Anonymous asked:
wellntruly answered:
a) Your dad sounds great and I empathize hard with his “it’s really good!!! that’s all I can come up with, but gosh I mean it!!!” approach to recommendations, for would you believe, that is my own natural state.
b) But I must fling myself toward expression always (A Curse), so LET ME TELL YA HOW I FEEL ABOUT DS9 IN RELATION TO TOS.
The given: that you have fallen hard for Star Trek: The Original Series. I understand this, ohohoho, very well. As recent events have shown. The next is a presumption: that what you feel about TOS bears some resemblance to what I feel about TOS, broadly: a silly beautiful starry cheese platter that I love tremendously.
Here are some more things about TOS that I think are integral to what it is as a work of art:
obvious metaphors
miniskirts
SPACE
~science~
Humanity
fun
This Planet Is Made Of Styrofoam, Glitter, and The Concept “Fuchsia”
And perhaps most unique to the modern television audience sensibility: a mid-century shrug at the concept of serialized storytelling.
A TOS plot lasts for 50 minutes, and that is it. You can bounce around the 80 episodes in preeeetty much any order, c.f. myself. But what I think this does, what I found myself totally obsessed with, is how tossing the timeline up in the air can make the show function like a myth. In myths, you have a set of known characters who go about having adventures. Sure there are good intros, but no one is gonna make a comment about “jumping ahead in the narrative”, y’know? Mythic figures don’t grow because of the sequence of what they experience, they grow in your mind as you accumulate more stories about them.
This is exactly how TOS works. Characters you completely fall in love through a scattered series of free-wheeling one-shots. There’s a freedom to this, and a comfort. And it’s fun, god it’s so fun.
Now, the mythish structure is just one of many things that are going to build someone’s concept of Star Trek qua Star Trek. And because they ARE Star Trek, most of the series fall pretty high on those Key Features TOS first established. Actually it’s probably just variations in how high they land that contributes to how much I enjoy them. Not enough “fun” is what kept me skipping along on the surface of my Next Generation sampling, because TNG is more than half myth-structured as well, and certainly has loads of “obvious metaphors” and “Humanity”. I get the feeling I may have liked Voyager significantly more than a lot of people, but I also know that the top-notch Trekkies who follow this blog recommended me only the best episodes of a notoriously patchy series. Enterprise, of course, we will pretend does not exist in this discussion, or in life.
And then there’s Deep Space Nine. Of the Star Treks that we know exist, this one is actually WAY THE OUTLIER. Breaks from form in DS9 that may have a TOS fan like yourself going hmm:
- a space station instead of a starship
- which means no landing parties, no away missions, no whatever you want to term that thing where they just beam all their highest ranking officers right into the middle an unknown situation and see what happens
- in addition to the usual thematic political bent, real af internal politics
- a sudden scarcity of clear Good solutions
- our commanding officer isn’t even a captain!
- but he’ll get there, because: SERIALIZED STORYTELLING
Let me gather these into three Points Of Issue and then tell you why it’s actually chill.
Narrative. DS9 builds on what has happened. It has narrative and emotional continuity. It’s honestly weird that this should have felt weird to me, but it was not the mythy Star Trek structure I had come to know and love! So it threw me off at first on some sub-level, until I remembered that I love me some good development. Verdict: not actually a problem.
Complexity. You may have heard people praising DS9 for being more morally complex, or even “morally gray.” You may have reacted, as I did, “uuuuuughhh I’m not here watching STAR TREK for your grimdark Anti-Heroes In Anti-Gravity. I am straight up on board for the optimistic moralizing. give me goodhearted people in colorblock jumpsuits engaging with philosophical questions and making SPACE JOKES.” Well good news, me of the past and maybe also you: that’s still Deep Space Nine! That sincere, science-loving, socially-conscious heart of Star Trek is still beating away on this space station. What has gotten more gray and complex are just the plots in which that pure heart shows itself. This show is Star Trek, hoo boy, is it ever.
Setting. The lack of landing parties I actually got over surprisingly quickly, because of what I was getting instead: domesticity.
And that is my closing point for why Your Dad Is Right, DS9 Is Really Good! You know all those times watching TOS when the camera is panning through a hallway or the canteen or something and are there are all these cute space folks hanging out and going places and doing their things, and you just think happily “people live here” and feel your heart warm? DS9 is that at maximum impulse power. DS9 is that on warp. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine understands and embraces the deep joy of QUOTIDIAN SPACE LIFE, and it’s one of the most charming things I’ve ever seen. This is a show where you will not only know the characters’ favorite beverages, but where – and this is just off the top of my head as I look back on the only first half of the series – a character’s fondness for a certain beverage has been a plot point on at least five separate occasions.
This is life on a space station with your space friends drinking space bevs, and I love it so much.
I still don’t go here, because every second of free time I have at the moment is one I have clawed viciously from desperately needed sleep, but I am charmed at the idea of the Star Treks that we know exist, because that implies that there are indeed Star Treks that we don’t know exist - the ones that are simply out there Somewhere, waiting to be discovered. I’m not even sure where that Somewhere is - forgotten storage rooms in old TV stations in Zimbabwe, like missing Doctor Who episodes? (Perhaps they have especially terribl-arious special effects?) Beamed in from space? (Where they are, in fact, simply rather dull documentaries from the space equivalent of community television?) Future Star Treks that unpredictably leak into the present and are found on obscure torrent trackers, where they are dismissed as admittedly well-made fanvids? Alternate universes, where the upcoming show is indeed about the petty professional squabbles and interpersonal drama of a trio of grudge-bearing space mycologists? Man, I could get seriously into some of these maybe-Star Treks!
I’m sorry that you all have to again scroll past my incredibly long answer to a question that wasn’t even asked, but like I was not going to reblog THIS MAGICAL ADDITION.
