18 réponses à ce sujet

[eternal_napalm]

I just got done watching this on Netflix for the first time. I rewatched The Next Generation and I have seen Voyager, but I got into it and devoured that whole series. I thought the characters were awesome, I liked the several branching stories, the writing was good and the tone was terrific. I liked the Dominion War plot and the overarching Bajor theme was interesting. The Founders, the Ferengi, the wormhole. I guess the Prophets did indeed live out if space and time.

I feel bad I never got into it until now, because I was missing a hell of a good entertainment.

[DWH1982]

Yeah, I recently re-watched DS9 on Netflix myself. It's my favorite Star Trek. Too bad it's rather underappreciated. Voyager seemed to be more popular - although I can enjoy that as well, I simply don't think it's as good as DS9, which presented a more nuanced, and in some ways more believable, side of the Star Trek universe.

[frustratemyself]

I really liked the earlier seasons of DS9 but the later seasons not so much. The vibe of the show changed a lot around the dominion war which I liked but there have been a couple of kind of bad or pointless episodes lately in the repeats I've been watching on tv.

[Olive Oomph]

DS9 is awesome. Great characters.

Dax

[Raizo]

Yeah, I recently re-watched DS9 on Netflix myself. It's my favorite Star Trek. Too bad it's rather underappreciated. Voyager seemed to be more popular - although I can enjoy that as well, I simply don't think it's as good as DS9, which presented a more nuanced, and in some ways more believable, side of the Star Trek universe.

Much like yourself, Deep Space 9 is my favourite Star Trek ( The Next Gen comes a very, very close second ). I think the main reasons I like it so much is because it was so different to all the other Star Trek shows thanks to its themes on Religion, Politics and War. There is a scene fairly late in the shows life span where Captain Sisqo tells Warf that life on a DS9 is very different to life on a Star Ship and you do feel it on the show. It was also the first Star Trek that had the balls to suggest that the mighty Federation was not perfect, that crooked self serving politicians and spies/ moles could corrupt and bring down an other wise noble system. I also loved the characters, not as much as I do the next gen ones but overall I think DS9 crew were more complex.

I also agree that the show is very much under appreciated . A lot of my friend love DS9 but I don't see it getting much love outside of my circle of friends.

[Neoleviathan]

DS9 was my first Netflix Binge. I began watching the OS after that. The original is pretty fun to watch, weird how creepy it could be at times. I didn't complete OS though, think I dropped off during the second season. TNG I haven't watched so much on netflix because that one is still on television all the time anyway. lol, not sure if it's still happening but at one point there were three different channels running TNG & often during the same hours. Most of the series have kept their rewatch value to me. I think Sisko is the most relatable Captain, despite the whole weird chosen one God-child part of him.

Was it Babylon 5 that had a weird relationship with DS9, I'd been wanting to watch that series because I heard that if you liked one you'd like the other. So far I don't think Netflix has had that. They've had other non-Trek off & on like Stargate, so I'm hoping they'll add that eventually. They did just add Farscape once Pivot began airing them, that was a fun show.

[Elhanan]

Great series, and arguably the best of the franchise. Really enjoyed the war stories against the Dominion and the Cardassians; still not too fond of the Celestial Temple and Emissary storylines.

 

One of the enjoyable trivia points for me is to see two of the stars of Zorro; the Series: Duncan Regher and J.G. Hertzler. I received the Zorro series as a recent gift, and was pleasantly taken back to seeing them in DS9.

[Lotion Soronarr]

I just got done watching this on Netflix for the first time. I rewatched The Next Generation and I have seen Voyager, but I got into it and devoured that whole series. I thought the characters were awesome, I liked the several branching stories, the writing was good and the tone was terrific. I liked the Dominion War plot and the overarching Bajor theme was interesting. The Founders, the Ferengi, the wormhole. I guess the Prophets did indeed live out if space and time.

I feel bad I never got into it until now, because I was missing a hell of a good entertainment.

 

I personally feel DS9 and VOY are the worst of the lot. At least I did until Enterprise

Enterprise had so much potential because of lower tech level, but they threw it all away by the second episode.

VOY had a great begining, but then it turned into crap.

DS9 had an interesting concept, but the acting was bad and in the end I hated where the plot went.

[Captain Crash]

DS9 was my favourite.  Mainly due to the characters and having other races not belonging being in Starfleet mixing things up (Garek, Quark, Odo ect). By the later series though you could tell they were struggling to confine stories to the station. Introduction of the Defiant became necessary along with the Dominion war.

 

Regardless, I don't even think it mattered as time with these characters in any form was more then worth it.

[DWH1982]

@ Neoleviathan: Babylon 5 is a great show, though some disagree with me on that. It seems to be one of those things where you either like it or you don't.

 

Watch the 2 hour pilot movie, The Gathering, but don't expect much from it - it's okay, but it's not the greatest part of the Babylon 5 series. It's mostly useful for introducing the concept, background of the universe, and some of the characters (some characters from the pilot stay, others leave the station before the series proper starts).

 

Stick with it during Season 1 - it can be somewhat uneven in quality. It really takes off, though, when they get to the plot arc that deals with the "big bad" for the series. Do not watch In the Beginning until after the end of Season 4. Even though In the Beginning takes place before Season 1, it's spoilerific and will ruin the tension and build up if you watch it before the end of Season 4.

 

Season 5 is kind of an "extra season," that shows the consequences of what happened during the rest of the series. It's okay, but it's also probably the weakest season, even taking Season 1 into account. Still probably worth watching if you make it that far, though.

[upsettingshorts]

I agree with Rowan Kaiser at The AV Club re: Babylon 5, and I'm a die hard fan:  If you're new to the show, skip The Gathering.  Midnight on the Firing Line is a better introduction to what the series actually became.  The stuff in it that becomes relevant later will make you smile with hindsight, but it isn't entertaining on its own and too much changes (especially wrt characters)  In fact, head over to The AV Club and skip everything he lists as being a C episode.  Early B5 is rough around the edges and painfully bad in a couple spots.  Rowan puts it better than I can in the above link.

 

As far as DS9 goes, it's also my favorite Star Trek.  I especially like that they went out of their way to demonstrate that the inherent premise of Star Trek - that technology will save us - is flawed.  Its side characters - such as Quark and Garak - really stand out as something no other Star Trek ever pulled off.

 

I like to put the comparison of the two shows this way:  DS9 was more consistently entertaining, but Babylon 5 was more rewarding.  If you want something to watch inbetween stuff, or as background noise, go with DS9 (and that's not a slight).  If you want to invest in watching something you'll appreciate for a long time, watch Babylon 5.

 

That isn't to say DS9 won't stick with you, but it will stick with you in the form of individually memorable episodes.  On the other hand Babylon 5 is, in the truest sense of the word, an epic.

 

 

Season 5 is kind of an "extra season," that shows the consequences of what happened during the rest of the series. It's okay, but it's also probably the weakest season, even taking Season 1 into account. Still probably worth watching if you make it that far, though.

 

I'd say season 5 is better than 1, but it suffers from the fact most of the show's A-plots have been resolved in Season 4.  It is a lot of B-stories pushed into A-stories because they had no choice.  Which isn't to say the questions S5 raises aren't interesting, but that they simply require reconsidering the show's epic scale.  S5 feels like season 1 for another show - which became Crusade, basically - mixed in with the end of B5 to come up with a complete season.  But it has some of the best moments of the series.  Veterans can appreciate season 1 for how much is set up that is paid off, but it can be easy for veterans to underestimate how hard it is for new people to get through it.

[Joy Divison]

Like TNG, DS9 took about a season to find it's niche and produce consistent quality episodes.

[Jorji Costava]

I'd say season 5 is better than 1, but it suffers from the fact most of the show's A-plots have been resolved in Season 4.  It is a lot of B-stories pushed into A-stories because they had no choice.  Which isn't to say the questions S5 raises aren't interesting, but that they simply require reconsidering the show's epic scale.  S5 feels like season 1 for another show - which became Crusade, basically - mixed in with the end of B5 to come up with a complete season.  But it has some of the best moments of the series.  Veterans can appreciate season 1 for how much is set up that is paid off, but it can be easy for veterans to underestimate how hard it is for new people to get through it.

 

What I've heard (not sure if entirely accurate, so don't quote me on it) about S5 is that the original plan was to resolve the two major plot threads of S4 (the Shadow War and the Earth Civil War) over both seasons 4 and 5, so that the Shadow War would be resolved by the end of S4 and the Earth Civil War by the end of S5. But because the showrunners didn't know if they would be renewed for a fifth season, they decided to condense both plots into S4 just to make sure that the show wouldn't end with either of those plots left hanging. When they did get renewed for a fifth season, they had already exhausted their best story ideas, leaving us with a relatively underwhelming final season.

 

Returning to the original topic, let me echo everyone else's sentiments about DS9 being the best Trek (although that's partly due to the fact that I have very mixed feelings about the franchise as a whole). Right now I don't have too much to add to what everyone else had said, so I'll just leave with this.

[upsettingshorts]

I don't know if best is the right word.  Biggest, most involved, and most deeply invested in... yeah definitely.  For example, the Telepath War is a really great concept that needed room to develop and just never quite got it.  It's the kind of thing that would have made a great foundation for a larger story but Crusade just didn't take off.  It's most enduring legacy is Lumberg in Office Space wearing his EarthForce Academy ring from the show, lol.

 

But yeah back to Deep Space Nine.  It's an interesting mix of fantastic characters and the occasional risk not taken.  For example, Dax presents a great opportunity to explore something like a trans* narrative, but her stories end up inhabiting this oddly gender-binary, heteronormative 90s-television bubble that doesn't really make sense given what the Trill are about.  Odo, an opportunity for an asexual character if there ever was one, is forced into this nauseating romance with Kira that neither actor appreciated in the slightest and actively opposed.   The Ferengi occasionally explore their cultural misogyny but their episodes are really all over the place.  The less said about Garak/Ziyal the better.  If DS9 fails in any respect, it's in failing to recognize and fully exploit all these opportunities, instead shoe horning them into the same handful of narratives we've all seen before.  Which is disappointing because it absolutely does not fail to address issues of race, imperialism, terrorism, etc and nails them about as well as Star Trek in the 90s could be expected to.

[eternal_napalm]

All of the characters resonated with me, and even a lot of the side characters like Nog, Martok, Dom, Grand Nagus and Kai Wynn who you knew was rotten from the beginning. Quark was great, and so was O'Brien, Bashir and Major Kira. I thought Major Kira was annoying at first but I think they just wanted to show how tough she was, once you get to know her she was cool. Jadzia Dax and Odo were my favorite...both fascinating species and Jadzia was beautiful and intelligent and funny, Odo grumpy and stern but in a likable way, his interactions with Quark always great.

Garak was awesome and so was the main antagonist...and we all know who that was.

I think the themes were definitely the unique because as mentioned, it showed the Federation as not perfectly utopian but with serious questions of morality. They won the Dominion War essentially by dooming the Founders to inevitable genocide through a biological weapon, but I think that it isn't necessarily negative because it also shows, bad or not, the lengths our species and others in our alliance would naturally go to if our very existence was threatened.

Just think....if we, planet Earth and humanity, were up against a threat to our very existence, what lengths would we go to, and where would our ethics and morality be?

The Prophets were interesting because even though those aliens (commonly referred to as wormhole aliens) were non-caporeal, they show the ultimate outcome and endgame of what could happen if the Federation breached their prime directive.

Living outside of space and time, it's easy to see why the Bajorans worshipped them

[NekkidNones]

I'd say DS9 is my favourite star trek, because of the attention paid to the series long story arc.  For the most part, all series seem to do a decent job of season arcs, character dev plots, and various subplots within each season.  However, not many seem to nail down the long term, overarching series long plot(s), as well as DS9 did.

It seems to me, to be the difference between stories and epics.  "The Sisko god child" plot, though not particularly noteworthy, or strong, in and of itself.  Was obviously chosen at the beginning, and was followed through right to the end.  This enabled a mechanism for a whole host of other stories to feed into, off of, and/or even just touch base with a stable element throughout the series/saga.  I think this is largely responsible for the richness and depth the fans "feel" the series provided.  Continuity is a powerful agent to enable viewers to attach a sentiment for the characters in the show, and the universe created on the whole.

Long story short (too late), if you want to write a good saga, it helps when establish a foundation and framework for the whole at the start.

 

My favourite episode was "The Visitor".  It managed to bring tears to my eyes, to the point where I had a quivering lip, and one or two desperate gasps for breath.  Bastards.  Playing with my emotions ;_;, they mind fracked me pretty good on that one.

[Lotion Soronarr]

The worst DS9 character has to be Sisko. The actor was all over the place, and it's like they couldn't decide what to do with him.

First he tried some over-acting/accent, imitating Picard (including shaving). I swear, he opens his mouth so wide when he speaks, it like he's trying to swallow the camera.

 

Never liked shape-changers, and Odo's people are really redicolous (changing of mass AND atomic properties???)

 

Didn't like the whole Prophets/wraiths buisness, with Sisko being the CHOSEN ONE...  (kinda like Picard and Q, only far more ham-fisted)

and  Cardassian being (again) the big bad. It's ALWAYS the Cardassians.

 

And let's not forget maj. Kira, the 1st class b****, who happily kills civilians. That mutilated cardassian tailor was right about her.

[FlyingSquirrel]

TNG is still my all-time favorite Star Trek series. I thought they did a good job of mixing the social commentary aspect of Trek with a healthy dose of imaginative sci-fi concepts, and Picard and Data may be my favorite Star Trek characters across all the series. While the Federation's transparency and cooperative approach is more idealized than in DS9, I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. Fiction shouldn't be limited to reflecting the world as it really is at the expense of suggesting what it could be.

 

DS9 probably had more coherent long-term plot and character arcs, and may have a slightly higher average quality per episode. (Though both were certainly more than capable of producing dreck - TNG Season 1 is just terrible at times, and DS9 had those awful Ferengi "comedy" episodes.) But TNG is the one that will stick with me over time for its portrayal of space exploration and cross-species relations in the context of a relatively peaceful future.

 

I'd classify both Voyager and Enterprise as underachievers. Voyager never really found a consistent way to deal with the most unique aspects of its premise - i.e. isolation from the Federation, the prospect of never returning home, and the fact that some of the crew were members of what the Federation basically considered a terrorist group. Unlike TNG's Enterprise-D, Voyager's mission *wasn't* simply to go explore and conduct dealings with other species and governments, but if you just tuned into a random episode you might barely notice the difference.

 

Also, in Season 2 of Voyager, this happened, about which the less said, the better:

 

http://en.memory-alp...shold_(episode)

 

Enterprise similarly had an interesting premise, i.e the pre-Federation days of Starfleet when humans are the newcomers to the galaxy, but it didn't really focus on it in a sustained and coherent way until Season 4. Seasons 1 and 2 sometimes zeroed in on the tense politics and the humans' relative inexperience, but they also had a lot of mediocre, pointless stand-alones. Season 3, while pretty good, was an extended diversion from what the series was really supposed to be about.