To Boldly Stay...

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE
SEASON SEVEN

by Matt Brown
December 2nd, 2003

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine will always remain Trek's middle child. To many, it will never be more than a footnote in the ever-lengthening Trek saga.

Footnote, hell. For me, Trek ended here. Voyager and Enterprise are garbage, and modern Trek is about as relevant as Why We Fight. It seems insane that Deep Space Nine ended its run only four short years ago. Where has Trek gone?

The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine rule the Trek roost. Between the two, they successfully and brilliantly explored and exhausted Trek's seemingly infinite potential. It would have been better to let the franchise end here. But of course, that has never been Paramount's way. It is ironic that a studio that had been so intent on murdering the original series during its initial run would now be taking the exact opposite approach, prolonging the franchise's lifespan through an unholy alliance with its least creative caretakers.

As trilogies go, the first three Trek series are just about note-perfect. The Original Series is the prototype, setting up the model and running it through some slick, lean storylines. The Next Generaton is the perfection of that prototype, cutting away the rough edges and creating a refined model that really hums. And Deep Space Nine is the extrapolation - a projection outward, an exploration of what the genre can really do.

Season Seven brings all this to a close with a self-awareness that borders on the uncanny. There's a delightful effort made to really close everything down, from the plot itself (of course), to more intangible elements like "stories in the _____ style," and the lives of tangential characters. This is the last time we cruise through a 60s-era holosuite fantasy, the last time Bashir and O'Brien get a little buddy adventure going, the last time we do an "and now for something completely different" episode, and the last time a chain of episodes links together to form a Star Trek miniseries of epic scale and storytelling breadth.

The first order of business for Season Seven is the new Dax. This could have gone horribly wrong, but thanks to the spritely performance of Torontonian actress Nicole de Boer, Ezri Dax is sufficiently unique from, yet linked to, Jadzia Dax, that it really is a fascinating continuation of the character. I suppose the only real shame here is that we only get Ezri for one season. I love my Daxes equally, but if Terry Farrell were going to jump ship anyway, might she not have done it a few seasons sooner, giving us more time with the new girl? No, probably not.

Admittedly, several Ezri-centric episodes (notably "Prodigal Daughter") aren't that great. What are great are the episodes where she mixes and blends with Jadzia's acquaintances, especially Worf and Julian. This is just good science fiction, taking a nifty premise into new places to see what it would be like, while grounding it all in emotional reality.

Also worthy of mention, because he gets so much screen time this year, is Jeffrey Combs. Combs played a miscellaneous alien early in the going, but in the fourth season, latched onto the role of Weyoun, one of the series' many Vorta overseers. So brilliantly smarmy was Combs' performance, that the writing staff came up with the entire "cloned Vorta" premise just to let Combs come back as Weyouns 5, 6 and 7.

But that ain't all: Combs also plays everyone's favourite Ferengi liquidator, Brunt. Both characters garnered a huge following, making Combs the only DS9 actor to play two distinct members the Extended Family. He even plays both roles in one episode, "The Dogs of War," but unfortunately, the characters never interact onscreen. What a missed opportunity!

Season Seven can be divided into two portions: the ten-episode grand finale, and everything else. Among the everything else, we have such memorable episodes as "Afterimage," where Ezri tries to get used to her new/old life on board the space station, "Covenant," where Dukat reinvents himself as a cult leader on the still-defunct Empok Nor (jesus, someone blow that thing up, eh?), and "The Emperor's New Cloak," a mirror-universe tale told from the one perspective we haven't seen yet: the Ferengi. Given that a Ferengi character dies in each and every mirror episode produced, seeing Quark and Rom stumble around the mirror universe is a heck of a lot of fun. And there's that one, hilarious, inexplicable moment where a flesh-and-blood Vic Fontaine shows up. Beautiful. Rom's right: the mirror universe just doesn't make any damned sense.

But the true standouts of the seventh, pre-finale season are threefold.

The first is "The Siege of AR-558." In spite of a seriously clunky title, this is a lovely, poetic episode that is the series' most sophisticated treatment of the Dominion War. Here, we learn that war hasn't changed much in five hundred years: it's still hell. Yeah, it's an obvious premise, but it's an important moral stand for DS9 to take. In spite of being Trek's "war series," DS9 was fundamentally and voraciously anti-war. There was no glorification here, and "AR-558" throws that truth into sharp relief.

Second, there's "It's Only a Paper Moon," where the great Aron Eisenberg gets what he's deserved since his very first episode: an entire show to himself. Recovering from the events of "AR-558," Nog disappears into the Vic Fontaine fantasy, with surprisng results.

And finally (and thank goodness), there's the great pressure valve of the series, "Badda-bing, Badda-bang." This is the last stop, folks, the last regular episode before the machinery that will bring the series to a close begins to roll. And so, the producers just basically went nuts: they did an entire episode about nothing more consequential than helping holographic Vic Fontaine win back his holographic bar from a bunch of holographic hoods. All our favourite characters get to dress up and play make-believe. And it works like gangbusters. The only awkward note is Sisko's initial feelings about the Fontaine fantasy, but this is more than made up for by the one thing I never, ever thought I'd see on Star Trek: Captain Sisko getting up and singing a lounge standard ("You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet", no less; touché!) with Jimmy Darren!

There's one shot in "Badda-bing" where the entire crew comes rounding a corner on the Promenade dressed in their 1960s costumes, looking for all the world like Ocean's Eleven on their way to rob a bank. The score busts into a full-on jazzercized rendition of the DS9 theme. It's one of the series single most perfect moments, and a flawless testament to every single thing that has made this show great for seven years. It's also bittersweet, because as I said, it's the last stop before the end.

But I'll take one more stop, because I have to address something that becomes increasingly prevalent, and fascinating, with each passing year of Deep Space Nine, and reaches its apotheosis in the final season, in the episode "Extreme Measures." I'm talking about Star Trek's first gay relationship.

It doesn't come off as such - like a blacklisted Hollywood writer in the early 60s, everything for this relationship is done through a veil of metaphor and secrecy. But there's really no way around it: Bashir and O'Brien have a homosexual romance.

In the simplest, most naive terms, the Bashir-O'Brien pairing is the best buddy relationship in all of Trek. It does what Paris & Kim could never hope to do, and what even Kirk & Spock never managed to do: offers a fully individuated, and often very touching, deep-set friendship between two very different men. Both are men who act like men, and are therefore somewhat incapable of expressing themselves to one another. But there's a real bond here, and more importantly, real love.

Laced throughout the series, for anyone who cares to look, are keys to the idea that this relationship is meant to represent something more. I'm not suggesting that O'Brien and Bashir are actually secret lovers within the DS9 diegesis. Merely, that their platonic friendship, more often than not, seems to be standing in for a same-sex romantic relationship that the writers didn't have the freedom to actually create.

This all comes to a head in "Extreme Measures," with the only sequence in the series that directly addresses this subtext. Lost in Sloane's mind and nearing death, Bashir and O'Brien exchange a superb string of dialogue where they admit that as much as they love their respective heterosexual partners (Ezri and Keiko).... they like each other just "a bit more."

It's a gorgeous tract of writing, and a great pair of performances. And after so much symbolism and avoidance, it's a direct dressing-down of the true nature of their feelings that is specific enough to raise eyebrows, and ambiguous enough to leave a lot of wondrously tantalizing questions. Their ultimate parting in "What You Leave Behind" is the grace note on this revelation. It's lovely.

"Extreme Measures" is the eighth part in the season's massive ten-episode conclusion, which includes the 2-hour TV movie, "What You Leave Behind."

As an extended dramatic narrative, the 10-parter, sadly, falls a little bit shy of the 6-parter in Season Six. Still, it's damn good stuff and it gives absolutely everyone some really interesting and remarkable plot twists to work their way around. And there's something about seeing Kira in a Starfleet uniform that gets me very excited.

(No, not the way you think. It's just that when DS9 was just a few months shy of hitting the airwaves, I took a picture of Nana Visitor and did a sketch of Kira in a Starfleet uniform, in one of my Grade 10 notebooks, not knowing that she wasn't going to be wearing one. It was a nice full-circle to see her finally get her scarlett tunic by the end.)

The 10-parter nicely and satisfactorily closes up the shop, bringing to an end the myriad plot threads and character lines that have accumulated over the seven years. Of all of these conclusions, probably the most amazing (and outrageous) is Rom's. Having been passed over to play Quark, Max Grodenchik's increasing indispensability as Quark's dimwitted brother has been great to watch over the years, but this grand finale, where Rom is actually made the Nagus, is nothing short of remarkable. His last, quiet "wow" in his final shot in "The Dogs of War" was improvised on set, by an actor amazed and appreciative of the incredible opportunities he's been given.

"Tacking into the Wind" is great, as is "The Dogs of War," but in this arc, individual episodes just basically vanish in the wake of the whole, ten-hour movie. Everything is just preamble to the show's jaw-dropping finale, "What You Leave Behind." A significant about-face from the style and structure of The Next Generation's successful finale "All Good Things," the DS9 conclusion is one of the most skillful and surprising closers I've ever seen. It actually takes a bit of getting used to, as it both does, and doesn't, conclude the show properly. It goes through all the trappings that a grand finale should, but at the same time, leaves a tantalizing taste of melancholy in the mouth, and opens up all new questions (not in an irritating, "we're going to the movies" way, but in a fashion that is fully in keeping with the nature of the show thus far: that life is still life, even on a space station far away, and nothing ever gets resolved too neatly).

And yeah, they kill Sisko. That's huge, not just because of the enormous religious subtext to his entire character this season (he literally has become the son of the gods), but because it's so demonstrably different from everything every other Trek series has ever done. By "What You Leave Behind," DS9 has left Trek behind: it's become its own entity, completely individuated; a middle child turned loose in the real world, no longer subservient to the expectations of its forbears.

If The Next Generation was about zipping all over the cosmos having adventures and "All Good Things" was a triumphant celebration of everything the Enterprise crew had achieved, and if Deep Space Nine has been about the building of a community and the willingness to stay and solve long-term problems by putting down roots, then "What You Leave Behind" is flawless. It's about legacies, and enduring history. It's about the cosmic sphere coming around again (placing the Cardassians in the same position the Bajorans were in at the start of the series). It's about coming home and leaving home (O'Brien, Garak, Odo, Sisko) and about the inevitable fact that no matter how hard you try to prevent it, time will eventually pull you away from where you feel comfortable.

Most importantly, it's about what Deep Space Nine has always been about: what can be made to endure, even in the face of insurmountable changes.

"To Boldly Stay..." has been an ongoing review of all seven seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The complete series is now available on DVD.

You can access the complete series of reviews on the left.