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February 19, 2003

The Middle Child Syndrome

By fdewaele (Originally Posted at TalShiarHQ.net)

The original Star Trek was...well, the original. The real “McCoy” as to say… The Next Generation reintroduced the concept of televised Star Trek to the masses after an absence of two decades. The show was a huge hit and created huge new audiences. Voyager was the one that Paramount hung its hopes on as the flagship of their new network, UPN. And then there is now the prequel Enterprise. But the special place in my heart has always been reserved for what has been called “the middle child”.

It's almost a cliché now to refer to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as the "middle child" of the Trek family. Yet it's accurate nonetheless, and not only because of its chronological position between TNG and Voyager but also because of the fact that it was treated as a middle child. In the real world it often happens that in a family with three children the middle child is the one most neglected and suffering from a lack of parental love. Often one parent has a special place in his heart for the first born and the other parent has pretty much the same feeling for the youngest child. This leaves the middle child hanging in a lurch. This is what happened to DS9.

DS9 never got the amount of “parental attention” that any of the other series did. All its seven year life, it was overshadowed by the elder and younger child - first by TNG's last two seasons and its much publicized finale “All Good Things…”, rapidly followed by its move to the big screen in “Generations”. Only then did DS9 got to ‘enjoy’ a period as the only Trek on the air - but Paramount was busy at the time building up its new darling, Voyager so it lasted only three meager months. The only attention DS9 got from the studio came in the form of attempts to "fix" the ratings by adding new features like the Defiant or the introduction of a new “old” regular character - namely Worf, rather than addressing the real problem the series was faced with which was a lack of publicity, coupled with an unprecedented wealth of TV science fiction competition that neither TOS nor TNG ever had to contend with. Both series had a monopoly during their run, DS9 was the first to encounter stiff opposition from competitors.

As if all that weren't enough, there was the attitude from many Trek fans. They often whined: "They don't go anywhere." "It's boring." "To boldly sit and wait for everything to come to us!" We heard less of that in later seasons, but the early misconceptions still continued to dog DS9 throughout its production. The fact was that after TNG, the Trek audience became split in DS9 and VGR adherents.

Yet, there was a bonus side. While TNG was a crowd-pleaser and VGR tried to be one, DS9 quietly made itself into something very unique. And for those of us who became its fans, no amount of starship-based adventure could match the richly detailed canvas of the corner of the Trek universe that DS9 created. We loved its characters, their motivations and relationships, and how they dealt with what happened to them and around them.

We appreciated the writers' willingness to experiment. They created an entire gamma of different episodes. Episodes that were dark, or had ambiguous endings. Episodes that were pure comedy. Episodes that explored the nature of faith, fear, love, and our reactions to war, death, and change. Episodes that delved into the psyche of a character, and sometimes found things there that no one should have known. Episodes full of political skulduggery, and episodes that were just about a normal day in life. There were even some episodes that cast doubt on the idealist view that the Federation is all Paradise and even suggested that the aliens and the renegades could be right... Not that all episodes were all glory. Good Heavens No! Even the DS9 writing staff made some horrible mistakes. We all remember the horror of the bad episodes such as “Profit and Lace”. Especially “Profit and Lace”… But it is a fact that those terrible episodes were less frequent than in the other series.

Characters got a chance to change and develop. In the beginning, you probably would never have guessed that this bitter widower who reluctantly took charge of the station would become not only a master schemer but also a revered near-mystical figure, wholly devoted to the world he was charged to protect and had come to love. You would not have been able to predict that the angry, scarred woman who was to be his second-in-command and had antagonistic feelings about her new boss would become the most faceted and realistic female character in all of Trek and that she would become completely loyal to her boss. That the naive, charmingly arrogant young doctor would grow into a mature, introspective, caring individual striking up a lasting friendship with a grumpy Irishman. Or that the cranky, lonely, misanthropic shapeshifting security chief would find his people, reject them, be turned human and back, find love and achieve a sense of atonement.

DS9's writers took what many people saw as a disadvantage - the lack of the successful starship format- and turned it into the show's greatest strength. The characters' actions had consequences that could not be left behind and forgotten; and therefore their actions mattered more than the usual "see planet, solve problem, go on to next planet, never look back" episodic formula that we saw on the other Trek series.

The other part of the essence of DS9 was conflict between the characters, and in their back stories and emotional makeup. For DS9 fans, to watch them spar and jostle and argue and get sarcastic was more “natural” than to see the happy, relatively uncomplicated life of the other Trek crews. It gave the writers something built in that they could work with, rather than being forced to manufacture a "problem of the week" in order to have an episode and then quickly solve it in the last ten minutes with some technobabble. As a result, we got to learn much more about the people on DS9 than we ever really learned about any of the other crews; and it made the friendships and romances that inevitably sprang up over the years seem all the more deep, complex, and real. Especially the last factor is important. The friendships and life of the other crews often seemed artificially utopian. Here we found something far more believable.

Now DS9 has gone to rerun heaven. Requiescat In Pace. This is it; there will most likely not be any movies. TV movies might be a possibility, but knowing the people in charge I'm not holding my breath…

What I am anticipating is a sense of vindication that DS9 fans will get in the years to come, as new fans discover it, and as its current detractors finally give it a real chance, through the reruns. Because I know what they're going to say: that DS9 was the smartest, edgiest, funniest, most sensitive, best-acted, best filmed and best-written of any of the Trek series, and that they wish it was still in production.

I know I do. I'm still missing it.

Frederik Dewaele aka fdewaele

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