Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Yes, at last, I watched it. I freaking binged the whole series in about a month.
I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS about this show. There were a lot of moments of HELL YES love, and a fair amount of "OH GOD, WHY?" throughout the whole thing. Also considering the length of the series there's no way I'm going to be able to articulate myself about it in its entirety.
To start with the positive, I love the diversity on this Star Trek, being a stereotyping and prejudice researcher it's actually a big part of what got me to watch it (well, and needing a scifi fix badly). It helped me make a quick decision on which Star Trek I was going to try to get all the way through for my scifi fix, as the other series really don't have enough alien characters to keep me happy. I was actually happy with most of the female characters a great amount of the time, and it even passes the beschdel test... sometimes. It also has what I read to be an ambiguously gay character (Garak! yay!), even though the writers apparently decided they didn't want anyone thinking that after a while.
In regards to the characters, I actually love pretty much everyone in the main cast.
Unsurprisingly, Garak is my absolute favorite. I'm weak to the sarcastic shady ones, I can't help it. Plus Cardassians are just cool and the best thing about this show. They wasted some of their potential with his character, but at least they used him for important things every now and then. I also always read him as gay/bi, whether they intended that or not, sorry, there's definitely UST with him and Bashir.
Bashir I wish I liked more, but their use of him made me waver from "Julian you are so awesome right now!" to "you, are pathetic". It helped once they dropped the creepy come ons to Jadzia (I have too much personal experience with his character type). I also loved some of his moments of "no, this has to be solved by science!" and when he wanted to do the right thing for others, even if they were enemies. But like every time he was around O'brian or a love interest I wanted to hit someone. I'm not going to devote a paragraph to him, but I am no O'brian fan, why they chose to have him come on the show from a previous Trek is beyond me.
"The Wire" sold me so fucking hard on Garak/Bashir, omg. If I'd just watched the show up to that point in the past I probably wouldn't have put the thing down so quickly. The first season drags so hard, but once I got invested in Garak I could deal with it, and the show was so good at dealing with culture clash and ambiguity. I loved it! I'd be more fannish if they weren't so dedicated to erasing Garak and Bashir being friends from our minds, but I've still read a lot of fanfic, which is more than I can say for most things I've been consuming these days.
Sisko is possibly my favorite captain from any Trek seeing as he's actually good at what he does and still manages to not be a boring cookie cutter hero type. I liked seeing a single dad kind of situation as well, even though I got bored of some of the episodes that focused on Jake.
Kira I was resistant to for whatever reason in the beginning, but she really grew on me. I know she's very much an angry emotional type of character, but I did actually buy that she was an old resistance fighter and had very believable motives which helped a lot. What I didn't like was how the series early on felt like the writers focused on her so hard, and often gave me the impression that she was the character that the writers had a crush on, which tends to skeeze me out. Still, Kira getting to be badass resistance fighter teacher at the end of the series really pleased me.
Jadzia Dax was honestly one of my role model types of characters growing up. Just a girl who can be one of the guys without trying too hard (although I did get tired sometimes hearing "I was a man before, you know"). Her getting involved with Worf for some reason when I was younger made me even happier, because it really got to bring out the badass warrior in her, getting to stand as equals with him. I all in all feel positively about her character at face value, she's easily my favorite female character on the show, but I have some reservations about maybe some of the implicit messages? In a way its subversive that you have a man in a womans body more or less, but I worry that the insistence about that makes it seem like she's not a woman at all? Blah, it's hard to say, because the more that I think of it, they do a good job of emphasizing that it doesn't matter and that Jadzia is made up of all those experiences, you can't really take them apart. Whatever, Dax was fucking cool.
Odo and Quark used to be a draw point for me growing up, I think being the most alien of the characters. I enjoyed some of the Ferengi episodes in a sense of culture clash, even if it was pretty over the top. The resolution of all the social issues near the end was unrealistic, but I liked Quark's mom and all the female Ferengis. Didn't really like how the writers had no clue what Rom's character was til halfway through the series and making some episodes kind of confusing, but whatever.
Odo I do initially like a fair bit. I mean he's interesting and his species is as well, but I sometimes got bored of the angst that got written into it. Especially the kind of "nice guy" drama shit with Kira. I could tell they were the writer's OTP the moment the show got more explicit about his feelings for her, and it was incredibly forced. I like them both as characters, just NOT together. I'll get into it later on my negative rant.
So, the negative/weird shit that came up.
My absolute LEAST favorite thing about the show, and the thing that makes me go WTF the hardest, hands down, is Vince Vaugn or whatever the fuck. Just. WHAT? Did someone have a serious hard on for vegas lounge singers or something? I could not fucking believe how they got Odo and Kira together. I didn't skip a single episode before that came up, but I got so disgusted within 10 minutes I just had to. He was first magical plot device who knows the answer to everything (in the inexplicable Kira and Odo episode), then plays therapist (isn't that supposed to be Ezri's function?), and then gets an ENTIRE episode all about him.
So it's bad enough they make you sit through whole songs of this guy, where a show would typically cut off about a minute/30 seconds into it, assuming you got the point. I don't understand why they think you would want to hear it or like the sound of it, but what makes even less sense to me is the main cast, most of them -not human- LOVE IT. Dude, you will rarely find more than a few people who love the same kind of music, you sure as hell wont find like 7 people who love this outdated as shit lounge singer music, who have -favorite songs- by the guy. The whole thing was offensive to me, these aliens should have completely different senses of what makes good music, the only character to protest was Worf who insisted Klingon opera was better. It also struck me as extremely white and American to project that kind of shit onto all of these characters. And okay FINE they all like it, WHY is this character in every 4 episodes in the last season?! AND THE FINALE.
-I know the show is old and the writers probably only have a white perspective of history, but having so much dwelling on the Alamo was terrible. Please do more research sometime you guys, it was not an event to be celebrated and you don't want to be the dudes on the US's side, there was nothing valiant about it.
-DS9 has no problem with cross-species relationships, but cross-racial relationships are a no? I don't really care but it was strangely noticeable that Sisko and his son rarely dated someone not of the same skin tone.
O'brian and Bashir's friendship was kind of tiresome. I felt like they were just cockblocking the Bashir/Garak fans with it, and to make it worse taunted us with ridiculous levels of "bromance" between O'brian and Bashir because it was safe. I did not appreciate that, at all. Also, major ew at the "I love my love interest, but I like you more", glorifying male friendship as the highest standard of relationship that them womenfolk can't have with men, ew.
Ezri. I don't want to hate her, but after Jadzia Dax and all that investment, why even bother? I would have rather they just not replaced her, if her replacement was going to look like she was 16 and be insecure all the time. I know she grows a bit more of a spine rescuing Worf (but seeing her bony self fight and get it on with him was ridiculous and gross) and she's not irredeemable, but she was just such a huge letdown. They tried way too hard to make sure that the new Dax wasn't the same character, to the point that there was no Jadzia Dax in her at all. Oh, and nice job making her a counselor (that they forget about in 3 episodes), that's only the general female support role every other Star Trek has, thanks. And pairing her up with Bashir, wtf? They had no time to make that convincing at all, AT ALL. They ironically tried to hinge it on "Jadzia kind of had feelings", but when they tried to make her not Jadzia so hard, it was hard to buy it, or understand why Julian would like this new Dax.
-The show has an ironic and hilarious tendency to explicitly reference the things that are wrong with how the characters are getting paired up, and completely not fix it. Worf accuses Bashir of having feelings for Ezri because of Jadzia, yet we're never convinced that this isn't the case.
-The ending was kind of predictable in a lot of ways, and also silly. Did they get forced to end the show sooner than they expected? That stuff with Sisko at the end was pretty cheezy and didn't tie in with what was going on at all. Was that really how the Pau Wraith thing was supposed to end? They spent so much time building it up for the wormhole aliens to just magic it away.
-Every relationship that got put together by the end of the show was awful, at least they had the sense to end the Odo and Kira thing and not make it seem like Kira could never move on.
-Did they forget how old Ziyal was or something? She came on supposedly being 13, then a while later she has this awkward crush on Garak that he doesn't really turn down. I understand it in the aspect of the show and being isolated, but the writers actually seemed to want us to think she was an adult. There's a scene where Kira even says "she's a grown woman and can make her own decisions". Kind of weird.
All in all, the show has some serious rage inducing flaws here and there, but it accomplishes so much that the other Trek's fail at. They really explore a world that isn't good v evil, and develop entire alien cultures and as individuals, and I think that's really quite awesome. The last season introduced probably the most rage for me, but it also had super cool Garak and Kira Cardassian resistance time and lots of continuity. The other seasons had awesome character moments, plot stuff, and culture. Just for whatever reason, they could never get it right all at once. It's not a consistent show at all, but I'm extremely glad I watched it.
There's a lot of filler, I'm contemplating going over episode lists and compiling a bunch in the case of trying to initiate people. The boyfriend has been around for some of my DS9 binge and often sees the boring filler shit, I'm wondering if people are convertable with the right episodes.