#5ever fav

omg ds9.  my favorite of favorites.  the best television show to ever air afiac.  we all know i love me some bsg and some farscape.  b5 is probably objectively the tighter and more impressive technical storytelling accomplishment.  but it always comes back to ds9 for me.

ds9 was also one of the first adult shows i watched.  i grew up with a trekkie for a dad.  tng premiered when i was two so i can’t even remember a time before my dad having a least one trek night a week.  when i was old enough i started watching with him.  first ds9, then tng, and then voy when it premiered.  (we started with ds9 because it didn’t air on a school night.)  i can still remember watching with holy shit starred eyed fucking wonder with him in our basement.

so why did i love it so much?  in no particular order:

kira nerys.  kira fucking nerys.  if ds9 was my first adult show, kira was the first character i ever stanned.  i loved her so much.  she’s still one of my top five favorite characters of all time.  when i as a kid i loved her because she’s a boss ass bitch.  as an adult i love her because she’s an incredibly complex multifaceted characters with a story arc that still floors me when i think about it.  she starts as this little ball of TOTALLY JUSTIFIED righteous fury and grows into a focused and tempered warrior.  she never loses her fire she just learns how to harness it and direct it. 

speaking of:  afiac “duet” is the finest episode of television ever put on film.  its study of anger and guilt in the aftermath of genocide is just so powerful.

actually the character growth in general on ds9 is actually my number one favorite thing.  watching these characters change over seven years… i could have watched them for another seven easily.  julian bashir is another who’s arc constantly blows me away from obnoxious over-eager young physician to a veteran war doctor without ever fully losing that optimistic streak.  and that’s not even mentioning his whole genetically enhanced thing.  and nog – jake’s troublemaking friend to first ferengi in starfleet!  and damar damar damar.  literally the most astonishing growth arc in a character in the history of television afiac.  from dukat’s yes man to leader of an anti-dominion resistence in the matter of like two seasons!  

but literally every other character on ds9 is fabulous too.  there is no one i don’t love.

and the fact that supporting characters just kept coming back.  (and i’ve found this to be a total ron moore thing.)  it made life on the space station feel rich and real in a way that voyager always fell woefully short on.

okay this is going to sound weird but ds9 also appealed to the gov nerd in me?  (my undergrad degree is actually in government if you didn’t know.)  like the first few seasons are all bajoran domestic politics and then once the dominion appears it basically transitions into great power politics!  in space!  

speaking of the dominion war… what a fantastic bit of plot!  and i loved how ds9 wasn’t afraid to take us to the front lines.  episodes like “the seige of ar-558″ and “rock and shoals” really showed us that even in the 24th century war is still horrific.

the dominion war also provided ds9 with fertile ground for arc-based story-telling which i don’t think people realize this now but ds9 basically PIONEERED.  when it aired standalone eps were the norm.  things like the season 6 premiere or the season 7 finale which were just episode after episode of “to be continued…” simply did NOT happen prior to ds9.  that was them doing something completely revolutionary and omg did it WORK.

 and i can’t talk about ds9 without mentioning its reputation as the “darker trek”.  which on one hand yes.  episodes like “the seige of ar-558″ and “rock and shoals” or the fucking masterpiece “in the pale moonlight” or “inter arma enim silent leges” would never have happened on tng or voy.  but at that same time ds9 was still fundamentally optimisti in a way that i miss in my sci fi shows.  it allowed its characters more room to fuck up or make bad decisions and it was willing to exam imperfections in the perceived perfection of federation society.  but it still envisioned a fundamentally better future for us as a species.  a future where we’d learned but were still learning, had grown but were still growing.  and that gives me the best kind of fuzzies.

and in conclusion:  romulans.  my favorite star trek race and ds9 did such a fantastic job of developing them as a society and species and as individuals during its later seasons.  i’m forever bitter that later movies basically nuked that.  :**(