I've talked before about my love for the Mission Log Podcast, and I'm going to say a bit more about it today. I just spent part of the day listening to their episode from January on the Deep Space 9 double episode from the second season, The Maquis.
I've been looking forward to it for a while. Since they started doing DS9, frankly. And all because of this scene:
I didn't see that scene when it first aired in the 90s, because I wasn't watching DS9 yet. But when I did see it on my first attempt at watching the whole series back in 2006 or thereabouts, I locked onto it because it articulated how I'd always felt about DS9 in comparison with other Star Trek shows.
Now, I grew up with Trek. Some of my earliest memories are of catching TOS reruns when I was three or four years old. Old videotapes my parents recorded for me of other TV shows had commercials for TNG, which at that time was airing in first-run. And in the 90s I was basically catching between 15 and 20 hours of Trek, new and in reruns, during the period when I'd discovered DS9 and Voyager and after TNG had ended.
I didn't expect to love DS9 so much, but it felt like a good corrective to the increasingly sterile and safe atmosphere of TNG and Voyager. Where Captain Picard and Captain Janeway were running around lecturing aliens and their crews on the Prime Directive and on Federation ideals more generally, Commander (and then Captain) Sisko was dealing one singular mess, week after week and year after year. He didn't have the luxury of flying away.
In part because whenever he tried, problems would come find him. In first run the episodes I remember that spoke to this were the two-parter of Homefront and Paradise Lost, where the suspicion of the Dominion infiltrating Earth causes the Federation to freak out and come close to imposing martial law. Maybe it says something weird about me, but I loved the show more for showing us that the Federation had feet of clay as well. And that's what I took along when I rewatched those episodes in 2006 and again in 2016.
Now Mission Log co-host Ken Ray doesn't love those aspects of DS9 as much as I do. He stressed in the episode recapping The Maquis that he's not bothered so much by the sentiments of Sisko's speech, as the fact that Sisko's the one delivering it. And when he puts it that way, I can't help but agree a little - it's disheartening that the captain, the freaking guy in charge of the Federation presence on Deep Space 9, is the one who's frustrated with the Federation and its high-minded ideals.
But on the other hand, what I love about the speech remains, at least in how I've always read it. If Star Trek maps onto Cold War-era views of the world, in which the Federation represents the United States, then the thing I loved about DS9 the most was that it questioned those aspects of Trek. Because America's role as a force for good in the world is always worth questioning... though not worth dismissing out of hand, because there are genuinely positive parts of it, even if US foreign policy kept many parts of the world under brutal dictatorships for decades because we were afraid of those countries falling to communism.
The way I read that scene, with Admiral Nechayev ordering Sisko to talk to the Maquis and make them see reason, fits into this ideal that America could go into a country, tell them what to do, and everything would be fine, because it's America saying it. Our interventions abroad have frequently followed this pattern, and we've gone awfully wrong in a lot of cases because of it - Iraq being only the most recent example.
When Captain Sisko says people on Earth look out the window and see paradise, the writers mean that people in America see paradise out their windows (remember this was the 90s, when things weren't as fucked up as they are now - and no, that's not a dig at the current occupant of the White House, but at the conditions that brought him to power). But seeing that paradise out their windows, the people of Earth think that all problems around the world can be solved the same way they did it themselves.
This isn't any sort of argument that democracy or freedom only works for certain types of people. Russia, China, the Middle East, and so forth, would be better off if they weren't being run by autocrats and gangsters. But equally it's not enough to tell them to just implement democratic and free-market reforms, and everything will be fine - that's exactly what Russia did in the early 90s, and we're paying the price for it now.
Worse, Homefront and Paradise Lost show how brittle that veneer of paradise is at home. But it's worth noting that in those episodes good prevails precisely because Sisko and his allies hold to their ideals, the ideals of the Federation and of Star Trek generally, and because the antagonists are just as devoted to the Federation's ideals (at least as they see it). Which is perhaps an instructive example for us now - that as we stick true to our proper ideals of respect, diversity and freedom, and don't compromise, we can still win out, even if it'll be difficult.
And that's a message that Trek has been giving us since the 60s, with the Original Series.
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