In defense of Deep Space Nine's first season

This will contain some spoilers for the first season of DS9, if you care about spoilers from a season of television that aired the year I was born.

Star Trek has long been a series I've meant to get back into. I enjoyed the many scattered episodes I'd caught of The Original Series and The Next Generation in middle and high school, and it's a huge influence on most of my favorite sci-fi. I love me some highly episodic series where the heroes are always running into weird new aliens and space phenomena that are an excuse for the writers to explore some scientific or philosophical idea. The problem was that I couldn't decide between two shows. I could indulge in my nostalgia for The Next Generation and watch it from start to finish, which I've never done, or I could watch the widely beloved Deep Space Nine, which I'd never seen a single episode of. While I could have decided to simply watch both back to back (and then maybe also Voyager), both shows are over 170 episodes long. That's a lot of TV! And so I just kept putting off both shows and watching other, shorter series instead.

Well, in the final days of Cohost, I decided to finally start the one that many of my fellow chosters seemed to prefer: Deep Space Nine. And I'm really glad I did, because only one season in I'm already having a ton of fun with it. More than I expected to have had by this point in the series, even!

There's a common understanding that Star Trek shows tend to have weak first seasons. This is most true of TNG, which had major growing pains, but you'll see this sentiment shared about DS9 as well. It's a show that's been lauded for its long, serialized war storylines with lots of complex themes and moral ambiguity that challenges Roddenberry's neoliberal "utopian idealism," but its first season isn't really that at all. It's a much lighter episodic series. It basically starts out as TNG in reverse—rather than being set on a ship that's exploring strange new worlds, it's set on a space station in a fixed location next to a newly discovered wormhole that leads to the opposite side of the galaxy, so the weird monster-of-the-week aliens and guest stars come to them. And, indeed, a good number of early DS9 episodes quite literally originated as unused pitches for TNG episodes. The Dominion War saga, this is not.

But still. I, personally, had a lot of fun with most of the one-off "filler" episodes that made up the bulk of season one. Way more than many other viewers did, apparently! I'd finish an episode and go "hey, that was pretty good, I liked that one," and then go check what fans thought about it and see a bunch of comments calling it another first season stinker and one of the worst episodes of the entire series.

I think this difference in opinion comes from a difference in mindsets going into DS9. A lot of people are either watching it for the first time after having finished TNG, and are thus comparing it to the very best TNG had to offer, or are otherwise rewatching DS9 with knowledge of how good the later story arcs are. And I'm in neither boat, so my expectations aren't nearly as high. If anything, I really savor having some old school Trek shenanigans to ease me into the show before it becomes more of its own thing, since that's kind of exactly what I was in the mood for. I see an episode that dares to ask "what if the crew met some weird guys in cheesy costumes" and results in 44 minutes of technobabble and campy sci-fi nonsense and I'm like, hell yeah, that's Star Trek, baby.

I also saw complaints that DS9 didn't do much with its own premise in its first season. The series premiere sets up the fact that the titular station is located near the planet Bajor, which is in a transitional phase after the end of a brutal occupation at the hands of the Cardassians, and that the station was originally a Cardassian mining outpost before being handed over to a joint Bajoran/Starfleet crew. And then most of the episodes in the first season do very little with this. We don't see much of Bajor, and key Cardassian characters like Gul Dukat and Garak only appear in one or two episodes each. It's much more a show about seeing what weirdos will come through the wormhole to mess with the crew of the station each week. But, again, I'm fine with a slow burn here. I've got six whole seasons left, and I know these things will be explored in more detail later. I don't mind having some episodic adventures to get to know the crew first.

And what a crew it is! I'd go over some of my favorite characters, but honestly, I'd just be listing the entire main cast. I love all of them. Yes, even Dr. Bashir. I was surprised to learn that people disliked him in the early seasons of the show! I find him extremely charming as this inexperienced young Starfleet doctor who romanticizes himself as this dashing adventurer out on the frontiers of space a little too much. He's like the polar opposite of McCoy, this idealistic young recruit who's constantly faced with the realities of his job. While I'm sure all of these characters will continue to evolve as the writers and actors find their voices, they already feel fully-formed to me. None of them feel like they need to be workshopped. I'd gladly watch six more seasons of them exactly as they are now.

But what about those stinker episodes? Don't they bring the experience down? Well, let's go over how many of those I actually think are stinkers.

• "A Man Alone" (episode 4) - Apparently people dislike this one? I thought it was fine. It's just an early episode establishing that Odo is seen as an outsider on the station as a seemingly one-of-a-kind shapeshifter of unknown origin, and I like that about him. That dual nature as both a no-nonsense lawman trying to maintain order on the station and also a lonely alien orphan. The plot and its twists to get us to that point are a little hokey and generic, sure, but I'm not gonna turn my nose up at a story that gives us lines like "Killing your own clone is still murder!"
• "Q-Less" (episode 7) - Definitely not Q's best episode, sure. This was one I'll agree was fairly weak. Q being obsessed with a woman who rejects his advances just isn't what I want out of the character. But DeLancie is always fun in the role, even if he feels underused in the episode, and seeing Sisko punch him out is an all-time classic moment.
• "Move Along Home" (episode 10) - Widely considered perhaps the worst episode of the show, and one of the worst in the history of Star Trek. And you know what? I thought it was fine! It just felt like the crew getting stuck in a TOS plot, and I don't hate that. Sorry, Avery Brooks, but seeing Sisko skip and sing a little rhyme as part of this weird alien game is very funny to me, and a version of the series without the "allamaraine!" scene would be a lesser version of the show. Yes, the ending that reveals it was all truly just a game and no one was ever in any danger kind of undercuts it, but it was obvious the visiting aliens were just fucking with poor pathetic Quark the whole time.
• "The Nagus" (episode 11) - The Ferengi episodes are apparently hit or miss for people, but I like Quark, that lovable scumbag, so I like episodes about him. And this episode gives us Wallace Shawn as the leader of the Ferengi, and he is just fully playing a cartoon character here. I love it. Excited for more of him. I also find the subplot about Nog being pulled out of school and Jake secretly teaching him how to read on their own time very sweet.
• "Battle Lines" (episode 13) - Generally disliked for writing off Bajoran spiritual leader Kai Opaka in only her second appearance, leaving her to try and resolve a conflict on some random moon on the other side of the galaxy. But I like the drama that ensues with the power vacuum she leaves, so I can't really complain about this, and I also think she gets some really good scenes here with Kira before she goes. But more importantly, this one features Jonathan Banks as its main guest star. That's Mike from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul! I love that guy! I don't care how trite the conflict is here, I had a lot of fun seeing Banks in Star Trek.
• "The Storyteller" (episode 14) - Kind of stupid, but seeing the odd couple team of O'Brien and Bashir have to save a superstitious Bajoran village is entertaining enough to me.
• "If Wishes Were Horses" (episode 16) - Sorry, this one's great. You cannot give me a Star Trek cold open that involves Rumpelstiltskin appearing on the station as a real guy and expect me to not have a good time. Like I said elsewhere, you just don't get gold like that in modern streaming shows with eight-episode seasons. This one leans into the absurdity of everyone's imaginations running wild, and they have a lot of fun with it. It's also the Buck Bokai episode! How can you not like the Buck Bokai episode?
• "Dramatis Personae" (episode 18) - I almost hated this one, a contrived episode where the whole crew is telepathically forced to behave completely out of character and turn on each other. However, by the end the evil Sisko is so cartoonish, so unhinged, and chewing the scenery so hard that it's incredibly fun to watch.

Really, there was only one episode in the whole batch that I genuinely disliked, and it's not even the lowest-rated episode of the season:

• "The Passenger" (episode 9) - This one was, frankly, just really dumb. A seemingly dead criminal telepathically possesses Bashir, and the crew spends half the episode not even considering the possibility that Bashir could be the one carrying the guy's consciousness, even though it's painfully obvious that it was Bashir who got possessed from the very first scene. There were two people in the room with the villain when he died, and he literally grabbed Bashir by the throat and said "Make me live!" as he went. Come on. When it's finally revealed, Alexander Siddig gives a very hammy performance as the possessed Bashir, and not in a fun way. The villain and plot here just aren't very interesting, and Quark's involvement in the murderous scheme feels like a bridge too far for him based on what I've seen from him so far.

So if that's the worst episode, then what about the best? Well, I know this will come as a shock to DS9 fans, but... yes, it's "Duet." The one everyone always says is the best of the season, one of the best of the show as a whole, and maybe even one of the best Star Trek episodes ever. Kira is the standout character for compelling drama in this first season, our resident former Bajoran freedom fighter turned reluctant official in the new government, and "Duet" is by far her best showcase. Half the episode is just her and a Cardassian in a room, having heated discussions about the occupation as she tries to discern his identity. There isn't even a B-plot because those scenes are so compelling on their own. Just a pair of great performances, revealing new layers to the horrors of that war and adding a lot of messy nuance that makes it feel much more real. It walks a very fine line, challenging Kira to reflect on her past and grow and painting a much more complete picture of the Cardassians as more than a race of cartoon villains, all without bothsidesing the conflict. It's fantastic.

But still, I think "Duet" hits so hard in part because we had 18 other episodes leading up to it. We get to know what Kira's like on a day to day basis in a variety of other situations, so when we see her really get worked up here, we know it's serious. And while the Cardassian occupation of Bajor has come up many times, they'd never been so direct and so specific about the harrowing details. It feels like this unpleasant part of history that everyone wanted to move on from. The war is over, and everyone has to try and play nice now, like it never happened. But here, Kira reaches her breaking point, and she just can't hold it in anymore. It's the episode where the gloves finally come off. And I don't think that would land the same if we got it an episode or two after the series premiere.

It's easy to look back on this first season and think that it had a lot of "filler," silly episodes that are just killing time before we get to the real meat of the show. But going in, the writers didn't know what the real meat of the show would be. "Duet" ended up defining much of the show's direction, but we only know that now, in hindsight. In 1993, it was just another experiment, a result of the writers playing in the space they created, just like the one about the crew being trapped in a very stupid alien board game. Giving writers, directors, and actors a lot of room to experiment, go on weird tangents, and iterate on their ideas over time is one of the joys of television, and it's a format we're losing as streaming services focus on extremely tight, serialized seasons that need to be hits right out the gate or else they get canceled. It's nice to go back to a show that was given this level of freedom to be weird.

Yes, even the Rumpelstiltskin episode. ESPECIALLY the Rumpelstiltskin episode.