mirekat:

Like, to follow up on that Insufferable DS9 People joke…I want to stress that I don’t personally endorse picking on New Trek series. Picard and Discovery and Lower Decks have all engaged me in different ways and pushed Trek in interesting directions (even if I found some of those directions infuriating) and I’m certainly going to keep consuming whatever narrative vegetarian microprotein Paramount throws fans like me.

But what I will say is that, for me, DS9 gets me in ways hardly any other tv series has. When we started watching it last year, amid all the cynical politicization of the pandemic and the police violence and…all that…I really wasn’t in a place to put my faith in institutions. So I appreciated DS9′s willingness to point out the ragged edges of the Federation, the ways its utopian rhetoric falls short. But DS9′s critical attitude toward institutions is coupled with a deep optimism about people. And this is why it’s become so important to me. The main cast is made up of people who fundamentally don’t want to harm other people, despite having to face the reality that some people do want to harm other people and that some power structures make it possible for those few people to do a whole lot of harm. Even Quark, who claims that every social relationship is an opportunity for exploitation, often ends up behaving in altruistic ways: he helps save the whole crew in Starship Down, he sets the resistance free during the occupation of DS9…And then you have someone like Kira, who in a lesser show might have been either forced to repudiate her terrorist past or, in a kind of Whedonesque twist, whittled down into a Badass Action Girl™, but who, in DS9, doesn’t have to do that. Doesn’t have to be that. She hurt people, yes, because that was the only possible response to an intrinsically violent colonial system, but she’s refused to make that capacity for violence part of who she is. Every time someone tries to get her to wax poetic about war (Thomas Riker, Dukat in ‘Return to Grace’, even–kind of–Jadzia, in ‘Blood Oath’) she’s emphatic: killing people kills part of yourself, even if, sometimes, that’s the only choice you have.

Anyway, I think it’s really unusual how DS9 manages to balance the individual and the systemic that way–to acknowledge that everyone has the capacity for harm, but that both intentions and power relations have a meaningful impact on the nature and extent of that harm. It allows the captain to collude in a murder in order to save the Alpha Quadrant, but never suggests that this one act makes him the equivalent of Gul Dukat. It acknowledges the neocolonial attitude of the Federation and yet never draws a false equivalency between the Federation and the Cardassian Occupation. It lets the good guys fuck up profoundly and still never dilutes the idea that there is not, in fact, Zero Difference Between Good and Bad Things.

IDK. When we started watching DS9 last year I was slipping into a place where I couldn’t imagine any kind of future, and while obviously it wasn’t the main reason I decided to stick around–Em is that reason, always and forever that reason–it did give me something else to hold onto. A philosophical touchstone, sort of. The Federation will always be a work in progress, was what DS9 told me, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting for. And if you choose to fight–DS9 told me–there’ll be a whole lot of people fighting alongside you.