"Die With Honor, O'Brien" (DS9 1-6 "Captive Pursuit")

He's living prey.  He's a Starfleet engineer.  Can they avoid getting shot?

January 31, 1993

(Synopsis on Memory Alpha)

With "Captive Pursuit" we get the first episode devoted to a character who's been around for ages but has only been "Chief Miles O'Brien" for a relatively short amount of time. Colm Meany appeared in the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Encounter at Farpoint," as the guy running Ops on the Battle Bridge. Starting with season 2 of TNG, he was the Transporter Chief. Over time, he grew in importance, and things were added to him. He went from Transporter Chief to Chief O'Brien to Chief Miles O'Brien. He even got married to one of the Enterprise's botanists, Keiko, and together they had a daughter named Molly, who Worf helped birth in the otherwise forgettable TNG episode "Disaster." (Come to think of it, that episode was pretty forgettable even including the "tough guy is challenged by having to be a midwife" plot, but never mind that.)

O'Brien was, in short, the most important character on TNG who wasn't in the main cast. Therefore, it was pretty reasonable that he'd end up as one of the main cast of Deep Space Nine, especially since they'd shown in the TNG episode "The Wounded" that O'Brien had a history with the Cardassians.

Throughout The Next Generation, O'Brien had been shown to be loyal, hard-working, and dependable. Here in O'Brien's first episode as the focus character, we see that he's loyal, hard-working, dependable, and badly overworked. So things haven't changed all that much for O'Brien, except for his workload.

Invoking British Redcoats and big game hunters much?

This episode challenges O'Brien with the station's first visitor from the Gamma Quadrant, a being named Tosk. Tosk, as we discover halfway through the episode, is raised and trained to be living prey for the Hunters. Needless to say there's something of an ethical dilemma involved for our Starfleet crew in this practice. On one hand there's the obvious fact that it's wrong to hunt sentient creatures. Especially to the point of death, as they do here. On the other hand, Tosk is happy to be hunted, and has in fact trained his whole life to be hunted. He knows it will end inevitably in his death, but being hunted is the ultimate expression of skill in his culture. To be a Tosk is to fight to extend your life just one more day in the face of incredible odds. Everyone in his culture, Hunter and Tosk both, look up to the Tosks, and they are heroes in death.

We'll touch on the themes of sentient beings manufactured for a single purpose by the end of season two when the Jem'Hadar make their debut. It is a debate that I see in reference to AI a lot too. If we are ever able to create true artificial intelligence will the constraints that are placed on them by their builders make them slaves?  Heady stuff, and worthy of some interesting debate.

Alas, that's not really what we get in this episode.  Because another of Star Trek's quirks pops up instead, the Prime Directive.  Confusing, inconsistently used, and more known for its breakage than its correct application, the Prime Directive is supposed to keep Starfleet from screwing around with other cultures.  In theory, it represents hard lessons about what happens when you give advanced technology to primitive cultures.  A long-held fan theory that was eventually disproved by Enterprise was that the original disaster was Starfleet giving the Klingons warp technology leading to generations of bloody conflict with a society that wasn't ready to hit the stars.  So making sure that not only does Starfleet tech stay out of primitive hands make sense, extending the directive to ban any kind of interference with other cultures seems like a great idea.

That's the theory.  In practice, though, the writers of Star Trek shows are pretty loose on what constitutes "interference."  From series to series, and sometimes even from season to season of the same show, the Prime Directive fluctuates wildly in what it means the crew of a starship can or can't do.  Sometimes it is explicitly stated to only apply to pre-warp cultures.  But other times, and as it is applied here in "Captive Pursuit," it means not messing around with another culture, even when that culture involves shooting up your space station!

And that's the problem with the Prime Directive.  Like technobabble, it has become a crutch for bad writing. Need to insert some quick drama to your morality play?  Wave around the Prime Directive.  Need to keep the characters from using the obvious and rational solution to a problem?  Prime Directive says you can't.  So sorry.  Does it matter that last season we used the Prime Directive in a way that completely contradicts what we're doing here?  No, no it does not.

Fortunately, Deep Space Nine's station-bound format limits the show's opportunities to trot out the Prime Directive.  Compared to the original Star Trek, The Next Generation, or Voyager the Prime Directive rarely comes up.  For the most part, the crew of DS9 aren't going out looking for trouble, and as such, the Prime Directive simply doesn't come into play.  Which is for the best, I'd say.

Overall, I find "Captive Pursuit" to be much like the Prime Directive itself.  It contains potentially interesting ideas that are marred by poor execution.  While Colm Meany's performance as O'Brien is solid as usual, I never connected to Tosk.  He never seemed as dangerous as the show was making him out to be, and I never felt much sympathy for his plight.  Some of that was script and direction, and some of it the acting.  Either way, I never really bought Tosk as a character, and since he was half of a two man play, the whole structure of the episode collapsed for me.  But hey, they can't all be winners.

Over on the B5 front, JMS had nothing whatsoever to say about this episode.  But he did say this:

"What the hell am I doing up at 4:15 a.m. my time? Watching B5 for the ten zillionth time. Picking it apart. Making notes. This is nuts. I'm going to bed. See you all in the afternoon....."

Which is pretty amusing in that twenty years later I found myself staying up to 4 am picking apart Deep Space Nine and will soon be doing the same to Babylon 5.  Some things never change, I suppose.

Next time, a pair of TNG characters stop by DS9 for a visit.  Which ones?  Well, I'll bet you can guess at least one of them when I tell you the episode is titled "Q-Less."  I'll see you there.

"We'll Haggle Over Price Later" (DS9 1-5, "Babel")

(Synopsis on Memory Alpha)

Dammit, who's going to unstop the toilet if O'Brien dies?

January 24, 1993

With three character focused introductory episodes in the can, Deep Space Nine opted for an ensemble episode for episode four. It's the first episode of the series that isn't really about any one character so much as it is about a plot event. In this case, the plot is a classic of science fiction, the Big Disease.

The Big Disease has a storied history in Star Trek. "The Naked Time," an episode of the original Star Trek series is considered a classic. The idea of a disease that unleashes the parts of ourselves that we keep hidden or under control was a good one, plus you got to see Sulu chase people around with a sword, and who doesn't like that? "The Naked Now," The Next Generation's version of the same idea was somewhat less successful, but showed us a few new things about the characters. What it showed about the female characters in particular is why the episode was less successful, but never mind that.

Both Naked episodes showed up early in their respective series runs, as the fourth episode aired for Star Trek and the third for The Next Generation. Similarly, "Babel" is the fourth episode of Deep Space Nine. That's understandable because one of the nice things about the Big Disease plot is that it lets you put the characters under stress in a way that they aren't accustomed to. This is particularly notable at the end of the episode where, "Ten Little Indians" style, Odo and Quark are the only ones left functioning in Ops after everyone else has either left or succumbed to the disease.

What "Babel" doesn't do, however, is recycle the Psi 2000 inhibitions destroying disease. Instead, the DS9 crew is infected by an aphasia virus that interferes with the victim's ability to use language. What's more, it wasn't just a random plague, but a Bajoran created bio-weapon designed to take out the Cardassians. The plan of the Bajoran terrorists seems pretty ill-conceived, though. If you're going to make a bio-weapon that, as we see, can affect Bajorans as easily as it does the Cardassians it's meant to kill, why are you planting it on a space station in orbit around Bajor? Surely there must be better places to release the bug, like Cardassia Prime for example.

The twist to the episode is that unlike Doctors McCoy and Crusher, DS9's Doctor Bashir doesn't get to find the cure to the disease. Major Kira does that by kidnapping the assistant to the scientist who'd created the weapon in the first place. You'd think that kidnapping a prominent doctor and risking his life by exposing him to a deadly disease would merit some kind of censure, but no, we're informed by the closing voiceover that "things are returning to normal."

"A Man Alone" ended much the same way, with Sisko making a log entry about how things are back to normal. It's an unsatisfying way to end an episode, in that it basically says that events in this episode have no greater significance. Considering that Odo was nearly lynched last episode and Kira kidnapped a guy in this one, you'd think that there ought to be more long term effects. That there isn't is a disappointment but not a surprise. Episodic television has almost always been a one and done state of affairs. Excepting the two parts of "The Menagerie" and the fact that the Romulans were introduced in "Balance of Terror" so you should probably watch that one before you watch "The Enterprise Incident" which has Romulans in it, pretty much any episode of Star Trek can be watched in any order you like. There are few recurring characters and even fewer direct references to previous events. Likewise, while The Next Generation dabbled in continuity, with such continuing stories as the Borg threat to the Federation or Worf, his family history, and the Klingon Empire, it was dabbling only. For the most part, as long as you ignore Riker's beard and the changes in uniform from season to season, The Next Generation can be watched is pretty much any order just like the original Star Trek.

Deep Space Nine breaks from tradition by having long running storylines throughout much of the length of the show. The first two seasons deal pretty heavily with Bajoran politics and religion, with a side of Federation and Cardassian politics. Then in the season two finale we're introduced to the Dominion, and the rest of the series tosses Bajor into the dustbin of history and focuses instead on the growing Dominion threat and the slide to a cataclysmic war. There's a reason for the sudden shift in tone, and his name is Ira Behr, but that's a while off yet. Suffice it to say that Deep Space Nine seems for its first two seasons to be a show about Bajor, the Federation, and the Cardassians, and becomes something else entirely for its last five years.

Which is an odd observation to make when writing about an episode that has no continuity implications what so ever. Neither the disease, the men who created it, the Bajoran terrorists who planted it, or even the panicked freighter captain who nearly blows up the station are ever heard from again. This is a purely stand alone episode. But sometimes you can see something best by comparing it to its opposite. So this is what we mean when we're talking about stand-alone episodes. It's an episode that, excepting certain signs that time has passed like changes to the opening credits, Sisko's hair, and Cirroc Lofton's height, could be seen in the beginning of season one or the end of season seven without changing at all.

As with many things, the gang at Babylon 5 felt less constrained by tradition than the Deep Space Nine crew. Of course, for the B5 team there was much less tradition to be constrained by. Rather than two previous television series and a handful of movies, Babylon 5 only had to worry about the basic rules of episodic television, narrowed down to science fiction television.

They mostly spent their time breaking those rules with a sledgehammer.

For instance, while Babylon 5 had several stand-alone episodes, especially in the first two and a half seasons, they also had one lone story arc that ran throughout the length of the show. Indeed, that was one of the main selling points of the show, that it was, in effect, a five year long novel. As Straczynski put it, three days before "Babel" aired, both in his comparison of his show to DS9 and about the ongoing story:

"Those who have seen the two shows have no problem telling them apart. And future B5 stuff will continue to remain separate and fresh for the same reason that the pilot is different and fresh: because it proceeds from another voice. Just as Clarke's stories have always been different from Asimov's has been different from Ellison's have been different from Bova's have been different from...well, you get the idea."

"No comparison of quality implied there, only as examples of voice. (One final note: B5 has always been conceived as, fundamentally, a five year story, a novel for television, which makes it very different as well.)"

And if there was one thing that sets the two shows apart, it's that. Deep Space Nine was a traditional television show that dabbled in longer story arcs. Babylon 5 was trying to tell one long story over five years. In 2013, that concept is widely accepted. Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and 24 all had either season long or series long stories. There is no such thing as a stand-alone episode of Game of Thrones, where every episode flows from one to the other like chapters of a novel, which is exactly what it is.

But in 1993, this was a very big deal indeed. It hadn't been done before quite that way, at least in American live-action television. Unless you counted soap operas, that is. Or the old serials of the 1950's and '60s. Or...

So perhaps it is more accurate to say that while the idea wasn't new, the implementation was. Certainly it broke the mold of what was expected in science fiction television. Fans of the idea, and the show, said that telling one story all the way through gave the B5 universe more depth and gave you more reason to care about the characters. Detractors said that if you missed the beginning or more than one or two episodes along the way you were screwed because you'd be lost and have no way to catch up. Both sides were right, after a fashion, and we'll get into that more when Babylon 5 finally catches up.

We should also say that when Babylon 5 gets to do the Big Disease show, they break the mold even more than "Babel" does here.

Sworn enemies working together.  We should do this more often.

What else do we have to say about "Babel?" It does seem odd to me that if Quark's Ferrengi immune system is so good that he can be unaffected by the virus, why weren't the rest of Quark's crew helping him out in Ops? I'll forgive the conceit, though, since the Quark and Odo scenes are very good in this episode. Indeed, if there was a B-Plot in this episode it was Quark and Odo, though like the better B-Plots, this one merged with the main plot by the end of the episode.

Thus we find that "Babel" is a reasonable if unexceptional episode of Deep Space Nine and move on to the next episode, "Captive Pursuits," where Chief Miles O'Brien finally gets his time in the spotlight. I'll see you there.

"Killing Your Own Clone is Still Murder" (DS9 1-4 "A Man Alone")

(Synopsis at Memory Alpha)

Murder, He Cloned

January 17, 1993

Structurally, Deep Space Nine takes the old Star Trek premise of "Wagon Train to the stars" even more literally than every other Star Trek show, though not a literally as the short lived and much beloved Firefly would in 2002.

As Deep Space Nine writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe would say:

"We had the country doctor, and we had the barkeeper, and we had the sheriff and we had the mayor, we had it all, it was all there. We had the common man, Miles O'Brien, the Native American, Kira."

Deep Space Nine was trying to portray a science fiction version of an Old West frontier town for the first couple of seasons. And if there was any one episode that proves it, "A Man Alone" was it. Between the mob violence A-Plot and Keiko O'Brien schoolmarm B-Plot, you can see some very familiar tropes at work in this episode. They even make light of the fact that you can't lynch a shapeshifter! Excepting that the murderer tries to frame Odo through aggressive cloning, you could pretty much pick this whole episode up and plunk it down on Bonanza with very little difficulty.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you. Consciously invoking the formulas of older genres is a way to remind the audience that you're doing something similar, just in a different setting. Want to show your audience that you're a spy show? Borrow from James Bond on Chuck or Burn Notice. Need your audience to recognize you're a new style forensics show? Borrow from CSI on Bones. Want people to know you're Wagon Train-ing to the stars? Borrow from westerns on Deep Space Nine.

We should also talk about A-Plot/B-Plot. This is a pretty familiar way to structure your television show, especially ones that have large casts like Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5. What you do is have part of your cast wrapped up in the main plot, while the rest shows up in a secondary plot. A-Plot is the primary and B-Plot is the secondary. Both of the previous Deep Space Nine episodes we've seen so far had A-Plots and B-Plots. The difference between those episodes and "A Man Alone" was that in both "Emissary" and "Past Prologue" the A- and B-Plots converged by the end of the episode. In "A Man Alone," they are distinct.

For example, in "Emissary" the A-Plot is Sisko becoming the Emissary and his time in the wormhole with the Prophets, while the B-Plot is moving the station to the wormhole and the trouble with the Cardassians. At the end of the episode, Sisko's resolution of the A-Plot solves the problem of the Cardassian ships in the B-Plot. Likewise, in "Past Prologue" Kira and Tahna and the plot to blow up the wormhole is the A-Plot, while Garak and Bashir make up the B-Plot. Once again, the two plots come together by the end of the episode where the information that Bashir gets through Garak in the B-Plot helps the resolution of the A-Plot.

"A Man Alone" does things differently. In this episode, the A-Plot of Odo being framed for murder and the B-Plot of Keiko establishing a school have nothing to do with one another. There isn't even a thematic link outside our previously mentioned "it makes things feel more like a western." It's more like "this stuff is happening over here while this other stuff is happening over there." In that it allows you to tell two stories in one episode, I can see the appeal, but every time you go from one story to the other the shift in tone is jarring. What's more, it's almost inevitable that one half of the episode will be more interesting to a viewer than the other. That leads any given audience member to be sitting around during half the show wishing they'd get back to the other half. Fortunately, most B-Plots take up much less time than their corresponding A-Plots, so as long as the A-Plot is more interesting to you, you'll be fine. That's the case here in "A Man Alone" where I can't think of many people who would find Keiko's plotline more interesting than Odo's.

At their best, A-Plots and B-Plots have some tonal similarities that give an episode a consistent feel regardless of the separation of the events within it. That isn't always true, though, on either show. Just wait until we get to Babylon 5's "TKO" if you want to see an episode where the tone shifts so fast you'll get whiplash. On the other hand, if you want to see one where the two plots never converge but the dissonance between the two is chillingly well done, then it's Babylon 5's "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place" that you should look at.

As promised, this is Odo's episode the way the previous two were Sisko's and Kira's. Want to see what your law enforcement character is made of? Strip him of his authority and make him a suspect in a case and see what he does. Babylon 5's Chief of Security Michael Garibaldi crawls into a bottle but eventually gets his act together and solves the case. Odo hides in his office and Doctor Bashir solves the case for him. Of the two the former is more heroic, but the latter still tells you something about Odo. To be precise, that at the beginning of the series, Odo has no way to interact with people outside of his job as Constable. He understands means, motive, and opportunity, but can't understand why people form couples. When pressed by the mob and unable to use his accustomed authority, he hides.

Since the man who ends up running the show through its later seasons, Ira Steven Behr, isn't fully in charge yet, it's hard to call the way the mob turns so quickly on Odo foreshadowing per say, but the fact is that they've set up in the third episode of the show that shapeshifters frighten people and that frightened people turn to violence easily. Behr will eventually use that point as the reason the Founders formed the Dominion, as a way to protect themselves from the fear of the "solids." Having Odo experience that fear and violence for himself makes the Founders' arguments to him more reasonable, and makes his choosing to stand in defiance of that fear that much more heroic.

Keiko O'Brien, Schoolmarm  

What is definitely foreshadowing, or at the very least least setup, is the B-Plot of Keiko's school. The school and what she should and shouldn't be teaching the children will become a major plot point in the season finale "In the Hands of the Prophets."  Here it unfortunately just distracts from Odo's murder mystery.

I do have some nitpicks. A lot of Deep Space Nine's extras are of dubious quality sometimes. I'm not certain if it's the direction or the actors themselves, but sometimes you get a line reading that's so stiff and unconvincing that it takes you right out of the episode. Some of the rioters in "A Man Alone" are terrible, and it hurts the episode to have to listen to them.

Over on Babylon 5, we find that by February of 1992, the idea of B5's own shapeshifter character had been shelved. Says Straczynski:

"And I dropped the idea, in my original screenplay, of a character who's an actual shape-changer because a) I found a better way of handling a particular plot point, and b) when Warner Bros. did the focus group study on B5, which at that point included the shape-changer, the UNIFORM reaction from the group -- especially now, after the Michael Jackson shape-changing, and that technology becoming SO commonplace -- was that it was a dumbness, and why would ANYONE want to do that since it's been done so much now, especially in TERMINATOR 2?"

"I agree. They're right. Why would any show want to include a shape-changer on a regular basis now that the technology has been SO over-exposed? Heh, heh...."

And thus Odo. A shapeshifter who doesn't know who his own people are, is isolated among his colleagues with his bitterest enemy the closest thing he has to a friend, but a man who's dedicated to justice, regardless of the letter of the law. Three episodes in, and we have a pretty good grasp of Sisko, Kira, and now Odo. Who's next, I wonder? Technically, it will be O'Brien, but before we get to his episode, we get a general episode where everyone is involved.

I'll see you here for our next chapter, "Babel."

"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.