Twenty years ago today, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
premiered. It was the second live-action spin-off of Star
Trek, and the first that was set (and aired) at the same time
as its immediate predecessor — in other words, the Star Trek
universe was, for the first time, expanding outward rather than
forward, and focusing not on the voyages of starship called
Enterprise but on the happenings at a space station.
Deep Space Nine was conceived from the beginning as a
departure from The Next Generation; the color scheme of
the uniforms, heavier on the black than those on the
Enterprise, signaled a darker tone. It would be a major
oversimplification to call DS9 a conservative show, but
defining the ethos of the show against TNG — which,
especially in its first couple seasons, preached an almost
childlike liberal utopianism — sometimes gave it a conservative
flavor, and that (along with strong characters, fine acting, sharp
writing, and so forth) helped make it great.
Because it was set mostly on a space station jointly
administered by Federation personnel but outside the Federation
itself, DS9 could cheat on the preposterous Next
Generation conceit of a future without money — “currency
could make a back-door re-entry into our story-telling,” in the
words of writer, supervising producer, and (in the later seasons)
co-executive producer Ronald D. Moore, who would go on to develop
the excellent Battlestar Gallactica reboot. The greedy
Ferengi, conceived in TNG’s first season as a villainous
race that human characters compared to “Yankee traders” — that’s
right, they tried to cast explicit analogues to American merchants
as the villains — were reinvented, and while they were often used
as cartoon capitalists for comic relief, at times, particularly in
Nog’s stories, Ferengi ingenuity for positive-sum market
transactions was portrayed as virtuous. (TNG, for its
part, had by this time found a genuinely great villain in the
hive-minded Borg, because, duh, collectivists make scarier
enemies.)
More importantly, Deep Space Nine dealt with what Glenn
Loury once called the essence of conservatism: The insight that
human nature has no history. When the Federation sign a treaty with
the brutal Cardassian Empire ceding planets inhabited by Federation
colonists, the colonists dub themselves the Maquis, break away from
the Federation, and start an insurrection against the Cardassians.
Commander Sisko (later promoted to Captain) identifies the very
progress that is so proudly touted by characters on TNG as
blinding Federation policymakers to reality:
The trouble is Earth… On Earth, there is no poverty,
no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters
and you see paradise. Well, it’s easy to be a saint in paradise,
but the Maquis do not live in paradise. Out there in the
Demilitarized Zone, all the problems haven’t been solved yet. Out
there, there are no saints — just people. Angry, scared, determined
people who are going to do whatever it takes to survive, whether it
meets with Federation approval or not!
I doubt that most of the writers of Deep Space Nine
would identify as conservative (and Loury himself, though still
idiosyncratic and interesting, has moved firmly to the left), but
that can be read that as a critique of the Federation from the
right, and it was quite a thing to hear on a Star Trek
show.
Deep Space Nine dealt with terrorism in a nuanced way
that would have been hard to pull off post-9/11. Kira, Sisko’s
second in command, committed terrorist acts she’s “not proud of” as
a Bajoran resistance fighter during the occupation, and struggles
with adjusting to the new political order. The Maquis are left
morally ambiguous. Anti-Federation Bajoran extremists are
unambiguously malign. The Cardassian Liberation Front that allies
with the Federation near the end of the series is unambiguously a
force for good. All are called terrorists, and some even
self-identify as such (though al Qaeda-style mass-casualty attacks
on civilian targets we now associate with the word rarely figure
in).
On the other hand, when the central conflict of the show became
an existential struggle against a dangerous foe, DS9 dealt
so unflinchingly with the necessary moral compromises made in war
that it’s hard to believe that some episodes were written in the
pre-9/11 era. Federation officers don’t order waterboardings, but
they do commit (or tacitly cooperate with) acts that are arguably
much worse — and they don’t stop being good guys.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available in its entirety
on Netflix Instant, which makes it easy to keep up with the
serialized format (which undoubtedly hampered DS9’s
ratings in the pre-DVR era — by the later seasons, it became
extremely difficult to follow the story after missing an episode).
If you’re a fan of science fiction, it’s worth revisiting, whatever
your politics.
