Rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

[Havok]

Yeah that was a good one.

Just watched Waltz... Fuck, Dukat is an amazing character.

[Connor MacLeod]

Agreed, at least where Kira is concerned. Never cared for Dax.

Depends on the Dax. Ezri was cute. Jadzea was nice looking but kind of annoying.

Edit: It just occured to me, did the ferengi 'culture' stuff start in DS9 or did that crop up in TNG? Its been ages since I've watched TNG from front to back and I only recall the early stuff with the Ferengi.

[Gandalf]

Agreed, at least where Kira is concerned. Never cared for Dax.

Depends on the Dax. Ezri was cute. Jadzea was nice looking but kind of annoying.

Edit: It just occured to me, did the ferengi 'culture' stuff start in DS9 or did that crop up in TNG? Its been ages since I've watched TNG from front to back and I only recall the early stuff with the Ferengi.

TNG showed us a race of little greedy people, and the concept of latinum. DS9 added the rest.

I thought the profit based religion was the most interesting. It beats yet another "death in battle" ideology.

[Connor MacLeod]

It was kinda nice, but I'd always kinda hoped they'd gone back to some of the early stuff with the Ferengi. They didnt have to be another warrior race but maybe more.. mercenary. There's lots of ways to portray them as greedy than just all being a race of alien capitalists. Especially givne the sort of character development they gave to Quark and Nog and such.

Especially considering the job they did with Cardassians in general - they were pretty well developed I thought and we also got some very excellent characters from them (Dukat was a good villain, but to be honest I always liked Garek more.)

[Gandalf]

It was kinda nice, but I'd always kinda hoped they'd gone back to some of the early stuff with the Ferengi. They didnt have to be another warrior race but maybe more.. mercenary. There's lots of ways to portray them as greedy than just all being a race of alien capitalists. Especially givne the sort of character development they gave to Quark and Nog and such.

I think that the craptacularity of those early eps meant that they weren't really going to be revisited without some arm twisting.

[Stofsk]

They focused too much on the whole 'ferengi are greedy capitalists'. Quark I can understand, and I loved how Rom and Nog were developed and became wildly different from the typical ferengi mold. But I kinda agree with Connor. The Ferengi Alliance is actually supposed to be a major power, and ok the ferengi themselves aren't much in a fight but money talks and I don't see why they couldn't staff those big-ass Crab Ships with nausicaan mercenaries.

edit also fuck ya all jadzia was hot

[Havok]

My fucking gawd... In The Pale Moonlight was fucking great.

The best thing is... I never saw it before tonight. It made watching every episode up until now absolutely worth it.

[Havok]

The Ferengi are handled excellently in DS9. In TNG as well actually IMO.

[Thanas]

Agreed, at least where Kira is concerned. Never cared for Dax.

Depends on the Dax. Ezri was cute. Jadzea was nice looking but kind of annoying.

Yeah, Ezri was definitely cute. My problem was mainly with Jadzea - it felt as if her character never went anywhere in the first seasons and by the time the worf stuff came around it was just annoying.

[Terralthra]

I actually just started re-watching DS9 with my fiancée in January. We're about halfway through Season 2, and she's utterly hooked.

[JME2]

I actually just started re-watching DS9 with my fiancée in January. We're about halfway through Season 2, and she's utterly hooked.

Good, because to quote Vic Fontaine, "The Best is Yet to Come."

[Channel72]

The Ferengi are handled excellently in DS9. In TNG as well actually IMO.

Quark and Nog are handled excellently, but the Ferengi culture overall is pretty one-note. With a few exceptions, most Ferengi are just Rule of Acquisition-quoting greedy misers who religiously pursue profit above all else. It gets old pretty quickly, and it's just as grating (if not more grating) than the Klingon honor-cult. It also makes you wonder (as with the Klingons) how a space-faring, hi-tech society manages to function at all with these sort of absurd cultural institutions.

DS9 has fantastic characters and was a great show overall, so it's a minor complaint, but the show tended to systematically reduce alien cultures to stereotypes. I'm not saying there wasn't precedent for this in TNG (or sci-fi in general), but DS9 really took it pretty far and made it a lot more noticeable, since many of the plots involved exploring recurring alien cultures in-depth. (Although I think Cardassian culture was an exception; the Cardassians were written fantastically.)

[Connor MacLeod]

They focused too much on the whole 'ferengi are greedy capitalists'. Quark I can understand, and I loved how Rom and Nog were developed and became wildly different from the typical ferengi mold. But I kinda agree with Connor. The Ferengi Alliance is actually supposed to be a major power, and ok the ferengi themselves aren't much in a fight but money talks and I don't see why they couldn't staff those big-ass Crab Ships with nausicaan mercenaries.

Well what bugs me more was how one-note they basically were... I don't mind so much the 'capitalist' angle, or even the religion (hey it works in the US THE INVISIBLE HAND PROVIDES.) But they could have diversified more on how they go about being 'greedy capitalists'. I mean they could have retained the military angle by having Ferengi being mercenaries, or privateers or even pirates. Even having some who are slavers would be better (They did try the pirate/privateer angle in Enterprise, with mixed results - I'll give them that much.)

It also didn't help that they played them a fair bit as a 'joke race' in a way. I don't mind the idea that Ferengi culture might look down on certain things (EG attitudes towards Rom and Nog) but that could have been something they explored more in depth - maybe there was a schism between the military and non-military arms, or certain means of acquiring 'wealth' were looked down on in a form of aristocracy or elitism.

It just seems there was a tremendous scope to expand on the idea, even with the 'greedy capitalist' angle. In my mind Quark always had a potential of sorts to be another Garak had he been given an opportunity. Quark was always another character I liked because of how he was usually written (at least when we got away from the FErengi stereotypes..)

[Havok]

Hahaha. You guys are severely misremembering how theyhandled the Ferengi. Ill expand on this when Im noton my phone.

[Stofsk]

They showed the final part of the season two circle trilogy, 'The Siege' on my sci-fi channel. Man I fucking loved DS9 in the early years.

Actually I liked it for most of its run truth be told. Season seven was more of a disappointment for the way they handled the conclusion to everything.

[CaptHawkeye]

Hav I just started watching DS9 like a month ago too and i'm with you on it. It's actually really good, in one or two ways even better than TNG. The first two seasons seemed kind of slow but Season 3 picked right up and the show has just been really good since. Personally I feel that all the non-starfleet characters are the best. Particularly Quark, Odo, Garak, Kira, and Dukat. Bashir and Sisko are the only Starfleet characters I really like.

DS9 has kind of dispelled the myth to me that the Trek spin-off series were all irredeemable garbage. My one consistent complaint of the show is similar to Mike's in that the fight scenes are horrid. The show isn't really an action serial though.

The best thing about DS9 is that it's more than willing to throw out the status quo episode to episode. It's better than even TNG in that way since things can actually happen, and mean something too.

[Scottish Ninja]

About the Ferengi - I sort of get the impression that their culture doesn't truly value money itself - they value their own cleverness in getting other people's money away from them. That's why they don't go about being pirates or mercenaries or thieves; there's no respect to be gained in simply taking things by force. Instead they value schemes, and craftiness, and scams - all essentially mental pursuits. If a Ferengi rips off another Ferengi, that's a feat worthy of respect because he's shown he's more cunning than the other, and therefore deserves the money the other doesn't. We get a bit of that in "Nagus" - Zek chastises his son, telling him (paraphrasing a bit) "Power is like wealth - you don't seize it, you accumulate it.

[JME2]

The best thing about DS9 is that it's more than willing to throw out the status quo episode to episode. It's better than even TNG in that way since things can actually happen, and mean something too.

Yeah, and it's something that still drives me crazy to this day regarding VOY.

[Crazedwraith]

DS9 has kind of dispelled the myth to me that the Trek spin-off series were all irredeemable garbage. My one consistent complaint of the show is similar to Mike's in that the fight scenes are horrid. The show isn't really an action serial though.

The Klingon's are generally the worst offenders. If you're not able to show people getting cut up. Don't have people who's shtick is cutting things up. It's that simple.

[Havok]

Hav I just started watching DS9 like a month ago too and i'm with you on it. It's actually really good, in one or two ways even better than TNG. The first two seasons seemed kind of slow but Season 3 picked right up and the show has just been really good since. Personally I feel that all the non-starfleet characters are the best. Particularly Quark, Odo, Garak, Kira, and Dukat. Bashir and Sisko are the only Starfleet characters I really like.

DS9 has kind of dispelled the myth to me that the Trek spin-off series were all irredeemable garbage. My one consistent complaint of the show is similar to Mike's in that the fight scenes are horrid. The show isn't really an action serial though.

The best thing about DS9 is that it's more than willing to throw out the status quo episode to episode. It's better than even TNG in that way since things can actually happen, and mean something too.

It also takes the exploration of it's lead to a new level. The closest TNG gets to showing Picard doing something wrong is when he was a cadet or when he was Locutus. Of course he was in no way able to control his actions as Locutus so it doesn't even really count.

Whereas, Sisko is shown to take deliberately dishonest action and chose to bear the burden of the guilt and consequences of his own free will. He allows himself to give into rivalry, lets his emotions get the better of him, actively, openly and unapologetically seeks vengeance. He obviously doesn't give a shit about the Prime Directive. He's not infallible like Kirk or Picard yet not fallible to the point of dereliction of fucking duty like Janeway.
Plus you get the dynamic of having his son with him, having relationships that last more than one episode, having his father in his life. He goes from thinking the wormhole aliens are just that, to believing fully in Bajoran spirituality.

The Picard we meet in the first season is the Picard that leaves us in the seventh season, except now Q likes him more and he doesn't yell as much.

Janeway is the same douche in the seventh season she was in the first season, as is made blatantly obvious by her making THE SAME DECISION in the last episode she did in the first.

Sisko comes in a bitter, almost destroyed, shell of a man, assigned to a mostly unwanted billet, looking for a reason to get out of Starfleet as he doesn't even have vengeance against the Borg left and leaves a spiritually and mentally sound and fulfilled, man who has moved past his bitterness, whose emotional wounds have healed, he discovered the only stable wormhole known to exist, has become one of the most celebrated Captains in Starfleet in command of one of the most important assignments and has embraced his position as the Emissary of the Bajoran prophets. Oh and he won the Dominion War.

Now I realize the format is different from TNG to DS9, but there seemed to be almost no attempt at furthering the characters of the Picard and Janeway. Outside of Data, Riker's beard and maybe Troy none of the TNG crew changed much in 7 years.

Voyager had a ton of possibility to mix both the TNG format and the DS9 format and failed miserably at trying to do the TNG format let alone trying to do DS9.

[Havok]

About the Ferengi - I sort of get the impression that their culture doesn't truly value money itself - they value their own cleverness in getting other people's money away from them. That's why they don't go about being pirates or mercenaries or thieves; there's no respect to be gained in simply taking things by force. Instead they value schemes, and craftiness, and scams - all essentially mental pursuits. If a Ferengi rips off another Ferengi, that's a feat worthy of respect because he's shown he's more cunning than the other, and therefore deserves the money the other doesn't. We get a bit of that in "Nagus" - Zek chastises his son, telling him (paraphrasing a bit) "Power is like wealth - you don't seize it, you accumulate it.

This is closer to what DS9 shows of the Ferengi than what the perception seems be in the majority of this thread.

Keep in mind that the Ferengi Alliance seems to also be in the midst of social upheaval by the 6th season thanks to Moogy's influence on Zek as well as his own open mindedness. There is obviously more to it than that as that one female Ferengi posed as a male to leave Ferenginar and make profit. It's not exactly a large sample group for a case study, but given the youth of the first female and the advanced age of Moogy, it seems to be reach across age barriers.

Throw in Rom, Nog, and the other assorted Ferengi that pop up and their intertwining relationships with each other and the rest of the characters and you have a great sampling of Ferengi society and it isn't just "Profit Hu-Mahn!!".

[Havok]

DS9 has kind of dispelled the myth to me that the Trek spin-off series were all irredeemable garbage. My one consistent complaint of the show is similar to Mike's in that the fight scenes are horrid. The show isn't really an action serial though.

The Klingon's are generally the worst offenders. If you're not able to show people getting cut up. Don't have people who's shtick is cutting things up. It's that simple.

They do a better job when they keep away from the CQC and just stick to phaser battles.

[darth_timon]

So I just hit season 6.

I have to say, I haven't been disappointing one bit. I haven't skipped an episode.

Weyon is just really starting to come on and gives Dukat a run for his money in the bad guy department.

The only thing that I would have liked to see done differently is Worf. They brought him on in a good way, but they got a little Klingon-centric in the following episodes. It makes sense, it just seems a tad forced.

Otherwise, l have been thoroughly pleased and am looking forward to the meat of the Dominion War.

Dukat was somewhat deluded- his whole 'statue of me on Bajor' business a sign of just how deluded he was, even prior to going completely nuts... Weyoun saw nothing wrong with genocide 'lets wipe out earth's population to pre-empt rebellion!'. Palpatine would have been proud of him

[JME2]

Dukat was somewhat deluded- his whole 'statue of me on Bajor' business a sign of just how deluded he was, even prior to going completely nuts...

This is something I liked about Day of the Vipers, the opening novel of the Terok Nor trilogy -- you get to understand how Dukat's obsession with Bajor got started and see his delusions progress over the course of the other books.

[Havok]

Just watched the last episode... I am sad.