Half-Finished ideas about DS9 characters

(These are rough drafts. I had been intending to write up a whole thing, mostly fellating Garak as the greatest character ever. But I might as well dump this now.)

I've had insomnia and been rewatching DS9 so we're going to review the characters. I'm going to be criticizing a lot of the characters on the show, but generally this isn't about the actors. I'm not a good judge of acting and generally if you're cast in a 1990s Star Trek show you must be doing something right. Most of what I'll be talking about is how the writers used these characters.

A pattern you might notice is that the show sucked at the beginning, was great in the middle, and sucked in the end.

Sisko

In the first couple seasons he was way too weak. Apparently this was a misunderstanding. The studio was giving the producers directions and they understood it to mean he had to be a cuck. Really it's that Avery Brooks had been a prominent character on Spenser for Hire and they wanted to make sure the audience didn't think of that every time they saw him.

In the middle he was okay. There's not much to say about that. He seemed like an adequate leader.

In the last seasons he gets kinda weird. I suspect that (this is a common theme among many people in the last seasons) Brooks was allowed to get self-indulgent. He makes Sisko more like him. This is very speculative, I've never met the guy, but his acting changes a lot. And it's not for the better.

The worst part is the writing. The whole emissary plotline that was so good before goes off the rails into crazy nonsense.

There's an aspect to his character that he's African-American. This is not a concept that would exist in the 24th century. It's like if me and @Nightcrawler had daggers at each other's throats over transsubstantiation. Star Trek works when it looks at contemporary issues and then zooms out, and looks at that issue in a way that's timeless. That's why you can watch 1960s Star Trek and it still resonates today.

This was done way better in Space Above and Beyond. They're telling stories about stuff like the experiences of black people in World War 2. If you're a boomer like me you got the subtext and understood what they meant specifically, but if you're not, these stories still work. Because everything that has happened has happened many times before and will happen many times again.

Dax

The Trill are an interesting concept and it's explored well a few times, but there's also some really boring obvious stuff. (You were husband but now you're in a woman's body. Wow. They already did this on TNG.) Not too much to say here as usually she's just the "straight" that other more weird characters are played off against.

I love the idea that the Klingons respect her because Curzon fought alongside them. What I don't like is that she can compete with them in hand-to-hand combat. The Klingons had been systematically emasculated for years, but this took it over the top. Apparently every goddarn species in the galaxy is actually as physically strong and good at fighting as them. So wtf is the point of being a Klingon? Wtf is being a non-Klingon if everyone has to be good at fighting?

Firing Terry Farrell was a bad idea. Jadzia was killed off in a really stupid way. There's no point in having Ezri Dax there for just one season where she's not going to have time to get developed.

The O'Briens

Everyman. They notoriously keep putting him in depressing situations. Again, he's a straight. A good character but not too much to say about him.

What's really criminal is what they did with Keiko. Rosalind Chao was a great actress, one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, and she could actually do kung fu. And what do they have her do? Be an amateur schoolteacher, a botanist, and a nagging b-word wife. There's only one episode where she's allowed to actually act and she knocks it out of the fricking park.

Oh yeah and there's that Irish gangster episode that totally destroys his character. It's like what I said about Sisko leaning into this black thing. He's somehow a gangster from South Boston now? This is totally incompatible with Star Trek (and common sense) to have stereotypical Irish gangsters in the Federation in the 24th century.

Bashir

He starts out being really annoying. Gradually grows on you over time. Eventually becomes an actual chad.

Then we get to "Doctor Bashir, I Presume". Great episode, one of the best. It also totally destroys his character forever. They could have made him genetically engineered and you're like "ohh, that's why he's really smart" and everything would make sense. This might have been a great surprise if they had planned it out ahead of time and did some foreshadowing. The kind of thing they did on Babylon 5. But no, they just came up with the idea and wrote up an episode one week.

Also they gave him all kinds of superhuman mental and physical powers. This is the dumbest thing a writer can do. A character gets less interesting the more superpowers they get. Look at how boring Superman is. Also, how in the heck is he not landing foids at will when he's so good at calculating probabilities? As a man, that's most of what dating is about. Calculating the probability of a certain action succeeding.

Worf

Bringing him on the show was a clear sign of desperation. At the time I saw this as the producers basically admitting that their show was way inferior to TNG and needed something from TNG to prop them up.

The relationship with Dax was incredibly cringy. Just like the Worf-Troi thing. At first I thought it had something to do with being him being Klingon. And then the lightbulb goes off in my mind: These tards are just really bad at writing romantic comedy and they're still trying to do it. Why in the heck did they try to switch to this genre when they're not good at it? Just hire some writers from Castle or literally anybody in Korea to do your romcom bits.

My general opinion of him is that the character is great but it's played out. We'd seen Worf for 7 years already on TNG. Ronald Moore is a great writer but there's just not much left to do with him. So it ends up in a really bad soap opera with Dax.

Odo

Again this is all over the place. He's a an interesting character some of the time, especially in the episodes where they deal with what it would be like to be truly alien and alone like that. At least the writers usually remember what powers he has (unlike Troi in TNG where they just flip it on and off to serve the plot).

I like him until the Kira romance arc. This always felt weird to me because he's supposed to be an alien. A real alien. Not just somebody with bumps on their forehead, a real alien. Why is he attracted to Kira? In a k-drama this would be something that would be gradually developed over 5-10 hours. On DS9 it just suddenly happens because the writers decided to do it that week. (As with Bashir's genetic engineering.) They jerk themselves off over inventing the concept of serialized TV (lol) but they were really bad at it. They just made shit up as they went along. You cannot do romance without building up to it.

Everything about his interactions with the Founders were unsettling to me. He had treasonous communication with the enemy. There's a lot of times where he betrays us. So why is it wrong to end the war and the oppression of the Dominion by infecting him with the bioweapon? It saves hundreds of billions of people from death or slavery, but Odo is too important to sacrifice for that? It really diminishes the war arc when it turns out when it comes down to it, our characters actually care more about their friend than winning.