"Traitor" (DS9 1-3 "Past Prologue")

(Synopsis of "Past Prologue" on Memory Alpha)

Commander to Major Heart-to-Heart

January 10, 1993 

"Past Prologue" is Major Kira's episode the way "Emissary" was Sisko's. Though other characters do things, and an important recurring character is introduced, the focus of the action is on Kira Nerys, and thus this chapter of Two Houses focuses mostly on her.

The first thing to know about Major Kira is that she wasn't supposed to be on the show at all. The decision to make Bajor the location for Deep Space Nine was not only to tie into using the Cardassians as enemies, but also because of Ensign Ro Laren, a Bajoran Starfleet officer played by Michelle Forbes on The Next Generation. By bringing both Ro and O'Brien over from the Enterprise crew, the idea was to provide a certain continuity between the shows without breaking up TNG's main crew. Sounds great, except there was one problem: Michelle Forbes didn't want the gig.

This is one of those problems in television and film that is pretty much unique to those mediums. After all, an author never has a character opt out of his next book. Actors are changed in plays all the time, but the character and his lines remains the same. That's not how it usually goes in television, as Babylon 5's revolving telepath game goes to show.

Mind you, losing a major actress wasn't a new thing for Star Trek. They'd gone through it before when Kirstie Alley declined to return to the role of Saavik for Star Trek III, leading to Robin Curtis replacing Alley in the role. That hadn't worked out very well, and indeed, when they were unable to convince Alley to come back for Star Trek VI, they opted to replace Saavik with Valeris rather than use Curtis or a third actress for the character.

Likewise, rather than recast Ro, the producers turned to a new character, Major Kira Nerys. (Bajorans use the Japanese family name first naming convention.) Nana Visitor plays Kira, and she does it loudly. That is, she yells a lot. This will be toned down in later episodes, but it's pretty noticeable early on. What makes things unusual for a Star Trek show is that she mostly yells at the other main characters.

Let's pause for a moment and talk about one of the disadvantages of being a Star Trek show, which is that you're tied to some of the stupid things that Trek has come up with over the years. One of them, this one from Gene Roddenberry himself, was the idea of having civilian families on board military vessels. The idea, of course, was that having your family on board was meant to show that Starfleet wasn't a military organization, but the idea is still ridiculous. Especially, as shown in "Emissary," when a ship is going into a dangerous combat situation.

I'll go ahead and put this chapter's J. Michael Straczynski quote here, as it's relevant to the current discussion. From January 10, 1993, the day "Past Prologue" aired:

"I have no problem with married couples, none whatsoever, serving the EA. And, as I've said before, there is no problem having a kid in the background, as one of a family passing through, for instance, but I do not wish to center a whole *story* around one. Someone said "But they can do it on TNG and DS9," which is one more reason for NOT doing it here, to keep the identities separate and distinct."

If I can perhaps extrapolate, you can have your family on a space station where lots of other people live, but bringing them onto a warship? We won't be doing that, because, well, it's kind of ridiculous.  Ridiculous or not, though, the idea stems from the utopian nature of Star Trek. Star Trek, as envisioned by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, wanted to show that by the time humanity had moved into space, we'd gotten better. We'd set aside war except in self-defense. We are explorers and diplomats, not conquerors. Heck, in Star Trek we've given up money!

One of the golden rules about Star Trek, and one that was followed pretty religiously on The Next Generation, was that there should be no conflict among Starfleet officers, particularly among the main cast. And if there was any, it should be because of outside influences or because individuals have psychological problems. Thus you see mind control space bugs in "Conspiracy," or Starfleet officers having breakdowns in "The Wounded" or "The Drumhead." The show even went out of its way to make the thieving time traveler from "A Matter of Time" be from the past and therefore less enlightened than the present members of Starfleet. Individuals can fail, but Starfleet, and by extension humanity as a whole, have grown better than that according to Star Trek.

This in a stark contrast to Babylon 5, where humans run the gamut from heroes to madmen and every point in between. Star Trek says humans will evolve into something better by the time we get out into space. Babylon 5 says that humans will pretty much be the same, just with bigger guns.

However, by the time Deep Space Nine hit the airwaves, Roddenberry had been in his grave for more than a year. From the outset, the DS9 production crew was maneuvering away from the conflict-free zone that Roddenberry preferred for Star Trek. Odo vs. Quark and Kira vs. Sisko in particular were set up to give conflict within the cast in a way that was foreign to the "we're all in it together" Enterprise crew from The Next Generation.

By the end of the show, Deep Space Nine will have strayed much farther from its Roddenberry roots, but that's for later. For now it is enough to note that Deep Space Nine is the first Star Trek show not worked on by Gene Roddenberry at all, and the first to consciously move away from his legacy. Kira yells at Sisko, goes behind his back to his superiors, and is generally a pain in the ass to the rest of the crew, and that is definitely new behavior for Star Trek.

Babylon 5, as it tends to, will take this to even greater extremes in the first episode of the series by having one main character try to assassinate another. But we'll get to "Midnight on the Firing Line" in its own time as well.

No, let's return to Kira Nerys, ex-guerrilla, ex-terrorist, now liaison between the Bajoran Provisional Government and the Federation. In "Past Prologue" her past comes back to haunt her in the person of Tahna Los, a current guerrilla and terrorist, who hasn't given up his war with the Cardassians and isn't too happy about the Federation presence over Bajor either. The episode deals with Kira's conflicted loyalties between the fighter that she was and the diplomat (more or less) that she's become. In the end, the latter wins out, and she sides with the Federation and the Government over her old comrade, and in doing so preserves the wormhole for Bajor.

The decision comes hard, and the lovely scene between Kira and Odo where she makes it is the highlight of the episode. I like, too, that at the end when Tahna's in custody they don't let Kira off the hook. Tahna's bitter "traitor" clearly has an impact on her, and lets her know where she stands with her former friend, and by extension the whole of the Kohn-Ma. She's sided with the government and the Federation, and that is all her former comrades need to know.

That said, the plan they used to arrest Tahna was pretty dumb. The fact that he came as close as he did to blowing up the wormhole means that they didn't plan it very well. Why not sabotage the runabout to make sure it couldn't escape? If Tahna had done the smart thing and just shot Kira when he'd had the chance and then flown the runabout himself to the wormhole, Sisko and company would have been pretty screwed. Bad writers, no cookie for you.

The ironic thing is that, in the end, Tahna Los is right about the danger the wormhole poses to Bajor. Though he had no way to know it, had Tahna succeeded in sealing the wormhole, billions of people, many of them Cardassians, would have been spared death in the fires of the Dominion War. Arguably, by failing, he killed far more Cardassians than he could have dreamed of any other way.

He's also right that Bajor's involvement with the Federation does lead to Bajor surrendering its sovereignty. By joining the Federation by the end of the series it ensures that Bajor's complete independence lasts only seven years. Though in the Star Trek universe it is clearly better to be a part of the Federation than it is to be dominated by the Cardassians (or the Dominion for that matter) the fact of the matter is that the independent Bajor that both Kira and Tahna fought for never returns.

Plain, Simple Garak

This is matched by what eventually happens to Cardassia itself, as viewed by a man who fought for it, Elim Garak. While the story belongs to Major Kira, the breakout hit of the episode was Andrew J. Robinson's Garak. The ex-spy turned tailor is a great character, one who manages to be both slimy and amusing all at the same time. You never quite know what's going on with Garak, and that's the way we like it. Garak was meant to be a one shot character, but proved to be so popular that he would return another thirty six times before Deep Space Nine ran its course. Indeed, by the second season, Garak is getting his own episodes. So we'll reserve our time for discussion of my favorite character on DS9 until Season Two's "The Wire" and merely note that this was Garak's first appearance, and it was a performance that kept Andrew J. Robinson employed for the next few years.

So that was "Past Prologue." At the end of it we've learned a lot about Major Kira, been introduced to Garak, and saved the wormhole. Where do we go from here? How about a look at our mysterious shapeshifting constable? That sounds about right. So we've got "A Man Alone" on tap. I hope to see you there.

"It is Not Linear" (DS9 1-1 & 1-2 "Emissary")

A contrast in captains.

(Synopsis of "Emissary" on Memory Alpha)

January 3, 1993 

On January 3rd, 1993, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine debuted with a two hour premiere, "Emissary." However, Deep Space Nine wasn't just any show. It was a Star Trek show, and being a Star Trek show comes with certain advantages. It also comes with certain problems, as any long term legacy does, but we'll get to those later on.

For now, let's see what being Star Trek does for you. And what it brings is in play from the very first scene.

The opening scroll tells us that:

"On stardate 43997, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation starship Enterprise was kidnapped for six days by an invading force known as the Borg. Surgically altered, he was forced to lead an assault on Starfleet at Wolf 359."

Have a look at that, and note how much they don't feel the need to explain. What's the Federation? Who are the Borg? Who is Captain Picard? None of these things are spelled out to the audience, because it's assumed that anyone watching Deep Space Nine will already know them from watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.

What's more, a large part of the pilot is steeped in The Next Generation lore. Sisko's experiences at Wolf 359 obviously, but also in the existence of Trills, Miles O'Brien, the plight of the Bajorans, and the wickedness of the Cardassians. This last had, in a smart bit of scheduling, been the focus of the last pair of The Next Generation episodes to air in 1992, "Chain of Command, Part I" and "Chain of Command, Part II." When "Emissary" aired it had only been a couple of weeks since Part II had hit the airwaves, so most The Next Generation watchers would know all they needed to about the Cardassians, namely that they're militaristic and had been about to attack the Federation until the Enterprise crew stopped them. They'd also spent an entire episode torturing Captain Picard. In short, they're the bad guys.

It's hard to overstate how helpful not having to explain is to a new show. A lot of time and dialogue in Babylon 5's pilot, "The Gathering," is spent detailing the B5 universe for us. And while some of that dialogue is quite good, and I'm thinking about Londo's scene about the decline of the Centauri in particular, some of it isn't. Even when it is, the time taken still limits the show's ability to tell a story and to introduce the characters to the audience. The pilot simply doesn't have as much time to do everything else.

So how does "Emissary" take advantage of its advantage? Primarily by dedicating most of the pilot to driving around in the lead character's head.

"Emissary" starts at the Battle of Wolf 359, the infamous massacre of Starfleet ships at the cybernetic hands of the Borg. Right away we see another advantage that Deep Space Nine has: their special effects are polished and skillfully handled. After five and a half years of The Next Generation, there's a lot of Star Trek resources available. Ship models, and the expertise in how to use them, are all brought to bear in this first sequence. It works, too. The ships move, and move quickly, bringing a life and excitement to a Star Trek battle that is much more engaging than the usual "two ships standing still and blasting each other" setup that was common in the earlier years of The Next Generation.

Alas, the battle is only on screen for a few seconds before we cut to the crew of the Saratoga, including first officer Benjamin Sisko. Things go badly, as they do when you're losing a battle, and soon enough Sisko has called for an evacuation. He heads back to his quarters and manages to get his son Jake out, but his wife Jennifer is already dead. Though overcome with grief, he eventually escapes the destruction of the Saratoga in an escape pod.

The scene shifts and we're informed that it is now three years later, and we catch up with Ben and Jake talking about Ben's new job running a space station orbiting Bajor. Jake's not happy about having to move, but Ben tells him it won't be that bad. Credits roll, including a cute bit where they leave out the opening of the wormhole from the first episode's credit sequence, and then we see that it is that bad, if not worse. The station is a wreck in space, since the Cardassians trashed it on their way out the door. Sisko gives orders to try and make the best of it.

What follows is a rapid fire introduction to the rest of the main cast, and their plot functions. Chief O'Brien is competent but overworked and does the technical stuff. Major Kira fought the Cardassians and doesn't trust the Federation. Constable Odo is a cynical and sarcastic shape shifting cop. Quark runs the local bar and has his fingers in local crime. He's pretty sarcastic, too. Jake Sisko is the kid. Doctor Bashir is enthusiastic and naive, but good at his job. Dax is an old man in a young woman's body. She's also one of the primary technobabble mouthpieces, a job she shares with O'Brien.

Fortunately, there's not a lot of technobabble in this episode, and what there is of it is mostly confined to the scenes moving the station from Bajor to the wormhole. Therefore I'll defer a discussion about it to a later episode when it's more relevant. Suffice it to say, however, that I'm not a fan of technobabble and the way that Star Trek tends to use it.

I'm also not going to delve too deeply into the rest of the cast in this episode. They'll each have their own episodes where they're the star and we can discuss each of them then. Major Kira gets the second episode of the series, in fact, so it won't be a very long wait for more cast biographies.

No, "Emissary" is about one Benjamin Sisko, and we'll spend the rest of our time in this entry talking about him. Sisko is an interesting character played by a good actor. Avery Brooks has charisma, and brings an enthusiasm to the role of Sisko that's refreshing. That's in pretty sharp contrast to his counterpart on Babylon 5, Jeffrey Sinclair as played by Michael O'Hare. O'Hare plays the role of Commander Sinclair rather stiffly, especially in the early episodes of his first and only season as the series lead. Brooks, on the other hand, puts his charisma to work, making Sisko among other things likable. Not only is that a different take than O'Hare's Sinclair, it differs from his immediate predecessor as a Star Trek leading man. Patrick Stuart's Picard can be called many things, but "likable" isn't one of them.

This scene doesn't work as well as it should, alas

We can see that expressed in the passing of the torch moment in the pilot, the scene where Sisko gets his orders from Picard prior to the Enterprise's departure from the station. It's a decent scene, with Brooks playing Sisko's barely controlled anger at the man he blames, at least partially, for his wife's death while Stuart shows the guilt he feels for the same encounter. The problem with it is its failure to cohere with what we've seen in the episode to date. You see, everything we've seen from Sisko since the pre-credits sequence implies strongly that he wants to stay on DS9 and make it work. He tells Jake that twice. He has Nog, Quark's nephew, arrested so he can use him to keep Quark on the station. He even kicks Major Kira out of her office and claims it for himself. Yet, in this scene, he's telling Picard that he's thinking about leaving Starfleet entirely rather than keep the job!

That's a bad piece of writing right there. Everyone knows that Brooks is playing Sisko for the whole season. No one believes he's going to quit the show after the first episode. Having Sisko claim otherwise hasn't got any dramatic weight. We know he's going to change his mind. So there's nothing to it beside waiting to see when and how he changes it. You could perhaps argue that his sudden decision to quit is a symptom of Sisko's unresolved grief over his wife's death, but for that to work, you should set that up properly in the scenes before it. After all, if Sisko was ready to throw in the towel before he's even begun, then why was he encouraging Jake to get used to living on DS9? Wouldn't saying something like "hey son, don't worry, I'll get us out of this soon enough" or something similar be more appropriate? Why is he kicking Major Kira out of her office if she's just going to move back in a little while later once he quits?

It doesn't hang together. Even if you want to say that seeing Nog get arrested or being in Picard's presence triggers his desire to "get out of Dodge", he doesn't act like he's only short timing it through the rest of the episode either. No, the whole "Sisko quits" thing feels tacked on as a way to get conflict between Sisko and Picard. It feels artificial.

What's worse, it comes at the expense of what could have been a great Sisko/Picard scene, one where the former confronts the latter about the part Locutus played in Jennifer Sisko's death. There's a hint of that when Sisko reveals to Picard that he'd been at Wolf 359, both in Sisko's anger and disrespect for Picard and in Picard's sudden expression of dismay, but frankly it's underplayed. We want the great confrontation that the Locutus scene promised us. What we get is Sisko acting like a jerk. It's disappointing.

Poorly handled quitting issue aside, though, the rest of the episode does give us a reasonable look at Benjamin Sisko. We see in the scene with Quark and Odo that he's willing to use blackmail to get his way. He has Odo sabotage the Cardassian ship so he and Dax can go look at the wormhole without the Cardassians knowing about it. That marks him as rather more underhanded than his Enterprise counterpart and more roguish. And throughout the second half of the episode, we see that he hasn't gotten over the death of his wife.

There's a lot riding on that plot point. Benjamin Sisko is the Emissary of the Prophets, and the thrust of the episode seems to be that for Sisko to move forward and fulfill his destiny as the Emissary, he needs to set aside his crippling grief at Jennifer's death. In short, we're treated to a grief counseling session as performed by non-linear semi-omnipotent wormhole-dwelling energy beings. That means a lot of portentous statements, some out of focus camerawork, and Sisko doing Picard one better, as he's not just defending humanity, but all linear matter intelligence!

It sort of works, at that. Sisko's final revelation that life isn't totally linear after all, and therefore that he needs to get over Jennifer's death is nicely handled, but there's no real indication about what being the Emissary of the Prophets even means. Now that isn't a problem per say. Having some mysteries hanging over the show that you take your time resolving is perfectly fine. Babylon 5 will do much the same with Sinclair's "there's a hole in your mind" business throughout the first season.  It's just a shame that, when we find out what the point of the Emissary business is come Season Seven, the answer is so underwhelming. Said point was almost certainly not what the writers of the Season One had in mind, presuming they even had a specific plan at all.   And, as we'll see, B5's version doesn't fare much better, albeit for different reasons.

That's for much later on, though, after DS9 had remade itself a couple of times over. For now, we have Sisko as both military commander of the station and a religious leader for the Bajorans. The station, seemingly miraculously repaired from the damage the Cardassians did to it, stands guard at the mouth to the wormhole. Deep Space Nine is online and going strong.

So what were the reactions to the show? Over at Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski wasn't impressed. His first response was a simple "Heh." His explanation of that remark the next day was:

"...imagine two boxers in the ring, each bloodied and exhausted after 11 grueling rounds. It's now the last round. You've each got one last shot in your heart. Your opponent comes in with a big name, with the sports critics approval, with fancy clothes and a twelve million dollar windup. He pulls back and lets you have it with everything he's got." 

"Then you look around...and you're still standing. And you're thinking THAT was their best shot?"

"Because everything he had was intent on one hard shot to knock you out of the ring...speed training, massive amounts of promotion, just to knock you out."

"And you're still standing. And you smile."

"Because now it's YOUR turn."

Of course, it wouldn't be for another month and a half or so before he got to throw his own punch back.  And in the event, it was Babylon 5, not Deep Space Nine, that got sent to the showers for a year.

For myself, "Emissary" was one of only a handful of episodes of either show that I can clearly remember watching live.  I was in college back then, and much of the time I spent watching either show live is lost in the haze of those years. I do still remember watching "Emissary," though. It was over winter break and I was home from school. I had re-united with my high school Dungeons & Dragons group for a one-off game before we all went our separate ways again. We took a couple of hours out of that game to watch this new Deep Space Nine. Back in 1993, the advent of a new Star Trek show was still an event. Voyager and Enterprise hadn't yet diluted the brand name,  and watching the show was almost a religious experience, albeit one with the host replaced by bad Little Caesar's pizza where one of our guys worked and could get it for us on the cheap.

There was surprisingly little discussion about the show when we'd finished watching, though. The general consensus was that it was decent if not great, and that it had gotten the job done. None of us delved into deep discussion about what it all meant or what secrets there were to find in the episode. It had been what it was and that was all. Instead, we picked up our dice and got back to the business of hacking up some dark elves.

That lack of involvement in a show wasn't something new, of course. Most television, even some of the very best, is like that. You watch it, maybe remember a scene or two, then go on and do something else. If there was one thing that distinguished Babylon 5 from Deep Space Nine, it was that B5 broke the usual mold. Babylon 5's ongoing story arc made you want to talk about it with other B5 fans. You got online or met in person and discussed the show. You looked for clues and made wild guesses about what things meant or what would happen next.

Occasionally, you were even right.

Alas, the 1993 version of myself wasn't a part of the B5 club. It wasn't until late 1995 that I started watching B5 regularly, and even then, my conversations were limited mostly to my friends in person rather than online. So I missed the great era of the Babylon 5 Fan. Perhaps this project is in some small sense a way to make up for what I didn't get, but could have, back in the mid-90's.

Because, as it turned out, I was mostly watching Deep Space Nine instead for the first couple of years. But that show had its good points too. Something doesn't have to be deep to be entertaining. And sometimes Deep Space Nine tried to make a point. One place where they tried was the second episode, "Past Prologue." Did they succeed? I guess you'll have to tune in next time to find out.

"I Was There at the Dawn of the Third Age" (Introduction)

"Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean."

                      -Narrator, Romeo and Juliet




It happens all the time in Hollywood. Someone gets an idea and by hook or by crook manages to get it into production. Someone else in the same business hears about it and "borrows" that idea for his own project, often using the fact that there's a similar project out there to get his moving. All of a sudden, you have Volcano and Dante's Peak, Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, Armageddon and Deep Impact. In 1985 there were three variations on the "science gone wrong" comedy: Weird Science, Misfits of Science, and Real Genius.

It happens on television too, of course. It's claimed that Lost in Space borrowed heavily from ideas that Gene Roddenberry had pitched for Star Trek. Or the seventh season of Doctor Who, which is widely considered to be "Doctor Who does Quatermass." Any successful television show is likely to spawn a swarm of imitators. One need only look at the platoon of police procedurals that appeared after the success of CSI, or the wave of spooky, sort of science fiction shows that aired the season after Lost became a surprise hit.

So perhaps what happened with Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone. Two science fiction shows, both airing for the first time in early 1993, both about the crew of a space station caught up in politics and war? That sure sounds like the usual Hollywood copycat game in play.

There was a difference this time, though. It lay in the nascent internet and in the mind of Babylon 5's creator, J. Michael Straczynski. You see, in the early days of the 'net, no one was quite sure what you could say and what you couldn't. Or, more to the point, what you should say and what you shouldn't. By 2013, certain standards have kicked in. Most everyone knows that if you're working on one show, you don't bash someone else's show. You give the same boring answers that everyone else does if you're asked.

"They're doing fine work over there."

"<insert name here> is a great <writer/producer/director/actor>, and I love <his/her> work."

"It's a great show, but we're going in a different direction."

And so on, and so forth. PR people for the various studios watch the 'net like a hawk, swooping down on any rogue Tweets, Facebook updates, or 'blogs to keep damage to a minimum and prevent any open warfare from breaking out between creators and their fans.

It wasn't like that in the early to mid-nineties. Back then, nobody in the Hollywood hierarchies had the faintest idea what the internet was. The 'net was wide open, and Straczynski, known as JMS to his fans, stepped into the gap.

Or perhaps it is better to say that he leapt in with both feet.

Because, in a feat never seen before or since, JMS went online with his thoughts about his show while the show was airing. And we're not talking about a blog post here and there as you got with Ronald Moore and the Battlestar Galactica remake, or John Rogers for Leverage. There are some seventeen thousand messages archived on the JMSNews website dating back to 1991. Some of them are announcements and pumping up hype for the show, of course, but the vast majority were a message board dialogue with the fans. What's more, they are decidedly not in the polite vein that one might expect from today's PR monitored producers. No, what Straczynski did was pour his heart and mind out online, not only about his show, Babylon 5, but about the show that he said was ripping him off: Deep Space Nine.

Here's part of a post made in early 1992 about the basic similarities:

"BABYLON 5 is a deep-space station located in a strategic sector of space that is heavily traveled, a jump point for journeys, with representatives from various civilizations on board.  DEEPSPACE 9 is a deep-space station located in a strategic sector of space that is heavily traveled, a jump point for journeys, with representatives from various civilizations on board.Funny...I don't see what's similar about them at ALL...even if there ARE some other points of comparison that I can't reveal for fear of compromising my OWN story. "

And here's part of a post JMS made in the middle of 1992:

"I am trying very, very, *very* hard not to lose it at this moment."

"Someone put the copy of the current ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY in my hands, with the DS9 cover story, and said "I think you should see this." And I saw some full-head makeup prosthetics that look an *awful* lot like ours. But worse yet...the sets. The Promenade looks amazingly like our bazaar; their casino/bar looks a lot like our casino/bar, on and on and on...."

"This is getting just a *little* out of hand. The visual aspect comes on top of the story aspect...that both shows are about a space station that functions as a port of call for businessmen, smugglers, diplomats and others, located near a jump-point/worm-hole, has an open marketplace, a casino, a bar, hookers, original draft screenplays in which a shape changer played a substantial role, a female second in command, a head of the station with the same initials (J.S.) both with the rank of Commander, and an attack scene near the end with the female second in command being in charge of the defense...oh, yeah, and both commanders carrying a trauma from a recent war or battle."

"And there are more points of similarity, those are just the ones that spring immediately to mind. And now they will even have much the same look, similar sets, similar makeups...."

"I'm calm. I'm quiet and collected. How that desk got tossed out the window is anybody's guess."

We should note that not all the information from EW proved to be completely accurate. The lead character on Deep Space Nine was named Benjamin Sisko, for example. The only hookers on DS9 are holographic, for another. And obviously, there is a degree of sarcasm involved in that first post. Still, most of the points made are correct. Even before either show had aired, Straczynski was calling foul on DS9's copying of B5.

There is, alas, no comparable resource from the producers and creators of Deep Space Nine, Rick Berman and Michael Piller. What we have is after the fact, and in many cases, way after the fact. Much of it comes from DVD special feature interviews or quotations from the "Star Trek: Deep Spare Space Nine Companion", a book published a year after DS9 aired its final episode. What's more, all that material relates only to DS9 and rarely, if ever, mentions Babylon 5.

If one looks hard enough, however, one can occasionally find something about the conflict between the shows from the DS9 side. Take this part of an interview that Berman gave in 2011:

"There was a time when, I don't know whether it was specifically Straczynski or other people, it was implied that he had pitched an idea similar to DS9 to Paramount and that it had been rejected and that, lo and behold, a year or so later DS9 came about. The implication being that Michael Piller and I perhaps stole all or part of his idea, which was always amusing to Michael and I because it was completely untrue. We had no knowledge of this gentleman. If he did pitch something to Paramount, we never heard about it. DS9 was a show that was created by Michael and me and Brandon Tartikoff, who was the recent head of Paramount at the time, without any knowledge of Straczynski or of anything that he had ever pitched. So when we were accused of stealing his idea it was a little sad but at the same time a little comical to us."

That's a pretty flat denial, isn't it?

So here we are, with two shows airing at the same time with similar premises and the accusation of plagiarism leveled from one show against the other. What are we to do?

"We count 30 Rebel ships, Lord Vader, but they're so small they're avoiding our turbo lasers!"

"We'll have to destroy them ship to ship."
       
  -Imperial Officer and Darth Vader, Star Wars



The way forward, as Vader commands, is to watch every episode of both shows. We'll examine the characters, settings, and evolution of B5 and DS9 both. As we find them, we'll point out the similarities and differences, and we'll see if we can come to some decisions along the way about the big questions.

Did one show rip off the other? Does it matter if they did? Which one was better? Can we even answer that? What else can we learn along the way?

I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

Let me end this introduction with a few logistical notes. First of all, there will be no spoiler protection whatsoever. Both these shows are 20 years old, and are easily available at public libraries, through Netflix and Amazon Prime, or on sale on Amazon or EBay. I will also not be following a traditional "review" format. That is, there will be no episode summery followed by my opinion of the episode. Instead, I'll provide a link to summary pages for the episode at either Memory Alpha for the Deep Space Nine episodes or from The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 for Babylon 5. While there will be some discussion about what worked and what didn't for any given episode, most of what I have to say will be analysis. What was the episode about? How does it fit in to the broad strokes of the show? How does it compare to the other show?

Updates will be three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  I've got a two week buffer already written, and my plan is to write constantly to keep at least two weeks ahead at all times.  Although the primary focus will of course be on the televised episodes, I do plan to divert every now and again to discuss the secondary materials for both shows, including novels, comic books, and games.  Putting it all together, this should take a little more than two years.

As I plan to cover the shows as they aired, we're going to end up with more DS9 than B5 in the long run. That's inevitable, because DS9 ran seven seasons while B5 went five. What's more, every season of DS9 besides the first had more episodes than the equivalent B5 season. Even counting the B5 TV movies and the spin-off series Crusade, there's still a good 50 more DS9 episodes than Babylon 5s. Worse, because B5 took a year off after airing the pilot to make some adjustments, a lot of those extra episodes are at the very beginning. There's a good season and a half of DS9 to get through before B5 proper starts up.

Fortunately, there is that wonderful archive at JMSNews. Early on I'll be drawing heavily on it to talk about what was going on in Grid Epsilon during the first season and a half of DS9. Once we get to January of 1994, things will even out quite a bit, and the back and forth between the shows will begin in earnest. I hope you're all still with me by then, because that's when things really start to get fun.

So I'm doing a soft launch.  I'll be taking the time through the start of B5 proper to get into the groove, identify and fix problems, and work out how this is going to go.  Along the way, I'll probably upgrade the site a bit, maybe see about getting some appropriate ads and post histories and the like.  By the time we get to B5's first season premiere, "Midnight on the Firing Line," we should be ready to really kick it into gear.

Speaking of problems, let me know in the comments or by email or Facebook if you come across any.  Things look fine in Chrome with the current formatting, but if it fails utterly in Firefox, I need to know that.  Drop me a line.  Thanks!

So first off, we'll be starting off with the DS9 pilot: "Emissary."  Come by on Wednesday to have a look.