That was horrible. With the singular exception of the wonderful TOS time travel tribbles episode, DS9 never once exceeded mediocrity at its very best.
The entire thing was stupid. The entire thing was boring. All of the original characters (exceptions being Garak, Quark, and briefly Nog) were boring and one dimensional. It says a lot when the only actually likable, interesting characters are the two B-listers they pulled from TNG (O'Brien, Worf).
Avery Brooks can't act. None of the cast could act. It's like they were directed to play someone playing an actor playing their part. And then there's Avery Brooks who had to have been directed to play an actor overacting the part of an actor overacting the part of an actor playing Sisko, a man with a debilitating brain injury.
Sisko wasn't even the worst though, that honor is split between Jake and Kira. Jake would clinch it easily if he had appeared more often (though he still appeared WAY too much) and this fucking episode that Reddit ADORES remains the single worst episode of anything I ever remember seeing. Kira ties him though with the sheer volume of her appearances and how the writers were deadset on having her be this sexpot despite being an aging, fuck ugly hag with some of the ugliest hair ever to grace the 90s, a grating voice and an utterly hateful personality. The mirror universe episodes where she was always in leather are going to haunt me for the rest of my life.
"teehee rom sounds goofy but hes actually a super smart engineer" would have been a funny bit for one episode but they built large swathes of the later series around this. It wasn't cute for very long and Rom is insufferable.
Bashir x O'Brien forced bromance is the most egregious example of what Peter meant when he said something insists upon itself.
Ezri was a horrible replacement for Jadzia and I don't know why we needed a trill for the last season. Just write the character out instead of inserting this pointless therapist bitch with a pixie cut and spending HALF THE SEASON telling us her backstory and showing us who she is.
Bajoran mysticism is fucking retarded and the entire show was built around this nonsensical space magic. Everything about the bajorans sucks. I think there are probably a double digit number of episodes where the premise is "Kira must work with a hated cardassian but what if the cardassian is actually a good guy????" and absolutely none of them were remotely interesting and having Kira be the focal point just made them all the worse.
Absolutely no one wanted 20 episodes of boring ass horrible actor Sisko romancing the ugliest women in the galaxy but we got them anyway
Oh and don't even get me started on fucking Odo and the entire race of shapeshifters
And that sappy fucking bittersweet instrumental music montage of all the Moments throughout the series at the end???? It didn't even come close to earning that fuck OFF
What else
EDIT: OH AND FUCK VIC FONTAINE
!trekkies kill yourselves
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I'm glad you liked it, Carp! Most people won't pick up on the subtext, but us discerning folk can tell that you loved it so much you had to pretend to hate it in your review to avoid coming off like the overly-enthusiastic redditors you watched the show to spite - DS9 has that effect on people!
You made it a bit too easy for us to pick up on your scent, though. You opened by going too contrarian on the quality of the characters, when it's obvious to anyone that the greatest achievement of DS9 was striking the perfect balance between personability and professionalism in the officer cast that TOS and TNG could never manage - no one likes the stifling awkwardness of TNG. You tried to pivot by talking about the acting, but everyone knows that that's a staple of trek. TNG's acting prestige is entirely carried by Patrick Stewart - no one thinks Levar Burton is a good actor.
You were much more deft in tip-toeing around the greatest characters (Odo, Garak) by focusing on a completely middling one like Kira. But even in talking about her it was easy to see you struggling to dismiss her as cute butch writer-insert when we all know that the appeal of Kira is that they managed to make us actually LIKE a raging cute butch, and used her and her cardassian-focused episodes as a vehicle to talk maturely about race relations where both sides have to admit to wrongdoing for the sake of reconciliation. (You also realized that because of the space aliens, science fiction is the only genre that can talk soberly about race in the Current Year; your restraint in dropping this truth bomb is herculean.) And that's without even getting into the way they used her moral code and rebellious personality to explore the line between pragmatism and idealism during the occupation arc where she becomes conflicted with feeling of uncertainty and guilt about becoming a 'collaborator' with the dominion.
And you made absolutely sure not to mention the elaborate worldbuilding approarch that DS9 took to support its storytelling, and how it distinguished itself from TNG by eschewing philosophy takes explored through zany space anomalies and instead focusing on the political realities that would challenge the utopian underpinnings of the federation. That you were gushing to talk all about Section 31 and episodes like Paradise Lost, In The Pale Moonlight, and Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges but couldn't because there was no way to disparage how they brilliantly forced the inherent libtardism of Star Trek to confront its own utopian bullshit that couldn't possibly persist in the reality of a world that contained war, factions, ambition, intractable race differences must have been excruciating! They even had to bring money back into the Star Trek universe because it was smart enough to realize that 'post-scarcity' would always be a relative term.
Sorry if you were planning on giving up the game later and admitting that you LOVED it and using the opportunity to write a diatribe about groupthink and gullibility, but I just couldn't pass up the chance to talk about one of my favourite shows with another true and honest Siskohead.
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I notice how you used the word "prestige" here. Yes, he has "prestige" because he's a Shakespearean actor from England. I guess that's all that matters to you.
the appeal of Kira is that they managed to make us actually LIKE a raging cute butch
No, they didn't.
And then they got mad that Dukat was too sympathetic to the audience when they wanted him to be a bad guy, so they suddenly just turn him into an evil psycho. So none of that actually mattered.
Okay that was actually really good.
They weren't. They were just making shit up as they went along with very little planning ahead.
Yet they flip from this edgy morally gray stuff to black-and-white morality whenever it suits them, like making Dukat pure evil in the end.
If they wanted to write about this kind of thing, they should have (like many Star Trek writers) gone and worked on 24. This is not Star Trek.
This works because in the end we're all reminded of what our values are as
AmericansFederation citizens and that we're good people as long as we stick to them. Section 31 is juvenile edgelord shit about how reallyAmericansthe Federation have actually been the real bad guys all along.Great episode, but if you really want a show that examines what parts of our moral compass we're willing to erase in order to preserve our society, I think 24 did a better job.
Have you ever even seen TOS: "A Taste of Armageddon"? They did this constantly on TOS except they didn't have to kittyfoot around these issues.
This is some redditor bullshit. In Star Trek IV when they need bus fare KIrk says "they're still using money". The whole idea that Star Trek is set in a "post-scarcity" universe is based mostly on this.
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