November 1, 2012

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Season One



Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Season One, 1993. Democratic imperialists and former terrorists work together on a space station in order to keep away fascist imperialists.

Created by Rick Berman & Michael Piller. Directed by Paul Lynch (5 episodes), David Carson (4), David Livingston (3), Winrich Kolbe (2), Les Landau (2), Corey Allen (1), Robert Legato (1), Cliff Bole (1) & James L. Conway (1). Written by Michael Piller (8 episodes), Ira Steven Behr (3), Robert Hewitt Wolfe (3), Peter Allan Fields (3), Rick Berman (2), Lisa Rich (2), Jeanne Carrigan-Fauci (2), Katharyn Powers (1), Gerald Sanford (1), Michael McGreevey (1), Naren Shankar (1), Sally Caves (1), Jill Sherman Donner (1), Hannah Louise Shearer (1), D.C. Fontana (1), Morgan Gendel (1), Frederick Rappaport (1), David Livingston (1), Sam Rolfe (1), Richard Danus (1), Evan Carlos Somers (1), Hilary J. Bader (1), Kurt Michael Bensmiller (1), Nell McCue Crawford (1), William L. Crawford (1), Don Carlos Dunaway (1), Jim Trombetta (1) & Joe Menosky (1). Starring Avery Brooks.

Concept: 1/4 (Bad). It takes the entire two-hour pilot just to explain the set-up, which is crap, but it doesn't matter much anyway since it's irrelevant for most of the show.
Story: 0/4 (Terrible)
Characters: 1/4 (Bad). O'Brien is the only main character who isn't a jackass.
Dialog: 1/4 (Bad)
Pacing: 2/4 (Indifferent)
Cinematography: 2/4 (Indifferent)
Special effects/design: 1/4 (Bad). It's good, in-so-far as everything looks exactly like it should look. It's not the artists' fault that the writers asked for a world that's dull and vaguely unpleasant to look at.
Acting: 1/4 (Bad). Some truly awful acting. (Although, again, O'Brien is the exception to the rule.)
Music: 2/4 (Indifferent)
Subjective Rating: 5/10 (Indifferent, 2/4). At its best, it's just barely an okay show. Usually, it's crap. The stories are the biggest offender - poorly conceived, uninteresting, and filled with plot holes and continuity problems. The show has a pretty good reputation, though, so I'd like to hope that that area will be fixed in later seasons. But short of a complete retooling, it could never be as good as TNG, simply because none of these characters get along. DS9's whole concept is that it's about unpleasant people, forced to work together on a job they don't want to do, in a place they don't want to be. What's fun about watching that?
Objective Rating (Average): 1.3/4 (Bad)

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