DS9 4x11-16
As always, I ask that you please avoid spoilers for later episodes in your comments. I'm watching DS9 for the first time and trying to stay unspoiled. Thanks!
4x11/12, "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost"
Another storyline that feels weirdly prescient, in this case of post-September 11, 2001 paranoia and the triumph of the national security state. I liked the political message about civil rights, not to mention the jaded eye the story cast on Starfleet as a military organization, but the story itself didn't engage me all that much. Sisko was his usual stiffly honorable self, Grandpa Sisko annoyed the hell out of me, and neither Jake nor Odo was given anything to do. Plus there was Nog, who is absolutely my least favorite character and whom I was glad to see leave a few episodes back.
So: good premise, mediocre execution. The story would've benefitted from focusing more on the earth's civilian population and what it felt like for people to live through that surge of fear and the desire for a crackdown, instead of concentrating on Starfleet's (highly uninteresting) internal culture.
4x13, "Crossfire"
As I said in an earlier post, Odo's unrequited love for Kira was not a direction I wanted to see Odo's storyline take. Odo is profoundly different from the humanoid characters, and an exploration of that alienness would be a lot more interesting than giving Odo the most commonplace of human problems.
And yet, watching this episode, my heart broke for him. Which isn't necessarily a sign that the episode was great. Precisely because unrequited love is the most commonplace of human problems, it's very easy to empathize with Odo. I've been in his position (who hasn't?) and I know exactly how awful it feels.
René Auberjonois did a great job of conveying Odo's (generally) quiet misery, and even managed to make the clichéd "repressed character finally flips out and smashes things" scene work. The best part of the story, though, was the Odo-Quark friendship, which is all the more believable for the odd, unspoken ways it's expressed. The episode found what they genuinely have in common--the belief that there are things more important than feelings--and built on that, which made their sense of connection plausible. And the resolution felt like Odo choosing his own difference rather than trying to shape himself (pun completely intentional) to fit the dominant cultures around him. It was sad to see Odo pull away from Kira (and I loved that the episode showed her sadness and confusion at the loss of his friendship) but that choice felt more self-respecting on Odo's part than some of his other recent choices. In an earlier episode (I'm not sure which one, but it was after 3x25, "Facets") I was disturbed by the scene where Odo explains to Garak how he can give the appearance of drinking coffee so he can share in mealtimes. It felt like too much compromise, somehow, like trying too hard to meet humanoids on their own terms instead of asking them to perceive and accept his difference.
I'd like to see the show really deal with this issue and explore ways Odo can have emotional connections without having to pretend to be something he's not.
4x14, "Return to Grace"
Well, that answers my question about whether Dukat really fancies Kira.
His flirting in this episode crossed the line into skeevy near-harassment; I wish I knew whether the show did that intentionally in order to underscore that Dukat is Still Not a Nice Guy, or whether the writers etc. just can't tell the difference. Unfortunately I incline towards the latter, because there've been a ton of scenes where a woman character experiences persistent, unwanted advances from a man, and not once has the man ever been called on his unacceptable behavior. (And when it was a woman harassing a man--I mean Lwaxana Troi and poor Odo--it was played for comedy.)
Anyway, I'm glad that Kira is still utterly unimpressed by Dukat, that she's not about to forgive him for things like the labor camps (where, as we were told in S1, Bajorans were not only subjected to slave labor but were tortured, systematically raped for demoralization purposes, starved, and sometimes just plain murdered) even though sometimes, despite herself, she does find him charming.
I wish the show came down a little harder on Dukat's claim that he and Kira are essentially alike, because there's a big difference between using violence to free oneself from oppression and using it to enforce oppression, as Dukat did on Bajor. They're perhaps a little more alike now, with Cardassia demoted from a colonizing power to a society under attack by a colonizer, but that doesn't erase Dukat's history.
Putting Dukat's daughter Ziyal on DS9 is a transparent device to keep Dukat on the show. I don't mind that, since Dukat is interesting, but I do feel that there were unexamined gender assumptions underlying that plot. Would the show have presented us with Kira "rescuing" Dukat's half-Bajoran son from a life as a guerrilla fighter? The idea seems to be that war is somehow more damaging for women soldiers than for male soldiers, and thus it's taken for granted that going to war would be bad for Ziyal. The assumption is purely based on gender and not at all on Ziyal's personality. There's nothing in the text to support the idea that she doesn't want to fight. She seems pretty eager to learn how to use weapons, and (unlike Jake Sisko, for example) we're not shown that there's something else she'd rather be doing.
The gendering of combat bothers me in relation to Ziyal, but even more in relation to Kira. Not once on the show have we seen a male soldier express remorse and a sense of personal damage as Kira frequently does. (Well, there was the Cardassian clerk in "Duet," but his guilt was specifically over war crimes in the labor camps, not war as such.) It's not that I object to DS9 taking a basically anti-war stance, even though I wish the show was less free with the word "terrorist" and less willing to treat the Bajoran liberation struggle as morally equivalent to the Cardassian invasion of Bajor and their enslavement and mass slaughter (ten million dead) of the Bajorans. It's just the gendering I object to, whether it springs from the idea that war is more damaging to women soldiers or the idea that for an audience to sympathize with a female soldier, she'd better show appropriate feminine softness in the form of guilt.
4x15, "The Sons of Mogh"
Eh, I still don't find Worf very interesting. I'm intrigued, however, that Federation medical ethics allow a doctor to perform a mindwipe on an unconsenting patient. And I totally don't see how Kurn being adopted by his new family is going to solve anything--surely the Klingons keep track of bloodlines, and an adult son suddenly turning up who never existed before is going to raise a few eyebrows? Normally I can suspend my disbelief and ignore plotholes, but this one was just too big.
4x16, "Bar Association"
I can't really dislike an episode that sneakily quotes Marx and provides a little (fictionalized) U.S. labor history for viewers. And the union basically won, yay! However, I don't believe for a second that Odo, with his belief in justice, would take the hard anti-union line the writers gave him. Odo's a keen observer, and he knows how power works; he'd see the intrinsic inequality of power between an employer and an individual employee and would understand the need for collective action. He wouldn't describe a peaceful picket line as a "mob," or say that things like fair pay and sick leave are "not worth getting" by such tainted methods.
I suspect the scene was written in because it was decided that a non-evil character had to voice anti-union views, lest the show be accused of being OMG EVIL LIBERAL PROPAGANDA. As Odo would say: hrrrrrmph.
(Also, WTF, does the Federation not have labor laws that govern its facilities? Or the Bajorans, since it's not entirely clear who has jurisdiction over what aspects of the station.)
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.
4x11/12, "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost"
Another storyline that feels weirdly prescient, in this case of post-September 11, 2001 paranoia and the triumph of the national security state. I liked the political message about civil rights, not to mention the jaded eye the story cast on Starfleet as a military organization, but the story itself didn't engage me all that much. Sisko was his usual stiffly honorable self, Grandpa Sisko annoyed the hell out of me, and neither Jake nor Odo was given anything to do. Plus there was Nog, who is absolutely my least favorite character and whom I was glad to see leave a few episodes back.
So: good premise, mediocre execution. The story would've benefitted from focusing more on the earth's civilian population and what it felt like for people to live through that surge of fear and the desire for a crackdown, instead of concentrating on Starfleet's (highly uninteresting) internal culture.
4x13, "Crossfire"
As I said in an earlier post, Odo's unrequited love for Kira was not a direction I wanted to see Odo's storyline take. Odo is profoundly different from the humanoid characters, and an exploration of that alienness would be a lot more interesting than giving Odo the most commonplace of human problems.
And yet, watching this episode, my heart broke for him. Which isn't necessarily a sign that the episode was great. Precisely because unrequited love is the most commonplace of human problems, it's very easy to empathize with Odo. I've been in his position (who hasn't?) and I know exactly how awful it feels.
René Auberjonois did a great job of conveying Odo's (generally) quiet misery, and even managed to make the clichéd "repressed character finally flips out and smashes things" scene work. The best part of the story, though, was the Odo-Quark friendship, which is all the more believable for the odd, unspoken ways it's expressed. The episode found what they genuinely have in common--the belief that there are things more important than feelings--and built on that, which made their sense of connection plausible. And the resolution felt like Odo choosing his own difference rather than trying to shape himself (pun completely intentional) to fit the dominant cultures around him. It was sad to see Odo pull away from Kira (and I loved that the episode showed her sadness and confusion at the loss of his friendship) but that choice felt more self-respecting on Odo's part than some of his other recent choices. In an earlier episode (I'm not sure which one, but it was after 3x25, "Facets") I was disturbed by the scene where Odo explains to Garak how he can give the appearance of drinking coffee so he can share in mealtimes. It felt like too much compromise, somehow, like trying too hard to meet humanoids on their own terms instead of asking them to perceive and accept his difference.
I'd like to see the show really deal with this issue and explore ways Odo can have emotional connections without having to pretend to be something he's not.
4x14, "Return to Grace"
Well, that answers my question about whether Dukat really fancies Kira.
His flirting in this episode crossed the line into skeevy near-harassment; I wish I knew whether the show did that intentionally in order to underscore that Dukat is Still Not a Nice Guy, or whether the writers etc. just can't tell the difference. Unfortunately I incline towards the latter, because there've been a ton of scenes where a woman character experiences persistent, unwanted advances from a man, and not once has the man ever been called on his unacceptable behavior. (And when it was a woman harassing a man--I mean Lwaxana Troi and poor Odo--it was played for comedy.)
Anyway, I'm glad that Kira is still utterly unimpressed by Dukat, that she's not about to forgive him for things like the labor camps (where, as we were told in S1, Bajorans were not only subjected to slave labor but were tortured, systematically raped for demoralization purposes, starved, and sometimes just plain murdered) even though sometimes, despite herself, she does find him charming.
I wish the show came down a little harder on Dukat's claim that he and Kira are essentially alike, because there's a big difference between using violence to free oneself from oppression and using it to enforce oppression, as Dukat did on Bajor. They're perhaps a little more alike now, with Cardassia demoted from a colonizing power to a society under attack by a colonizer, but that doesn't erase Dukat's history.
Putting Dukat's daughter Ziyal on DS9 is a transparent device to keep Dukat on the show. I don't mind that, since Dukat is interesting, but I do feel that there were unexamined gender assumptions underlying that plot. Would the show have presented us with Kira "rescuing" Dukat's half-Bajoran son from a life as a guerrilla fighter? The idea seems to be that war is somehow more damaging for women soldiers than for male soldiers, and thus it's taken for granted that going to war would be bad for Ziyal. The assumption is purely based on gender and not at all on Ziyal's personality. There's nothing in the text to support the idea that she doesn't want to fight. She seems pretty eager to learn how to use weapons, and (unlike Jake Sisko, for example) we're not shown that there's something else she'd rather be doing.
The gendering of combat bothers me in relation to Ziyal, but even more in relation to Kira. Not once on the show have we seen a male soldier express remorse and a sense of personal damage as Kira frequently does. (Well, there was the Cardassian clerk in "Duet," but his guilt was specifically over war crimes in the labor camps, not war as such.) It's not that I object to DS9 taking a basically anti-war stance, even though I wish the show was less free with the word "terrorist" and less willing to treat the Bajoran liberation struggle as morally equivalent to the Cardassian invasion of Bajor and their enslavement and mass slaughter (ten million dead) of the Bajorans. It's just the gendering I object to, whether it springs from the idea that war is more damaging to women soldiers or the idea that for an audience to sympathize with a female soldier, she'd better show appropriate feminine softness in the form of guilt.
4x15, "The Sons of Mogh"
Eh, I still don't find Worf very interesting. I'm intrigued, however, that Federation medical ethics allow a doctor to perform a mindwipe on an unconsenting patient. And I totally don't see how Kurn being adopted by his new family is going to solve anything--surely the Klingons keep track of bloodlines, and an adult son suddenly turning up who never existed before is going to raise a few eyebrows? Normally I can suspend my disbelief and ignore plotholes, but this one was just too big.
4x16, "Bar Association"
I can't really dislike an episode that sneakily quotes Marx and provides a little (fictionalized) U.S. labor history for viewers. And the union basically won, yay! However, I don't believe for a second that Odo, with his belief in justice, would take the hard anti-union line the writers gave him. Odo's a keen observer, and he knows how power works; he'd see the intrinsic inequality of power between an employer and an individual employee and would understand the need for collective action. He wouldn't describe a peaceful picket line as a "mob," or say that things like fair pay and sick leave are "not worth getting" by such tainted methods.
I suspect the scene was written in because it was decided that a non-evil character had to voice anti-union views, lest the show be accused of being OMG EVIL LIBERAL PROPAGANDA. As Odo would say: hrrrrrmph.
(Also, WTF, does the Federation not have labor laws that govern its facilities? Or the Bajorans, since it's not entirely clear who has jurisdiction over what aspects of the station.)
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.