Lower Decks

‘Next Generation’ had established a new mark for Star Trek TV shows with seven seasons, a full four more than the original series, which became the model for two of its three successors. So the fall of 1998 promised but one thing for fans who’d become so enamored of ‘Deep Space Nine’ the previous season, that this would be the final year of the show. Unburdened but still energized, the creators knew the best way to impress was to take out all the stops, which included limiting the writing staff to just the core names (at least in the final teleplay credits) that had developed over the past few seasons, who seemed to have the whole thing mapped out just nicely.

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Here’s the start of the ‘Deep Space Nine’ its most fervent fans to this day will still remember vividly, entering into serialized territory for the first six episodes of the season, exploring the opening months of the Dominion War. What its curious competitor, ‘Babylon 5,’ had been doing for most of its run, and what would become popular with ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and ‘Lost,’ a total immersion in storytelling, the show was now ready to exploit its own way.

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If the third season opened the series up and the fourth season made it go widescreen, then the birth of the ‘Deep Space Nine’ that most fans would truly recognize was the fifth, which premiered in the fall of 1996, the thirtieth anniversary of Star Trek. By the end of the season, the Dominion War had begun. What else do you need to know?

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The term “widescreen” has been used for certain large scale comic book storytelling in the past, and is meant to suggest a summer blockbuster scope. I’d suggest that starting in the fall of 1995, ‘Deep Space Nine’ got into widescreen mode, now that anyone who had been paying attention previously knew everything there was to know about the particular circumstances of the station at the edge of the final frontier. Now it was time to have a little fun.

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I still consider this one to be my favorite season of Star Trek, and it’s not strictly because it was the first one I watched completely as first run material. It was the year ‘Deep Space Nine’ seemed to finally click on all cylinders, make bold strides toward the future, mold some definite franchise ground of its own. More importantly, the actors themselves really seemed that much more invested in the material, and maybe that’s what makes all the difference with these things. I know I talked a lot about confidence when ‘Next Generation’ hit its own third season, which on that show meant simply earning the right as the second incarnation of Gene Roddenberry’s vision, but here, there was half a season where the series was going to be the only Star Trek on TV, and then all the attention would go from the end of the predecessor to the beginning of a successor. It was if ‘Deep Space Nine’ was saying, yeah, we’re definitely here, too.

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Up to this point in my Star Trek experience, I had been following the franchise in second run syndication, but finally, in 1994 (quite handily, with the still-memorable occasion of the broadcast of “All Good Things…” looming), I started catching it the first pass around, notably as ‘Deep Space Nine’ was wrapping up its second season, which I can say with all honesty to this day probably made me the fan I still am, forever invested in this crazy future.

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In January of 1993, Star Trek expanded once again, notably for the first time in its history to have two series run simultaneously on television (though it might be noted that competing crews had been a problem for fans since 1987, not just as a matter for debate but as a practical concern, between movie and TV adventures). ‘Deep Space Nine’ was the first franchise incarnation to launch without the hand of Gene Roddenberry, guided instead by the emerging new creative generation led by Rick Berman and Michael Piller.

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In 1994, ‘Next Generation’ concluded its run, a fact that seemed completely incomprehensible to fans, a premature end to a series that had eclipsed the length of the original series by four seasons already, and seemed capable of continuing for so much longer. It was more than a quarter century into the franchise, though. Things were changing.

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In 1992, ‘Next Generation’ had half a season to be the last Star Trek TV show to air alone before the end of the millennium, which to anyone looking back, and realizing just a decade later the final film featuring its cast would face a great amount of ambivalence, would look pretty strange, because at this point the franchise is just about at its peak of popularity, at least in this incarnation.

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