A Brief Guide to Star Trek (29 page)

At a cost of $12 million, the pilot episode of
Deep Space Nine
was the most expensive television pilot then made. The episode featured Patrick Stewart to cement the connection to parent series
The Next Generation
. The fledgling show found it difficult during the first year, with writers who’d written for a previous
Star Trek
driven by exploration, having to revamp stories for a station that went nowhere and a cast of characters who – by virtue of their circumstance – were more reactive than active.

It always takes a new series a while to find its feet.
Deep Space Nine
both benefited from and was hampered by being under the wing of
The Next Generation
for its first two seasons. The show spent very little time as the only
Star Trek
series on air, though, as halfway through its third year it was joined by the more traditional (for
Star Trek
)
Voyager
.

Beyond the elements set up in the pilot show, ‘Emissary’ – Bajor, the wormhole and the role of the Maquis –
Deep Space Nine
would explore areas that made for a darker
Star Trek
series
than any that had gone before. In many ways the show initially struggled to find an identity, but the third season (the show’s first without
The Next Generation
around) saw the development of a strong military space opera storyline with the Dominion War arc (contrasting heavily with
Voyager
’s traditional exploration-driven narrative). Writer–producer Ira Steven Behr was a key storyteller behind this development, initially set up by a mention of the Dominion in an otherwise comic episode of the second season, ‘Rules of Acquisition’. The aim with the Dominion was to clearly differentiate the Gamma Quadrant from the more familiar
Star Trek
‘home turf’ of the Alpha Quadrant. Those who hailed from the Gamma Quadrant were the ‘anti-Federation’, an alliance of alien races who were the opposite of the ‘enlightened’ Prime Directive-following Federation, a kind of ‘axis of evil’ in space.

The second season finale episode, ‘The Jem’Hadar’, properly introduced the Dominion, a military power from the Gamma Quadrant led by the Founders, a race of shape-shifting changeling aliens. Odo (Auberjonois), the station’s amnesiac alien security officer, discovers he is one of the Founders and that his race is in a battle for dominance with the ‘Solids’, as they call creatures of fixed form like humans. It was writer–producer Michael Piller who made the connection between this new race and Odo, solving the existing mystery of the character’s origins. This development gave what had previously been a rather mysterious and underdeveloped character a strong role in stories going forward, and built right through to the series’ overall finale. It elevated Odo to the role of the character with split loyalties that had previously been filled by Spock and Worf. The Founders use a pair of genetically altered races, the Vorta and the Jem’Hadar, as their foot soldiers. Both races worship their ‘creators’ as gods. Fear, rather than the Federation’s friendship, was the tool used to cement alliances and hold these races together in their malevolent (at least to Federation thinking) aims. It’s evident from their name that in developing the Founders,
Deep Space Nine
’s key storytellers – Behr, Robert
Hewitt Wolfe and Peter Allan Fields – had been looking to Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation
trilogy of ‘deep history’ novels. Asimov had been a friend of Roddenberry’s and was someone he often consulted via letter in the days of the original
Star Trek
. For all involved, the development of a new iconic
Star Trek
villain, following the original series’ Klingons and Romulans and
The Next Generation
’s Borg, had been incredibly difficult. Wolfe admitted that they’d fallen back on the old idea that had informed the Romulans – the history of the Roman Empire – in some of their thinking about the nature of the Founders.

The third season not only brought the threat of an all-out Dominion attack, but also saw
Deep Space Nine
acquire its own ship, the USS
Defiant
, a small prototype originally created to combat the Borg. This allowed the characters to more easily get off the station and fulfil the traditional
Star Trek
mission of ‘boldly going’. An influx of writing talent from the now defunct
The Next Generation
also boosted the series’ storytelling from the third year.
Deep Space Nine
had always embraced serialisation and the possibility that characters could change – both strong ‘anti-
Star Trek
’ elements. These aspects differentiated it from everything that had come before and were even stronger from the third year. The original intention – according to Berman – was for the Dominion War story to play out over a handful of episodes. So rich were the storytelling possibilities, however, that the decision was taken to extend the plotline for as long as good stories could be developed. It would actually run right through to the end of the series. An additional factor was the arrival of
Star Trek: Voyager
which took up much of Berman and Piller’s attention, meaning that Behr and his collaborators running
Deep Space Nine
had more creative space in which to work, allowing the series to move further away from Roddenberry’s idealistic view of the
Star Trek
universe.

According to an interview with TrekWeb.com, Behr saw
Deep Space Nine
’s mission as ‘getting back to telling character-oriented stories, getting back to having conflict between human beings; plot at the service of character. We created a much more
complete universe in which you can have all these characters with all these back stories, all these races, all these supporting characters. You knew more about Garak or Gul Dukat, ultimately, than you knew about Riker. We brought back money, greed, racial bigotry, war – all the stuff that [had] disappeared [from
Star Trek
]. I began to see opportunities that I hadn’t seen before. We certainly took the series where [co-creator] Michael Piller would freely admit he hadn’t thought of [taking it].’

Building up the existing villains, the writers put the deposed Cardassians in an alliance with the Dominion, resulting in a state of all-out war by the fifth season’s finale episode, ‘Call to Arms’. Shifting loyalties and alliances kept the story elements fresh, but for any
Star Trek
fans not enamoured with military science fiction the strong shift in this direction was off-putting. Even
Star Trek
’s long-time enemies turned friends the Klingons got caught up in the Dominion War (on the Founders’ side), while the Romulans stuck by the Federation. Whatever viewers’ feelings about
Star Trek
turning military, there can be no doubt that this was a unique storytelling gambit and it certainly provided much story potential that had been denied the more straight-laced
The Next Generation
, which had been firmly stuck within Roddenberry’s storytelling ‘box’.

Deep Space Nine
seriously explored the horrors of war more than any other series, even
The Original Series
that had regularly highlighted the issue in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Inspired by contemporary events in the Balkans, the later seasons of
Deep Space Nine
deliberately set out to reflect some very 1990s concerns. President Clinton had committed American military forces to preventing genocide in central Europe following the break-up of Yugoslavia at the start of the decade. Ethnic tensions had increased among Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats, resulting in an international armed conflict between 1992 and 1995. The show drew on this, and the earlier Gulf War of 1990–1, to inspire storylines of conflicting religious ideologies, the rise of international terrorism, the role of nation-building after conflict, the threat of bio-weaponry and the dangers of ethnic cleansing
and potential genocide, all in a ‘dark’
Star Trek
context. The show took a more serious approach than
The Original Series
episode ‘A Private Little War’ had managed, an analogy of the Vietnam conflict with the Klingons representing America’s Cold War opponents. The seventh season episode ‘The Siege of AR-558’ saw regular Ferengi character Nog (Quark’s nephew) seriously injured in battle and lose a leg as a result. The greed of the Ferengi is highlighted when Quark quotes the 34th Rule of Acquisition to Ezri Dax: ‘War is good for business’. Faced with the personal outcome of war when his nephew suffers, Quark is forced to reconsider his opinion. Sisko ends the episode recalling that the people who lose their lives in war are all individuals, leaving behind family and friends. ‘They’re not just names’, he says. ‘It’s important to remember that – we
have
to remember.’

Moral ambiguity was also more prevalent in
Deep Space Nine
, with the station’s resident Cardassian character – a tailor named Garak (Andrew Robinson), who befriends Dr Bashir – revealed as a former secret policeman turned spy. The ending of the Dominion War largely depended upon a very un-Starfleet-like deception enacted by Sisko with Garak’s help. In the season six episode ‘In The Pale Moonlight’, Sisko participates in a conspiracy to bring the Romulans into alliance with the Federation, but which also leads to Garak committing murder on his behalf – an event covered up to preserve the greater good. It’s a subversive take on the usually very black and white moral universe of
Star Trek
. According to writer Michael Taylor, this episode ‘showed how
Deep Space Nine
could really stretch the
Star Trek
formula. It pushes the boundaries in a realistic way, because the decisions Sisko makes are the kinds of decisions that have to be made in war. They’re for the greater good.’

Another sign of
Deep Space Nine
breaking taboos was the way in which the series undermined the purity of the Federation, something
The Next Generation
had only briefly toyed with (in the episode ‘Conspiracy’, and later in the movie
Insurrection
). ‘Conspiracy’ was the penultimate episode of
The Next Generation
’s first season. The first story ideas had a group of warmongering
Starfleet officers try to provoke war with the Klingons. Revised following Roddenberry’s intervention, the episode instead featured an alien-driven conspiracy in which Starfleet Admirals were possessed by alien parasites, as he felt Starfleet officers themselves would never turn against the Federation. A suggestion that the alien creatures might become recurring adversaries was never followed up.
Insurrection
saw Picard turn against a wing of the Federation Council, which was conspiring to steal the secret of long life. Neither of these stories suggested that Starfleet had a secret intelligence wing, although it might be supposed that despite such enlightened future times such a thing would not be impossible.
Deep Space Nine
would spend several episodes exploring the implications of just such an organisation within an organisation.

Dr Bashir was the centre of the Section 31 episodes. Introduced in the sixth season’s ‘Inquisition’, Section 31 was depicted as a Starfleet agency operating without oversight, represented by Sloan (William Sadler). It is clear to Bashir that Section 31 is violating long-established Federation values, a position defended by Sloan as ethical compromises necessary to defend those same values in times of war. This drew on real-life 1990s concerns about the activities of US and other intelligence agencies that used the excuse of defending liberty to justify inhumane actions such as torture. As alien security officer Odo comments in the episode ‘Dogs of War’: ‘Interesting, isn’t it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31’s tactics, but when they need the dirty work done, they look the other way. It’s a tidy little arrangement, wouldn’t you say?’ Odo’s scepticism is interesting, especially as it would later transpire that Section 31 both created and provided the cure (once Bashir extracts it from Sloan’s mind) for the ‘morphogenic virus’ affecting Odo and the Founders. Sharing the cure with the Founders helps bring about the end of the Dominion War, and it’s an action Odo takes in defiance of Federation policy. Complex shades of grey dominate morality in
Deep Space Nine
’s complex storytelling.

Gene Roddenberry’s view of
Star Trek
’s future would have
little room for such a covert organisation as Section 31, seeing it as unnecessary in a utopia. The creators of
Deep Space Nine
, however, had truly escaped Roddenberry’s box and had bypassed his storytelling limitations while still trying to stay true to the heart of
Star Trek
. Behr limited Roddenberry’s view to Earth, refusing to accept that things might be the same on an outpost such as
Deep Space Nine
in the middle of a war. ‘We decided that Earth is paradise – we’ll buy into that [Roddenberry notion]. I don’t quite understand it, but we’ll buy it. “It’s easy to be a saint in paradise,” Sisko said in “Maquis, Part II”. To have a Federation person say that as opposed to a Cardassian, Ferengi or Bajoran was telling, because Sisko was learning.
Deep Space Nine
was the series that refused to play it safe. We all knew it, every writer was behind it. It was an exhilarating place to be creatively.’

Section 31 dealt with threats to the Federation that could not be tackled successfully in more acceptable ways, but gave those involved plausible deniability. For Section 31 operatives like Sloan, the end always justified the means and if that meant breaking a few rules along the way, so be it. This was not a viewpoint Bashir (representing Roddenberry) could agree with and he refused to be co-opted (at least willingly) by the organisation. Despite Bashir’s interest in espionage narratives, displayed through his James Bond-like fantasy holodeck activities, real-world spying and betrayal was not for him. Section 31 would reappear in several episodes and the organisation’s origins would eventually be revealed in the
Star Trek
prequel series
Enterprise
.