star trek

Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation a Generation later

/ geotrickster / Leave a comment

This is not meant to be a comprehensive review of Star Trek: The Next Generation, nor is it a deep dive take connecting it to political theory like I once did for Deep Space 9. This is simply an overview of what it was like to rewatch one of the defining shows of my childhood from start to finish (albeit with some skips) for the first time since it was being broadcast in real time back when I was in elementary school. 

This was the first non-cartoon television show I ever got into (not counting Rescue 911, which was ironically hosted by William Shatner), being introduced to it by a babysitter in what I imagine was the fifth season at the time. The show would have one new episode per week with the rest of its slot time in the week being dedicated to re-runs. This made it easy to catch up on most of the older episodes within a year or so of starting. 

Despite the fact that I demanded action in my sci fi entertainment, and always preferred the more violent episodes at that time, the Enterprise-D quickly became a kind of fictional idealized home, a place that one could imagine “Maybe when I am older I can do something like that.” Because of this, I pretty much ended up liking all the episodes. It also inspired me getting into Micro Machines because there were so many Star Trek ones out there. 

I had all of these and even more. These days I only have one left in my possession. But if I told you which I would be letting slip what my third and probably final Star Trek post on here eventually will be.

When the show ended, the final episode went a bit over my 9 year old brain and I mostly focused on how cool the alternate future Enterprise with the third warp nacelle was. I wasn’t too broken up about the end as I had found a local public access channel (remember those?) that played The Original Series and soon pivoted to that, which at that time I liked just as much. I was still too young and DS9 was too serialized and too adult to grab me aside from the occasional episode and the later Voyager just did NOT work after I gave it a couple seasons, so I ended up moving away from the franchise for over a decade. Only returning to it in my senior year of college when, sick with the flu, I ended up finding TNG and DS9 both on some of the channels the university network had access to. At the time they were playing seasons 1-2. The next year I moved to the UK where, interestingly enough, the novelty rerun station Dave (yes, that was its name) was re-running TNG’s seasons 6 and 7. In this time my primary return-focus was DS9 and the TOS movies so this spotty partial rewatch was hardly comprehensive and missed most of the middle run of the show. Ten years ago I gave DS9 a full rewatch, and last year I gave TOS the same treatment. These past 3 months I finally came back to my first show and did the long overdue same for TNG. I also decided to rewatch the first two of the TNG movies but not the later two, as I rewatched all of these under lockdown and so had recent experience.

Let us break the following down into sections.

My streamlined rewatch guide:

Want to do a beginning to end watch but not see every single episode? I have some easy but loose guidelines for you. It is easy to skip episodes because the show has relatively little serialization (though more, bizarrely given the other show’s premise, than Voyager ever did). 

I strongly recommend skipping the majority of Season 1. To say the show had yet to find its footing would be understatement. It comes across as a bad parody of TOS. “Encounter at Farpoint” is necessary but more for how it bookends with the final episode and introducing the character Q then for any reason of quality. “The Battle” and “The Neutral Zone” are key establishing episodes for important themes. You can watch Tasha Yar die to a stupid slime monster just to see the end of that character arc and Worf’s promotion to security chief. Otherwise, it’s best to zip through this one. Season 2 improves upon it and has more episodes worth catching, but is still very much not the TNG you remember qualitatively. There are stand outs though, especially including “Q Who?” which is the introduction to the Borg and is one of the top 10 episodes of the entire show. Be sure to skip the montage episode season finale though, it’s the worst episode of the entire show if not the entire 20th Century era franchise.

For the remainder of the show’s run I recommend watching the majority of the episodes. Yes, including in the more uneven Season 7. The show is firing on all cylinders from Season 3 through 6  with bad or even lackluster episodes being the outliers. Season 5 was the high point for me, and it contains the best single episode, “Darmok” (the meme language one that encapsulates all that is best with Trek as a franchise). My general guide to what is skippable is all Lt. Barclay episodes except for “The Nth Degree”, all Lwaxana Troi episodes save maybe Menage a Troi (for the ending Picard monologue), and all Alexander and Holodeck episodes save perhaps the funny “Fistful of Datas”, which paradoxically is both an Alexander and a Holodeck episode. 

Season 7 is an extra-special season and so I have extra-special thoughts on it. I was most curious going into this what I would make of it on rewatch. I found that, for the most part, I liked it. The writers clearly knew (and later in interviews they would admit this) that they were running out of ideas and just throwing things at the wall to see what would stick. This creates some truly awful episodes, chief among them “Sub Rosa” and “Force of Nature”, but also possibly the highest concentration of really stand out episodes such as “Phantasms”, “The Pegasus”, the so-bad-its-good “Masks” (you may hate but I KNOW you remember it), “Preemptive Strike”, and of course “All Good Things…” which is not just a series highlight perhaps the best show-ender of all time. Considering that most shows linger on well past their expiry date, I think it was great we saw just enough to want the show to end but not enough that it dragged. And what a finale! Upon rewatch I enjoy the ending so much more than I did as a kid. If only shows since had followed this path of ending on a high note.

 And since I  wanted to end the films too on a high note and not a mediocrity (Insurrection) or something outright vile (Nemesis- not even pre-fame Romulan twink Tom Hardy could save it)…so  when it came to movies Generations and First Contact was the perfect endpoint for this rewatch. Generations is pretty mediocre in a lot of ways, but ends up just over the positive side for me on rewatch specifically due to its most criticized aspect: the offscreen and seemingly random death of Picard’s extended family in a house fire. This not only reminds us that in the relatively utopic future of the 24th Century life is still filled with unpredictable and random tragedy and how this can inspire both bad and good coping mechanisms for people. It also gives an emotional resonance to the main plot point of the film of people trying to recover an idealized past. Additionally, it is the end of the Enterprise-D and the Duras Sisters. Data getting his emotion chip completes his arc in a way, though whether you find it funny or annoying will vary with the observer. Plus, Malcolm McDowell. First Contact, meanwhile, is a great series send off because it is the best TNG film, introduces the beautiful Enterprise E, and completes the Picard Borg Arc by having a drawn out fight on a single ship, deck by deck and point blank range. Speaking of Arcs…

General Theme and Character Impressions

The Borg Arc is an example of how a not-very-serialized show can have a running theme. Hinted at only vaguely near the end of Season 1, encountered in a freak one-off in Season 2, properly confronted in the climactic “Best of Both Worlds” (and its PTSD  follow up third part “Family”), then with occasional reference to a looming threat without overusing it. The drone Hugh is returned to the collective to sabotage it with individuality, which causes a single group to go rogue but otherwise does not remove the threat. Picard’s experiences with assimilation are clearly (but not directly) akin to a rape. They were aiming for a concluding confrontation in film form which is why I view First Contact as a necessary conclusion despite not agreeing with the introduction of the Borg Queen as an element in the lore. Also, we know now that this more restrained use of the galaxy’s ultimate threat was far more effective, with Borg episodes/movie being horror-lite forays into the dangers of techno-optimism which are needed to balance the general euphoria of the setting. Voyager would, of course, go on to totally ruin this by making the Borg almost a monster of the week, easily fooled and outwitted by a single ship. But Voyager was, of course, the beginning of the decline of the franchise as a whole.*

Something I found more interesting than before on rewatch were Prime Directive episodes. Starfleet’s first and foremost rule is to not interfere in the development of prewarp civilizations. I have seen a lot of hot takes, especially during our recently concluded Woke Era, by midwits online that this policy is somehow racist and bad. Implying that one cannot trust single-planet species with advanced technology. I think watching the show clearly should give the opposite impression- it is to protect weak powers from exploitation at the hands of great powers and safeguard the cultural diversity of cultures in or near Federation space. It is cool and good, the revisionists are wrong, and in the unlikely event we ever go into space outside of our own system ourselves and (even more unlikely) encounter sentient life, we should adopt a similar rule.

Prime Directive episodes, where inevitably the rule is broken, usually by accident in some way, thus became more interesting to me during this rewatch. “Who Watches the Watchers” is justly famous on this premise where contact must be initiated after an anthropological investigation is exposed to the natives. But even better is “First Contact” (the episode not the movie) where a race is deemed ready for contact by the Enterprise but the political situation quickly shows that it is not and the whole attempt has to be aborted and covered up, showing how contested these issues can be. 

The astropolitical situation of the Alpha Quadrant is obviously something I was much more tuned into this time around. I know the actual explanation of things is that the writers were trying different races as regular arc-villians, starting with the Ferengi, mostly settling on the Romulans, and diving into Cardassians later as a hand off to DS9. But what this really shows in-lore is that the Federation is bloated, over-expanded, and needs to consolidate. It has too many cold wars ongoing, hence the need for an unfavorable peace settlement with a weaker power (Cardassia), perpetual fear of the peer-competitor of the Romulan Empire, and the need to hold the peace after the destruction of much of the Federation fleet in the first Borg invasion. Interestingly, this invasion did spark a revolution in military power, as seen by the ships we get in First Contact (the movie not the episode) and in DS9. And once again showing a realistic take on the unpredictability of power politics, most of these vessels would end up used to fight the previously totally unseen threat of the Gamma Quadrant’s Dominion, which would be the ultimate arc of DS9 if not the franchise itself.  One cannot help retroactively fan-theorying that Q’s actual role was not to indirectly prepare the Federation for the Borg by forcing contact between the two- who were too distant from each other to immediately square up at full force- but rather to prepare them for the Dominion by way of a Borg-induced military upgrade. You thought the Alpha Quadrant was bad, you should see the other neighborhoods.

One theme I especially appreciated was to be found in “The Chase”, which might be the episode I have most upgraded from prior view to present estimation. An episode clearly designed to provide an in-universe explanation as to why most of the races of the galaxy live on the same type of worlds and all look the same save for different forehead ridges, “The Chase” does a great job providing a founding species myth to actually explain this otherwise improbable series of events. Sure the universal translator shows why everyone can talk to each other (even apparently when one party has it only) but the actual shared genetic heritage of the species shown via an archeologically themed thriller episode is great fun and ends on a poignant note with the Cardassians and Klingons rejecting the findings out of racism while the Romulans and Humans quietly nod respectively at each other and wonder when the galaxy will be ready to accept this knowledge of a common origin. At least now we know why different species can breed with each other, though billions of years of divergence still makes this…improbable to say the least.

Another great episode that lacks the fame of the typical “best of” lists (the rightfully famous episodes everyone talks about like “Yesterday’s Enterprise” “Darmok” “The Inner Light” “Best of Both Worlds” “Chain of Command” etc) is “Phantasms”. My personal favorite (after Darmok) episode and the one I always like more every time I see it. Data learning to dream and finding the dreams are utterly bizarre and an  indirect portal to the subconscious is interesting enough, but as a person with intense and often utterly unhinged dreams myself it really speaks to me. It also has the best scene in the show. You know the one I mean.

My character impressions are as follows. Wesley is still annoying, but probably not as bad as you remember. The character was an expy for Gene Rodenberry’s self-insert instincts, whose death freed it to become less annoying. Ensign Ro was a way better helmswoman though. She was my favorite character as a kid despite appearing in only 6 or so episodes but that is mostly because she was my first crush. (Such is the power of Michelle Forbes that she convinced me from elementary until halfway through high school, no mean feat- It was only another science fiction film, Pitch Black, that would awaken reversal of the trend years later). Interestingly, the most impressive pilot and person who seems to appear most in the role is a character with maybe one speaking line in the entire show’s run, and who is only referred to by name about twice- Ensign Gates. Talk about the true unsung hero of TNG.

Geordi…uh…comes off way worse on later rewatches. He is just such an incel. One of my favorite characters from childhood is now, in my minds eye, the Ship’s Creep. Your spine will not survive watching “Galaxy’s Child”, I can tell you that much. Ah well, at least he’s an engineering genius!

My least favorite character as a kid was Counselor Troi, called by my entire family at the time “Counselor Cleavage” due to her amazingly unprofessional early show attire. It is interesting how the writers made her better once Captain Jellicoe made her put on a real uniform. We went from “Captain, I sense anger” in response to some enemy ship threatening to fire on the Enterprise to actually being one of the funnier (intentionally) characters in later seasons. Even so, true 90s kids know Marina Sirtis’ best role was actually as Demona. Plus, her office perfectly encapsulates the nostalgic vaporwave interior of the Enterprise-D.

The D was never my favorite Enterprise on the outside, being beaten by the A-refit of the TOS movies and the E, but its interior is like a warm dreamy cruise ship ready to bathe you in slowed down reverb elevator music. Perhaps it is nostalgia from childhood, but I swear there is something to the D-interior that just makes it the kind of place you could happily live in even while facing mortal peril once on average of every week for seven years.

W E L C O M E  T O  B Σ T ∆ Z Σ D   P L A Z A

Another character who grew in my esteem was Dr. Crusher. Not just because it’s funny when Picard pronounces her given name as “BEBALY”, but because she has a habit of flying any ship she is in charge of into the nearest star. This happens more than once. She deserves to be captain one day just because it is hilarious.

Though if one wants to mark a real scene-stealing character who is not part of the main cast it has to be Gowron. This is a bit of a cheat because he has an even larger role in DS9, but TNG was his start as High Chancellor of the Klingon Empire and what can I say, the eyes have it. I would have also liked to have seen more of Commander Tomalak from the Romulan Empire as well, as he was a great foil for Picard. Denise Crosby coming back to play the half-Romulan Sela was not a full replacement for his presence, though I do maintain that Sela should have been used in DS9 as the primary Romulan character. That was also a wasted opportunity. 

Conclusion

My concluding thoughts are that the show is not as euphoric as I remember. Its vision of the future is optimistic unabashedly but Trek is best when grappling with difficult ethical questions. Despite being an “End of History” era show on broadcast, it actually gave far more nuance than even the politicians and media entities of its time could towards exploring the future. Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama were singing the praises of a society that had beat all challengers and could happily auction off the roots of its success to international finance capital, laying the seeds of terminal decline at the height of triumph. As the Chinese strategist Su Shi once said “It is at the point of victory that the greatest danger lurks”. Despite being a product of this era, Star Trek: The Next Generation did not do this. Its post-scarcity future was still one of messy compromise. Living standards could expand and knowledge could grow, but the wrestling with what it means to make difficult calls in the face of the unknown remained. Even if the future is nicer, it would be any better at providing simple absolute answers.

Sure it is a fun nostalgic show from a more hopeful time. Perhaps it would seem to modern audiences as quaint even. But it still makes for interesting and entertaining viewing today. And for me in particular as someone who finds television by far the worst form of entertainment media, being both passive for the audience and lacking the singular vision of film, it takes a lot to get me to watch, even re-watch, a long running series. TNG has that appeal. 

Star Trek, despite the protestations of its fans, is definitely NOT hard science fiction. Its technobabble is a contrivance to engage in high space fantasy. Its exploration episodes are fun from a visual perspective but usually empty or only half-explored. Its strength, and Picard’s strength as captain in TNG, is in how it covers diplomacy. How the inevitably flawed compromise that decides the fates of millions is almost always for the better. How it is usually more desirable to show restraint than to dive headfirst into a crisis. And how, even with all of this, one will still fail and will need to take risks. But the inevitable failures to come do not diminish the effort it takes to keep the peace, to meet new people, and find new constructive ways to work with them. 

—

* My personal theory is that the reason the massive Borg Collective only sends two one-ship attacks on Earth is that the Collective experiences lag between ship communications. The cube that attacked in Best of Both Worlds was a reconnaissance vessel responsible for the earlier destruction in the Neutral Zone (meaning it was already there before the first encounter of the Enterprise elsewhere)  that gradually became sucked into an armed recon in force towards the heart of the Federation. Meanwhile, I think the lone cube with experimental time weapons we see in the First Contact movie was the originally encountered cube from “Q Who?” that had been effectively chasing the Enterprise’s direction of retreat for years and years, finally arriving perhaps with little detailed knowledge of what happened to the previous Alpha Quadrant assigned cube.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the Ultimate International Relations Saga

/ geotrickster / 5 Comments

Previously, I weighed in on just how terrible I find most explicitly International Relations focused film media (P.S. as predicted ‘Good Kill’ seems to be making chump change and being seen by perhaps a few hundred people). This leads to being asked, ‘well what is a good IR movie?’ The obvious answers to this question is ‘Team America: World Police’ ‘Nixon’ and ‘Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.’ But that is just film. In actuality I think the best visual medium treatment of IR comes from a television show-that of Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

Deep_space_9

Now before we get to into this subject I want to make a disclaimer. I am not a person who has encyclopedic knowledge of Trek canon, especially regarding the two series I gave up on early in their runs (Voyager and Enterprise) or any non-show or film lore. Before my 11th birthday I probably could have competed with the biggest of nerds on this topic but I fell out of caring about Trek for a decade and only came back to it in college-and even then only came back to the things I knew I liked (some TOS, TNG, and much more recently DS9 thanks to Netflix, plus the handful of good movies like II, VI, and maybe First Contact). When it comes to science fiction franchises, Star Wars and Battletech defeated Star Trek in my latter childhood and then Alien/Aliens and eventually the rebooted Battlestar Galactica defeated that in turn in my early teens and my late teens respectively. I am probably not the most qualified person to write this in the world-but thanks to a few months recently completed of gorging on DS9 I feel this is something I can indeed talk about.

Star Trek’s strength was always its diplomatic episodes, in my opinion anyway, but the utopian and Wilsonian nature of the setting never accounted for how something like the Federation could thrive in a somewhat hostile environment and a lot of brilliant ideas were half-formed. As we will see, the crisis of the events of DS9 cause the mask the slip-illustrating a valuable lesson in how nations see themselves, and what they really are.

God-tier IR scholar Barry Buzan has written more than one article on the IR of Star Trek, but like many pan-franchise overviews it shafts the grungy sedentary base by the wormhole for the flashy ships of the series, at least proportionally speaking. This is a major problem, because it is DS9 which deals explicitly with the IR-themed oversights of the other more euphoric series. In particular, I wish to make the argument that, probably unintentionally, DS9 is a gateway to view IR through the framework of this blog’s favorite theory: Neoclassical Realism. To put it succinctly, Neoclassical realism, like other forms of realism, recognizes the centrality of states and power politics, but adds to it the dynamic domestic factors and internal cohesion of varying states to explain why some countries follow the policies they do. But at its most blunt, its about regime survival, and how different concepts of regime survival come to arise based on diverged geographic and historical factors which together create the political culture.

The Messy Frontier:

The concept of the show is to move more in a direction of serialization in a sedentary location where the visitors move but the protagonists usually do not. There is no escaping the consequences of the crew’s actions. The storm will be weathered here rather than escaped. In this way, the station itself is a microcosm of the bigger forces which are usually more abstract in other series-the state actors. Having defined territorial boundaries and political cultures, the United Federation of Planets and the other Alpha Quadrant powers do not have quite the episodic flexibility that some of their individual ships might have-and DS9 is in a similar position.

To emphasize this point the static location on international trade and diplomacy which is the station in question is located on what at first seems to be the most peripheral of frontiers. A former slave mining station and HQ of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, the station is a joint Federation-Bajoran operation in a place only recently vacated by a hostile power. As it is, it represents a guarantee of security by a major power to a tiny and only recently liberated nation and a long term investment in the hopes that the Bajorans will one day join the Federation.

Everything changes with the near immediate discovery of the nearby wormhole. Inhabitants of powerful non-corporeal aliens who communicate with Commander Sisko and who once apparently inspired the Bajoran religion allow transit into a whole new quadrant of the galaxy which would be beyond reach of the Alpha Quadrant powers otherwise. Now, a postwar backwater has become the single most strategic location in the galaxy. This, however, does not change the remoteness of the posting. In fact, the rapid influx of intrigue from other powers mean this is one Star Trek series where the crew seeks to navigate the muddy waters of compromise and balance rather than principle or self-discovery to a previously unheard of degree. Sisko must guide these waters with minimal oversight and little prospect of immediate backup due to his location. Furthermore the nearest ally in the still unstable and completely weak Bajor. Both sides running the joint administration of the station would be familiar to the description in the introduction to Lobell, Ripsman, and Taliaferro’s edited work ‘Neoclassical Realism and Foreign Policy’:

‘Limitations on executive autonomy in different national contexts, however, may undermine their ability to respond as necessary to shifts in the balance of power. Neoclassical realists consequently view policy responses as a product of state-society coordination and, at time, struggle. Less autonomous actors must frequently build coalitions and make compromises to mobilize social and political actors in order to enact policy […] Most states must also frequently bargain with societal actors in order to secure the provision of national security goods to implement policy. […] Finally, neoclassical realism recognizes that many states or regimes do not necessarily function as ‘unitary’  actors. Elite consensus  or disagreement about the nature and extent of international threats, persistent internal divisions within the leadership, social cohesion, and the regime’s vulnerability to violent overthrow all inhibit the state’s ability to respond to systemic pressures.’

It is this kind of diplomatic grunt work that Sisko and his crew must deal with. Everyone can only be placated so far before it rubs up against someone else. All decisions must ensure the survival of the station and of Bajor’s new independence. And the setting further marks a break with what is usually seen in Star Trek by further adding the variable that humans as a species are not the star of this story. Human characters predominate, sure, but humanity is a background species. The real species whose culture is shown in nuance, detail, and variance in this show are the Bajorans, the Cardassians and their difficult and historically tragic relationship with each other. This has been written about before, and quite excellently too, so we I won’t dwell on it here, but it is part of what makes the show so great and also in some sense, very real. This is not a show about one culture interacting with others, but of many cultures continually interacting over a sustained period, and in turn influencing each other’s decision making process.

But I want to fast forward to the story arc the dominates the latter sections of the show: the Dominion. The Dominion is the monster that lurks on the other side of the wormhole whose existence is only found out about once lots of exploration begins on the far side of that cosmic aperture. A type of almost anti-Federation, it is a state which exists as effectively a web of protection for a species of shapeshifters (the Founders) who uphold their hegemony of the quadrant with an intricate web of multiple genetically modified species to carry out their will. The details of how they govern are never fully explored, but one thing becomes immediately clear-because of their history as persecuted by ‘solids’ they will do whatever it takes to become hegemonic over other humanoid life.  Their brazen expansionism and plots to use their unique abilities to destabilize potential threats from the inside are actually for a psychologically defensive purpose, or so they claim. Most likely, they even believe their claim-as ridiculous as it clearly is to outsiders.

The Dominion is possibly a match for the entire Alpha Quadrant, but not being ones to take risks set on on an indirect campaign to destabilize that region before they launch their official invasion. Shapeshifters lure Romulan and Cardassian intelligence agencies and fleets into a devastating trap (and in so doing validating tragic literature as a concept in a sub-plot way far better than most story arcs I have seen), and then proceeding to use their shapeshifting abilities to infiltrate other powers from within, possibly causing a Klingon-Cardassian war and almost causing a major rift in even the utopian Federation where for the first time in centuries troops are deployed on the streets of the future crime and prejudice free Earth. All the while, the Alpha Quadrant remains as divided as ever. Alliances that should be formed are not, even in the face of knowing quite clearly what the intentions of this new and dangerous foe clearly are:

Cardassia, smarting from its instability and loss of standing decides to throw its weight in with the new power under Dukat’s new government-the kind of vindictive re-alignment in diplomacy which is guaranteed to upset the status quo. This is something on the scale of Sino-American rapprochement in the 70s or Japan joining the Axis Powers. It gives the enemy a foothold for free in the Alpha Quadrant and a large supply of allied ships. When the war finally does break out over Sisko’s mining of the wormhole to prevent further reinforcements to the Dominion, everything changes.

With even the ostensibly pacifist Starfleet forced to launch a pre-emptive strike you know things are going to a bit more hard core in this show. And to its credit, DS9 shows us the evolution of a country used to long periods of peace of security and how it changes over prolonged total warfare.

The loss of DS9 itself, and the awkward political situation which the Bajoran crewmen are put in (not to mention the planet itself) of knowing they will be destroyed if they resist, but also that they will be occupied if the war they are forced to declare neutrality in is lost speaks volumes to the struggles of small states in times of chaos. Major Kira struggles with her past as a freedom fighter and now worries about being a collaborator when a dramatic event makes her disavow her government’s stated neutrality-if not overtly.

The war has many back and forth shifts, as one would, and eventually with the re-taking of the station after some Not Your Father’s Star Trek battles settles into a kind of exhausting stalemate. It is here that the show really develops its spine of steel at looking at the anarchic world of foreign policy head on, and to an extend science fiction perhaps did not do before in this particular medium.

To understand the transformation that Starfleet is undergoing, I actually find the career trajectory of the character Nog the best way to see it in microcosm. He starts off exuberant to be the first Ferengi in Starfleet, becomes a prodigy in training, and then fights in the war with the crew and even falls in with some new cadets who the war has shaped into fanatics far removed from the ideals of the service they most likely joined for very different reasons.

Eventually, Nog is terribly wounded in a ground battle of dubious necessity and has a subsequent entire episode devoted to his recovery from PTSD by temporarily living in the fantasy world of a holodeck. He eventually overcomes the worst of it and when asked if he will is better responds with a frank, ‘No, but I will be.’ Here we see the terrible cost of the war, the tragedy that ensues when diplomacy breaks down or the paranoia of an enemy prevent negotiation. But yet in the end this tragedy must be burdened as the alternative is infinitely worse-enslavement for the entire Alpha Quandrant is something worth any sacrifice to stop. Through the microcosm of Nog’s experience we see what Starfleet itself goes through, a torturous realization that their civic mythology is not enough in a time of extreme danger. A crisis of conscious, self-doubt, but ultimately when faced with the reality, adaptation for survival. If some values must be sacrificed in the defense of others it still preferable to the sacrifice of all of them. The Federation must grapple with how to marshal its options and function in the trauma of wartime crisis situation. As M.R. Brawley states:

‘Neoclassical realists look to the state as the manager of the nation’s resources for competition in the anarchic international environment. The state’s position as mediator between the two realms of politics-domestic and international-gives it a unique role. It must coordinate diplomacy and domestic policies, harnessing economic capacity to generate military power in the defense of interests.’

First diplomacy failed, then military only options  could only go so far. Now we reach a point in the final two seasons where only special operations of the most delicate kind can turn the balance. This is, of course, the famous moment as well as the best episode of the series-when Sisko and Garak conspire to bring the so-far neutral Romulans into the war by an act so illegal, so dangerous, and so unethical it could cause war with the Romulans if ever found out. The sham is found out by its Romulan target (‘It’s a FAAAAAAAAKE!!!!’), but before he can relay this news Garak assassinates him in a way that covers up the false data and brings the Romulan Empire into the war against the Dominion. This is, to me, the star episode of the series and the peak of the show’s IR themes. Shadows of the Zimmerman Telegram coupled with who knows how many forged intelligence coups in history  tie this firmly into reality and strategy. In the ethics of Starfleet this is the most heinous thing imaginable, and so it took someone without a country and with a strong understanding of the inter-state system to do it for them. And of course, they can live with it:

Furthermore down the dark path of grand strategy, up until this point much has been made of the Cardassian and Romulan intelligence services, but what we find out, and which shatters the myth of Federation success  as values based as a sole explanation for their thriving for the past few centuries, is that Starfleet has an intelligence service so good no one even knows of it. Not only that, it has already used Odo as conduit for which to infect the entire Founder race with a deadly bioweapon before the war even began. This is Section 31, what I imagine to be the most controversial aspect of the show. An organization accountable to no one, filled with dangerous individuals whose very existence compromises the stated goals and intents of the Federation itself. It is precisely this which has enabled Starfleet to be so principled. Aside from that first point, this is Sun Tzu’s fantasy right here.

The main figures have after all never had to get their hands dirty, someone else did it for them-and possibly did so without anyone finding out. Who knows how many events Section 31 pulled off in the past which have never been exposed? A friend of mine postulated the theory that the relatively organized and potent Klingon of the original series seemed to give way to the brittle warrior feuding culture of later renditions precisely because of some kind of Section 31 operation that indirectly backed the most right wing and chauvinistic elements of a country in order to make it easy to manipulate and destabilize much like the United States with organizations like the Gray Wolves in Turkey or military regimes in Latin America in the Cold War. After all, near the end of the series the Federation basically has Worf kill Gowron to get a better strategist in the cockpit of the Klingon Empire-and that little change wasn’t even hidden from public view.

But here is the kicker, love it or hate it the most subversive part of DS9 is not just showing the Federation being a great power out of necessity when the chips are down-just like the others it does what is necessary and hence must forfeit the mantle of moral superiority-that is only part one of the real message. The real message is this: politics is lesser evils. the Federation was worth defending against the Dominion. All those events that showed it at its worse and most fanboy purist upsetting-these are the things that enabled its survival. Naturally with the war over, Section 31 becomes more a danger than a benefit, and the galaxy at the end of the war is left in an ambiguous position with quite possibly the Romulans in the driver’s seat of regional affairs. Political problems will never end, and allies and enemies always change, but in a crisis one doesn’t have the luxury of playing with all considerations in mind, only the most immediate ones. After all, who would have predicted Kira as the leader of the Cardassian resistance? That the ‘bad guy’ races advocating a pre-emptive attack on the Dominion who were portrayed as warmongers would be more than justified as events ensued? That the drive for regime legitimacy in the eyes of its own people would be enough to drive Cardassia entirely into ruin? Well, a world history major perhaps, but few others.

Given all the messy compromises of politics, something that only gets worse as the scales increase, one is never going to get a happy ending in IR, or even an ending barring sentient extinction. But ultimately the prevention of things getting worse must stand as the positive outcome. A rough lesson DS9 and human history alike tell in abundance. Whereas before DS9 Star Trek clearly dealt with power politics without *really* dealing with them, in DS9 we see the darker reality that makes even something like the Federation possible. Just as in real life Wilsonism or other ideals driven foreign policy views can be shown to be a superficial guise for what often really lurks beneath. DS9 brought the realism to Star Trek in more ways than one.

The only thing I felt the series was lacking, as a Jeffrey Combs fan, was a scene where Dr. Herbert West re-animates a Weyoun clone.

I would also like to nominate Garak to be one of the spirit animals of this blog.

Well the next few posts will probably be back to normal after that, but at some point in the future I would like to do something similar-ish for the Battletech Universe, we will see.

The book cited twice in this post can be found here.