I for one would also enjoy a post-DS9 storyline, perhaps one where there’s a new Cold War between Earth and Cardassia, the same way DS9 mirrored WWII. To make it more timely, it would be mostly set on a frontier planet rife with dilithium variants, the same way China and the U.S. are competing for lithium. It would be filled with spies and opportunistic miners, and Starfleet sends someone to become the lawman of this desert world, in a very neo-Western manner that DS9 couldn’t quite achieve. It would probably even question Starfleet’s police power and the institutions of the Federation in a sociological, David Simon-esque way, fulfilling what DS9 tried to do with Section 31. Just some food for thought
I was actually thinking along the lines of “What if Star Trek did Breaking Bad, Altered Carbon, The Shield and The Wire in the same show?” when I wrote this, but I can see that too
DS9 has always meant a lot to me as it was airing when I was in my peak Trek teenage years. I recently revisited it when my son was born, watching episodes while he was asleep on me, or exhausted late at night when I couldn't sleep because I was too frazzled. I was surprised by just how well it all holds up. Yes there are some cringe moments, yes the romance is non-essential, yes episodes sometimes hand-wave away the consequences of quite traumatic incidents (O'Brien life-time mental incarceration for a crime he didn't commit, for example)... but still. The characters are well realised, the stories are often good to excellent, the emotional investment is there and many of the social issues it deal with feel just as or even more relevant as they did then.
As you say, it is a shame that modern Trek dwells so fully on TOS and TNG, overlooking what I honestly believe is the best TV show to carry the Star Trek name.
I don’t get this is “romance is non essential” thing. The relationship between Odo and Kira is absolutely essential. The romance between Dax & Worf give us some extremely terrific moments.
I found DS9 made Worf a far more interesting character. He’s relationship with Martok?
There’s a difference between “isn’t the best thing about the show” and “not essential”.
As for hand waving traumatic experiences? The show has plenty of long term traumatic moments. Look at what happens to Nog. Or Odo. Or Kira. O’Brien knowing what he experienced wasn’t real probably helped. It’s essentially like a dream. Keep in mind this is a very, internal, pragmatic man. How much interesting drama can be mined from that? Not much. But the show not bringing something up doesn’t mean they are hand waving. It just means it’s a story we didn’t see told.
Thanks for the Deep Space 9 appreciation (and the prompt for a recollection of Avery Brooks saying "Spen-saah"). Always like the "take Me Out to the Holodeck" episode for some reason.
We're a couple episodes behind on Hacks S3 (do not understand why HBO is dropping multiple eps every week, it's sort of annoying) but enjoyed the S3:05 bottle episode that felt like an homage to "Pine Barrens," just minus the attempted murdering.
I was never a big fan of 20-24 episode TV seasons, the inevitable filler episodes were always frustrating to watch (even though the best written shows of that era could make those palatable). But having all that extraneous storytelling to build characters was great, and could lead to fun diversions like "The Zeppo" on Buffy where all the sidelining of Xander paid off magnificently.
Or on West Wing, where Mrs Landingham is a minor supporting character but the repetition of her appearances happens so consistently that she can become a pivotal element of a season finale and be featured in one of the best episodes of the show's entire run.
The double-pump weekly release of series on streaming platforms, and even those who drop multiple episodes at once the week they premiere before stringing the rest out on a normal schedule, invariably has us behind on lots of stuff we'd like to be current on and, consequently, ranks high among reasons why certain shows that interest us barely get started on let alone finished.
Yep, same problem here. HBO didn't do this much in the past with their comedies, don't love this trend. I'll die on the hill that the Netflix binge model is bad for the success of TV series generally and therefore bad for TV, and dropping multiple episodes a week is just another aspect of that.
Agreed on Hacks. I am of the opinion that a show should release one episode a week or release them all. Maybe you can persuade me to release 2 episodes for the first week but that’s as far as it should go. I also am behind on Hacks. I still have 3 episodes to watch and the finale airs this Thursday. So I never caught up and then it’s going to be over. I just watched the one where they got lost in the woods and it was superb!
I get that's it debatable, filmed mostly outdoors which stretches the definition. But in terms of this series, it felt like they shot all those scenes in 2 days, also appeared to be the simplest and least narratively complex episode of the entire series so far.
I have never been able to really get into Abbot Elementary, despite liking it whenever I watched it, and I think the will they/won't they plot is a big reason for that. It felt very forced to me, and just reminded me that I've seen this same type of show many times before. I don't think there's any new territory to mine there that Jim and Pam (or, for that matter, Tim and Dawn) didn't already cover.
In The Visitor, when Ben takes a second during the commotion in Sick Bay after he phased back in to ask Jake how he’s doing, and Jake just melts into him - that was a hell of a thing.
DS9 is so damn good. Easily my favourite TREK. Though TNG is a close second. But holy shit does it need a REMASTER. Come on Paramount! The TNG Blu Rays look so damn good. I realize it was an expensive process but damn it I just want the show to look amazing. I don’t know how they’d go about remastering the SD CGI effects but…just make it so!
Also…How can you skip the Ferengi episodes? The Roswell episode as well as the episode with Iggy Pop are fantastic. Quark is one of my favourite characters.
DS9 actually made me a Trek fan. I’m always amazed at how action packed the show got compared to TNG. An episode like Way of the Warrior just didn’t happen on TNG. Some of the space battles looks dated now but for the time? Nothing like that was on TV.
And im confused. What’s wrong with Odo’s love for Kira? Why is it creepy? That’s an odd way to describe it. I think that relationship was handled just fine.
Oh. Question for you Alan. Are you doing anything special for the upcoming 20th anniversary of Long Term Parking? (On a side note. How the hell was that 20 years ago!?!)
Not related to LTP but I came across the shooting script from the final episode of Sopranos first season. And there’s a crazy twist Chase cut out. It would’ve changed the Tony/Melfi dynamic quite a bit. Melfi rats on Tony to the FBI. There’s a scene in the script where Melfi, with her lawyer, calls the FBI to report everything on Tony. And the FBI blow her off.
I thought I'd heard the DS9 remasters were finally happening, but it's taken so long because, again from what I've been told, the TNG Blu-Rays were nowhere near profitable for them unfortunately.
Oh how I wish that was true. Nope. I’m pretty plugged into that but as far as I know there’s been no movement. Especially now that paramount is in this weird for sale limbo. Our best bet is them doing an A.I. Remaster. Which isn’t ideal but anything is better than what we’ve got. But man those TNG blu rays look amazing.
I told my wife and daughter during the Abbot finale how TV shows always pay off the slow burn in Season 3. The Office did it with Jim and Pam end of Season 3, Parks had Ben and Leslie as a "secret couple" at the end of Season 3 (though to be fair it was only one full season of Adam Scott). It was clear Abbot was heading to this resolution and I'm glad they didn't delay it further. And while it wasn't a shocking development, I was pleased with everyone else's storylines. I love episodes when the entire cast is in a single location and clearly enjoying themselves (See Jim and Pam's wedding, and the Parks gang at the Snake Hole lounge).
The reason we're only getting Trek set in familiar times and places is the same reason the wider entertainment industry is only giving us reboots and remakes and retreads: because it's seen as safe. And since these shows are so massively expensive - because people mistakenly think that Trek is an action franchise - they doubly have to take no risks because they're literally too big to fail. It's not a recipe for good storytelling, but it is everywhere.
TNG was done in first-run syndication for a $900k/ep license fee. It was mostly people having moral dilemmas in standing sets. I'd love to see someone make a Trek series like that again. When you don't have the budget for flash, you're forced to focus on telling great character stories. And if you don't make us care about the *people*, nothing else matters. I think modern Trek forgets that.
Not the same trope as secret identity but similar enough, it’s impressive that Dana Scully didn’t come off as an idiot (before they slowly shifted her skepticism) even there was clear evidence of alien life on the show from the beginning.
I can't believe you skipped the Ferengi episodes in ds9! The Magnificent Ferengi? I always felt like DS9 was the show that managed to give characters like Luxwana Troi or species like The Ferengi real depth and episodes focused on them aren't the skips that other ST series would warrant. Nog downright has one of the best character arcs of DS9 - and given the deep bench there, quite a feat!
I agree that I never quite got Kira and Odo as a couple (they focused too much on his feelings for her when we've known it since the first season and we never got to glimpse at how Kira's feelings may have evolved from friendship to romance), and I don't understand the purpose of giving Ezri any romance arcs given how short a time they had anyway, but I actually found Worf and Dax to be really kinda great. Perhaps because Worf's arc in DS9 is far more developed than TNG, so maybe it's biased, but I just found the relationship gave us some new angles on Worf as a character (and Dax too) so that was the one of the few romances in ST that I actually enjoyed fully (as I've aged, I actually find Miles and Keiko to have one of the most stable and strong marriages in ST, and how resilient their love is despite all the weird things that happen to them. There's a bit of a no nonsense "hey, we are life partners so we will work things out together" that is sweet, looking at it as an older person vs when I was young.)
It is funny that when I rewatch DS9 I look at Bashir as basically the prototype of which they based Baltar in BSG on. It's like Baltar is Bashir, if he were not a starfleet officer and is self-serving and selfish.
And finally, YES! I had been waiting for the continuation of the ST timeline that starts after the Dominion Wars forever. It is why I find it difficult to really get engaged with new ST franchises because they are always prequels. I want to see what happens after, not before!
I didn't skip all of the Ferengi episodes. Just a lot of them, especially the ones that were primarily about Ferengi politics, the Nagus, etc. There are some Quark spotlights that are really good, but I found DS9 as sitcom to be unbearable.
And I just could never understand what Jadzia — as uninhibited and comfortable in her skin character as exists in any Trek series — saw in the version of Worf we got on DS9, who was an unbearably uptight, puritanical killjoy in nearly every scene with her. They did a whole episode where he joined a terrorist coup of a Federation planet, just because he was annoyed that people came to Risa to have sex!
I always chalked it up to Curzon's (and thus Jadzia's) fascnation and love of the Klingons that made Worf someone attractive to Jadzia - they both share this intense love of the Klingon traditions (the heart of a Klingon) but are outsiders to it for different reasons.
Resident Alien is a show that I still enjoy — and I’m glad to an extent that more of the characters have been read into knowledge of the aliens’ existence — yet I can’t help wondering if it’d have been better off having a shorter run. Alan Tudyk’s brilliant performance is all-time great but suffers a bit from the trope of him being the only* alien in human form who seems to behave so oddly. Discovering so much other alien activity on Earth and indeed in his backyard in general has been “more is less” to me. (*The avian in this past season was a nice exception.)
I subscribed to Apple TV+ for the Steve Martin doc and slow-binged Sugar, a.k.a. the Bizarro Resident Alien, in the week leading up to the finale but didn’t get to comment in timely fashion on the previous newsletter, so: Other than the “uncanny valley” CGI nature of Sugar visually after his transformation really taking me out of what should’ve been a moment of wonder, I don’t think I’d have minded the late reveal of this major part of the premise if the case Sugar was working hadn’t been at once kind-of minimized and then awkwardly stitched into the most hackneyed aspects of the last episode. My kingdom for a taut drama where not everything has to be connected to everything else including the hero/protagonist’s traumatic past! I’ve largely appreciated rather than enjoyed Colin Farrell’s work before this but his measured demeanor and that voiceover absolutely hooked me from the start, and I loved the interstitial film bits; honestly, I don’t think I’ve been so completely absorbed in a show right out of the gate since The Americans, which makes it all falling apart for me when it’s all coming together in the finale such a frustration.
I for one would also enjoy a post-DS9 storyline, perhaps one where there’s a new Cold War between Earth and Cardassia, the same way DS9 mirrored WWII. To make it more timely, it would be mostly set on a frontier planet rife with dilithium variants, the same way China and the U.S. are competing for lithium. It would be filled with spies and opportunistic miners, and Starfleet sends someone to become the lawman of this desert world, in a very neo-Western manner that DS9 couldn’t quite achieve. It would probably even question Starfleet’s police power and the institutions of the Federation in a sociological, David Simon-esque way, fulfilling what DS9 tried to do with Section 31. Just some food for thought
Ha, I think you described a much better version of the main plot of For All Mankind S4.
I was actually thinking along the lines of “What if Star Trek did Breaking Bad, Altered Carbon, The Shield and The Wire in the same show?” when I wrote this, but I can see that too
Your intent was clear, that would be fun, I was just struck by the overlap. I'd rather watch what you described than what I got with FAM S4.
DS9 has always meant a lot to me as it was airing when I was in my peak Trek teenage years. I recently revisited it when my son was born, watching episodes while he was asleep on me, or exhausted late at night when I couldn't sleep because I was too frazzled. I was surprised by just how well it all holds up. Yes there are some cringe moments, yes the romance is non-essential, yes episodes sometimes hand-wave away the consequences of quite traumatic incidents (O'Brien life-time mental incarceration for a crime he didn't commit, for example)... but still. The characters are well realised, the stories are often good to excellent, the emotional investment is there and many of the social issues it deal with feel just as or even more relevant as they did then.
As you say, it is a shame that modern Trek dwells so fully on TOS and TNG, overlooking what I honestly believe is the best TV show to carry the Star Trek name.
I don’t get this is “romance is non essential” thing. The relationship between Odo and Kira is absolutely essential. The romance between Dax & Worf give us some extremely terrific moments.
I found DS9 made Worf a far more interesting character. He’s relationship with Martok?
There’s a difference between “isn’t the best thing about the show” and “not essential”.
As for hand waving traumatic experiences? The show has plenty of long term traumatic moments. Look at what happens to Nog. Or Odo. Or Kira. O’Brien knowing what he experienced wasn’t real probably helped. It’s essentially like a dream. Keep in mind this is a very, internal, pragmatic man. How much interesting drama can be mined from that? Not much. But the show not bringing something up doesn’t mean they are hand waving. It just means it’s a story we didn’t see told.
Thanks for the Deep Space 9 appreciation (and the prompt for a recollection of Avery Brooks saying "Spen-saah"). Always like the "take Me Out to the Holodeck" episode for some reason.
We're a couple episodes behind on Hacks S3 (do not understand why HBO is dropping multiple eps every week, it's sort of annoying) but enjoyed the S3:05 bottle episode that felt like an homage to "Pine Barrens," just minus the attempted murdering.
I was never a big fan of 20-24 episode TV seasons, the inevitable filler episodes were always frustrating to watch (even though the best written shows of that era could make those palatable). But having all that extraneous storytelling to build characters was great, and could lead to fun diversions like "The Zeppo" on Buffy where all the sidelining of Xander paid off magnificently.
Or on West Wing, where Mrs Landingham is a minor supporting character but the repetition of her appearances happens so consistently that she can become a pivotal element of a season finale and be featured in one of the best episodes of the show's entire run.
The double-pump weekly release of series on streaming platforms, and even those who drop multiple episodes at once the week they premiere before stringing the rest out on a normal schedule, invariably has us behind on lots of stuff we'd like to be current on and, consequently, ranks high among reasons why certain shows that interest us barely get started on let alone finished.
Yep, same problem here. HBO didn't do this much in the past with their comedies, don't love this trend. I'll die on the hill that the Netflix binge model is bad for the success of TV series generally and therefore bad for TV, and dropping multiple episodes a week is just another aspect of that.
Agreed on Hacks. I am of the opinion that a show should release one episode a week or release them all. Maybe you can persuade me to release 2 episodes for the first week but that’s as far as it should go. I also am behind on Hacks. I still have 3 episodes to watch and the finale airs this Thursday. So I never caught up and then it’s going to be over. I just watched the one where they got lost in the woods and it was superb!
Lol, the Hacks episode where they got lost in the forest is very much not a "bottle episode."
I get that's it debatable, filmed mostly outdoors which stretches the definition. But in terms of this series, it felt like they shot all those scenes in 2 days, also appeared to be the simplest and least narratively complex episode of the entire series so far.
It's a definite shock to start S7 with three serialized and frankly overly dark episodes and then Take Me Out to the Holosuite happens.
It's worth it though for the one two of Worf's cheer of "Death to the opposition!" and then telling Nog to "FIND HIM AND KILL HIM!".
I have never been able to really get into Abbot Elementary, despite liking it whenever I watched it, and I think the will they/won't they plot is a big reason for that. It felt very forced to me, and just reminded me that I've seen this same type of show many times before. I don't think there's any new territory to mine there that Jim and Pam (or, for that matter, Tim and Dawn) didn't already cover.
In The Visitor, when Ben takes a second during the commotion in Sick Bay after he phased back in to ask Jake how he’s doing, and Jake just melts into him - that was a hell of a thing.
DS9 is so damn good. Easily my favourite TREK. Though TNG is a close second. But holy shit does it need a REMASTER. Come on Paramount! The TNG Blu Rays look so damn good. I realize it was an expensive process but damn it I just want the show to look amazing. I don’t know how they’d go about remastering the SD CGI effects but…just make it so!
Also…How can you skip the Ferengi episodes? The Roswell episode as well as the episode with Iggy Pop are fantastic. Quark is one of my favourite characters.
DS9 actually made me a Trek fan. I’m always amazed at how action packed the show got compared to TNG. An episode like Way of the Warrior just didn’t happen on TNG. Some of the space battles looks dated now but for the time? Nothing like that was on TV.
And im confused. What’s wrong with Odo’s love for Kira? Why is it creepy? That’s an odd way to describe it. I think that relationship was handled just fine.
Oh. Question for you Alan. Are you doing anything special for the upcoming 20th anniversary of Long Term Parking? (On a side note. How the hell was that 20 years ago!?!)
Not related to LTP but I came across the shooting script from the final episode of Sopranos first season. And there’s a crazy twist Chase cut out. It would’ve changed the Tony/Melfi dynamic quite a bit. Melfi rats on Tony to the FBI. There’s a scene in the script where Melfi, with her lawyer, calls the FBI to report everything on Tony. And the FBI blow her off.
I thought I'd heard the DS9 remasters were finally happening, but it's taken so long because, again from what I've been told, the TNG Blu-Rays were nowhere near profitable for them unfortunately.
Oh how I wish that was true. Nope. I’m pretty plugged into that but as far as I know there’s been no movement. Especially now that paramount is in this weird for sale limbo. Our best bet is them doing an A.I. Remaster. Which isn’t ideal but anything is better than what we’ve got. But man those TNG blu rays look amazing.
I told my wife and daughter during the Abbot finale how TV shows always pay off the slow burn in Season 3. The Office did it with Jim and Pam end of Season 3, Parks had Ben and Leslie as a "secret couple" at the end of Season 3 (though to be fair it was only one full season of Adam Scott). It was clear Abbot was heading to this resolution and I'm glad they didn't delay it further. And while it wasn't a shocking development, I was pleased with everyone else's storylines. I love episodes when the entire cast is in a single location and clearly enjoying themselves (See Jim and Pam's wedding, and the Parks gang at the Snake Hole lounge).
I'm surprised you didn't mention Tim Lynch and the really wonderful piece on ArsTecnica (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/01/the-usenet-deep-space-9-recapper-that-helped-inspire-modern-tv-criticism/) that features you.
What’s on that table? I see Battleship, Connect 4 and a I love Pennsylvania puzzle, but can’t identify the other 2 boxes.
The reason we're only getting Trek set in familiar times and places is the same reason the wider entertainment industry is only giving us reboots and remakes and retreads: because it's seen as safe. And since these shows are so massively expensive - because people mistakenly think that Trek is an action franchise - they doubly have to take no risks because they're literally too big to fail. It's not a recipe for good storytelling, but it is everywhere.
TNG was done in first-run syndication for a $900k/ep license fee. It was mostly people having moral dilemmas in standing sets. I'd love to see someone make a Trek series like that again. When you don't have the budget for flash, you're forced to focus on telling great character stories. And if you don't make us care about the *people*, nothing else matters. I think modern Trek forgets that.
Great piece on Resident Alien even though I had to skip some of it because there's some shows I haven't seen yet 😅
Not the same trope as secret identity but similar enough, it’s impressive that Dana Scully didn’t come off as an idiot (before they slowly shifted her skepticism) even there was clear evidence of alien life on the show from the beginning.
I can't believe you skipped the Ferengi episodes in ds9! The Magnificent Ferengi? I always felt like DS9 was the show that managed to give characters like Luxwana Troi or species like The Ferengi real depth and episodes focused on them aren't the skips that other ST series would warrant. Nog downright has one of the best character arcs of DS9 - and given the deep bench there, quite a feat!
I agree that I never quite got Kira and Odo as a couple (they focused too much on his feelings for her when we've known it since the first season and we never got to glimpse at how Kira's feelings may have evolved from friendship to romance), and I don't understand the purpose of giving Ezri any romance arcs given how short a time they had anyway, but I actually found Worf and Dax to be really kinda great. Perhaps because Worf's arc in DS9 is far more developed than TNG, so maybe it's biased, but I just found the relationship gave us some new angles on Worf as a character (and Dax too) so that was the one of the few romances in ST that I actually enjoyed fully (as I've aged, I actually find Miles and Keiko to have one of the most stable and strong marriages in ST, and how resilient their love is despite all the weird things that happen to them. There's a bit of a no nonsense "hey, we are life partners so we will work things out together" that is sweet, looking at it as an older person vs when I was young.)
It is funny that when I rewatch DS9 I look at Bashir as basically the prototype of which they based Baltar in BSG on. It's like Baltar is Bashir, if he were not a starfleet officer and is self-serving and selfish.
And finally, YES! I had been waiting for the continuation of the ST timeline that starts after the Dominion Wars forever. It is why I find it difficult to really get engaged with new ST franchises because they are always prequels. I want to see what happens after, not before!
I didn't skip all of the Ferengi episodes. Just a lot of them, especially the ones that were primarily about Ferengi politics, the Nagus, etc. There are some Quark spotlights that are really good, but I found DS9 as sitcom to be unbearable.
And I just could never understand what Jadzia — as uninhibited and comfortable in her skin character as exists in any Trek series — saw in the version of Worf we got on DS9, who was an unbearably uptight, puritanical killjoy in nearly every scene with her. They did a whole episode where he joined a terrorist coup of a Federation planet, just because he was annoyed that people came to Risa to have sex!
I always chalked it up to Curzon's (and thus Jadzia's) fascnation and love of the Klingons that made Worf someone attractive to Jadzia - they both share this intense love of the Klingon traditions (the heart of a Klingon) but are outsiders to it for different reasons.
Yes, we try to forget about that episode!
Resident Alien is a show that I still enjoy — and I’m glad to an extent that more of the characters have been read into knowledge of the aliens’ existence — yet I can’t help wondering if it’d have been better off having a shorter run. Alan Tudyk’s brilliant performance is all-time great but suffers a bit from the trope of him being the only* alien in human form who seems to behave so oddly. Discovering so much other alien activity on Earth and indeed in his backyard in general has been “more is less” to me. (*The avian in this past season was a nice exception.)
I subscribed to Apple TV+ for the Steve Martin doc and slow-binged Sugar, a.k.a. the Bizarro Resident Alien, in the week leading up to the finale but didn’t get to comment in timely fashion on the previous newsletter, so: Other than the “uncanny valley” CGI nature of Sugar visually after his transformation really taking me out of what should’ve been a moment of wonder, I don’t think I’d have minded the late reveal of this major part of the premise if the case Sugar was working hadn’t been at once kind-of minimized and then awkwardly stitched into the most hackneyed aspects of the last episode. My kingdom for a taut drama where not everything has to be connected to everything else including the hero/protagonist’s traumatic past! I’ve largely appreciated rather than enjoyed Colin Farrell’s work before this but his measured demeanor and that voiceover absolutely hooked me from the start, and I loved the interstitial film bits; honestly, I don’t think I’ve been so completely absorbed in a show right out of the gate since The Americans, which makes it all falling apart for me when it’s all coming together in the finale such a frustration.