify-the-means throwing a party because he basically broke every federation rule in order to unlawfully provoke an entire species into an intergalactic war, but in the Mirror World episodes, where good are evil and evil are good... Sisko is a helpful freedom fighter working to aid humanitarian causes and assist the downtrodden.
Don't forget that the 'real' Sisko also slept with mirror-verse Dax when he was posing as their Sisko and her husband.
Oof, I remember Profit and Lace. Doctor Bashir directed that one iirc.
Was Star Trek Disco released yet in 2018? :')
Holy hell I forgot all about that one. I know "O'Brien Must Suffer" is a meme but they really didn't need to do my boy (and his family) so wrong over the years.
Another one with questionable medical ethics was when they wiped Worf's brother's memory. I remember hating it on first watch and being in disbelief that Bashir could get away with that, although I can better appreciate their point of view as I've grown older. The Molly episode didn't get better with time. It comes across even worse now.
Only place I must disagree with you on is the acting chops of Dukat / Marc Alaimo. Sure it was a little hammed up but he did just fine in that episode and any other role he's been in.
The facial prosthetics make him passable when he's playing a Cardassian. Perhaps acting with facial prosthetics on forced him to emote differently in his face. And he could no longer turn off that habit when he was finally acting without a mask on.
The Worf brother thing was also a waste of an episode but it was funny when Sisko complained that even his respect for cultural diversity ended with ritual murder. (Which is strange, because the Feds had Klingons as their major allies.)
DS9 and the Star Trek universe were major proponents of cultural diversity and used to promote mass immigration and multicultural in Western countries.
Normies love later DS9 but it got really shitty, especially the beloved Dominion War stuff. I'd always hated how shit the battle scenes themselves actually were, but in the post-Marvel world, the dialogue is especially bad. There's one line that always stuck with me, "Who says there's never a Klingon around when you need one?" Nobody. It's babble. You just tossed darts at a board covered in cliches and filled in whatever you hit.
SNW actually canonized Sisko's 1960s alter ego really existing. He's the one who wrote that story the doctor reads to his daughter. Naturally, it's about a wise black king in vaguely European stylings who ends up saving and marrying a white princess.
They couldn't get the difference right between phaser bursts and quantum torpedoes. And that was just the beginning.
You're referring to this episode. Actually saw it a couple of years ago. One of those episodes where everyone went ham on the acting and DEI was the leading philosophy in determining who gets to play what shitty part.
SNW is just DEI laundering with a white male captain acting as the beard.
It started out pretty good? But even the first few seasons had "klunker" episodes. They fell flat, klunk! and were best forgotten.
Then the whole season was a continuous klunker! Or worse.
IMO it was the weakest of the first 4 trek series.
I have heard so many conflicting opinions on DS9. As someone who has only watched TNG, I think I’ll stay away from it.
It's pretty good- although the first 1 or 2 seasons kind of drag. When they start the Dominion War storyline it gets really good for the most part. In some ways it's even better than TNG.
Is it not all about the Dominion War? My impression is that it was entirely about it.
The Dominion isn't even mentioned until season 2 and aren't actually encountered until the s2 finale. Open war doesn't really start until the end of the 5th season.
Depends what kind of Trek you like. If your favorite stuff is interpersonal drama and relationships among the crew, epic space battles, and ongoing plot threads, DS9 has all that in spades and does the serial stories better. If you prefer seeing first contact with new life, exploring the mysteries of the universe, and random alien of the week anthology episodes that pose excellent philosophical questions with potential for massive repercussions to humanity and are never revisited again, nothing in DS9 comes close to TNG.
I think DS9 is many people's favorites because it was one of the first TV shows to introduce a continuous story arc (although many of the episodes were still disconnected "alien of the week" style). That's commonplace today, to the point that you won't have any clue what's going on in many shows if you haven't been watching from the beginning of miss an episode, but it was innovative at the time.
Profit and lace was the only episode of that series I rolled my eyes and skipped once I saw where the plot was going. Couldn't stand his mom and the fact that obnoxious thing seduced the leader and turned him into a simp was cringe feminist writing.