To Boldly Stay...

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE
SEASON FOUR

by Matt Brown
August 5th, 2003

I abhor perceived desperation in a television series. When it was announced that, only a year after the conclusion of The Next Generation, Michael Dorn would permanently join the cast of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Worf, desperation was the only explanation I could think of. It's a populist move - trying to wed the flagging DS9 to the still-popular Next Generation in a more cohesive way.

Far from being the hallmark of desperation, thank goodness, the addition of Worf to the cast was actually a vital coalescing of the nature of character on DS9. The series is, fundamentally, a character-driven show, and Worf's dour Klingon fit in perfectly among the often sombre cast.

What's interesting, looking back, is how much of a difference there is between TNG Worf and DS9 Worf. They don't look much alike, for one thing, and any tendencies toward friendliness or warmth that Worf might have developed on the Enterprise were firmly erradicated by the time he stepped onto Deep Space Nine. For his four years on that series, he was a consistently sullen, sour, emotionless wacko. Only his eventual romance with Jadzia ever really humanized him, and even there, the change was fractal. This was Michael Dorn's auteur take on Worf, the Worf he'd always wanted to play. With a lucrative contract on Deep Space Nine offering him greater creative control, he was finally able to do things his way.

The Season Four premiere TV movie, "The Way of the Warrior," besides being a drawn-out showboat re-introducing Worf, was concocted by the writers as nothing more than a delaying tactic. The creative team felt that the Dominion War was heating up too quickly, and wanted to shunt things off in a different direction for a while, to let the Dominion situation percolate.

So, they "went back to the well," as it were, and decided to introduce a newfound conflict with Trek's original villains, the Klingons. The new Klingon war proved to be all part of a Dominion conspiracy to self-destruct the Alpha Quadrant, but for the time being, it sure is fun to see a phalanx of Klingon warriors beaming into Ops, giving our streetgang-like principal cast the chance to do some serious fistfighting.

Yes, "streetgang-like." By Season Four, the fundamental differences between the principal casts of TNG and DS9 couldn't have been more apparent. While the mind's eye always pictures Picard and his crew standing in a blazing circle of light, chins thrust proudly forward, the DS9 crew always enter my daydreams standing in a back alley, holding baseball bats. These are tough motherfuckers. Now that Bashir has been groomed into a rabble-rouser in his own right (see "Hippocratic Oath"), there isn't a softy left among them. With Worf in place as a final touch, the ensemble became electrifying.

This, of course, is all in service of the fact that these once-green soldiers are about to go to war, although it's still a few seasons away from getting bloody. For now, the producers turned to the Klingon War to get some crucial character development and keep the wheels of the series spinning long enough to cook up a really Big Bad. And on the whole, it works: with a few admissible clunkers, Season Four really starts to kick hard Trek ass.

The Klingon conspiracy introduces General Martok, who would go on to become my second-favourite non-principal character, behind Garak. J.G. Hertzler's vigour in the role is just intensely fun to watch - this is a man who gets Klingons, in the same spirit as a certain Lord of the Rings cast member who liked to sleep with his sword. Hertzler would get to shed the makeup a few years later in "Far Across the Stars," and play a different character in Season Seven's "Chimera," and does well at proving himself indispensable in every episode he touches.

By Season Four, DS9 was firmly in the hands of show-runner Ira Steven Behr, who had taken over direct control of the series after the departure of Michael Piller in Season Three. Alongside Robert Hewitt Wolfe, it was Behr who carved out DS9's unique identity, and also penned most of its "mythology" episodes, à la Chris Carter on The X Files. Since the series' end, Behr has disappeared into the mists. If Paramount ever succeeds in getting rid of Rick Berman, Behr is my #1 choice to take over the franchise.

"The Way of the Warrior" is a solid, if unimaginative, opener for the season. (The conversation between Quark and Garak is the show's best moment.) It is followed, however, by one of DS9's shining stars, "The Visitor." My only complaint with this episode is that there are too many flashbacks - I could have done with 42 straight minutes of just watching Tony Todd talk, and then have Sisko pop in at the end to conclude the storyline, and watch time fade away.

Still, the episode is far from conventional, and Todd - already known to us as Kurn, under a pound of latex - really shines here, and carves himself a place as one of Trek's great guest stars.

"Indiscretion" is enough fun on its own, but is more notable both for introducing Ziyal (played by the first of about sixteen rotating actresses), and finally going the whole hog and letting Kira and Dukat start to really have it out. (Thank heavens - thank heavens - a potential romantic subplot was nixed. Dukat is nothing short of the antichrist, despite Season Four's attempts to give him some dimension. I'll rant about him some more in Season Six, when he's shown his true colours...) Also good for Dukat this year is "Indiscretion"'s sequel, "Return to Grace," although the promise of having Dukat out in space, Robin Hood-ing his way around the Klingon-occupied Cardassian territories, never really pays out afterwards.

"Rejoined" is one of those "very important episodes," and successfully does what Roseanne could not. Yep, Trek gets the first lesbian kiss on television, but thank goodness there's some humility at play here. The episode is a lovely romantic story in its own right, and kind of a tonal sequel to that other Trill love story, "The Host" (on TNG), following through on the same-sex relationship that Beverly could never have. Of Susanna Thompson's many (many) appearances on various Treks, this is her best work.

A new sub-genre of DS9's patented escapes from the mundane begins in "Our Man Bashir," the first riff on 60's culture that would expand tremendously in the following years. Avery Brooks' take on the demented Doctor Noah is nothing short of hysterical, as is Nana Visitor's outrageous russian accent.

"Bar Association" is one of my favourite Ferengi episodes of the whole series, owing largely to Max Grodenchik's performance as Rom. Like Martok and Garak, Rom became one of the series' fundamental recurring characters. Given that Grodenchik just barely lost the role of Quark to Armin Shimmerman, it's fitting that the producers found a spot for him on the show that became as indispensable as his onscreen brother's. It's also a heck of a lot of fun to watch Rom develop over the first few years - in "A Man Alone," he's little more than a Sovak retread, but by the end of the first year, that dumbass-with-heart portrayal is in fine form.

Of course, the season also has its fair share of duds, of which I'll name "The Muse" as the worst with "Sword of Kahless" as runner up - who would have thought they could botch an appearance from John Colicos?

"Crossfire" is just a bad take on The Bodyguard that re-opens that damned Kira/Odo romance, although it has several exceptional scenes for Odo and Quark. "Shattered Mirror" is where the integrity of the Mirror Universe plotline begins to unravel - the stories were never very good from this point forward, although I will say that Michael Dorn has a hell of a lot of fun playing Mirror Worf.

I'm fond of "The Quickening," even though much of it is hoary melodrama, but I'm really fond of the season finale, "Broken Link." It's a great payoff to the whole season, bringing the Founders back into the fold as the true nemesis threatening the Federation. It also sets up a boffo story concept - making Odo human!

And I'll give it up to "Body Parts" for the most ingenious method of Trek-izing an actress' pregnancy, ever. It even pays off great dividends for Kira and O'Brien, as the series finds yet another way to bring a new pairing into the regular mix.

The season's strongest episode, however, is "Hard Time," which is nothing short of groundbreaking for Star Trek. By the time O'Brien has the phaser to his head, we are in brave new territory for the franchise, testing the limits of just how far that "Federation morality" that Roddenberry espoused can really go. The same question would pay off in even greater depth in Season Six's earthshaking "In the Pale Moonlight."

"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 right.